Is the FLGS obsolete?

[Michael Hopcroft]

I was thinking of starting a game store when i graduated from business school, but now I'm starting to wonder whether the FLGS we grew up with has been rendered obsolete. Columbia Games' recent announcement that they are going to direct sales only indicates some companies seem to think so. My own experience with the retail chain has been anything but encouraging as a publisher as well.

Will people be buying games in stores in four years when I graudate? And if not, what SHOULD I be doing? (There's no way to answer the second question, so I'll settle for the first).

[Scorpio]

I think it can still work, but you have to go 'outside the box'...have a game room for clubs/open nights/meetings, stay open late, do a lot of cross-marketing, even have computers with on-line capabilities....a real game zone, as it were.....maybe?

[anonymouse]

My problem with having computers for online gaming is that a lot of those customers get pretty disruptive. It's a good idea in theory, but.. <shrugs>. It doesn't help to ask those disrupters to leave, because they just wind up being replaced by others.

To answer the main point: I wouldn't say they're any more obsolete than any other store. But with places like Borders (and our own Powells) taking up gaming as mainstream, and thus carrying some of those books, the FLGS has to provide more to be attractive.

[Scorpio]

Yea, unfortunately the target audience and customer base are at an age where a lot of them don't give a damn about other's property and authority...if you build a loyal clientle, they tend to self-police...but getting to that point is the gist!
I still think there is a concept that would work, though...

[samdowning]

I think the FLGS has to expand in order to compete in the market.  You could be a bookstore that sells all sorts of books with a back room for people to play in your store.  I think playing in your store is key, though.  And I don't think that online gaming is a direction to go.  I've seen too many of the computerized game stores tank.

However, I think there is a place for computers in game stores, just not for playing Everquest Online, IYKWIM.  I was just talking to one person who said he had to take our pdf to Kinko's just to print it out because his printer didn't have the capability.  You could be the POD people are looking for and start a trend selling pdfs and charging for the printing.

[JSDiamond]

Mike,
Here is my experience (my opinion only) based upon what I have recently seen here in San Diego.

The game store can work.  Local hangout Game Empires recently relocated to a larger facility where they could fit more tables for RPing all night.  Game Empires has employees who actually *play* and the store has a strong rep for staying open 24 hours on weekends for all-nighters.
Game Empires is often crowded (*I will get back to this) and its patrons are fanatics like rabid pit bulls on a crack bender.

There are a couple of other stores here in SD county as well.  All sell board games, RP games and assorted supplies, magazines, figures, etc.

We also have a WotC megastore.  They also have LAN games on thirty stations as well as a dozen big tables BUT no RPing.  The tables are for CCGs only.  The place is loud with LAN players and screaming children playing Yu-gi-Oh and Pokemon.  This is not flame bait; but NO gamer even mentions WotC's store.  I never hear anyone even mention it, not even as a place to pick up spare dice.  In San Diego, Game Empires is #1.  But both GE and GameTown are (as well as a couple of hole-in-the-wall joints) loyally patronized.  They are the quintessential game stores we love.    

Summation: Scorpio and Anonymouse are dead-on correct.  

*Crowds at Game Empires:
"Will they buy in four years?"  I don't know, but I do know that I see college guys in Game Empires and they look like they walked out of a Mountain Dew commercial (I.e., they look to have dated girls).  You know what I mean.  And they are D&D3 players.      

Summation: The game store and in-store gaming of the type we know and love is not (in my opinion) going away.  As long as the core quality and friendly atmosphere exists, it will continue.  Ron might have something to say about running your own game store being a potential 'heartbreaker' of a type all its own and he would be right.

There are many details to consider of course, but with thorough planning and execution I believe that it could be personally satisfying and a business success.

[Andy Kitkowski]

The cross-marketing idea is the way /I/ would go.

In the ten year plan, if my wife and I are still in the area, is to make a tea house (my wife is an expert on leafy tea, and there's no coffee house/pavillion in the area that uses anything other than tea bags). While I wouldn't make half of it into a "gaming store", I'd certainly sell gaming books on the side, open up booths for casual gaming (including a casual gaming night), etc.

Maybe a coffee house/game shop might work?  Thing is, it's important that you love what you combine. Don't combine, say, PC gaming or coffee or books or whatever if you have no interest in them. Believe me, it'll show.

Good luck.

-Andy

ps- I, like many of you, had the "run a game store" dream. Then, one day,  I realized that all those unwashed grognards that hang around in the LGS and talk to the store owner emphatically about their Chaos Armies or 20th level bipolar paladins will be talking to me.  My dream died that day, but not in a bad way (I also gained more respect for the social stamina of game store owners). Actually, it more or less evolved into that above tea hose idea. :-)

[Tundra]

Well, I guess I can jump in here and try to give you some more information, Micheal.  I'm no expert (and each day I feel I'm getting more and more wrong about this market), and this is only touches your questions, but it's good info.

Upturn of the curve...

Back in the '80s we saw the first major rise of GAME stores, rather than Hobby stores with a game selection. The combination of easy availability of product for stores (lots of distributors), low cost for inventory, the newness of the pasttime, and the normal gamer habits of "must buy it all" made for easy profitability for anyone with enough cash to begin. Same on the manufacturer end, where anyone with access to a computer could publish their game and make money (it was sooo easy to make money then).

Downturn of the curve...

in the late 80's and early 90's it was no longer new, computer and console games were.  The stores who never had good business planning closed, taking many distributors with them.  Product sales consolidated to just a few companies, and even their sales were often not enough to keep them in business.

Upturn of the curve...

In the mid 90's TCGs boomed.  It was new and fed into the normal gamer habits of "must buy it all".  Anyone with a decent amount of money could afford to open a store, and regional sales meant that the secondary market (buying used cards or games that didn't sell other places at rock bottom prices) meant that it was easy to make money. On the manufacturer end (remember, these are mostly just gamers with companies, not companies with a game as product) many jumped on to the band wagon, because manufacturers love easy money even more than retailers.

Downturn of the curve...

Boom. Crash.  It's not new anymore.  Loyal purchasers get better prices via the Internet and don't spend as much in stores.  Stores drop like flies, again taking distributors and manufacturers.

Upturn of the curve...

Year 2000. D&D3rd and D20.  Manufacturers again see easy money and get heavy that direction.  Massive number of titles released each month means store's scan the release lists, buy by branding rather than by interest, and for a while things are rosey for a few...

Downturn of the curve...

Note that in the last there is one thing missing...the increase in stores. There are less FLGS that there have been in previous upturns.  Sales are still focused on top brands or branding.  Stores aren't the only place to get those, so people have less need to go to stores.  It's only the stores that understand their role to promote the Gaming Hobby, rather than promoting specific products, that are still doing well.

Conclusions: If "Loving Gaming" is your only reason to start a store or to mortgage your house to start a company, you WILL fail.  However, if you can combine that with smart business tactics, good customer awareness, and the willingness to change when you see better ways to do things, you got a good shot. Indie companies who don't overextend themselves and keep their focus will ride out all the other companies who look at being the Next Big Thing.  Ok, so they may never become full time businesses, but the melding of art, author, and fun makes gaming a nice lifetime hobby, and if the business pays for going to conventions, you're gold! ;-)

As an aside, Colombia has done this once before, in the late 90's.  That time, they cut off distribution and only sold direct to retailers.  For a while. To me this is less a failure of the FLGS and more Darwinism in the wargame world.  Essentially, they are moving to the indie level by choice, and by doing so they can go back to enjoying their hobby (I hope for Tom at least) rather than fighting entropy with tools and energy they do not have.  If it works for them, and they get refocused, they'll step back up again. But hopefully this will make it fun for them.

ttfn - woody

[Valamir]

Conclusions: If "Loving Gaming" is your only reason to start a store or to mortgage your house to start a company, you WILL fail.  However, if you can combine that with smart business tactics, good customer awareness, and the willingness to change when you see better ways to do things, you got a good shot. Indie companies who don't overextend themselves and keep their focus will ride out all the other companies who look at being the Next Big Thing.  Ok, so they may never become full time businesses, but the melding of art, author, and fun makes gaming a nice lifetime hobby, and if the business pays for going to conventions, you're gold! ;-)
ttfn - woody

And I can't imagine there's ever been an easier time to be a hobby business in gaming.  We're all familiar with the publisher side but even the retail end is opening up.  While E-business is not the overthrow everything model it was once hyped to be, it certainly is valid.  I know a lot of guys making a nice chunk of change in the secondary market.  Guys I know who used to work all year for a big score at the Origins Auction (like antique dealers) are now buying and selling in volume over E-bay.  They'll buy 3-4 incomplete game copies in various stages of wear.  Kit bash them together to get 2 complete sets at decent quality and sell them for double or treble.

If you like the social contact with gamers aspect more than the being in retail side...you'd be hard put to find a town of any decent size that doesn't have a community college within 30-45 minutes.  CCs are rife with game clubs and if there isn't a good one, they usually welcome people interested in starting them.  Bigger schools like Penn State had a whole staff of people dedicated to the "Free University" which was just a collection of student clubs organized to use campus facilites.  There were at least 3 gaming clubs among the several hundred options.

If you're an organizer take advantage of the HUGE downturn in travel.  Some hotels are so despirate for business they're giving block room convention style rates to much smaller groups and renting out conference facilities for a fraction of what they charged during the boom.  Organize a local con.  One of the successful FLGS guys I know used to run semi annual cons like this that made a good chunk of change from the registration fee.

IMO there is less and less of a NEED for brick and mortar gaming hobby stores themselves.  But there is no less of a need for the things the gaming stores provided.  There's just alot of alternative ways to get those things.

I can't imagine it ever being easier to take your pick from the part of the market you enjoy most and work out a way to at least get it to pay for itself.

[wyrdlyng]

Maybe a coffee house/game shop might work?

Well, the coffee house/bookstore model has worked well in general for Barnes & Noble stores down here in South Florida.

Tying into that, an old gaming group I used to play with would meet once a week at a more or less centrally located Barnes & Noble store to play cardgames (most often Shadowfist) at the internalized Starbucks section.

The people running the Starbucks didn't mind because we weren't rowdy and bought coffee and food there (and some were gamers as well) and the Barnes & Noble folks didn't mind because we bought books there as well (almost all of us were techies/programmers as well as avid readers so there was a large range of books for us to purchase).

The reason our de facto group head chose this was a) it was a nice social diversion outside of playing, b) this was how he screened new potential players ("Never play with someone you wouldn't want to hang out with"), c) people would see us playing and inquire, and d) we all liked books and coffee. :)

Personally, I can say that I and most of the players I know would be all over a coffee house/gaming place in an instant. Of course, we're almost all also firmly in the "I like Gaming but I don't interacting with Gamers" camp, so we might be different from the norm.

[Tundra]

And I can't imagine there's ever been an easier time to be a hobby business in gaming.  We're all familiar with the publisher side but even the retail end is opening up.  While E-business is not the overthrow everything model it was once hyped to be, it certainly is valid.  I know a lot of guys making a nice chunk of change in the secondary market.  Guys I know who used to work all year for a big score at the Origins Auction (like antique dealers) are now buying and selling in volume over E-bay.  They'll buy 3-4 incomplete game copies in various stages of wear.  Kit bash them together to get 2 complete sets at decent quality and sell them for double or treble.

This is essentially commodities selling.  It does little to nothing for increasing awareness of the culture of gaming or increasing the gaming population.  This, imho, is the greatest problem in the marketplace. Wouldbe gamers are hijacked by other industries who are more aggressive than the game industry (most game companies and stores rely on the "If I build it, they will come" level of outreach).  

Worse yet is the Games Workshop model (also adopted by WotC) of not trying to retain customers over the long haul.  GW's research tells them that each Warhammer player is worth $500 for three years, so they don't attempt to keep players longer, always aiming for new gamers. Yet noone yet has found a way to target those 4th year people who stop sinking pounds into lead and instead focus on pixels.

So we have two approaches...the large companies grab new meat and spit it out.  Other companies deal with the same people day by day until their piece of the pie is too small to avoid starvation.

ttfn - woody

[Valamir]

This is essentially commodities selling.  It does little to nothing for increasing awareness of the culture of gaming or increasing the gaming population.  This, imho, is the greatest problem in the marketplace. Wouldbe gamers are hijacked by other industries who are more aggressive than the game industry (most game companies and stores rely on the "If I build it, they will come" level of outreach).  

Seems to me you have that backwards.  
"most game companies and stores rely on the "If I build it, they will come" level of outreach"   THIS would seem to be the actual problem in the marketplace.  I don't particularly see the logic that says aggressive marketers are bad because they are causing difficulty for passive marketers.

Plus the secondary market is hardly damaging the majority of game stores.  By far the majority of product that is being bought and sold by these people is out of print older stuff, and it DOES increase the exposure of those products to gamers who wouldn't have access to them otherwise (particularly older SPI and AH titles).  Often for many of these products there is no other way to get them.  

Further the existance of a vibrant secondary market in miniatures is a huge benefit to those gamers who DO intend to play Warhammer and the like for the long haul.  They don't have to put up with GWs scalping policies and can outfit their games with discontinued older minis available dirt cheap (and often painted) when they're dumped by the transitory gamers.

I know of at least one FLGS owner who closed up his brick and mortar shop and now operates exclusively as a e-tailer offering both new and used games.

Could you clarify where you see this as being damaging to the hobby?

[Michael Hopcroft]

We're all seasoned gamers here. perhaps asking how you buy games (ir if you buy games) might be instructive on the e-publishing/FLGS question.

Since there is probably going to be a delay of at least a term before I start school (not my fault really -- my doctor won't write a letter for the financial aid people for fear of unintended consequences, which furstrates me to the ends of the earth), I figured gathering some ideas would be a good idea.

I guess what I'm wondering about it whether a company like RPGHost will eveolve into the equivalent of a FLGS for e-publishers. It's certainly become almost a business neccessity to sell through them, s they clearly have both the best storefornt and most efficient payment scheme in the current market. The question is whether I can find some way to make a place for myself in this market as a publisher and a businessman, and figuring out how people buy and why they buy the way they do would help my thought processes no end.

Permit me to pick your brain. I promise you'll get a good one. 8^)

[Tundra]

Seems to me you have that backwards.  
"most game companies and stores rely on the "If I build it, they will come" level of outreach"   THIS would seem to be the actual problem in the marketplace.  I don't particularly see the logic that says aggressive marketers are bad because they are causing difficulty for passive marketers.

The key phrase, which you excluded, states that the agressive marketers are in other industries, and they are keeping the population focused on their products which leaves less for our industry.  Stores who play the passive game, as most of them do, are just going to die.

I know of at least one FLGS owner who closed up his brick and mortar shop and now operates exclusively as a e-tailer offering both new and used games.

Could you clarify where you see this as being damaging to the hobby?

I know of many.  The problem with e-retail is it is exceedingly passive from the most important part of grassroots marketing; creating awareness of new products outside the mainstream.

When RoS was picked up by stores, people weren't even aware that Jake existed.  They saw the cover on store shelves, they picked up the book and glanced through, they discussed it with some other people in the store.  This doesn't happen online.

Gamers are, truthfully, extremely cheap by nature. They buy online both for convnience and for the cheapest game product.  Since an online store doesn't have the community obligations (and costs involved), they are skimming sales from real stores without any potential market growth.  Online stores make real stores less profitable, and has put real stores out of business (not dissimilar to the store you know who went e-retail only).

TSO only sells to stores who have consumer accessible store fronts. I won't support the online model for stores until I leave the industry. Then, I won't care if everyone dies ;-)

ttfn - woody

[HinterWelt]

Woody-
I just wanted to pipe in and emphasize something you touched on in terms of online tore fronts as opposed to B&M. That is, the B&M stores are critical to introduction of new product. They are a vital part of the sense of community that many games have. It is a place to meet, ask questions, get answers, see actual play and be involved in demos. I imagine I will get flamed for such talk here but a great many gamers still buy based on walking into their local game store, picking up the book and thumbing through it. That is not to say that there are no other ways to sell but it works.  Plain and simple.

I do not believe that the B&M store will disappear but it will evolve. We saw it when we were retailers and you hear of it today. The swing today is from novelty shop to entertainment provider (tournaments for a fee) with a retailer section.

Just my thoughts,
Bill