(I write this in the midst of the summer convention season, 1999.) On January 1st of this year we at Clash of Arms Games took some radical but necessary steps to insure our survival. Because of a decline in the sales over the last decade we were forced to rethink our policy towards distribution. The need to print games in their thousands once gave us an economy of scale that made wholesale distribution possible. However, once the number of units we could hope to sell in a reasonable amount of time dropped enough to jeopardize this economy of scale something had to be done. I'm sure everyone noticed a dramatic increase in the price of board wargames in this same time period. Now you know the main reason why. Rather than increase prices further we instead chose to cut out one tier of middlemen. Stores now have to deal directly with us if they wish to carry our games. On the one hand this has greatly reduced the number of stores that the two of us can reach (it's just not possible to call two to three thousand stores every month). However, on the other hand most of these stores couldn't care less about historical simulations. They essentially special ordered them for the occasional customer who wanted one without keeping any stock on their shelves. While this was great for the store it played hell with the hobby. After all, how is a person unfamiliar with historical board-gaming supposed to get interested in it if all he sees on the store shelves is card and role-playing games? Now we deal directly with between one and two hundred stores. Each of these stores maintains a fairly comprehensive stock of our stuff , and for the most part are fairly well versed in the hobby, whether it be with historical games, books or miniatures. If you know of a store that doesn't carry our games but should, in that they do the hobby justice and aren't just after your bucks, but your patronage as well, by all means let us know about them. In a play on the credo of the U.S. Marine Corps, "we're looking for a few good stores." Another thing we did was move to smaller digs (which occupied most of the month of January). This cut our rent in half, which is a welcome change, but we are also packed to the ceiling with components and assembled product. Looking this over and contemplating our inventory for a while has led to a second major change: A solution that everyone seemed to resort to in order to compensate for the aforementioned decline in sales was to shift to a cash flow sales strategy. In other words, if you can no longer release two games a year and sell twenty thousand units, release 6 games a year and sell roughly 3500 each. This led to two serious problems. First, although it looks good on paper, six games a year is really three times the amount of work that two games a year requires. You can hire more people but this fails right away because you are working with the same sales volume as before. So you are stuck with two or three guys working two and three times as hard as they were before. This pace is impossible to maintain without something starting to give, like development time. So you find yourself releasing 6 games a year, three of which are only half-baked. Bad, bad, bad. This is a terrible trap to fall into, and several companies fell into it. Second, when everyone starts doing it you have a glut; which leads to fire sales; which leads to closets filled with games you'll probably never play; which leads to psychological resistance to new titles ("Geez, what do I want with another game? I already have twice as many as I'll ever play in this life and the next."). We threw away thousands of games rather than dump them on you... leading to our third major change; fewer releases. I really believe the fewer titles we release the more time you will be able to spend on each game, and the better support we will be able to give each title once it is out there. In summary then, we have gained better control over who our games are sold to by cutting out man) middle men and restricting distribution to just a few good stores who will promote the hobby by show casing historical products. We have downsized our overhead freeing up cash that can be better spent elsewhere. We have slowed down our production schedule (without actually canceling any projects so that we might better concentrate on our existing stock and the new titles once they are released. I am writing this in the month of July, roughly months into these changes. Looking things over all I can say is... so far so good.) Back to Art of War Issue #30 Table of Contents Back to Art of War List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Clash of Arms Games. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com