The reaction from retailers has been sharply negative, to understate the matter. Wizards's response has been along the lines of how this helps them with quality control. They are referencing the cover damage problem from last summer's Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes sourcebook, which resulted in distributor returns and most stores just never getting replacements. That is a pretty flimsy justification, though, leading us to speculate that in reality, that's just spin and the simple truth is that the staggered release was a logistical bother and they would rather not spend the resources on it.
Every few weeks lately it seems like there is some policy change that leads to a great online dust-up in which retailers around the world assert that Wizards of the Coast doesn't care about them and doesn't want them to succeed. While I speculate that Wizards is internally well aware that there are too many stores and is willing to allow some to shake out, their public-facing policy has been one of considerable direct support of their WPN retailer member stores. I say "direct" rather than "financial" because they are not just outright handing us cash, but with the amount of prize support and promotional material we get, it's pretty close to that.
It occurs to me that a lot of hobby game, comic, and tabletop retailers simply don't have a frame of reference for whether a publisher is supporting them or not. They honestly don't know any different. A rich child might cry because the family had to cut short a Hawaiian vacation by a day, while a poor child might not complain about repeated missed meals or a freezing bedroom in an unheated apartment. We all walk alike on the hedonic treadmill, and tend not to recognize whether our own experience is typical or an outlier. And that is why Wizards of the Coast can announce that stores are going to receive dozens, in some cases hundreds, of value-rich promo packs for free to hand out to tournament players every quarter, and then retailers will take that news and complain that their porridge is too cold.
"Oh what Bahr you have such an informed perspective then why don't you straighten us out on this" DON'T MIND IF I DO. Pull up a chair.
Ladies and gentlemen and all non-binary friends and colleagues, I give you: The video game industry.
Pictured: a Playstation 4 kiosk. Not yours.
In the video game industry, we have access to a far wider customer base. And in terms of used merch, we can make pretty good margins. But when it comes to the way small independent stores interface with Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, EA, Bethesda, Capcom, Square Enix, Konami, and so on? Here are some inconvenient truths.
Video game publishers (VGPs) see digital delivery as a way they can eliminate the need for most or all stores, mass-market or independent, in the future. The publishers' own Online Stores are veritable templates of modern e-commerce best practices and are surely profit centers for them. Microsoft's and Nintendo's are particularly impressive. This is therefore the focal point of their infrastructural development.
VGPs provide virtually always zero organized play support. Their preferred implementation of organized play is for people to log in to the multiplayer lobby and play online from home. I would say that this is a feature and not a bug, but we're in the context right now of publisher support of independent retailers, so in that respect: virtually always zero organized play support.
VGPs provide new software at margins in the single digits. The mass market has access to rebates, rep display curation, and buybacks. Independents do not get access to these things. VGPs are more than content that the main delivery vectors for their physical product be mass-market entities. With Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, and Gamestop, they are reaching 95%+ of their target audience.
VGPs provide new hardware at margins in the single digits or zero, and often with a Minimum Advertised Price that is more of an Exact Advertised Price. Mass-market resellers get rebates, rep display curation, and buybacks. Kiosks like the one you see in the article photo above. Independents who end up having to source from book-industry distributors such as D&H and Ingram Group do not get this support. Meanwhile, in tabletop, independent stores get display models, demo units, promo signage, and so forth, direct from the publishers, while the mass market largely gets nothing and is fulfilled by third parties like Excell and MJ Holdings.
Even when independent retailers utilize consumer-facing direct portals, there can be issues. Independent retailers have reported, in fact, that e.g. Nintendo and Microsoft have canceled their parts orders based on the buyer being a dealer, which may be prohibited somewhere in their terms-of-service fine print. (Gamestop's TOS just says outright, "No dealers." It's at the bottom of their trade landing page. They don't tend to enforce that much, but they could if they wanted to.) This order cancellation has never happened to me so take it with a grain of salt as second-hand information. I have placed orders with Nintendo in particular that they cannot possibly have mistaken for a consumer order, online shopping carts like "DOL-002 GameCube Power Supply (Certified Refurbished) Quantity 20," and I received the goods timely and intact. But multiple colleagues of mine have reported cancellations. The closest analogue, I think, would be if Games Workshop opened a company store in your area and suddenly started canceling your Space Marine restocks.
It isn't 100% safe to resell current-generation (and even some previous-generation) consoles due to network bannings, and this is a side-effect of the VGPs' direct enforcement of copyrights, which they cannot realistically abstain from doing. Checking a PS3, PS4, Xbox One, or Nintendo Switch when buying one is an archaic exercise in creating a network connection (worse on Sony's hardware for some reason, since it hates business DNS on static IP and you have to enter manual IP config even for ethernet) and using a store throwaway account to see if that console has been banned for TOS violations, modchipping, or what have you. It's rare enough that the value is marginal on taking the time and labor to test each one, but when you get a banned console it's a non-trivial monetary hit if you already paid the cash and the seller is long gone. Among all recent systems, only the Xbox 360, as of this writing, can get a banned-or-not-banned instant answer by entering the serial number into a web tool on the Microsoft support home page. Somehow they have not (yet) extended this courtesy to the current-gen One systems. Given Microsoft's future approach to the Xbox platform and not caring what hardware players use as long as they're consuming content in the ecosystem, maybe it's not a surprise that only Microsoft has made even the smallest foray into solving this problem for resellers. For the tabletop analogue, imagine if Wizards of the Coast made no public acknowledgment whatsoever about the existence of counterfeit Magic cards, and either refused to discuss the security features developed to help fight the problem, or refused to develop them at all.
Nintendo has gone further and made it possible for individual game carts/cards to be banned on the Switch, as each one is serialized. They don't have a solution for resellers and it's probably in their business interest not to have one. This is, again, fortunately, a fringe situation. DSG has been through several hundred Switch games in and out, a higher number than I expected to see in the sales report because of how infrequent their trade-ins are, relative to other systems. We have encountered zero banned game carts/cards. May it continue to be so. If we get one, too bad for us. We're not checking each one, we're just not.
Speaking of Games Workshop opening a company store in one's area: A Warhammer company store is opening right here in Chandler on April 20th, though it's almost ten miles away from DSG, farther than the distance we moved from our old Gilbert location. Many peers, customers, and friends have asked me what I think of that and what I plan to do about it. Folks, there's a Microsoft Store two miles away from DSG at the Chandler Fashion Mall and they have day-and-date access to everything consequential for Xbox, and effectively no cost-of-goods. I plan to do not a damned thing about either of them, because the presence of company stores in proximity to my business does slurp up some low-hanging fruit sales, but is ultimately a push versus the kind of sales pressure I would see from any other channel or even from other ways people spend their entertainment dollars. But it is yet another example of how tabletop retailers are sure that a publisher is doing them dirty, and we have to turn around and point out that video game publishers already been there and done that, and in fact they basically suborn every big-box store with their store-within-a-store template that started back in 1988 with the marketing master-stroke World of Nintendo merchandising rig. I'll take three Warhammer stores within driving distance if you can talk the area Wal-Marts and Targets into ditching their gorgeous publisher-subsidized and publisher-curated merchandisers for video games, which obviously they are not going to do.
Beyond even what the first-party publishers do in the video game industry, the third-party video game landscape is often virulently anti-store and reinforces at every turn the "all-digital, all-online, all-virtual future" that "everybody knows" is inevitable. The default physical organized play location for video games is the convention hall or the college union building, not the retail store game room. Every piece of high-end hardware from fight sticks to gaming keyboards to headsets and so on and so forth is either manufacturer-direct, Amazon, or Massdrop to the consumer. And also, all of E-sports exists and stores barely amount to a lost footnote in that equation. I have written before right here on this blog that there is a sunset coming for the video game category, just as there are sunsets coming for comics, movies, and even general tabletop. But only in video games is there a pervasive assumption that physical retail is actually already dead, we are just too stupid to realize it yet. Usually, a collector or retro enthusiast has to take a level in their collecting experience before they start to understand the vast treasure trove of hardware and software already circulating, and how independent video game stores still remain one of the most cost-effective ways of acquiring those goods, and how the original gear is still often the best way to consume that content, and is sometimes the only way to do so because of technological, licensing, or logistical obstacles to modern-era re-release of many titles.
So, what does all this litany of difficulty in the video game industry mean to a tabletop-only dealer, or a tabletop-first dealer, you might ask, beyond merely broadening perspectives? Let's address that, and I'll wrap up from there.
I am not saying that there are no tabletop publishers who give short shrift to independent game stores. There certainly are those. Almost all Kickstarter trash publishers hate independent game stores and only turn to them when they have a print run remainder to liquidate. These publishers are essentially the board-game equivalents of Magic: the Gathering backpack dealers. They have no concept of what it would take to keep high-quality content in print sustainably, and the designer is instead just buying-a-dream of publishing their pet game invention at a nickel over production cost so they can spend the next two decades of their life at dinner parties with a ginger-infused craft ale in one hand, delivering the carefully refined boast that they are a Published Game Designer. It's no different than the Vanity Presses that used to prey on your aunt in the 1980s when she dreamed of seeing her slush-quality bodice-ripper novella in print. So no, they don't understand the FLGS's benefit to the ecosystem and they aren't about to learn. Sadly, even a few larger and more established publishers are producing shovelware-grade content right now, confident that Amazon fulfillment and sales off the table at Gen Con, Origins, and DragonCon are enough that Dice Tower will continue to answer their emails and accept their review copies. Many of them have even gone back to the crowdfunding well as a means of funding speculative releases.
But most major tabletop publishers by now have seen that a boxed game that has no presence at independent retail, and is sold out of the virtual-or-actual trunks of cars, tends to sputter out. If it is a constructed-deck, constructed-army, or similarly modular game or game system, it needs support at retail from day one or else it will absolutely sputter out. And if it's a game that needs a player base beyond the kitchen table, Justin Ziran's "network of nodes," the publishers have in many cases gone well above and beyond expectation to support independent game stores and give that game a solid foundation. They have, in some cases, provided more support than many of these downstream stores deserved.
Now the good news on the video game publishers' side is that they are staffed by decent, intelligent people who do care about marketing their products well and who do recognize that independent game stores can be a net benefit in the ecosystem to their mission of moving their brands forward and reaching more gamers. (And teaching new ones!) An independent video game store that establishes some longevity, operates professionally, and builds relationships, can eventually expect to be able to work with these publishers to mutual benefit. Sound familiar? I will be the first to admit my own store is not at that level yet. I have some work to do. In the meanwhile I am going to do some good-faith promotion and hope positive feedback makes it to the publishers. For example, once we learn the release date of Ori and the Will of the Wisps, my most anticipated video game title of my adult life, I will begin planning a launch party for the game that will be a wholesome, exciting, all-ages celebration of the wonder of Ori. I have no idea whether Moon Studios will have any interest in it even if they find out about it, but I am going to do it anyway. That is how you build bridges. You lay a foundation and you look for an opportunity to make a connection. And even if nothing comes of it this time, there is always next time. And I also get to make some local players happy.
In the meanwhile, I am going to take the absolutely lavish publisher support I get week in and week out from tabletop publishers and use it as gratefully and productively as I can, and importantly, I am going to use it the way it was designed to be used. I am always surprised when retailers apply some hack or workaround to a promotion. Do they seriously believe that a major publisher doesn't have human beings with marketing degrees putting hours of work into devising a program that will sync with their marketing message and branding? And you're going to take that apart instead of running it at full octane, out of the box, as it was prepared for you to use, in the manner that will connect with what your customers arriving are expecting to see and pay for. And then you say the publisher isn't supporting you. Given what you do with their promotional materials, if they were supporting you, are you sure you would know it?
I can't think of the last time Sony gave me two hundred free month membership codes for Playstation Now to give out to my players, at zero cost to my business. I'm sure they have swag handouts from time to time, but nothing like that, and not formalized and regularly scheduled. Wizards of the Coast is sending different numbers of promo packs to every store, and it might be a lot of packs and it might not be so many, but it is costing you nothing and the contents are hot fire as far as the players are concerned. It should really not be that difficult for you to make this work. If you are bound and determined to look a gift horse in the mouth, maybe first make sure that horse isn't Shadowfax.
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