Newsletter Flashback: Analog events in a digital world
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How we pivoted to online events during Covid-19, and what we saw as the future of in-store events. Note: This was originally published as an email newsletter on September 16, 2020.
Successes and failures - analog events in a digital world
As we all know, there’s something satisfying about playing games in-person; these tangible and tactile experiences encourage people to put down their screens and actually interact face to face with friends and family.
Strangely, this last feature has become both more and less appealing lately.
When Covid precautions hit in mid-March, our in-store events were the first to get cancelled; full store closures started a few days later.
As it became apparent that this was going to be a long-term situation, we knew that we would have to transition our in-store events to an online format to maintain our store community during the shutdown.
Dungeons & Dragons was the first area that we focused on and things went pretty well - our adult and youth D&D events were the first things we sold on our newly revamped website, and all seats filled within 36 hours. At that point in time people were looking for a sense of normalcy and community, and online Dungeons & Dragons was a way for us to offer that.
We also tried to extend this model to Magic the Gathering and board games, but here we weren't quite as successful. We offered a few events for each, got very few sign-ups and participants, and so we quietly discontinued both series.
With the benefit of hindsight, we realize there are probably two main reasons why this happened:
- MTG and board games have higher barriers to entry, as players typically need copies of the games at home and/or existing knowledge of the rules to participate
- There are already online platforms that do a pretty good job of reproducing the in-person experience
People often talk about the odd silver linings of this whole Covid-19 experience. One of ours is that it forced us to take a critical look at our offerings, identify which ones were really working for us, and cut the rest. Scaling back down to only 2 employees in March-April meant we had to pick and choose how to spend our time and energy - it forced us to think critically about what works, what doesn’t, and what our customer base responds to.
Of course, figuring out how to measure success is a whole different thing - one store’s criteria will certainly be different from another’s. So if you want your peek under the hood for this newsletter, here it is: On paper, over 90% of our events operate at the break-even point or at a loss.
Your standard-issue businessperson would look at that and say ...well why are you doing this?! and it’s sort of hard to put the answer into words.
It’s partly the nature of the events - we can’t get away with charging higher ticket prices (especially in an online format), and we can’t make it up in volume (D&D gets unwieldy with too many players).
But taking a step back, making a profit off our events isn’t really our goal. Our goal in offering events - whether online or in-store - is to provide and maintain our local gaming community, because we believe that having a strong community will ultimately benefit us all in the long run.
As event host, we can only achieve this by offering experiences that you can't get anywhere else.
Our online D&D is led by a former children’s educator and a prominent RPG creator/critic, each sporting online tools to make your virtual game more immersive. Our in-store staff have years of customer service experience and board game industry knowledge to guide you to the game that’s perfect for you. Our website and social media experiences improve in quiet leaps and bounds every week.
But I digress.
All things considered, we’re pretty fortunate. Where some game stores have based their entire business model around being event centres, we see events as a bonus add-on to our retail operations. That’s not to say that we don’t take events seriously (we most definitely do!) - we simply don’t have the physical space to host the larger events that an event-centric business model would require.
Because of this, we aren’t in any great rush to restart in-store events. We would rather focus on providing a high quality online experience for the foreseeable future, and resume in-store events when it’s safe to do so. And realistically? It's going to be a while.
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