Sell Out!Well, with slightly under five days until it officially hits the stores Wizkids has announced that their Supernova expansion has sold out.
Here's the text of the press release from their site, minus the final two paragraphs that are just legal statements and boasting for the company:
MARVEL HEROCLIX: SUPERNOVA EXPANSION SELLS OUT
November 10, 2006 (SEATTLE) — WizKids Inc. announced today that the entire U.S. print run of Marvel™ HeroClix®: Supernova has sold out from its warehouse. The ninth Marvel HeroClix expansion releases worldwide November 15, 2006, and has been eagerly anticipated by fans and retailers alike.
“The buzz on Supernova building up to, and then as a result of, the Prerelease on October 28 has been spectacular,” said Joe Hauck, EVP of Sales, Marketing and Product Development at WizKids®. “This news is particularly exciting because it represents an increase in sales from our previous Marvel expansion, Sinister. Our authorized hobby game distributors are getting full shipments of their original orders, which should satisfy consumer demand at retail.”
A contributing factor to the product sell-out was the success of the Prerelease tournaments. At the Supernova Prerelease, fans were surprised by the surprise appearance of four Marvel Zombies figures — HeroClix pieces based on a popular Marvel comics miniseries. The four figures are packaged in roughly one out of every 100 Boosters, and include monster cards to make them compatible for play in WizKids’ new HorrorClix™ collectable miniatures game (CMG).
Supernova also contains new versions of previously produced and popular figures such as the Silver Surfer™ (sculpted in a classic Jack Kirby–style pose), Thanos™ and Thor™, god of thunder. High point values and figures representing characters from the current Civil War and Annihilation storylines in Marvel comics make Supernova a good fit for both game and comic book stores. For more information on HeroClix, visit www.heroclix.com.
Several sets back (starting with DC's Legacy, I believe) Wizkids ended the practice of formally over-producing and warehousing their stock, so their aim has been to ship their entire stock to paying customers, letting the market take care of itself via entreprenuerial/gambling instincts by larger retailers and wholesalers who ordered more than their immediate needs so that they would be in a position to supply later demand. I'm guessing that still tended to leave a marginal percentage of initially un-ordered cases they had to warehouse somewhere, briefly.
The extra three week delay and the interest generated by the October 28th pre-release events was apparently enough to find all the primary buyers bucking up their orders until there were none left from the manufacturer.
That they sold a greater number of these than they did of Sinister has to be significant, though we're never told what the actual sales figures are. This could just mean that Sinister performed more poorly.
I do like that they've verified what I understood to be the case from an earlier announcement, that all of the retailers will receive their full orders up front, in a single wave, instead of in fractional waves. With the marquee events scheduled almost immediately - rather than the three weeks to three months afterwards practice we've previously seen - makes it imperative they have the stock available both to feed the immediate demand and have supplies for those sealed events.
This would seem to indicate that they're, for now at least, going to treat holding back on information about specific pieces longer, as they have this time. (The Supernova gallery still only has 64 items in it as of this writing, despite all the information being known and posted by fans, elsewhere, since the pre-release.) No problem for me, as I'd been avoiding most of even what they've posted. However, if I knew they were going to be holding back on the majority of the set -- from the primary set they've so far only officially revealed the sculpts and dials of 18 of the 40 characters (counting an REV as a single character) -- I probably would have allowed myself to look at them. Well, I've made it this far and gotten so see some in person last Saturday, so I'll wait for another five or so days.
Tags: Supernova/a>
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Comments
That should work.
I saw that shortly before the pre-release they'd set up the structure so that people could report the dials they pulled and they could be posted here by the one of the moderators.
Geez, Karnak is a BEAST. Pick up him and a Black Bolt, and my Inhumans team can rock anyone's world.