Subsidizing Player Sponsorships with Merch - SQ x ID

20 Jul, 2026

One of the hats I wear for SQ and SQXL is being the merch lead, handling things like commissioning art and designing the shirts, hoodies, and other miscellaneous items that we sell in the store for SQXL. I enjoy doing this and it turns into a source of income to help us pay for the event itself. Fighting game events aren't cheap to run!

Another thing I find myself doing on occasion is helping sponsor players, giving financial assistance to send them to regionals or majors that they otherwise couldn't attend. This is a rewarding endeavor; however, it is also an expensive one. This isn't something I can do regularly, and the fact that sponsoring players in this fashion relies solely on my, or someone else's, ability and willingness to do so feels like something that can be improved upon.

At one point or another, the SQ team had discussed doing a merch drop as a fundraiser to send someone to an event, subsidizing or outright covering that cost rather than depending on an individual or individuals paying up. I kicked around some ideas for the line but nothing ever stuck as something that had a clear vision, so we dropped the concept; that is, until the Impossible Dust crew approached us with the same idea.

This led to the Better Player shirt and sticker, the first SQ x ID merch collaboration. Sending NC's resident grappler Beef to Boston Blue Beat: Beach Episode seemed like a clear choice to both parties, so we got to work. The ID team commissioned some incredible Ladiva art from Mango Lullaby and we did a very fun launch trailer for when the store went live. That Billy Mays impression actually trashed my voice for a few days, but I think it was worth it.

Now that the merch run is done, I'd like to give a bit of a retrospective on how this went.

Expenses

While the store was live, there was still a matter of paying for the actual trip. I covered those expenses up front, which broke down like this:

This only wound up under $500 thanks to a very generous room split with other NC players attending (as well as Beef's willingness to sleep on a roll-in cot.) This also, notably, does not include the cost of the art commission for the shirt and sticker. The art commission cost $240, bringing our total cost up to $736.59. Admittedly, I accepted going in that I was going to eat the cost of the art with the hope that if we covered the full cost of the sponsorship any "profit" would just help fund art for the next sponsorship merch drop.

Sales

The store launched on June 3rd, 2026 and was open until July 20th, 2026, a run of roughly 47 days. In that time the Fourthwall store sold 23 t-shirts and 12 stickers, producing a total net profit of $344.51:

Accounting for the cost of the art commission, the merch covered $104.51 of the sponsorship, of ~21% of the cost.

Takeaways

The main lesson from this experiment? This approach isn't really any more sustainable than just having individuals sponsor a player! While the sales did technically subsidize the sponsorship, getting there involved much more up-front cost and took significantly more time from a number of individuals to put together. At our current scale and reach, the benefit doesn't match the cost.

Another big takeaway? Selling stickers through Fourthwall's fulfilment sucks for everyone involved. They're too expensive to be attractive for customers, and even then the margins on each unit are too thin. Our sticker offerings are likely going to stay offline at SQ and SQXL for ethe foreseeable, since we can order them in bulk ourselves and get the same or better quality at a lower price for everyone.

That's not to say that this was a failure though, just a learning experience. Limited-time drops and FOMO are not going to be big drivers for us right now, so perhaps the smarter play is to accumulate merch in a persistent store over time. There wouldn't be a large quantity of orders in a short period of time, but over a longer stretch a store with 1) cool designs for characters that may not get a lot of love in terms of merch and 2) a stated goal of helping sponsor players with the proceeds could wind up being able to actually send players to events more regularly. That would also let us make merch that doesn't necessarily fit themes for SQ events or specific players, opening up possibilities that don't currently exist.

So, will we do this again? Almost certainly! Helping the NCFGC travel to different regions and throw down with the best they have to offer is always a worthwhile endeavor. Things will just look a little different next time around.