I am the person most responsible for pushing this change. So even though past experience tells me that no good can come of this, I am going to respond to the criticism. I knew that this would not be a popular decision with many of the players. I don’t think that player’s complaining about it is unreasonable. We gave you something big and impressive and now we are taking that away. I didn’t expect that go over without having a few shots lobbed my way. I did it anyway because it is a good decision.
I think it was a good decision because I believe the trophies took up too large a portion of our limited resources for the benefit they provided. The POP team doesn’t get to decide how much money we have to spend but are often responsible for deciding how that money gets distributed. There usually aren’t direct correlations between saving money in one place and spending on another. In this case there is; I took part of the savings and bought new State Championships in Arkansas, Nebraska and Alabama with it. Without this change, those events would not happen this year.
I see posts dismissing the savings as unimportant and I have to believe you haven’t really thought about it. I don’t think that even the people trying to defend us really grasp the scope of the problem. I would love to rattle off some pricing here, but I cannot do that and expect to remain employed. However I can point out some tournament numbers, mention some shipping routes and ask a question to try to bring a bit of perspective.
Firstly, glass is fragile and those trophies did break. In order to combat this we had to pay a company to uncrate the trophies and put them into custom designed padded display boxes. They still broke, so the next year we put those custom boxes into large shipping boxes filled with packing peanuts. Now only a few break, but we have to ship the all trophies from the manufacturer in China to the Ohio box company and then to our South Dakota fulfillment house, before sending them off to the organizers.
Last year we had 125 SPTs worldwide. That is 1500 heavy glass trophies; plus a large volume of packing material that doesn’t ship for free. My guess is that your largest estimate of the shipping and handling costs wouldn’t get them to South Dakota let alone to individual tournaments all over the world. Now for the homework; how much does it cost to ship a 442 pound pallet from Sioux Falls SD to Melbourne Australia? Don’t forget insurance, it is a 442 pound pallet of glass. Oh, and import duties for a pallet of trophies that are considerably more expensive than the estimates I see bandied about.
I look at all that and have to justify those costs against the benefits and the trophies come up short. I imagine that is why you don’t see a lot of other game companies shipping 1500 big hunks of glass to 22 countries. We have wanted to replace them for a few years but didn’t have a better option.
We finally found a suitable replacement in the new medals. Besides being cheaper, smaller and blessedly lighter, I think they look really nice. My guess is if we had started out with these everyone would have thought they were cool and we wouldn’t be having this fuss.
The intangibles brought up by Meganium and others are also true. The glass trophies are not compelling in photographs unless you stage them like a product shot. Even the City medals look great in photos, and the new medals are bigger and more colorful. Somebody called wearing a medal to a tournament bad sportsmanship, I call it a photo op. We are truly excited over the prospect of all the juniors strutting around Worlds proudly wearing their medals. Whether you competitive players like it or not, Organized Play is a division of Marketing. Generating photographs of cute children decked out in Pokémon gear is one of our primary benefits to our company.
