I’m a few weeks behind on writing about this, but I wanted to share the experience of Free Video Game Day 2019 for those who may find it interesting from the point of view of the retailers.
The event is simply a way for game stores to give back to their customer base. The idea is simple – people visit, they get a game. That’s the core of it. How stores implement this is up to them, however.
I wrote a very scattered article about this event last year (seriously, it’s a damned mess of a read) and in the year since then we’ve changed how we did things slightly.
Our method currently is this: We set up 100 bags total for varying systems – think maybe 20 SNES, 20 NES, 15 Genesis, so on and so forth to make a total of 100. Inside those bags we also have a few goodies, a coupon for use in store, and in a few bags coupons to win something else free – a shirt, a console, what have you. I’m really happy that we actually can afford to give away such to our customers — many stores I’d imagine couldn’t do the same even if they wanted to.
We try to put decent games in the bags – nothing expensive, you won’t be getting a copy of Chrono Trigger, but nothing terrible – you won’t get common junk either. I personally picked out some Genesis, NES, and PS2 games that I thought were great and all in all people seemed happy with what they got, so it seems we picked well!
The format we went with this year was actually the same one we used for Black Friday. Instead of the chaos of letting everyone in the store at once like we did last year, we only let in small groups at a time; what we knew we could handle as far as customer flow. For Black Friday this was great, given the number of people who wanted to come in. This time, however, the store traffic was light at points when people got their bags and left, not coming in (at least, then.) That’s fine, there’s no obligation to come in — that’s kind of a jerk move to do, but we were expecting it to be much more like Black Friday than it was.
As far as actual crowd control goes, we did the same as we always do — as people arrived we gave out numbers, and once we hit 100 that was it. Everyone afterwards could still, of course, come in, enjoy the sales we had on consoles, and if someone didn’t claim a bag they could get it, but things flowed pretty normally. There was only one odd situation — a guy put his number 99 on his shirt as 66, getting a bag earlier than he should have, probably in the hopes of winning a console. He didn’t, and nothing odd came of it, but it’s something I only noticed after it was too late. Whatever, we will do better to differentiate the numbers next year. The last aspect was a cosplay contest where the winner was picked at random, rather than based on the quality of the contest. That too had a decent turnout of about 20 people and was quite a bit of fun.
Otherwise, it was a fine day — the people who won the contests enjoyed what they got, everyone seemed happy with their games, and the rest of the day was relaxed, which was good for me, considering I had to work the entire day and was running on virtually no sleep from all the time spent preparing the previous week. That’s probably what helped me get sick, considering during FVGD I began the cough that turned into me being sick the past week.
The day ended, oddly enough, with one of our regulars who had absolutely nothing better to do that day just hanging out chatting and messing with stuff for the last 7 hours or so of the day. Hey, that’s the kind of stuff that happens sometimes, and at least it was someone cool.
All in all, a fun time. I really enjoy us getting the chance to do events like that twice a year, and hope Black Friday this year goes as smoothly as FVGD did earlier this month.
“a guy put his number 99 on his shirt as 66, getting a bag earlier than he should have”
Oof. That’s why you gotta underline your 6’s and your 9’s.
They were formatted as “ #66” and should have been noticeable. Hell I noticed it but didn’t have time to say anything. They took advantage of the confusion of the event and how everyone generally was trusting.
That being said, the font we used was a basic one, looking like NES game text, which meant 6 and 9 look the same when inverted.
Regardless, we will be doing that underlining next year and if anyone else tries that crap I will be vocal on it. We may skip 66 and 99 all together, instead doing 101 and 102, just for the heck of it. Haha.