Castle Perilous Books and Games opened 25 years ago this month,
actually on St. Valentine’s Day. Why we chose to open on February 14, I have no
idea all these years later, except maybe since it was St. Valentine’s Day, we
wouldn’t see much traffic, giving us a chance to shake out the bugs without
bothering customers the first day. We operated out of a 2nd floor
suite with no elevator and about 500 square feet of retail space. What can I
say, rent was cheap and we were right across the street from SIUC and we did
well. Today, the store occupies 6000 square feet 8 blocks from campus with
about 10,000 cars passing us per day and our sales flabbergast me compared to
what I considered a great day back then. Oh how times have changed and this seems
a good time to look back at 4 trends that shape the game industry today (there
are certainly more but four is a nice round number):
1)
The shift
of RPGs from print to PDF—As have mentioned in previous posts, we started
off dealing RPGs and miniatures. While there were many companies dealing in
RPGs (see Shannon Applecline’s Designers and Dragons for a overview), TSR and
AD&D dominated the field and with no crowdfunding, no desktop publishing
and no PDFs, a company had to have a lot of faith in their product to launch
one. In most game stores, the RPG section dominated, unless their focus was
historics, either miniatures or boardgames. Today, due to the aforementioned
crowdfunding, desktop publishing and PDFs, the overwhelming majority of RPGS
reside on computers or the Internet, with most stores only stocking Dungeons &
Dragons and Pathfinder with maybe a few local favorites.
2)
The shift
of historics from stores to mailorder—When we opened, every game store
worth its salt had an Osprey book spinner rack and likely also a selection of
historic miniatures, as well as some shelf space devoted to Avalon Hill,
Victory Games and SPI wargames. Today, Osprey racks are scarce as hen’s teeth,
historic boardgames are limited to Memoir ’44 and Axis and Allies and, should
you find historic miniatures in a store, they likely consist of Flames of War,
Sails of War and Wings of War. Most historic boardgames and miniatures sell at
wargaming conventions or over the Internet.
3)
The rise
of the trading card game—Ah yes, Magic the Gathering and all its offspring.
When the Alpha set of Magic released, my distributor could not explain the
concept to me so we bought 1 deck and 2 boosters, which sat on the shelf until
players came back raving about this new game they found at GenCon. The industry
adopted the TCG and never looked back, with, I would estimate, 95% of all game
stores stocking at least some Magic, if no other TCG.
4)
The (concurrent)
rise of the boardgame—As I noted earlier, most game stores, when we
started, focused on RPGS. If they carried boardgames, they stocked historic
ones. No long, the last years have seen the rise of the Eurogame, led by
Mayfair Games and Settlers of Catan (now just Catan). While playing boardgames
in the US still does not have the cachet of those produced in Europe, witness
the number of boardgames imported from Europe each year, sales and importance of
them to most game stores supplanted the RPG in the product mix of most existing
stores and fit as a major component of the business plan of most new game
stores (that don’t focus on TCGs).
More changes coming. Yeah, I would bet so. What
they are, not a clue.
Very sad to see historic miniatures gone from store shelves, but I do understand the reality.
ReplyDeleteUs too. We cannot even move Flames of War.
ReplyDelete