Transcript for:
Limited Run Games Overview

I would start getting death threats I think we're going out of business everyone should find other work what the heck limited run what I thought this was limited people sending me emails calling me the worst things imaginable saying like I hope you die I hope you burn I wanted this game screw limited run this game's $90 now my first question is why does everybody hate you limited run games is one of the largest Publishers of physical indie games in the world since 2015 they've generated over 150 million in revenue and have' given physical releases to hundreds of games that otherwise would have only been available digitally but as much growth as they've seen in the last 9 years they've also seen their share of controversy many gamers and collectors have accused them of caring more about quantity than quality artificially inflating market prices and even being dishonest about the number of copies they're releasing so I drove all the way to North Carolina to the only physical video game store owned by limited run their CEO Josh has agreed to show me the store give me some switch game recommendations and let me hit him with my spiciest questions about how he grew the business and why their practices are so controversial well Josh thanks so much for having me out I wanted to open by asking you when I searched limited run games on YouTube the results were almost as bad as if you were to search Phoenix resale on Reddit so my first question is why does everybody hate you so it's I'm self-aware enough to admit that there are a lot of reasons that people have taken umage with us but I think one of the main things that I've picked up on is we take a really long time to ship our products the main problem that I think everyone can agree with is turnaround time because somewhere along the way they got so big that turnaround time became an absolute Nightmare and a lot of that comes out of the fact that we keep them open pre-order so in order to make them open pre-order which allows anybody who wants the products to get them we have to start manufacturing them at the end of pre-orders so it means that we can't start the process of manufacturing which takes several months until those pre-orders have closed which is very different from ordering on Amazon and then just getting the thing and I get it we're in a society now where it's like everyone wants everything kind of you know the minute they order it cuz we're kind of trained that way so it's a unique experience and it leads to a lot of people not being super happy about especially when it's Collector's Editions that can take a year or more to manufacture because of the components inside but the only way we could speed that up is to make our collector's additions not cool you know the cooler we do something for a collector's edition the longer it takes to manufacturer and you know that's kind of a double-edged sword cuz it means more people buy it but then more people are left waiting a really long time and then they get mad and angry and I think you know we've made a lot of strides recently to try to address that and start giving people more updates because I think that was really our big problem in the past is we were kind of quiet we have somebody now who is kind of focused on responding to customers and I think that will help things a lot but there's also people that you know they don't like us because they feel like you know our products are arbitrarily limited and they're not we started the model that we have here of doing limited prints because we came out of the development world and when we were developers we noticed that we were having trouble staying in business because people were waiting for our games to be a penny or 10 cents or whatever in a sale on sale like on steam or a Humble Bundle something like that or or Worse we were putting our game in this thing called indie G and Andy Gala was like on Wednesday it's buy one get five free so you get six copies of the game for the penny you pay for the bundle so it's like I was getting paid literally fractions of a penny for my game and it's like how do you sustain a business of developers on selling copies of your game for a fraction of a penny and the only way to do that is to get people to somehow pay full price for your game and the only way to convince people to pay full price for a game is to know like it's not going to be around long enough to become a penny or to become $5 or to become whatever that worked out you know throughout our first couple years of releasing games we saved a number of Indie developers from going out of business because they were finally able to sell their games for enough value that actually kept them in business rather than you know just trying to scrape by on the bare minimum so the nature of being limited was driven by wanting to protect and preserve the value of the games themselves it was not to artificially inflate a market or just arbitrarily be like it's limited and put a gun against people's heads it was to say these games are worth paying the full price for and these devs deserve that cuz our deals that we make with them most of the sale goes to our partners it doesn't go to us so you know really was out of a place of concern for our partners and the developers we were working with yeah we'll get a little bit more into the spicy stuff later but first I wanted to ask you when I asked you before if you had a favorite failure you mentioned a moment that actually was before limited runs history pretty early on in your development Studio would you mind telling that story yeah so prior to limited run games I was actually an indie developer so I had started a company fresh out of college called Mighty rabbit Studios and we spent two years developing this game called Saturday morning RPG throughout the development I did not pay myself anything I was just you know always pay my employees before myself and we had basically no money I think we had $40,000 to start the company on and that was it so stretching that out across 2 years was insane I ended up massively in credit card debt I was like I think $330,000 in credit card debt at the time and I was sustaining Myself by buying and selling used games which I had done you know for years prior as well that's how I paid for my college education without having to get loans there's some money in that there is you know at least there was at the time you know in 2007 when I was doing it to pay for my college education you know there was a lot of stuff that I could find you know and I love doing it cuz I love games so for me it was a way like I was broke I had no money it was a way for me to like temporarily own these games that I wanted to own if I actually had money after developing Saturday morning RPG we put it out it was this critical success you know we got a lot of press coverage we were featured by Apple all of these things but it just didn't pan out commercially we were prepared to have all this success we're like we're going to pay down our debt we're going to pay down our bills and it didn't work out that way and from that failure I had to learn to be adaptive I had to learn to figure out you know how do you emerge from a failure stronger and we ended up fighting for this deal to make another game breach and clear breach and clear ended up being I think we we were paid $60,000 to build a demo for this game but then we ended up building the entire game for that amount we didn't have any kind of Revenue share in it or anything like that we just wanted to prove our worth and hopefully that would lead to more work right that game ended up making several million dollars for our partner so they decided to fund a sequel the squel had three Publishers and the three Publishers all had different ideas about what they wanted so we had to make a game that was three different games in one it was 11 months with 10 people which is insane wow uh it should have been way more of a train wreck than it was but obviously it wasn't a financial success because it was trying to be too many things at once and it wasn't a master of any of the things it did so our partner was like okay we're not doing any more sequels we're leaving you and we were left with this is 2015 we were left with no additional work and we had $10,000 in the bank and they were like parting present you can Port the original breach and clear to Vita we don't care what you do with it because it's the vaita and nobody cares about the Vita so we were like it's all we got let's do it so we ported breach and clear to the Vita and then it sold miserably as anybody would expect a VA game in 2015 to do and at that point what was the financial state of the company cuz it was you were in pretty dire straights we had $10,000 left in a staff of 10 people so you know do the math there like it's I'm still paying myself nothing at that point and you know the other nine people they need something somewhat livable so it's like we basically had a month left we did breach and clear for vaita as fast as we could put it out it made another $10,000 so was like replenish it one more month whatever but then there was this kind of moment where I felt like we were going to go out of business we had nothing else at that point breach and clear andv did nothing and I was at a Crossroads I actually sat everybody at the company down I said I think we're going out of business everyone should find other work at this point we're throwing in the towel or whatever so what surprised me in that moment though was that all of my employees rallied behind and they were like we're not we're going down with the ship we're going to stick here we're going to go down with the ship we don't don't care we'll figure out our other jobs later and that inspired me to push through and figure it out and I took a job teaching at a local community college teaching programming so I was doing that running Mighty rabbit Studios and buying and selling used games still because that was the only way I could pay my bills you know even though I was racking up credit card debt in the process so I was doing three jobs and then I was like you know what if my employees believe in this as much as they do I'll take out a personal loan so I took out a personal loan $85,000 worst terms imaginable lendingclub.com where they will lend anybody money it's just predatory terms and I use that to keep our development company open and the $10,000 we had in our bank account I used to create a physical run of breach and clear on the V because in my mind I wanted people to be able to remember that we had made this game if it was just available digitally at some point it would disappear into the ether and people would never remember it cuz when you think about games like people still remember horrible NES games because they're physical they're cartridges they change hands people see them at stores like they have a legacy by being physical but think about the Xbox Live arcade on 360 how many horrible Xbox Live arcade games can you remember these days and I'm not saying breach and clear is horrible but like with the amount of digital games that come out now digital games are prone to being completely forgotten you know so I wanted to give that game a legacy show people that we had been around that we had done something that we were there you know like we we didn't want to just disappear and then say these 5 years of struggle were nothing so we made that game physical and I brought on a friend that I had working with me uh Douglas who had been doing a lot of testing and he helped me launch limited run we started going to communities of collectors talking about how we were doing this physical run of our game and you know really trying to Rally some support behind it and what surprised me was when we put this product up uh it sold out within 2 hours you know we every copy of it and it was this instantly validating thing it was like we had taken what little money we had left in our bank account and it multiplied it to an extreme degree which allowed me to continue operations at Mighty rabbit and start paying that loan down and then from there we were able to do our next G we took Saturday morning RPG that first game we made ported that to vaita PS4 physical run of that sold out again real quick even faster this time and then other developers started reaching out what was wild was the first developer that reached out ended up being the developers of Oddworld which was this legendary PS1 game so to have them Reach Out was this instantly validating thing and from there like epic was like if they're working with you we'll work with you and then from epic we go to you know these very popular Indie devs that we worked with in that first year and then then we did Star Wars Castlevania Doom it was just a snowball from there so if I could go back just a little bit you're you're $86,000 in the hole you're at a Crossroads in your business and on the brink of potential Financial ruin what gave you the confidence and the belief in this idea that you had CU we have a very Business Heavy audience who is thinking about you know getting into various businesses of their own how would they go about making that decision and the risk assessment so for me what gave me the confidence was just knowing that I really personally cared about video games like physical video games I've collected physical games for my entire life I still collect them I love them I love every aspect of it I was very passionate about it and I knew that if I cared about having these games physically like there would be other people out there that also wanted it that was really what I I knew what drove me towards that was knowing that there are other people out there that if I love this as much as I do there are going to be other people who want it and if nobody else is providing this service I'm filling a niche that needs to be filled cuz at the time you know take it for granted now that there's 30 40 Publishers doing this but in 2015 the only similar thing things were Retro City Rampage which vblank had done and it was their own game they weren't doing anybody else's titles there was Gin Works which had done class of Heroes 2G on PS3 but outside of that nobody was doing direct to Consumer physical games and obviously that was a huge opening in the market and just knowing that I have this passion for it made me know that I could approach that confidently and then there was this thing in the back of my head I was like if it doesn't work out I get to bulldo all of these games cuz that was what we were going to do it was like you know like physically bul them just just for you know before I have to go live in a gutter somewhere we were just going to pile them up and run them over with a carve and just celebrate how stupid the decision was if it didn't work out but thankfully we didn't have to do that and we were able to cuz the mindset at that point was sell what we can sell and if whatever doesn't sell you know we'll just have fun running it over or dropping it off at a Goodwill or whatever I don't know but fortunately it didn't come to that limited run was born out of that experience has it been pretty much smooth sailing since then I mean we've had a lot of ups and downs you know our original model for limited run was printing a certain amount of games and then selling that limited amount what benefit that provided was it address the problem we have now taking forever to ship because at that point we were just like it's in hand boom it goes out the day we sell it which was fantastic but the downside to it was it's it's impossible to know how many copies of a game you need to print it just doesn't there's no reality where you can look at a game and say exactly this many copies are what you need so it was just this cascading effect of every time we had a game where we were slightly under or massively under I would start getting death threats just people sending me emails calling me the worst things imaginable saying like I hope you die I hope you burn I wanted this game it was absolutely miserable and then it all came a head with night trap on PS4 you know this game was historically regarded as one of the worst games of all time I loved it cuz I'm a big FMV nerd I'm a big Sega CD fan so for me I was like I want to do this game but you could look at any list of worst games of all time and it would be there in the top 10 so I was like 4,000 copies that's going to be enough it was not enough we sold out in half a minute it was like everything was gone and I started seeing videos pop up just one after another on YouTube just saying F limited run F them they're horrible they're terrible they're anti-consumer they're garbage and every time our customers were missing a release they were like screw limited run I'm never coming back so we started seeing our customer base shrinking so you know now that people are in this thing of being able to get any game they want and then having to wait for it they're like I wish everything was in hand because the grass is always greener on the other side like when everything was in hand people were like I wish I could always get what I wanted but there's a weight on that and now that there's a weight on it they're like I wish everything was just in hand and it's like there's no winning approach here to me the winning approach is let everybody be able to get the games they want and then have that weight cuz you know at the end of the day a weights you know it means you can at least get the thing you love but not being able to get the thing you love just seems far more frustrating in my mind so you know I I am very happy with the model we're at now even though it comes with the downsides that it does I want to ask you more about that model a little bit later but right now I'm in the middle of working on my switch collection I'm wondering if you could give me a few limited run switch game recommendations cuz we're here in this gorgeous limited run retail store I brought a few of my personal favorites from my collection to maybe give you some inspiration would you be down for that yeah absolutely all right so the four games that I brought as we in front of the Fantastic switch section here are obviously the classic SEL in a similar vein Super Meat Boy couple of 2D Platformers here Rivals of ather 2D platform fighter which I love and maybe honestly my favorite I would say the most underrated limited run game is Duck game yeah arcade party game shooter so freaking fun based on this somewhat eclectic mix what do you recommend if I'm recommending to you specifically based on those yeah uh I don't know where it is on our Shelf TowerFall is the game that I would recommend above everything else and it looks like we don't currently have any copies what dictates like what games are here versus online are these the same ones that are in stock online so when we sell a game we have to produce a certain amount of extras either for returns damages and we have to produce quite a lot because we can have catastrophic mail failures and by catastrophic male failures I mean something like on our third release Oddworld new and tasty French Customs decided they didn't want to let any of our games through we're talking hundreds of copies of new and TC on PS4 we had to use all of our extra promotional copies to try to figure it out and like even then we didn't have enough since then we've always said we're going to account for catastrophic errors if for some reason the boat carrying all of our European shipments gets sunk and we lose 800 copies of the game we're accounted for it great 800 is that that's a stretch sure we're not producing 800 extras of everything of those make their way here yes these extras sit in our warehouse until we do a blowout sale which is very deliberate like Hey we're selling these in stock at leftovers but that's once a year and the only way to get them outside of that is events like packs or this retail store that makes sense so the retail store is all of our leftovers but since our products are truly limited you know we do one production run the store is just selling leftovers when they sell out that's it yeah we're gone we're we're out of copies so Ed you from your mission here that would explain that would explain why TowerFall is not here but TowerFall is from uh MD thoron who did Celeste and it was a four player couch multiplayer game that is absurdly good like Duck game that premiered on this very obscure console called the Ouya and I feel like Duck game is partially inspired by TowerFall so I would highly recommend TowerFall the other thing is if you like you know challenging platform you know we've got Super Meat Boy forever you know the sequel to Super Meat Boy you know that is that is a a musthave in terms of you know if you're a fan of Super Meat Boy you want to get a hand handle around that you so those are kind of my recommendations based on uh your personal choices there but you know I've got some of my own what are what are your overall favorite limited run games ever yeah so my favorites and I I don't want to seem too you know cliche here but I love getting to work on things that connect back to my childhood so getting to do teenage mut Ninja Turtle Shredder's revenge was a huge thing for me cuz I grew up during the height of Ninja Turtles Mania so getting to do anything related to ninja turtles was like a dream come true but also you know getting to do these two games which are my favorite Star Wars games of all time you know this was a big deal for me because I also was a mass Star Wars fan I don't want to sound like I only care about the licensed games but there's something about working on it's special yeah something that like really impacted you as uh a kid and getting to be involved in that capacity those were those previously only on Xbox is that right yeah so they were originally Xbox games but they were ported to switch uh by Aspire and they were originally not going to get physical releases so we were lucky enough to negotiate a deal to make that happen what else I mean I'm rubbernecking a little bit in this store cuz there's so much cool stuff to look at what do I need to make sure to not miss while I'm here so the things to not miss are the pre-owned section you know a lot of people probably would not expect the limited run store to sell anything is that the stuff back here yeah so a lot of people would not expect us to sell anything but limited run titles but we've got this great pre-own section one of the things that I love about our pre-own section yeah is if somebody comes in to trade a limited run title we don't sell it for market value we sell it for whatever the original MSRP was so we very deliberately do not scalp our own products so when they come in we tell people we're up front you know like Hey listen if you're trading at limited run products you're not going to get what they're worth online MH and surprisingly a lot of people are okay with that they're like whatever like I'm happy to trade these back into the limited run store and make another limited run fan happy when they discover these products so you know the tradein section the pre-owned Zone can be a treasure Trove of limited run titles that were missed but also you know I'm a big game collector so I love this section because I get to keep my eye on like hey anything cool come in for my collection so you know just today you saw me pick up Ribbit King for GameCube Ribbit King so yeah I I I love this section this is kind of my happy place here is this pre-owned Zone the other thing that we have here that I think is really interesting though it's a little empty right now is our damaged section where we have customer returns that are sold at a discount you know interesting they're the games run fine but these are things that were sent back by customers to be replaced or whatever below original retail yeah so these are all marked down from original retail and the longer they sit on the Shelf the more they get marked down so a lot of these Collector's Editions are kind of you know 30% 60% you know somewhere in that range right um but it's a great way to get limited run products marked down like for instance 30% off Super Meat Boy for vaita and this collector's edition is in very rough shape but the actual game itself in there right is in perfect condition and this you have the figure and this is a v game that I got death threats over when we sold out of so you know the retail store provides an opportunity for people to be able to find releases that they may have missed and that's what I love about it so if you're watching and you're someone who sent Josh a death threat guess what you can revert your death threat and you know take it back because it's here on this channel we are very money positive what are you able to say about the kind of numbers that limited run is doing yeah so I've I've been fairly public in this it's on our LinkedIn profile but since starting the company we've done over a quar billion dollars in sales so I think the LinkedIn may be a little outdated I saw 150 million yeah it's it's it's over a quarter of a billion now in sales and that sounds like I should be like Scrooge MCD ducking into like a a money bin of money but that's not really the case cuz like I said earlier the majority of what we get goes to our partners the developers who own the software that we release so you know at the end of the day we don't actually have very high margins for limited run itself but in contrast to my previous business this is a wild success absolutely I am able to actually pay myself a salary now and live a comfortable life so that's I mean 250 million that's a long way from being adk in debt I mean yeah so it's it's what's that like for you like psychologically it's just a a massive like adjustment in terms of what I'm able to do in life which is great but it also I'm thankful that I have the perspective of being in a position where I had virtually nothing and having to like really fight to survive because if you don't have that perspective like you're not prepared for life really like you can't you can't survive if you've only had success the failure really drives it and I think that has been an important experience for me that's so [Music] inspiring all righty so folks good news we actually did uncover a copy of TowerFall is that like a special edition yeah so this was the Collector's Edition for TowerFall I can't remember all of the specific items that are inside but you pretty guaranteed to uh know that there's a soundtrack CD in there a game poster uh I think there's a pin uh but this game is fantastic it's looks gorgeous so many hours were lost to that game cuz it's fantastic it's so good I wanted to highlight one other section in the store and it's my personal happy place here which is the card connection okay the card connection is filled with all sort of weird trading cards that are either tangentially related to video games or directly related or just absolutely weird left field kind of trading cards that nobody has ever heard of something about trading cards I've always loved them I've always loved this opening the pack it's probably the gambling aspect to it that I like just like not knowing what you're going to get inside and maybe there's something really cool in there but you've got everything from Naruto the Nintendo tattoos yeah so we've got a wild selection here of stuff that a lot of people probably don't even know exists like the Killer Instinct collectible card game so cool but even more obscure you know we've got the official Nintendo Donkey Kong trading card game no way how many people know that there's a Donkey Kong trading card game and it was I don't know I love this kind of stuff uh it makes me really happy so uh when we started the store I wanted to have a weird selection of cards it's constantly rotating I've cursed my store employees with a back room that is just filled with boxes of trading cards uh but I think it keeps it fun for the people that care about this stuff so I promised that we would get into some of the spicier topics I was wondering how you would feel if I told you about the worst experience I've had with limited run cuz I'm really curious your perspective on it yeah so I think the year was maybe 2020 maybe 2021 I was really getting into switch collecting for the first time got my hands on a copy of Celeste uh eventually because at that point it was so expensive it was like 150 maybe 200 bucks online I was like all right I'm going to bite the bullet everyone says I need to play this game I'm going to get it played it absolutely loved it a few months later I want to say was walking around in Best Buy and was like wait a second is that the same game that I was just playing and it was way cheaper and I was like what the heck I just bought this for like 200 bucks and then I looked on eBay and was like oh now my copy is worth way less and was like what the heck limited run what I thought this was limited so the games are always limited we do timed limited pre-orders so we've got you know anywhere from 4 to 8 weeks where we can show up on our website get things we don't print more copies after that we did previously have a partnership with Best Buy where during the Preorder period they would order they would say yeah give us 5,000 copies of this and then they would get it they would run their pre-orders and then they would put it up on their store shelves after their pre-orders were over but they didn't really need to run pre-orders they had committed to a set amount so it was like you know that was manufactured already and they were getting it but the way that they would figure out distribution and how many would get sent to each area was by running those online pre-orders we no longer have that partnership with Best Buy now we're more dealing with vgp up in Canada but uh Best Buy would have you know I would say 6 7 months delay in terms of when theyd put it up so there would occasionally be these gaps where you know it had sold out from us many months ago our pre-orders had ended and it hadn't been available on Best Buy and in that kind of No Man's Land period of time the prices could rise and yeah it's a bad experience to get caught in there the other thing to mention is we don't claim Perpetual rights to our software so another reason going back to that original question that people hate us is they think we buy the rights to games we don't buy the rights to any games we sign a deal with people that says we can make physical copies we can run pre-orders and we can manufacture as many as are needed to fulfill those pre-orders but then after that period rights are back with you so you can take that game to another publisher and do another physical run if you want so with Celeste in particular you may have noticed that now fan has actually brought it out again so there is another print of Celeste back so the value has further eroded and that is outside of my control because as a person who came from a development background I don't think it's ever fair to sit on rights perpetually it's very developer unfriendly so I want to make sure that we can revert back but we've released thousands of games and I'd say it's less than 10% of those that ever get another shot at going physical so for the most part things still stay limited but it's outside of our control especially when it comes to other regions like you know say a game comes out in Japan like we got a lot of flack for No More Heroes cuz we sold it and then you know seven eight months later uh Arc systems Works did a print of it in Asia region yeah and of course at that point you can get this Asian English version not of ESRB rating on it or anything but people who just wanted to play the game are like what the hell limited right I thought this was limited it's like it's not we're very transparent we don't have worldwide exclusivity over our games forever it's just not something we do I'm so glad I asked because to be honest I never would have known I just probably didn't do the right due diligence and in the moment I was like what limited run must be doing something wrong yeah but it seems like there's a lot of context to this business that is not necessarily intuitive yeah exactly I mean a lot of people wouldn't think that we would have leftovers right like where all these copies coming that you're bringing to packs or that you're selling in your retail store and it's like they're leftovers they're not reprinted we're not getting more from the factory it's not out of print or you know whatever it's like the games that we have in our warehouse are what we have and we have to work through those but when you think about you know we hit most of the demand during the pre-order period it can take a while to sell a couple hundred leftovers yeah you know like let me ask you this though what would you say to the people who say making a limited quantity of these games in the first place is anti-consumer like wouldn't we all just be better off if you just made however many people want and that's what we try you know with the open pre-orders the thing is you know which when you say that what does that mean so on open with open pre-orders it means when we put a game up on our website it's available anybody can come through and you know I'll take a recent example Persona 3 and four we put them up on our website they were available anybody who wanted them could get them for 6 weeks you know it's like you could roll up at any point during the day it was not like a one minute and it was gone kind of thing and I was on social media screaming from the rooftops buy this game it's going to sell for more than we are selling it for please buy it and I'm just getting dismissed this game must be selling horribly he's so desperate to move units he's so desperate to sell I'm like no I'm just telling people I don't want to get death I don't want people yelling at me saying screw limited run this game's $90 now they're so whatever it's like I'm just trying to get people to buy it when it's $35 right and sure enough sh the game in DEC criticism is coming we ship the game in December and it's 80 $90 on eBay and people are like screw limited run I hate them it's like I'm I'm here trying to tell people buy this game it's available now it's available at the price it's supposed to be please buy it this is H a little bit too close to home for me we we we do try our hardest to get this game out there so people know you can buy it you know like nothing is arbitrarily limited we make as many sell and that is how our pre-orders are run and then after that we don't make anymore and that's that you know the rights revert back to Sega or back to whoever and then they can do whatever they want after that but for the most part most of them don't want to deal with the Hass of a physical release that's why they let us do it in the first place yeah well there's there's only so much that you can do on your end it's hard especially when you're dealing with limited quantities to ultimately make sure everyone is happy but you're right it's hard to imagine a system that works better and also serves developers there's there's almost no way to effectively reach everyone who wants a game during the pre-order cuz our partners aren't just sitting on a list that's says this is everyone who likes this game make sure all of them know about it it's like we can only get as far as our marketing can get us but during our pre-order campaign we try to be as loud as we can to get as many people in on it as possible so that there's no residual or lingering demand and time and time again what I've noticed is if we sell something during quarter four that's October to December those games end up being absurdly valuable if they're something that's in demand and that's because during that period of time you know people don't have money or they're focused on other things they're like I got to buy the new Call of Duty or I got to buy the new AAA game that's launching and they kind of tune out limited run for that quarter and I try my hardest to not put big releases in that time frame but sometimes my hands get tied and I have to put something like Persona 3 or four in that quarter and then it's just like you know I can scream as much as I want buy this game please buy this game so that you know you're not trying to find it at an inflated price later year after year works out the same way do you have kind of a six sense for that at this point which games are going to be I can I can tell like the kind of games I need to not put in that period it's anything that I know is going to sell you know beyond a certain terms threshold in in Revenue we have enough data at this point where I can tell you know if it's a popular game try your hardest to not put it in this no man land but then we'll have things that'll be like developers who have spooky games they like it's got to come out in October and I'm like no October is a horrible month but then you look at how popular a game is you'll put it you'll release it at different time I try to put it out you know in this period of March to September which are historically the months where we have the most ability to reach the audience that we need to reach but if it has to fall into this weird period of OCT October to December which is the worst you know sales go down like 30% and then the resale prices end up going a lot higher as a result because after the holidays people are like let me try to figure out how to get this game that I ignored during the pre-order period and look I know there's a lot of reasons people can't buy things all the time but yeah the thing that bothers me is when it gets like me trying to market the product gets dismissed as despera ISM like I'm not desperate to move copies is I'm desperate to avoid angry people like I want to make people happy I don't want to make people angry and that's a misconception that a lot of people have about me they think I sit in like a volcanic Lair like twiddling my fingers like how can I screw over as many people as possible yeah and there's this like innate feeling that people have where they're like everything he does is done with evil intent and it never is I I want people to be happy I don't want people to dislike me or dislike my company or you know anything I want people to be able to engage with these games and play them but if you look at the games that we've had to release in Q4 historically especially spooky games Outlast one and two on switch absurdly expensive those were open pre-orders anybody could scroll up to our website and buy those for $30 each these games are $180 a piece on eBay now and you could just Waltz up to our website and get them there was nothing stopping anybody from being able to get them during the pre-order period shant and the Pirates curse which I get the most hate about on switch because it's so expensive now that was an open pre-order December 2018 it was not quantity limited it was a show up and we'll make as many sell and what would you say to the people who say well just do another run of it like everyone wants this just do it again I think it violates the agreement that we made with our customers I mean we have told our customers we will not reprint our own games right so we have to stick to that other otherwise we're at risk of false advertising you know we don't want to get into that rabbit hole of accusations there like we made a promise and then we broke it we don't want that to happen so we stick by our promises but we don't hold our partners back from doing runs elsewhere so you know there is a possibility that in the future it could come out through somebody else I think I interrupted you earlier why not just go totally open addition so that's a logistics problem and it's what our partners are hoping to avoid with physical when you look at physical games at retail there's this ongoing issue of warehousing management be BuyBacks I'm using inventory retail store terms that suck where like you know you have to put Resources Personnel accountants all of this stuff onto this project for years at a time to see this stuff sell through move out you have to charge people for warehouse space these are all problems that our model solves so it makes physical not be a headach M the reason Publishers and developers were getting out of physical is it was too much of a headache they didn't want to deal right games in stock yeah they don't want to have to deal with how many copies of this do I have to make to restock Walmart Target Amazon Best Buy or to restock website you know they didn't want to have to deal with how many accountants do I have to pay to keep on staff to keep dealing with this stuff because accounts are expensive yeah so they were just like screw this we're going all digital because on digital you get your monthly report that's it you don't have to worry about warehousing Distributors taking their Cuts markdowns all of these things that compound to make it not worth it and that's another thing we get a lot of hate for people are like Sega should have done Persona 3 themselves and it's like yeah they could have done it but there's so much headache involved in doing a physical release for traditional retail that you look at it and you're like why would they do that that's exactly what was causing companies to drop physical and why we stepped in to make the process easy so that they could do it again so people could enjoy physical releases we stepped in with a simpler model that makes going physical a turnkey thing where they can just sign an agreement and we do everything for them the money comes in they're making more per unit than they do digitally and they're like yes we can do this this works makes these things [Music] yeah so Josh I'm conscious of the Optics right now of doing this interview on a resale Channel cuz one of the things that you guys have been criticized for is having a model that's too reseller friendly do you want to set the record straight at all about what your stance is on resellers have you guys resold your games what's the story we do not resell our own games 100% I used to sell Ed games like I said earlier my background you know how I survived for years was buying and selling games on eBay and I hated like I loved finding the games and listing the games the part I hated was actually like everything that happened after that M I haven't sold a game on eBay since 16 and I don't think I ever will again because I had I had my fill of it for a decade so you know I can tell you point blank we have been very thorough on V all of our employees signed an agreement as long as you're employed at limited run you cannot sell any of our products it doesn't even matter if it's for MSRP you know anything that is limited Run related there is a a extreme no tolerance policy on selling our products as a limited run employee and even at our retail store we're very focused on you know if somebody trades in a limited run product it's MSRP it's not marked up so we are very conscious of that but with our pre-order model anybody can show up and get a product I don't see it being our business what somebody does with that product once they get it because it's a Level Playing Field you know if you as a consumer want to show up on our website and Order 10 copies of a game you can there's no limit placed on it it's literally open for everybody we will make as many sells so everybody has a completely Level Playing Field and I don't think that it's my business to feel anyway about what somebody does with the products that they buy from the website you know if somebody looks at a game and says I think this is one that I want to own multiple copies of and have some extras to sell down the line you know I feel like everyone has that same opportunity so the pre-order model makes it a completely moot point in my opinion I think it was a more of an issue when we had limited quantities back in 2017 and prior that's when we were saying you know we're only making 2,000 copies of this and yeah it would be a huge pain in my butt you want those going to resellers you want those going to people who are going to keep coming to your site to buy your products so as a brand I I was very angry about that at that point because I'm like I'm getting again I hate to keep bringing this up but I'm getting death threats because people were using sneaker Bots to buy our products before anybody legitimate could get them and that was frustrating and I would spend hours devising ways to screw over the bots so that you know you know I remember on Tow Jam and RL we had this exclusive case and there were people who had trained Bots to buy them the minute they popped up so I actually took the listing changed it so that it was like literal trash for $30 all the Bots bought the literal trash they just received a box of trash you shipped it out yeah you shipped boxes of trash to the B no because it was funny no it was funny to me so in that case actual customers got the products that they wanted and then the resellers kind of learned a lesson like maybe don't train Bots unlimited run products granted they got better about it cuz they knew you know they're probably going to get a little exclude the keyword trash please yeah so they started to figure out how to how to get around this but what I found as we moved to open pre-orders it's like it's it's a non-issue at this point because everyone can get what they want as long as they are watching limited run and showing up we're not producing an arbitrarily limited quantity we are producing the quantity that sells and I think that's fair well I for one would never flip a physical video game I think that's disgusting but I wanted to ask you about the demise of physical media what is that something you're concerned about what direction do you think it's heading and is that a threat to the fabric of your business so I think that as long as people have physical items you know as long as we don't move into a world where we're all just doing VR or whatever but I think people are going to want physicality look at vinyl people for the longest time I'd say from the time iTunes was announced until maybe 5 six years ago people were like digital is the future for music like this is where it's all going nobody cares about physical anymore but then vinyl came back with the Vengeance to the point where it was one of the biggest Revenue drivers for the music industry which proves that like people started to get frustrated with digital they started to realize like hey I have no ownership digitally that's the thing eventually people are going to realize that they're buying licenses on the digital side and those licenses can be revoked people are seeing that like HBO Max coming through and removing all of this content people cared about that they can no longer access they're like hey this kind of sucks like I wish I could have this stuff physically and I think that's been driving people to realize like physical ownership is what I want because I can count on these things I love being available so I don't think that's going to go anywhere what will go somewhere is the platform holders saying we don't care about physical anymore we're going to stop putting disc drives on PlayStations or Xboxes but I see Nintendo not following that trend for decades interesting because on Nintendo it's still I think 85% of first party games are sold physically so why would they go rather than digitally than digitally they're contrary to all the other platforms where Xbox I think it's like maybe 15 20% of first party titles are physical PlayStation is more 50/50 but Nintendo is still very much physical focused and I think that a lot of that comes out of the fact that they were a toy company before they got into video games you know physicality has always been core to their being and I don't think they're going to drop that anytime soon I think they're going to stick to it so I think I've got several Generations worth of Nintendo platforms to still release physically on I also think there's a thing to be said about people who grew up with Nintendo care more about physicality because there's something on the Nintendo platform it's having cartridges for a very long time up to the N64 that kind of ingrained physicality into the being of Nintendo fans interesting and I think that that's why their sales still skew so highly towards that and it's also like Nintendo fans I think by and large more than any other platform they go back to the games that they love people who love Link to the Past still go back and play that on their SNES to this day so people are still going to want to go back to tear of the Kingdom or any of these Pokemon games that they're buying so that physicality component is core to Nintendo so I'm not super worried about it but in the future where all physicality goes away you know I think we've still got a business in terms of supporting older platforms like the NES and SNES and or even the switch one day exact you know there there could be a market for home brew games on switch in 20 years who knows so I look at things through a positive lens that physicality is always going to be in demand that's never going to go anywhere will the market shrink maybe in 20 years it's possible but we just have to be cognizant and aware and watching that so we can shrink with it I wanted to ask you also about the business side I'm super inspired by what you've been able to build in the last what 9 years talk to me about do you have any like Northstar business principles that have guided you through the multiple stages of the journey so I mean for me it's it's it's about doing what you love like I don't think you can do something successfully if you're doing it without passion even when I was reselling games that I was Finding at flea markets and garage sales or whatever I had a passion for that I loved video games I loved being able to hold something and appreciate the history of that game and and the significance of finding it you know was not a soulless Endeavor for me and I think that is important in terms of guiding anything you do I think you have to do things that you truly care about cuz if you do something without passion and without Soul it's going to be reflected in the outcome and the results I heard you giving a keynote one time to I think a room full of young developers video game developers you were talking about the importance of starting out small because I think a lot of the people in your graduating class at was it game development School in North Carolina State University so I was in the computer science program and yeah everybody that wanted to make games in there they wanted to like get out and just immediately make this giant game that they'd had in their heads their whole life and it caused them to become jaded and not want to make games because making this big thing is impossible they never finish they never finish it but if you start small you can finish that and it gives you a sense of accomplishment to take on something slightly bigger next and then you kind of scale up from there so even with limited run that process and principle was followed and we started with our own game we didn't dive in and try to do something huge we tried to do this little game that we made prove out the concept and then build from there and our release schedule I think at least early on was maybe one game every two months or whatever it was very slow very considered as we rolled up and scaled up to figure out what we could handle and what we could actually take on with our skill set as your release schedule has grown as the company's grown there have been some people who have said that limited run is now more focused on quantity than they are on quality do you think there's any any reality to that there's absolutely Merit to that so throughout the pandemic you know there was this huge demand for Collectibles and people were just buying anything to fill the void in their soul that the pandemic had created and we got way too overzealous during that period of time in terms of signing too many games and we got into a bit where I was I I almost feel like we were doing things without passion so I was going against what my principles were just to try to keep up with the demand just to keep up with demand because there was so much demand we were like we don't want to leave anything on the table and there's also this you know I I love games so it's like of course I want to own all these games and have them up on my shelf but we lost sight of the passion during that period of time and we really got carried away in terms of bringing too much stuff to Market and we have drastically and dramatically scaled back post pandemic you know we're left with this backlog of games we've signed that we still need to work through and release so there's still going to be a bit of a quantity over quality problem for a little while but as we work through this you're going to start seeing the fruits of this new Focus we have which is quality over quantity better titles bigger games fewer releases is really what we're focused on right now that's kind of our guiding principle in terms of of what we're signing and the content we're chasing wow that's really cool to hear that you've sort of made a pivot almost backwards yeah that's kind of unintuitive yeah it's it's really a matter of just kind of having to respond to the market and be quick in that cuz every Collectibles business has seen a post-pandemic drop off like everyone's going outside and enjoying life again they're not you know retail therapy to deal with the the troubles that are plaguing them it's more like I'm going to go outside and walk that's how I'm going to deal with you know any issues I have so we're realizing that we need to be releasing games that people actually care about and I mean that's also I think the driving principle that we should have been focused on from the beginning is like do people actually care about this game or are they just going to be buying it to speculate you know it's not healthy to run a business where people are only buying things to speculate yeah and that was a problem that we tried to address early on you know and shift towards let's focus on games that people really care about so yeah it's definitely been an experience in terms of learning to roll with the demands of the market and you know what people want in 2022 you guys were acquired mhm walk me through cuz at that point you had been building this business for 7 years yeah what's that like psychologically to go from like owner and CEO to just CEO it's been weird because I am the kind of person I've I've been a lifelong entrepreneur like even when I was five I would go around my neighborhood selling oranges from the orange tree in my backyard so like I've always been very focused on like how can I fund myself however I can fund myself uh I don't like having to answer to somebody I don't like it I like to act on my passions and my own whims there was this period of time where we were seeing like all of the partners we were working with were being Acquired and I was like at some point you know we're going to have to follow into that too because we need the resources of a bigger company to help allow us to continue growing uh we were hitting a point where I felt like you know we had grown to a an amount of Revenue and a scale of operation that I didn't really fully know how to manage myself you know and I think that caused some of our shipping and fulfillment lows where it's like again it goes back to my eBay thing I don't like the part that comes after selling the game yeah I like the part leading up to the sale and the sale itself but then it's like after that it's like I'm always focused on the before part and getting a bigger company involved is helping us sort out the part that I hate you know we've got somebody in now as a chief operating officer a new coo who like really loves that part that I hate that so I guess the yin to my yang where it's like you know I love the first part he loves the last part so our fulfillment has been getting faster it's been getting speedier our warehouse operations have been getting getting more professional and more smooth as somebody has actually been here that loves it and is focusing on that aspect and it's rare to find somebody that actually likes the part where you're putting stuff in boxes and getting it out the logistics yeah for most people it's just a relief of knowing hey I got that thing out thank God I can focus on the fun part now which is you know the sale itself that's kind of what's come out of that that I have liked even though there has been some adjustment to you know having to work within a larger structure and have a boss but one of the things that attracted me about the company that acquired us is that the the guy who's the CEO of it is a huge collector like he's legitimately like he loves collecting stuff like he was telling me last time uh I met him about how he just bought a uh abandoned video store in Sweden because he wanted all the VHS tapes that they had because he wants to collect VHS tapes right now so he's he's building a collection of VHS tapes and uh he was telling me the first time I met him about how you know he's really proud of how many uh NES games he has and he was telling me all about his copy of gimmick that he has you know the Scandinavian release of gimmick for the NES which is super valuable super rare and he was just so proud and excited to talk to somebody about it and that made me comfortable in the acquisition CU it's like I want somebody who owns us to have the same passion for this business that I do they have to get it otherwise I would never even consider it you know I I would never want to sell to somebody who's just all I care about is the money the bottom dollar because that would force us into that situation we were in in the pandemic which just sign as much content as we can because we got to make the bottom line having a an entity above us has allowed me to say we can refocus we don't have to worry about the bottom line or chasing Revenue growth we can focus on chasing a healthier business so that's what we've been focused on for the last year or two since we've been acquired it's how do we make this business more healthy well that's a beautiful thing you've been in it now for 9 years limited run is a household name among collectors what's your endgame I just like making cool stuff so I don't really have an end game I just want to keep making cool stuff because for me I I am legitimately through and through another thing I think people people have that's a misconception about me is that I only care about money that I'm in it for greed for me I make decisions on what we release and what we do based on whether I want it myself it's all about like I want to make the products that I'm putting up on my own shelves I'm not trying to do it for money I'm trying to do it because it's exciting to me you know I some examples of releases that you know if we were only in it for money why would we have re-released Plumbers Don't Wear Ties one of the worst games of all time for me that was because it was to do it was a cool cool idea a cool thing to chase why would we have done a physical release of Che quest which is a Serial game that came boxed in packages of checks in the '90s like to me that was about doing it because it was for me it was because I wanted to do it because it was neat not because it was going to make us a ton of money but because it was neat and that's my driving principle it's like I want to keep doing cool things neat things that's inspiring I have to say getting to meet people of your caliber has been easily the most rewarding part of my YouTube Journey so when I say I appreciate you having me out here it is the understatement of the Year well I appreciate you coming out and actually you know checking out our store and you know giving me a chance to talk about some of the you know challenges we've had and the the issues we faced as a business appreciate you a ton thank you so much thank you folks I just created a playlist of all the business interviews I've ever done I'm going to link it right down here if you're interested if you like this video I'm sure you will love it and I'll catch you guys on the flip