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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9563834" data-attributes="member: 7044704">At least in the US, distributors act as de facto gatekeepers to getting your products on retail store shelves.  You can certainly succeed these days with direct sales and crowdfunding models, but if you want access to any significant number of game stores you have to get one (and preferably more than one) of the major distributors to carry your stuff.  That's never been a guaranteed thing, and the distributors my various FLGSs use have become increasingly risk-averse as their own financial position has become weaker.  They simply won't stock as widely or as deeply as they once did, and dealing with really small publishers isn't very appealing at all to most of them at this point.  Even when you do get them to stock a line, they're often sluggish about restocking as things sell out in their warehouse, and sometimes won't do so at all - which inevitably leads to stores acting the same way, treating many games as something to carry for a handful of order cycles at most and then just forget about in favor of newer product.The trend started well before COVID but became much more noticeable afterward.  There are viable alternatives for smaller companies now - direct sales online, crowdfunding, even Patreon and the like - but they still lack the ability to put physical product on store shelves where people can pick it up and look at in person.  Even in 2025 that's a style of shopping many people prefer, and that isn't going to change any time soon.</blockquote>

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