Free RPG Day Follow-Up

Free RPG Day was a huge success for us. Before we even opened, there were a dozen people waiting for us outside. By noon, all of the free stuff was gone and we had already ran half a dozen events in the game center, mostly the D&D  Dark Sun adventure. This was a much bigger turn out than last year, and next year we'll be sure to get additional kits to give away.

The event went especially well thanks to our new social network marketing. It's pretty hard not to know what's happening at the store. Between Facebook, Twitter, Constant Contact emails, the store blog and the RPGA, you have to choose to ignore us to not hear about these great events. The event was free, including a surprise pizza delivery from Aldo, Free RPG Day's national organizer. The Dark Sun Adventure that we handed out for free, now sells on Ebay for over $20. How could you beat that?

I played in a noon session of the Pathfinder adventure, Master of the Fallen Fortress, and had a fantastic time. My half-orc cavalier, a new class from the Advanced Player's Guide coming out August 4th, was the party's beat stick. I loved getting a mount at first level. The adventure's pre-gen characters showcased the new classes in that book, including the inquisitor, alchemist, witch, oracle and summoner. You can still download the beta PDF for free from the Paizo site, if that sounds interesting. It's already available for HeroLab as well. I don't play a lot at the store, mostly because it tends to be too disruptive for me, with people asking me questions all the time. Sorry if I ignored you, I was beating up trogloydytes.

Only about 10% of game stores participate in Free RPG Day, which is unfortunate for the other 90%. Bug your store owner to join up next time. Let them know our sales were double our usually good Saturday sales. Most stores report significantly higher sales during this event. Like in past RPG Day events, sales were across the board and not limited to RPGs. This is because the customers plugged into these events tend to be alpha gamers. Alpha gamers, we've discovered through social network tracking, tend to be "multidisciplinary gamers," meaning they have purchasing interests that go beyond role-playing games (about two thirds of them). These are our best customers.

We ran D&D and Pathfinder because we were able to tap our organized play community, RPGA and Pathfinder Society. In the future, I would like to see more diversity in the games we showcase on Free RPG Day. I'm going to place this at the feet of the other publishers. As Free RPG Day starts to roll around, use your forums and your social networking skills to get your fans to volunteer to run your quickstart at the best stores in the country, the 10% who embrace role-playing games.

Finally, I want to thank our fantastic game masters for spending their day with us, promoting the games they love. It's also a stressful day for staff, so thanks especially to Michael Parker for managing the chaos and wrangling the game masters. Everyone should thank Aldo at Impressions for promoting role-playing games like he does and buying us pizza.

The Stages of Inventory

Inventory seems like an obvious task for a retailer. However, it's horribly time consuming so it's often put off. A full and thorough store inventory, taking everything off the shelves, scanning it and returning it, will take us about 16 man days of time, an expense that may be higher than the losses. We could move the entire store faster. We're in the process of doing this now. Usually we do spot inventories of a particular product line or perhaps an entire department a couple times a year. There's an emotional toll to inventory that seemes peculiarly like grieving. There is loss. Granted, it's nothing like losing a loved one, but it's probably bigger than you expected. Here's the grieving process applied to the inventory process with some exaggeration added for emphasis:

Shock and Denial. Denial is what kept you from doing inventory for so long. It seems mostly right on a daily basis. How bad could it be? When it's eventually done, the shocking truth of inventory losses is hard to swallow. The longer you wait, the worse the denial, the more shock experienced. Where did it all go? There's an accepted industry shrinkage of 2-5% of your cost of goods, but any loss is hard to bear. This 2-5% includes shoplifting, but it also includes items that weren't received properly, weren't sold properly or that had to be disposed of because of shelf wear. If you're in hard core denial, you may believe that most of your losses are mistakes not related to theft. They're procedural errors and thus that stuff never really existed. This isn't happening! That your customer base could be so callous as to steal from you and you family is simply impossible. Silly computer, you lie.

Pain and Guilt. You should have done inventory sooner. How will you explain this to your investors, your spouse, your employees? Why didn't you hire more staff to keep an eye on the store? Why didn't you aim your cameras in the right direction or invest in an inventory control system? You suck as a retailer. You're just playing at retail, while your peers would never have let this happen. You want to forget about this and throw yourself into your miniature painting, making that next character, or building the killer deck, but you know it won't solve the problem.

Anger and Bargaining. That stuff was gone anyway, a formal inventory was just an acknowledgment of this fact. Nothing to see here, move along. If you had done your inventory sooner, it wouldn't have changed the fact that the stuff was missing. You probably lost sales because you thought you had that stuff, but heck, it's not like you had the money to replace it, right? You paid taxes on it too, but hey, the schools need teachers and the roads need paving, you were just doing your part. Consider it your charitable donation for the year. Not having product on the shelf serves the customers right. A theft of an item has a direct effect on the community that stole it, as your offerings in that range diminish. Screw those guys! Maybe if you just buy back the missing stuff you'll feel better about it.

Depression. Oh my God, there's thousands of dollars of stuff missing. That could have gone to your kids college fund. That's a vacation somewhere nice! Just when things were turning around with the economy, this. Everyone needs to just leave you alone. Spend some time in your office, contemplating your profession and the base nature of those who have robbed you blind. You can't believe how many hours your staff took to find this out or the hours you spent when you could have been at home with your family or playing games.

Upward Turn. You begin to think straight and everyone doesn't look like a crook anymore. Some missing items show up, possibly because they were miscounted or mis-categorized. You run a bunch of reports that show the damage wasn't quite as bad as initially thought. Questions to employees about missing items yield some logical explanations. The emotion of the situation begins to defuse as you apply your professional skills to the task at hand. You work through it.

Reconstruction. It's over now and after a careful analysis, most of the stuff wasn't worth re-ordering. Otherwise, customers would have brought it to your attention or you would have noticed. Sales should turn around in those areas with missing stock. Extra staff has been assigned busier periods to watch over the store and extra security was implemented to cover trouble spots. Staff will get some loss control training. You can handle this and the losses are built into the business model, after all. Remember that 2-5%? You'll have to put off some product expansion and new fixtures to pay for the missing merchandise.

Acceptance and Hope. You'll have to do this more often to lessen the pain. A bit of your faith in humanity has been removed from your soul. Perhaps it is gone forever.You generally know who stole what, based on the categories. You've got a short list of suspicious customers, perhaps based on rumor or gut instinct. You stop pretending and take precautions, such as putting product in display cases, increasing visibility, or simply drop product that can't be secured. This is a learning process which means you can get better at it, which should increase profitability. Your faith in humanity has been diminished, but you will be a better retailer for it. You focus on the future and the exciting releases coming up.

Blog House Cleaning

The blog will be three years old next month. Here are a few changes and why:

• Removed follower boxes. Times are a changin' and those who "follow" the blog are now a small percentage of those who read it, about 10%-20%.  There are many ways to get here. Most people get here via Facebook.
• Removed ads. It was something to try, but figuring out effective online advertising on Facebook made me realize the futility of monetizing something like a blog.
• Removed profile. Which was redundant and told you nothing anyway.
• Old Comments. I still haven't figured out how to get old Disqus comments to populate back to the blog. Sadness.

Some stats for you:

• Most popular blog posts. Anything discusing top sellers. This blog post disussing RPG marketshare was 10% of my blog traffic over the last year and has links in three different languages. Anything RPG related gets way more traffic than discussions about other types of games.
• Short posts generally get more attention than long posts. That doesn't seem to stop me.
• Product reviews are always popular long term pages, while news pages get huge blips in readership and then nothing.
• Visitors. About 2,000 per month, mostly from the US, then English speaking countries, followed by the rest of Europe. 65 countries total. Finally got some people from Africa (thanks South Africa and Morocco!). What's your problem Belarus and Estonia? (Kidding).

Return of the Muggles

Unlike your average game store owner, I worry about cleanliness and lighting, contemplate just the right music and volume settings, and generally stock my store in a "cradle to grave" fashion that places the scarier stuff farther back and the ponies and butterflies up front. I very much want the general public to visit my store (AKA muggles*), as opposed to creating intentional or subconscious cues that drive them away. I'm a bit like a stay at home parent surrounded by children all day long. I want, no I need, adult company after a while, especially during the Summer when I'm babysitting the local kids. That's why it's my pleasure to announce that the muggles are back.

The recession devastated many retailers, and anything that we sold that attracted the general public, suffered as well. Toys, classic games, puzzles, all performed wretchedly over the last couple of years. The store in general prospered during this time, but it was due to our core hobbyists and rapid growth and almost nothing to do with "muggle" customers. Unemployment is at 11% in Contra Costa County, with a more accurate rate of probably twice that, so I don't want to pretend everything is back to normal. That said, we've got a baseline normal that people have accepted. Check the origin of the word SNAFU to catch my drift.

Nevertheless, this new baseline normal is seeing regular folks returning to our store. They are frugal, carefully target their purchases and are likely to ask a lot of questions. Most shy away from our high end items, but seem to appreciate their presence. Many say they'll come back later in the year for that perfect gift. Our jigsaw puzzle clientele is slowly growing, especially since we've expanded our Ravensburger and Pomegranate lines. Classic games do well too with a fuller range of products, from the super cheap games from Pressman to the super high end by Alex Cramer.

Overall, we're doing pretty well. This June is dramatically better than last June, which was a basket case. Our store plans extend out to years now, instead of wearing survival blinders that had us planning weeks or months ahead. We now talk about grandiose plans, like large product expansions, constructing bigger spaces, buying buildings, and adding or buying additional stores. Few of these things will happen, some give my bad dreams, but there's a sense of optimism just thinking about them. We're learning to navigate the snafu.

* Muggle: "Generally speaking, it is used by members of a group to describe those outside the group, comparable to "civilian" as used by military personnel." - Wikipedia

Hobby Board Games Go Mass

Yesterday I attempted to go to my usual Barnes & Noble store in Richmond, but discovered it was out of business. This store, along with a closed store in Jack London Square in Oakland, were occasional weekend destinations for me and my family, especially when shopping for my five year old. I prefer independent bookstores (and despise Amazon) but there are few left.

Where once you could casually wander through bookstores on almost any shopping trip, book stores are now destination stores, requiring planning, much like a game store. That my Richmond store blamed the closing of the nearby Circuit City for a fall in foot traffic and their eventual closing, shows that regular foot traffic must have been a big part of their business and that they're far more susceptible to a bad economy than destination stores like ours. Thus, the 25,000 square foot space, which now seems insanely optimistic, is on the market. That it closed four months ago and I hadn't noticed shows that I've cut back dramatically on my book store purchases.

My next destination was the El Cerrito Barnes & Noble store, where customers were sparse, a burly security guard stood in the entryway like a bored gladiator, and the idle staff congregated in the center of the store. In this center area were a bunch of mostly empty silver shelves. Some were stacked with some tired board game titles. However, what caught my eye were the various planogram documents taped to the shelves, awaiting product. A planogram is a kind of map that tells you exactly where to shelve products. The games on the planogram sheet were anything but tired.

These were serious hobby games, the cream of the crop. Usually about ten percent of B&N board game offerings have any cross over whatsoever, but the planogram showed most of our top sellers. Settlers and expansions, Carcassonne, Dominion, Ticket to Ride, various flavors of Munchkin, Pandemic and even the new Forbidden Island and the SdJ nominee (and presumed winner for months now) Fresco. Someone with a lot of game industry sales knowledge (or a distributor - I wonder who?) did their homework. The Days of Wonder and Gamewright games provide an easy hint.

Taken with my super secret spy camera (iPhone)

I have to admit being a bit shocked and appalled. Usually when a hobby game hits mass market, it means the decline or death of that game for us. Our sales plummet, turn rates go from stratospheric to average, and we generally stop pushing that game. Games like Apples to Apples, Cranium and Blokus used to require multiple case ordering for the holidays, but now get treated like the red headed stepchild, both because mass has tarnished it and taken customers and the margins are usually turned into mass market low profit items. The game trade often sees itself as the stepping stone or test market for games that eventually go mass, and eventually get dumped when they fail to meet mass markets high turn rate requirements.

I could go on a tirade about the potential threat of mass market to these publishers and to us, but the threat is just not there. Barnes & Noble and the mass market book store are no Target or Wal-Mart. This smells of a desperate attempt at relevance and capturing sales through diversification. It's the wrong move. I dumped my book purchases on the closest shelf and left the store. I'll be buying my books online from now on, although I hope I can find an alternative to Amazon.

Free RPG Day

There are two events this year that are such good times, such fantastic values (free), that you should clear your calendar and make sure you attend: Our 6th Anniversary Party, with free prizes and amazing food (October 24th) and Free RPG Day, where you can pick up free role-playing supplements and play in RPG events (Next Saturday, June 19th).

Free RPG Day is what it sounds like. Come to our store and pick up free role-playing games. These aren't recycled or discontinued dreck, but brand spanking new supplements created specifically with this event in mind. That's the basic gist of the event. Some stores stop there. However, we organize RPG events to coincide with Free RPG Day, with semi-volunteers (they get a small gift certificate) running games in the back. Traditionally, it has been a hugely exciting day, with lots of happy people doing what they love.

The point of the event is to try to get RPG customers back into brick and mortar stores. Perhaps the lure of free stuff can pry them from their WoW game for an afternoon, and if the sunshine doesn't turn them to dust, reintroduce them to ye olde game store.There are also the online only shoppers we would like to bring back in, if possible. If you haven't played an RPG in a while, it's a great way to meet new people and perhaps recruit for a game, or learn about our regular gaming schedule.

The event is free to participants, but we do pay hundreds of dollars to get the books shipped to us as well as compensate the game masters and pre-empt other events, which is why some stores pass on Free RPG Day. Without any optimism or wishful thinking, I can tell store owners out there that the expense easily pays for itself with happy customers (goodwill) and strong sales (money). For us, most of the people who come to Free RPG Day are not just lifestyle role-players, but true multi-disciplinary hobbyists, AKA core game store customers.

I think RPGs are in trouble. Getting new players into the hobby is an uphill battle, considering all the entertainment options available nowadays and our aging RPG base with all their adult responsibilities. Events like this build and reinforce the RPG community. I envision an event where five guys who stubbornly want to play five different RPG systems but can't find a group, sit around a table and play one agreed upon game for a couple hours. Maybe they'll be inspired to compromise and get a group together. I curse the long tail of role-playing games not because it hurts my sales, but because it divides the pie too thinly. Free RPG Day brings everyone together at the table, just for a little while.


For best results in getting into a game on Free RPG Day, RSVP on Warhorn, an RPG scheduling tool. We've got one Pathfinder game, a bunch of D&D 4 games and a few others in the planning stage. Otherwise, just show up, check out the store, and pick up some free role playing games. If you have suddenly become inspired to play once again, we've got a very strong Dungeons & Dragons RPGA group on Thursday nights, as well as a fledgling Pathfinder group that meets at the same time (Pathfinder is D&D 3.5 with candy).

Disqus Down

The comment software add on refuses to work with Blogger after I changed the template. The comments are all still there on the Disqus site, but I can't get them to display. I'm working on it; Disqus is being the helpful.