WayneLigon
Adventurer
This may be a bit convoluted. Give me a minute.
Ryan Dacey's Predictions for 2007 for the Game Industry got me to thinking. I read further down in his entry some other interesting bits, such as
When we created L5R in 1995, the conventional wisdom in the gaming industry was that there were 5,000 hobby gaming stores in the North American market. That conventional wisdom was wrong, but we didn’t really figure that out until sometime in 2000. In fact, there were between 2,000 and 3,000 hobby gaming stores in the late 1990s.
In 2000, Pokémon swept the hobby gaming market, and there was a short-lived increase in stores as people rushed to cash in on the Pokémon phenomenon. From 2001 to the present, there has been a steady decline in the number of retailers. Today, the best estimate that Luke & I can arrive at is that there are between 1,000 and 1,500 hobby game stores left.
Now, before that Magic: The Gathering sweeps hobby shops.
Here's what happened locally - by that, I mean the store near me, and a couple stores I used to go to in Birmingham. Magic comes in. Within a few weeks, there are lots more people in the store than there used to be, but they buy nothing but Magic and play nothing but Magic. They don't buy RPG stuff and they don't cross over into playing RPG stuff.
Historically, the hobby store has been where new RPG players met each other. Now, store space is tight to begin with. Soon it's tighter as Magic players take up all the tables that used to have D&D and other games going on. Soon after this as tournaments start up and the whole organized leagues get started, they get pushed out completely. By this time, most of the RPG crowd has stopped coming to the store because they can't stand the much younger Magic players, most of whom are - as most children are - rude and loud.
By, oh, 1995 the hobby store is ruled by the Magic players and, to an extent, still is. They never went much for Pokemon though they sold it; so did everyone and his brother but the Pokemon players went to Books-a-Million on weekends. You could hardly move in certain sections for them.
It's 1993-1995 and the Internet is just starting to make it's big splash. The DotCom Bubble is not yet burst, and we start to see lots of game retailers online. So I started buying stuff online, as did most of my friends. The hobby store stopped stocking a lot of new RPG stuff because their customer base for it fled. Soon thereafter, they closed. Another store opened a year or so later, but it was several years before RPGs began to make an appearance there again. Other stores I know simply converted completely to cards and dropped their RPG lines. There used to be several hobby shops in the Birmingham area. Now I think there is one or two.
So, now... rampant speculation. What happens if Magic never occurs? The entire collectable idea never fires off, companies are not ruined or crippled by either the effects of it, or by trying to emulate it too late.
WoTC, without the millions upon millions generated by Magic and Pokemon, doesn't have the cash to save TSR wholesale. Probably no-one does.
It's now 2007. What's happened in the last ten years?
Ryan Dacey's Predictions for 2007 for the Game Industry got me to thinking. I read further down in his entry some other interesting bits, such as
When we created L5R in 1995, the conventional wisdom in the gaming industry was that there were 5,000 hobby gaming stores in the North American market. That conventional wisdom was wrong, but we didn’t really figure that out until sometime in 2000. In fact, there were between 2,000 and 3,000 hobby gaming stores in the late 1990s.
In 2000, Pokémon swept the hobby gaming market, and there was a short-lived increase in stores as people rushed to cash in on the Pokémon phenomenon. From 2001 to the present, there has been a steady decline in the number of retailers. Today, the best estimate that Luke & I can arrive at is that there are between 1,000 and 1,500 hobby game stores left.
Now, before that Magic: The Gathering sweeps hobby shops.
Here's what happened locally - by that, I mean the store near me, and a couple stores I used to go to in Birmingham. Magic comes in. Within a few weeks, there are lots more people in the store than there used to be, but they buy nothing but Magic and play nothing but Magic. They don't buy RPG stuff and they don't cross over into playing RPG stuff.
Historically, the hobby store has been where new RPG players met each other. Now, store space is tight to begin with. Soon it's tighter as Magic players take up all the tables that used to have D&D and other games going on. Soon after this as tournaments start up and the whole organized leagues get started, they get pushed out completely. By this time, most of the RPG crowd has stopped coming to the store because they can't stand the much younger Magic players, most of whom are - as most children are - rude and loud.
By, oh, 1995 the hobby store is ruled by the Magic players and, to an extent, still is. They never went much for Pokemon though they sold it; so did everyone and his brother but the Pokemon players went to Books-a-Million on weekends. You could hardly move in certain sections for them.
It's 1993-1995 and the Internet is just starting to make it's big splash. The DotCom Bubble is not yet burst, and we start to see lots of game retailers online. So I started buying stuff online, as did most of my friends. The hobby store stopped stocking a lot of new RPG stuff because their customer base for it fled. Soon thereafter, they closed. Another store opened a year or so later, but it was several years before RPGs began to make an appearance there again. Other stores I know simply converted completely to cards and dropped their RPG lines. There used to be several hobby shops in the Birmingham area. Now I think there is one or two.
So, now... rampant speculation. What happens if Magic never occurs? The entire collectable idea never fires off, companies are not ruined or crippled by either the effects of it, or by trying to emulate it too late.
WoTC, without the millions upon millions generated by Magic and Pokemon, doesn't have the cash to save TSR wholesale. Probably no-one does.
It's now 2007. What's happened in the last ten years?
