2WS-Steve
First Post
The early d20 glut wouldn't have killed stores. Early d20 was a boom and stores were suddenly making surprisingly good money off RPGs again. After that leveled off to the baseline for RPG sales, some stores were too slow to see that coming and didn't slow their orders down.
Many of the stores that came through this realized that it's expensive to have a robust RPG library and the turnover isn't as fast as for other products without the boom, so they trim to just the main lines from the big publishers.
Then the customer walks into the store, sees the same selection he'd get at Borders or Barnes & Noble, but without the cute grad school girls hanging out in the coffee shop, and turns around and leaves. And now there's a real RPG bust since the FLGS can't even sell the mainstream books.
Many of the stores that came through this realized that it's expensive to have a robust RPG library and the turnover isn't as fast as for other products without the boom, so they trim to just the main lines from the big publishers.
Then the customer walks into the store, sees the same selection he'd get at Borders or Barnes & Noble, but without the cute grad school girls hanging out in the coffee shop, and turns around and leaves. And now there's a real RPG bust since the FLGS can't even sell the mainstream books.