IME, the key to making retail work is having a product suited for it. The latest D&D starter set is a good example. It's a hefty box with great cover art and a bunch of components. It sells itself. Dice and accessories are similar. They explain themselves from the shelf.
Board games are similar. The art draws you in, and the product photos on the back help make it clear what you are getting into. When my family goes to our local store, we almost always leave with a new set of dice or a new board game.
TTRPG books can really struggle, because if you aren't already a fan it's hard to figure out why you should buy it. My local shop actually carries Draw Steel, but unless you already know and want the game there's no way the book can convey its value in the minute or so someone might handle it.
Yep. I think there's a lot of folks for whom their core memory of RPGs is very closely tied to the experience of game stores.
That's certainly true for me. I remember game stores in the 80s and 90s. This was before free trade with China, so they were unrecognizable compared to modern stores. There was no facility to cheaply make a high quality board game with hundreds of custom pieces. So there weren't hundreds of boardgames on the shelves. No high quality replica Hand & Eye of Vecnas on the shelf.
But RPGs in the 80s and 90s were pretty cheap to make. Books were mostly black and white, cheap paper, 650-750 words per page, 128 pages. That's how a company like Last Unicorn Games could get 9 books done a year. And you
had to go to a game store to buy most of these games. There were no online sales.
So there were lots of RPGs, because they were pretty cheap to make and you could only buy them in game stores. Board games were harder. And not all these stores were run like a business. Many of them were run like a hobby. Every store in the Metro Los Angeles area in the 80s and 90s stocked products without ever having a plan to sell them. Their plan was "put it on the shelf!"
When they didn't sell? The one thing they weren't going to do was put it on sale, pulp it and use that shelf space to stock products people want or, heaven forfend, run a demo night. It was great for folks like me who were interested in the history of the hobby. You could go to the War House in 1998 and browse their extensive collection of minis from 1978, with their original price tag! Fun for me, I love museums! Not much of a business though.
RPGs are a bad value proposition for game stores. If someone comes in and asks about a boardgame or a card game or even a minis game, the folks who work there can grab the store copy, open it up, and show the customer what the game is and even how to play. This is something I have actually seen happen at different stores and every time it happens, the store made a sale. That's a business.
RPGs? Good luck doing a quick demo!
But if your core RPG memories are closely tied to the game store experience, you don't care about the value proposition, you start with your conclusion. "It is a good thing for game stores to stock RPGs I am not going to buy or play. I
might buy and play them, so they should stock them." Great if you're a library. Not a great plan if you're a business.
Our data leads us to conclude there's about 20 games stores in the US that are "serious." Meaning they're a business that follows trends and knows their customer base and when they stock a product, they work to sell it. These stores order direct from us, we give them a discount, we cover shipping, and they're doing great. Tons of sales! Everyone's happy. There's a store somewhere in Arizona that sold a TON of MCDM books. Eventually, they stop ordering, because there are no more customers! They all already bought everything!
But most stores aren't really motivated to stock a ton of RPG books just to make folks feel good. If they order Draw Steel, they order 3 books. That's fine, we sell into the distribution chain, they can buy from a distributor. But those "three books please" stores aren't core to our business or our success. Of course, there are always people who are convinced that, regardless of how much success we have, or what we've learned, or what we know, we'd have MORE success if we catered to them specifically. I think lots of companies learn hard lessons listening to those folks.
We're currently noodling on a high-quality, expensive, print version of the Delian Tomb starter. It probably won't be labeled as a starter though, it'll be presented as a self-contained game. Because that's what the Delian Tomb is. It includes all the rules you need to play for at least many weeks and probably months. It's a mini campaign. It comes with pregens and has, according to our customers, the best onboarding of any RPG product they've seen.
That product might be a better value proposition for more stores. We'll see!
