gamersgambit
First Post
I'm a gaming retailer.
Most of my revenue comes from Magic: The Gathering (roughly 40%) with a smaller (20-25%) amount coming from D&D and D&D Minis.
Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Borders, and the other deep-discount big box stores are killing my desire to support D&D slowly.
Think of them as Wal-Mart, only worse. Buying your stuff at WalMart certainly saves you money, and may put local retailers out of business but they provide very little other than product (and tax base for your community, but few people apparently care about that).
On the other hand, your FLGS--me, people like me--are the cradle of the gaming population. It is through us, and the locations we provide for players to come and play--valuable retail space we pay rent on and which could easily be retasked for more retail space--that provides the continuing growth of new D&D players and roleplayers in general. I often find myself migrating Magic players and boardgame players on to D&D as a fun and exciting new game, and in order to do this, I run demo games for them and provide them a place to play.
But the sales of the books decrease every time someone decides that they prefer the discount from a website or big box store. I've resorted to sending people out to the local BB stores to put my business cards in their copies of 4.0 books and elsewhere as advertising.
When the sales of the books decrease, I get more and more tempted to convert all that nice gaming space into space for more retail products. Spending the space to display my D&D books in an attractive manner rather than spine-out like the big box stores do becomes less attractive, too, which would continue to lower my sales.
So I put it to you: Support your LGS. It's the birthplace of the next generation of gamers, unless you really WANT 5.0 and 6.0 to become *completely* focused on duplicating MMORPGS because the only market left becomes people who play online.
Scott
Most of my revenue comes from Magic: The Gathering (roughly 40%) with a smaller (20-25%) amount coming from D&D and D&D Minis.
Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Borders, and the other deep-discount big box stores are killing my desire to support D&D slowly.
Think of them as Wal-Mart, only worse. Buying your stuff at WalMart certainly saves you money, and may put local retailers out of business but they provide very little other than product (and tax base for your community, but few people apparently care about that).
On the other hand, your FLGS--me, people like me--are the cradle of the gaming population. It is through us, and the locations we provide for players to come and play--valuable retail space we pay rent on and which could easily be retasked for more retail space--that provides the continuing growth of new D&D players and roleplayers in general. I often find myself migrating Magic players and boardgame players on to D&D as a fun and exciting new game, and in order to do this, I run demo games for them and provide them a place to play.
But the sales of the books decrease every time someone decides that they prefer the discount from a website or big box store. I've resorted to sending people out to the local BB stores to put my business cards in their copies of 4.0 books and elsewhere as advertising.
When the sales of the books decrease, I get more and more tempted to convert all that nice gaming space into space for more retail products. Spending the space to display my D&D books in an attractive manner rather than spine-out like the big box stores do becomes less attractive, too, which would continue to lower my sales.
So I put it to you: Support your LGS. It's the birthplace of the next generation of gamers, unless you really WANT 5.0 and 6.0 to become *completely* focused on duplicating MMORPGS because the only market left becomes people who play online.
Scott