Just after the holiday shopping season, a good friend asked why all the games she had seen in Borders while she was gift-shopping seemed so underwhelming.
Can you diagnose the difference between game-store games and big-box-bookstore games? I don’t think it was just a matter of prejudice on my part.
It took me a while to come to a satisfying expression of the answer, but I think in the end that the it goes to one of the major premises of Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, which amounts to the idea that modern abundance makes it possible for niche products tailored to a very specific audience to nevertheless find modest profits.
In games, the niche-tailored products are obviously the ones you find in your FLGS. I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to suggest that Ars Magica and Supremacy aren’t likely to find many fans among soccer moms and other mainstream types.
“Modest profits” is the problem for Borders. Borders can’t survive on modest profits. They’ve got gargantuan square footage parked on prime real estate to pay for, not to mention a national network of spendy infrastructure. They need to maximize the amount of money they can make off of every square foot in the store. (Amazon, of course, is the opposite. It costs them next to nothing to stock a given title, which is why you can buy all kinds of crazy niche games from them that you’d never see in Borders in a million years.)
So Borders has to stock games that will appeal to the broadest possible cross-section of humanity. “Lowest common denominator” isn’t the right way to put it; that makes it seem like they’re making a cynical appeal to the culturally ignorant, which isn’t quite true. “Greatest common denominator,” more like. They need to stock Dungeons & Dragons instead of Ars Magica and Scene It instead of Supremacy because that maximizes the spread of people who might make a love connection and buy the product.
That’s where the line of reasoning falls apart for lots of hard-core gamers, though. There’s a compelling argument to be made that lots of boutique games are simply better games than their mass-market counterparts. And sometimes, it’s true.
But even given that, the purchasing equation for your average Borders customer isn’t always — maybe isn’t even often — about which game is the best game qua game.
World of Warcraft MMO players will be more interested in a licensed game about WoW than in a superior game based on no property at all). Grandparents buying gifts for their grandchildren might just want to get back home as soon as possible with something that doesn’t offend their sensibilities. Lots of people play games only to pass the time; they want something with literally no rules-reading start-up time.
It’s like the gulf between your average blockbuster and your average art-house flick. Or like the CD recommendation you get from that one friend (everybody’s got one) who knows some genre of music to death. He was blown away, but you’re left scratching your head. It’s niche music for a very small class of the interested. If you’re not in the niche, it’s difficult to arrive at even an intellectual appreciation, no matter how brilliant scholars and reviewers say it is.
Of course, that’s not the whole story (although it’s a lot of it). There are market factors, too. Some games make it into Borders because they’re published by established companies with an entrenched sales pipeline. Even if those guys publish a few clunkers from time to time, Borders doesn’t have a great deal of motivation to cut them off and try new or different suppliers, since a lot of the time, the clunkers just go back to the manufacturer for a refund.
Some games make it into Borders because it’s the right theme for the right price. Borders would never pick up Pieces of Eight; it simply costs too much. Even if Pirates of the Caribbean makes buccaneer merchandise hot, hot, hot some Christmas, they need an item that costs $7.42 — or whatever — because that’s what research tells them is the optimum price to extort from an impulse buyer.
And sometimes, there’s no reason at all that one game finds itself in Borders in the place of another game that’s better by every measure. That’s a hard lesson for a creator, but a critical one for avoiding, you know, soul-crushing despair. (Super-good related reading: Josh BishopRoby on The Pride and Pain of Publishing.)
But mostly, the Borders game section is the way it is because of Long Tail forces. If you haven’t read The Long Tail, and you have any interest at all in how and why the pop cultural landscape is the way it is, you should pick up a copy. Some chapters are also available for free on the web, on the About page of the Long Tail blog.
Here’s a one sentence boil-down, then: The games in Borders underwhelm us, as hardcore gamers, because we’re too enlightened!
Borders will also do a lot of special orders if people take the time to ask. If the book is available from the regular distribution channels. Diamond Distribution for example has a pretty good relationship with Borders. I know PSI is working on increasing the types of games that Borders will carry.
Customer feedback is necessary for a company like Borders. Gamers will have to get involved and let the company know what they would to like to buy (and then they need to back that up with actual money, not just talk). As you said, Borders has bills to pay too.
That makes a great deal of sense. I haven’t read the Lnog Tail, but it does sound like something to look into. I agree that we have thought a lot more about gaming than the average Borders customer. And I like the idea of special-ordering from Borders as Matt suggested, as a way of educating Borders, and the public, about what games are out there that may hit Borders’ price point but may not be on Borders’ radar screen. (Assuming, of course, that such special ordering isn’t taking away from the game stores!)
Thanks for the heads-up on the Long Tail. Within two days of checking out the link, I was able to reference the concept in a high-level discussion of Where Things Are Going, and got to look smart. Thanks for making me look smart, Jeff. 🙂
Aren’t you really saying, though, that the reason the games in Borders underwhelm is because we’re gaming geeks? That we happen to like more specialized games?
Lately I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone is a geek of one stripe or another (where geek = someone really in to something). So, while I’m a gaming geek one of my co-workers is a movie geek, and another is a fashion geek.
So, yes, Borders can’t please every geek out there. They need to make sales which means providing products that will satisfy the greatest number of people, which means mostly non-geeks. Geeks, after all, are willing to special order something that they want or to go to a specialized shop that caters to them. It isn’t necessary for Borders stock a niche item that can be ordered when needed.
The Long Tail is an interesting read. The author’s arguement that the internet allows niche products to flourish and succeed where once they couldn’t makes sense and that’s good.
Jason, yes, I think that’s exactly it.
To add to your thought, I think the long tail phenomenon also satisfies non-geeks in some senses and ways. Or, maybe, enables geekery in non-geeks, would be a better way to put it. For example, I’ve found lots of music niche-tailored to my tastes — even though I’d never consider myself a music geek, and even though my tastes are probably pretty pedestrian as prog-rock goes — through Pandora.
(Also, I think we need a Pandora for games, but that’s a completely different topic.)
Well, geekness is definitely a spectrum. I’m sure that my level of comic geekery is surpassed by others but that doesn’t stop me from being a comic book geek.
As for a gaming Pandora, isn’t that what sites like Yahoo! Games, Chessworld, and most MMOs are all about?
What about WotCs new online gametable? It’s supposed to feature Voice over IP which will allow a more real-time TTRPG-like experience.
I’m thinking about a Pandora-for-games as a way to discover new games based on the characteristics of other games you like, rather than the ability to play games online.
Boardgamegeek has the only thing remotely like it for games that I’m aware of, and the BGG functionality simply doesn’t hold a candle.
At Barnes & Noble yesterday, I found games from Rio Grande, Mayfair, and Steve Jackson on the shelf by the cafe (not in with the criminally geeky stuff like D&D and video game manuals). Chez Cthulhu in the mainstream family game section? A surprise to me.
Jeff,
Ah, I see what you’re saying. What you want is a Games Genome Project similar to the Pandora Music Genome.
Let me know when someone starts that project, and I will be happy to help in anyway that I’m able.
Will,
I predict that the B&N in question employs a gamer. Which, IME, is how these things end up happening.
I work for a B&N College store and the only reason that we have such things is because I pushed to get them in. Superstores are supposed to carry games but they seem to vary so much between stores that I have to think that the staff has a lot of control of what they get.
So, are we talking Carcassonne, Settlers, and Munchkin?