Is the age of discounts over?

[billd91]

And again, his company, while he was there, got out of the RPG retail market. WotC clearly does not believe it was a critical component of selling RPGs.

I think that's an overly strong conclusion. I think it would be appropriate to say that WotC (or possibly Hasbro) didn't believe it was critical enough to justify the resources they were investing in it. That doesn't say much, ultimately, about whether they felt that FLGS were or were not critical for selling RPGs in general.

 

[Storminator]

That's never been in question. The argument was made that they were a critical portion of the RPG industry and there's been nothing substantial offered to suggest that, other than Ryan Dancey's word.

No argument was made. It was posted as an assumption. That's the whole problem with everything you've said. Your counter also has nothing substantial to support it. It is also an assumption.

PS

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Even so, to be accurate it only has to show that they have seen games played at gaming stores and it affected a purchase decision.

Very true. That sounds like a question for a new poll.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'll agree that personal spaces are the primary method of bringing people into the hobby, but I won't discount the importance of the FLGS to the hobby. Game shops enable small publishers to have a foothold in the market and they also help diversify the hobby.

Is that as true today as it once was, though? I've never seen anything from the Wicked Dead Brewing Company in any store, of any sort, but I can hear about them online (at RPG.net more than here, admittedly) and get their products with no trouble at all.

For most of the time I've been a gamer, the main bookstores that carried games had D&D and little else. Some White Wolf, maybe a scattering of a few other things, rarely even Champions, almost never Traveller. How many would carry a small card game like Let's Kill, Ebola Monkey Hunt, Dungeonville or any of the Cheapass Games? How many carried Panzerblitz or Advanced Civilization? Not many.

You're very right about that. OTOH, Paizo promotes such stuff on their front page, as does RPGShop and other online retailers, arguably giving even more "window space" to them than gaming stores ever would.

FLGS promote diversity by providing a place to browse and they ignite passion because they allow instant gratification.

Do they, today, perform this function better than the Internet, though?

Let's say I see a cool indie RPG mentioned at RPG.net. Even if the poster doesn't include a link to the company's Web site (bad poster!), I can highlight and right click and Google will probably find it for me.

I go to this site, and since it's an indie company, they may well be publishing on PDF anyway -- and I bet PDF publishers outnumber the number of hardcopy indie RPG companies that have ever existed. At that site, I may get a chance to read a free preview (smart company!) and if I like what I see, I can buy the product and download it instantly.

If I'm not convinced, I can highlight and right click again and go hunting for reviews and get more input on a way-out-of-the-mainstream product like Cat, Octane or Sq3am than I could in any store, unless everyone who picked up the game was there at the same time as me.

Now, according to lots of (omg!) anecdotal posts by hundreds of gamers, it sounds like a lot of people aren't really on board with PDFs at this time. We don't know that holds true for indie gamers in the same proportion, but we do know a lot of these indie games -- like the super-awesome Kobolds Ate My Baby! -- never get to the huge retail numbers they'd get in a just universe anyway. So for them, it's not the difference between selling, say, 50,000 copies and a few hundred, it's probably the difference between selling a few hundred and a couple hundred.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

No argument was made. It was posted as an assumption. That's the whole problem with everything you've said. Your counter also has nothing substantial to support it. It is also an assumption.

You do realize your contribution to this thread has boiled down to saying "nuh uh" about a dozen times, right? If we're talking about substantial contributions.

 

[Glyfair]

And again, his company, while he was there, got out of the RPG retail market. WotC clearly does not believe it was a critical component of selling RPGs.

IIRC, it was a Hasbro decision because it wasn't profitable enough. Remember, the conventional wisdom is that the RPGs are barely a blip on Hasbro's corporate radar. The stores were a drag on the business, so they got rid of them.

In fact, from my experiences with the WotC stores, and second-hand acoounts, they weren't the sort of stores that were growing the business too much.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

IIRC, it was a Hasbro decision because it wasn't profitable enough. Remember, the conventional wisdom is that the RPGs are barely a blip on Hasbro's corporate radar. The stores were a drag on the business, so they got rid of them.

You're right.

In fact, from my experiences with the WotC stores, and second-hand acoounts, they weren't the sort of stores that were growing the business too much.

All the WotC stores I went to (there were several in LA) had fewer and fewer RPGs as time went on. What once was a full wall became a portion of the wall to filling a free-standing bookcase to a portion of it ... to gone.

It was pretty depressing the day I went into a WotC store and found they had fewer D&D books than the Barnes & Noble at the other end of the mall.

 

[Nikosandros]

Getting back to the original point, for me this is bad news... in Rome there's only one store that really carries RPGs, but their selection is pathetic and everything arrives months after release (if ever).

I always buy online from the US (and rarely from the UK or France). In May the USPS killed the surface mail option and if it is true that discounts are going away things are looking even worse... :\

 

[jodyjohnson]

It seems to me that WotC has been setting price points in mind with where they end up after the online discounts.

They know where the break point is (lost customers) and have raised prices to where the street price is close to their optimal price (with SRP likely bordering on break price).

Cut the discounts out and prices on our particular niche product may actually drop.


Maybe it's not a fluke that the original MSRP on DDM was $10 and the current discounted street price is within 5% of that.

WotC should know that the market value of the books/miniatures is well below the MSRP. If they no longer have to inflate MSRP to push up the street price then they could lower the MSRP and bring back FLGS.

At least I can hope.

 

[Pyrex]

Larger retailers have a full-price which is a discount of the SRP, and they offer a 30% off coupon.

Larger retailers contractually sell the book at SRP, and they offer a 30% off coupon.​

You suggest that the second case does not make it more difficult than the first for large retailers to bring customers into the store based on price discounts?

No. I've never seen Borders (b&m, not their online store) offer even the slightest discount from MSRP on RPG books.

What I'm saying is that contractually forcing Borders to sell RPG books at MSRP will have absolutely no impact on the fact that I pay MSRP-30% when I buy RPG books at Borders because said books have *always* been priced at MSRP and would continue to be priced at MSRP regardless of the outcome of this ruling.