Dollar Bill, who initially showed a lot of interest in starting something new right after we went out of business, had clammed up and didn’t really want to have anything to do with a new store although he did offer some startup advice. After a lot of talk, even some fairly serious discussions that could have lead to laying the groundwork for a kind of “sequel” to Atlanta Game Factory he simply lost interest in the frivolous way that the young and wealthy often do. I believe he became more interested in horses and gardening than gaming or opening a retail store, at least for the next six months.

I applied for my own business license, re-established my relationships with key distributors, and set about running my own hobby gaming retail micro business with the idea that I’d offer a combination of the personalized and face-to-face service of a FLGS but with Internet pricing and convenience. At first, I actually made a little money- at least enough to fund my own hobby purchases- but it wasn’t long before the virtual lack of any return on investment and the enervating grind of having to drive out all over the Metro Atlanta area to meet random strangers to give them their orders started to really wear on me. It just wasn’t the same. I was still the guy many Atlantans went to for their gaming fix and I had a lot of regular customers but without the store, it just felt really empty.

But nonetheless, I soldiered on— sending out weekly emails to my customer list and letting them know what new games were available and getting phone calls and emails from folks looking for things. I persevered mainly because I couldn’t imagine my life without working in hobby retail, but there was also this fading possibility that somehow I could raise enough money through Factory Games to finance that new store that all my friends and customers were calling on me to open.

So I’d order once a week and go about distributing it once it arrived and I’d usually wind up either breaking dead even or in the hole once the sales were made. And of course, since I wasn’t a physical store there were a lot of logistical problems. If an order was delayed a day or if something was out of stock at the distributors, I’d sometimes miss giving everyone their stuff at the weekly game meet-up and they would sometimes get very pissy with me, apparently unable to comprehend the simple fact that I was really more of a guy doing the community a favor than an actual business. Or someone would order a pile of games from me on Monday and then suddenly decide that they wanted them right away from an online store on Tuesday- leaving me to have to try and find homes for the games they abandoned to recoup my costs.

Eventually, I brought in a gaming couple that I had actually known from the AGF days to help out and some of the burden was definitely lifted and I think they were actually much better suited to the Factory Games personalized business model than I ever was. They had quite a lot of success with Factory Games in their own right, selling a lot of games through eBay and at gaming events that I didn’t care to attend and I was more than happy to split the sales with them if only because I didn’t have to drive out to meet some gamer in a parking lot somewhere thirty miles north of Atlanta.

I ran Factory Games for nearly two years, and although it certainly kept me in wholesale pricing for games and maintained at least something of the relationship I had with Atlanta’s gaming community, it just wasn’t the same. It felt very empty, meeting these people and handing them a game that they would go off and play who knows where. There was no foundation, no edifice, and no structure to this kind of brick-and-mortar-less retail. There wasn’t a heart.

I wanted it to be like it was at AGF, where I’d hand them the game and they’d go sit down at a table, open it, and get people to play. I wanted to sell a box of VERSUS cards and hear the cries of jubilation when a pack yielded the coveted foil “Critical Beatdown” card. I wanted to listen in on the D&D campaign and see if the DM was going to punish that uppity elf for being such a jerk to the party. I wanted to hear the clatter of dice skittering across miniature trees and burned-out Styrofoam buildings. I wanted the TV to be showing KRULL for the thirtieth time, cold Yoo-Hoo in the refrigerator, and the laughs of my friends and others gamers pealing out onto 10th street and into the Atlanta night.

Inevitably, I’d think about The Barrister and what he had done to destroy all of that- knowing full well that those things were never as important to him as making an illusory fortune off the hobby and its constituents. And at the same time, I was coming to terms with the realization that it doesn’t matter how much you love something or how much passion you put into it, at the end of the day you need to feel that you are getting something back for all your hard work. It’s a mistake to think that you shouldn’t make some kind of profit or receive some kind of benefit for your passion- at some point you have to realize that you deserve it.

Something people like The Barrister and many people involved in the gaming community or doing business in the hobby will never understand is that there isn’t really much money to be made in it. You can do OK, and in some rare cases you can do extremely OK, but the people who get rich in board games or card games or whatever are few and far between.

There’s no gold mine, there’s no oil well, and there’s no jackpot at the end of the brand new, hot CCG rainbow. The hobby industry is in decline, diminishing, and struggling to keep up with a youth market that is leaving it behind and taking their money with them, giving it to EA Games, Rockstar, and Blizzard rather than TSR, Avalon Hill, and West End Games. In 2005 alone, over half of the FLGS in the United States went out of business. Don’t come here if you’re looking for profit.