I have a law degree, a genuine bona-fide certified authentic Juris Doctor, from Arizona State University in Tempe. Sun Devils 4 lyfe, yo. I never entered legal practice, but instead spent a little over seven years in government administration, then parted ways with the bureaucratic profession to work full-time as the administrator for my company, Desert Sky Games LLC, of which I am the majority owner.
I have two main business partners aside from my wife. Michael Griffin, programmer and DCI level 2 judge, is known in the community. The other partner, also Mike, is silent and prefers semi-anonymity. He is an electrical engineer by day and enjoys maintaining DSG's eclectic vintage arcade in his spare time. Other limited partners pass in and out of the business from time to time.
When DSG began in 2012, there were 11 total partners (counting spouses), and we had a single location in nearby Gilbert, at the southeast corner of Gilbert Road where Williams Field becomes Chandler Boulevard. That was always a mouthful. I like giving directions from our present location better. DSG Gilbert opened its storefront August 10, 2012, but was operating online at the beginning of July. While expensive to lease for its 2400-square-foot size, the DSG Gilbert location was spectacular in terms of access to a strong customer base.
In early 2017, we acquired Tempe Comics, a competitor near ASU's main campus on east Apache Boulevard. It operated for a year as DSG Tempe, and we allowed both the Gilbert and Tempe leases to expire in late 2017. September 29, 2017 was the opening date for our combined single Chandler location at the southeast corner of Ray Rd and McClintock Drive, a behemoth facility sporting over six thousand square feet of awesomeness. It remains, at the time of this writing, the Phoenix metro area's largest game store.
Chandler is home to 250,000 residents, and the Phoenix metro overall to almost five million. This is a high-population market compared to most comic and hobby game stores, and is also a supersaturated market, with roughly 50(!) game stores if you don't count mass market, pure bookstores, pawns, or thrifts. Every few months we lose one or two and gain two or three. Some of those competitors are pretty aggressive, while others are friendly. Ultimately, we are all also competing for the entertainment dollar against the mass market, online, and other forms of recreation besides games.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I traveled to Pro Tours, Nationals, and Grand Prix tournaments as a DCI Level 3 judge. The judge program was not very advanced at the time and a lot of the durable skill was more of what we consider today to be tournament management, not ruling precision as such. Today's level 2 judges are better at the game rules than level 3 judges of my era. I retired from judging to go to law school in 2004 and "go pro" in that respect. Because of this, I come from the competitive side of Magic: the Gathering. As a player I am an insufferable scold in any constructed format where I am allowed to prevent my opponent from playing Magic. I like limited better anyway. I don't tend to play much these days and would need extensive practice to shake the rust off if I ever hoped to be competitive again. The business end of Magic and trading card games, however, shifted sharply away from competitive play to casual play around ten years ago. This meant I had to learn a different approach to conducting business related to the game, an approach in which an understanding of competitive play prerogatives was no longer especially valuable knowledge.
Thus, you will frequently read in this space a business perspective borne of doing what the market wants, as indicated by the market's actions and behaviors more than its verbal signals alone, and that may or may not reflect what my personal preference is in terms of game content, gameplay style, business processes, or even what I'd rather see from the industry itself. I'm not here to change the world, I'm here to make the world more fun for the people already stuck in it. Fighting the tide just gets you fatigue. Riding the tide brings you to shore. Riding it poorly will dash you on the rocks.
I'd like to provide more content this week but there isn't a whole lot to discuss just now. I am in the middle of Yet Another Point-of-Sale Migration that I will write more about when it's finished. The current Magic and Warhammer releases have been good, even very good, but not mind-blowing by any measure. We did break records with prerelease attendance, but things calmed back down to normal after that. The GAMA Trade Show in Reno is just over a month away. My wife and kids are all in the middle of that looooong third quarter of the school year, in her case at the front of the classroom and in their case being taught in it. January took forever. And it's so cold. I know nothing we had here was comparable to that polar vortex in the upper Midwest, but I'm ready to go back to hundred-degree temps again here in the desert.
Whatever this week has you doing, seeing, reading, or playing, enjoy it! See you next week!
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