#1386: Unenfranchised Players

Mark Rosewater (0:00)

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so today, it's all about unenfranchised players. Well, I guess I should start by saying, what does that mean? So enfranchise talks about how much you are part of the core, part of the game, the community, online activity, sanction play, sort of how involved you are. The more involved you are, the more enfranchised you are, or you're sort of part of the main Magic community. And the less enfranchised you are, the less you're connected. It's an important term because while we spend a lot of time and energy on enchanted player, I'm sorry, enchanted, on, while we spend a lot of time on enfranchised players, we don't, we, sorry, sorry, I was, somebody was trying to pass me. I apologize. Safety first. So whenever I have traffic, I make sure I deal with that. Sorry, back to the hand. So enfranchised players are players that very much are involved with the core aspects, the magic and sanctioning and community and stuff. And they're super important to us. But we also need to understand about the unenfranchised players. So today is me talking all about the unenfranchised players. And so I'm going to begin with a story that I told a lot of times, actually. But I'm going to tell it and go in a little more detail than I normally go into. And this was our, this was wizard sort of big realization about unenfranchised players. So we have to go back to time spiral block. So at the time of time spiral block, there were two different, I mean, there's lots of metrics we pay attention to, but there are two big ones that we pay attention to. One was sales. How well does something sell? The other was in franchise play, sanctioned play. How much are people playing? It's important people are buying magic, it's important people are playing magic. And up until time spiral, those two numbers were always in lockstep. If sales were up, sanctioned play was up. If sanctioned play was up, sales were up. And so we really thought of those as being interconnected, very causal numbers, that one affects the other. So anyway, we're in the middle of time spiral block, and something odd happened that had never happened before since we had been measuring these two things. Sanctioned play was up, but sales were down. The numbers weren't connected, and it really threw us for a loop. Like we thought they were causally connected, right? That one makes the other go up. But all of a sudden, they're not acting the same. And so we had to sort of say to ourselves, what is going on? Like what, what exactly happened? So it made us go a little bit into looking. So now I got to talk a little bit about how we do research. We do a lot of market research. One of the number of ways that we are able to tell things is by going out and talking to players. The most common way we do market research is we go to a place where we know players, magic players are, and then we ask them questions. It could be on our website. It could be other websites that people frequent. We just go someplace where magic players are to ask questions. But, and here's the thing, we're only measuring enfranchised players when we do that. We're measuring players that actively go to magic sites, including our own. If you're less enfranchised, the whole point of being enfranchised is you're connected in. So you do go to those sites.

So what we realize is when we were doing data, we were very much like when we were looking at sanctioned play data, sanctioned plays, people who come to our stores to play where we can see you. Right? So what we realized is our market research was very, very good at seeing the enfranchised players. But sales, sales are not much bigger than that. Sales about how it sells regardless of who buys it. So sales was indicative of a larger audience than play was. So what play was telling us was the enfranchised audience actually is having fun. So Time Swirl Block, for those who don't remember, I had a bunch of time themes I was really interested in doing. We wanted to do suspend, and we had split second.

Flash was a keyword for the first time. We were just messing around with the idea of time. And so I came up with the idea. This is my second set once I became head designer. I really wanted to have a block plan. I wanted each set in the block to have an identity. So we were doing time. So the logical way to chop time up was into the past, the present, and the future. The present ended up being the alternate present to give it a little bit of flavor.