nogrod.net

First, click here..

The link above takes you to the blog of an FLGS owner in Phoenix, Arizona. I encourage anyone here (or on Google+ where for the first time ever I am going to mention my much neglected blog) to read it. If you wish to avoid inane sophistry and silly speculation based upon someone else’s real work and hard numbers; once again feel free to click here. and ignore the rest.

Background- Daily (yes, its true I follow this stuff too much) I see, hear, and participate in so much blather and conjecture about the state of the hobby and where it is leading or whether it is a new golden-age or an embarassing nerdoclypic uberdecline, that I easily tire of the retreaded edition wars or things would only be better if [insert your favorite IF here]. In fact sometimes my head spins wondering about the true state of the hobby, as opposed to what our increasing smaller echco-chamber-esque screen fests would have me believe. So anyways, during my daily blog routine, I found the above mentioned post. If you must know I was checking a local Con’s table schedule and noticed that someone named Imperial Outpost Games was hosting a table. Never having heard of said game store (or company, at the time I didn’t know what they were) I googled them and found a real gem of a post that I was surprised I haven’t seen anyone link to before. The original post (or series of three posts actually) concerns the actual numbers of what a store owner is seeing in terms of what is moving and his take on the future of the games market.

Well here is a guy with real numbers, at a real store, who is a real fan of the hobby with an opinion based on having an actual stake in the game. Hell, I probably met him at one point since there have only been so many FLGS stores in Arizona in my lifetime of visiting them. I have never been to his store, but that is going to change this weekend after what I read.

Anyway, the meat of it-

By looking at sales, and seeing what the trends are, I don’t carry a lot of hope for RPG’s in general, at least here in the store. I love RPG’s and I will continue to carry them, but it would be irresponsible of me to keep carrying them in the ways that i’ve done in past years. A good business is one that’s flexible enough to adapt to changing markets and make decisions based off of that.

This of course surprises nobody who has been paying attention. But what he does show are numbers breakdowns by RPG with explanations as to why some of them show up differently than what would be expected. Some of his numbers did surprise me. I was happy to see how well Pathfinder did and actually shocked that the World of Darkness stuff was still selling much at all (but thats me, If I was a World of Darkness fan I would hate me for saying that too). But here is where it got interesting to me, in regards to Dungeons and Dragons.

All of that aside, these charts tell me that D&D is no longer king of the heap, and I can no longer afford to just bring in several copies of each new release as they come out, and expect them to move. D&D will now be subject to the same scrutiny that the other RPG’s get. If I don’t reasonably know of someone who will buy a copy of a particular book, I’m not likely to order it. D&D books were usually immune to any kind of process like that, but no longer. Empahsis added.

Now this is news to me. Although I haven’t bought a Wizards of the Coast product since 3.5, I figured that someone was buying them. I realize that this is long past the fad era of our games in the culture at large, but I figured the D&D license alone could sell product at A GAME STORE! This, in my opinion, doesn’t bode well for future versions of D&D and therefore role-playing as a whole. I feel bad about that in a nostalgic way, but I think this is what started happening as far back as the early 90′s and all the different campaign settings and specific rules put out by TSR that bled the D&D license dry. What he is saying is just stating a fact, but a sad one.

However it is the second part of that quote that gives me some quiet optimism, specifically “D&D will now be subject to the same scrutiny that other RPG’s get.” I think that overall that is a huge net positive. What makes it even more amazing is in another post from November where he breaks down some of his new role-playing purchases. All of which include games I would consider to be Indie and/or OSR (see here, its good stuff like Thousand Suns and Agon). Having people come in to the store and having a small slice of what is out there available and not dwarfed by WotC products may allow people to try new things and in turn discover the PDF’s, the ConstantCon’s and some of the mind-numbingly interesting things I run across all the time.

I am mostly a collector, the only time I expect to play is at conventions (since I live in a small town in Northern Arizona) and even with this being the case I see so much good stuff being written and produced by hobbyists that it is getting hard to tell a good portion of “the one guy with an idea” product from products during the height of the cultural popularity of our hobby. I buy PDF’s and Print on Demand stuff, in addition to old stuff on eBay. In fact in the same week I bought the Lulu release of the 1st Edition of Metamorphosis Alpha, a used copy of Star Frontiers and a PDF from Drive-thru RPG whose name escapes me. I am happy with all three. Since reading the above post I feel better about having a vibrant hobby that includes game stores, though in a much dimished way. I for one will be at that specific store on Saturday to pick-up something I know I will want, though I don’t know what that is yet. Yes, Dungeons and Dragons is in decline from its behemoth sized share on top of the rpg market. And yes the overall share of RPG’s is declining in in-store sales. But there are stores that are taking a risk with the quality (and quantity of quality so to speak) products that may attract the kind of gamers we want in the hobby.

We often lament the way FLGS’s are disappearing, but to me they don’t seem to be disappearing as fast as bookstores (or music stores for that matter). I do think that my earlier fears that all FLGS’s will completely disappear are somewhat allayed.