New Asmodee distribution plan sounds...ominous...

Started by Arctic Blast, December 18, 2015, 10:36:17 PM

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Arctic Blast

So, Asmodee has consolidated all of their North American sub-companies (at least the business side of things...game development will apparently remain independent) into one corporation, headed up by Christian Petersen (Fantasy Flight) at FFG's headquarters in Minnesota. That means FFG, Asmodee, Days of Wonder, Cryptozoic, and a pile of others. After some blathering about changes in their game distribution agreements, we come to this :

QuoteNew sales policies for specialty retailers will take effect on April 1.  Those policies will restrict sales by game stores to "consumer transactions through retailers' physical retail locations" and at consOnline sales and mail order will be prohibited with exceptions granted for online retailers that "contribute either significant scale, unique service, or other exceptional differentiation," the company said.  Those sales will take place under separate terms of sale from the Specialty Retail terms.

I have no decent local game store, unless they count the 4 game cafes that will soon exist in Edmonton (yes, seriously...four, as of next spring). The closest awesome store to me is Sentry Box, and that's 2 hours down the highway in Calgary. It sounds to me like the exceptions they talk about will exist for big US retailers like Cool Stuff. This sounds potentially like a gigantic puddle of crap. Not even gaming stores (physical and online and both) up here know what any of this means, because it's been communicated horribly.

I've already got FFG releases topping $100 Canadian thanks to the exchange rate. I'm not paying more than that. I can and will find other hobbies to spend my money on.


Nefaro

Man, that sucks.

I've been there AB.  Out in flyover country with no local retail for such things anywhere nearby. 

I still have about a 40 minute drive, one-way, to the local game store.  It's far better than your situation & my past experiences in the boonies.  But when I spend almost an hour & a half driving, only to find out that the handful of titles I'm looking for are all out of stock at the area store (as they often are), it would still burn my ass if I couldn't go home and order it from a different store further away, via post.

If I were to guess, they're probably trying to push a new distro agreement to prevent stores from pricing competitively via Amazon, Ebay, etc.  Trying to get a unified Suggested Retail Price across their retailers & shut out the non-local discount price wars.  It would be very disappointing if they were trying to squeeze out places like CSI in order to increase their own in-house sales & low-qty/high-cost retailers.

Arctic Blast

^^Hopefully it doesn't end up being nearly as bad as the release makes it sound. But for now, even store owners I chat with a bit on Twitter and Facebook are confused. This hasn't been communicated well at all.