Local Stores Don't Carry GURPS any more

[Teclis]

Originally Posted by Kale

Gaming cruises are a thing. Seriously considering it when my little guy is a bit older.

Hi,

All the ones I have looked into are mostly video games with a bit of D&D 5e.

Do you know of any that actually run GURPS?

Originally Posted by lordabdul

The way I see it, it's the crazy amount of new board games being released all the time that have eaten at the rest. RPGs are effectively fighting for shelf space against board games (for all ages, some for adults only).

The owner of the local gaming store tells me that since Wil Wheaton stopped doing his board game show, the sale of board games has really slowed down.

Originally Posted by RogerBW

I may be mistaken, but I seem to remember Kromm saying something along the lines of:

90% of the RPG market is D&D.
Of what's left, 90% is other dungeon bashing games (Pathfinder etc.).
The remaining 1% is everything else. World of Darkness, Call of Cthulhu… and GURPS.

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy could take a substantial share of the market away from D&D 5e and Pathfinder but it would take work. The MIB would have set up something equivalent to Adventures League or the Pathfinder society as these organisations build communities in the local gaming stores that play weekly. The people don't just play because they like the game, they play in order to be part of an established community that plays regularly. The local gaming stores, while they carry Munchkin, don't even carry GURPS Dungeon Fantasy.

The last time I ran GURPS 3e at open RPG day at the local gaming store all I had to do was show the 11-15 year old male D&D 5e players the modern day weapons list in the back of the GURPS Basic Set 3e and they were all playing at my Autoduel table. Understandably the store owner isn't to keen on this as it doesn't make the store any money, but if the store carried Dungeon Fantasy and there was a good GM there to run it once a week like Adventures League I'm sure it would be a different story. And if there was an establish Dungeon Fantasy community it would be much easier for me to find players for my realistic, by the book 3e campaign.

[lordabdul]

Originally Posted by Teclis

The owner of the local gaming store tells me that since Wil Wheaton stopped doing his board game show, the sale of board games has really slowed down.

It's crazy to me that just a handful of YouTubers are effectively influencing the market so much. Not so long ago, the Critical Role folks ran a Call of Cthulhu one-shot, promoting the CoC Starter Set as product placement.... the video has been seen by close to a million people, and apparently that was enough to completely crash Chaosium's american fulfillment centre, forcing them to do overtime, mess up, incur more delays, and providing everyone with discounts and coupons to make up for it. A few months after, a couple VTTs reported CoC had jumped to 2nd place (behind DnD of course) in the previous quarter's game stats.

[namada]

It's not just You Tube - anything that goes viral on the internet gets insane. See the somewhat recent Popeye's Chicken Sandwich craze...

[Kale]

So SJG needs to hire Ryan Reynolds to promote a GURPS cruise. @:-)
He has name-dropped GURPS before...

[DarkPumpkin]

Originally Posted by Teclis

Maybe SJ Games could put web kiosks in stores and people can buy GURPS material directly from Warehouse 23 via the kiosk and the local retailer hosting the kiosk could get a percentage. The kiosk could download the books directly onto a USB key for the purchaser or even print it full color using a off the self laser printer.

I admire the OP's enthusiasm and love the idea of an alternate universe where there's a futuristic "web kiosk" in the local mall where queues form to wait for the machine to spit put their selected GURPS 3e book, PoD'd on the spot...

[robertsconley]

For niche RPG products the way to get ahead in the current economy to have an small army of influencers with the right to produce support for the system. With the main publisher still producing "official" works.

There isn't a RPG company including Wizards who have the resources to cover all the area where hobbyists gather. However in order to get people interested in being those influencers is that they have some kind of stake in the deal. Which in my experience provides that added push to go out and do the promotion that the parent company doesn't have the resources for.

That would the need to have local stores carry one's products for that line on their shelves.

Also what does it take for a store to order a GURPS Product if a customer is interested? So I am a influencer and a hobbyists at a store wants to buy GURPS products. Despite the changes in the economics, gaming stores are still a prime location to meet and play with other hobbyists. So it would be rude and ill considered to refer somebody to Warehouse23 or Amazon.

How difficult is for the game store owner to special order a copy of a GURPS Product?

[David Johansen]

If your distributor doesn't carry GURPS it's a bit harder, you have to order direct from SJG's Warehouse 23. I've done it once and once I figured out why the shipping kept coming up so high it went smoothly. There are some books that are available from the warehouse that aren't available from Warehouse 23. I can't quite justify ordering cases of books right now. I've also got Dungeon Fantasy on order through kickstarter, though that isn't any kind of good business sense. It ties up capital or credit for far too long for too little return. I really appreciate that SJG has decent retailer kickstarter reward levels. But that same cash could have me product I can sell in a couple days. So it's still a case of supporting GURPS as a retailer because I irrationally want to support GURPS.

I've talked about in store print on demand as the way of the future but the infrastructure just isn't there yet and you need to convince publishers that giving retailers a discount on pdfs is to their benefit. You also have to convince gamers that paying for a book is better than downloading an illegal copy which seems to be the biggest problem the rpg industry faces these days.