Marvel Comics Exec Says "Diversity" Is Why Sales Are Down

David Gabriel, Marvel Comics' Vice President of Sales spoke at a recent retailer summit and said that "...people didn’t want any more diversity. They didn’t want female characters out there," and that "Any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up [at]."

This contrasts with the experience of one retailer who spoke with ICv2 on the first day of the retailer summit who said a more diverse cast of characters were helping bring new customers to his store. The latest iteration of Ms. Marvel, which has Muslima teenager Khamala Khan taking up the title role, was nominated for a Hugo Award this year. In a detailed post on CBR.com that did some serious number crunching of Marvel Comics' sales for the past year, Charles Paul Hoffman wrote:

Just to be clear, “diversity” has very little to do with the drop in sales in Marvel’s top 10 books. Only three (“The Mighty Thor,” “Invincible Iron Man” and “Black Panther”) can be considered “diverse,” in that they star a lead character who is a woman or a person of color. The rest are series starring white male heroes or teams made up predominantly of white male heroes. These are Marvel’s traditional A-list heroes, being written and drawn by A-list writers and artists (almost all of whom are themselves white men), and yet they are floundering... 

While Marvel has admittedly had some misses among its “diverse” titles, it has also had some genuine hits. “The Mighty Thor” remains Marvel’s No. 2=selling ongoing superhero series. “Black Panther” has been a solid hit as well, selling enough single issues to be in Marvel’s top 10, and enough trades to make the bestseller lists. “Invincible Iron Man” (starring Riri Williams) is also in the top 10, showing very little attrition from writer Brian Micahel Bendis’ pre-“Civil War II” series. “Spider-Man” is close behind, selling about 5,000 more copies than Miles Morales’ pre-“Secret Wars” series.”Spider-Gwen” and “All-New Wolverine” are also both doing well, with more than 29,000 copies sold in February for both titles. And then there’s “Ms. Marvel” and “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl,” two series whose trades have also made the bestsellers lists. 

Having dug into the data, it’s become clear that diversity is not hurting Marvel. The truth is, Marvel’s “diverse” titles actually sell decently. 

So if Marvel's more diverse offerings are actually selling decently, bringing in newer clintele and winning awards... then what's up with declining sales? Professionals and fans on twitter have a few ideas:

An idiotic conclusion, @Marvel. I stopped buying your books because of the high price & event fatigue not diversity. https://t.co/uysUOwOBkh

— Anthony John Agnello (@ajohnagnello) March 31, 2017

Marvel thinks diversity is ruining their sales? Idk, MAYBE turning Captain America, a worldwide symbol, into a nazi has something to do

— ㅤmanu (@gecrgeblagden) April 2, 2017

Other industry analyses have pointed out stumbling blocks that Marvel has seemed to put in its own way, like trying to make its Inhumans line-up replace the X-Men series while X-Men hemorrhages sales and the Inhumans branding repeats many of the same mistakes of the X-Men before them. The Nerdist has an excellent take-down of how diverse casts written by the same ol' roster of white men leads to a lot of tone-deaf bullcrap that can end up alienating readers old AND new:

When Brian Michael Bendis writes Miles Morales as being upset with a fan who mentions his black heritage, or when Nick Spencer has Sam Wilson apologize to Steve Rogers for any activism-fueled anger he may have displayed in the past, it comes off as tone-deaf and leaves readers understandably less than thrilled. The same comic features multi-ethnic villains who are parodies of the “Social Justice Warrior” stereotype, who shout phrases like “You should be an ally, not helping to defend oppression culture!” and “Consider this your trigger warning!” as they throw grenades at Sam... 
Let’s also remember SHIELD #8 (2015), written by Mark Waid, where a black woman viewing her young son’s corpse remarks, “He was no angel“—the same phrase used to vindicate Michael Brown’s murder.

G. Williow Wilson, the lead behind the currently Hugo-nominated Ms. Marvel points out a few things about authenticity, new audiences, changing markets and industry expectations:

What I didn’t realize was that the anxieties felt by young Muslims are also felt by young Mormons, evangelicals, orthodox Jews, and others. A h-u-g-e reason Ms Marvel has struck the chord it has is because it deals with the role of traditionalist faith in the context of social justice, and there was–apparently–an untapped audience of people from a wide variety of faith backgrounds who were eager for a story like this... Diversity as a form of performative guilt doesn’t work. Let’s scrap the word diversity entirely and replace it with authenticity and realism. This is not a new world. This is the world... 

Never try to be the next whoever. Be the first and only you. People smell BS a mile away. 

The direct market and the book market have diverged. Never the twain shall meet. We need to accept this and move on, and market accordingly.

That last point is something important to remember as far as sales. The relaunched Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (which I covered here back in 2015) only sells a few thousand issues a month... but its trade paperbacks and graphic novel collections sells like hotcakes to little kids via Scholastic Book Fairs. The market is changing, how comics are sold are changing, and the audience is changing. As Alex Brown puts it on Tor.com:

Blaming readers for not buying diverse comics despite the clamor for more is a false narrative. Many of the fans attracted to “diverse” titles are newbies and engage in comics very differently from longtime fans. For a variety of reasons, they tend to wait for the trades or buy digital issues rather than print. The latter is especially true for young adults who generally share digital (and yes, often pirated) issues. Yet the comics industry derives all of its value from how many print issues Diamond Distributors shipped to stores, not from how many issues, trades, or digital copies were actually purchased by readers. Every comics publisher is struggling to walk that customer-centric tightrope, but only Marvel is dumb enough to shoot themselves in the foot, then blame the rope for their fall.

Looking at a diversity initiative as the beginning and end of what's needed to help improve the state of comics is short-sighted and wrong-headed. Instead of just having the same white men tell stories with some characters of color here and there, there should be structure in place for minority writers and artists and creators to tell the stories they want to a mainstream audience. Diversity as the final and only goal is a hollow act that does nothing but reinforce whiteness and the status quo as the default. That's not the world we live in, so why so worlds we get to make up have to be that way? Free your mind, and the audience will follow.

Studio Says Steam & Bundles Killed Indie Gaming

Image courtesy of puppygames

UK indie games studio puppygames, most famous for its tower defense games, its retro-inspired arcade games and declaring that the games demo was dead, has fallen on some hard times recently, as they posted on their official blog last week:

We tried for several solid months to rescue our direct sales but it seems nothing but nothing that we can do will change the fact that at any given moment, Steam comprises 97% of our income. And that’s just when there isn't a crazy Steam sale on. So we wasted months on that and achieved precisely nothing. This is especially depressing when we consider that those months could have gone into furthering the progress of Battledroid... we only had about four months’ cash left in the bank (as of the start of May), and by my best estimates, we needed to spend about another 12 months on Battledroid before it could actually take in any money (which itself is a dauntingly difficult prospect for a game we were planning to release for free).

While the frustration and disappointment are understandable, puppygames unleashed a salvo yesterday entitled "BECAUSE YOU’RE WORTHLESS: THE DARK SIDE OF INDIE PR" where they place the blame for sinking profit on Steam & bundled sales:

...the value of an independent game plummeted from about $20 to approximately $1, with very few exceptions. Steam is great! You can sell loads of games! But only if they’re less than $10. Technically Valve don’t actually dictate the prices we charge... market expectation of games now that means you can only sell them for a dollar. That’s how much we sell our games for. One dollar. They’re meant to be $10, but nobody buys them at $10. They buy them when a 90% discount coupon lands in their Steam inventory. We survive only by the grace of 90% coupon drops, which are of course entirely under Valve’s control. It doesn't matter how much marketing we do now, because Valve control our drip feed.

So where does that leave customers in this value equation? Not worth very much to them, according to the entry:

Now you’re worth $1 to us. If you buy every one of our games, you’re worth $5. After Valve and the tax man and the bank take their cuts, you’re not even worth half a cup of coffee. So, while we’re obsequiously polite and helpful when you do contact us for support, even if it’s just the same old “please install some actual video drivers” response, you really should be aware that you are a dead loss. Even if you buy everything we ever make again. Even if all your friends buy everything we ever make again. You just cost us money. Not just fictitious, huge-piles-of-filthy-lucre indie-game-developer who made-it-big money. All our money. 

We barely scratch a living, like most indie game developers. You quite literally cost us lunch because the shop sold you a computer with broken software on it. So you’ll understand now why customers aren't worth anything much any more. You’ll realise why we’re actually happy to see you go if you feel like insulting us. You might add two and two together and realise that for four, we’re not going to cry ourselves to sleep over the loss...

I don't know if I really agree with much of what they have to say, though. Some games don't sell well because they're not fun to play or put together well. For example, the tower defense genre has hundreds of games, many of them completely free to play. So when you take a game like puppygames' Revenge of the Titans, it's already up against a lot of competition. For example, I thought the character design was really well done, but the actual game wasn't fun. The progression from level to level was really stop and start, and the skill progression tree was hard to use and harder to understand for me. 

The post also has some really odd classism ("When he [Phil Fish] walks into the restaurant where you pitifully scrub the floor like a servile wretch in order to pay for DLC in DOTA 2, you'll call him sir.") and a lot of sour grapes, like Homer Simpson complaining that "They won't let me into their crappy club for jerks!" What do you think, readers? Are they right on the money, or have they missed the mark?

Historic 6th Reprint of New Ms. Marvel Is Great News For Diversity In Comics

Kamala Khan is a daring and cheerful 16 year old Pakistani-American girl. She's also the secret identity of the super-heroine Ms. Marvel, stepping into the boots of a legacy hero in her own solo title in February of this year to critical acclaim. In addition to fighting crime and taking on super-powered super villains, the comic also explores how she deals with a new ability to shapeshift, and how it's not just a strong power to have as a superhero, but also as a way to confront battling what it means to be a Muslim teen growing up in New Jersey.

It turns out that the Ms. Marvel run has also been a runaway commercial success as well, in a way that few other titles have. MS. Marvel is getting a sixth printing. The Daily Dot puts that in perspective:

Sixth printings are major milestones in the world of comics. Spider-Man Issue #583, the one with President Obama on the cover, only made it to a fifth printing despite making international headlines. Kamala now joins an elite lineup of bestselling comics that have performed beyond all expectations. Many of these titles are genre classics and major issues in their respective franchises, including a number of prestigious Marvel titles ...That Ms Marvel is getting a sixth printing speaks to the increasing diversity of comics fandom as well as the growing number of women and supporters of multi-cultural storylines who are entering the fold.

Retro Repost: THQ IS Wrong - How Used Game Sales Help The Industry

Note: This article was originally published as part of my time as an Associated Content Featured Contributor to the Video Games Section. Associated Content was later bought by Yahoo! and renamed Yahoo! Voices. Yahoo Voices shut down in July of 2014. This article is being republished here on The Code, backdated to its original date of publication to remain as a record of my writing.

The tension between video game publishers and the used games market boiled over last week. THQ creative director Cory Ledesma said in a CVG interview that "...when the game's bought used we get cheated," and further declared that THQ didn't "...really care whether used game buyers are upset because new game buyers get everything. So if used game buyers are upset... I don't really have much sympathy for them." Jerry Holkins, one half of the popular web comic Penny Arcade that has spawned a charity, two gaming conventions, merchandise and even a series of video games, went even further. Commenting on the controversy, he said "I honestly can't figure out how buying a used game was any better than piracy. From the perspective of a developer, they are almost certainly synonymous." With video games commanding billions of entertainment dollars, and the US recession still showing no signs of reversing, purchasing used games versus buying them new seems to be an increasingly polarizing issue. However, there is a strong case to be made that buying used video games is not only a morally sound practice but also a boost to the video games market.

Buying Used Games Is A Legal And Moral Right

Once you have purchased a video game, you own the game you bought. The rights of the creators of a copyrighted work, such as a video game, stop once the work has been sold (with the exception of making unauthorized copies). You have the right to the give away or sell property that you own to someone else if you want. It's called the "Right Of First Sale", and it's been a part of property law in the US for 102 years. In the more recent case of Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc. the court held that a retail purchase of a computer or console game has all the physical and commercial aspects of a sale, not a license. If if looks like a sale, walks like a sale, and quacks like a sale, then your have the same rights of first sale doctrine. That means that you can even resell it if you want; you're not infringing on any other rights.

A Customer Who Buys A Used Game Is Still A Customer

When a customer walks into a store and pays money to purchase a used game, they are already doing two out of three things a game company wants them to do. A sale is still being made, a game is still being purchased, monetary value is still being assigned. All a game company has to worry about in that case is providing enough of a value to the customer that the customer will decide to buy a new game instead of a used one next time.

Someone pirating a video game is not engaging in a sale, or assigning a monetary value to a game. A video game or software pirate is downloading an unauthorized copy for free. There is little a video game company could do from its end to change a pirate's behavior.

Sales of Used Games Fuel The Purchase of New Games

GameStop CEO Dan DeMatteo spoke to industry publication Gamasutra in 2008, saying that he expected the retail chain to give out approximately 800 million dollars in used video game credits, pointing out that these "... trade-in credits will go toward the purchase of new video games... [T]he consumer oftentimes.. needs that residual value from those games as a trade-in to be able to afford a new video game". Steve Perlman, speaking at the Design Innovate Communicate Entertain Summit in Las Vegas recently, established that the average price for a new video game is $60. With a recession that is showing no signs of reversing anytime soon, consumers are looking to stretch entertainment dollars even further. And sixty dollars is three times the average new release DVD or CD.

Industry analyst Micheal Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities says that the relationship between used video game sales and new game sales isn't parasitic, but mutually dependent, asserting that when customers get credit for used games, consumers buy more games, "Sometimes they buy new games. If, instead, they buy used games, so what?" he said in article for the Holywood Reporter. He continued, "In creating more demand for used games, it keeps the price of used games up, which means there is less cannibalization of new game sales."

Selling A Used Game Is Inherent In The Value Of The Game Itself

This value extends past the legal right of first sale. There is actual monetary value inherent in physical media that you own and can later give away or sell if you wish. When a company strips away the ability to re-sell, rent, or even lend out a game, that company is now delivering less of a value to its consumers.

For a salient example, one need look no further than conducting a Google search for "PSP Go" and "expensive". The PSP Go is similar to Sony's previous hand-held gaming console, the PSP, except it does not use physical media at all. All games are sold through a digital download system. These digital downloads are non transferable. These digital downloads are also priced at the same cost as traditional physical media. This, in essence, makes the consumer pay more for video games with less value. It's not hard to see why sales have been lackluster and consumers feel the PSP Go is an expensive proposition. It turned out that lots of people noticed they were paying physical media prices for digital media that can't be loaned, re-sold or lent out. There's always a market for the the latest and and coolest design, and PSP Go is a smaller and sleeker design than the original PSP. But the video games for the PSP Go weren't just the same price as comparable hand-held console games and other media. The games cost more while offering less value because they are not transferable.

Used Game Sales Help Video Game Retailers Large And Small Stay In Business

Wilm Stocks, the Executive Vice President at Atari acknowledged in a Hollywood Reporter interview that video game stores are balancing on very thin profit margins. saying "[I]f you talk to anybody in the used [video game sales] business, they'll tell you that they don't make enough margin on sales of new releases and that, in the large, expensive environments in which these guys operate -- in the mall-based stores -- that a three- or six-month delay becomes a problem for them." Customers playing a game and trading it it towards the purchase of a new game generate additional revenue for the store and video game publishers. As Patcher said, even customers who just buy used games end up reducing and internalizing market churn.

Used Game Sales Help Minimize Consumer Risk While Creating Potential Fans

While intense competition for entertainment dollars, being able to re-sell a game offers a built-in incentive to try a video game they might be unwilling to buy new. If a consumer is unsatisfied with the purchase, the customer can partially recoup their losses by selling or trading the game in. If the buyer of a used game likes the game, they may be more likely to purchase the next video game in the franchise, or other video games from the publisher.

The Video Game Industry Is Doing Just Fine

According to market research firm The NPD Group, Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare 2 sold 550 million dollars worth of video games in just five days. After 2 months of being released Modern Warfare 2 achieved sales of a billion dollars. Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 4 sold over 3 million copies the first week it was out, and as of Spring 2010, it had sold a total of 17 million copies.

In conclusion, while video game companies may have issues with retails that sell used video games, there is nothing wring with a consumer choosing to purchase a used video game. It is a legal right, and in a period of increasing costs and shrinking disposable income, a legitimate choice.

Source:

http://laws.findlaw.com/us/210/339.html

http://ftp.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/550/550.F2d.1180.76-1141.html

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=261330

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100824/11142810761.shtml

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/109.html

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002035113

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20050728/0216218.shtml

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21233