Friendly Local Glen Smallman (2024)

01/05/2024

The plot of Newsies is the newspaper publishers keeping consumer prices the same, but decreasing margin to the newsies selling the product.

I dont care your industry pedigree, you're basically a Disney villain if this is you.

Also, if an agent or consultant is telling you to do this, find a better one, or find out what the consulting fee is for someone great in the industry.

Too many of these "one stop shop" bottom feeders are adding to the overheads of newer publishers and their genius idea is to "do what the big boys do" without realizing the only reason the big boys can get away with it is because they're the big boys -- but we'll drop the big boys as soon as they fail to deliver because they're awful too.

It is a difficult industry, and learning how to make the right moves is difficult, no question. But the margins are too slim in this industry to cut these consultants in.

18/04/2024

Forward: Yesterday, in retailer forums, the universe exploded over an announcement over Asmodee's MAPP. Asmodee announced 100% MAPP starting in June, which means for the first 90 days, you cannot advertise any discount of any kind.

The big one I caught basically was discounters versus MSRP stores. One particular fight got so cantankerous a discounting retailer blocked an MSRP retailer, the blocked retailer came back and started posting a bunch of platitudes about running your business: "Keystone is cool, profit is good, discounting: bad". A lot of folks liked the post.

I find these posts that become self-reinforcing boring and without key nuance, with other retailers piling on adding their own maxims and syllagisms, so I started adding my own platitudes, "Call your mom, save the whales, eat a banana every now and then". Dont think of it as a troll exactly, a bit of guerrilla satire.

Anyways, I'm Team MAPP, so long as when you hear me say Team MAPP you know I mean I like MAPP generally. 100% is fine, the problem is in Asmodee's case, its 100% unless they don't want it to be 100%. I wrote this thing a couple weeks ago on my personal FB, right after GAMA when Asmodee announced MAPP holiday (again). Since, Asmodee has sold MM, but its basically right otherwise.

Asmodee has to do MAPP when it hurts in order for it to mean anything at all or its just another club to hit the indie retailer with.

Post:

Two weeks ago I got into a tiff with Asmodee over MAPP.

Miniature Market, also owned by Asmodee, appeared to be selling something under MAPP, I reported it, because I don’t like windmills. (I mention it was Miniature Market because I’m reticent to throw another retailer under the bus.)

At this point, Asmodee informed me the item in question was never under MAPP. It had been released and despite being an exclusive with them, it had never been under the normal 90 day MAPP (so MM was in the clear).

Some highlights from our email thread (which, yes, out of context, but I'm not misrepresenting them):

"[it] is Asmodee North America’s policy to determine MAP pricing independently and unilaterally without the influence of other parties."

"A product having MAP for roughly 90 days post-release date is a guideline that we apply to the majority of the products in our catalog, but Asmodee USA reserves the right to determine a products MAP or lack thereof at its sole discretion."

So, to be clear, since Asmodee has implemented a MAPP policy that originally went from (1) MAPP on all Asmodee products, period, to (2) 90 days on all Asmodee distributed items to (3) we're going to have a holiday on MAPP whenever mass market wants to discount, to (4) things have MAPP when, like, the vibes are posi, bruh, no cap.

At multiple points I asked for clarification on when they had announced to retail partners that this had changed, to which I was tossed a lot of obfuscating non-answers.

I mention this in part as well because during winter well outside the MAPP holiday windows, Target was deep discounting several items that had been on Best Sellers (dont know if they were at that time). When I bought this to Asmodee, one employee told me "it was probably because a new version of X is coming" and it didnt matter to them.

So again, I ask: what is even the point of MAPP outside of clubbing an indie retailer who is trying to clear some slower moving product and accidentally over-discounts?
The point of MAPP was supposed to be to means of maintaining prestige, but if the prestige you're maintaining is just to fry the local retailer, it would do all of us some good to just shift those employees over to Customer Service and shutter this vestigial department.

17/04/2024

I started my first day back at work trying to repair a relationship with a Discord troll who is also a customer. He didnt know his tirade in our Discord server threw me off for a an hour or so on my vacation, but I was eager to try and fix what was broken if possible.

I joke often about how disliked I am by many people, but its not for lack of trying to build bridges.

I'm somewhat of a feedback absolutist, I want folks to tell me their genuine constructive opinions because I feel like we grow when growing our perspective, even if its difficult to hear. I will often bend over backwards to try and meet someone 80%+ of the way there if it doesn't over-burden my staff.

My time in retail has taught me that you can build a better, stronger relationship with a customer who has a negative experience, but you reach out to try and fix what went wrong. Sometimes they need to be heard, sometimes they want to hear your side, sometimes you or your company screwed it up and they deserve to be made whole.

Knowing what your non-negotiables are and what your variables are is key.

My non-negotables usually start with how much work or awareness it requires of my staff, and future moral hazards; a lot is on the table if I think I can convert a detractor or even just do right by them.

Retail and sales people will often say everything in life is selling, and I think that's generally right, but I think from another perspective its trying to reorient people to see things from your perspective (see what I just did there). I've always liked the retail concept of positioning, because I find that your perspective can change so much in life, so so much of what I do even when not selling a game to someone is selling them my perspective on an issue.

For my troll this morning, his big issues were feeling disoriented and unseen. MTG prerelease had displaced his gaming groups, and it put him on tilt so he was misreading other situations and mistrusted the store; he also had longer held grievances he wanted to litigate while he had me on the phone. I took the time to hear him out.

I was firm on where we stood as a store, I don't even think I apologized because we hadn't done anything wrong. I explained our intention wasn't to pick on him or overlook him, and that there were privileges his group enjoys that I don't offer to others -- knowing that when you lose a privilege, it feels like a genuine loss, but that I hoped he could be flexible recognizing broader scope of the store. I felt like at the end of the call, he may not have liked everything I said, but I do think I won him over on a few things, and that will win the day.

I like making these phone calls not only because I like getting the feedback, but being the guy in charge gives the person on the other end the knowledge that there is agency. Also, I’m sure its a control thing — in another life I hated confrontation, but I’ve gotten pretty good at difficult customer service.

Like my earlier post about “trade offs”, “feedback” is one of these core concepts for me and they’re related: you can make a decisions or start a new program, but you never know quite what the downstream affects are unless you get more perspectives. I've related to the idea comedians have of needing to test their jokes and delivery out in clubs ahead of time because you never know what is going to hit.

Is this helpful? I find myself comparing myself to Gary Ray and his are much more drill down and practical while this feels much softer to me.

06/04/2024

First vacation-vacation in at least two years. We were gifted a trip for Christmas and extracting myself from the business is exactly what youd expect. Not because my staff isn’t great nor because my business partner isn’t great, they all are. It’s mentally hard to disconnect, to try and finish any urgent stuff, etc.

Appreciate folks who are following this so far. I have a post coming about my strategy in 2024 for selling LCGs.

I’m still trying to figure out my voice for this, so I’m not posting as often as I had expected, but I appreciate yall joining me for this.

03/04/2024

Let me just start by I basically never enjoy saying “I told you so”.

I mean, I guess unless its something like “there will be ice cream” in a room full of ice cream doubters.

Folks kept asking me for updates about SWU the last several weeks, and for me, I kept saying “I may be wrong, it will depend on what allocations look like”.

So this isn't a spiked football, this is the update.

I’d heard a rumor about what quantities looked like and doing elementary school math on the number of stores in the US, so I was genuinely surprised to see so many important voices in retail continue to be bullish on SWU.

So we got our allocation numbers, official.

They’re dismal. As I’d expected but I wasn’t happy to be right.

Again, I have a great group of folks coming out every week, folks traveling from all over, excited to play a game they love, to see friends they love, to continue to collect; folks who want to build the alpha deck they saw their favorite streamer build, or some weirdo who wants to build a rogue deck.

Its likely the same reason that we got numbers, we also go trailers for the new set: the goal is to shift attention away from now until July.

Anyways, while we get our dribs and drabs, while we wait for resupply in July, we hope for the best. See my whole last post.

22/03/2024

Its Adepticon weekend, and there's a lot to be excited about.

Miniatures are in a weird place right now, particularly non-GW miniatures. About 7-10 years ago, when Games Workshop was in a very bad place, there was a thriving more independent miniatures space with a lot of creativity and heart.

Since 8th edition of Warhammer 40k, and with a few newer editions of Age of Sigmar, GW has claimed much of its market space back by being a 30% nicer company to its player base. Anecdotally, many folks like the ease of finding games, so many folks trickled back into GW's gilded domain, which caused or exacerbated a lot of the problems many of these indie companies were experiencing.

It is hard to find good minis communities outside of GW in the same way you could a few years ago. I think this point can't be understated. Before you could find a small group of 7 people wanting to play X-Wing at a store, or 20 people in a county playing Privateer Press.

I don't know if this is merely my perception, but the market has started tacking against GW with even smaller skirmish games, smaller even than Kill Team. I think some of this is trend and looking at what your competitor is doing, and I think some is emergent independent thought. Atomic Mass' big two games (Marvel Crisis Protocol and Star Wars Shatterpoint) are the biggest example of that small model count.

Anyways, Adepticon usually is a space where a lot of announcements are made, so here's what I'm thinking about:

Games Workshop already announced a new edition of Age of Sigmar. What I learned at GAMA is some retailers are still in the long shadow of the loss of Fantasy, or even just never having AOS uptake in their stores. For me, each edition has brought more folks in, but there's always a level of caution that any edition change brings. That said, it looks like a lot of positive changes that they first made in 40k, and look like they're doing here now.

Atomic Mass for us has had a stutter-step particularly after the release of Shatterpoint. We have a lot of folks who would naturally have transitioned or moved in to any Star Wars game, but this never quite landed, and MCP sales dropped off around this time. AM is a very small studio which is managing 2.75 games (they have 5 games in their portfolio, so you're welcome to figure out how that math works out), so its tough to figure out where they are going from week to week, and I find they often lack candor. They usually announce a lot at Adepticon, and I've heard it will be par for the course this weekend.

Wizkids has Star Trek Into the Unknown coming. I had a chance to play it this week, my only nervousness is its way heavier than I think anyone is expecting it to be. It has a lot of neat rules, its the Trekkiest game Ive ever played, but I think folks are expecting it to be Picard shooting bad guys, but its much more searching anomalies, using technobabble, and in the last resort, blowing up your enemies. Its neat, but I think the positioning and customer expectations need to focus on how much its like playing an episode of Trek, rather than explosions in space. I'm hoping we hear more as this game has had very little marketing.

GaleForce 9 has Star Trek Away Missions. Its such a small game, but with a ton of heart. So far it has a core set ($50) and I believe six expansions ($25 ea), and one OP kit. You have a small away team, you have mission objectives, and the game is only three turns, so it plays in about an hour on a grid -- part of what makes it interesting is everything you do matters because its so short. I haven't seen much uptake in this game even though I think its so clever, but I expect we'll see more info this weekend.

Finally, Renegade with the runner up. Heroscape was announced just before GAMA, so I wouldn't expect a ton out of Adepitcon, but it's possible we see some morsel they wanted to hold back for the minis gamers. We're pushing preorders hard to see if it will make sense for us to run events. I talked to Renegade a lot at GAMA, I really like how OP is set up for this game, but all told lifestyle games are hard for smaller studios.

Anything I missed? Think I'm wrong? Let me know!

18/03/2024

At GAMA I met up with someone from Asmodee. In passing, they asked how our prereleases for Star Wars Unlimited went, cordial, but actually curious.

I joked we had lots of folks and lots of interest, but I made the mistake of having my events guy use the new FFG software.

“It crashed after the first round and he ended up doing the rest of the tournament by hand. But let’s be honest, using brand new beta FFG software for a prerelease, that’s really a ‘shame on me situation’.”

The line grabbed pained laughs knowing we were all its butt.

***

Happy Monday: If you’re not up to speed yet, the situation is that Star Wars Unlimited is a situation.

Let’s back up, because there’s a chorus of “of course it is” or “FFG again”, etc., that naturally shows up, but more context is helpful:

Over and over and over the word from FFG and Asmodee: the gimmick of Star Wars Unlimited on was it wasn’t supposed to have any gimmicks. The gimmick was it was supposed to be ubiquitous and that we could buy more than our retailer hearts could want. Supply overwhelming demand.

I didn’t have very much heat on it and I think largely it was because the speculator market that attached itself to Lorcana’s scarcity, was absent due to the space whale’s weight in product that is purportedly sitting in some frosty Minnesota warehouse.

So I played it cautiously.

I had talked with enough folks to assuage concerns, and in fact thought Asmodee was trying to put out a product that would slow grow its way to evergreen.

In retail, especially over the past six years, a key question has been, ‘How much of this do I need to warehouse?’ It is a fact of any product these days more than maybe ever that if a product looks good at all, you know you get one shot at the initial wave, then its out of distro for months.

The promise of SWU over and over and over and over: that will not happen with this.

So I played it cautiously — **because I was told I could**.

The mantra in business is to under sell and over deliver, the under sell seemed to be that they wouldnt have a bunch of gimmicky manufacturing hooks, no chonky, sexy dice, or special Beskar foils only one factory in Guam can produce to ensure that until the second set release in July, we’d have product.

There are a lot of frustrating voices out there right now, even now, and this is before even the most caustic ones will join in. So I want to capture the feeling now before the relentless phone calls asking if we have product or waves of customer interest slosh back and forth and push strange bedfellows together.

Obviously this is the point where we pull up our big boy pants.

Obviously this is the time where we make the best of it.

Obviously this is the time where we surf the odd tides of customer sentiment.

We try and run events and engage communities. We shake hands and empathize with frustrations. We respectfully call reps and check any forum of only slightly dubious and above for rumors. We hire goons to hijack trucks of product; we look for Ezra Bridger and see if maybe he was hiding packs among the space whales the whole time.

We do all the normal things retailers do: we make the damn best of it. And in general, we avoid complaining in front of customers.

I believe Lorcana and Star Wars Unlimited show promise. They have solid foundations, and I anticipate their continued presence in my store. I am committed to them, I think they will persist at my store and I am continuing on with them in hopes this isnt a fad.

Sigh.

But.

The question I keep thinking is what happens to the person who feels like they’ve been fooled a third time?

16/03/2024

Partly because I want to have a tiny bit more content and get used to the FB interface, I want to take a beat and talk through something I think will be a core theme on this page: trade offs.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Doing orders, scheduling, podcasts are usually running.

I dont even know the context but I was listening to an economist talking about being pregnant. She was in the doctor's office and in the normal running list of things you tell pregnant folks, they mentioned to her she should not consume alcohol.

She then asked what the up and downsides are, to the horror of the nurses.

She noted that as an economist, the question is not one of yesses and noes, but of trade offs -- where in medicine its periodically the opposite. What does one glass of red wine in the first trimester do versus the third? What formative effective on a child versus a therapeutic effect on her now?

**Here's the part of this post where I note that no one should, under any circumstances, consume alcohol while pregnant, and I am not questioning the science of it, I am just relaying an anecdote which stuck with me.**

Periodically in our business the question is not one of yesses and noes, not directly, but of trade offs. I think periodically that one of the results of having mathematics in our base curriculum as kids is we think of things in terms of answers, in terms of resolutions and solutions. But periodically we're not talking about solutions, we're talking about tradeoffs.

I mention this in part in my last post on the GTS Crowdfund platform, but to me its clear GTS has come up with a really slick, plausibly monumental program. But to me the longer term issue is what does this do to crowdfunding? By reducing the friction (an unquestioned good positive in my workflow), it also reduces the barrier to entry and continues the cycle of reliance on crowdfunding in the broader industry with all of its positives and negatives.

With pledges now as quotidian as ordering a new copy of Codenames, what does taking a process that was the equivalent of taking a winding country back road from and turning it into a superhighway between crowdfunding and retail?

Furthermore, what does it do on GTS's backend? What would it mean for publishers, are the deals favorable or is it another party trying to take a bit out of their apple as they bring it to market? And if so, do they try and make up those odds by biting further into retail, if not today, eventually?

Trade offs. At the bottom, there is no simple fix, not event really a complex fixes, just ever forward moving momentum. Its trade offs all the way down.

I wanted to touch on this because its so base in whatever we do, and its what most of us are thinking about all the time in the tabletop industry.

When I say something is good, another retailer may see it as terrible. Often, we're both looking at the same thing, but we're looking at intended and unintended consequences, we're weighing perceived intention, and weighing them in the balance. And both of us may be correct, or not.

That said, do not drink while pregnant. Or at least don't tell anyone I said it was okay. Because I did not.

16/03/2024

8 years ago at GAMA, CMON announced something big.

Was it A Song of Ice and Fire Miniatures game? I mean, yes, it was this, but there was an added rider that changed everything: retailer crowdfund backing.

We can pause for a minute and acknowledge how weird the world is now with crowdfunding. Its weird. It’s a world of strange gooey grey. But the world prior to retail tiers for retailers was black and white. Crowdfund: bad, direct to retail: good.

Hyperbole? Somewhat. But what CMON had announced felt like an inevitable inflection point: a space where B&M retail could get in on crowdfunding alongside individual backers where before they were locked out entirely.

There was still a lot of pluck and shine on me back then (as opposed to the gruff up-and-coming curmudgeon I’m putting my Gladwell-esque 10,000 hours in toward), so I could see no downsides as we moved further up and further in to the strange world of boom, bust, kicking, and starting again. All of the crowdfunding would be with us, and soon, like that buy the world a Coke commercial, we’d be heading into a new era of holding hands and unmitigated commercial success.

I’m not here to comment on crowdfunding and retail per se. It’s a strange new world, and every day we strap in, toss in a mouth guard, and hope for the best.

But I do feel like today we’re hitting a new inflection point for retail and B&M in the form of GTS’ new crowdfund-to-distro model.

Quick cut to: a month ago I sat down and had a crowdfund day. I had a week where I was backing six projects in the same week, so I was making a morning out of it. For each of them, no two was the exact same. When I had to figure out how to back one, figure out which hoops to jump through. Do I need to submit a business license? What is the deposit? Each had a different set of requirements, some easy, some multi-step, but it’s a process.

Today, I punched in a few numbers, and had to check three times I did it right because it all few too easy for Wroth from Chip Theory Games.

GTS is allowing publishers who are doing Kickstarters to do fulfillment with them for retail backers.

In effect, all of the process that I sidled up for on aforementioned Crowdfund Day 2024 is now basically a push button, one-and-done. Dealing with distro in general is not like dealing with Amazon Prime, but insomuch as dealing with distribution is easy, starting today doing retail crowdfunding is easy (at least for Wroth from Chip Theory Games).

All I needed was a GTS account. Once I do that retail backing Wroth was the equivalent of doing my regular GTS order.

It compresses all of the difficulty into a normal task for a retailer. No hoop to jump, just a quotidian box to check. Which feels monumental in its banality, as what took me a morning would take me less than five minutes if all things were equal.

My cards on the table, Patrick at GTS is a great friend. He’s one of the best people I know in the industry and has been a real ally to me along the way. So, I both heard about this ahead of time, contributed my thoughts when asked (was not asked often), but mostly cheerleadered (Cheerled? Cheered-leadered?) him along the way. So I’m biased. He also had lots of folks helping him.

Again, this feels like another inflection point, and now as a gruffer, seasoned retailer (the movie version of me has an eyepatch and cool scar), I’m far more skeptical than I was — but I can appreciate the moment we’re in where if feels like we may be moving into a new era where edges which are rough, and now have less friction. So in that sense, I’m so happy.

Also, if one distributor does it, the likelihood all of them do it to some degree is high (and/or fulfillment companies will add an aspect of that).

I think there are reasonable considerations of what KS is doing to retail in general, especially medium to small sized B&M. Even with CMON as our arch-example, looking their terms and margins are much more difficult than they were by comparison. So I don’t think these things are uniformly positive merely by reducing the friction.

BUT LESS FRICTION, YALL. I do think it’s super smart and think the GTS folks continue to try and address problems head on to make things easier for all of us in the industry.

Link below. Let me know if you have thoughts.

Friendly Local Glen Smallman

01/05/2024

18/04/2024

17/04/2024

06/04/2024

03/04/2024

22/03/2024

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