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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Glyfair" data-source="post: 3285009" data-attributes="member: 53">The answer to that depends on who you are.Are you a customer?  Then that answer hinges on whether you need a game store (whether brick & mortar, online or something else).Are you a game store?  You need a distributor to manage your time.  All of the game stores I know personally do not have hours and hours to spend ordering from literally hundreds of game companies.  Having to set up an account with each game company is very labor intensive, especially the ones where you only need one or two products.  Let's not mention the customer that wants a special order from a company that you don't normally carry.Are you a game producer?  Unless you are one of the largest, you need them to get your product in the stores.  Without distributors, because of the above problems mentioned for retailers, you have to convince each game store to deal with you.  In fact, you have to spend a lot of time selling your product to individual stores, rather than a few distributors.  Without distributors, only the top few companies would have their products carried in the game stores.  A game store would only deal with companies that is worth their time to carry.  Dealing with WotC or Gamesworkshop gives them hundreds of products their is a market for.  Dealing with say Inner Circle games requires time and effort for a few products that their customers might not even be interest in.  Multiply that by the number of game companies out there with only a limited number of products.Sure, some smaller game companies might band together (sort of like what happened with White Wolf during the early d20 years).  However, that is really creating distributors under a slightly different paradigm.Distributors really are needed in the game industry.  However, based on my experiences secondhand with them, I think that if one entered the market with a very different idea of what the experience could be for stores, retailers, and maybe even the end user, than they could easily take over.  There is lots of room for improvement (unfortunately, I'm not sure the profits are there to encourage that).</blockquote>

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