The Business: The Diamond Diasaster Means Doom

This came out late Sunday last weekend.

Image gets the clicks, but Tabletop publishers are among those trying to use lawfare to stop Diamond from fucking them over.

Not all Tabletop people are in this trouble, but a lot of them are; as Comic Shops and Game Stores are often the same thing, the real threat here is to retail.

Like it or not, retail remains the place where most of the hobby gets played- definitely where adjacent stuff is played and sold. Furthermore, retail feeds into and out of the convention scene. Second-order effects could see that scene, itself not as good as they wish they were, taking serious or calamatous damage themselves sufficient to tank already weakened conventions and put others into that position.

This, coupled with all the other issues, are going to force a lot of people out of pretending to be in business at long last- and that assumes that the legal efforts are allowed to proceed, result in victory, and result in payouts worth a damn before the damage done is too much to keep going. For those panicking, this them attempting to escape Darth Vader before he cuts them down.

Most of them are not going to make it, and those that do will only get taken out later. Only Big Corpos have a chance here, as only they have the means to hire lawyers able to either lawfare their way to a win or have the connections required to fix it for their client- and yes, the latter matters, as Legal Mindset and others with such experience will tell you flat-out (or have you not realized that the same Fuck You mentality we see against President Trump applies to us little people too). That means Wizards of the Coast and, maybe, Image Comics; DC and Marvel aren't going to care, and WOTC saw this coming a while back so they may not either- especially if this means lot of their problems get crushed.