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.
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.
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