But in all seriousness, part of business and really part of succeeding in life is making careful decisions based on the best information you have at the time, and trusting that process and judgment even when the result is an adverse outcome. Most -- not all, but most -- decisions made that way that turn out to be sub-optimal, can be overcome by due diligence. Everything is fine. Nothing is ruined.
The exercise also gives me a chance to examine how the idea of exiting the industry registers in my state of mind right now. The past year and a half, thanks to the tremendously difficult store move and its aftermath, have me in a mental state that's different than I've ever experienced before, and that's counting law school. It's a weird combination of burnout, frustration, and pessimism, tempered with confidence in my systems and my people, and recognition that I can continue to lean on the asset base I've built and use the calendar to my long-term advantage. In essence, I know I've got sufficient fuel and oil to reach any destination, but the interstate keeps throwing detours.
My mental state is definitely better now than during my grayest years in state government, which at one point had me dreading even waking up for work in the morning. I worked with good people at the state, but the work itself was godawful. Today, however much I need a vacation -- and I really do -- I don't dread going into the store at all. I am eager, even excited at times, to see how I might advance the business today in particular. Even the grindy dredge work accrues to a purpose. It's night-and-day different than being a professional bureaucrat.
That's a healthy mental expression. I am excited about some of the upcoming category moves I plan to make. I am excited to present Hybrid Theory: Video Games at GAMA 2019 in Reno in March. I am excited to experience the rest of the 2018 holiday shopping season, which kicked off, more or less, over the weekend. I am excited at some of the structural refinements I'm lining up for the main storefront over the next 60 days or so. I'm excited to see more of the store's debt burn away as we wind up the year. I have some big moves on deck that I don't know yet if I will get to make, but I'm ready if the shot opens up.
I am not that excited, or confident, about where the tabletop industry is today, and I think the What If exercise really brought that into focus for me and helped me recognize how much of my pessimism is rooted in that side of my business. It's not just a case of the grass being greener elsewhere. There are always hazards in the video game, pop culture, and comics worlds. For comics, those hazards were so substantial that I didn't believe DSG had a long-term value play compared to the focused stores, and I exited the category. But all three of those businesses address a far larger mainstream audience than tabletop does, which is critical. Tabletop is narrow. In the end, to paraphrase from either Gary Ray or Paul Simer, I forget which: Being focused in the world of tabletop for your business is kind of like depending on the only person who knows where you live to keep bringing you food.
For the sake of context, here's everything that's happening in my major business categories, in relevant part where DSG is concerned:
Magic: the Gathering - Late last week Wizards as much as announced (for anyone who cares to follow the $10 million in money) that Magic Arena, the digital app version of MTG that's still in open beta, is the horse they are betting the entire company on all of a sudden for some reason. Quick backpedaling assured all of us that paper Magic and Magic Online the Least Worst Option Available are both still going to be supported... for the next few hours, surely. Paper Magic has weathered greater threats. Don't know don't care where Magic Online is concerned. Players are wondering out loud whether to dump their collections, but most seem to be hanging on. This is smart as the possibility of the Arena move actually working would result in card values increasing in all channels.
Video Games - The Nintendo Switch and Classic Minis are no longer unobtainium at mass retail, and that's letting them mature nicely into a healthy used market. The Playstation 4 is still winning this generation on exclusives, but the Xbox One X has been the best-selling system of 2018 and hosts the best version of anything multiplatform, much as the 360 did last go-round. GameStop just reported a half-a-billion-dollar quarterly loss, mainly owing to a slowdown of their used software business and meaningless increases in every other category. The digital sunset for new content is still a decade or more away, as players continue to like having guaranteed access to their games on a physical slab. Right now only platforms that are exclusively digital, such as iOS, are irrelevant to my purview.
Comics - I do continue to follow the industry. I don't think anything has changed since last month when I posted my wrap-up (link a few paragraphs above) but 2019 looks like another banner year for mass-market comic properties, so for the stores that have fully tied their fortunes to that wagon, I think you're gonna be okay at this time next year.
Pokemon TCG - Booster packs are still hot, but the rest of Pokemon TCG product has collapsed utterly. Even singles mean little, because deckbuilding at the competitive level has stratified to a few solved strategies and the players who need cards for those either rip off kids, buy the singles outright, or enjoy an eBay full of booster boxes at a nickel over wholesale. If it weren't for the good work being done by our league coordinator, Brian, at keeping things fun and inclusive, I'd cut bait.
Miniatures That Are Not Warhammer - It has never been a better time to refrain from carrying these. There is so much Kickstarter trash out there these days, and so many games that are hype hot out of the gate and then never garner a following, that I'm not sure there's a margin you could promise me that would get me to buy into more of them. In 2018 alone I sunk blood and treasure into Star Wars Legion, A Song of Ice and Fire, X-Wing v2.0, and Guild Ball. The only one still sustaining activity, Guild Ball, is disastrously difficult to stock reliably. I can't even lay the entire blame at the publisher's feet, as a major production run of theirs was destroyed by a typhoon on its way out of China.
Warhammer - This game is in a mixed place right now. Age of Sigmar has a real following this year, which it didn't before. Kill Team was a success this year, which it wasn't before. Shadespire Knight Boat or whatever they keep renaming it, has proven reasonably popular and benefits a lot from being playable on smaller surfaces. And 40K is 40K. On the flip side, the back catalog may as well not exist, and a depressingly small number of kits being released these days actually provide much in the way of new models. There continues to be the perpetual mercantile roadblock with Warhammer that once someone owns their army, they don't have to keep buying booster packs to add to it, usually. I have been studying the Games Workshop company stores and learning useful things about their logistics. At the start of this year, Warhammer wasn't working well for me, but depending on some of those moves I vagueblogged about above, there may be opportunity here in 2019.
Board Games - Obviously this one is the news of the season. In 2016 there were 3600 board game titles released, an average of ten new ones every day (though actually clumped around the Essen, Gen Con, and Origins conventions). In 2017, industry figures suggest we repeated that number. I am reliably informed that as 2018 draws to a close, that number has jumped to a staggering five thousand new titles. Over a dozen a day. Folks, this transcends mere saturation and amounts to utter supersaturation. There is no way board gamers, even devoted and fanatical "alphas," can ingest that much content. And verily, finally, they are not. The popping of the bubble is underway. The best board game retailers I know are reporting a noticeable plateauing and regression this holiday season. If a new board game doesn't sell meaningful numbers on release weekend, the prudent retail move is to dump it, unless you know for a fact it has enough money behind it to grow legs, however briefly, such as an Asmodee Group release. Otherwise, it's never going to get going, it's already yesterday's news. Or else it's Kickstarter trash and it was effectively dead before it ever shipped. This is not a healthy place for a category to be. It's nice that the few hits we are seeing are astoundingly good -- they have to be to move the needle now. It's less nice that games that would have been the best thing on the racks in 2011 or 2014 are completely lost in the static today and we can't help but miss out on them. (And I say that as a player, moreso than as a retailer.)
That brings us up to the present, and we're in what amounts to the matinée of the shopping season and we'll get into the bulk of it sometime next week. This is the perfect time to have max selection from stores as most FLGSes are loaded for bear. Unlike last year, this year DSG is ready, at least as ready as I reasonably expect to be, and I'm excited to see what happens.
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