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-----—"Sales of dice games stayed strong, accounting for 8.35% of total sales. Zombie Dice was our #4 item, ranked by dollars."
-----—"We raised nearly a million dollars with the Ogre Kickstarter (more on that below). That was a dramatic upward tweak to gross sales, but if we hadn't been working on Ogre we would have shipped Castellan and more Munchkin in 2012, so the Kickstarter income was not as huge a distortion as it might first appear." And then this on Ogre: "If it were sold at a normal gaming markup over print costs, it would probably go for around $400, but retail for the base set will be $100. And it will be at least seven months late, and it totally wrecked the 2012 schedule and is impacting 2013, and it just about drove Phil Reed and Sam Mitschke mad as they managed the project, AND we may very well lose money on it when all is said and done."
-----—"In January 2012, our test of Munchkin in Target stores went system-wide. Almost every Target store now stocks Munchkin. And some are testing Munchkin Zombies! Later in the year, Trophy Buck passed its sales trial at Walmart and is now in most Walmart stores.... This re-skin of Zombie Dice was specifically aimed at the mass market, and it is selling well!"
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Aside from the march of Munchkin, which will undoubtedly consist of more than what's summarized above, SJG also plans to release the aforementioned Castellan (June for the U.S. edition, July for the international edition), Chez Guild (Q3 2013), Ogre Pocket Edition (2013) and – last but not least by any measure, including weight and length – Ogre Designer's Edition (2013). Additional items mentioned in passing include a Zombie Dice dice cup and a "school bus" expansion for that same game.
For all the invective directed at Munchkin on BGG, Steve Jackson and company clearly understand and deliver to their market – that market just happens to be present in small quantities on this site. And I had seen Trophy Buck in Walmart a few months ago while looking for something else – naturally I survey the game shelves at whatever stores I visit – and I hadn't thought about its presence as being yet another intrusion of hobby games (however light) into the mainstream market, but indeed it is.
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