ToppsTown: flattery

Today Nick found a bit of flattery at a blog called Game Guts, and coming from someone else in the biz it means all that much more.

Here's a part I agree with:

...if you're going to be selling the product anyway, and you're going to have a website anyway, you might as well have the two working together. This is particularly true of collectible and entertainment products.

I love talking about this site as added value! This is one thing I love about it-- people who already buy the Topps cards have this new experience at no additional cost.

Now here's a part that I'd like to expound on:

Toppstown looks to be a pretty modest site. Good for them. Keep costs down, make the thing do what it needs to do, and don't sabotage a good thing by breaking the bank.

Adam (author) is right, for the most part. Topps Town is modest-- we spent much of our effort making the Avatar builder streamlined and fun, into making the Clubhouse customizable, into tweaking the Trading Zone. But the part that I would like to add is that the site will grow. We believe that the site needed to be built on solid legs before pumping it full of stuff-- if the functionality isn't there, how can we expect users to come back long enough to see it grow? While I can't give away anything about what is coming in the future, I can say that football launches at the end of the summer and there are surprises to come.