|
Megazver posted:Anything that puts less of a burden on the GM puts more of a burden on the players and the typical new-ish D&D 5e player is not comfortable with that, in my experience. Lightweight systems have less burden overall, so you can have a lightweight system where players aren't also being asked to do worldbuilding or whatever. I bet there's a bunch of them that folks could list.
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 00:44
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 10:09 |
|
|
its hard to find a gm. a game master. a great monarch. a good man.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 00:49
|
|
|
I'm sorry, it's my group's fault, we're all happy to GM but keep each other tied up instead of sharing our gifts with the world. (Okay, mostly their gifts, I'm a pretty mediocre GM.)
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 00:59
|
|
|
Megazver posted:Anything that puts less of a burden on the GM puts more of a burden on the players and the typical new-ish D&D 5e player is not comfortable with that, in my experience. There are plenty of systems that make heavy use of tables and such instead of putting burden on players. Also, hard to call what games like BotD allow players to do a burden as opposed to agency and space to roleplay with mechanical backup.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 01:26
|
|
|
MadScientistWorking posted:https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/magic-the-gathering-analysis-prompts-bofa-to-double-downgrade-hasbro-432SI-2943159 RE: The BofA Report: It's been torn apart to hell and back as absolutely shoddy work done almost exclusively on vibes and reading chud internet screeds but the best part is that their Store Research was literally going to 2 Targets nearest the BofA building in Manhattan (one of which, I poo poo you not, was a Target Grocery) and finding some old boosters mixed in the pile at 1 and the grocery having no magic product... because it's a grocery... And basing their market predictions on that.  They did not go to any game store, consider Amazon, or review the top online retailers: TCGPlayer/Star City/MKM 2 Targets Lmao BTW "Older Product" = Current Standard Legal Sets I went to Wendy's today and asked for a 4090Ti. They didn't have any, so I'm downgrading nVidia to a Sell! Sell! Sell!
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 02:24
|
|
|
Megazver posted:Anything that puts less of a burden on the GM puts more of a burden on the players and the typical new-ish D&D 5e player is not comfortable with that, in my experience. Not even closer to true. I'm currently introducing 5e players to Blades in the Dark. Same players in many cases, but they definitely find it easier because their character sheets are only a single side of A4 and there aren't many conditional rolls. I also find it easier because planning goes so sideways anyway I do little. IME rules heavier games put more of a burden on all parties.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 02:48
|
|
|
Toshimo posted:RE: The BofA Report: It's been torn apart to hell and back as absolutely shoddy work done almost exclusively on vibes and reading chud internet screeds but the best part is that their Store Research was literally going to 2 Targets nearest the BofA building in Manhattan (one of which, I poo poo you not, was a Target Grocery) and finding some old boosters mixed in the pile at 1 and the grocery having no magic product... because it's a grocery... And basing their market predictions on that. Beginning to think the stock market may not be accurate reflection of a business' health after all.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 02:59
|
|
|
At least here in SoCal they're right accidentally. All the local Wal-Marts and Targets have stopped carrying almost any MTG stuff, apparently because the shrinkage rate on them was crazy.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 06:09
|
|
|
Toshimo posted:I went to Wendy's today and asked for a 4090Ti. They didn't have any, so I'm downgrading nVidia to a Sell! Sell! Sell! This joke only works if it’s for a product that exists, if the 4090Ti is a thing it hasn’t even been announced to the public yet
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 06:16
|
|
|
admanb posted:Beginning to think the stock market may not be accurate reflection of a business' health after all.  I don't care if it's true or not, based on vibes or not. As far as I understand it, the academic evidence about predictions supporting individual stock-picking is essentially non-existent. It's just fun that the vibes are so bad that normies cottoned on and decided to act on it, and in a way that directly affected the only thing Wizards and Hasbro care about, at least temporarily.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 11:32
|
|
|
Another major issue with Magic right now is that the main constructed competitive formats, Standard and Modern, have been completely run into the ground by Wizards printing overpowered cards that end up overpriced, and then eventually get banned. This has been an issue for a few years now. Standard is basically 'All mainline sets from the past two years'. A little over fifteen years ago there was a trio of sets, collectively known as the Mirrodin block, which was a wild swing in power level, eventually leading to one card being banned in 2004, and another eight in 2005. After that, there were two more bans in 2011. Starting in 2017 however... In 2017, five cards had to be banned, including one that formed an infinite loop with another Standard legal card that had slipped through the cracks in playtesting. 2018 saw four more bans, 2019 another four, a whopping ten in 2020. 2021 surprisingly had none, but 2022 has had four cards banned in Standard so far. Wizards of the Coast had long ago learned how bad a volatile Standard format like this can be for the game, but it seems that around 2017, they completely forgot that. Of course a lot of these powerful cards had similarly problematic impacts on formats like Pioneer and Modern. As a result, people who want to play Standard and Modern on a low to medium budgets live in constant fear of the next pushed overly expensive card. Meanwhile the high rollers have to worry that their next big investment is another card that ends up having to be banned. Both have to deal with the fact that they have to deal with a constantly shifting metagame that's just not worth investing time in, let alone money.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 14:25
|
|
|
I feel like Standard was always stupid expensive. Eternal formats cost big money once but only once (mostly for dual + shocklands) and then you had a deck that would be playable if not top tier for years and could often build new ones for less than the cost of chasing Standard. And on top of that, you could cash out any time; I didn't make money playing magic but between tourney winnings and being able to resell most of my collection I broke even. Meanwhile Standard created constant artificial scarcity since all the pros and all the suckers all wanted the same cards from every set as soon as possible, and then when those cards went out of rotation 99% of them became worthless. Granted I quit right around the time Wizards gutted a bunch of core engine cards in Legacy, and not just format staples but specifically cards that interacted with new broken cards they'd just released (rather than banning the new poo poo). So maybe my impression is outdated. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Nov 15, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 15:27
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:I feel like Standard was always stupid expensive. Eternal formats cost big money once but only once (mostly for dual + shocklands) and then you had a deck that would be playable if not top tier for years and could often build new ones for less than the cost of chasing Standard. And on top of that, you could cash out any time; I didn't make money playing magic but between tourney winnings and being able to resell most of my collection I broke even.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 18:20
|
|
|
Purely anecdotal, but I've been mildly tempted to poke my head back into Magic but every time I look it's a complete nightmare. All the game stores here have entire walls of boosters from 15 different sets or more, it looks like each set now has multiple different kinds of boosters, and when I looked into the new "Brothers' War" set, most of them apparently include dumb Transformers cards. I don't want to be opening a pack of tightly themed cards about a fantasy epic only to be greeted by Optimus Prime or Megabutt or whatever. That's probably my own personal hangup, but I think it also speaks to a company that is more concerned with giving addicts and collectors something of value to chase than in the integrity of their product. I wish FFG was still making competitive LCGs because that model is just so much more customer friendly than the insanity that Magic has become. Clearly it doesn't offer the same returns, but that's capitalism I guess.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 18:37
|
|
|
Magnetic North posted:If that were true, that would mean that people are being paid a lot of money to something useless and stupid... but the efficiency of capitalism would never allow for that, right? Analysts are notoriously bad. Here's the thing. If you picked any random analyst and just bought all the stocks they recommended to accumulate when they said to, and sold when they said to, etc. you would probably come out ahead over a period of a decade. This keeps analysts in business. BUT. If you picked any random collection of stocks and did that too, you'd also probably come out ahead over a decade, because over the course of the last century+ the stock market as a whole has tended to go up. Buying stocks and holding them for a long time is a winning strategy. The fun part is that nobody has ever found an analyst (or a stock broker or a hedge fund or a fund manager) who consistently beats the market. In other words, on a risk-adjusted basis (and that phrase is incredibly important), expert stock pickers only temporarily beat comparative benchmarks, and the pattern in which they do so looks exactly like the pattern you'd expect from a random sample of random picks. In the long run because of fees and drag and the tendency to pick too few stocks compared to a benchmark of "the entire sector" or "the entire market" they all actually underperform the market eventually, and there is no criteria you can come up with that lets you find the random selection of pickers that luck out and wind up beating the market just through random chance. Folks in the long-term investing and retirement thread understand this, and so do a ton of reliable sources for long-term investing. Short-term investors (read: gamblers) may or may not accept this, but basically anyone who claims they can beat the market through stock-picking is probably wrong in the long-run. This absolutely includes highly-paid professional analysts, including at Bank of America. What we see here with this lovely, deeply flawed analysis of Hasbro is actually totally typical; if you actually are an expert in the company and its business, the analysis you can find tends to be transparently stupid. But if you're just a stock picker and don't really intimately know a given company, the analysis you can find just has to sound plausible, and it'll generate some clicks and maybe impress some moneyed clients, and that's all these analysis firms are being paid to do. The efficiency of capitalism is totally at work here. This is capitalism efficiently scraping a percent or two from the pockets of rich gullible people. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Nov 15, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 18:43
|
|
|
FishFood posted:Purely anecdotal, but I've been mildly tempted to poke my head back into Magic but every time I look it's a complete nightmare. All the game stores here have entire walls of boosters from 15 different sets or more, it looks like each set now has multiple different kinds of boosters, and when I looked into the new "Brothers' War" set, most of them apparently include dumb Transformers cards. I don't want to be opening a pack of tightly themed cards about a fantasy epic only to be greeted by Optimus Prime or Megabutt or whatever. That's probably my own personal hangup, but I think it also speaks to a company that is more concerned with giving addicts and collectors something of value to chase than in the integrity of their product. I think you're mixing up the new mechanic/gimmick of 'this card transforms into another card under the following conditions' with an IP tie-in. Though you're not the only one, I've seen people complaining the opposite- that they wanted IP tie-in cards and don't understand why they're a rare part of this new block that has nothing to do with robots in disguise. By the way, about a decade ago they did a similar mechanic that my friends and I were highly skeptical of working with physical cards because it required proxies, but which wound up being really well implemented and fun.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 18:58
|
|
|
Coolness Averted posted:I think you're mixing up the new mechanic/gimmick of 'this card transforms into another card under the following conditions' with an IP tie-in. Though you're not the only one, I've seen people complaining the opposite- that they wanted IP tie-in cards and don't understand why they're a rare part of this new block that has nothing to do with robots in disguise. No, Brother's War set and collectors boosters include crossover cards with the Transformers IP with unique mechanics, the same way Crimson Vow collectors packs included cards that were reskinned to be about Dracula.You can read more here. They've established how they're going to reprint unique cards like this in future set boosters when rethemed version of the unique Stranger Things cards were included with the random reprints in New Capenna set boosters, so it's... fine. In the long term it isn't permanently out of theme, and you only get them if you buy the packs intended for collectors/speculators and not the packs intended for actual play. It's weird and corporate, but it's fine.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 19:04
|
|
|
Printing 3000+ new cards a year and doing dumb things like the $999 set feels like a last stretch of "squeeze all the money out of paper magic" before digital takes over as the prominent form of the game, as does their moving away from local game shop support. I don't know anyone still playing paper between the pandemic and Arena. All formats of the game have always been expensive to play competitively, but they also had way less releases and cards to keep up with by like half. Arena being playable at all via f2p just makes the paper side look even worse.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 19:06
|
|
|
Lurks With Wolves posted:No, Brother's War set and collectors boosters include crossover cards with the Transformers IP with unique mechanics, the same way Crimson Vow collectors packs included cards that were reskinned to be about Dracula.You can read more here. They've established how they're going to reprint unique cards like this in future set boosters when rethemed version of the unique Stranger Things cards were included with the random reprints in New Capenna set boosters, so it's... fine. In the long term it isn't permanently out of theme, and you only get them if you buy the packs intended for collectors/speculators and not the packs intended for actual play. It's weird and corporate, but it's fine. Right, but those are seperate IP tie in collector things -like secret lair- it's not a matter of them being in the regular packs right? Oh actually reading the announcement, that's incredibly dumb and confusing.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 19:09
|
|
|
Bottom Liner posted:Printing 3000+ new cards a year and doing dumb things like the $999 set feels like a last stretch of "squeeze all the money out of paper magic" before digital takes over as the prominent form of the game, as does their moving away from local game shop support. I don't know anyone still playing paper between the pandemic and Arena. I'm pretty sure that digital took over as the primary form of the game a while ago. I think the rest of your post is generally right, though.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 19:14
|
|
|
Hasbro reported a huge increase in profits for both paper magic and Arena during the pandemic. This was surprising to a lot of folks who are mostly focused on/immersed in FLGS play, e.g. friday night magic; but the most popular format remains Commander and the largest market for opening packs is probably still kitchen table magic. The sales coming through Amazon and big box retail like Target likely made up for the loss of sales via small game stores. And one of the cheaper and still quite popular formats is still Limited, e.g. drafted magic. It is an equalizer: you draft a set with other players, you're all on the same footing, so the affects of the expensive aftermarket for singletons aren't really important, except as a way to recoup some money if you just sell the cards you accumulated from each draft.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 19:25
|
|
|
Paper magic is basically the backbone of the LGS model, so if that goes the whole in-person industry is hosed.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 19:33
|
|
|
I suspect that the player base for friday night magic doesn't evaporate even if the game does; instead, other games would fill the vacuum. People got the time, they got the money, they got the inclination. But also I don't think paper magic is going anywhere.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 19:41
|
|
|
FishFood posted:Purely anecdotal, but I've been mildly tempted to poke my head back into Magic but every time I look it's a complete nightmare. All the game stores here have entire walls of boosters from 15 different sets or more, it looks like each set now has multiple different kinds of boosters, and when I looked into the new "Brothers' War" set, most of them apparently include dumb Transformers cards. I don't want to be opening a pack of tightly themed cards about a fantasy epic only to be greeted by Optimus Prime or Megabutt or whatever. That's probably my own personal hangup, but I think it also speaks to a company that is more concerned with giving addicts and collectors something of value to chase than in the integrity of their product. Here's the 411 on Magic, currently:
As far as the health of Magic/WotC/Hasbro: Magic (and D&D) are always outselling themselves. Number keep going up. Anyone who tells you otherwise has some weird fetishistic axe to grind. Now, does that make Magic/WotC/Hasbro "Cool and Good"? No. They are loving over local game stores, they keep doing racisms, and they keep loving up poo poo, like their "Magic 30" convention, or D&D's Adventurer's League. If you don't want to financially support them: Don't. There's plenty of reasons not to. But, don't bother with mental gymnastics or weird conspiracy theories. Just say "I don't like their products" or "I don't like their business practices" or "I'd rather support another publisher". Those are all legitimately valid takes. In short: Do what you want, but be nice to your fellow TG players and let them have their fun.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 20:03
|
|
|
Having your whole business rely on one large corporations generosity isn't great, so the LGS just really have to diversify that product line. I am fortunate enough to live near a super nice FLGS that has a staggering amount of product lines and even a board game cage thing. If they shut down I guess I would just get my stuff online, but as an older long term hobbist I have a play group for most of my games. I stopped buying physical rpg books years ago so I am doing my part to shove them into oblivion at the end of the day.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 20:11
|
|
|
Lord_Hambrose posted:Having your whole business rely on one large corporations generosity isn't great, so the LGS just really have to diversify that product line. Honestly, if MtG disappeared overnight (which it won't), probably 70-80% of LGSes would be gone in 6 months. There's just no sales driver like it at the broad scale. Not even getting into how badly most shops are run (from a financial perspective), there's just the fact that everything else is basically super niche or extremely small margins. It's nice to have a wall of board games, but if you can't convince your customers to splurge for Amazon+25% on the regular, it's not coming close to keeping the lights on (and board games are slow movers, anyway). Yes, there's pockets where other CCG or mini's games do well, but they are the exception, rather than the rule, and making your money on snacks/sodas is more likely than sourcebooks or niche LCGs or whatever.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 20:15
|
|
|
Lord_Hambrose posted:Having your whole business rely on one large corporations generosity isn't great, so the LGS just really have to diversify that product line. I am fortunate enough to live near a super nice FLGS that has a staggering amount of product lines and even a board game cage thing. My FLGS also have a staggering amount of product lines, but I suspect that they would all implode almost immediately if paper Magic died. They might be able to survive with Yugioh as their primary revenue source (and other games supporting the base), but I kinda doubt it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 20:16
|
|
|
Lord_Hambrose posted:Having your whole business rely on one large corporations generosity isn't great, so the LGS just really have to diversify that product line. Good news, now they can choose between Hasbro or Asmodee  Though, how long until Embracer owns Hasbro too?
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 20:17
|
|
|
I'm fortunate in that my LGS is also a comic shop and apparently a funko pop supply station or something. Seriously the funko pop people are wild. People come in and buy five or more at a time, and the store can't keep them in stock. Warhammer also seems to do more business than Magic, there are regular huge tournaments. So if Magic died, I think they would be okay. Also the backlash to the Transformers cards struck me as weird, but I'm also apparently the one person both among the local players and online who wants them. I was there on prerelease night and people were just handing me their Transformers cards after I said I was looking to trade for them.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 20:36
|
|
|
Lord_Hambrose posted:Having your whole business rely on one large corporations generosity isn't great, so the LGS just really have to diversify that product line. I am fortunate enough to live near a super nice FLGS that has a staggering amount of product lines and even a board game cage thing. It has nothing to do with diversification, it's how LGS's make money vs. what takes up space. If MTG disappeared from existence it wouldn't matter if your LGS store was the best board game shop in a 50 mile radius, they wouldn't be able to make enough money to pay for rent and employees. Sort of like how if prohibition came back, most restaurants wouldn't survive. It doesn't matter how many customers your food pulls in if the profit margins aren't good enough to cover fixed costs.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 21:00
|
|
|
Lord_Hambrose posted:Having your whole business rely on one large corporations generosity isn't great, so the LGS just really have to diversify that product line. I am fortunate enough to live near a super nice FLGS that has a staggering amount of product lines and even a board game cage thing. I'm... uh... going to assume you meant "game cafe".
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 21:16
|
|
|
Toshimo posted:Internet theorists were dumbfounded and gobsmacked recently when the lead designer revealed that 75% of players still don't know what Standard Format or Planeswalkers are. Can you expound on the Planeswalkers part a bit? Not knowing Standard, sure. 75% of players not knowing planeswalkers, a regularly seen card type, seems weird though. The statement is also vague in a couple ways that could sort that out (don't know *both* standard and planeswalkers, planeswalker the lore concept, etc.)
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 21:26
|
|
|
PharmerBoy posted:Can you expound on the Planeswalkers part a bit? Not knowing Standard, sure. 75% of players not knowing planeswalkers, a regularly seen card type, seems weird though. The statement is also vague in a couple ways that could sort that out (don't know *both* standard and planeswalkers, planeswalker the lore concept, etc.) The exact context was that the Lead Designer has a Q&A Tumblr where he fields fan questions and the following question was asked: "A mistake folks in the hyper-enfranchised, intensely online segment of the Magic community make is thinking that all players are like them. Folks like me and them might buy Walking Dead because of human tribal or UNF for shock lands, but it seems obvious given how mainstream/ popular Magic is that’s a relatively minority position. Could you share a stat I’ve heard you reference, about what % of players have ever seen a planeswalker? The median MTG customer is not who we think!" He responded with: "The stat I gave is that the vast majority of tabletop Magic players (over 75%) don’t know what a planewalker is, don’t know who I am, don’t know what a format is (let alone know of any particular format), don’t frequent Magic content on the internet (including this blog). They are far less knowledgeable about the game than enfranchised fans realize." This tracks with everything he's ever had to say about demographics: Kitchen table players who just buy random packs and don't read websites are their bread and butter. https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/698478689008189440/a-mistake-folks-in-the-hyper-enfranchised
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 21:40
|
|
|
I'd imagine many hobbies would have similar stats for their own equivalents
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 21:44
|
|
|
Does he mean a kitchen table player doesn't know who Jace or Liliana or uhh... Karn? are? That makes way more sense than them not knowing what a Planeswalker card is.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 21:46
|
|
|
It's probably out of date now, if only due to internet updates being mandatory, but one of my favorite stats of a few console gens ago is more than half of all xboxes sold had never been connected to the internet. A game being multiplayer is already a huge self-selecting filter all by itself, and any kind of competitive play or knowledge is a whole second order of magnitude smaller.Admiral Joeslop posted:Does he mean a kitchen table player doesn't know who Jace or Liliana or uhh... Karn? are? That makes way more sense than them not knowing what a Planeswalker card is. I could absolutely believe it was the card type. In highschool (so, like, Mirrodin / Kamigawa era) most of the people I knew in real life were playing with collections made up primarily of pre-6th Edition cards. I had a guy get huffy at me when I explained the concept of damage on the stack, a rule that was 5+ years old at that point. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Nov 15, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 21:46
|
|
|
Admiral Joeslop posted:Does he mean a kitchen table player doesn't know who Jace or Liliana or uhh... Karn? are? That makes way more sense than them not knowing what a Planeswalker card is. It has to mean to concept/characters of planeswalkers and not the card type because that statement is obvious made up garbage otherwise. The only way that could be accurate would be if he's counting people that played the game before planeswalker cards were added and haven't since. It also says more about how little the playerbase cares about the theme and lore of the game than anything about the success of it or its place in the market.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 21:50
|
|
|
Toshimo posted:
You're really trying to reframe this whole conversation as a personal criticism instead of what the topic is actually about; Hasbro/WotC's handling of the game and the general ennui the community seems to have about the state of the game's publishing. Criticizing WotC/Hasbro is not being mean to fellow TG players. Players that don't like having to sift through hundreds of product releases to figure out what to buy or pay outrageous amounts for the special cards that formerly all came out in standard booster packs in 1 of 3 sets a year are not living a worse life in any way, they're correctly pointing out the production bloat sucks for all levels of players.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 22:02
|
|
|
It's probably been long enough that it's worth linking again to Gary L. Ray's blog, Quest for Fun. He runs my local FLGS and he's been blogging about (mostly) the business of running an FLGS for something like a decade now. He regularly shows insights into his books and finances, including discussing the degree to which Magic is fundamental to the viability of a game store these days. For example, from his Friday Nov. 4th blog post discussing "witchcraft" (the arcane arts that FLGS owners practice): quote:Safety stock. Is this product likely to run out? Am I being told it will run out? I just placed a top up order of Root, because it was clearly the last shipment for the holidays. Is this a top tier product I don't want to run out of? I don't want to be out of anything D&D, for example, so I don't mind ordering beyond my normal threshold. Nobody with cash reserves loses money on Magic overstock; eventually it sells for more than you bought it for ... if you can wait. This runs directly counter to the BofA analysis claiming that unsold product is sitting around. Yes, it probably is... and by design. There are exceptions, but Gary has a decade+ of experience selling Magic, and if Gary says his stock (which doesn't take much room) eventually sells above his wholesale cost, he's not lying. That same post included this graph:  Upcoming Magic: The Brothers' War Set Booster with Commodity Pricing When the price of an upcoming set drops, that tends to get blogged or vlogged etc.; when it recovers days later, people don't talk about it. Contrasting to the above, Gary posted about game store investing back in September: quote:The most solid store investment you can make is more inventory. Even bad inventory that underperforms is better than pimp value. Avoid spending money on Other Peoples Property. We spent $160K expanding our game space to a second floor, just in time for the Magic boom to end. We paid it off during COVID, and event attendance may never fully recover. When we one day move out of our space, our landlord will likely tear down our second floor. It's that idiosyncratic to our operation. The "magic boom" he's talking about is in-store events, I believe; but he's not seen FNM and other Magic events recover to pre-Covid attendance, and that attendance was supposed to be the return on the big investment on game space. So when people say paper magic is "dying" I think that's not a wildly inaccurate statement, but it also implies an end-state that isn't justified by what we've seen. And Gary uses his game space for other games too, although they're not nearly as profitable for the store - both in terms of net attendance fees per day, and in terms of additional product sold to the attendees: FNM players buy lots of cards; people coming to play Warhammer buy a few minis or some paint; people coming to play D&D may buy a supplement occasionally. A recent post that I think provides an excellent insight into what actually makes retail games stores tick is this august post about Frosthaven. A key concept is turn rate. You dedicate a section of shelf space to a game, you dedicate a chunk of your capital to stocking it, and then you need to sell a certain number of copies per year to justify that investment. Something that has a lower per-item profit margin but a higher turn rate can wind up being more profitable for your store long-term than a high-margin low turn-rate item. Having all your capital tied up in inventory that isn't selling means missing out on the opportunity of investing it in inventory that does sell. This is what makes Magic so valuable to stores. It takes up comparatively small amount of shelf space per item, it has a gross margin per pack/box that ranges from fine to excellent, and it has a high turn rate, most of the time. Stock that languishes but eventually sells for more than you paid for it is still a drag and can still kill a business... but three boxes of some unpopular set takes up less space than one moderately-sized board game. This is why Gary says nobody "with cash reserves" loses money on unsold Magic: the "with cash reserves" means you're not out of cash, so the capital tied up in that inventory isn't costing you the opportunity to buy some other profitable product instead. If Magic disappears, and isn't replaced by one or several similarly-popular card games, then FLGS stores will hemorrhage money. They'll have to tie up capital in products with much worse turn rates, watch their monthly income drop below labor and rent costs, and close. However I do not think Magic will disappear, and I also do not think the vast player base of Magic buyers will just stop spending their money on CCGs if it somehow does. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Nov 15, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 22:29
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 10:09 |
|
|
Improbable Lobster posted:I'd imagine many hobbies would have similar stats for their own equivalents There's a huge long tail of players out there who aren't buying new items regularly or posting on message boards or attending gaming cons/tournaments. FMguru fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Nov 15, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2022 23:25
|
|
