Ep2: What Running a Game Store is Really Like with Tribe Comic and Games
Join Josh on The Business of Gaming podcast as he visits with Eric from Tribe Comics and Games, a local game shop open for 16 years in Austin, Texas. This episode discusses tips for local marketing for game stores, thoughts on Kickstarter's impact on the business and thoughts on the future of game space in local game stores.
Auto Generated Transcript:
Introduction
hey y'all welcome to the business of gaming podcast today we are at Tribe Comts and Games in Austin Texas i'm Josh
from Game Haven Guild i'm here with Eric one of the owners who's been running the store for almost 17 years tell us about
the beginning what got you into the idea of wanting to start a game store that's
Where did the Idea of Starting a Game Store Come From?
a very long story so I will try to make it as short as possible uh I don't know
in my 20s I was at UT i was studying to become a teacher did really bad one semester they said "Hey you got to take
a semester off." I said "Okay." My local comic and game store uh said "Hey we're
hiring." I was like "Well I need something to do for a semester cuz I'm not going to be in school." And so I
went to work for them and I enjoyed the work and I worked for them about 10 years and worked all the way up to um
the general manager for the company so my best friend who was also working there as the manager of the Austin location uh he was like "Hey
why don't we open up our own store?" My wife was like "That's a great idea." And I was like "In this town with Austin
Books and Dragons Layer you want to open up a third store and you think we're
going to make it?" They're like "I think so there's nothing in South Austin that's pretty empty." And I was like "I
don't know i'd love to run our own store but and but they convinced me that South Austin was open at the time there was
the only thing here was Junior's Comics and Cards which is mostly a card shop that sells uh some comics and a very
very like maybe two two racks of board games and role playing games so they're
they're mostly about cards and back issues and I was like "Okay well you're
right south Austin seems empty." And so we came south we opened up uh in our sister the sister complex of this
complex right across the street uh in a little place probably
uh what a third to a fourth this size it was very small and narrow how big is
How to Handle Play Space in a Large vs Small Game Store
this store in the room uh officially we're 3100 but that includes the office
the two rather large bathrooms and the storage closets so I would bet floor space-wise we're probably closer to 27
and of your four space you're about half of it as playing space versus Yes i'm
I'm I'm probably roughly a third plane space a third comics and graphic
novels and then a third games although the games because of the way the play
space had to be thing is is kind of stretched almost the way around so when you first come in it looks like oh wow
there are way more games in here than there are comics but it's just because comics I can put in a much smaller area
well take us back to the first shop how was the first shop set up in terms of that dynamic a lot of play space or not
a lot uh it was 1,200 square f feet I think very tight on we had uh and and it
was just shaped like a a rectangle so we basically went comics then games except
in the front just to the right of the door we had a single square table
probably half the size of this table two chairs at it that uh we used for lunch
but I guess I told anybody well if you if you want to try to play a game there you can um we of course needed to do
something for the community if we were going to try to build it our friend Jonathan uh came up with an idea and he
was like "Why don't you talk to what was then Rockin Tomato uh over here and see if they're pretty
slow on Tuesday nights maybe I can coordinate a board game at Rock and Tomato sponsored by Tribe Comics and
Games i was like well if you think you can pull it off they may not like the idea of people just hanging out there
all night right turned out Tuesdays was a very slow night we gave them the pick and they picked Tuesdays uh so they
didn't mind that the players were hanging there all night and uh so for
about six years while we were at that spot uh that's what we did um then they
started getting some friction at Rock and Tomato about the same time this space came open in what we call the Big
Boy complex obviously gets a lot more traffic uh we were we were debating whether to
reup our lease in the small one or move and this was going to be significantly more expensive and our friend Jonathan
again who uh was going to school to be an accountant was like "Hey man one of
the things I have to do for my class this semester as a project to do a business analysis what if I sit down I
do a business analysis about what it would be like if y'all moved across the street how much money you'd have to
bring in what the foot traffic's like all of that?" I was like "Sure." So he did the analysis it looked good so we
made the jump over and stopped doing it at Rock and Tomato and started doing it in here and then our play spaces
fluctuated between this many tables uh we used to have another table right there but we needed to expand uh role
playing games and then I think there's another table I think right where manga
is um so you got about nine tables each one's seating four to six people you can
fit a pretty big crowd yes we can and and there have been times not lately not
post pandemic but pre- pandemic there were times in here where it was it's just a wall of noise cuz there every
table's filled well that first opening period first day week month right what
Building a Community for a New Game Store
did that look like from a trying to drive interest in the store was there a community waiting to get in since or was
anything here on the south side or what there were some people who were
customers at the previous store we went to that knew Roy and I uh and that were south and were like "Oh well Roy and
Eric left Dragon's Layer that's where we were." Um we want to follow them so they followed
us um but most of it we were just having to build up uh and in the early days the
thing that worked the best was at the time The Onion had a print magazine uh
and it was only I don't know what 20 25 pages it wasn't very thick not like The Chronicles
and they were offering very inexpensive ads so we were taking out quarter page
ads in The Onion mhm and The Onion apparently was being read by roughly the same crowd as the Chronicle because
people would come in all the time and they'd be like "I saw your ad in the Chronicle." No you saw us in the Onion uh but it was it was much easier to see
us in the Onion because there's only 20 pages there's what maybe three pages of ads versus the Chronicle so local adver
the local print local advertising was the big it really helped put us on the map and then once we moved over here 6
years later the difference in foot traffic was insane and Kirby Lane and Torches Tacos bring in so many people
yeah and so they would they would see the hand or they would see the comics and game they would they would come in
well tell us about the hand tell us about how how Tribe come up how is the the hand is the symbol for the store it
is the symbol for the store so this is this is uh
it's just our it's our group of friends so our group of friends since we've been in our 20s we're the same group of
people we've been having a Saturday night uh either board game or role playing game night since our 20s we
still do it to this day uh but in our 20s a good chunk of the group thought
they were going to be you know artists or tours and they wanted to start a
production company and oh we'll be able to produce music and movies the way we want and TV shows
and they went so far as to design a logo which was the hand and call themselves Tribe Productions uh I think they ended
up getting like a friend they knew that had a band to like we'll handle your advertising
uh they wrote a movie script that went nowhere there were too many chefs in the kitchen
years later Roy and I decided to open up a store and get to the what I think is the hardest question what are you gonna
call yourself yes um because that's going to be all about identity and I from the very beginning was like "Look
dude all of our friends are helping us do this they they were the ones that
helped do the construction the all the manual labor." I was like "We just call ourselves Tribe Comics and Games i mean
it's our philosophy we're all a big tribe we want everybody to be welcome i
think this really captures what we are." And he's like "I don't know it It's not very comic booky." Yeah um and he had
settled on a fantasy name based off our role playing group and he really liked that and he thought no that's that's
kind of fantasy I think people will be more like what's that I was like I kept
coming back to Tribe so he agreed for Tribe as a placeholder
in case we couldn't find anything better and I kept working on him and and eventually he came around and and was
right he was like no I mean I see what you're saying it is the philosophy we're trying to put forward and that made for
good branding plus the hand is a very good image um we didn't have a good
image of the original logo so another one of our friends was like "Oh that's easy." He just dipped his hand in red
paint smacked it on a sheet of paper took an early I guess it 17 years ago would have been a very early digital
camera took a picture of it uploaded it to his computer smacked out a logo for it and sent it to us and I was like
"Thanks man." Yeah right and that's uh that's how it happened very cool well
that that vision you talk about right tribe community building things along those lines how is that maybe changed
How has the Game Store Changed Over the Years?
over the years or has it changed in what ways over the years that's a good question um it has changed over the
years uh one is there's now a lot more game stores in South Austin so the competition for places have been
a lot more pressing on us um the other thing is that uh the pandemic actually
at least here I don't know about other stores but here made a seismic shift in
the patterns for our gamers okay before the pandemic
D and D night was our best night it was insane we would fill up all nine tables
sometimes we'd have to put a table up at that couch over there uh there would be 60 people in here playing D and D
um our board game night was filled to the brim uh we had a decent Magic night
and then we had a couple pockets of Magic that played other days in the day um
and nobody played minis we had two guys that came in on our mini nights and we kept switching x-wing for a while was
popular but then it died down we couldn't ever get anybody to do 40k because we didn't have any terrain or
the big tables kill Team wasn't a thing yet post pandemic all of our magic people
both our sponsored magic and then our independent magic night our independent magic groups I should say all
disappeared really and our DND collapsed on itself almost I mean now we get maybe two or three tables
but our minis night exploded really and now that is our most popular night we
get all tables are all filled with different kill team going on there's another minis game it's based off the
new cyberpunk video game the 2077 yeah the 2077 stuff uh but apparently the guy
that really loved Kill Team started playing that and he said they took kind of all the Kill Team ideas made the
right kind of changes and so he's been really pushing people for that another guy uh did a trench warfare game and
that proved really popular but that's become our best night lots of people
coming out people getting excited and uh you know we had to officially uh stop
being a Watsi uh play store because post pandemic we weren't getting the numbers
watsi has uh Watsi has benchmarks you explain what Watsi Oh sorry yes wizards of the Coast you know people that make
Magic yeah um to be an official Play Store they have benchmarks and two of their most important benchmarks is you
have to have a minimum number of unique players every week in addition to you have to have a
certain number of new unique player IDs coming in okay and you have to do both
these things in concert over a month and you have to hit these certain benchmarks and depending on the benchmark that is
how big or small your event can be that that's how much product they'll provide
for prizes yeah how much you know you get for pre-release um and we weren't
hitting it post pandemic and and they were like "Okay we've we've kind of relaxed the post-pandemic rules but
you're still just right under the mark." And I was like "Look I'm I would love to
keep doing magic here but the people aren't coming in i can't make them come in." And they were like "Well you know
we're we're going to have to cut you off." And I was like "Oh I understand." And then the the few people that we had
well they left to go to the places where you can get the cards yeah customers you focus on serving then sounds like it's
changed a ton and the big c was the pandemic within them yes yes now in your store you again you've got a significant
comic book section significant gaming section how do you see your store mix kind of operate in terms of customers
right now it's probably we are strangely enough we have probably stayed the same
level of mix which is roughly 6040 maybe 55 45 um part of that is because comics
are a weekly thing so you have people coming back all the time for that where games as you know being somebody who
loves games you can't depend on games to come out in any kind of timely manner right at all and so that makes them a
bit more sporadic which makes the comic side a little stronger both in terms of people uh and things um let's hit on
back to you mentioned you know you're hosting some nights here Magic Knights now you've got a specific minis night
yeah what does like an event schedule andor like how much does your business
model depend on special events versus the customers just coming in to play games themselves and or look around
almost 100% on customers coming and looking we we occasionally will do a special event
usually it's player driven somebody comes up with an idea they're like "Oh my god I would love to host something
here." and they asked "Can we set aside a Saturday?" And we're like "Yeah sure." Uh and we and we've done some of those
and they're usually good for business um but you know we're we're so small mom and pop there's only four of us uh and
so we do not go out of our way to court special events which may be a weakness on our part but it does mean that we
have a lot like in the daytime we have a lot of table space for people to be able to just come in and play and that
happens a lot in the summer comes less of course during the school year right so your your note on the games right
it's very unstable in terms of the timeline on when they come out how often they come out how do you look at your
assortment and fill out an assortment based on you know what's popular what's new what you know will sell what do you
take chances on how do you think about that roy is usually the one that handles doing the game board we used to do it
together but over the intervening years
his game knowledge started mine cuz he less so about board games than role
playing games but he loves reading the rules rule systems yeah he really
loves that and I start to fall asleep so our game knowledge starts eclipsing
um there are of course companies that we tend to okay this is you know like if
something's coming out from the people that make Sellers Guitar we're like okay we know that's going to sell well ticket
to Ride we know that's going to sell well um you know the people that make Terraforming Mars I forget their name uh
but if they come out with a new game we'll try it out uh Evil Hat Productions who used to make Mice and Mystics and uh
Robin's Caruso they're a company that we'll we'll generally gamble on but now
especially in the Kickstarter era it's kind of become almost wild west and there are so many small new game people
that we really are just shooting blind based off whatever tiny ass paragraph is
in Yeah you know Meeple Monthly Allianc's game catalog that they send
out uh there are a couple other cataloges that come in and you know you kind of get that one one paragraph just
kind of guess okay is does this sound cool does it not sound cool it on that
specifically so you're buying a lot of these through a group of distributors a certain distributor mostly Alliance
although we do go through ACD okay um and
uh then of course Asthma day controls insane amount of the market share and you have to go through them there they
do deal with some of the others but they cut their percentage significantly if you go through one of the other people
so we deal with asthma day directly so those are the three big ones that we work with any particular games that have
come out that you were really excited for and did not do well and or vice versa anything caught you off guard in
the last few years fortune well Fortune Glory now is really old that came out and that was such an amazingly good game
and I thought it would do well um and it it did not do well which is too bad it's
it's such a fantastic game uh kind of in the same token though I haven't gotten to play it yet um Unfathomable
which is Fantasy Flight's reskin of their popular Battlestar Galactica game which is an amazing game but they of
course lost the rights to Battlestar Galactica but it's still an amazing rule system so they reskinned it as a
you're on a ship passage uh like a steamer ship with Cthulhu cultists so
same idea right yeah uh and I thought that would do well given how popular Battlestar Galactica as a game system
was and it just has not consistently I mean it sells okay but nowhere near what
Battlestar Galactica sold given that it's almost the exact same rule set
well how about we talked your early marketing yeah the the print ads these
days what are you doing now to drive traffic what are you doing now to try and build that we have tried all sorts
of stuff and none of it seems to be working uh we did radio ads uh last year
year before last we're in 2025 i think in 2023 we did radio ads for a while
that didn't work uh I did uh some sponsorship with KUT uh they have two
different types of sponsorships you can do uh you know they have the business sponsorship that you always hear on their drives yeah but they also have
special ones like when they go to their breaks they're like you know Anteater Plus has helped us bring this to you
remember Ante Eater Plus and uh so uh we we did that neither of those really
worked i'm constantly am advertising on and off in the Chronicle that's not working
so I actually have no idea we we are trying everything and nothing seems to
be driving people back in interesting yeah very hard and that seems to be you
know I've talked to other people and that that seems to be where it's going you know a lot of people are saying Google ads or Facebook ads and then
other people are like "Well that's not really getting us the target clientele we want." I'm like "Oh." And it's really
hard in South Austin because um and this is probably unique to
highly desirable big cities but because rents skyrocket after the pandemic as everybody could move wherever they
wanted and so many people moved to South Boston yeah uh it drove out a lot of our
existing customers because they couldn't afford the rent um and because they couldn't afford the rent they had to
leave either Austin or they had to leave South Austin but the new people are coming in so we're almost back kind of
where we were when we first started where we have to find a way to connect with these new people so that they know
we're here so well how about the industry then industry when you first started versus now how has that changed
Kickstarter Impact on the Gaming Industry
in terms of the business side of gaming the biggest change has been Kickstarter
um as I'm sure you've probably talked about numerous times Kickstarter has been an amazing godsend
to the gaming industry to anybody that loves board games role playing games miniature games miniatures it's been a
godsend it has been a nightmare for retailers um
you know in the early days they weren't doing retailer levels mhm then they
started doing retailer levels but the discount was absolutely wretched then it
would take them months after fulfillment before they could get enough stock I
guess in again to get to distributors to get to retailers so if you wanted this
hot game that everybody wanted you had to back it on a retailer level right um
but then the problem became you got in six copies but everybody who was super excited about it backed it on the
Kickstarter to get all the bonus features and they didn't want the game so you
know for a while we were pretty aggressive on Kickstarter and then we kind of gave up on that after the first
few waves and now we just kind of wait for it to trickle down into distribution and get it um as a gamer I love
Kickstarters as a retailer I have so many mixes so then on so Kickstarters and their
impact yes online stores how has online over the last 10 years in particular
have you seen a big impact or at the beginning I think there was a very large impact um I think it has lessened
somewhat um or I shouldn't say lessened it has plateaued
um we still get people coming in occasionally being like hey do you price match Amazon where I'm usually like no
the Amazon prices what I pay what I go to a distributor I can't price match that and they're like oh okay uh but
most people I guess now have have in at least in our space have gotten accustomed to the fact that the game
stores can't price match and I know there are some that do and God bless them for doing it I don't know how they
make money um especially now that so many of the distributors post pandemic
and I understand it their margins are getting tighter publishers margins are getting tighter so they're squeezing the retailers and
decreasing our discount that we pay so we're paying more for games because they
raise the price but we're also getting less of a discount so we're making less money uh
I don't know how anybody could could price match but I think that I think it's died down somewhat as people you
know become aware that oh if I keep buying from Amazon my favorite game store is not going to be around i'm not
going to be able to go in and talk about games i've also seen a big ch trend from
very few game stores now don't have playable space in them as well yeah do you think having that playable space has
been part of what's helped that trend abide that's a good question
playable space is a mixed bag because unless you are actively doing Magic
tournaments that you charge entry for or some other kind of card game you charge entry for or you're renting the space
which we never do if I host a game here whether it's a tournament whether it's
just game night we don't charge period i want it to be hey I came to town or I
moved here i'm trying to find people that like the same things I like i don't think you should have to pay to do that
but the problem is I mean if you look at this space like I said it's about a third of the store maybe a fourth that's
all essentially dead space it's generating no direct income and so to
keep the space that's a lot of money yeah you know rent-wise percentage and I can understand why game stores are
eliminating their game space and we have talked about it before our
came up last year and we were seriously considering moving and one of the things we were going to have to do was just eliminate our game space
it does help I think in the long run but since there's no direct ratio of cash
coming in to table space it's difficult to adjust totally difficult to justify
yeah and there are days where I'm like "Oh we probably should have gone to a smaller space because you know our rent
keeps going up just like everybody else's." Uh and South Austin is so desirable that's another big difference
between now and 17 years ago south Austin was the hillbilly place that except for South Congress people were
like "Oh yeah South Austin that was the cheap place to go live and North Austin was the whackadoo place you did not go
to unless you wanted to pay through the nose." And it's flipped in that 17 years
uh and our rent correspondently has also flipped in that 17 well what do you
What is the Future for Games Stores?
think the future for physical game stores is where do you see it going where do you see your store where do I
see future for physical game stores i think there's always going to be physical game stores if for no other
reason than Magic and Pokemon are still shaking the tail of the dog they're the
tail that shakes the dog i forget how that expression goes but they're still driving everything i mean in the last
two years last three years three stores have opened up in South
Austin specifically catering to cards um
and new game store just opened up in I think within the past two or three years
and another one in Kyle in the past two or three years maybe two years so there
is a hunger at least in Austin for game stores i've heard another
other cities you know people come here and they're like "Wow y'all have such a huge gaming community." I'm like "Man
it's always been like this there's there's always been this kind of rise of game stores and they go away." So I
always think there's going to be game stores if for no other reason than
you can't get somebody to tell you about a game on Amazon i mean you can read the two paragraphs Amazon puts out and you
can read the 50 reviews other people have put but it is much easier to go
into a game store have the person that's there take the game off the shelf flip to the back where they usually have a
picture of the board and then give you as detailed as you want sometimes an
explanation on how the game runs or it's the only place where you're going to find other people um that may have
similar interests to you yeah um are they always going to have game spaces i
think if Magic and Pokemon ever go away as far as a tournament space there will
be very few game spaces left it'll be big stores like Dragon's Layer u just
the ones that have very deep deep roots that'll be able to keep that game space because rents are going to keep going up
especially here in Austin um and it's going to be a luxury most game stores
can't afford to can't afford to pay for well how about
uh advice to your younger self what would you have told yourself now 17 years in you're getting ready to sign
that first lease what what would you tell yourself oh damn that is a good question what would I have told myself i
honestly don't know uh probably when we get to the very flush years put much
more aside into a reserve than you think you're going to we had a good reserve but I should have put more reserve aside
during the flush years when we were really hitting it high before all the competition um
I don't know if I could have warned myself somehow of
all the discount contractions that were going to be
coming i don't know what I could have done different cuz the largest discount contractions are understandably from the
biggest most important gains so it's not like you can't carry right
but if there would have been something I could have done maybe I could have you know been in the vanguard with other
retailers going hey man you can't do this because if we go away you won't have this um we did not talk about this
when you were talking about pressures but uh the fact that so many mass market stores have now
realized they're leaving you know millions and billions of dollars on the
table by not by having ignored this industry for so long if I could have warned myself about that then I could
have done more things to kind of I don't know prepare for that
eventuality because that that's also been a a really real struggle because you know when you can go into Target and
buy Solaris Katon uh you know you don't even think about going online to Google a game store why
would you you heard about this cool game and you go into your supermarket and it's there on the shelves it's it's a
very different world but again great world if you're into games right you
know probably also I would I would have more actively looked for especially in
the beginning I would have looked for a place to have game space mhm um I don't know if we would have been able to find
anything in our early days that would have been within our price range but the difference between the old shop
and this shop was so huge that it would have made a much bigger difference early on early i got two get to know you
questions forgot to ask at the beginning not about fire in the edit i'm probably going to put these back oh that's that's totally fine what is the first game you
remember being obsessed with when you were young besides Axis and Allies which I always played with my dad very good
one um there was a game called Wizards from Avalon Hill
um it is so intricate and way too long and
repetitive as most early games are in the 80s right even when they try to make them cool but it was so neat you you
took on the role of this wizard and you were running around this board a typical Avalon Hill board so you had a hex map
that you built so it was different every time you played and you were having to complete quests to go up in power so
that you could eventually challenge whatever the big bad was that I don't even remember now um I don't think we
ever finished that game because it took so long once you got powerful enough to then make the journey to to fight the
big the big evil but I loved playing that game i loved set up um and then of
course D and D i was obsessed with D and D yeah and now what is the game you are
currently most obsessed with so there are two answers to them okay the
first answer is probably the closer to true uh Lords of Water Deep I think is the best worker placement game I've ever
played and as a kind of a point to that it is
the only game I have on my phone and it is the only game that my board gaming
group plays on the phone against each other and when we get together still wants to pull out the board game to play
the board game even though we're all playing like different combinations of all of us three different games of it
all the time on our phone um that said uh the rising sunset for Dominion I just
played uh Sunday uh for the first time and uh the new game mechanics that you
know every time there's a new Dominion set he always adds some new game mechanics the new game mechanics that he adds for that was phenomenal i loved it
it it is probably Prosperity was my favorite set but I think Rising Sun may
have Eclipsed Prosperity is my favorite set nice work thank you for taking the time to to talk to us and invite us into
the store to see the space hey anytime thank you it's always fun to talk about games with people