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The state of the FLGS part x

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There Will Be Games

My FLGS (actually more a toy store franchise) is dropping its excellent board gaming and Warhammer sections. He actually took some time from behind the counter yesterday to give me the bad news.

I guess we've long been lucky to have an excellent board games shop nearby. Not just the staple of Settlers and Carcassone, but also FFG, Phalanx and other foreign publishers. Delft, with a population of just over 100,000 is not particularly big to host a boardgame store, although most comparable Dutch towns have a shop carrying board games. In the small towns they often also carry Warhammer stuff, while bigger towns have separate GW stores.

The shop owner isn't chucking out all board games and GW, but turning to the basics, which requires much less storage space and product knowledge. He said that turnover was slow, with quite a few games collecting dust on the shelves and thereby reducing profitability. But specialist sections like Warhammer and board games require a significant amount of time to keep track off. You have to know the new releases, rule changes, etc etc. to keep up with the generally knowledgeable customers.

Looking at the turnover data for Dutch toy shops (a much broader category, so I don't know how relevant they are to this issue), it seems that form 2005 to 2009, the volume of turnover has increased by 30%, but prices dropped by 10%. The price drop seems to have started even earlier, in 2002. And then 2009 was a pretty bad year as both prices and volume dropped for a combined loss of 10% of value. So times are tough for toyshops overall.

Personally I think the guy has a lot on his hands now that he has kids, and playing games and miniature battles has lost much of its attraction to him. That will have made the decision easier, but I guess that the bottom line was dominant in his decision.

As an aside he also told me that Dutch publisher 999 Games is in dire straits and cut back the number of new releases. Looking at the number of releases for Essen, I hadn't picked up a decline, but the declining market may be less pronounced for Ameritrash than for Euro games.

Of course, much of the new releases comes from essentially hobbyists that are willing to discount the hours invested from the production costs.

All this together indicates to me that the current economic crisis is starting to affect board gaming publishers and retailers. Together with structural changes like competition from other pastimes (computer games) and online shops challenging shop prices, for the first time in a long while I start to question the long term viability of the sector.

There Will Be Games FLGS
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