Welcome back, everyone. We've missed so many of you.
There is more to say than a quick social media post will cover, so we're going to have a quick info dump first and then I will address some questions that we know will (or already have) come up.
(For those of you who have never read The Backstage Pass before, it's our business blog related to the comic and hobby game industry. Most of the articles here are meant to be business-facing, but everyone is welcome to read on if you're curious about the inner workings of DSG and stores like it!)
EVENTS AND OPEN TABLE USE RESUME FRIDAY MAY 28TH
NEW STORE HOURS: OPEN MON-WED 12pm-7pm; OPEN THU-SAT 12pm-10pm
EVENT SCHEDULE:
- Thursdays 6:30pm Draft, 7pm Legacy;
- Fridays 6:30pm Draft, 7pm Modern;
- Saturdays 1pm & 6:30pm Draft, 7pm Standard and Pioneer;
- Pokemon League Saturdays 3pm-6pm;
- Special events will typically pre-empt the Saturday 1pm Draft;
- Booster drafts and constructed sit-and-go events will be available on demand as capacity and clock permit;
- Commander play is available any time the store is open but may have space limits during paid events.
OTHER CHANGES:
Facemasks are no longer required as of May 28th. The science says once you're in a room for half an hour with someone, you have aerosol saturation and masks no longer help (in either direction). This means if the tables are open, facemasks become a matter of personal preference rather than business policy. However facemasks are still permitted and we will not tolerate any harassment of visitors or staff for opting to wear a mask. Some folks have immunovulnerable family members or other circumstances where they may wish to have every last grain of potential benefit. We at DSG respect this and we will insist upon this courtesy at all times on our premises.
All sanctioned events require Wizards EventLink registration (for capacity management) and we will waitlist players in-store when events are full on EventLink. Any EventLink registered players not present at the start time of the event may be dropped in favor of enrolling a player on the waitlist. Note that this means you must have a smart device or phone to play in sanctioned events. Wizards's rules, not ours. You receive pairings and enter your results through your device. We are new to this too, so bear with us as we all learn together how this stuff works. Wizards Event Reporter is defunct now and there are no more DCI Numbers.
There is now a venue fee. Event entry covers the venue fee as it is a component of the entry price. Admission to tables without entering an event (i.e. Commander open play or Pokemon League) costs $9.99 per day (after tax) OR ONE DSG STAR per day. (The cost to acquire a DSG Star is essentially $2, as you are awarded one for every $20 in purchases, and ten DSG Stars may be redeemed at any time for 10% off any purchase.) DSG Stars are our electronic reward system that is automatically maintained by Square, our credit card processor and point-of-sale system.
The venue fee won't go into effect until June 1st. Holiday weekend fun! But also a chance for everyone to return and get used to the new event layout and let us shake out any glitches.
Events will get priority seating. With our seating reduced to 36 (regular) or 48 (high capacity), paid events will be allocated reserved tables, and open play will have capacity limits going into event times.
Event entry fees are changing. Booster Draft entry is now $19.99 after tax, including venue fee. Constructed daily event entry is now $9.99 after tax, including venue fee. Special events will be priced on a case-by-case basis.
Tables are exclusively reserved for Magic, Pokemon, Final Fantasy, and video game play. We are no longer supporting in-store play of any other games. Nothing against those games, it's just not part of the DSG business plan moving forward.
REALLY GOOD NEWS STILL TO COME:
We have some awesome special events coming up. In addition to the official stuff like the Modern Horizons 2 prerelease week, the Chilling Reign take-home prerelease, and the Forgotten Realms prerelease week, we are setting up even more fun events: DSG stowed a lot of surplus product during the pandemic so that we could all play formats that never had a chance for in-store play. Time Spiral Remastered drafts, Zendikar/Kaldheim/Strixhaven Prerelease sealed deck events, and more! Stay tuned for scheduling on these great experiences!
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS:
That's all the news for now, so if you learned what you needed to know, you can skip the rest of the article. Below, I will set out some additional details and some of our rationale for these decisions for those who are interested to know.
Q: Why only three evenings of events every week?
A: We think there needs to be time to ramp back into full operation. Also, before COVID, events early in the week often did not fire, while events later in the week generally did. We don't know if that trend will continue, and we will be monitoring event results over the months ahead to get a sense of the player community's mindset. If we do have to make a change later, it's far easier to add events than to take events away. And for things like prerelease weeks, we can still run pods earlier in the day on Mondays through Wednesdays, for those players who aren't at work or school.
Q: What's with the venue fee? I want to hang out and play Commander all day for free!
A: We expect a certain amount of unhappiness on this because a thing that was free is now not free. However, this is the new reality. We learned during COVID that the "sea of tables" game store business model is just flat-out worse than the shopping-only model. The old way is labor-inefficient and space-inefficient and makes it more difficult for us to provide a good customer experience in a multitude of ways. But we are players too and we always intended to bring back in-store play. It just can no longer be a promotional expense now.
This change is also extremely overdue in the tabletop world. Venue fees are commonplace in e-sports and nobody even thinks about it anymore.
We deliberately crafted a venue fee structure that is effectively free for players who do business regularly with us -- many of our long-time customers have hundreds of DSG Stars on their accounts, and are often event players anyway who will not incur a separate table charge. By contrast, the venue fee might be cost-prohibitive for players who do not typically transact with us, whether buying or selling, and who do not enter paid events.
Q: Can I use store credit to pay the venue fee rather than earning and spending a DSG Star?
A: Yes, of course!
Q: Can I use store credit to pay event entry and have it still include the venue fee?
A: Yes, of course!
Q: Have you considered a membership plan rather than pay-by-day?
A: We did evaluate this extensively. We found that, on balance, memberships look like a bad value for most of our players. The biggest problem is what happens when life gets busy and you don't get to come in very often. You feel like you had to pay (often on an automatic credit card charge) and didn't get your money's worth out of it. Feelbads, plain and simple.
And let's face it, there are too many subscriptions dripping each of our credit cards every month. We don't want to encumber you with yet another recurring bill.
Membership timing also sets up bad incentives, like if you have final exams this week and summer break starting next week, you don't want to start a membership right now because you don't get to really use it until afterward... but what if the night you REALLY need a break is TONIGHT? Or if you are about to change jobs and you don't have a firm schedule yet, it's a major feel-bad to pay for table time you might end up unable to use.
With the DSG Stars option for venue fees, it's a breeze. Your DSG Stars don't expire for a year, so you can wait to use them, and the system automatically keeps track. And you can always just redeem them on purchases if you go a while without needing any for table admission (or you are mainly playing in paid events anyway). Talk to our players who have been using the ten-DSG-Stars-discount regularly, especially for booster box purchases and pre-orders and such. It's an ongoing discount that keeps renewing. It's a reward to everyone who keeps coming back to DSG. It's probably the single best thing we've ever done in terms of successfully setting up win-win incentives for doing business with us.
From a logistics perspective, using DSG Stars for venue fees works great because we have a star redemption in the system showing who paid for open play table access that day. So we will be able to verify pretty quickly if someone tried to sneak into the play area. (Don't do it. The rope and stanchion is there as a polite way of deterring this.) We don't have to keep lists or anything. For busy nights we ordered up a bunch of wristbands we can use, like at a concert.
Q: What if I pay my admission into the 6:30pm draft at 12:01pm? Do I get table access all day for no additional cost?
A: Yes. We will watch to see if this presents any issues, but we don't expect it to.
Q: What if the draft then doesn't fire?
A: Your draft admission will roll over to a future draft. Event admissions are non-refundable (and always have been at most game stores, so this is nothing new). Seriously, though, we're not jerks. We want you to get your money's worth. In the unlikely event drafts continue to come and go without ever launching, we will figure out a make-good transaction for you.
Q: OK then, what if I pay my DSG Star for table access and then decide to enter the draft that night and it does fire. Do I get my star back?
A: Yes. Again, you really don't need to worry about these kinds of things, but we've already been asked by people who we discussed the changes with and these sorts of concerns were in their feedback. We get it, the first worry is whether something basic like this is going to become a problem.
Like I said, we're not jerks. We have no need to double-dip, and the venue fee plan is intended as a cost that will only apply once per day per person. Whatever we might have to do to reconcile that if some weird circumstance comes up, we will take care of it. We got you, fam.
Q: Did you upgrade the tables?
A: Yes! We ended up doing it a little differently than planned, though, because we are less than two years from end-of-lease now and we wanted to make sure the tables we bought would work at the prospective locations we are already evaluating. (Most are very close to where we are located now.) The long and short of it is that we went with heavier-duty tables that are eight feet long, so that standard capacity at three players per side was comfortable, and max cap at four players per side was no worse than max cap before. Multiple spots we've surveyed lay out very nicely with eight-footers but would be too crowded with pairs of six-foot tables per section, and not have enough seating with single six-foot tables per section.
The boutique tables we originally planned to bring in didn't look like they were standing up to wear and tear very well in the stores that had them already (in other parts of the country, not local competitors). Based on feedback from those store owners and their experiences, we decided to double down on ruggedness and let tablecloths and table mats provide the aesthetics.
Q: What's up with the game exclusivity? No more Dungeons & Dragons?
A: I'm afraid so. In fact, D&D is already being phased out from DSG, including this week's enormous dice sale on most specialty dice and dice packs, and soon the last of the sourcebooks will be sold off and not restocked. So 2021 is the end of the line for RPGs at DSG; we've enjoyed having them (and I have been playing since 1st edition and the basic red box) but the pandemic accelerated the market's move toward virtualization, remote play, specialized play venues, and other market segments DSG just isn't in. Even discounting the books hasn't mattered. And as a matter of course, we're not supporting gameplay for TCGs we don't carry. We see the appeal of new hotness like Flesh & Blood and Digimon, but right now we're focused on continuing to improve our Magic and Pokemon offerings, and we keep Final Fantasy TCG around because we have a special relationship with that player community and with the publisher, Square Enix.
Board games are basically gone except for a small remnant that are video-game licensed or related; we moved away from general tabletop in 2020 when it became clear that our Amazon sales of board games etc were far higher than our in-store sales of them would ever be, and labor constraints and publisher channel restrictions made it unfeasible to continue in the category even as a local/online hybrid. We discontinued miniature wargames in 2019. We discontinued comics in 2018.
This years-long process is something we internally have been referring to as DSG's "Great Narrowing" and it's something of a controversial move in the industry where diversity of product is promoted as axiomatic. I believe that approach works in different markets, especially smaller metros and rural areas where high labor efficiency can couple with a broad product spread to create a strong unified hobby offering. In Phoenix, a tech-heavy major metro with high competitive saturation, I think an independent store is best positioned if it dominates a single category. In 2022, DSG will be splitting into two companies, one for trading card games and one for video games. (I have been foreshadowing here on the blog that this split was coming; it's just a matter of timing now, and is likely to be the major shift at end-of-lease as I discussed above in the answer to the table upgrade question.)
Q: Why are you still closed on Sundays?
A: That decision is subject to change later but it has been an enormous quality-of-life improvement for our staff and ownership. We do like money, so it's possible that as business ramps back up to full power, we will find that being open on Sundays is unavoidable. And as with the event days in the first question, it's a lot easier to add an open day later than it is to take one away.
Q: What will you do if the venue fee plan doesn't work?
A: That depends on what's "not working" about it. For business purposes, empty tables during non-event times are preferable to having non-monetized open play taking place. If we experience significant problems with logistics, enforcement, or other aspects of venue-fee-supported open play, we will probably close the tables except at event times. As players ourselves, we consider this an undesirable step and we don't want to move in this direction.
Q: Where are you getting your facemask science?
A: I saved this one for last because there's a lot to say here. But first, credentials. DSG's managing partner, yours truly, worked for almost a decade at the Arizona Department of Health Services as a senior analyst. I have extensive familiarity with public health, epidemiology, and health policy administration. Our decisions throughout COVID since the very earliest days of the pandemic have been close to flawless in terms of reading the data, assessing the news, reading the trends, and making the best decisions for the protection and safety of visitors and staff. Long story short, we know what we're doing and we stand on our record.
Moreover, the CDC has released guidance within the last week that vaccinated people can cease masking indoors. We're not going to police peoples' vaccination status, but if you're genuinely worried about catching COVID... well, you should probably get vaccinated. Just go to CVS, it's call-ahead or even walk-up in most cases now. I took a chance on a walk-up a few weeks ago and missed an open service window by minutes, and they just had me come back the next morning for the shot.
Small businesses spent the last year getting a great deal of public pushback against facemask requirements, regardless of whether those requirements were imposed by state or local laws or orders, or whether they were put into place by the business owner. We required facemasks at DSG from May 4, 2020 (the day we were allowed to reopen the doors) to May 27, 2021. Over a year. We took a lot of heat for it even though for over 11 months of that time, the policy wasn't even our choice, but was a governor's executive order, and then a City of Chandler municipal order. For the last few weeks we have continued the mask requirement as a business policy on our own decision, because we follow the science and there was still a non-granular health benefit to being masked with the tables closed and most visitors being in the building only a short time. The negative response in recent weeks has been significant and reprehensible, including a visitor bullying one of our staff members over the matter. (If that person returns when I am in the store, they are getting a lifetime ban from DSG.)
So now that the long year of facemasking at DSG is over, we hold everyone who harassed us about facemasks in absolute contempt. This is a private business on private property; respect our rules or don't come in. Is that libertarian enough for you? DSG has been, from the very start, a politics-free entertainment space. No harassment. No bullying. No discrimination. No proselytizing. I shouldn't have to say this but I just spent a year having the public prove to me that I guess I do have to say it. No matter which jersey you wear, park your politics at the door, and then come in and play some games. Let's get back on track.
For those of you who showed immense support during these last 14 months of uncertainty and upheaval: Thank you. Thank you so very much. We see you. We remember you. Moving forward, the decisions we make and our efforts to make DSG better, are done with your enjoyment in mind. Yours specifically. We specifically want this place to make you as happy as it reasonably can. We want it to be the place that was worth you going the extra mile to make sure you would get to enjoy again. Hopefully we will live up to that commitment. You are awesome.
See you all at DSG! Shuffle up and draw seven!
