Just Another Weekend But Not Just Another Year

We approach the end of 2019, and of the twenty-teens or whatever we are calling this Godforsaken decade.  And yes I know technically the decade doesn't begin until January 2021, and I absolutely am enough of a pedant to point that out in mixed company that doesn't want to hear it, but when in Rome, we do as the Romans do, and those damned Romans say we're in a new decade next week, so that's how it is.

Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa/Happy Winter Capitalism Festival is a retail season that everyone knows has an impact on commerce, but never seems to have the same impact every time anymore.  When I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, back when we used stone tools and hunted tatonka for fur coats and meat, every Christmas season was basically the same.  Starting the day after Thanksgiving, everyone spent every dollar they had in local stores until there was nothing left to be bought, and then on the 25th there was an orgy of pleasure (of gift-giving, not the other kind, you pervert) followed by a frantic run to every convenience store on the planet for AA batteries.  You could basically set your watch to it.  (Watches were a thing we wore then.)

Even in modern times and the Amazon Age, the Saturday before Christmas used to be its own kind of little Christmas for stores, especially small independent specialty retailers like we have here in the game trade.  Indeed, the several Saturdays before are supposed to be just wonderful for us.  Absolutely go-time.  Even this year with the latest possible Thanksgiving and thus the shortest possible holiday shopping window.

Some stores are still seeing that affect despite all the attenuative factors, in most cases because a given store is very well positioned for mainstream customer footfall, such as at a newer mall, or in a newer shopping plaza with strong anchors.  Even where that is not the case, real holiday sales happen in earnest at destination stores that have made substantial capital investments, like Mox Boarding House as reviewed in my Seattle visit two weeks ago.

As for us and, as I am informed, as for stores like mine?  The entire holidays this year was just another bunch of weeks, and in fact November was down a bit, owing to no year-over-year big release like we've had the past few frames: Iconic Masters, Unstable, Ultimate Masters, Keyforge Call of the Archons, and so on.  This year, we got the Throne of Eldraine Gift Bundles, which sold great except nobody had enough of them.  The new Star Wars Destiny expansion was delayed into 2020, a shame given the release of a popular and well-received Star Wars Episode IX movie.  The top board game release of the year, Wingspan, came and went from stock.  Despite DSG not being "a board game store," we moved cases upon cases of that game, when we could get any.

No surer was this the spoken truth than the weekend before Christmas for DSG, which saw sales... exactly in line with regular norms.  Those norms are targeted to cover all the bills and be profitable, so it's not like we're eating ketchup sandwiches here.  But the last time the holidays were truly bananas for us was back in 2015, before the post-election slump of 2016 and the it's-too-late-now new Amazon reality of 2017 and 2018.  Our Amazon FBA sales have been off the charts this entire 2019 holiday season, by the way.  Even when the price online was higher than in-store.

The sales activity we are getting in the gift-giving or even holiday-esque sense is mostly Dungeons & Dragons dice, books, and figures; Magic box sets of various kinds from Game Night to Commander 2019; Pokemon in general; and some of our various new-sealed video games, which is a distinct minority of our massive video game stock.  Those sales are offsetting a slight drop in "ordinary" sales of Magic singles, used video games, and other bread-and-butter activity.  Party games still have yet to launch for 2019.  We have them in stock.  They've sold modestly.  Usually right before Christmas and New Years, those shelves get scoured bare.  We'll see.

The best thing about this year is that we're missing very little in terms of sales we could have gotten, but failed to get because of a structural problem or omission.

Merch always varies of course, and had we received even more Wingspan and Eldraine Gift Bundles and additional restocks of titles like Gloomhaven and Marvel Champions, we certainly could have sold more than we did.  Any amount of Nintendo Switches we had traded in likely could have sold, but as it stands we've still got inventory.  We went through plenty of Playstation 4 systems in both directions, buying and selling.  And the WizKids Dungeons & Dragons unpainted figures are dependable sellers, such that the most demanded SKUs don't last long on the peg.  I ordered slightly lighter than I should on Pokemon packs, so that mistake goes against my personal scoreboard.

But beyond merch, DSG is robust and functional right now.  We have near-perfect payment interchange, with all credit cards and all contactless services available, lacking only really in some pay-over-the-telephone functionality that is rarely requested anyway.  We have perfect gift cards, a workflow we solved either last year or 2017, memory fails me, and that I've never had to give a moment's thought since.  We have near-perfect loyalty star administration and redemption, with excellent data providing me the insights I'll use to fine-tune after the first of the year.  We have gate-access to some of the best brands in the game business for our Amazon seller account now.  We have the best singles kiosk in the business via TCGPlayer Pro.  Finally, though I prefer off-the-shelf options in most cases, we have some custom-coded software solutions providing us access to buying prices and store credit administration right there at the registers.  Even my workstation has higher physical work capacity now, enabling me to process bigger and better video game buys into merch faster.

Desert Sky Games has certainly had its share of stumble and trial in 2019, but we're immensely better now than we were twelve months ago.  We broke into the two-comma column this year for the first time.  The end-point net income is only a small percentage of that, but it was enough to clear out the last of our bank loans and put us in a strong position facing forward.  Now I can move into 2020 and focus a little more on some things that have gotten short shrift lately, such as my personal health.  I'm looking forward to what tomorrow brings.

I wish you all a joyous holiday of whichever type you celebrate, and a safe New Years.  The next blog article here on The Backstage Pass will be in January, and will be our semi-annual Store Closure list and review.  See you then!

Wizards in Winter

It's not just the name of a great prog-metal Christmas song, but also my destination for the first half of last week: the Wizards of the Coast corporate headquarters in Renton, Washington!

This was my first trip to Seattle, and I had a great opportunity to experience the city and region during my visit.  It was cold and rainy the entire time I was there, and the scent of coffee was omnipresent, no surprises in either case.  In my youth I had been to Portland, but remembered little about it except everything being green.  I expected Seattle to remind me a lot of Denver, where my sister and her family live and where I've visited a bunch of times in my adult life.  Instead, what I discovered was that SeaTac was a lot more like San Diego, except with pine trees.  Not just the mountainous terrain or the abundant shoreline, but the architecture and city planning, all the way down to the mundane.  If you shot springtime photos of the same random single-family detached house from either Coronado or Bellevue and didn't tell me which one it was from, I might be hard-pressed to tell them apart.

I don't think the Seattle-San Diego parallel is an accident, either.  Both cities had a post-war military boom, with the former becoming an aviation nexus and the latter a naval epicenter.  Their explosive growth happened concurrently throughout the 1960s and 1970s, hence the parallels.  Later was when they diverged, with the 1990s seeing Seattle become the world capital for software, and San Diego going all-in on its resort-town geography to capture much of southern California's convention, transportation, and communications industries.

In any case, there I was, right in the middle of Queensrÿche's Empire, hand on heart and everybody listening in the silence, and I had a Monday afternoon to explore, so naturally I went to a bunch of game stores.

Maple Bar Games in University Place is a store after my own heart, an ultra-efficient deployment that's exactly how I would build DSG if I were doing it over from day one.  MBG offers broad coverage of Magic and some ancillary TCGs, enough seating to run core events, and a respectable video game stock.  Aesthetics were solid and pleasant, and parking was ample.  As with many of my peers in this industry, the owner is a friend of mine, so he and his adorable kindergarten daughter joined me for the rest of the day's excursion.

Pink Gorilla Games near the University of Washington was one of my must-see stops.  Not because I expected it to be some massive monument to import and retro video games, but because Pink Gorilla is tightly focused on doing just those things, and I've been in both fandoms since my youth.  Kelsey Lewin has two locations for the Gorilla, the other one a microboutique downtown, but today I wanted to make sure I got to the original storefront, the "Metal Jesus Home Store."  It's small by FLGS standards, under 2,000 square feet from what I could see.  But every inch of it, floor to ceiling, boasted a gorgeous array of video games, accessories, collectibles, plushies, and related aggregalia.  They even had a Gachapon machine to amuse the kiddo.

Meeples Games on the west peninsula of Seattle proper is an upstairs boutique that combines cozy earth tones with delicious cookies, and honestly if you can't appreciate that then we can't be friends anymore.  Two owners visited yet a third owner we knew and we got the grand tour, including a fully functioning kitchen tucked away right in the middle of the store's publicly-accessible footage donut.  By now the rain was pounding down pretty heavily, and to everyone else there this was basically invisible, but I was absolutely experiencing the travel since Phoenix gets about five inches of rain a year (but it sure is somethin' the day it falls).  The 7-11 next door even had my orange cocaine drink, so after chasing the cookie with that, it was off to dinner at...

Mox Boarding House in Bellevue, one of three locations, is just as silly and excessive as everyone says, and yet it's impossible not to be impressed.  The sheer capital magnitude of Mox is worth the visit.  Everything you would think a Disney Store of board games would do?  Mox does it.  Large staff census, direct customer approaches at regular intervals, demo tables, splash tables, nooks, theme aisles, general gameplay tables, a rentable room that could be used for a wedding reception if you needed it to be (and probably has been), and of course a full restaurant.  The "Mox Tacos" were acceptable, and coming from an Arizonan that counts as an endorsement.

There were at least five more places I can think of that I wanted to drop in on, and I penciled that in for Wednesday, and then of course it ended up not working out and I headed home on an earlier flight than planned, for which I have to give Delta props, they made it easy and trouble-free.

Tuesday was the big day at Wizards, from morning through evening.  Due to a non-disclosure agreement I actually won't be sharing most of what I discussed with them!  But I observed some things that I think we all benefit from understanding -- store owners, employees, and players alike.

Information flows in peculiar ways in and through large corporations, and Wizards is absolutely one of these, even though it rose from gamer circles and humbler digs.  Their headquarters is just an office building, though admittedly with some extremely cool decor.  It's so much "just an office building" that you only see the one angle of it from the WPN article photos because the other side of the complex is occupied by other businesses and has their logos hanging up.  (Mitsubishi Aircraft is one of them.)  But to those of us out in the world of Magic and D&D fandom, the Wizards HQ takes on something of a mystical quality.  It's basically Hogwarts!  And it's easy for us to forget that the people there, while sometimes celebrities of a sort in our particular niche, are also just folks with jobs who go to work, and possess no supernatural powers of divination.  They use everything they know to create good products, programs, and marketing, and then they count on scattered, imperfect, and sometimes unreliable information to figure out how things went.

I intuited that one of the key things I could bring to the table was a self-aware perspective, a willingness to provide unfiltered information without adversarial assumptions.  Wizards endures a bombardment of negative feedback from players and store owners alike because that's the kind of information that is most likely to find a conduit back to them.  It becomes difficult for them to ascertain what worked (beyond what sales numbers reveal) and also why the parts that worked, did so.  Imagine if an athlete had to accept all the invective that is customary to their profession, but when they succeeded, there was silence instead of cheers.  They can read the scoreboard, but it can be hard to tell what they actually did right.  While not perfect, I do get accurate reads on a lot of what worked for DSG and trustable reads on what went right among my inner circle of peer friends.  I hoped this might be a goldmine for the various internal teams I met with, a way that I could tie concrete examples to things they were wondering if we had seen happen, and if so, how much of it, and in what way(s).

You can do your part too, by completing the various surveys publishers like Wizards send out.  And from what I remember of survey implementation when I was in government employ, I can speak with professional authority that Wizards's market research is well-executed.  People like to down-meme Mark Rosewater when he refers to "market research" as having told Wizards that something is so, when that person's local game store or play group maybe doesn't do it that way.  Well, then tell them!  But tell them when they solicit the info, because the feedback channels they set up are meant to improve the quality of the information that gets to them, and make it actionable.  Publishers absolutely do take those responses seriously and they can make a difference in what your favorite game offers next in its future releases.

I delivered a substantial presentation in the afternoon, complete with a question-and-answer session that had me really wishing I would just bite the bullet and get hearing aids already -- I have a hereditary doom to become stone deaf if I survive into retirement, and the hearing loss is already noticeable -- and fortunately I managed through it with the help of a patient and friendly audience.  Wizards paid me actual moneydollars for this component of the visit, and as such I have a professional obligation to keep that work product exclusive to their private use.  They did film it, so if they opt to share any part of it, that is obviously perfectly all right by me.  For those of you whose curiosity is overwhelming, I'm afraid I can't be of much help, other than directing you to my various publicly known spheres of expertise and their related subject matter.

After a nourishing catered dinner, I joined my audience for an activity I do far too little of anymore.  I played Magic.  You heard me.

To be specific, I drafted Mystery Convention Edition.  The only way to play this set right now is at select MagicFest events; the Mystery Retail Edition has slightly different contents and releases in about three months.  I hate chaos drafting, but was pleased to learn that the level of curation in the Mystery set makes it draft and play more like a cube.  Cube drafting is one of my favorite formats of Magic to play these days, so you might imagine how surprised and happy I was to make this discovery.  I had little enthusiasm for Mystery after the initial reveal, but having played it firsthand, now I suspect it could end up being a genuine hit.  We'll find out in March.  A lot is still left to learn, such as cost and availability.

I couldn't do much more after that, because 45-year-old Bahr doesn't have the energy of these bright, outgoing youngsters anymore.  I enjoyed meeting my company reps, both past and present, as well as the content team I've worked with to bring you WPN retailer support articles, and on top of that, a veritable who's-who of familiar names and faces and people whose particular work I've either enjoyed as a player, sold as a retailer, or both.  (And of course Nelson Brown, our WPN retailer liaison, who channels Spuds MacKenzie levels of exuberance without breaking a sweat.)  A few of the longer-tenured Wizards staff were even re-acquaintances from my Level 3 Judge days.  One of my hosts and I swapped family stories, discovering to my delight that we had a lot in common.  And whilst moving from meeting to meeting, the introductions kept right on going.  I recounted that DSG had seen better-than-par sales of one of the other games Wizards produces, which of course summoned a smile from the person in charge of that product line.  It was just that kind of visit, and I did my best not to waste it.

The final day was, unfortunately, not contributory to the narrative.  Because I was out of town, naturally an inordinate number of things cropped up that demanded my specific attention, and in recognition that I'd be struggling to enjoy a day touring more game stores and/or grunge-related tourist traps with that cloud building overhead, I turned in the rental car, swapped my flight, and got my desert-dwelling bones back to the wasteland from whence they came.  It all worked out in the end, and my kids got a kick out of their Pink Gorilla t-shirts.

Roll to Save Versus Scrutiny

Two weeks ago, I discussed how and why DSG was taking an extended break from the miniatures category, which in effect means Warhammer because that's the center of the wargames universe.  I did not make this move lightly, as the article should have made clear.  Games Workshop and Warhammer have been a tabletop staple for literally decades, and for many game stores, carrying such a product line is a no-brainer.  One has to look at a sharply unfavorable market position such as mine to see a scenario where Warhammer doesn't work.

For many of the same reasons I cited for Warhammer, DSG has been shifting its approach to the board game category.  A big difference there is that board games in subgenres can still be viable.  Our selection of inexpensive party games sells as well as ever and I have no intention of moving away from them.  In the world of heavier strategy games, the board game category behaves a little more like a deep-devotion product line such as Magic or Warhammer.  A major metro will only have market room for so many tier 1, best-in-class game stores, given existing competition from online and the mass market.  Even the buzziest titles of 2019 have underperformed the mark, often by far, and even when available right during peak "new hotness."  I have seen enough.  I realize what I'm seeing, which is that DSG is not tier-1 best-in-class for board games, and won't be seen as such, so that traction isn't available to us.  There's some viability to the approach of "then be the cheapest" and I'm not as opposed to that as many of my peers, but there's an opportunity cost to putting attention and resources in that direction, and right now I get a better payoff spending that attention and resources on Magic and video games.

Which brings up the category I have next in the crosshairs, role-playing games (RPGs), which for DSG purposes means Dungeons & Dragons.

Know before you read another word that I have loved D&D since literally grade school in the early 1980s, since getting that basic Red Box set for Christmas in 1981 and having it become the forbidden fruit when my parents were misled into all the D&D-is-Satanic balderdash.  My friends and I pored over every scrap of D&D material we could get for both 1st and 2nd Editions throughout the 1980s and 1990s.  Until Vampire: the Masquerade and then Magic: the Gathering, D&D was the meaningful entirety of fantasy gaming as we knew it.  Roleplaying was the vicarious thrill that hopeless nerds like me hung our entire social livelihoods upon.  I will die a little inside if the day comes that D&D has no place in my game store.  But that day may be approaching.  I can see smoke on the water and fire in the sky ahead.  And I honestly don't know how this is going to play out yet.

The modern-day reality is that books, as a form of consumptive media, are in growth in digital formats and in decline in physical tree-corpse bound slabs.  Physical books are great in many ways; as Penny Arcade noted, they have an intuitive touch-based interface, require no charging, and work fine with the shelves you have at home.  But text as data takes up no room at all, graphical data is nowadays trivial to store, and that's before you unlock the vast potential of hypertext markup, mixed media, and so on.  Digital books are just better in something like 90% or more of scenarios.  And... they are weightless and sizeless (aside from the size of the reading device) and capable of being infinite inventory.  Even Amazon's relentless dumping of books can't compare to what basically any rightsholder can offer, and the official D&D Beyond is no exception, with this year's Black Friday sale offering the gamut of content to the public for well under the physical sourcebooks' wholesale pricing.  Much as the world of physical music has become a boutique niche, roleplaying sourcebooks are going to taper off as the delivery share converges toward the virtual.

That's not all, fortunately.  RPGs require only rules and the players' imaginations, but in practice they also make extensive use of dice, and more and more lately, visual aids such as figurines, table maps, and even intricate miniature landscapes.  And yes, all of this can be virtualized.  Video games do exist, after all.  But for now the particular expression of tabletop RPGs is a physically present social activity, and for that we're seeing a strong attachment to the tangible.  (Regardless of whether we get our table-sized iPad holoprojectors to handle the "game board," people still don't trust virtual dice.  Ask anyone about the deck shuffling algorithm in Magic Online if you don't believe me.)

The tale of the tape is relatively simple.

The good: DSG sells a mountain-load of dice, and there isn't much more to say about that.  DSG sells a reasonable amount of WizKids D&D mini figures, and a reasonable amount of paint and brushes to go with them, but in both cases there we have supply constraints.  I can bear that problem to some degree because catastrophic success is such a preferable status than its opposite, slow and anemic failure.  Bottom line, supply is shaky but getting better.  We also finally seem to have improving supply of Gale Force Nine's D&D Spell Cards.  Who knew a licensee of Wizards of the Coast was going to struggle to get up to speed printing cards, but at least they're getting there.

The bad: Sourcebooks are poor sellers, as expected somewhat based on the factors recounted above, and yet we can't simply dismiss them because the absence of D&D sourcebooks marks a store as incompetent in the category.  And more critically, in-store play is a complete mess.  One that, per the Warhammer article, I'm less sure now might be solvable.  We've been permissive about unmonetized games in recognition of facility and schedule shortcomings, for instances where available table space exceeds demand that night.  The supportive players have, of course, come through on the purchasing front regardless.  And let's be clear: The meter isn't running on every visit. But over time we need to be selling what they're playing, or else those tables could be repurposed for TCG use and do better for us.  And the players that don't support the store, are audacious in that non-support, squatting for extensive time periods at a table and smuggling in grocery bags, and rarely to never buying anything.  I was sure that sufficiently upgrading the game room would put us in a position to monetize the space effectively.  The difficulties Gateway Games had in that department with their utterly magnificent game room served to discourage me entirely from taking that approach.

It is at this point in the article that I am going to stop being specific.  I am not announcing a threshold or offering a deal, because I meant it when I said above that I don't know how this is going to play out.  It's possible that I don't change anything regardless of what happens in the months ahead.  It's also possible that I make vast changes even if nothing happens in the months ahead.

In essence, I am unsure whether allowing D&D play in the store makes sense for the business, and I am pondering a solution to address that.  The degree of difficulty goes up due to the cascade into whether DSG would carry the known good products, minis and dice.  I'm pretty confident we can just "have dice" even in a "dormant commerce clause" manner.  But eight grid gondola aisles full of minis and two towers full of paint and supplies would surely not stay if D&D did not.  Maybe the real answer is to have two great D&D tables and have them be monetized-only, rather than using more space to bring in more players, only to find that many are parasitic.

I don't want anyone to do anything special.  I don't want any player anywhere to feel like they are being guilt-tripped into spending money they wouldn't otherwise.  I've discussed here on this weblog many times that I dislike the "social pressure" to support an LGS regardless of the value offered.  I'm totally good with the LGS taking the next step to show and promote the intangibles and other value that might be there, of course.  But that's not the point.  This isn't a "let's all gofundme" blog article.

Organized play in your LGS, including DSG, is an entire ecosystem, and either the various parts of that ecosystem are going to be healthy or they aren't.  It's my job to make sure DSG as a business is a positive contributor to that ecosystem.  We're going to find out if the result is something where every animal on the savannah gets to eat.  The totality of circumstances is what will force or stay my hand when the time comes, including determining when that time is.  We shall see.