Wasn't over printing what killed yugioh? The secondary market is why magic took off. In the older days it was a lot harder to get the cards you needed to build decks. Secondary markets started filling the void which made the game much more enjoyable. WOTC needs the secondary markets, I only buy singles, so, if their is no secondary markets to buy from I would have no way to obtain cards. I know this makes cards cheaper for me to buy but is it worth putting shops out of business? No, A lot of shops have thousands of dollars invested in singles.
Of course, being the best-selling card game in the entire world, maybe they have a good idea of what they're doing. Their policy seems to be "reprint thm into the ground" and it hasn't hurt them on tiny bit.
Not contending whether Yugioh is dead or not, but I just got curious. Are we sure that they are officially, undoubtedly the number one selling game? Or could Magic conceivably be outselling it in terms of total cards sold but that it can't be made official since Wizards/Hasbro aren't giving us print numbers?
The Yugioh entry lists around 25 billion cards sold by march 2011. At that time, Magic was in its 17th major block (SoM). If we're just counting the blocks, Magic would have needed to be selling around 1.5 billion cards of each block up to that point on average.
Revised edition sold "over 100,000,000" cards. Is it totally out of the question that expansion since then has been printed at 5x that on average? It doesn't sound that far-fetched to me, the game was in a very different state during revised. And this is only counting the block expansions, even if core sets always sold "poorly", they have probably been handily outselling Revised edition since fourth upwards. That's 13 core sets as well.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, yes. YGO is the best-selling trading card game (as of March 2011) with over 25 billion cards sold globally. That's 25,000 times Revised, which I doubt would be accounted for by the sets before and since.
I'm sorry, but I'll actually go as far as to: "Did you read my post"?
It has a link to the Guinness book of records, so I was obviously aware of that claim. I wonder if Guinness can only take official sales numbers into account, so if Wizards are withholding theirs, then there is no counter-claim to Yugioh being the best-selling game.
I then try and break down the 25 billion and look at how many cards on average per set would need to have been sold, and I end up at a number of ~5 x revised on average per expert expansion.
And 25 billion is not 25000 times 100 million. It is 250 times.
IIt's the most recent record. I'd love to see the updated numbers, but one thing to note is that YGH sold 25 billion cards in 12 years. Magic had what, 6 years headstart and YGH still had more cards sold. since YGH is still in print, and comes out with a TON of new and reprint product. That's just their 2014 release schedule. Just as a guess, they're far outselling M:tG cards.
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Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Well considering that Konami does wanna sell cards without creating false scarcity and any regard to secondary market. They don't need stores to sell cards. Any non-cardshop store sells them, so availability isn't an issue while not all big stores carry MTG, especially outside the US where even some people in big cities may struggle to find MTG locally. Meanwhile, any candy shop may carry YGO. It makes sense that YGO may outsell MTG. Even people who aren't into cardgame may recognize YGO brand than MTG.
It would be interesting to compare profitability as well.
As long it's working for both companies and fanbases, I guess it's all fine and dandy.
Same is true with Pokemon. My daughter started collecting Pokemon cards before she could even read them because of the cartoons. I haven't seen anybody play a physical game of Yugioh or Pokémon in years. No card shops sale them were I live. I buy my daughters Pokémon cards at walmart. Yugioh might be seeing play outside of the usa but is dead as a tourney level game here. Compared to MTG were I could play in a tourney every day if I wanted.
As otherz have said, ive known alot of people who have bought ygo cards just for the art or the anime etc. They have a unique type of art style that is geared towards otaku and youngsters.
Mtg seems to be geared more towards teens and yiung adults then to children.
I know when i was growing up my parents werw fine with pokemon and ygo but not magic because some of the mtg art and wording is pushing it. Theres a lot more grizzly death and gore in mtg.
I can see why ygo would be number 1 as well as far as sales. Alot of people who play ygo jave never even heard of mtg. Which might have something to do with availability. I discovered ygo in 6th grade and discovered mtg in 9th grade. See that age difference?
Perhaps the biggest reason why Yu-Gi-Oh! is outselling MTG right now is due to Konami making the game less expensive and more affordable for players to get into where they finally got their acts together by making Yu-Gi-Oh! less linear and more skill intensive in deck strategy while it's not without it's flaws sales figures are showing that it might be stepping in the right direction but even then for a Trading Card Game/Collectible Card Game that's been notorious for it's power creep since the Forbidden/Limited List was enacted in 2004 I highly doubt it holds any water contrary to popular belief of what Yu-Gi-Oh! players on Pojo say about the game nowadays.
MTG in comparison seems to have gotten more expensive than Yu-Gi-Oh! on a competitive aspect in the last few years up to now where players end up having to spend close to $300+ on playsets of shocks, fetches, and mana dorks in order to compete in sanctioned tournaments and currently there isn't a format in the game where you can build a competitive deck on a budget and still be able to win a PTQ or a Grand Prix with it. Getting rid of Core Sets with less reprints down the road will probably drive more players away from MTG especially If those reprints end up becoming hard to come by in limited edition sets like Modern Masters and Modern Masters 2. I don't think marketing has anything to do with why Yu-Gi-Oh! is outselling MTG right now, perhaps it's nostalgia as others have said.
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1) yu gi oh is a franchise, mtg is just one game (for know, that why WOTC pushes PC duel of planeswalker, new mtg strategy game, magic movie, etc), you can compare yu gi oh with pokemon, not with magic.
2) more product sell=/= profit, WOTC want profits.
3) you really cant compare yu gi oh/magic "reprint" police and their impact on profits.
short story: yeah, yu gi oh outsell magic, and that the only true thing you can say.
Yugioh had mass media before the cards were even in english, I haven't ever even seen an ad for magic. If there is a cartoon of something, kids will buy it, it's not super complicated.
. Alot of people who play ygo jave never even heard of mtg.
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I discovered ygo in 6th grade and discovered mtg in 9th grade.
A lot of people playing Magic have never even heard of yu-gi-oh. I discovered Magic in 8th grade and my only knowledge of Yugioh is from (mainly negative) comments by other posters on MTGsalvation. I guess it depends on where in the world you live.
I guess it could be outselling magic, but I still have a few reservations. My main concern is that we don't know how much magic has sold, and neither, most probably, did Guinness in 2011 when they awarded the world record to Yu-gi-oh. Guinness is not exactly overly rigorous in fact-checking. As an example, The Beatles' "Yesterday" was listed as "the most recorded song in history", but it turned out that several songs eclipse it. Gershwin's "Summertime", for example, has been recorded ten times more. They did not bother to fact-check this. So I can easily see a scenario where Guinness put the Yu-Gi-Oh record in with at "to the best of our knowledge" kinda attitude, because from the information that was available to them, it was the number one selling card game.
Of course, if Wizards/Hasbro knew and could prove that Magic was outselling, they might have wanted to approach Guinness and set things right, to use in advertising etc. But who knows, they are careful about print numbers for whatever reason..
Another thing: Kids buy these cards, that's fine. But kids generally do not buy boxes upon boxes of cards, like silly adults do.
But anyways, we can't really prove anything in this thread, but it seems like it at least seems reasonable to most people that Yu-gi-oh can be the number one. No one has commented on whether it seems reasonable that Magic could be the number one however.
Is "5 times Revised on average" really that far fetched?
1) yu gi oh is a franchise, mtg is just one game (for know, that why WOTC pushes PC duel of planeswalker, new mtg strategy game, magic movie, etc), you can compare yu gi oh with pokemon, not with magic.
And we arent' comparing other merchandise sold, really. The thread is about the card games only. YGH mechandise is likely worth as much or more than the value of the TCG. But selling cards is something they're still good at doing, even ignoring all the other merchandise they sell.
3) you really cant compare yu gi oh/magic "reprint" police and their impact on profits.
Of course we can. We may not be entirely correct, because we have incomplete information, but everyone here on this site is a gamer. Incomplete information is part of what we do. YGH tends to reprint everything popular, until anyone can get them at very low prices. It's not unheard of for them to reprint an ultra-mythic chase card as an uncommon a year later. It's pretty easy to theorize a link between "they reprint a ton of popular cards" and "people spend money on packs with those reprints in them."
short story: yeah, yu gi oh outsell magic, and that the only true thing you can say.
We can say that YGH outsells M:tG. But from there, we can theorycraft. YGH has a HUGE market segment, and it's a multinational segment. All those Korean releases? One can assume that they're profitable. While YGH may not have much of a competitive scene here in the US, it DOES have a competitive scene in Korea and Japan. Part of the units sold are also due to the fact that Konami has prioritized selling packs, even if it makes singles harder to move. The YGH market (and this is secondhand, from a friend who used to play,) is EXTREMELY volatile. Many LGS won't even touch singles, for fear of getting burned on them. If a card is valuable, chances are it will tank, and tank hard, within a year as it's reprinted in a new booster set. It's nearly impossible to build value of a collection over time, because Konami treats their cards like game pieces: inherently valueless except to the game itself. Wizards has gone the other direction, creating artificial scarcity to enforce a perception of value for their game pieces. This makes the secondary market more stable, but increases prices of singles (the cards Wizards make neither revenue, nor profit on...)
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Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
I feel like Magic is bigger in the Americas and Europe and Yugioh is bigger in Asia. The only places I have seen competitive Yugioh is in large cities and the vast majority of players were Asian. Magic on the other hand has a presence almost everywhere I go. Even small towns I have seen shops to play. Magic is sold at most hobby stores and big box retailers in the US at least. I have seen Magic sell out in big box retailers and card shops. Yugioh not so much. While the prodect moves it doesn't move nearly at fast here. I think over all globally Yugioh outsells Magic and is probably more profitable how ever there is far more "money" in the market. Yes magic has been around longer but last time I checked Yugioh cards don't touch Magic in value.
Yugioh might outsell mtg too because unlike mtg it also has video games, duel disk accesories, the animes, etc. People can relate to yugioh and the struggle of good vs evil. The characters are often centered around some nerdy card players that findthemselves facing off against powerful and famous rivals.
Mtg doesnt have anything really for us all to relate to. Yes we can pick melek taus or chandra but do we know their personal lives? Do we see them behind tbe scenes and watch them struggle with goals and desires? No for most of us ybey are a card with some words and an image.
MTG in comparison seems to have gotten more expensive than Yu-Gi-Oh! on a competitive aspect in the last few years up to now where players end up having to spend close to $300+ on playsets of shocks, fetches, and mana dorks in order to compete in sanctioned tournaments and currently there isn't a format in the game where you can build a competitive deck on a budget and still be able to win a PTQ or a Grand Prix with it. Getting rid of Core Sets with less reprints down the road will probably drive more players away from MTG especially If those reprints end up becoming hard to come by in limited edition sets like Modern Masters and Modern Masters 2. I don't think marketing has anything to do with why Yu-Gi-Oh! is outselling MTG right now, perhaps it's nostalgia as others have said.
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Tom Ross won back to back invitationals as well as states using Boss Sligh, a deck that's quite cheap.
Yugioh reprints a ton of product, and that is something WOTC cannot do as much. You can now buy at Target a box with reprint packs from the very first sets of Yugioh. Imagine a box set with exact reprints of Beta and Arabian Nights at a Target.
Magic doesn't release print run numbers, but we can use quarterly reporting from Hasbro to guesstimate some stuff. They're cagey about numbers, but the 2011 year end financial report states that Magic "...totaled less than $100 million in revenues in 2008 and was on the decline, to where it is today - the largest brand in our Games and Puzzles category, the largest game brand in the U.S. and more than double the size it was just 3 years ago."
If you take double the size = $200 million in revenue for 2011, and you assume that wizards gets $2 in revenue/pack they sell, then that would be 1.5 billion cards in 2011. I'm not sure on pricing; they might get less than that per pack (which would lead to more cards), but they also sell non-card stuff that makes up part of that revenue like MTGO, MTG branded gear and cards that are priced higher than packs on a per-card basis like FTVs. Since $200 million @ $2/pack would lead to 27 billion cards if they had sold at that level for all 18 years of the game, I think it is not too likely they were over the 25 billion mark in 2011.
First: Who cares? As long as magic is thriving that is all that matters.
Second: Just because it is selling more doesn't mean it has a larger player base. As a former competitive YGO player its not uncommon for one or two people to crack several cases due to how expensive YGO cards can get. It's not very uncommon to have $80+ dollar cards out of a new set that you need 3 of for every deck in YGO. When Pot of Duality and Solemn Warning came out we cracked sooooo many packs as Pots were $110 a piece and every deck needed 3 and Warnings were $50+ and every deck needed 3. Same when the teledad deck cost over $1200 and you couldn't win a tournament without it. YGO just tends to throw cards at the wall to see what sticks with no regard to secondary market or game health which is why people buy so many packs. It's way cheaper to play the pack lottery vs spending $400 on a playset of cards for a deck.
TLDR as long as Magic is doing well there is no reason to care if YGO is selling well. It just means everyone has access to a game they enjoy.
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Trying to make crappy pet cards work since 2002.
I'm usually typing quickly at work or on my phone so I appolize from the crummy grammar
Magic players will always be quick to use YuGiOh's supposed failure as a reason why Magic can't mass reprint certain cards to make them affordable or reprint things more frequently, but despite it's "failure", YuGiOh has been going strong for over 10 years now and still has a very healthy secondary market. YuGiOh has a ton of commons that rival the pricey Modern commons/commons in terms of value and they still have lots of cards that sell for more (way more) than your average Magic card. The only difference is unlike in Magic, there's actually hope that you'll be able to afford to play the deck you want eventually.
The anime is definitely a big factor in helping to sell cards too. There's nothing like seeing characters in an anime play your favorite cards/deck strategy, no matter how cheesy it is. So I don't doubt that YuGiOh outsells Magic.
Magic players will always be quick to use YuGiOh's supposed failure as a reason why Magic can't mass reprint certain cards to make them affordable or reprint things more frequently, but despite it's "failure", YuGiOh has been going strong for over 10 years now and still has a very healthy secondary market. YuGiOh has a ton of commons that rival the pricey Modern commons/commons in terms of value and they still have lots of cards that sell for more (way more) than your average Magic card. The only difference is unlike in Magic, there's actually hope that you'll be able to afford to play the deck you want eventually.
I don't think I've seen Magic players use Yu-Gi-Oh as an argument against reprints. If anything it's usually an argument Magic players make that Wizards of the Coast should be reprinting cards more aggressively, arguing that Yu-Gi-Oh does it and has done just fine (and might be more popular as a result).
Wasn't over printing what killed yugioh? The secondary market is why magic took off. In the older days it was a lot harder to get the cards you needed to build decks. Secondary markets started filling the void which made the game much more enjoyable. WOTC needs the secondary markets, I only buy singles, so, if their is no secondary markets to buy from I would have no way to obtain cards. I know this makes cards cheaper for me to buy but is it worth putting shops out of business? No, A lot of shops have thousands of dollars invested in singles.
Of course, being the best-selling card game in the entire world, maybe they have a good idea of what they're doing. Their policy seems to be "reprint thm into the ground" and it hasn't hurt them on tiny bit.
I think most of Yu-gi-oh!'s issues have more to do with the power level of cards than oversupply. Without rotation, they're forced to ramp the power level up with each set or else people will stop buying cards.
Also, Upper Deck Entertainment had a tendency to make the good cards REALLY hard to get. I hear they created new rarities for valuable cards and removed those cards from preconstructed decks (then again, I also hear Konami made those rarities)...
And then there's the whole thing with UDE allegedly making counterfeit cards. (Despite the fact that they were, like, making the real cards at the time. I don't understand what's going on there.)
Yugioh's problem is that it struggles to retain its players. A lot of young kids buy the cards, but they eventually lose interest and find something else. There is no market for teenagers and adults. 12 and Under seems to be the yugioh target range. Kids just lost interest in middle school, high school and college. You look goofy playing a game that has an anime made for 5 years-olds. If you compare a magic card to a yugioh card, the yugioh card is smaller, like it was meant for smaller hands. Plus, one thing that hurts yugioh the most is that majority of their players do not have extensive incomes, credit cards or independence. A large amount of people on this forum play MTGO, duels of the planeswalkers, have the cash to purchase dark confidant and his pricey friends, and can buy booster boxes. Yugioh players do not have that amount of disposable income.
Magic has a lot of players who quit before come back. Majority of the people who played yugioh when it became big here in the states are around my age (21). They just forgot about the game and moved on. True, magic has been around much longer, but yugioh was just a fad for people my age. They have moved on. It did not gather a dedicated audience like Pokemon did.
. Alot of people who play ygo jave never even heard of mtg.
[...]
I discovered ygo in 6th grade and discovered mtg in 9th grade.
A lot of people playing Magic have never even heard of yu-gi-oh. I discovered Magic in 8th grade and my only knowledge of Yugioh is from (mainly negative) comments by other posters on MTGsalvation. I guess it depends on where in the world you live.
I guess it could be outselling magic, but I still have a few reservations. My main concern is that we don't know how much magic has sold, and neither, most probably, did Guinness in 2011 when they awarded the world record to Yu-gi-oh. Guinness is not exactly overly rigorous in fact-checking. As an example, The Beatles' "Yesterday" was listed as "the most recorded song in history", but it turned out that several songs eclipse it. Gershwin's "Summertime", for example, has been recorded ten times more. They did not bother to fact-check this. So I can easily see a scenario where Guinness put the Yu-Gi-Oh record in with at "to the best of our knowledge" kinda attitude, because from the information that was available to them, it was the number one selling card game.
Of course, if Wizards/Hasbro knew and could prove that Magic was outselling, they might have wanted to approach Guinness and set things right, to use in advertising etc. But who knows, they are careful about print numbers for whatever reason..
Another thing: Kids buy these cards, that's fine. But kids generally do not buy boxes upon boxes of cards, like silly adults do.
But anyways, we can't really prove anything in this thread, but it seems like it at least seems reasonable to most people that Yu-gi-oh can be the number one. No one has commented on whether it seems reasonable that Magic could be the number one however.
Is "5 times Revised on average" really that far fetched?
I think a lot of these points are spot on. I'm not going to say it's impossible that yu-gi-oh has outsold magic, but I find it unlikely. Sure, lots of kids buy yu-gi-oh, but kids only buy a few packs here and there and don't have the money for boxes, cases, or expensive rares. I know yu-gi-oh prices have come down, but they have a different rarity strategy (i.e. my understanding is they made previously hard-to-find cards less expensive by reprinting them at lower rarity rather than by necessarily reprinting more total product). This would be like MTG reprinting goyf at uncommon in RTR instead of mythic in MM... they could have printed the same number of cards and goyf would suddenly be like $5-10. By contrast, MTG has moved toward having most of it's "good" cards at rare and mythic, so stores are forced to open many cases of cards to pull singles. With this strategy, it seems like MTG would sell more.
anecdotally, I can find a sanctioned MTG tournament literally almost every day within a 1-hour drive of my house. I don't think that's anywhere near true of yu-gi-oh. While I recognize much of the market is more casual, the casual players aren't the ones opening cases for mythics... that's the tournament players. Perhaps yu-gi-oh is wildly more popular than MTG in other countries (I honestly don't know). Even if it is, it would be hard to out-strip MTG... the US has a lot of disposable income and just a lot of people.
Finally, with regard to guiness fact-checking, I think it's less that they don't fact-check and more that they only accept formal applications for most records. If Wizards doesn't apply for the record, then they won't get it. And we can say with reasonable certainty that they won't apply because they don't want to release numbers. 5x the revised print run seems extremely possible. Think about how many people you know with 4x underground sea compared to 4x voice of resurgence. Voice was a higher rarity AND in a set with a low run by today's standards.
Not contending whether Yugioh is dead or not, but I just got curious. Are we sure that they are officially, undoubtedly the number one selling game? Or could Magic conceivably be outselling it in terms of total cards sold but that it can't be made official since Wizards/Hasbro aren't giving us print numbers?
The Yugioh entry lists around 25 billion cards sold by march 2011. At that time, Magic was in its 17th major block (SoM). If we're just counting the blocks, Magic would have needed to be selling around 1.5 billion cards of each block up to that point on average.
Revised edition sold "over 100,000,000" cards. Is it totally out of the question that expansion since then has been printed at 5x that on average? It doesn't sound that far-fetched to me, the game was in a very different state during revised. And this is only counting the block expansions, even if core sets always sold "poorly", they have probably been handily outselling Revised edition since fourth upwards. That's 13 core sets as well.
Thoughts?
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It has a link to the Guinness book of records, so I was obviously aware of that claim. I wonder if Guinness can only take official sales numbers into account, so if Wizards are withholding theirs, then there is no counter-claim to Yugioh being the best-selling game.
I then try and break down the 25 billion and look at how many cards on average per set would need to have been sold, and I end up at a number of ~5 x revised on average per expert expansion.
And 25 billion is not 25000 times 100 million. It is 250 times.
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Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
It would be interesting to compare profitability as well.
As long it's working for both companies and fanbases, I guess it's all fine and dandy.
Mtg seems to be geared more towards teens and yiung adults then to children.
I know when i was growing up my parents werw fine with pokemon and ygo but not magic because some of the mtg art and wording is pushing it. Theres a lot more grizzly death and gore in mtg.
I can see why ygo would be number 1 as well as far as sales. Alot of people who play ygo jave never even heard of mtg. Which might have something to do with availability. I discovered ygo in 6th grade and discovered mtg in 9th grade. See that age difference?
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MTG in comparison seems to have gotten more expensive than Yu-Gi-Oh! on a competitive aspect in the last few years up to now where players end up having to spend close to $300+ on playsets of shocks, fetches, and mana dorks in order to compete in sanctioned tournaments and currently there isn't a format in the game where you can build a competitive deck on a budget and still be able to win a PTQ or a Grand Prix with it. Getting rid of Core Sets with less reprints down the road will probably drive more players away from MTG especially If those reprints end up becoming hard to come by in limited edition sets like Modern Masters and Modern Masters 2. I don't think marketing has anything to do with why Yu-Gi-Oh! is outselling MTG right now, perhaps it's nostalgia as others have said.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Sometimes I think it's a sin when I feel like I'm winning but I'm losing again." - Gordon Lightfoot
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
2) more product sell=/= profit, WOTC want profits.
3) you really cant compare yu gi oh/magic "reprint" police and their impact on profits.
short story: yeah, yu gi oh outsell magic, and that the only true thing you can say.
A lot of people playing Magic have never even heard of yu-gi-oh. I discovered Magic in 8th grade and my only knowledge of Yugioh is from (mainly negative) comments by other posters on MTGsalvation. I guess it depends on where in the world you live.
I guess it could be outselling magic, but I still have a few reservations. My main concern is that we don't know how much magic has sold, and neither, most probably, did Guinness in 2011 when they awarded the world record to Yu-gi-oh. Guinness is not exactly overly rigorous in fact-checking. As an example, The Beatles' "Yesterday" was listed as "the most recorded song in history", but it turned out that several songs eclipse it. Gershwin's "Summertime", for example, has been recorded ten times more. They did not bother to fact-check this. So I can easily see a scenario where Guinness put the Yu-Gi-Oh record in with at "to the best of our knowledge" kinda attitude, because from the information that was available to them, it was the number one selling card game.
Of course, if Wizards/Hasbro knew and could prove that Magic was outselling, they might have wanted to approach Guinness and set things right, to use in advertising etc. But who knows, they are careful about print numbers for whatever reason..
Another thing: Kids buy these cards, that's fine. But kids generally do not buy boxes upon boxes of cards, like silly adults do.
But anyways, we can't really prove anything in this thread, but it seems like it at least seems reasonable to most people that Yu-gi-oh can be the number one. No one has commented on whether it seems reasonable that Magic could be the number one however.
Is "5 times Revised on average" really that far fetched?
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And we arent' comparing other merchandise sold, really. The thread is about the card games only. YGH mechandise is likely worth as much or more than the value of the TCG. But selling cards is something they're still good at doing, even ignoring all the other merchandise they sell.
Obviously, they work on different margins, but there IS a direct relationship between "units sold' and "net profit."
Of course we can. We may not be entirely correct, because we have incomplete information, but everyone here on this site is a gamer. Incomplete information is part of what we do. YGH tends to reprint everything popular, until anyone can get them at very low prices. It's not unheard of for them to reprint an ultra-mythic chase card as an uncommon a year later. It's pretty easy to theorize a link between "they reprint a ton of popular cards" and "people spend money on packs with those reprints in them."
We can say that YGH outsells M:tG. But from there, we can theorycraft. YGH has a HUGE market segment, and it's a multinational segment. All those Korean releases? One can assume that they're profitable. While YGH may not have much of a competitive scene here in the US, it DOES have a competitive scene in Korea and Japan. Part of the units sold are also due to the fact that Konami has prioritized selling packs, even if it makes singles harder to move. The YGH market (and this is secondhand, from a friend who used to play,) is EXTREMELY volatile. Many LGS won't even touch singles, for fear of getting burned on them. If a card is valuable, chances are it will tank, and tank hard, within a year as it's reprinted in a new booster set. It's nearly impossible to build value of a collection over time, because Konami treats their cards like game pieces: inherently valueless except to the game itself. Wizards has gone the other direction, creating artificial scarcity to enforce a perception of value for their game pieces. This makes the secondary market more stable, but increases prices of singles (the cards Wizards make neither revenue, nor profit on...)
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Mtg doesnt have anything really for us all to relate to. Yes we can pick melek taus or chandra but do we know their personal lives? Do we see them behind tbe scenes and watch them struggle with goals and desires? No for most of us ybey are a card with some words and an image.
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If you take double the size = $200 million in revenue for 2011, and you assume that wizards gets $2 in revenue/pack they sell, then that would be 1.5 billion cards in 2011. I'm not sure on pricing; they might get less than that per pack (which would lead to more cards), but they also sell non-card stuff that makes up part of that revenue like MTGO, MTG branded gear and cards that are priced higher than packs on a per-card basis like FTVs. Since $200 million @ $2/pack would lead to 27 billion cards if they had sold at that level for all 18 years of the game, I think it is not too likely they were over the 25 billion mark in 2011.
Second: Just because it is selling more doesn't mean it has a larger player base. As a former competitive YGO player its not uncommon for one or two people to crack several cases due to how expensive YGO cards can get. It's not very uncommon to have $80+ dollar cards out of a new set that you need 3 of for every deck in YGO. When Pot of Duality and Solemn Warning came out we cracked sooooo many packs as Pots were $110 a piece and every deck needed 3 and Warnings were $50+ and every deck needed 3. Same when the teledad deck cost over $1200 and you couldn't win a tournament without it. YGO just tends to throw cards at the wall to see what sticks with no regard to secondary market or game health which is why people buy so many packs. It's way cheaper to play the pack lottery vs spending $400 on a playset of cards for a deck.
TLDR as long as Magic is doing well there is no reason to care if YGO is selling well. It just means everyone has access to a game they enjoy.
I'm usually typing quickly at work or on my phone so I appolize from the crummy grammar
The anime is definitely a big factor in helping to sell cards too. There's nothing like seeing characters in an anime play your favorite cards/deck strategy, no matter how cheesy it is.
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Also, Upper Deck Entertainment had a tendency to make the good cards REALLY hard to get. I hear they created new rarities for valuable cards and removed those cards from preconstructed decks (then again, I also hear Konami made those rarities)...
And then there's the whole thing with UDE allegedly making counterfeit cards. (Despite the fact that they were, like, making the real cards at the time. I don't understand what's going on there.)
Magic has a lot of players who quit before come back. Majority of the people who played yugioh when it became big here in the states are around my age (21). They just forgot about the game and moved on. True, magic has been around much longer, but yugioh was just a fad for people my age. They have moved on. It did not gather a dedicated audience like Pokemon did.
I think a lot of these points are spot on. I'm not going to say it's impossible that yu-gi-oh has outsold magic, but I find it unlikely. Sure, lots of kids buy yu-gi-oh, but kids only buy a few packs here and there and don't have the money for boxes, cases, or expensive rares. I know yu-gi-oh prices have come down, but they have a different rarity strategy (i.e. my understanding is they made previously hard-to-find cards less expensive by reprinting them at lower rarity rather than by necessarily reprinting more total product). This would be like MTG reprinting goyf at uncommon in RTR instead of mythic in MM... they could have printed the same number of cards and goyf would suddenly be like $5-10. By contrast, MTG has moved toward having most of it's "good" cards at rare and mythic, so stores are forced to open many cases of cards to pull singles. With this strategy, it seems like MTG would sell more.
anecdotally, I can find a sanctioned MTG tournament literally almost every day within a 1-hour drive of my house. I don't think that's anywhere near true of yu-gi-oh. While I recognize much of the market is more casual, the casual players aren't the ones opening cases for mythics... that's the tournament players. Perhaps yu-gi-oh is wildly more popular than MTG in other countries (I honestly don't know). Even if it is, it would be hard to out-strip MTG... the US has a lot of disposable income and just a lot of people.
Finally, with regard to guiness fact-checking, I think it's less that they don't fact-check and more that they only accept formal applications for most records. If Wizards doesn't apply for the record, then they won't get it. And we can say with reasonable certainty that they won't apply because they don't want to release numbers. 5x the revised print run seems extremely possible. Think about how many people you know with 4x underground sea compared to 4x voice of resurgence. Voice was a higher rarity AND in a set with a low run by today's standards.