While I feel like I'm a bit late to the party, I am happy to provide a brief explanation of the reasoning behind the decision to add stipends to the Junior and Senior divisions at Regionals.
I am tasked each year with creating and maintaining a fixed budget for the TCG (and now, VG) Organized Play program. In addition, our typical goals are to increase the reach of the program (more events) and to increase the number of players participating in those events.
Total attendance is a reasonably good measure of the overall health of the existing program. Whether we’re being successful in compelling the player base to compete often, in multiple events throughout the season. Unique attendance is a far better measure of year to year growth of the program.
Each year, we announce changes to the program that we feel will be best for the overall, long term health of the Play! Pokémon program. Each year, a subset of our player community is upset by those decisions while at the same time, another subset is happy with those same decisions. Sometimes, we find that ideas that initially appeared as though they would work, don’t. When that has happened, I think we’ve been pretty good about making adjustments and moving forward.
It is very clear to us, and likely to the majority of you, that Pokémon gains new fans while they are still quite young. We see that new Pokémon fans are rarely entering the brand over the age of 11 or 12 years old, and in most cases, much younger than that.
In 2004, our National Championships in the United States was 236 players. In 2012, the Video Game National Championship was larger than that (571 total players) and as we’re all aware, the TCG portion of the event was over 1,500 total players. With 1,003 Masters division players, many of whom were Junior Division players at that 2004 event, we feel that we have made many of the right decisions along the way.
This decision is not unlike many of the other decisions we’ve made over the years. This is a concerted effort to increase participation at the Junior and Senior level. These efforts in the past are in large part why we have a 1,000 Masters National Championships. These efforts are why a good many of you can look back on your past in Pokémon Organized Play with fond memories of playing the game you loved, and winning some neat stuff that made you really happy. We believe this has a profound effect on player retention. We did not take one penny of support away from the Masters division to affect this change, and that was not easy from the standpoint of keeping the budget in line with what is required of me by the company.
If this works the way we hope, then it will most certainly continue. If it doesn’t, we’ll keep trying. Our hope is that in the coming seasons, we’re able to roll out more changes that not only affect the Junior and Senior divisions positively, but also contribute to the satisfaction of the Masters’ division as well.
Thank you,
Professor Dav