[Matthean]

RE: Eclipse

Why is this practice important? Because game retailers – both brick-and-mortar stores and online sellers – have traditionally been terrible at placing preorders, leaving publishers in the dark as to how many games to produce.

Asmodee's Stefan Brunell mentioned this during our talk. In late 2011 Asmodee brought it roughly two thousand copies of Eclipse, despite not having preorders to justify that amount, and blew through all the copies immediately. Now Asmodee has an Eclipse reprint of 5,000 copies scheduled for release in the U.S. in May 2012. Brunell says that his bosses balked initially because retailers and distributors still weren't placing reserve orders to justify a print run that large, but he convinced them to do it anyway. What's changed in the intervening weeks between the time that reprint order was placed and today? Eclipse has hit large, everyone wants it, retailers and distributors have finally placed preorders – and now those 5,000 copies are already sold out at the publisher level, with another reprint in the works. If retailers and distributors had done their homework when the game debuted at Spiel 2011 in October and placed orders accordingly, both the initial shipment and the reprint would be larger, and everyone would have a better chance of getting the game. (That said, gamers also tend to be negligent when it comes to placing preorders, and their preorders drive those of retailers and others down the line.)

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