Posted in: Comics | Tagged: ar, avx, Comics, david gabriel, idw, marvel

New Augmented Reality Content For Marvel's AVX Hardcover And The Future Of $3.99

Published Fri, 11 May 2012 08:00:51 -0500

Last updated Sat, 12 May 2012 08:02:31 -0500

You know how some collections of comics like to add forewords, afterwords, sketches, deleted scenes, script, commentary and the like? Well, now Marvel will be adding extra virtual material as well.

The recent AR material has been such a hit, according to Marvel's SVP David Gabriel talking to ComicVine, that there will be extra content triggered by the hardcover collection.

AR content will definitely be used in the upcoming AvX collection available in November. The collection will contain all original AR applications along with new content created exclusively for the hardcover.

And there's more to come.

We have continued plans to use AR within the AvX series; in addition we are currently working on a large-scale integration tied to something very big we haven't announced yet.

David also talked about how digital and print sales on the series have been rising

While digital are increasing, it's nice to report that all related print sales are also going up. So while we're seeing issue AvX #3 digital sales surpassing issue 2, print sales of AvX #4 are tracking higher than issues 2 and 3. We are expecting this trend to continue for issues 5 and 6. This is phenomenal feat in the comic industry, where distribution usually trends downward. The upswing in sales is great reflection on the quality of the product.

And as for those $3.99 price points…

Looking at the sales for Marvel and its competitors, it certainly doesn't seem like the $3.99 price point is a huge barrier for fans or retailers. We believe the price of our comics is justified by the content and that we deliver an exceptional value for the price.

IDW's Ted Adams over at ICV2 seems to agree about the print vs digital playoff.

There's just no question at this point that selling comics digitally is definitively not impacting [print] comic book sales. If anything you could make the argument that the success of digital is driving more print comic book sales. The correlation at this point is that increased digital has resulted in increased print. Whether or not that is a direct correlation, I don't know how you would figure that out. I can say with no uncertainty that our increased digital revenue has come at a time when we've had increased comic book sales.

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