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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BruntFCA" data-source="post: 5135706" data-attributes="member: 85487">You need to be sticky....and a good video game helps.To have a good "bricks and mortar" store, you also need a kick ass website, otherwise your just screwed. Let me give you an example. I was interested in picking up PHB1.On Amazon it's £15. I went into town, drove the car, in the UK fuel is about $8 per gallon. To get into town and back costs be about £5. Then comes the unbelievable hassle or *parking*. Where I live in the UK, to get a decent parking spot in town is about £6 to £8.I eventually get to the store, not in stock, find another store, it's there for £20. So in total I must pay,Petrol £5Parking £6Book £15Total cost £26.Cost from Amazon £15.Almost double the cost. And lets be honest, if you're driving in and out, you may pick up a coffee of cigarettes due to the sheer hassle. So what about actually *getting a game* and meeting people? Well Amazon score 0/10....as does the brick and mortar shop pretty much!In contrast I recently bought a bike from a brick and mortar shop....but the guy has a kick ass website. All his stuff is listed, he has "bundles" to collect, he has meeting places, discussion forums for bike owners, he offers services etc etc.I can't see how anyone can run a shop just stocking books and expect anyone to come. Moreover it's not impossible to make money running an RPG store. Where I live in Cardiff, the "Games Workshop" store has been there since I was 16 years old. I recently failed my saving throw versus self respect and 20 years later I went inside<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /> The shop was thriving. 2/3 of the shop was taken up with people *playing games* etc. They also have an amazing website to back it all up, calendars, schedules etc etc.The other huge problem WOTC have at the moment is the *lack of a video game based on DnD*. Kids grow up fast, if you have a "vacant window" while the kids are between say 12-16, their early opinions etc will all be formed by say Warhammer40K (excellent RTS games), or need I say it the dreaded WoW. WOTC have nothing to show. Any computer game also acts as marketing for the other products. Until recently I was never interested in the WH40K universe, however after playing some 40K games, it was a lot less lame than I thought. I've not bought some fiction books, and may even pick up "dark heresy".As an anectote I went around shopping for an LCD screen for a virtual table top. Most of the responses I got from the mostly pretty young staff in the shop was, "hey thats a pretty cool idea, I could get into that, you play 40K or something?".....now go figure.</blockquote>

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