There are plenty of games that are safe harbours. Plenty of workmanlike companies that punt out success after moderate success. There will always be a market for Games Workshop. There will always be a market for Pokemon. There will always be families dreaming of playing a boardgame together.
People don’t suddenly drop thousands of pounds on a brand new miniatures game or a cardgame during a monetary crisis. People need to know that their investment is going to deliver a return.
Expect a Pokemon crash.
Here’s what has happened during the last few years. People raced to a nostalgia brand. People invested heavily in it. If they could only hang onto that bedroom full of Celebrations for two decades they’d all be millionaires. Anyone can be a trader in sealed product. Anyone can get a trade account. It’s a nice extra earner if you are on furlough or laid off during a pandemic. This time in 2040 Logan Paul III will give us enough money that we can go live on Ganymede.
This is a lie.
Collectibles are a pyramid scheme. You need more people coming in at the bottom to support a high end at the top. But what we got were kids who were kids twenty five years ago racing to a nostalgia brand. I love that they still love Snorlax. But they also love food. And the carboot sales of the early 2000’s were full of their Fossil collections.
Cardgames survived Rolling Thunder, the D20 collapse, the dot com bubble, the credit crunch and the pandemic. They survived not because of what they are intrinsically. They are pieces of coloured cardboard. Massively overpriced coloured cardboard. They are a game that people buy, a lifestyle they buy into, a friendship circle of people like them who like them – or at least tolerate each other. It’s not an investment in cardboard so much as it is an investment in people.
Yup. Events again.
If people aren’t playing then they aren’t buying. Buy a pack? Play some games? It’s a cheap form of entertainment. In a monetary crisis people need cash. Those big singles dealers came from somewhere – when folks are strapped for cash they have to unload their collections, and you may find you have enough cash reserves to buy.
Or not. Because in a monetary crisis when you run out of money you die. Nobody is saving you – they are too busy saving themselves.
Of course the other thing we will see is a race to even more crowdfunding – at the exact point in history that people will have less disposable income to invest. As the pandemic hit I was investing around £20K a year in Kickstarters. But you can only do that – on the possible pay off years down the line – if you have the money to invest long term. During the pandemic I needed that money for my core business.
Run out of money? I die.
Kickstarter is amazing in so many ways, but it is a risky investment. It may never deliver (though that is rare). It often delivers late. Recently my liability as backer is in freefall – there may be delays until after a retail launch, there may be extra shipping charges, there may be extra customs charges. Uncertainty is not my friend in a monetary crisis.
Even then, future Dave and Lizard brain Dave sometimes find themselves in simpatico. Lizard brain Dave backed Frosthaven and that looks like a sensible investment – albeit a pricey one.
Luxuries are luxuries even in a crisis. It’s a bigger ask and yes, you sell less. But there will be somebody who needs that product and wants it now. Who covets it.
Of course, that also means there is a possibility that somebody is going to steal it.
Four, a crisis of criminality. When people need money some of them turn to crime. There’s a moral philosophy question of when it is appropriate morally to steal. Most moral philosophers think it is OK to steal to feed a child, say – or to get a child medical care. But most shoplifters are not moral philosophers, and they aren’t selling that Brilliant Stars ETB at Macdonalds for some chicken nuggies.
The rise of Pokemon saw a rise in smash and grab theft, in shoplifting, in singles theft, in credit card fraud, in online fraud, in Amazon return fraud. In porch theft. There’s not enough police to deal with that, even if they knew how, which they don’t. It’s a sticking plaster for a gaping head wound.
This wasn’t crimes of poverty. These were crimes of criminality. Fraud is rife, and the companies that should be clamping down on it are aiding and abetting it.
This is only the start sadly.
When businesses move out, drugs and prostitution move in. There is a shadow economy that also likes to be close to where people live and work. This was the Northern Quarter when I moved into Manchester. Our shoplifters were snatch and grab addicts looking for a fix. Skeletally thin Prostitutes would wander in out of the cold, desperate for warmth.
Without urgent action from city mayors all over the world, this is the future for cities. We will all be Warriors era New York. And nobody is going to want to come out to play.
Cars broken into, Random street muggings. Kerb crawlers. Drug dealers hitting up your Yugioh kids. Your Yugioh kids hitting up drug dealers. Desperate times breed desperate people and Logan Paul has a Charizard worth a million dollars.
(This is not a good match).
Is criminality a thing you can mitigate against? Well, you should have CCTV and a secure building. You will probably need window shutters. Most modern units were built to stop ram raiding and most modern cars are almost impossible to steal. A shoplifter is – probably – going to check out your CCTV system first. A burglar is going to – probably – do a trial run of your doors and windows and next door vacant property. Most burglars aren’t spur of the moment guys. Drug addict snatch thieves are.
Don’t buy stolen goods. Obviously it’s hard to tell sometimes, but if you start buying stolen goods it’s impossible to stop. When my ex employer no longer bought in stolen goods, the shoplifters he had unknowingly cultivated as a clientele started targeting him in revenge.
The strongest defence against criminality is footfall. That light industrial unit miles from anywhere? Turns out it was cheap for a reason. In Central Manchester the police will come in minutes, because they understand the danger of public order and public perception of order being synonymous. They are not there to protect me, but to protect the city, the property, the money. All that requires the perception of safety. And so they protect me.
Criminality isn’t something you can ever stamp out. You can only move it to another part of town. The stronger your neighbour businesses are, the less likely it will be your part of town. I worry for the restaurants and cafes that surround me. Because times are tough for hospitality and only going to get tougher.
Tougher for us too.
But we have things we can sell and experiences we can deliver above and beyond lunch service. Chances are we are about to see a recession, but we have traded through those before.
What we have not traded through before is a depression.
Or a world war.
Nobody alive knows what that is like. Well, nobody in the west.
During the last recession I survived because I traded on providing cheap entertainment experiences. Maximum happiness, minimum outlay. I understand why many of you are loathe to do that.
In a recession people move to safe havens. Investors buy gold or sad looking apes wearing yachting clothes. Crypto bros desperate for the world to burn so they can be rich.
Magic
GW
Low priced family boardgames
D&D
Yugioh
We know this because that’s where the money fled during the stock market crash of 1929. To the stock equivalents.
People still buy luxury. That luxury is a copy of Frosthaven.
I expect we will see a Kickstarter funding crisis. I expect that we will see more projects using the platform for completed products ready to go to reduce lead time.
We are already seeing people flipping Kickstarters as soon as they arrive in every group dedicated to boardgames. These groups should be serving as springboards for people excited to play, not offloading the crown jewels at cost. Like everything its a confidence issue at the end of the day.
People start questioning the very value proposition.
Many boardgames are overpriced. Not for what they deliver – in a way – but in comparison to other games that also deliver the same degree of entertainment. If you can play a game half a dozen times with four people? The difference becomes one is $40 and another is $100.
A recession is two quarters of negative economic growth. We are not seeing that at the moment because inflation is rampant and we are emerging from a pandemic where nothing was performing as expected. But all those bills are coming due now.
Choose your partners wisely.
Support those publishers who best support you, who produce the games that you can sell. Not ‘want to’ but can. I love you all and I want you all to prosper. But in order for me to continue to deliver that level of support I have to survive too.
If you have depth of stock that you have paid for? You can probably ride this out. If you didn’t pay down your loans when you had the chance, things are going to get pretty choppy pretty quickly. Those Pokebros can’t pay their bills with Charizard and neither can you.
Form strategic alliances with your fellow local businesses. Buy every meal you can afford at a local cafe or restaurant. These are your wingmen staving off urban decay. At least in a pinch you can all eat their overstocks.
The difference between a recession and a depression? It’s probably around 80% of us. So lets hope its the former.
In London in 1929 there were 268,000 Cinema seats. Of the big five motion picture companies, only MGM made a profit in the thirties. Cinema switched to lower budget b movies and kept prices low. Ticket prices dropped by a third. Staff were laid off.
The other crisis we face is a staffing crisis.
At the moment the brunt of the Great Resignation is being felt in hospitality. People don’t want to do hard work for low wages. But if restaurants are running on empty, there’s no money for wage increases. Delivery companies are fighting for drivers – another reason I predict the cost of shipping is set to rise.
In two weeks my staffing bill goes up fifteen thousand dollars a year. Minimum wage rises. National insurance rises. The cost of goods has risen. So far the expectation that prices will rise has not. Like many businesses I am playing chicken with the global economy.
You can’t afford to pay your staff enough to mitigate for all these other crises. The money in their pocket is depreciating faster than you can increase their pay. Support as many of them as you can the best you can. They are the only investment that won’t go down the Suwannee in a time of crisis. They are better value than a picture of a sad chimp smoking a hoagie.
As I walked through Guildford High Street I thought to myself, you know… game stores are in a pretty good position. We can pivot from events to stock and back to events again. We are a hobby that people enjoy, that spreads happiness and community. We are a panacea for loneliness, a little engine builder for dopamine, oxytocin and all those other lovely happiness hormones. We may even prosper, as impulse purchase and destination store browsing return from cyberspace.
But it’s not a given.
Cinema was the dominant art form of the nineteen thirties, but every economic analysis of Hollywood you read tells you how badly they were fucked. None of us can halve our prices and double our prizes.
A few years ago I visited Roanoake. I drove past row after row of derelict stripmalls and boarded up Wendy’s. The future isn’t hard to predict.
Because it’s already here
Somewhere.
I am your magic 8 ball.
Rocky times are ahead.
The Quantum Retailer 