"Support your friendly, local gaming store"

Today, SJGames implores us to support our FLGSes. They even have a link that takes you to a GAMA site that lets you find your localest and most friendly gaming store.  I tinkered with it, and for me, it was an exercise in depression.

I grew up in a friendly local gaming shop.  My gaming career would not be what it is today without Debbie's store.  We played games, I learned Necromunda and Warhammer 40k, and between my highschool and her shop, we played Marvel (FASERIP), Rifts, MERP, WoD and, yes, GURPS.  That's where all of this got started.  And when I moved to the Netherlands, I made a point of touring all the game shops, looking for obscure RPGs that others hadn't heard of (yes, I was a gaming hipster back then).  So I hit the gaming shops of Eindhoven, Amsterdam, and everywhere in between, though I noticed the gaming sections seemed to shrink year by year.

Now when I look, I have to expand it out to a 100 mile radius from either my home in Kansas or my home in the Netherlands to find anything, and what I can find, I can count on one hand.  Yes, they're still out there, but they're definitely a dying breed, and I'd have to drive for an hour or two to reach any of them.

 If you haven't been paying attention, or paying attention to the wrong people, you might not know that the comics book industry (especially the stores) are going through a crisis of existential proportions.  I imagine the same forces working against them are working against gaming stores too, so, yeah, if you have a gaming shop, go buy something from them.  I hit up my local comic book (they're technically still a gaming shop, in that they sell board games and D&D) and dumped a bunch of money on them before they shuttered for the quarantine, though they claim that they've diversified enough that they're not struggling nearly as badly as some American shops seem to be.

But I wonder if it's going to make a difference in the long run.  If I look at RPGs, the march away from the FLGS, as much as every gamer will offer effusive lipservice to the idea.  Why do we need FLGses?

• To buy RPGs, of course (but we have Amazon, DTRPG, Warehouse 23, and increasingly Kickstarter)
• To have a space to meet other gamers and be introduced to new ideas (but we have facebook groups, forums, discord servers...)
• To have a space to play RPGs (but we have virtual tabletops and vocal chat that lets us play with people all across the world).

 It's not a trend exclusive to RPG.  Retail in general is dying.  When I first came here, there were three Free Record shops and there were several places where you could buy games.  Now, the only place I can buy CDs are online; DVDs are increasingly only available online, I generally buy music as audio files, I buy all my computer games from digital distribution and even things like PS games tend to only be available in big box stores. Eindhoven's city center went from a bustling, commercial sector to more of a place one walks around and hits up a cafe.  There are major stores that closed down and never re-opened and still sit essentially unused.  Most of the smaller shops that closed down have been replaced with vanity boutiques, or "pop-up" shops, or things like mobile phone repair shops.  The ones that survive tend to be places that offer services more than products, like I take my son and daughter to "Tien Tenen" (Ten toes) to buy his shoes; they're more expensive, but there's staff on hand to give advice about what to get our kids, and the shoes we get tend to last longer and have a generally higher quality than what we get online.  Or they tend to be places with a lot of atmosphere, where you go for the sake of going, like restaurants or nice little shopping places where a couple of ladies can while away the day and then go and get a coffee.

How is a gaming store supposed to survive in such an environment? The 90s and early 2000s were really the heyday of the FLGS, as we were coming out of the stigmatic era of the 80s, the internet was spreading the idea of RPGs around more, but we didn't have things like Amazon or PDFs to compete directly with the retail marketplace, and because of that, there were darwinian pressures on RPGs that whittled their numbers down.  If you were an FLGs, you definitely sold D&D, you probably sold White Wolf, and you might sell GURPS, Palladium, Hero, Call of Cthulhu, other TSR products, MERP, Shadowrun and a handful of others, though by the early 2000s the writing was already on the wall as the number of RPGs began to explode (BESM, 7th Sea, Nobilis, Legend of the Five Rings, Warhammer RPGs) making it harder and harder for a shop to know what to stock.  Nowadays?  Fuggedaboutit. The other day I was tracking the Ennies and I hadn't even heard of half of these RPGs.  I might not be as "plugged in" as I used to be, but the modern RPG industry seems based on the boom and bust of Kickstarter: you start up a campaign, you whip up interest, you get your kickstarter money, you sell all your books, then you fold up shop and go home and perhaps think about creating your next batch of games.  What's even the point of an FLGS participating in that cycle?  By the time they have the product, it's already old hat, been-there-done-that and the hype has rushed on to some other kickstarter campaign. Interest has been spread ocean-flat, with a couple of spikes out there, mostly D&D and Pathfinder (so you can at least sell those) and a handful of games that can maintain more of a presence than "We did a single kickstarter campaign," most of which are die hards who were around in the 90s and early 2000s (Shadowrun, GURPS, 7th Sea, etc) or a few newcomers with some really big names behind them (Gumshoe, Nobilis), but most of these mainly survive online.

So what are we supposed to do?  The thing is, I'd love to have an FLGS to drop my son off at once he hits 12 or so, because I think it's a good experience.  You get surrounded by lots of neat ideas and like-minded-but-sufficiently-different people that it helps you expand your horizons a bit. I can recreate that sort of environment at home, or with the help of things like Minecraft, but the internet is "too big" for a 12 year old, and the house "too small."  So, I'd love to see the FLGS come back in a big way, but I feel like we're building sandcastles against a flood.  The times are changing and we can't turn the clock back on it, as much as I wish we could.