so whats the deal with nothing for this or being available? its been that way for a while now

Has it been that long already since the previous thread? (edit: yes, 3 weeks)

Summary: "Not available" only means not available in the FFG Webstore (due to FFG's agreement with Hasbro, who is the licensor of Star Wars boardgames in North America at least).

1 hour ago, a1bert said:

Has it been that long already since the previous thread? (edit: yes, 3 weeks)

That's got to be a record, right?

I feel like I'm rick-rolled every time one of these is posted, but without the song

3 minutes ago, buckero0 said:

I feel like I'm rick-rolled every time one of these is posted, but without the song

5 hours ago, archon777 said:

so whats the deal with nothing for this or being available? its been that way for a while now

Hi, Archon777,

This is a VERY frequently asked question hereabouts, hence the jokes It's all made in love.

Welcome to the forum!

These kind of posts remind me every time that marketing of this game is nuts. They failed in letting people know the game is in production and available - Marketing 101. If anyone in FFG is reading, I offer free web development consulting for adding a text saying "Check availability in your FLGS or online stores".

11 hours ago, Golan Trevize said:

These kind of posts remind me every time that marketing of this game is nuts. They failed in letting people know the game is in production and available - Marketing 101. If anyone in FFG is reading, I offer free web development consulting for adding a text saying "Check availability in your FLGS or online stores".

You are not wrong, sir.

The crazy thing is a few people every couple weeks care enough to seek out this forum and post their question about it. How many others just assume it’s out of print / discontinued and move on? I bet the ratio would be at least 5 to 1. Seems silly to not include a simple note on the product page about where you can purchase it.

FFG are geniuses at designing games. Game support, marketing, communication, those things, not so much.

I like these threads because it means new people are still buying in. But yeah it would be sad if there are a bunch of other players who don't buy the game because they just see it not available and never bother to follow up. FFG really needs to just replace "not available" with "retail only" or something like that.

4 hours ago, Tvboy said:

I like these threads because it means new people are still buying in. But yeah it would be sad if there are a bunch of other players who don't buy the game because they just see it not available and never bother to follow up. FFG really needs to just replace "not available" with "retail only" or something like that.

Exactly, that's not rocket science. They should have done that ages ago.

I see plenty of failures other than this on the marketing side. In example:

- incomplete skirmish in core box gives such a poor experience that results in a bad advertisement and penalised skirmish itself. Latest meta is a much better game. List building and game strategies are much more challenging after the last 2 big expansions. Core box buyers can't even imagine this or afford the price of the full experience. Also you need to buy obsolete stuff like Hoth just for Negation CC. What a shame!

- campaign and skirmish are different games for different targetsof customers, you can't plan for effective marketing strategies as long as you ship them in the same box. Also most of the buyers aren't using half of the content of the box because either they want campaign or skirmish. Very few of them enjoy the content fully. This ends up in a waste (extra cost) that discourages new buyers and creates an additional resistance to their ingress into the "full" experience.

- descent is campaign based, be brave enough and develop SWIA focusing on skirmish for the sake of diversification! SWIA skirmish is a much better designed game than campaign. It suffers the fact that marketing sells this product with a "campaign first" strategy. This brings SWIA into direct competition with descent and prevents people from buying both games.

- app is campaign. If you look on Vassal servers you'll see people playing mostly skirmish instead. Also communities in some countries suffer the lack of local events. In many cases people have to travel a lot to participate events. A skirmish app would make a lot more sense as it could remotely connect skirmish players. If we wanted campaign we could just buy descent.

- give campaign a plot. I mean something deep with a lot of RPG elements. Also use "capital" heroes, like this: HEROES. I mean, heroes from the movie. That's what people love. The movie heroes are relegated to secondary importance (allies/villains, rather than actual heroes) and this gives less prestige to the storylines of the campaign.

- your customers are mostly fans of the movie saga and they are divided into factions. There're people playing only imperial role because their brain says so. Give them imperial heroes. Let rebel player act as an overlord. Same for scum. Let people be what they want to be.

As I said this isn't rocket science, we're going to get the 6th expansion for this game and we already know that it will be pretty standard. Be brave and bring some real changes into the game, it's dieing if you haven't realised.

Descent is a fantasy themed campaign.

it isn’t the same as playing a Star Wars themed campaign.

if you made the box IA Skirmish only, you would lose sales. Mine included.

Clearly FFG have struggled to bring a balanced set of content for both formats, but precluding one would reduce sales to those who want the other. Regardless of which way that preclusion goes.

11 hours ago, Majushi said:

if you made the box IA Skirmish only, you would lose sales. Mine included.

Clearly FFG have struggled to bring a balanced set of content for both formats, but precluding one would reduce sales to those who want the other. Regardless of which way that preclusion goes.

You don't lose any sale. You want campaign so buy campaign box. Someone else would rather go for skirmish only. I would buy both. I'm saying they should split the games.

They would lose sales simply because most people won’t buy two products, unless those products happen to be in the same box.

for me, command cards, Skirmish versions, Skirmish upgrades and Skirmish mission cards sit unused in my box.

i have no intention, nor the time available, to invest in a second format of the game. (Or disposable funds)

My campaign stuff gathers dust.

My campaign stuff gathers dust, too.

But I have no problem with that. According to sales, I'm not sure if either a campaign stand alone product or a skirmish stand alone product would be sold as much as needed to keep the game running from a business point of view.

Most people feel they get more even when never using the other half, because the option is there.

Also, it's doubtful if separate skirmish boxes or campaign boxes would get shelve space due to reduced demand for each item. And it's quite a bit more certain that figure expansions would sell much less if they had only skirmish content in them. (I think there would not even be figure expansions if they were only useful for campaign.)

4 hours ago, a1bert said:

Most people feel they get more even when never using the other half, because the option is there.

Also, it's doubtful if separate skirmish boxes or campaign boxes would get shelve space due to reduced demand for each item. And it's quite a bit more certain that figure expansions would sell much less if they had only skirmish content in them. (I think there would not even be figure expansions if they were only useful for campaign.)

Of course you have to differentiate campaign only and skirmish only packs. I'm talking of 2 separated games. I would even rebrand skirmish in something different than imperial assault. We need an easy way to get people on board with skirmish and offering them a starter pack plus the ability to buy only what they need is the way to go. Legion works like that, xwing works like that, imperial assault is dieing instead. Look at the number of posts in this forum, look at the actual innovation in next expansion... we are getting close to zero.

So the solution you are proposing to save IA skirmish is to kill IA skirmish and IA campaign and launch a new IA skirmish game and a new IA campaign game?

I don't think you appreciate the development costs in producing a single product, let alone two separate products.

Are you secretly a Legion spy come here to push IA skirmish players over to their side?

6 hours ago, Majushi said:

So the solution you are proposing to save IA skirmish is to kill IA skirmish and IA campaign and launch a new IA skirmish game and a new IA campaign game?

I don't think you appreciate the development costs in producing a single product, let alone two separate products.

Are you secretly a Legion spy come here to push IA skirmish players over to their side?

Not a fan of legion but I must admit it has a much better business model than IA.

6 hours ago, Golan Trevize said:

Not a fan of legion but I must admit it has a much better business model than IA.

For competitive players, sure.

I'm definitely not interested, though.

Splitting it into two product lines? That would be a marketing/sales nightmare.

The thing going for Legion is being a miniatures game and thus not needing to give Hasbro a cut.

Honestly they are too far gone to go back and make any sweeping changes to IA without just relaunching it as a new product. It seems like if anything they are very comfortable with the mixed modes contained in a single box since now there is a THIRD game included if you take the app campaign as another “mode”.

I do agree releasing a skirmish box as an additional “update” would be a nice bone to throw to new skirmish folks. It’s silly to have to buy a large expansion (or multiple!) to use one one card , one figure,etc.