The D&D Pie

I was chatting with a customer yesterday who was wondering how D&D 4 was doing at our store compared to Pathfinder. You know, I said, I think it's all good and Pathfinder may have even increased the size of the overall D&D community. That statement may or may not be true, but I wondered if my sales reflected that. I didn't feel they were bigger.  I knew Pathfinder was getting huge, since we now carry every Pathfinder product, host Pathfinder Society organized play and have most of our staff loving and playing the game. What I got was a bit unexpected:

The 2010 numbers are extrapolated. As usual, remember this is one store, not some grand industry trend, as far as we know. The size of the pie remains the same, but the distribution is evening out. Again, a near impossibility in traditional marketing theory, but not unlikely in the age of open licensing.

I'm predicting D&D sales will grow as the new Essentials line is released. Still, I don't think I can continue the argument that the pie is getting bigger. I hope the pie gets bigger and I think that needs to be the focus of these two companies for the future. Essentials does this and as we were told here, Paizo is planning some sort of introductory product as well. 

D&D Essentials should not only bring in new players, but it promises to liven up the line. As Mike Mearls told retailers recently, Essentials should add a lot more flavor to the player books. The DM books for D&D 4th Edition are very well done with some of the best written ideas in D&D for some time. The player books are just dull in comparison. I used to buy them in 3.5, just because they were fun to read. The new books aren't fun. They're a list of powers for the most part, like reading a Magic deck in a book. I think this dullness is reflected in our sales of D&D, where once player books outsold DM books by quite a bit, now they're at parity. Many have realized it's just easier to subscribe to DDI.

As usual, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Internet Price Pressures

There's this theory with some anecdotal evidence that some customers will shift their purchases from their friendly, local, brick and mortar game store to the online store as the price goes up. They might buy that $30 board game locally, but as the price climbs they flee to the online market to save "real" money. It occurred to me in a dream (yes, I know that's sad) that the truth of that statement might be in the numbers.

My goal was to create cool bell curves of price versus sales, but the preliminary data looked good enough to share without all that flash. Bottom line: the average board game price on our shelves, which includes about 600 games is: $34.65. The average price of a board game sold in the store, since we've opened, is $34.07. That's a very small 2% price difference.

Ah hah, you might say, you self select your inventory based on your sales. If so, it's not intentional. Actually, I'm pretty even in my dispensing of retail justice with my turn rate analysis. A slow selling $20 game is just as likely to get dumped as a slow selling $90 game. I don't think I've ever backed away from a new game solely due to price. What does happen, I'm sure, is that potential price pressures slow higher priced games to where they get dumped, which could be reflected by their absence. In that case, all my data shows is that my inventory is "in tune" with my sales. Then again, the real story may be in card games, with their lower price point and sales quantities at twice board games.

So is that 2% price differential between available and sold a true reflection of Internet price pressures, or is this a case of knowing our customers? In any case, I won't be losing any more sleep over this.

Top Board Games

Once a year, in the spirit of (over) sharing, I like to post our list of top board games. The last post was made back in September. As a retailer I've found other store's lists curious and sometimes helpful. It's one more piece of information to help make decisions.

In the past I've divided board games from card games and excluded expansions. That's honestly just too hard, so here's everything together, from our catalog of around 1000 games. It starts on the left with game number one, the right column starts at 51. It's by profit, rather than quantity sold. Any game making it on the list is by definition in the top 10% of our games and does well for us.

Pandemic	Arkham Horror Innsmouth Horror
Space Hulk	Memoir '44: D-Day & Liberation
Settlers of Catan	Roll Through the Ages
Finca	L-C-R Game
Dominion	Settlers Catan-Seafarers Rev
Dominion: Intrigue	A Touch of Evil
Endeavor	Munchkin Quest
Carcassonne	Dungeon Lords
Maori	Wits & Wagers
Ticket to Ride	Poo
Pandemic: On The Brink Exp	Smart Ass
Dominion: Seaside Expansion	Munchkin 2: Unnatural Axe
Munchkin	Zombie Fluxx Deck
Small World	Puerto Rico
Descent: Journeys In the Dark	Tayu
Arkham Horror	Bang! The Bullet
Ticket to Ride Europe	Talisman: The Highland
Catan: Traders and Barbarians	We Didn’t Playtest This At All
Apples to Apples	Qwirkle
Settlers of Catan 5-6 Player	Cosmic Encounter
Chaos in the Old World	Blokus Classic
Settlers Of America	Agricola: Farmers Of The Moor
BSG: Pegasus Expansion	Battles Of Napoleon: The Eagle
Word on the Street	Bang
Carcassonne: Big Box 2	Stone Age
Battlestar Galactica	Talisman 4E: Frostmarch Exp
Tobago	Game of Thrones Card Game
Five Crowns	Talisman Rev The Dungeon Exp.
Warhammer Invasion Core Set	Martian Fluxx
Gloom Card Game	Talisman Revised 4th Edition
Horus Heresy Board Game	Game of Thrones Boardgame
Ren Faire Card Game	Guillotine
Zombies!!! 2nd Ed	Grind
Kids of Carcassonne	Steam Board Game
SoC: Cities & Knights Exp	Cyclades
Monty Python Fluxx	Axis & Allies 1942
Last Night on Earth	Battlelore Battles of Westeros
Secrets of the Sea	Risk: Halo Wars
Killer Bunnies Blue SD	Risk 2210 AD
Agricola	Carson City
Citadels	San Francisco Cable Car
Axis & Allies Pacific	RftG: The Brink of War
Dominion: Alchemy Expansion	RftG: Rebel Vs
Fluxx - New Edition 4	Forbidden Island
Wasabi!	Chaos Marauders
Lost Cities	Nuns on the Run
Race for the Galaxy	Cookin Cookies Lunchbox
Power Grid	Twilight Imperium Shattered Em
Tales of the Arabian Nights	Bohnanza
Dixit	Thunderstone

Pristine vs. Craptastic

One thing you may notice when you shop at big box stores is the raggedy condition of their stock. The first Christmas season I was open, I shopped a really good Wal-Mart sale for Hasbro board games. These games were marked down well below my distributor cost. When I got them back to my store, I was appalled at how dinged up and damaged they were. They didn't seem out of place back at Wal-Mart, but in my clean, well lit store, they looked trashy. Some were also of lower quality than I was getting through my distributor, apparently designed specifically for Wal-Mart in a cost savings, craptastic level of quality.

This contrasts sharply with the hobby game trade. The game trade works in this wonderful way where stores are guaranteed top quality games in top condition. If I had received that same Hasbro order from one of my distributors, I would have shipped back 75% of them. The distributor would have paid for the entire process.On the positive side, there are small but lucrative business opportunities if you can find manufacturers and suppliers with these piles of dinged and dented games. Thus our fantastic ding & dent auctions that we hold each quarter (there's one Sunday). The game industry has high standards.
 
I'm reminded of this mass market negligence whenever I receive a Mattel order. Mattel ships their games with no packaging. They stick a bunch of board games in a box and send it out. No bubble wrap. No modest cardboard inserts. Just a bunch of games shoved in a box. Inevitably we lose 15-25% of the shipment to damages. These "damages" are, for the most part, completely acceptable to Target, Wal-Mart or whatever mass merchant normally receives them. Their business process falls short of our level of quality and it's pretty typical of any of our suppliers that ships to "mass." It's not just Mattel, it's any company that primarily sells to mass.

Hobby gamers have higher standards. Our customers envision a new board game in their collection. They want to see top quality board and game pieces and have little tolerance for cardstock quality boxes with dinged corners. Most are willing to pay for this. Perhaps their game will be collectible in twenty or thirty years. Maybe they'll pass it on to their children. In any case, part of hobby gaming is the visceral experience. No hobby gamer wants to play a board game with pink money and plastic pieces, let alone one that numbs their brain.

Talking about component quality and even the smell of a printed product is not unusual in a hobby game store. I regularly tell my story about how the smell of cookware stores takes me back to my early role-playing days. That's where I bought D&D, before there was a local game store. D&D next to pots and pans. Ahh, that unique smell.

Meanwhile, I've seen Target customers shop a game based on price. On price! They'll stand in the aisles with coupons. We'll get Monopoly Horse Feces edition instead of Oranges to Oranges Junior 9.25+ because it's $1.75 cheaper. No wonder muggles raise an eyebrow at board gamers.

Store News Round-Up

We post our news on Facebook/Twitter now, but here's what's been happening:

Foursquare. Facebook Places will likely nuke Foursquare, but the good news is our Foursquare marketing campaign was finally approved after several months. If you're the mayor of Black Diamond Games on Facebook, meaning you have the most check ins, you will receive a free soft drink can when you visit us (one per day). Here's the link to our page on Foursquare. Facebook Places promises to eventually integrate (possibly become) our Facebook Fan page and you can count on us taking advantage of it.

Facebook 900 Coupon. We hit over 900 fans on Facebook (941 as I write this). We're now ranked #3 in the world for Facebook fans, a ranking that I happen to be list keeper for and only I really care about, but I still think it's cool. We regularly give out coupons for every 100 new fans, resulting in a coupon every six weeks or so. This Facebook 900 coupon is a Paladin Club point multiplier. When you refer your friends, you get additional points for their purchases -- quite a few points really. It's experimental and we haven't gotten many back, but it's actually highly valuable if you do the math. It expires at the end of September. Oh yeah, and I really was kidding with that Finland comment (I've noticed a lot of new fans with funny umlauts and diacriticals in their names).

Ding & Dent Auction Sunday. Our ding & dent auction and sale is Sunday. You can bring in your games to sell or auction for store credit or you can just come and find some slightly dinged up games at very low prices. This upcoming auction is of about average size (the last one was probably twice as large). It features a wide variety of mostly current board games in smaller quantities than usual. You can also expect a huge collection of 40K to be sold in pieces. We won't be posting a list, but it's definitely worth showing up. There are some items already out on the floor, including a big tub of Reaper miniatures (German packaging), some Malifaux rulebooks, and some role-playing games.

Is Indie Dead?

The question: Are indie role-playing games dead? For years we've been buying RPGs from Indie Press Revolution. It has been mostly about buying one or two smash hits, with a smattering of slow selling showcase games to round out the order.  Like other small game trade niches, the indie RPG needs a lot of hand holding and game store staff involvement to be successful. I think we represent the average store in that respect. We're not hard core evangelists, but we push the good stuf and encourage play in our game center.

So much of this question is about one industry champion, Indie Press Revolution and their majority acquisition by DOJ. Acquiring titles from IPR was a rather labor intensive process that usually involved loading up on top sellers and bringing in a bunch of smaller titles that were cool, but performed poorly. To make the economics work we needed free shipping, which required more than just the top sellers. These slower sellers got free passes from our tough inventory metrics because of their social value. In other words, they really didn't work as store products. Before the Dresden Files RPG release, Spirit of the Century, one single book, comprised 30% of our IPR sales. Combined with the Dresden Files RPG, that number jumps up to 60%. So for us, IPR has primarily been a conduit for obtaining high quality Evil Hat products (also see "The othe story here" below).

DOJ now works as a consolidator of sorts, similar to industry middle men like Impressions. Where before we were economically forced to get a side of fries with our burger, smaller selling titles with our big selling Evil Hat, now IPR titles come to us through mainstream distributors. We can pick and choose. Our range of best selling indie press titles are now available with next day delivery and without the bundling with slower selling dogs. So no, I will not have fries with that. Don't get me wrong, I'm a believer that indie press titles are RPG incubators from which nearly everything good in the industry emerges, they just don't sell very well. They should go incubate over there. I've got a mortgage to pay. Being a retailer means I'll take calculated risks, not flog myself constantly after a product fails to perform.

What DOJ has done is make indie mainstream. Every game store in the country that does reasonably well with role playing games should stock Dreden Files RPG and Spirit of the Century. Far fewer are now likely to continue stocking the cutting edge indie products that rounded out their previous orders, and that's where there is threat to the model. The DOJ conduit is likely a fantastic consolidator, but the big question is for how long. Distributors are happy to get Dresden and Spirit, but may not be so content in the long term to get the more cutting edge, art project books. So yeah, indie press has broken out, but boo, because the incubator may be in serious trouble.

The other story here, the break out from indie, is the emergence of a system. FATE is hot and you've got a lot of ways to play it via Spirit of the Century (pulp), Legends of Anglerre (fantasy), Dresden Files (modern), Starblazer Adventures (space opera sci fi), and Diaspora (hard sci fi). Anglerre drove it home for me: you can play FATE in whatever genre you're playing now. FATE scratches that indie itch and it's widely available now through all game distributors (with Diaspora coming soon). For me, the story of indie press is the story of FATE. It's about FATE now and it has always been about FATE, at least where economic success is concerned.

Feel free to refute this, educate me, or otherwise comment. I'm hardly an industry expert in this niche and I'm only approaching it from the perspective of your average retailer.

Strategy and Demographics

It might seem that I just can't stop talking about Facebook and how it helps the store, but the insights it provides are useful. The demographics section of our fan page has been an issue of concern and celebration for most of the year. First, I have to think it's representational, since we focus so much marketing effort and money in that direction. Sure, there are a lot of industry people who follow it, but as our fan (customer) base increases, those people become statistically less relevant. Second, I know not everyone is on Facebook and there are plenty of folks who get our Facebook posts via Twitter, but that's a small number of people and I generally know who they are. It's what you learn when you talk to your customers (they've got their own demographic).

So what has been the take away from this?  I call it my life boat problem.  Lots of men, but not enough women and children. Some of this is natural based on what we provide, but I think we can do better. I've mentioned it before, but it's very easy to coast in the game trade. You can play to your adult male base and ignore new hobbyists, especially if you've got activist game stores out there doing the heavy lifting or excellent local conventions. We have none of the first and a varying degree of quality of the second. Without these outside drivers creating new hobbyists, a region can die. There are vast swaths of this country where there are no game stores, where the closest store is 90 minutes away, or where game stores are wretched shells of their former glory (I just visited Southern Calfornia - shudder). That's tragic. It might sound like a sappy song, but the children are our future, both as hobbyists and as a business.

Older gamers often fall away from the hobby so we need the young'ins to enter it. Our biggest success here has been our Young Generals program. It's our kids only 40K event that places an expert hobbyist with a small group of kids. Young Generals is just a start and we would love to have additional programs in the role-playing arena and board games. Our board game group is already family friendly, but a more focused kids group would be ideal. If you know kids that are interested, or if you would like to volunteer for an event like this, let us know.

We're also focusing more on games for kids. Childrens' games are the biggest area of growth for us right now. We've been bringing in high quality games from Haba and we'll continue that trend as we approach the holidays. Another big Haba order goes out this week. Selling kids games is hard without a lot of foot traffic. Hobbyists like to get their kids into these high quality games, but most "muggles" will gasp in shock when they see a $40 board game for a five year old. They're used to low quality (inexpensive) games with ridiculously inane game play and it's hard to break them of that. There are some good "gateway" games, so we'll continue the fight.

We also can't forget Yu-Gi-Oh, which brings in 50-60 kids weekly. They actually have their own Facebook page, since they're primarily "mono gamers." There are about 60 Black Diamond Games Yu-Gi-Oh fans out there too.

Having a store friendly to women is part two of the life boat problem. We do a better job than most. Our store is consciously laid out to, at the very least, not repel women. It's professionally cleaned, the fixtures match, and the music is pleasant enough (movie soundtracks). I don't want to paint women with too broad a brush. There's mom friendly, and then there's female hobbyist friendly. Putting the scary war games and D&D towards the back of the store (it's passe to complain about devil worship, but war is alright), having a mom's lounge with comfy chairs, and having ADA compliant aisles for strollers is mom friendly. Keeping the bathrooms clean and addressing gamer funk is the primary concern of the female gamer.

Our biggest complaint from female customers is not having enough staff for assistance. Most veterans are on auto pilot, whether male or female, and generally need little more than a greeting when they enter the store. It's the new folks, especially the board gamers, mostly women, who need hand selling or else they'll walk out. If we can't provide that, we've lost to the online store. We've actually increased our staff hours quite a bit after these kinds of growing pains. We can't really afford it, but I see it as a necessary investment for the future.

What about older gamers? The big question: Is there a "boomer like" demographic bulge of gamers who started playing in the '70's that will continue to play into their late 40's and 50's? There's a lot of nostalgic interest in the new D&D red box starter set at the store. This is the crowd I'm talking about. I'm in this category and I wonder. Will I be playing with a younger crowd as I get older, or will my friends, now in their 40's, continue to play? We're now playing with their children at the table, which is actually kind of nice. Still, I'm hoping the lack of 50 year old gamers in our demographics is either an issue with Facebook (I think not) or a hobbyist crowd, from the booming days of fantasy gaming, that hasn't reached maturity yet. If it's the latter, hobby gaming might actually be in better shape than most thought.

Have I missed anything important? Is my Male, 35-44 year old demographic clouding my judgement? Let me know.