New Year, New Glow!
Keith Avallone, PLAAY Games LLC
Happy New Year! We're looking forward to another exciting year in 2023. I outlined our plans for the year in our January 5th "Look Ahead" YouTube stream, I'd encourage you to take a look if you haven't done so yet. I'll hit the high points in this blog post, but there's quite a bit more ground we covered in the stream...
You've likely noticed we've made some changes to our web presence as the new year begins. The first thing you’ve noticed is the new “glowing neon” logo. What you may NOT have noticed is the web address—it’s back to good ol’ PLAAY.com, established in the year 2000.
We haven’t abandoned the brand segmentation of PLAAY Classic and PLAAY Now, we’re just housing them at the same URL: www.plaay.com. That is to say, if you type in “PLAAYnow.com,” “PLAAYclassic.com” or just “PLAAY.com,” you'll be brought to the same site—PLAAY.com. The main benefit here is that you can browse games from both brands in the same visit and also mix and match games from both brands in the same shopping cart. On our end, it's less time spent in website maintenance and eliminates duplication of content—blog posts, news updates for live events and conventions, e-newsletters and so on.
BTW, we haven’t necessarily settled on the glowing neon logo as a permanent look, it’s more like an audition logo. (Although, I really like it!)
We discontinued the old PLAAY.com site at the end of 2022. I hand-coded that site in the summer of 2015--almost eight years ago--out of necessity, NOT expertise! In fact, I took a two-week online crash course on HTML coding just to make it happen. I thought it looked pretty good in 2015, but as time passed it began to look pretty outdated. Bottom line, we felt that the old site’s look detracted from our company rather than enhancing it. Using SquareSpace's state-of-the-art e-commerce design software, we created and launched the PLAAY NOW site in the summer of 2019 and the PLAAY Classic site in February of 2020. But we kept the old PLAAY.com site active, a sort of "online museum" we called it. But with our old HTML hosting agreement expiring on December 31st, the time was right to make the move.
When the old PLAAY.com site went away, the free stuff page disappeared, too, nearly fifteen years of digital content. This brought consternation to some, at least at first, but all of that content has migrated to the PLAAY Games FAQ page, where it'll be curated going forward. Big thanks to moderator Al Wilson for making this happen. As I mentioned in a Facebook post about this, a lot if that content has outlived its usefulness. However, in the next several weeks we do plan to bring back the best, most relevant content to the PLAAY.com site. We'll also be simplifying the free stuff download process. Starting on March 3rd, you'll be able to access free content at PLAAY.com through a simple one-button download. Instead of a nice icon and descriptive text about a free card set or add-on, there'll instead be a button that lists the item and author (i.e., "1958 Japanese Pro Baseball Season, Brien Aronov.") It'll be less fancy, but more efficient.
We're going to make an "event" out of the return/reconfiguration of free stuff, "Free, Free, Twenty-Free" (see what we did there? "3/3/23?"), stay tuned!
Another change you’ll notice is that we’ve instituted a $5 shipping charge on orders under $49. This is in lieu of a price increase, which we've been considering for awhile now. It's no news that prices have gone way up over the last year, for everything. For us, the biggest increases have been in shipping costs: postage, mailing supplies (like bubble wrap, tape, mailers, boxes, etc.), mailing fees and other shipping-related costs. It's particularly problematic on smaller orders, where postage and handling has become disproportionately large. Recognizing this, we decided to take a different approach to price increases. This $5 shipping charge is ONLY in effect on orders under $49. We feel like it’s a good solution. We'll give this idea a chance to take hold, and re-evaluate in the spring.
Switching gears, we're super excited about this year's product releases and live events. Again, we covered these in detail in our 2023 "Look Ahead" stream, but here are some of the highlights...
New Products
• Commemorative card set, 25th Anniversary of the 1998 Baseball Season (March).
• PLAAY NOW card game collaboration with game designer Mike Fitzgerald (March).
• "Binge Week Golf!" New Course Collection, golf PLAAY mat, plus we're going to offer the All-Time Greats set in a new color, cut-card format (April).
• Commemorative card set, 75th Anniversary of NASCAR, "All-Time Greats of Racin'!" for RED WHITE & BLUE RACIN’ (May).
• Two new vintage seasons for our fictional sports series: 1995 SCRAM for RED WHITE & BLUE RACIN' and 1987 Baseball America. (May)
• Memorial Day Weekend, we'll kick off "The Summer of NOW!" Three new PLAAY NOW releases: Memorial Day Weekend, Juneteenth (6/19), Fourth of July.
• Full-color, boxed version of our holiday Tennis game! Also a new "pro season" card set, and a fictional women's set, "how-to" guide and tennis PLAAY mat (August).
• Football America Anthology, a compilation of the other seasons, 2010-2022; release 2023 season (September).
• Cooperstown Collection Re-Release, ONE card set plus some new cards new inductees and footnotes (October).
Live Events
• Dice Tower West (March 8-12), let us know if you're thinking of being there! We're planning to have a HMG golf tournament, plus launch Mike Fitzgerald's new card game!
• PLAAY Dot CON 2023 (July 27-29), Special guests include Glenn Guzzo, ST Patrick, Jeff Giordano, and of course many celebrities from the PLAAY community!
• Fall Ball at the Hall (October 14), a LIVE History Maker Baseball in-person event at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY!
In our look-ahead stream, I also mentioned the ConSimWorld Expo/Phoenix, where we're aiming to have two new PLAAY NOW games which we feel will appeal to the war game crowd--as of this post, dates and times for the event have not been set. We'll keep our eye on it and let you know more when WE know more...
YES! It's going to be a VERY busy year, and we're excited that you'll be part of it! More information is on the way...