Vividly COVID

So the coronavirus COVID-19, the latest evolution of what we were calling SARS over a decade ago (and they're basically variants of a common organism set) has exploded from a central outbreak point in or near Wuhan, China, and has now infected people on every continent except Antarctica, and just give it time and it will probably get there too.

I'm not going to recap everything to do with COVID-19 because if you are reading this then you surely have access to the internet.  And honestly, people dying of this infection is much more important and serious than the disruption of the supply chain for hobby gamers.  However, this is a weblog about the hobby game business, so I wanted to document the situation as it occurs to us in the moment.

Unlike the "Asian Flu" from the classic Simpsons episode, product shipments from China are not going to incubate contagious strains of the virus.  To the extent that COVID-19 might be airborne, its lifespan is short and is concentrated in highly unsanitary locations and situations.  By all means use some Purell when you're opening that parcel, but no, you won't take sick because of that Wish order, you'll just want to die because of how awful the quality of Wish's bootleg merchandise is.

Instead, we're seeing ripple effects stacked on ripple effects on the movement of goods out of or through both China and other sensitive locales on the Pacific Rim.

It doesn't help (or does it?) that this outbreak occurred roughly at the same time as Chinese New Year, which is when our entire industry stops being able to order things that aren't already in the channel, until a couple months later.  So on the one hand, publishers were topping off distributor stocks with pre-CNY shipments, but on the other hand, who knows when production will resume to prior throughput levels.  There's money involved here, mountains of it, which even for a putatively communist regime is something China can't handwave off for long.

I have thousands of dollars' worth of dice sitting in a container somewhere near Shenzhen harbor, and fortunately a lot of dice made it out under the gun a month ago so DSG's main storefront isn't bone dry on that stuff, but still.  It represents the most obvious consumable that customer-facing optics will suffer from a shortage.

Board games are no longer a central category for DSG, and likely haven't been for a while given the sales percentage they've posted for years now, but even then, disruptions in supply are definitely noticeable today.  I would chalk these up more to CNY than COVID-19 in the immediate term, and however much shortage there still is as the spring season unfolds, will start to be more the effect of labor and transportation interruptions due to the pandemic.  I warned about this.

This is the first CNY cycle where I've had new video games as a priority item to stock, and so far I've actually seen zero effect on those, and maybe it's just because of the paucity of new releases in between a holiday season that was heavy, and an upcoming one with new generation console launches involved.  But the same distribution that brings me new video games also brings me things like licensed plush, and the supply of Mario and Zelda stuffies is low, while the supply of Pokemon plush is close to nonexistent.  The latter of which is weird because Tomy's biggest toy factories are in the Jiangsu and Guangdong provinces, not in Wuhan City.  You have to figure there's a transportation and labor constraint going on countrywide.

Obviously "ain't no global freight disruptions when all the merch is used," and times like these have me leaning gratefully into the scale of "pawnshop" business I've built, both in TCG singles, video games, and miscellany.  But Wizards of the Coast prints cards in Texas, so Magic: the Gathering was going to be unaffected regardless.  Magic represents the overwhelming portion of DSG's revenue, both in-store and online, and I don't see that changing in 2020 even with video games constantly growing.

It's important to take this in perspective and realize that no matter how much inconvenience resellers face from global sourcing problems in the short term, everything will be back to normal in the long term and China will continue being the highest-volume highest-scale manufacturing base in human history.  The West (and everyone else) will once again have more plastic doodads to buy than ever before.  Indeed, what we're seeing now barely amounts to an interruption of that, compared relative to what we had even twenty years ago.

So until then, make sure you're washing your hands with soap.