Once You Pop, That's Great!

The pace of new releases right now across tabletop categories is such an overloaded blast that it can only be properly depicted by the Whaaargarbl Sprinkler Dog:

We can't keep up with this.  There are not enough gamer dollars out there to ingest all this content.  There is so much that the top gamers in my player community, the guys who jump onto each new game system with top enthusiasm, are tapping out and abandoning ongoing games, and largely shrugging at new ones.  The top fervor I get for new titles on the rack is when the reseller scrappers show up because that title has already sold out online and they know they can flip it at a profit.

I talked about this a few months ago and concluded that despite the content quality being very high right now, we were headed for an analogue of the 1983 video game industry crash.  This bubble was bound to pop.  Well, it's happening.  Maybe people should heed my warnings instead of brushing them off.

The mass market, which pushed so hard to bring about this torrid pace of releases, is learning something the game trade knew all along: by mass market standards, these things don't turn worth a damn.  They're fine for small specialty retail, which can survive and even thrive on a turn figure between 3.2 and 3.8 per annum.  But mass sets a base standard of 12.  If it doesn't turn over monthly, clear the rack.  And the bloodbath has ensued.  Among others:

Barnes and Noble is tapping out.

Gamestop is tapping out.  Maybe.

Walgreens is tapping out.

Target kind of tapped out after their "all these exclusives" plan last year, with Oregon Trail and Dirty Codenames and Machi Koro Nights and so on.  They'll retain Cards Against Humanity (or Prongles or whatever it is now, see also title of this article) and Hasbro mainstream stuff, and a few sacrificial lambs to be able to say they have hobby games.  But they won't really.

Pardon the use of Reddit for links on those; much of the circulating news about those clearances was via social media that is not readily linkable.

The DSG plan to ride all this out?  Lean on our pawnshop business, of course.  Ain't no such thing as a new release when all the merch is used.

I wonder what will happen once the bubble has popped and things contract back to reality.  Will some of these amazing games finally have room to breathe?  Will I get to enjoy like three years of data packs from Android: Netrunner?  Will HeroClix v2.0 with its streamlined rule set finally start gathering momentum again?  And wow, what about Magic: the Gathering, which has had enough content to hold player interest for ten years released in roughly the space of two years?

You know what?  It's going to be miserable and lose a lot of people money, but maybe this is for the best.  Content is eternal and good content will still be around for us to partake of it later.  The mass market is Leviathan, and perhaps that tortuous serpent will finally starve out and seek waters better suited to its gluttony.