The international hobby
by Zac Belado
This article appeared in an edited form in Ravage Magazine
One of the more interesting facets of the miniature gaming hobby over the last few years is that way in which the Internet has taken what used to be a parochial and national hobby, especially in North America, and turned it into a very diverse and international pastime. There are, I believe, some interesting implications of this not only for gamers but also for miniatures and game producers.
Ten years ago the main producer of miniatures and miniature games was, at least in my city, Games Workshop. And while this may seem like an international company selling in Canada it really wasn’t. The product may have been shipped from the UK but it was sold and distributed by a Canadian company and I bought it from a local game store often learning about it via that same store. There were no foreign language games or miniatures available and the only people playing German and French board games were those who brought them back from holidays. And they also had to know how to read German or French as the games were not available in English. The hobby itself was also more insular. The opinions about games that I got were either from local gamers or from magazines like White Dwarf, Wargames Illustrated or Avalon Hill’s The General.
Since those heady days when I would stumble into a store and discover some new, heretofore unknown, product I now find almost all of my information about games online and I also buy more products direct from manufacturers in the UK, France and even Australia. Even my local game store orders models in that they see, not from a product circulars from their distributors or the manufacturer but from their own explorations online. The owner of my local game store doesn’t give me a puzzled frown when I ask for figures from European manufacturers as those have gone from being a niche item to being for more the norm.
Now the experience of gamers in Europe may not be as parochial as mine was growing up in Canada but I suspect that even in places such as France and Germany the amount of product and product information available to gamers and store owners has dramatically increased in the last ten years. What has changed, aside from trade liberalization, is, of course, the wide use of the Internet to not only promote products but, and this is more critical I think, as a medium to allow people from various countries to discuss the hobby. People from all over the globe can meet online to discuss their favourite games or, with the help of search engines like Google, scour the Internet for pages related to their hobbies. In either case people are often stumbling across new products that are now, unlike a decade ago, often only a click away from being purchased.
Where this has lead has been to an opening of markets to gaming companies that may not have existed before and also increased demands on manufacturers to produce materials for gamers in other languages. And it is not just companies like Games Workshop and Rackham that are being asked for translations of their products but also companies like Asmodee, Darkson Designs and Kraken Editions. Rackham’s AT-43 starter set had a rulebook with eight languages in it and I am sure that Asmodee is regretting their decision not to release an English rulebook.
The biggest potential losers in this newly developing worldwide marketplace are local game stores. Especially those in North America. For while it is much easier for companies to directly appeal to gamers from other countries this also means that the local game store becomes less of a gatekeeper for exposure to new games than it was previously. Many local game stores, at least in North America, have been fighting a losing battle against online retailers that have been taking away their profit centers (such as Games Workshop products) and leaving them with little in the way of profitable avenues to expand their business. In the past this would have left these stores with an opportunity to differentiate by bringing in games such as Alkemy or Hell Dorado but if gamers can connect directly to foreign suppliers and manufacturers then this avenue quickly dries up.
The speed of the Internet works to the disadvantage of local stores in a case like this. Often gamers are better informed about new product and can order direct before a local store can even find a distributor that carries the product. And once gamers get in the habit of ordering direct there is often little incentive for them to stop doing so. Instead of being a boon to local stores, the development of a more international, web based gaming market may actually drive more stores to close. The Internet enables people to take on for themselves the intermediary position that games stores used to hold. When I first got into the hobby I went to my local store to find out what was new and what was going to be coming out. That simply isn’t the case now and with more manufacturers being able to market directly to their customers it may mean a tougher fight for some stores to prosper.
The new international marketplace also opens small manufactures up to the influence of fluctuating exchange rates and the influence of foreign economies in a way that they may not have been previously. The US dollar has declined precipitously in the last year making a lot of foreign products much more expensive. Most US based gamers have seen prices for UK and European products rise 30 to 40%. No manufacturer is able to absorb or respond to those costs and so many companies that may have been looking to gain sales in the US or expand their markets into the US may see that market dry up completely until such time as US consumers get used to the new reality of the diminished buying power of their dollar. These sort of economic upheavals are often unforeseen and it isn’t inconceivable to think that in the future another currency shift like the one we are currently seeing with the US dollar may cause a game company to go under as companies become more reliant on international business.
While there is certainly an economic cost to the development of a wider client to business network that the Internet has enabled I think that these costs are worth it in the long run. The hobby is much stronger when it has a wider range of participants, both buyers and sellers, and ultimately it is the Internet that will help the hobby grow. There may be some rough patches ahead as businesses and consumers both adapt to this new way of interacting and doing business but without a doubt the world has changed and it is dragging our hobby along with it.