Today was quite the interesting one in the gaming community, and was something I actually wasn’t aware of till just a few weeks ago: Free Video Game Day.
It functions much like Free Comic Book Day does for, well, the comic book community. The different is FCBD is sponsored by the comic book industry, directly producing comics to give away for the sake of boosting business in the somewhat faltering comic book retail industry.
It’s a similar idea with FVGD, except that the games industry isn’t exactly giving away free copies of current release games – oh no, this is a retailer driven initiative for smaller game stores – the one-off’s, the local hole in the wall shops run by people who love gaming – places like our shop, and people like those of us who work there. It is, as the website for the event states, a way for us to give back to our loyal customers, in some modest form.
Once we became aware of this event, we knew our store had to participate. We had maybe a few weeks at most to get ready so we had to plan things out quickly. First things first, 100 or so games from our inventory would be given away. Normally you would think a place would give out cheap, terrible, or otherwise unwanted titles – filler inventory. Nope. We gave away some good stuff. Nothing too crazy, but nothing objectively terrible either. We picked games we personally enjoyed – that we knew were good titles. Sure, there was a chance a person would get a duplicate but hey, it was free, right? Give it to a friend or whatever, or just have a backup / display copy of your favorite game!
We were the only store in the area to participate.
That’s not all though. We had coupons in each bag for $2 off any one game in the store, and consoles were 10% off all day. Not too bad, especially the console sale. We price games and consoles fairly, of course, so people who did purchase would get a damn fine deal, and purchase they did, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
In the bags we also had other goodies both purchased for the event and some donated by Hyperkin. We had 3rd party controllers for some consoles, Nintendo PEZ dispensers, and all kinds of other fun little things in the bags, along with 10 free shirt coupons, and 2 free console coupons. Yep, we were giving away shirts and consoles. All in all, a fun time for everyone!
I actually, in the past week, had to do a somewhat mad dash to create the coupons, the cards, and the promotional posters for the event – literally taking photos of what I had worked up in Photoshop to send to the store owner for him to look over, suggest changes to, and when the back and forth was done, approve and print up the emailed final images. That was awesome, since it gave me a chance to not only work from home but have some fun with an atypical Photoshop project. I have to say, I think things came out well!
Some random games, nothing to see here…
10 A.M. was the time we were kicking off the event – an hour before the shop normally opens. A small group of maybe 25 people were lined up outside once I made it in – nothing too crazy, many of our regulars. As the last 30 minutes or so passed more people lined up. Our bag selection consisted of the best we could do from mostly the NES, some SNES and Nintendo 64, Playstation 1, 2, and 3, some original Xbox and Xbox 360, some Sega Genesis, a couple of Atari 2600 bags and one lone Wii bag. The selection we had in the store somewhat dictated how many of each bag would be made, as we obviously couldn’t give away top dollar titles and rather than give someone a lesser quality game, we just limited the bags. Incidentally, while each bag only had one game each normally, the Atari 2600 bags had 5 games each because, well, that just felt fair given the nature of the system, and the probable demand the bags would have (read: not much.)
once 10 AM hit we began giving out bags. Of course, we figured the NES bags would be the ones to go first, but that wasn’t the case. People picked their system, and we handed them a random bag from the pile. The SNES bags ran out first, instead of NES. The Wii bag was snagged pretty quickly, then PS1 got hit hard. We ran out of those quickly enough then everything else slowly began to get pulled from. People were actually not picking NES until the latter half, when the selections had thinned out, a surprise to us! By the end of it of course an Atari 2600 bag was the last one to go, but the other had gone earlier on. Exactly one hour after we started the last bag was handed out, and that was that. Game over.
Early on while the crowds were thick I saw one person pull out a console card to win a Game Boy, which was pretty cool, of course. I knew the other card was somewhere, offering that winner the chance for either an Atari 2600, a Sega Genesis, or a Playstation 1. That one would be won right in front of us when a kid opened his bag to discover the card! He chose the PS1, which is what I expected to be picked, but he was super happy, and I was glad to see him smile when he pulled the card out and learned he had won.
A funny thing happened, though, with the shirt giveaways – one shirt was never claimed. I don’t know if anyone came back to get it later, after I left, but I know by the time I did leave today it was still there unclaimed. Kind of odd.
Things died down, and we didn’t have much in the way of after-the-fact people. Everyone seemed to get something they could smile about, they had fun, and those that came later after the bags were gone still got a $2 off coupon, and had access to the console discount, so they still could get some savings if they felt like making a purchase.
I know they did in the first hour – we did more than we do on many entire days in-store in sales in that one hour. Damn nice! People took advantage of the sales to pick up consoles, games, what have you, and the atmosphere was just great! Of course, I was outside handing out bags for it all, so I didn’t get to experience the fun inside, but I did at least see the crowd – more than I’ve ever seen in the shop before!
All in all, it went better than I expected, and was a way smoother process than we expected. Free Video Game Day is certainly something we will be doing again in 2019!
[updated 5/7/2019 to fix some glaring phrasing errors. I was super tired last year when I wrote this. Updated 5/28/2019 to add FVGD logo]