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Tell me about the RPG section of your local game store
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<blockquote data-quote="FitzTheRuke" data-source="post: 9819834" data-attributes="member: 59816"><p>I own my store, but I will be honest - I am often disappointed by my TTRPG section. It's not for lack of trying - we have a bunch of non-D&D titles. They just don't sell very well, so I can hardly justify getting too many more. To be fair to my customers, we're only 1/3 a game store, and 2/3 a comic store. I am proud of the comic store part - I pretty much hand curate about 200 people's comic collections! I generally know what they want better than they do!</p><p></p><p>But the game part is harder. It's not that I don't love games - I wouldn't be <em>here</em> if I didn't, right? But we're less known for them, and what we <em>are</em> known for is primarily D&D and Board Games. (And a bit of Magic and Warhammer). It's a vicious cycle! We <em>have</em> to cater to what sells, and therefore, we in-store play more D&D than anything else - not enough people show up otherwise. But the flipside is, it's difficult to build the audience for other games, and fans of those other games generally go elsewhere.</p><p></p><p>On top of THAT struggle, we have a hard time sourcing many of the current favorites. For example, I kickstarted A5e, Shadowdark, Draw Steel, and Daggerheart - but I didn't make any money doing it! I got them for the love of it (I get the PDFs for myself, and sell the books, even though I personally prefer print books). They sold, which covers (most) of my costs, but they're hard to justify getting in more copies due to two big hurdles: 1) Usually, you need to get them in bundles of something like 6 copies. That's often more than I expect to be able to sell in any reasonable timeframe) and 2) The shipping costs are usually prohibitive, in particular because I'm in Canada, and getting stuff from the US can often result in <em>extremely</em> high Duty + Shipping + Exchange costs that you can't just apply to the price of the books (not if you want to sell them).</p><p></p><p>The traditional model of things being available from a <em>Distributor</em> works best for us. It's becoming less fashionable, because it makes for more middle-men, but the benefit is that the distributor takes care of the biggest part of the shipping costs (because they essentially allow multiple stores to share the cost, and more copies cost less on a per-copy basis).</p><p></p><p>At any rate, I'd love to have more games (I do my best) but the realities of the business prevents it. This is being critical of myself - some people have said that we have a decent show of it - it's simply a matter of perspective.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="FitzTheRuke, post: 9819834, member: 59816"] I own my store, but I will be honest - I am often disappointed by my TTRPG section. It's not for lack of trying - we have a bunch of non-D&D titles. They just don't sell very well, so I can hardly justify getting too many more. To be fair to my customers, we're only 1/3 a game store, and 2/3 a comic store. I am proud of the comic store part - I pretty much hand curate about 200 people's comic collections! I generally know what they want better than they do! But the game part is harder. It's not that I don't love games - I wouldn't be [I]here[/I] if I didn't, right? But we're less known for them, and what we [I]are[/I] known for is primarily D&D and Board Games. (And a bit of Magic and Warhammer). It's a vicious cycle! We [I]have[/I] to cater to what sells, and therefore, we in-store play more D&D than anything else - not enough people show up otherwise. But the flipside is, it's difficult to build the audience for other games, and fans of those other games generally go elsewhere. On top of THAT struggle, we have a hard time sourcing many of the current favorites. For example, I kickstarted A5e, Shadowdark, Draw Steel, and Daggerheart - but I didn't make any money doing it! I got them for the love of it (I get the PDFs for myself, and sell the books, even though I personally prefer print books). They sold, which covers (most) of my costs, but they're hard to justify getting in more copies due to two big hurdles: 1) Usually, you need to get them in bundles of something like 6 copies. That's often more than I expect to be able to sell in any reasonable timeframe) and 2) The shipping costs are usually prohibitive, in particular because I'm in Canada, and getting stuff from the US can often result in [I]extremely[/I] high Duty + Shipping + Exchange costs that you can't just apply to the price of the books (not if you want to sell them). The traditional model of things being available from a [I]Distributor[/I] works best for us. It's becoming less fashionable, because it makes for more middle-men, but the benefit is that the distributor takes care of the biggest part of the shipping costs (because they essentially allow multiple stores to share the cost, and more copies cost less on a per-copy basis). At any rate, I'd love to have more games (I do my best) but the realities of the business prevents it. This is being critical of myself - some people have said that we have a decent show of it - it's simply a matter of perspective. [/QUOTE]
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