The Report To The Stakeholders And What It Means For Munchkin

A little over a month ago, we published the annual Report to the Stakeholders. As usual, there's a lot of content there, but one paragraph has caused several people to contact us asking for clarification:

The shift in the market affected our "keep it in print!" approach to Munchkin games and expansions, and we're now starting to let some of the slower sellers fade into out-of-print status. We would rather keep the Munchkin games and expansions available at all times – it is frustrating when a Munchkin fan is forced to spend five, ten, or twenty times MSRP on eBay to get a game they want – but declining sales volumes do not mesh well with holding inventory. We will try to keep the top ten or so Munchkin games and expansions available at all times, but everything else will see out-of-stock times . . . or simply go away for the immediate future.

Of course, the most immediate concern expressed was, "Is Munchkin in trouble?" My answer to that is an unequivocal NO. Munchkin continues to be a large part of SJ Games' business, particularly with the impressive launch of the Collectible Card Game, and that's unlikely to change any time soon. What we are seeing, however, is a sales drop in many of our older titles in favor of the New Hotness (to quote Ken Hite). That's absolutely to be expected, but it highlights a problem that has grown worse in the last several years: the effort required to keep an ever-growing line of games and accessories constantly in print is taking resources (both time and money – especially money) away from continuing to develop new games. Not just Munchkin games, either; one of the delays in Car Wars has been an inability to give it the focused time it needs because we have had to pay so much attention to Munchkin and the CCG.

The obvious solution, of course, is to shift away from having everything available all the time. We had already decided that most of the 15- and 30-card mini-expansions (such as Munchkin Clowns and Munchkin Cheats) would not be reprinted, but we've now made that a hard policy for all of them, with very rare exceptions, if any. We've also realized that we put too much energy over the last several years into Munchkin game accessories, so we'll be backing away from those in favor of games and expansions. We won't stop doing them entirely, but we will be a lot more choosy about them moving forward, and you'll see most of them designed for general Munchkin games instead of specific genres.

Looking at the games themselves, we're going to stress our top sellers and let the rest go out of print. Without giving a complete list, I can say that of the lines published before 2010, we're planning to keep Munchkin, Star Munchkin, and Munchkin Cthulhu available, possibly one or two others. We're also going to be less afraid of games that will be printed once and once only: Munchkin Shakespeare is a recent example. With the exception of Munchkin and Munchkin Deluxe, however, even the titles that are staying in our catalog may have a delay of a few months between printings if that's what works for our schedule.

As for the tuckbox expansions, we plan to keep the numbered expansions for the original Munchkin game (such as Munchkin 6.5 – Terrible Tombs and Munchkin 9 – Jurassic Snark) in print, and that's as far as I'm able to commit right now. While sales of many of the core games have declined, the sales of their expansions, including fairly recent ones such as Munchkin Apocalypse 2 – Sheep Impact and Star Munchkin 3 – Diplomatic Impunity) has plummeted – even at our minimum order from our printer, we'd be getting a multi-year supply of almost all of them, and right now that's just not a good investment for us. We don't plan to stop making new expansions for new core games, but it's very likely that those will be "one and done." The larger-format expansions, such as Game Changers and Holiday Surprise, are almost certainly going away for good – in fact, we expect those two titles to sell out at our Atlanta warehouse well before the end of the year. If you've been holding off getting them, don't.

This may sound dire, but it really isn't. It's a deliberate shift in policy toward a more flexible catalog, without the constraint of keeping all of our Munchkin games and expansions on shelves all the time. Just like partnering with great companies such as USAopoly, IDW Games, and SlugFest Games, it's part of our plan to keep offering our fans new Munchkin games for the foreseeable future.