The End of Indie Retail?

Next Generation has a piece discussing the problems facing independent videogame retailers, with commentary from a gent who just recently had to close down his store. From the article: "In our desire to maintain our own idealistic goal we overlooked a key element to any capitalist venture: Capital. Sales are everything and as base and pedestrian as that sounds, it is not so easy to pull off. There is no room in this industry for empathy. You certainly don't get anywhere steering people away from product that you've overstocked, since you know it sucks."

Comments

...the more they stay the same.

[irn_bru]

As it happened with bookstores and happened with record shops so shall it happen to your local neighbourhood game retailer. It's a shame but it all seems rather inevitable...

Re:...the more they stay the same.

[baldass_newbie]

Those who read the Book of Gord knew this day was coming.

Re:...the more they stay the same.

[itsthinking]

there are a couple in NYC. another one just closed (on 33rd st, building is gone, dunno if they moved.) I think stores, like the indie record shops here, could survive if they specialize, like in old games and imports but its gotta be hard even in the big city, and going head-to-head with people like EB and Gamestop in the general games market has to be suicide.

At one time I bought a lot of imports - for Sega Saturn, easy to get the console to play them and the language wasn't much of an issue since I was buying action games. But I ended up buying a Japanese anyway one cuz it was cheap and looked cool. I remember briefly places like EB selling imports and also some weird shit like the Sega photo printer, but I guess it didn't work out.

Luckily.

[cornface]

Luckily with the rise of the giant franchise stores, every city will soon look exactly the same.

Re:Luckily.

[Kuvter]

I noticed this while going shopping at a mall the last trip i made. Besides the stores having a few different items there wasn't much of a difference.

People flock to lower prices and huge stores can give that over mom and pop stores.

Atleast it's illegal to have Walmarts in Rhode Island

Re:Luckily.

[FLEB]

All that means is that independent stores will just have to innovate, something which the franchises will naturally be slower and less equipped to do, with their size, inertia, and more centralized management.

Re:Luckily.

[Anonymous Coward]

Atleast it's illegal to have Walmarts in Rhode Island

What the hell are you smoking? There are no less than six Wal-Marts in Rhode Island

Warwick, RI 02888
Cranston, RI 02921
Warwick, RI 02886
Coventry, RI 02816
Woonsocket, RI 02895
North Kingstown, RI 02852
Newport, RI 02840

You can find Wal-Marts in every state. Vermont was the last holdout, but they have two now.

Re:Luckily.

[Pxtl]

All the malls are owned by Cadillac Fairview. For example, your area probably has a recently built mall called "X mills" where X is the region it is located. The ads have a cute little cartoon woman, parts of which are made of products. The music is catchy swing with some guy going "bah bah". There are similar ads on bus stops.

This is a mall chain. I've seen the one near Chicago, I've seen the one in Vaughan (Toronto). They're all the same.

Meanwhile, the last-gen of malls also is all the same - just a little smaller, but still the same damn Reitmans, semi-detached Old Navy, and La Senza as every other mall.

This is why I shop downtown, in an old run-down mall that is having a pleasant resurgence. Despite being laid out like a cold-war rat-maze, it at least has different stores (plus a kickass farmers' market).

Unfortunately, there are two games stores there. One is a discount store selling severely outdated stuff they obviously bought bulk, and the other is an overpriced poor quality wannabe-EB.

I'm thinking that, with the movie-style blockbuster games coming out where everything must be a triple-A megagame, the indies will end up stuck in internet-only distribution.

not just indy

[Anonymous Coward]

if you read the whole article, it concerns the death of game store retail in general (GameStop, EB, etc.) in favor of online content distribution

That's what I call professional journalisism

[Mensa Babe]

Fact: some unknown guy in the middle of nowhere just recently had to close down his tiny little store.

Slashdot headline: The end of the entire indie retail business is near! Film at 11.

And we wonder why we are not taken seriously? Oh, come on!

a sad irony about Red Devil Games' closure

[AtaruMoroboshi]

I was one of eric's loyal customers, even though there were two gamestops, two ebs, a target, and a toys r us and more 20 minutes closer to me.

There was a morning earlier this fall when I said to myself "I better e-mail eric and reserve Gunstar Super Heroes, Dragon Quest VIII and Final Fantasy IV (gba)." It turned out that that was the morning they announced their closure.

And if Eric's reading this: Congrats on the new baby daughter!

Re:a sad irony about Red Devil Games' closure

[egrissom]

Hey man! Thanks, I just saw the article got slashdotted. Unfortunately I don't know if many people actually read the article, it was more a focus on gamestore retail dissappearing in the next generation, and not on the death of indie retail. Indie retail has been dead for some time, this was about EB and Gamestop's future problems. that was really the dialog I was trying to create, but the title of this thread makes it misleading. Oh well, good to hear from ya.

Re:a sad irony about Red Devil Games' closure

[Anonymous Coward]

How is that ironic?

Re:a sad irony about Red Devil Games' closure

[Anonymous Coward]

Like rain on you wedding day, man!

400 lb gorilla or 20 lb monkey?

[imunfair]

TFA: The funny thing is those giant retail stores are in for a world of hurt. The giant 400-pound gorilla that has yet to truly reveal its retail chomping head is Broadband. Currently about half the country has some form of DSL or Cable modem, and that number is growing. Download speeds are increasing as well, and once we start seeing download speeds of 100Mbps, content on demand will swallow the game retail beast whole.

I disagree. Yes, broadband speeds are going up, and yes the saturation level is increasing - but I don't think that means the big developers are going to make it their primary distribution system.

What are they really going to do? Make larger maps, add more detail to graphics, add more Hi-Def cutscenes. Only MMO* and other generes that are quite dependent on the internet for playability will resort heavily to this method - if any do at all. Sure we have steam, and it's easy to use and a pretty great service - but that isn't going to stop them from sending their CDs to Best Buy. They know the guy pacing up and down the game aisle is a valuable customer, and for at least the next 40 years there are plenty of people accustomed to shopping at brick and mortar stores, even if they game online.

Heck, I know plenty of adults that are wary of giving their credit card number for a business transaction online, much less buying a game for their own entertainment.

Re:400 lb gorilla or 20 lb monkey?

[egrissom]

You make a lot of good points, its foolish to underestimate the customers that are accustomed to the brick and mortar method, but if the experience is seemless enough i don't think the transition would be all that hard to pull off. Especially if XBOX Arcade and Nintendo's online game distributions are a hit this coming generation. The next generation is what- 2009? 2010? Speeds will be faster, online penetration will be larger, and Microsoft will be (if all goes well for them) on their third generation of LIVE. A system like that creates a seamless transaction- order a game the way you order a movie on a cable box. No worries about giving away a CC number- they already have it. Granted there are issues from bandwith to piracy, but hell its 2010 anyway so we are all probably slaves to robot monkeys anyway. Who knows though- its all speculation anyway, i just believe for publishers and consumers there are just too many positives in the digital distribution collumn.

Re:400 lb gorilla or 20 lb monkey?

[KingSkippus]

They know the guy pacing up and down the game aisle is a valuable customer, and for at least the next 40 years there are plenty of people accustomed to shopping at brick and mortar stores, even if they game online.

And I, in turn, disagree. 40 years? Wow, that's a long time to be guessing things won't change dramatically. Businesses work so much differently now than they did in 1965 it's unreal, and changes are coming a lot faster now than they have been.

I know that if I had my choice of buying a game in a store or over the Internet, I'd pick the Internet every time. Hell, I already do, buying most of my games at Amazon.com, Gamestop.com, or other online retailers, and I grew up in a brick-and-mortar world myself. If they would let me download the stuff I buy instead of shipping it to me, all the better!

I think that as brick-and-mortar shoppers get older and today's kids who are used to doing everything on the Internet already start getting disposable incomes, you're going to see exactly what Eric's talking about. Brick-and-mortar stores will last a bit longer, but eventually, it just won't be profitable. Everyone will buy online or, in the case of brick-and-mortar shoppers, get games at general merchandise retailers like Target and such. There just won't be a place for brick-and-mortar game stores any more.

I've still got indie record shops

[rsilvergun]

and indie book stores. What I don't have is indie game stores (unless you count pawn shops). Indie record and book shops are specialty stores, and games don't lend themselves to that. Imports are a bitch to play (chip your console and learn Japanese?) and you can't barter in rare games since there are only a handful of them. Then again there is ebay, quite possible the largest gamestore in history.

Not just games

[viniosity]

There are problems facing all sorts of independent businesses. From the people who sell food to the people who sell hats. If you want to do something about it then put your money where it counts and buy from indie retailers:

Insightful...not

[afabbro]

In looking back, it became necessary to close my store for a variety of reasons: be it my new baby daughter who poops like a champ, the sluggish sales, or more importantly because it was just time to go.

It's that sort of penetrating analysis that keeps me coming back to Slashdot.

One failed business != death of indie retail

[Anonymous Coward]

So one guy opens up shop with way too optimistic expectations, fails within 2 years and somehow this is the death of independant game retail?? How do we know this guy had a solid business plan? How do we know he chose the right location with the right rent and right customer pool to draw from? How do we know he had the right prices and right "savoir-faire" in selecting his merchandise?

WHY DOES EVERY ARTICLE ON /. HAVE TO BE A "DEATH OF" WORST CASE SCENARIO!?!?

Re:One failed business != death of indie retail

[Anonymous Coward]

WHY DOES EVERY ARTICLE ON /. HAVE TO BE A "DEATH OF" WORST CASE SCENARIO!?!?

Easy, because sensationalism sells.

This text is here because the lameness filter can't dicern between quotes from a previous article and what I actually wrote...

End of Indie retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs Indie retail? Didn't Lucas already make enough money off of Darth Vader and Jar Jar action figures?

Article disqualified

[Red Flayer]

No way I'm going to bother reading this, with these lines quoted in the summary:

"In our desire to maintain our own idealistic goal we overlooked a key element to any capitalist venture: Capital. Sales are everything and as base and pedestrian as that sounds, it is not so easy to pull off."

Capital is not sales; capital is not profit. Capital is what you invest in a business. Did he forget to fund his shop? Or did he just not get the sales he needed to be profitable? Sounds to me like no matter how much capital he invested in his shop, it would never have been profitable

I'm sad that he went out of business, but capital is not what he forgot. And that kind of inaccurate writing, quoted in an article summary, just turns me off.

Re:Article disqualified

[damsa]

I think he meant working capital. A lot of small businesses even though they can be profitable forget about working capital. If 90% of your business is in Dec. But your sales in June slump. Then you don't have enough money to buy new inventory for those games that come in November, or you don't have the funds to pay rent.

Re:Article disqualified

[Red Flayer]

His store was open for 2 years, though, so I'm not sure that applies.

I think he maybe just overestimated the demand for his services.

hmm.. fitting

[Lifelike]

Anyone else reminded of this ask slashdot article from a few days ago? http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/03/22 44202&tid=206&tid=212&tid=98&tid=211&tid=4 I feel sorry for the folks who just bought their stores, from the looks of things it seems like they might be doomed.