Tuesday, March 19, 2019

The Bomb Cyclone and the 2019 GAMA Trade Show

For two Marches running, I have proclaimed that if the Peppermill ends up being better than Bally's, the use of Reno as a location for the GAMA Trade Show will probably end up okay.  Well, the Peppermill did remain better than Bally's, but the shine rubbed right off the Reno apple and we're ready to scout for a new location now.  I will be skipping at least GAMA 2020 and unknown at this point what I'll do in 2021 pending the show's outcome.  I doubt they'll miss me, given that retailer badges sold out this year and the show hit capacity.  And boy, was that a travel nightmare for a lot of folks.

Nonetheless, the 2019 GAMA Trade Show stands as a tremendous experience in my business memory and it's time to blast into our annual setlist, starting with a favorite from our last album!

Snowstorm
Last year, we convened in Reno to clear skies but frigid temperatures, before giving way midweek to full-on blasts of arctic weather, with a ridiculous snowstorm grounding planes and ruining the end of everyone's week.  This year, the snowstorm appeared at the beginning, with a winter weather system crossing the Sierra Nevadas right on Sunday.  By Wednesday morning, Reno dawned clear and free, if still a bit brisk for my taste, but somehow everybody still lost.  The Rockies and the midwest after them got slammed by the "bomb cyclone" weather system, causing deep snowfall and excessive flooding.  And Reno, under clear skies, saw half the show attendees get stuck in town thanks to Trump's order grounding all the Boeing 737s, which are extremely common on Southwest Airlines and other regional carriers.  Granted, that bit wasn't the show's fault or the city's fault, except to the extent that the show could be held somewhere else.  We'll play that tune later in today's set!

The Four Horsemen of Desert Sky Games
Asmodee North America offered a can't-miss event incentive to retailers: Preregister before the deadline and get a booster box of Keyforge decks printed with the store's name on them!  (Every Keyforge deck is unique and has an algorithm-derived name.)  The show promptly sold out of retailer badges.  Keyforge was already a hit, and few stores would want to be left out of such a promotion.  I allocated DSG's decks to be gifted to various of our Keyforge players, and I kept one for posterity.  From what statistics retailers have been able to glean from one another, the decks had a fairly normal rarity and type dispersal.  Asmodee basically gets an A-plus for this.

Moneyhammer
According to the Games Workshop official show presentation, Warhammer had its best year ever in 2017, and then its best year ever again in 2018.  From a lot of publishers, I would dismiss that claim as humbug.  In this case, I believe it.  Despite extremely scrappy regional competition for the miniatures market hereabouts, and despite the bottom end of our regional player base being utter beardie grognards fitting every stereotype of the toxic player, Warhammer somehow... soars at DSG.  We have a better Warhammer player base right now than we've ever had, in terms of people who are personable, approachable, and fun to engage in the hobby with.  So imagine that except mix in some of the strongest release lineup GW has had in years, and what happens.

The company is dropping an official store in the southeast part of Chandler where high commercial rents are prohibitive to independent game stores, and unlike the reaction I've heard from most of the East Valley minis hangouts, I welcome it.  What, GW?  You say you're going to hire friendly, gregarious extroverts to demo the game and get people to engage in the hobby for the first time and you're going to do it all at MSRP?  I don't care if you do get the cream of the front-end army purchase spending.  You will be earning it.  I will take them from there.  I have a plan to amplify that, but it's still in the brewing stage at this point.

The Party Barge
John Coviello from Little Shop of Magic procured for us a Sprinter van, and a half-dozen retailers (and one publisher) clambered into the vehicle to roll across some eight hours of trackless wastes, complete with Area 51, through the Mojave Desert from Las Vegas to Reno.  Halfway there, the blizzard began.  We saw snow-choked burned-out husks of towns, "the sort of places where horror movies begin," as one rider observed.  We took pictures at basin lakes backgrounded by snow-capped peaks.  We stopped at Tonopah Station at the Beans & Brews for enough liquid cocaine to kill an elephant.  We crept behind rubberneckers past a sprawling wreck just northwest of Clark County.  We searched to no avail in the forlorn ruins of Fallon for an eatery still open at 10pm on a Sunday, and ended up just eating at the Peppermill after midnight.  (See below.)  We saw a hippie bungalow and somehow let one of our number enter there freely.  And we talked shop.  And business.  And commerce.  And product.  And logistics.  And everything under the sun.  And it was great.  I'm glad we had a British visitor with us, GRD Board member Dave Salisbury of Fan Boy Three, because an American road trip is one of those experiences everyone should get to enjoy.

Wizards of the Steak
I mentioned last summer that I was asked to join Wizards of the Coast's Retail Advisory Panel.  (The opinions in this blog are mine alone except where cited otherwise, and do not reflect those of the Panel, but Wizards has clarified that panel members are only under NDA for panel discussion content, not for the fact of being on the panel itself.)  Wizards decided to have an increased presence at GAMA this year, for reasons I'll touch on in a moment, including a floor booth of sorts with a giant statue of Jace (see photo above) and a lot of open/negative space.  They decided to invite the eight or so advisory panelists who were at GAMA to dinner on Monday night, in the way of a "thank you" for our input and for some additional relationship-building with the corporate support team.  It was nice to put faces to some of the names, with some of our reps in attendance, some folks from management and admin, and of course Nelson Brown, our Facebook retailer liaison who has taken up the Michael Yichao mantle and made the role his own.  The meal was fairly decadent and it afforded us a chance to get to know each other beyond the bounds of the business.  My interim rep, as it turns out, comes from the same competitive side of Magic that I did, and was thoroughly familiar from his own experiences with some of the events that shaped my early steps in the industry.  I think a lot of retailers get so much tunnel vision with their own stores' struggles that they forget there are real people on the other side of that publisher email or phone, people worth connecting with.  Anyway, thank you Wizards for graciously inviting me!

Hybrid Series: Video Games
I have presented retailer seminars at GAMA three years running at this point, and I hope they have been of some value to attendees.  In 2017 and 2018 I teamed up with John Stephens from Total Escape Games in Broomfield, Colorado to present SWOT, a primer on the use of the situational assessment tool for planning and business-building.  In 2017, I teamed up with Paul Simer from Nerdvana in Jackson, Tennessee for "Video Games?  In My Game Store?", which has been retroactively deemed the first seminar in the Hybrid Series.  In 2018 the Hybrid Series continued with Stephen Smith from Big Easy Comics in Covington, Louisiana teaching tabletop retailers how to enter the comics business.  This year I flew solo teaching tabletop retailers how to enter the video game business, adapting Paul's original seminar plan with a focus on the steps to deployment, on the assumption that my audience would mostly already be inclined to move forward with it.  I think the seminar could use even more fine-tuning still.  There are some tidbits I included just to give people a sense of the scope of the category, the untapped potential out there once they get their sea legs.  In reflection I wonder if those things are too much "director's cut" and it would be better to run Deployment 101 and touch on basically nothing else.  I really only do have 40 minutes or so to work with before taking questions.  After my session, I stayed and watched the second Hybrid Series seminar of the show, with Maryam Al-Hammami of The Game Chest with three SoCal locations talking about toys and mainstream merch.  If you'll pardon me, I have to order about fifty cases of Crazy Aaron's Putty now.

Premium*
As mentioned above, Wizards showed up to make an impression this time at GAMA.  The big announcement for Tuesday morning, which the Advisory Panel members got to know about and shut up about until it was revealed to the public, was the overhauling of the WPN Retail Program.  This is going to be good for an article all its own, I have no doubt.  The nutshell version: Using close tracking of event metrics, Wizards consolidated the promo offerings for Magic into a unified promo pack configuration that WPN retailers can allocate as event needs dictate.  The promo packs are basically straight upgrades from prior prize support.  Starting with Core 2020, the store levels of Core, Gateway, Advanced, and Advanced Plus will go away and store allocations will purely follow the event metrics.  However, for those stores that want to go a little further in providing a high-end customer experience, a new Premium Store credential offers a promotional benefit and the promise of future prestige signifiers under Wizards' imprimatur.

The early word is that earning Premium is much more difficult than the published list of requirements suggests, because of strict application of those criteria.  When Wizards says they want the store tables and chairs to match, they mean match.  Those of us in the midst of the Premium store process have compared notes and observed fairly stringent review by the WPN reps.  I am doing non-trivial renovation to the storefront in the weeks ahead because I don't intend to spend any longer in limbo than necessary, and I want to pass this review by a mile, not by a meter.  DSG's event metrics are way past the required threshold, and I don't like the business notion that we're held back only by a matter of housekeeping, even if that housekeeping is more significant than just some tidying up.

Midnight Munchies
As each GAMA evening deepens to night, retailers and even some publishers and distributors in attendance tend to congregate and socialize and enjoy recreating.  Even though we all have to be up early the next morning, there is an incredibly strong pull where we want to keep hanging out deep into the night.  We make this worse for ourselves by eating and drinking stuff.  There was a gelato counter in the hotel.  So, yeah.  The thing is: It's worth it.  We need this.  After spending all year in full-tilt business mode, we need to find our comrades-in-arms and have the soldiers' revelry with them.  For practical reasons the one time we're all going to be in one place most years is going to be at GAMA.  A little excessive celebration is worth the 15-yard flag to be enforced on the morning's kickoff.

All Creatures Great and Small
The hit of the show on the board game side was Underdog Games's Trekking the National Parks, which appears this week at DSG for your tabletop enjoyment.  This blend of Tokaido and Ticket to Ride with a camping/traveling overtheme is the perfect sort of game to reach across the chasm to mainstream gamers and welcome them into deeper strategy offerings.  Last year's party game sensation Wing It! made an encore appearance and teased us with an upcoming expansion.  Iello reported a refresh configuration for their buy-it-all-at-once mini game display, and unlike many tabletop stores who move more bigger boxes, I see far greater sales of the smaller games, so this was highly relevant news for me.

The Guard Remains
Last year we had a changing of the guard on the GAMA Retail Division Board, which is elected at the Retailer Dinner on Tuesday evening of each year's Trade Show.  Industry heavyweights Travis Severance, Paul Butler, and Steve Ellis finished their terms and did not stand for reelection.  As it happens, this year they've taken over Free RPG Day, a move that I approve of wholeheartedly.  But anyway this year the succeeding chair, Dawn Studebaker, the vice chair, John Stephens, and at-large member Josh Fohrman were up for re-election.  After the turmoil of last fall and the departure of John Ward and arrival of John Stacy, there were all kinds of ways this thing might have gone tiltwise.  We were fortunate perhaps in that four prominent and experienced retailers threw their hats into the ring for election: Stephen Kirwan, Nick Coss, Jim Bruso, and David Wheeler.  If any of those guys had gotten elected, I know they would have brought clout and a good voice to the board, especially as the former three are high-end Magic dealers.  In the most participated GRD Board election in the organization's history, with some two hundred retailer members voting, the three incumbents held their seats and took home a vote of confidence in the GRD's direction.  This was a long way and a far cry from previous years' participation by a few tables full of interested folks, if that.  I am perhaps happiest because I know none of the three has any plans to vacate their seat, so the odds that I might be asked to step in as a replacement are remote.

Pro Platforming
The Edge Nightclub was a fun place to throw back a few beverages with the guys, and a great assortment of friends and peers was on hand.  What came next was what we all were waiting for.  The newly revealed next steps in the TCGPlayer Pro platform offered glimpses of end-to-end retail fulfillment in a connected Apple-store-esque style.  The Pro Kiosk, which rolled out a few months ago, has some expanded functionality coming, including buylisting.  Payment processing and back-end infrastructure figure in.  Overheard on the floor from a retailer smarter than me, "I didn't realize how ambitious Chedy [Hampson, founder of the company] really was with this, but he's looking years ahead and this isn't anywhere close to finished."  I would concur.  Like me, Hampson is a Class of '92 Gen-X'er.  I don't have any special insight into his day-to-day thinking, but every time he shows us the next step, it's like I got the map upgrade on an RTS and I see what he's been doing all along and wonder how the hell I didn't put the pieces together sooner.  TCGPlayer's path to success uses integration of existing off-the-shelf tech, leveraging software, resulting in a solution that attacks the root causes of multiple problems.

I recently migrated DSG's Magic singles from Crystal Commerce sync to the TCG Pro platform, and at every turn I have had strong access to Chedy's team and relatively immediate direct assistance with the tech.  Importantly, this includes my staff being able to work directly with them to resolve issues, as I am rarely personally at the steering wheel on singles fulfillment anymore these days.  I recognize TCGPlayer is making money from my sales.  If I am making the sales I'm supposed to be making, they are earning it.  I need to increase my volume, and a physical tool for doing that appeared at GAMA as well, as I'll discuss shortly.

My speedrunning friend ogNdrahciR still works for TCGPlayer, and I was delighted at the chance to talk Tetris and Ori again with one of the top players in the scene.  He is also part of the tournament organizing crew for Ori, and the past 12 months of their events have offered some of the most exciting event coverage I've watched regardless of game or speedrunning format.

WHAR GO
Retailer groups turn to Facebook Messenger as the app of choice for coordinating meetups, meals, activities of every kind.  The first few days, we type the same few things over and over again, from "Who here is hungry?" to "Who wants to try Game X in an hour?" to "Anyone with a laptop still in the lobby that can look at Z with me?" to "Who is still up and staying in the Tuscany Tower?"  After a while you just want to cut to the chase.  I'm in on whatever you're doing, until I conk out for the night on my hotel bed.  You don't even have to ask anymore.  Just tell me whar go.  I'm having such a blast I'll barely even register it anyway.  We always get pretty efficient by the end of the week.  "Bimini 7:15 reservation under Josh"  "IN" "Yep" "OMW" "yeah" "Rgr" "yesplz"

The Op
Mainstream board game manufacturer USAopoly has rebranded as "The Op," and presented to us an upcoming slate of releases that had me unexpectedly impressed.  I mentioned that last Christmas was something of a bust for DSG in the board game department, but that the more mainstream titles and properties did noticeably better than the hobby-styled content.  I didn't bring in a whole lot of USAopoly stuff overall, but most of their stuff I did bring in sold through.  Even though it's the offseason for tabletop right now and for a while to come, I am here budgeting up a mid-year refill on their highly accessible, highly recognizable fare.  In addition to great material with the Harry Potter and Marvel badges, The Op showed us a Die Hard asymmetric game where one player as John McClane takes on the other players as terrorists in the Nakamoto hostage standoff.  The Op also has the new license for Talisman and is going to release IP skinned editions almost immediately, including one for Kingdom Hearts III that is as obvious a pre-order as I've ever seen.

Robotica
Nohtal Partansky and his team at Sorting Robotics have given the hobby game industry what might be its first true piece of rugged capital equipment: the Roca Sorter, a literal Magic card sorting machine.  I got to see the device in action firsthand, and I went in expecting a science-fair project and instead got to see a polished, heavy-duty product.  The price tag is not cheap, but machinery that creates value throughput rarely is.  I am absolutely voluming enough cards to achieve the fastest possible ROI on this device, with my current fulfillment staff perpetually backlogged and the front-of-house staff preemptively sorting inbound collections to prep them for import.  This also blew my show purchasing budget right out of the water, but that's OK, much of what I might otherwise have bought will still be there later, even if I do miss out on some "show special" pricing.

Baby Dragons
Retailers are now broadly aware that the WizKids D&D and Pathfinder pre-primed unpainted miniature figures are basically the best thing to come to roleplaying tables since polyhedral dice.  At their publisher presentation, WizKids kindly reminded us all why we don't stock Reaper Bones anymore and don't miss doing so, by showing us an outstanding assortment of upcoming figures.  These figures included baby dragons.  Shut up and take my money.  In turn, my D&D players will ask me to shut up and take their money.  When the worst problem with a product line is that huge quarterly restocks are not enough, we have ourselves a pretty good situation.

Darkening Sky
The bloodbath I've been chronicling on the hobby game retail side of things has extended into the parallel industries that sell picks and shovels to the gold rush prospectors as well.  The latest victim is apparently Skyline Designs, which manufactured the best comic book fixtures in the business.  It's tough to ascertain publisher closures because even an inert publisher is still an IP rightsholder, and could sell out at any time, usually to Asmodee.

Meetings
Each GAMA more than the last has me in meetings with various people.  This year it was mostly distributors, with highly productive face-time in front of several.  In one case I was helping them with research for a project they are considering.  In another case we had some customer service difficulty a couple of years back and it was time to reopen the bridge we repaired last year.  In yet another case it's a smaller distributor who started with imports and light manufacturing, who had some new offerings on deck and a potential custom solution to one of my process problems.  And I met with one manufacturer in particular whose product exceeded my expectation (the Roca Sorter).  The thing with meetings is that by the time you are being asked for them, you need to think about what you bring to the table and why the other party wants to talk to you.  Business is a two-way street.  If they just wanted to pitch to you, they'd do it in the same room as their pitch to everyone else.  So yes they want money, we all do, but they had ways to ask for that already.  A meeting request is an opportunity to do something more.  I'm socially awkward so I just roll with it and try to be genuine about how I work and what I might be able to offer.

Relocation
The GAMA organization needed badly to get out of Bally's and it did.  A short-term sojourn at the edge of wherever is a reasonable price to pay for that.  Aaaaand because the Peppermill couldn't grow with the show anyway, we're already maxed out there, though I imagine the custom Keyforge decks helped make that happen for 2019 at least.  Now that the show is under stable footing and a new roster of stewards, it's time to fix the location situation in a way that keeps the GAMA Trade Show, the only significant West Coast business-facing convention in the hobby game trade, out west.

John Stacy and the main and retail Boards are already starting to put feelers out for this, and I am absolutely confident they will do their diligence.  If I had to lay spoilers for what they are going to conclude, it would be something like: Vegas but off the strip (Red Rocks, perhaps?), Phoenix, or San Diego.  Without any doubt California brings with it some costs, but also some pretty serious event voltage.  Vegas and Phoenix are both tourist towns with relatively inexpensive airfare access and there's probably no better time to visit either locale than mid-March.  And lest you think I'm homering this, I'd rather they pick Vegas than Phoenix, but that's just personal choice and it could turn out that Phoenix is the best option for the show.

I get that GAMA was just another small show in Vegas and a much heavier-weight puncher in Reno.  Unfortunately, possibly too much heavier.  If the ref doesn't stop this fight, I fear we'll leave Reno on the mat like Ivan Drago did to Apollo Creed.  If you have a better idea, a cost-realistic idea, and one that isn't just making this the umpteenth show in Indianapolis, Columbus, or Atlanta, GAMA is listening.

Net Income
Always our pre-encore closer in these articles, Net Income remains, far and away and beyond any doubt, the #1 most important thing in any business.  Without Net Income you can't do anything else.  You can't "be there for the community," you can't behave with integrity, you can't bear the cost burden that it takes to be in clear and unambiguous compliance with the law, you can't borrow and be counted on to pay back, and so on.  Without Net Income, it doesn't matter what you gross.  Without Net Income, it doesn't matter what you carry.  Without Net Income, it doesn't matter how many damned butts you have in seats.  Without Net Income, it doesn't matter what you promise.  If I can only teach one thing to any new retailer, or even any new small-shop publisher for that matter, it is to set up a business structure that provides adequate net income.  DSG's early configuration was not sustainable, and it almost put us out of action by late 2014.  Every time we've been forced to zig when we needed to zag, there has been a negative bottom-line impact.  If we had done in the beginning some of what we've done since, today I could be administering half a dozen or more stores... or the same one big store, but doing so from a tropical beach somewhere.

What You Give
It takes a few GAMA Trade Shows to realize a truth: It's not what you got, but what you give.  No, I haven't suddenly turned socialist; I feel no Bern or other redistributive lunacy.  I'm referring to the shift from acquiring giveouts to establishing relationships.  Yes, there are plenty of opportunities at GAMA to get hands on sample product, and even in some cases product you can put right on the shelf if you like, starting with "The Box" that retailers can earn for attending all nine publisher presentation time slots. I usually use that as an opportunity to try the provided products out for sale.  It helps defray the cost of traveling to the show, and anything that sells within 90 days will get restocked the same as if I had bought the first one on regular pre-order.

Look, you can trawl the exhibit hall floor with the coupon book and visit every publisher pitch and even attend the demo game nights and the poker game and so on, and gather veritable boxes of GAMA swag and genuine merchandise, and you won't gain anywhere near the kind of enduring, long-term business benefit that you will get from building relationships with people at GAMA.  And I don't just mean a feel-good benefit here, though it's nice to be rewarded at the same time for being a decent human being.  I mean you make more money from it.  And so do they, the people who you build relationships with.  With the publishers, you get to know the people behind the product and understand how they are positioning their offerings, and many times you can open up a direct sourcing conduit.  With the distributors, you have a chance to open a relationship with a company that can meet multiple business needs at once for you.  With other retailers, you get to learn what they've figured out, and vice versa.  It's very rare to meet a retailer who actually cares enough to make the trip to GAMA, who has nothing they can teach you.  And I can tell you, retailers I might never have said three words to ordinarily, have shown me ways to level up DSG that I can scarcely sum up in a simple blog article.

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That's it!  Hope you enjoyed my GAMA 2019 wrap-up.  And, to address a question raised two years ago in this space... a small piece of Interstate 11 is open, and it's great!  It begins at the Tillman Bridge and bypasses the entire ridiculous traffic jam of Boulder City, leading directly into Henderson and allowing a traveler with sufficient fuel and no need for a restroom break to drive nonstop from basically Kingman to the Strip.  It probably saves at least 20 minutes off the journey, bringing a well-planned Phoenix-to-Vegas drive in under four hours for the first time in history.  You know what would be cool?  Getting into the car at DSG and getting out at the hotel for GAMA, in Las Vegas.  And not even feeling travel-stressed.  We can dream.

Thank you for rocking with us, Cleveland, and good night!

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