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Size, scale, and scope primarily.

As a store owner the easiest way I can put this into perspective is a couple of the following ways. The first and simplest is that for each table I have I can fit 4-6 card players, but for every Warhammer game I can fit 2 for regular 1 on 1 play. More so, I need to modify said tables as 44" x 60" is not the standard folding table size which complicates things but it's an easy enough work around with some plywood. Though right off the bat I'm down to half the capacity if not more than a card game.

The next thing to consider is Warhammer and other miniature games are non consumable products, so once a person buys what they need, unless they're really enfranchised into the hobby, they usually have very little continuous spend. Card games on the other hand are extremely consumable, as not only are booster packs gone once open, they are constantly pumping out sets new players want and rotating cards. That's not even getting into the secondary market which alone can make rather large businesses for those who want to dabble in it.

Why this is important is because while I lose money as a store on both events I can sink much more into a card event as the player pool will be larger, therefore more ticket and snack sales to offset costs, and more overall purchases in the long term. Additionally, due to the non consumable nature of the product, it's better for me to use said "marketing" funds for newer players in leagues and the like that encourage them to join the game or grow beyond the first kit they buy as that's the person with the most spend potential.

Now, that's not saying I don't care about other demographics in either card games or miniature games, as I want to take care of anyone who plays or is in the hobby, so ultimately I try to make different events for different players and offer something for everyone, but there is a limit to funds that are allocated for what's essentially a marketing budget, and while I do everything I can to grow games like 40K, AOS, HH, the new Epic scale, and more, it's definitely easier to cycle a portion of that budget into card events as it's recouped a little more quickly which can then be put towards miniatures as well as back into card games.

I'd guess that there's a similar thing going on at higher levels as well.

 Overread wrote:
Not to mention, for card games you can even run a booster draft event which basically means you get to sell a chunk of product as well right on the day. Pre-registration and you can have a guaranteed amount of sales before you add on anyone getting an opportunistic pack or such; or buying dice/accessories or food/drink.

While true, the actual amount brought in for selling boosters for a draft is rather small in the grand scope of things. Think of it this way, for every eight man pod you're basically bringing in 80$ of sold draft sets assuming no additional prize support from entry. It's not terrible, but it's a very much a drop in the bucket long term.

Snacks are also great, and have fantastic margin in many cases, but the volume is still going to be rather small as even if every drafter in each pod buys a drink and snack, you're probably looking at an additional dollar or two in net profit per person. It's not bad, but compare that to rent and unless you're doing a draft daily with large turnouts, it's not going to keep the doors open. Our store is a bit unique as well as we offer a large assortment of imported foods that compete with grocery store prices, so we do have people who come in just to buy their snacks, drinks, and even parts of their meal from us, so it's a bigger segment for us, but the average store who goes to Costco and buys some soda and chips probably isn't making a ton off of it. That's to say we don't buy basic things like water and soda that way, just that it's a much smaller aspect.

The big benefit is that people who play at your store are more likely to buy other items, especially things like Commander precons and other similar products that have a healthier margin than booster boxes. They're also more likely to bring in new players. That being said, a person getting into a card game versus a person getting into something like 40K, the 40K player would bring in more overall net return just due to differences in margin. Though the volume of people getting into card games is much higher and there are things like Pokemon or Weiss that are collector games as opposed to player games, where people come in, splurge and generally take their stuff back home to crack.

It's all a very interesting ecosystem, but the more I think about it, the more I'd say the reason that you don't see big cash prizes for minis, is that the player base for them isn't as swept away by the figures and are more in it for the overall hobby. Magic and YGO players tend to be very price conscious and a lot of their hobby revolves around price and value, whereas Warhammer, Pokemon, and other games are less about the winnings or how much an item is worth on the secondary market, and more about the other aspects of the hobby.

tneva82 wrote:

 Techpriest_ wrote:

While true, the actual amount brought in for selling boosters for a draft is rather small in the grand scope of things. Think of it this way, for every eight man pod you're basically bringing in 80$ of sold draft sets assuming no additional prize support from entry. It's not terrible, but it's a very much a drop in the bucket long term.

Eight? If tournament only has 8 players then either magic isn't big on that area or the area is TINY. The place where we play GW games we can play with 5 tables, maybe 6 if we really cram. Magic? I know they have played tournaments close to 50 players...

And you can easily have tournaments in more rapid succession. They don't seem to get bored of it despite having way more tournaments than GW games have(because room priority is card game tournaments).

Now albeit might be just local oddity but 8 player tournament seems small since you can fit more card players to same area than miniature tournaments. 8 is not unreasonable amount for local miniature tournaments here(stores don't have unlimited space) but for card games I would expect more. Space wise always more so if your area has only 8 players at MTG it would indicate your area might just not have much of MTG players.

As Overread said, the 8 player number isn't the total player base but the number of a single draft pod which can then be multiplied by the number of pods. Another way to think about it, is for every pod and a half you host, you've sold one booster box, so with a group of 50 players you've sold a little more than four booster boxes, and if that's your weekly event in a month you're selling about two and a half to three cases of Magic product for drafting. That's not bad and I'm happy to make that sale, but most stores operate at a much greater scale in the grand scheme of things, and the margin on those sales is about 16% before account for credit processing fees and etc which is rough.

Now I agree with you in terms of how many players you can fit in an event being relevant, and said as much in my initial post, as collecting 5$ for prize support from 50 players will give you a much bigger prize pool than collecting it from 10 players. Though you'd probably want to offer a deeper prize support with the larger group, unless they really want a top heavy prize support.

As for number of players per store, you do have to consider a few things as well, such as is it an established store or a new one, as you'll need time to build up that community. Early on especially you'll probably struggle to get events to fire, but each time you'll have more players and once you cross a certain threshold it grows quickly, but until then you'll really depend on sales from people coming in to pick up a few things or online sales more than people hanging out and playing as well.

tneva82 wrote:
That's lot more sales than gw event would be generating though. So no surprise which events stores will prioritize.

I get what you're saying, and it's true to a point, but from a business perspective it's not particularly relevant. I'm not saying I don't appreciate those who participate in events, but ultimately let's say you have 4 draft pods, that's 32 players and 10-15$ a player, which is 320-480$ an event. You'll usually host about four of these a week, which is 1280-1920$ in revenue a month. That's not nothing, but even as a small store we spend a minimum of 20K$ a month in expenses between rent, inventory, etc, and that's with me taking 0$ salary currently while being the only employee. Or to put it a bit differently, my order of holiday boxes from GW was about 5,000$ alone, and they mostly sold out now, though we still have a few left on our website that were less popular.

The reality is that it's not the events that bring in the cash flow, it's the purchases outside the events, although events do feed into those. We're still a very new store, so this may change over time, but right now our two biggest sellers are Pokemon and Warhammer, both of which are primarily enjoyed outside events with Magic, which is a highly event based franchise being in third place. I'll also add, that Magic is owned by a company that directly dumps on Amazon for less than we get product from distribution and they have even presold product on Amazon directly for under distribution at this point. There's a reason why Troll and Toad are dumping them completely and Penguin Random House isn't carrying D&D products anymore.

TangoTwoBravo wrote:
@Techpriest,

I really appreciate your insights as an FLGS owner!

The FLGS in my area run events for both 40K and Magic. My sense is that the 40K events are intended to keep interest high in the 40K community as opposed to making money directly at the event - the modest fees go into prizes.

Do you also run 40K events?

Happy to provide them, it's always fun to talk about such things.

You're spot on in that events are there to drive interest, and are often times loss leaders even in card games. We do run events for 40K, every quarter we have a free to enter league that starts with a combat patrol box and grows from there, and prize support is provided by us, so it's basically free stuff for the players, though GW does have incentives for such things which I don't know how much detail I can go into about. I'd like to do similar things for Horus Heresy, Legion Imperailis, and AoS, in fact you can find me asking questions about the structure for such a thing on here in the AoS section. I'd also like to do more events for people with fully built armies as well in the future.

The goal of any event isn't just to bring people into the store, but it's also to give them some assurance that the item they just bought isn't going to collect dust, as they know they have somewhere that they can use said item when they want. It's not uncommon that I hear someone bought something, whether it be for Warhammer or even MTG, and then their friends who also bought in at the same time lost interest so they never had a chance to play, so them having somewhere they can enjoy the hobby goes a long way.

 Kingsley wrote:
Interesting thoughts Techpriest_, thanks for sharing! I'm primarily interested in the very high level competitive events more than the local store tournaments, but those are cool looks into the dynamics of the basic game store events.

I'm curious how much organized play stuff does or doesn't help? I've noticed some companies have organized play kits with prizes for smaller events (FFG and LSS do this a lot), while others don't really. From the store's perspective does that stuff help?

(Also, on the original topic -- LSS, makers of Flesh and Blood, just announced that they'll be giving out $1.5 million USD in cash prizes for tournaments in 2024...)

Both are good, but there's a balance you need to strike as a store owner when it comes to casual versus competitive. A competitive scene in itself can't sustain a business usually and can drive away other players if it becomes the only option, but it can also be a way to get more players in if it's something they can aspire to. Basically you want the competitive and casual scene to be separated and distinctly labeled, but you also want them to be visible to one another as well so players can enjoy both, even if only in different phases of their interaction with a hobby.

It depends on the franchise and how those kits are structured. For things like Flesh and Blood or Yu-Gi-Oh! they go a long way as the promos are something players want, especially in Yu-Gi-Oh! where the promos can drive a scene in themselves and without them it can be a nightmare to grow a community. The Magic Promos are a bit more hit or miss, and a lot of times they can be completely meaningless, and I don't even know if they still do them for FNM or not at this point. I will add, Games Workshop does have their own organized play kit which comes with a bunch of free stuff to give away like core rule book stratagem cards and a glass trophy for the store champion, and I bring those in for Warhammer events so you end up getting a few extra goodies when you sign up.

 endlesswaltz123 wrote:
Costs and turnover of games.

You have 2x gamers per 8-10 or so for card games. You then also have to have significantly more investment in set up time and table costs (scenery etc) for those tables, all of those table costs have storage and transport costs. Then the real kicker is game turnover. I may be ignorant but how many games can those card games have in 2-3 hours which is what is allocated per game round in a GW tournament, including setting up/packing away of the players armies in the game.

A reasonable space that can hold and play a tournament for upto 64-256 people is going to be between 1500-5000 per day, location dependent in the UK. At the average of costs that is £39 just for the person to be there if the tournament is only 64 people or so, then you have the tables themselves, and the scenery for them. Let's amortise the costs at £10 per table or so over the lifetime of a few tournaments.

This is kind of true, but at the same time I'd say the cost of the terrain and tables is somewhat negligible in comparison to all of the other hardware you're buying when opening a location. Granted, I might have a skewed perspective as I have drink fridges and display freezers I brought in, as well as more expensive shelving which ends up costing a ton. I'm also looking into things like claw machines and coin operated arcade machines which cost several thousand dollars in comparison to the few hundred dollars to get a couple of tables set up for Warhammer.

 endlesswaltz123 wrote:


For 64 players, paying £100 for a two day tournament, with 32 tables, you are making about £1000 profit, so there isn't much spare for prize money etc, because the tournament organiser won't be doing it for the goodness of the community, they'll want some money out of it for all the organisation - unless you have supplementary business' like techpriest who is effectively using events as advertising/marketing for the retail arm of their business.

You're on the right track, but I think you're approaching this from an event organizers perspective as opposed to a game stores. This is probably something I should have brought up earlier, but almost all card game events lose money or break even at best, however what separates them from Warhammer is the secondary market that card games have. Most card shops operate in a similar but distinctly different way to pawn shops, where they buy singles at a percent of market cost from players and resell them at full cost. Whereas you're looking at a 16% margin on a booster box if not less, you can easily get a 25-50% margin on singles and events drive sales of singles, but they also bring in players looking to sell singles.

In fact, when I was still in college, I used to manage the convention aspect for a card store, and while at a traditional convention you'd often go in with a booth to sell product, at a large card tournament you'd go to sell some of the sitting inventory but more importantly you'd go to buy new inventory as you'd be able to pick up things local players don't have but want while moving some things local players have but don't want. It was very normal to leave a large thousand player plus card tournament with significantly less money than you arrived with, but with a far larger inventory of singles.

So I'd say those are two major factors when looking at the differences, miniature games don't have a secondary market in the same way as card games, and generally miniature players aren't as impressed by high prize pools.