FLGS pay rent to have the space to offer games of various types. With the trends toward buying online (they can't compete with Amazon), they are selling a lot less product and not covering those costs. (Source: Two close friends who ran gaming stores in two states for over a decade apiece, both going out of business.)
So, the option is gaming stores moving to locations with less square footage and not offering gaming, which has a cycle of not attracting customers, not showing off games to new customers, etc. Or finding an alternate income stream to cover the cost of offering those tables.
From talks with them over the years, I can pretty safely say that RPGs rode the coat-tails of the CCG events in terms of having free space available to game. Because those could cover the costs. (Except Yu-Gi-Oh - for some reason both friends did not do well on sales from regular Yu-Gi-Oh events.)
One of those friend now runs a gaming club. It charges per seat to play (with DMs getting a ticket for a free play elsewhere). It has walls of shelves of minis, sells food/drink for $1 each, and has a very limited selection of product, mostly dice and things you'd need at a game.
The Adventurer's League wrote an article about them:
http://dndadventurersleague.org/spotlight-nn-adventuring-company/
The article is a bit dated now, it's been open for several years since it was written. The run primarily AL and their own AL-like world, Dark Earth, where there are many DMs in a shared world running different parts of a meta-theme and you can move back and forth between them to see the bigger picture.
And yes, it regularly is all tables running, even though "pay for a seat" is still something the wider gamer population still questions.