Actually, the most dissatisfied retailers are the small toy shops who suffered tumultuous declines in recent years due to the prevalence of Wal-Mart, Toys R Us, Amazon.Com and the like. They've taken strips out of the toy retail industry, almost killed it.

The hobby side of the industry has actually been doing alright mostly because the hottest games in the last decade have been their newest specialty: CCG's. WotC has maintained this industry and even made it thrive. They are often the only repositories of for sale card collections which dramatically add to revenues.

CCG's have outsold "family" games by huge margins overall, almost exclusively via hobby and game shops. WotC is a $220 million company before Pokemon.

In fact, the staggering sales of CCG's and Pokemon actually spurreasbro to acquire WotC and leverage distribution into the major retailers and even convenience stores. Still, WotC expects that hobby game stores will sell the bulk of their products...to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars for the forthcoming Christmas Pokemon selling season. They have the best selection, great product knowledge, very high turn-over, and most of them allow trading and playing on site. this is why WotC went out and bought a chain of them, not a "family" toy store.

Hobby retail outlets have actually grown in recent years, moving into the previously forbidden territory of malls in middle America. They've done so by focusing on the big $$ items like CCG's and comics, but also pushing non-family games such as Warhammer, Cheapass games, and, increasingly, games from Mayfair and especially Rio Grande.

The game retail landscape is such that a mall or commercial strip has at least one type of hobby store in it or nearby, whereas the "anchor" of this strip or mall is a Toys R Us or Wal-Mart, the latter two having forced the independent toy retailer out with ruthless efficiency.

I might also point out that for years the dominant "hobby" games were made by TSR on one side and Avalon Hill on the other. This so-called "struggling" market (as you put it recently) was deemed to have intellectual property and sales appeal valuable enough that (gasp!) the lar-gest names in the industry--WotC and Hasbro-respectively bought them out, and then then Hasbro bought out WotC.

The rise and triumph of WotC from a "hobby game" company to game juggernaut itself totally refutes your arguments. Their revenues are enormous and who has been their prime retailers? The "hobby" game store. Fifteen years ago these stores were on the commercial margins. Now retail lease issuers actively look for them. Their products (especially the CCG's and comics) bring in the most desired market: children and youth. In fact, this arrangement proved so successful in the UK that Games Workshop outlets became a staple of retail malls. The same has happened in North America where the pull power of CCG's and comics has driven the smaller toy retailers to the brink in comparison.

Ask any distributor where the real money is in the game market and they'll point to WotC's products. Now look at who sells the most of them. It isn't your toy shops, it's the "hobby" retailers. The same retailers who had long relationships with Avalon Hill, TSR, WotC etc. now, who is better prepared to capitalize on the Hasbro acquisitions with their knowledge of games and gamers for the upcoming products and brands the Hasbro/WotC union is coming out with? Sure, the big retail chains will get their bite, but niche marketing is the tour de force of retail right now and the "hobby" game stores are the perfect vehicles for this consolidated push of this growing market.