The Business: SOBS Big Move & Your Local Store- Do You Even Retail Bro?

"But Sorcerers By The Sea doesn't affect me!"

Motherfucker, do you even pay attention to the retail real estate collapse?

This has been a known issue with comic book stores for a long time now.

Gary of Nerdrotic has talked about his in the context of his former comic shop also.

Why do you think your local game store isn't just a game store anymore, and hasn't been for many years? Why does the selection keep winnowing down to just The Brands That Matter? (i.e. Current Edition, SpaceMace, FightStick, The Spellcaster Card Game, etc.) Why is there more Other Stuff (usually Manga and merch)?

BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT SELLS!

"But my-"

SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP!

Your specific example does not invalidate the trend. It just means that the shockwave hasn't hit you yet.

What does going all-digital mean for The Only Game And Brand That Matters? No more Current Edition in the stores! They may not even bother to keep the Collectiable Print stuff in stock, and if The Only Game That Matters quits the retail space because there's no more physical product to push (and thus no more reason to be in the store at all) then you are never going to get them to so much as look at any other tabletop game.

ANY. OTHER. GAME.

All-digital publishing and distribution means that SOBS shoves its users into a wholy-owned, wholly-controlled content and business silo that also functions as an echo chamber.

Remember what I said about Brand Cults? Guess how you create all of the conditions to make one seize your brainmeats really fast and hard?

"But they need the stores to promote-"

NO. THEY. DON'T.

They need only a set of wholly-bought-and-paid-for online channels to do all the communication for them. That's what hiring those cheap whore channels on YouTube was about.

SOBS' present and future customers, user, and audience are all terminally online. They don't need retail stores for a damned thing, and SOBS would rather cut out those long-irritating and demanding middlemen anyway; this furthers the C-Suite's avowed objective to maximize the montetization of the Brand as reduced costs is money in their pocket.

Once those users migrate into the Walled Garden, it'll be like becoming a member of Costco or getting an Amazon Prime subscription: they are disincentivized from going outside the Walled Garden for as much as can be had (and if you have accounts at Costco or Amazon, and most of you reading this have one or the other, you know what I am talking about) so no the users/customers don't need the retail stores either.

What you are going to see over the coming decade is an already weakened retail game store presence all but vanish, and those few that survive will not look at all as they do now. This will have cascading effects upon the publishers trying to make their living selling Conventional Play crap, as SOBS' vacating Tabletop and thus retail means that the load-bearing pillar propping up retail (as it does Conventional Play in Tabletop generally) gets yanked out and the stores can't survive without it.

They won't pivot in time, so most stores are going to either stop being game stores or stop existing. Count on the latter more than the former.

The result will be forcing most people who buy at all to buy used or buy from an online storefront (usually Amazon, because Network Effects and Revealed Preferences yo) and those that refuse to adapt will be among the first who have their (lack of a future) decided for them by SOBS and end up forced out of the hobby by their own refusal to deal with it when they could.

So yes, you Soup Aisle reject, this does affect you. Don't come crying to me when you go to the store one day to find it closed never to reture. I told you so, and you didn't listen.