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 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Ok I have a question, if any other business did this, would we be ok with this?
Lets say, EA suddenly decided it didnt want people buying their games online anymore cheaply and possibly bundled games, so they said no more online sales.....except for those that they deem ok and from their own website......Im sure EVERYONE would be fine with it because it grows the gamer community.

EA did that a few years ago and you could only get their new games (like Mass Effect 3) on services that linked through EA's direct online Origin service and not on the most popular service, Steam. I don't know if it is still the case with newer games like Star Wars Battlefront. There was the initial surge of indignation that died down to a whimper.

 insaniak wrote:
Seems legit. The 20% discount offered through Amazon is a different kind of 20% to the 20% offered by Dave's Discount Games.

They take it from a different part of the pricetag, or something.

The difference is that once all the Dave's Discount Games shops have been eliminated, so you can only buy from the big three, the 20% discount will be a kind of magic number that disappears when you look at it.

 Peregrine wrote:

No, I got your point, I just don't agree with it. Many of these people DO care about their stores. They care about the free table space, they care about the events, they care about the new players the store recruits, etc. They just want to have all of that stuff for free and save an extra 5% by buying all of their stuff online. I've seen people in stores to play games on that store's tables bragging about how clever they are for buying a whole army online instead of at the store they're playing in. The only way to make these people stop being TFG is to take away their ability to buy online at a huge discount and allow the local store to be the cheapest option without going bankrupt trying.

I'll one up you. There was a guy at my old FLGS who joined our local twice a week group who would pass around his card IN THE FLGS to get 40k at 35% off during 40k nights (this was during 3rd edition when GW had no limits on who they sold to at all). I never took him up on the offer because I thought it was a ridiculous thing to do. Telling the FLGS that also sold online out of state for 10% off at the time to stop selling online or they'd lose their access would have done NOTHING to stop the guy in the store that was the actual problem and would instead have punished the store they're supposedly protection. The FFG policy simply bullies the easy targets and does nothing to protect stores from the real "culprits" (assuming that the presence on online discounters is an actual problem). If the problem actually is online discounters, the ones that do the biggest sales with the biggest discounts get a free pass on this policy. That's stupid and hypocritical.

 Peregrine wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

 Jehan-reznor wrote:

You know there is a social part to gaming, right? meeting like minded people, getting information and people views on games...

So, nothing that inherently requires you to be standing in a shop...

Not inherently. But, like it or not, that's how it works in the US.

bs.

You are incredibly delusional. It might work that way for you, but it doesn't work that way "in the US". Population density dictates otherwise.

I've been gaming for more than 25 years, and have been to many shops in that time. Of the few that actually had gaming space, I never encountered a single board game being played. Magic the Gathering, yep. Tons. And some shops would only permit card gaming in their space. Wargames? Yep. Not nearly that often, though. Board games? Nary a one.

But this is all moot. This policy is entirely about beginning the funnel down to exclusive online sales going through their own store.

~Eric

 Kilkrazy wrote:

 insaniak wrote:
Seems legit. The 20% discount offered through Amazon is a different kind of 20% to the 20% offered by Dave's Discount Games.

They take it from a different part of the pricetag, or something.

The difference is that once all the Dave's Discount Games shops have been eliminated, so you can only buy from the big three, the 20% discount will be a kind of magic number that disappears when you look at it.

You will also loose allot of the community atmosphere that Dave's DG used to provide and the new gamers connected to it and the greater hobby.

Overall the effect of loosing DDG to future business would probably outweigh the leveraging of better whole sale prices obtained from limited online sales alone.

Hang on, Having read through the article, arent you all getting a bit excited over nothing.

Reading the press release, it seems that the group is now restricting sales to actual game stores, rather than online only retailers.

So why would this stop gaming stores selling their stock online. As long as they have a physical retail location (shop) and sell stuff in store, they should still be able to sell stuff online also.

I know this as a friend of mine runs a weekly shop outlet but can only do so on saturdays at the moment and the UK distributor claimed he was an online only retailer so he isnt allowed to stock certain FFG products, but he argued he actually has a retail outlet and contacted FFG directly, and they agreed with him that he has a physical presence, as well as an online presence\store.

I think this is just FFG ensuring that stores are the main go to for people to buy their products, and the bulk retail line is about suppliers that distribute FFG products more locally into stores.

 Rick_1138 wrote:
Reading the press release, it seems that the group is now restricting sales to actual game stores, rather than online only retailers.

So why would this stop gaming stores selling their stock online. As long as they have a physical retail location (shop) and sell stuff in store, they should still be able to sell stuff online also.

No, you need to reread it. In the original post it specifically says physical stores are limited to only in person sales and it is reinforced as one of their bullet point FAQ articles in their follow up BGG "clarification" post. If your actual phsyical location brick and mortar FLGS store sells online, they'll have to stop. Exceptions for big sellers (with coincidentally the biggest discounts typically and the biggest "problem") will be made though... you know... to protect the little guys.

https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/49101/asmodee-clarifies-its-changes-2016-online-sales-wi

Some brick-and-mortar specialty retailers also sell online, how will this affect them?
We recognize that these new policies come with implications for some retailers. One such change will be that authorized specialty retailers will agree not to sell Asmodee North America products online. That said, we hope the end result, i.e. enabling us to support them relative to other defined channels, will be a significant net improvement for specialty retailers overall.

On the topic of Walmart/Target/et al, it's doubtful that Big Box cares too much about FFG products outside of the LCGs and the core boxes, and even those are iffy. Big Box works on breadth of offering and not so much on depth.

FFG stock moves no where near fast enough to justify the shelf space required by their various and plentiful expansions. For X-Wing alone there's about 40 different SKUs, and some of those boxes are sizable. That'd be nearly an entire endcap display and outside of specific situations (see also: movie releases and initial release of a wave) the stock just isn't going to produce the revenue. Target already clearance-ed off X-Wing once, and it was hard to pass up $15-20 starter sets. Disney might be helping out a bit to get the basic parts in, but just like with MtG, the boxes found in the big stores are the intro point and not a full-service stop for the complete range.

Asmodee's other offerings though are probably what the terms would be geared towards as board games can be reasonably self-contained and don't take up tons of room. These are the generally more mainstream items. I'd have to go through FFG's catalog but I don't think they make tons of mainstream-ready games. They excel in the niche market, which is generally not an area Big Box ever cares to cater towards.

Neronoxx wrote:
Amazon stays in business by running a deficit (losing money on every sale) but then generates a collosal amount of revenue from investors, keeping them in business.
In short, Amazon makes money by losing money. How do you expect any other store to compete?

Also, small point of fact, this is no longer true although it was up until recently. They posted a small loss in Q1 this year, and then were profitable for the next 2 (no earnings report for the last quarter yet, obviously). They will probably surpass 100 billion in revenue for 2015.

 Peregrine wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 insaniak wrote:

 Jehan-reznor wrote:

You know there is a social part to gaming, right? meeting like minded people, getting information and people views on games...

So, nothing that inherently requires you to be standing in a shop...

Not inherently. But, like it or not, that's how it works in the US.

Not around me. Where exactly do you live where you think most people game in a store? Particularly board games? Yeah, that's just what I want, to lug 7 expansions of Arkham Horror to game with some random dudes rather than my friends in my home!

 warboss wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Ok I have a question, if any other business did this, would we be ok with this?
Lets say, EA suddenly decided it didnt want people buying their games online anymore cheaply and possibly bundled games, so they said no more online sales.....except for those that they deem ok and from their own website......Im sure EVERYONE would be fine with it because it grows the gamer community.

EA did that a few years ago and you could only get their new games (like Mass Effect 3) on services that linked through EA's direct online Origin service and not on the most popular service, Steam. I don't know if it is still the case with newer games like Star Wars Battlefront. There was the initial surge of indignation that died down to a whimper.

They did do this yet you can still buy their games online from Amazon, CDKeys etc on the day of release for 50% cheaper.

My FLGS is not so local (about 80 miles (~120km away)), but I do try and buy from them when I'm up there gaming. There are several product lines that I'm currently into that they don't carry however. For those lines I generally shop online and try to get the best deal I can.

I can't really see how this new FFG policy will help my local store any. All it will really do is move more of the sales to the large online discounters at the expense of the smaller discounters.

A fascinating read all the way through this thread.

I'm sorry to say Peregrine that you just don't make a compelling argument to someone that is not being served by an LGS. If an LGS can't compete with an online discounter why should everyone else be taxed to subsidize the unproven and intangible benefit of "growing the hobby"?

The one and only game store in my town of 64K does not "grow" anything related to board games. It's CCG's, 40K and Warmahordes in that order. The staff don't demo anything and rarely have any clue about board games. They're a bunch of swell guys, but they add ZERO value to my gaming experience.

And here's a fun though. When FFG found their relationship with Dust Studios no longer to their benefit. What did they do with their stock on hand? I seem to remember them dumping it at 50% to 70% off of MSRP. How many LGS did that protect?

rwwin wrote:


And here's a fun though. When FFG found their relationship with Dust Studios no longer to their benefit. What did they do with their stock on hand? I seem to remember them dumping it at 50% to 70% off of MSRP. How many LGS did that protect?

They also did that with AT-43 as well when being the exclusive distributor for that game for several years (just like Dust) didn't work for them any more. They also discount their own in print not discontinued nor cancelled stuff at up to 75% off every year for black friday online no matter what FLGS across north america have in stock. Please note that I'm not complaining about the sales as they allow me to try things that I'd never otherwise try (like variant 40k rpg books instead of just the deathwatch that I was running at the time).

I saw earlier in the thread somewhere that FFG was apparently cancelling all their 40k RPG lines? Can anyone point me in the direction of this news since I had not heard it anywhere before this thread.

hokieseas wrote:
I saw earlier in the thread somewhere that FFG was apparently cancelling all their 40k RPG lines? Can anyone point me in the direction of this news since I had not heard it anywhere before this thread.

I said ALMOST, which is not the same as all. They can bluster, blabber and scream all they want, but Rogue Trader, Deathwatch, Black Crusade and Only War have not seen an update or a bit of news in well over a year now, so we can safely assume that they will not see any further supplements or work done on them, thus they are dead.

There's been no official word on any cancellation

(and no hints from the our spinny friend H.M.B.C who writes for them) so I don't think it's happening

(although they don't seem to be releasing a lot for some of them any more and quite a few of the books and supplements were involved in their BF blowout sale so there's always some room for worry)

Edit: although BrookM's pessimism and my optimism may end up in the same place, with the games officially live, but with no new material coming out, so only you can decide if they're games you want to get into on those terms

Yes, so they keep telling me, no official word means that they're still working on it, right? Well, get to fething work already and give us that Schola Progenium splatbook you gakkers!

Oh look.. yet another company too big for its britches,

With the current way that FFG sucks, I've just up and held off on them, anyway, I get my FFG second hand, anyway...

Bad enough that they are overpriced on a good day, they go with the hostile attitude to the gamer, yet another good company going Meh.

Too bad, too. all because they want to squeeze another dime.

I want to get nasty about them, but they dig their own hole.

oh well.

 Red Harvest wrote:
For grins, here is one Game Store Owner's view of the decision:

http://blackdiamondgames.blogspot.com/2015/12/fixing-devalued-market-tradecraft.html#disqus_thread

He seems quite pleased about it. I suspect a fair number of FLGS owners will be too.

Board Games, and even this X-wing game also sell in the Big Box stores-- Target, Walmart etc-- in the USA. I wonder if those places had any influence on the decision?

Donkey cave author here. I want to point out what I wrote is addressing a very specific problem in the game trade. That problem is other game stores over ordering product because of perverse game industry incentives and then using the Internet as their exhaust pipe, blowing out what they can't sell. Because game stores are doing very well right now, the number of stores has grown tremendously and therefore the number of stores exhausting product onto the Internet has also increased. This has created a devaluation of board games during a boom time, with it not uncommon to see games sold online at around cost.

We sell over 20,000 board games a year and we can palpably feel the effect of this dumping. As a small business, we're not looking for protection. In fact, the usual response to this is to pivot quickly away. That means dropping product lines, like FFG. It might mean moving to other businesses. It's a personal choice.

The publishers know this is happening and know we're talking about the pivot. Asmodee has decided that it's to their benefit to address this problem, even though they make the same amount of money whether it's sold in my store at MSRP or sold online at 40% off. They acknowledge that the FLGS has value in promoting the brand beyond the potential sales loss of huge volumes of online sales.

This allows us to promote their games through events and tournaments, a win-win. I am not claiming online sales are killing game stores. I *am* claiming game stores are killing game stores when they hit this critical dump mass. The FLGS is the worst enemy of the FLGS.

Some LGS exist to promote, and they probably sell at full price.

Others are Internet wholesaling and working off volume.

And then there are the big boxes, which probably sell far more than the LGS and Internet are likely to believe.

All of these are legit business models. If I know what I want, and it's merely a question of buying, I should be able to simply buy the thing at/near cost, because I've already done the hard work of educating myself, rather than taking someone else's time to do the teaching.

A LGS that is "losing" sales to the Internet never had them in the first place, because it didn't drive sufficient value to cover the delta between wholesale cost and MSRP.

 blackdiamond wrote:
The publishers know this is happening and know we're talking about the pivot. Asmodee has decided that it's to their benefit to address this problem, even though they make the same amount of money whether it's sold in my store at MSRP or sold online at 40% off. They acknowledge that the FLGS has value in promoting the brand beyond the potential sales loss of huge volumes of online sales.

Except that they're not addressing it.

They're still allowing the big box retailers to sell online, and because they're big box retailers they will still be setting their own price. So you'll still see exactly the same pricing trends as you see now, they'll just be coming solely from the big box stores with FLGSs no longer allowed to sit at the same end of the bus.

This doesn't protect the FLGS. It just pushes more business towards the big box retailers.

 insaniak wrote:

 blackdiamond wrote:
The publishers know this is happening and know we're talking about the pivot. Asmodee has decided that it's to their benefit to address this problem, even though they make the same amount of money whether it's sold in my store at MSRP or sold online at 40% off. They acknowledge that the FLGS has value in promoting the brand beyond the potential sales loss of huge volumes of online sales.

Except that they're not addressing it.

They're still allowing the big box retailers to sell online, and because they're big box retailers they will still be setting their own price. So you'll still see exactly the same pricing trends as you see now, they'll just be coming solely from the big box stores with FLGSs no longer allowed to sit at the same end of the bus.

This doesn't protect the FLGS. It just pushes more business towards the big box retailers.

I disagree, because nobody is making money selling board games at 40-50% off. Those are dump prices. The FLGS problem is it's pretty easy to compete with standard online pricing, around the 20% range. We've got a value proposition that competes with that price differential. At 40-50% off on a regular basis, we can't compete. We cede the market and walk away.

If people are selling at a loss, that's their problem. Eventually, they go out of business.

Why that should be any sort of concern to an ongoing business, or why any ongoing business should be claiming it to be an issue, those are both beyond me.

Smoke and mirrors, guys, smoke and mirrors.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
If people are selling at a loss, that's their problem. Eventually, they go out of business.

Why that should be any sort of concern to an ongoing business, or why any ongoing business should be claiming it to be an issue, those are both beyond me.

Smoke and mirrors, guys, smoke and mirrors.

No, they don't go out of business. For example, they order 50 copies of a game. They order more than they need because their distributor discount is based on volume and there's no risk. They sell 40 copies in their store at MSRP and 10 copies online at 40% off to get their money back, probably as an Amazon seller. Amazon's algorithms responds by selling at 41% off. Everyone erroneously blames/credits Amazon. When enough stores do this, the next game only sells 30 copies in store. Suddenly they have 20 copies they have to dump online. When store owners identify this value spiral, they eventually store owners stop ordering that game as it inexplicably stops selling. Again, a problem for game store owners, caused by game tore owners.

From the sounds of it, this does seem to be a uniquely USA based problem, then?

The only place I've ever seen come close to that sort of values in the UK is Chaos Cards, or Amazon during their major, major sales - and that's just coincidence, like a couple of weeks ago, that "Star Wars Armada" just happened to be a board game, and valid for a promotion...

 Compel wrote:
From the sounds of it, this does seem to be a uniquely USA based problem, then?

The only place I've ever seen come close to that sort of values in the UK is Chaos Cards, or Amazon during their major, major sales - and that's just coincidence, like a couple of weeks ago, that "Star Wars Armada" just happened to be a board game, and valid for a promotion...

Occasional sales are not a problem, and most other countries don't have nearly as many game stores. In the US we just have this perverse incentive to buy beyond our local needs and a trade that lacks professionalism. Most game store owners don't know how to buy, budget or forecast. They have no tools in their toolbox, and why would they need them with a magical outlet for their mistakes? I think this is a result of a huge number of new stores popping up due to the Magic boom. As many people denigrate the FLGS, there are far more now than there were 10 years ago.

Nope. 10 copies got sold cheap, and that was it. The idea that Amazon will always be the cheapest seller and match indefinitely is kinda silly, because I am looking at other goods, and that scenario just does not hold.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Nope. 10 copies got sold cheap, and that was it. The idea that Amazon will always be the cheapest seller and match indefinitely is kinda silly, because I am looking at other goods, and that scenario just does not hold.

Well, I've done this every day for the last 11 years, selling 20,000 board games a year. I wanted to attempt to explain the nuances of this, but I guess there are limits.

I appreciate the explanation about how small stores fit into the equation. I still respectfully think FFG is targeting the small fish because it is easy while sadly giving the bigger problem a free pass. I cant speak for others but when Im looking to gamble on a new untested product, I dont order from small sellers online but rather only from trusted big names. Ymmv.

Also, I'm surprised board games are such a big part of your business. There's definitely been an uptick in the past years but that is alot. Congrats either way.