Despite spending a ton of time in a comic book shop from age 13-17 playing Magic the Gathering, I actually wasn’t into comic books. It took another collectible card game, which used Marvel and DC characters, to really get me hooked. VS System was a hell of a game.
It was created and published by the company with the English-language license for the Yu-Gi-Oh! Card Game back then, Upper Deck Entertainment. Yu-Gi-Oh!’s popularity meant a continuous stream of profit to invest in launching VS System, and they spent big. Their marketing plan seemed to have two pillars: host prestigious tournaments with huge prize purses to attract some “professional” Magic the Gathering players, and advertise in lots of comic books to reach the masses.
The tournaments worked. A lot of Magic pros learned the game to claim their part of the pie. While they certainly had some success, the most successful players were actually people who were not quite as good at Magic as the pros. These new VS System pros spent more time mastering the game than the Magic pros, who had to split their preparation time.
The ads in comic books reached people, but they didn’t seem to work. Hindsight is supposed to be 20/20, but I still don’t think anyone can say why that advertising failed with certainty. I have a few ideas:
For one, if any of the ads actually inspired a reader to try it out, they would soon find one of the least-friendly games to new players. New pros loved VS System because every one of the 6-8 turns of a match required each player to make upwards of 10 decisions, and had severe ramifications for even one bad call.
Another issue was the product path. Collectible card games always struggle with this, but it was worse for VS System. If a player decides they do like the game experience, their next step is to build a custom deck. If you’re wondering how they do that, you’re going through the same struggle they did. The answer is “buy more cards via randomized booster packs or singles through a secondary market.” There were multiple sets of hundreds of unique cards from which to choose. Then they had to pick 60 total cards to form their deck instead of 36 or so for Magic. Getting up to speed was tough.
And lastly, the game’s design had some flaws that limited the fun. The most egregious was that each turn was long, and lacked a back-and-forth experience of alternating throwing jabs and blocking uppercuts. Instead, one player got to make all of their attacks before the other player each turn, which meant you spent five minutes getting beat up, then five minutes doing the beating. With so few turns, if one of your offensive turns ever didn’t go to plan, the disadvantage was compounded when it was followed up with a beating.
Funny enough, they only had to look at a comic book itself to see a product which has overcome all three of these problems:
A comic book is always friendly to new readers, despite twisting storylines and huge casts of characters. If a story is mid-arc, they summarize the plot and developments up front, sometimes even with character portraits.
The product path for a comic book is dead simple. Every issue has a number, and if you want to jump back in time to get caught up, you just pick a lower one. Next month, you can go get the highest and therefore newest issue. (Granted, comics have kinda messed this up in the last decade with so many re-launches and #0’s.) If it’s been a while, hey, we collected a bunch of older issues together in this trade paperback for you.
And comics are designed for incredible fun. They tell stories that are both contained and expandable; a requirement of their medium and business model. An unresolved plot point isn’t a flaw, it’s a strength: the cliffhanger! Wild new characters and worldbuilding are the expectation, not aberrations of a story’s vision.
And so, VS System found itself without a casual base of players to fuel the necessary throughput to supply a secondary market, buoy demand for singles and product, and ensure profitability. When the Yu-Gi-Oh! money dried up, so did the chances for the game to continue. Years later, in an attempt to solve some of its problems, VS System was relaunched as a non-collectible product, with tweaked gameplay. It seems to have finally found its niche.
