I'VE HAD ENOUGH. | Game Retail Ramblings Ep. 39

Welcome to Gaming Retail Ramblings, episode number 39. I'm your host, Travis Evans, coming to you live from Millennium Game Studios here in Rochester, New York, where it's been hot, hot, hot, which is to also say the TCG market has been very hot as well.

Today we're going to talk all about sort of where TCGs are in the in the general landscape of what's going on in the game industry, some of the things that are impacting the sales for them, and some challenges that we're running into with the with the next sort of line of TCGs that are brand new that are coming out soon.

A couple of episodes ago, I had mentioned um a whole list of of TCGs that I was excited about that were coming out that were sort of going to hit the marketplace in an already pretty competitive landscape of TCGs in general. And these are the ones that I was sort of looking at with an idea of, okay, let's look at seeing if we can lean into these a little bit. Let's build a community around this thing. Let's look at opening singles and let's hosting events and and that sort of thing. We'll do some demo days and that kind of thing to gauge interest for our customers as well as my employees and stuff.

A lot of times sales for products that we have in store uh live and die based on the enthusiasm and the engagement from my employees. So, if it's something that I have that we brought in because it was exciting and I thought it was compelling, but I don't have anybody at the registers that think it's exciting and compelling, a lot of times that doesn't line up really well with sales for us.

To sort of go through where we are right now, um, in general, the the main store in Rochester, we're we're up 20% for the year. The store that I'm managing in Roseville, they're up 80% for the year, but there's a whole bunch of other reasons why that store is doing as well as it is compared to where it was the year before where I where I wasn't managing the store. A large amount of what we're seeing in increases for us here at at Millennium has to do with where we're at as far as TCGs go.

And to put some of that in context, our our year-over-year sales for for Magic is up 40% this year, which is an astronomical number. I think Magic was somewhere between 20 and 25% of all of our revenue generated last year for the store. I'm not sure what the percentage is this year cuz I haven't broken it down that much. But to have that category by itself up 40% is just astronomical in terms of what where our numbers are at. Pokemon this year is up 64% for us year-over-year. And this both of those games are coming off of two like banger years for us. Like two two years where we had really big numbers. Yu-Gi-Oh's up 20%, our One Piece is up 20%, our SWoo's up 20%. So every single one of those lines that we sort of had some focus on and we did some things with are are up a good amount.

Flesh and Blood's up a ton as far as singles go. and we sort of took the beginning of the year to get the singles online for us and to put them into the kiosk and our system for our instore ordering and that sort of thing. And we we've seen massive growth there. Their their last two sets, the hunted and high seas have both sold really well for us. The numbers on those have continued to punch above what we thought that they're they were going to be at when we placed our initial orders.

The landscape in general in where we are with TCGs and how things are going is the money that's being generated and the revenue that's being generated on those triedand-true TCGs have done really well. to briefly talk about sort of Yu-Gi-Oh. I would put Yu-Gi-Oh in this category. I would put Digimon in this category because Digimon sold pretty well for us, too. Uh it doesn't carry the numbers in terms of the width that we see and the number of zeros attached to some of the other things. But it does sell really well for us. But we had to change sort of our mentality and our focus with with regard to carrying that product and some other products. Shadow Verse is another one that I would lump into there. Lorana, Swoo, that sort of thing.

And it was an interesting comment that was put up with regard to Swoo sales in one of the retailer forums. I think it was last week and somebody had asked about how well we were doing with Swoo and we saw significant growth from this set. Sales have been really good. I think the timing of it based on when the worlds is happening is really good because we have a new meta that's shaken up. I know there's a big number of people that are headed to Las Vegas. I'm actually going to to the tournament. I was invited as a guest of Asthma. So I'm going to go down there and check it out. I'll probably play some limited games. So, if you're in Vegas and you see me there or whatever, feel free to stop me and we can have a conversation about anything you like to do with retailing because it's sort of a quasi. It's a work vacation that leads right into Gen Con. So, I'm leaving from the SOU event in Vegas on Monday and I'm flying from there to Indianapolis and I'll be at Gen Con for the entire week after that.

But, they talked about there was a number of retailers in there that said, "Well, after the second set or after the third set, I just stopped carrying SWOO because it stopped selling." And a lot of them were uh living on the fact that if you go on TCG player right now and you take a look at what Swoo boxes cost in general, they are right around cost for most of the sets, right? The second set's ticked up a little bit. First set has been out of print for a while. So that one's obviously carrying its own weight. But when rotation hits, the numbers on that will probably come down a little bit depending on if they push some cards forward or if they keep those cards the same. So we'll see what happens as far as the the numbers on Spark go. But the rest of the sets are pretty close to what cost is for us overall. So, you talk about shipping and you talk about fees and things like that, you're not making a ton of money on that stuff.

So, what we had to do, and we did this with Lorcon, we've done this with Digimon, and there was times when we had to do this with Flesh and Blood, and we do this with Yu-Gi-Oh pretty consistently, is because those games have a tendency to go to the bottom very, very fast is we sort of take a look at what we think we're going to sell within the first 30 days. And I don't really want supply after that. And some of those games actually 30 days is a little bit long. Like if I look at Shadow Vverse and I look at Digimon and I look at some of those so even some of the um supplemental sets for for Yu-Gi-Oh, right? They just don't carry for that long. I don't want to throw away the money that I'm going to make in the early times for that because I enjoy the first 2 3 weeks of that kind of stuff, but I also don't want to have I don't want to stock the inventory on those games as if I want those sets in perpetuity because it's just going to continue to go down.

And one of the terms that we have with regard to singles when more and more and more and more singles come into sort of the marketplace and things like that is we have a term called rot. And essentially what rot is is rot starts at pre-order numbers and then where does it land after the first week, the second week, the third week, the fourth week, the fifth week. And we monitor that on each of the different sets for each of the different games. Now raw on Final Fantasy, it was a lot different if we try to look at that numbers for Magic compared to other sets, right? Because that set came in, it sold out, it was out of control. It was crazy. and the numbers carried a lot heavier and a lot harder than what a typical set would do. But other rot rates you see around 30% the first week, another 20% the second week, and so on and so forth. So what that tells us is we have a certain mindset to open what we think we want to open. We're going to carry a certain amount, and then in general, we're not going to stock the product long.

If I've got sealed product on my shelf and I'm waiting for the miracle for that to appreciate when it comes to certain games, it's just never going to happen, right? like Pokemon, Magic, some of One Piece, these are anomalies. This isn't consistent stuff. Like recently, Flesh and Blood, old Flesh and Blood boxes have started to come back largely because there's a bigger community that's engaging with that game again. Um the adjustments that were made on printing for the hunted and uh high seas has started to really hurt in terms of allocation and what products in the marketplace for retailers because there's just so many more people that are playing the game. So, good for them, they've attracted more people to the game. It's a little bit rougher for us at retail if you don't have an established flesh and blood community. You're trying to come into this and you're trying to get that game going in your store right now. It's hard to do because product a lot of times is limited and people want the newest stuff and if you don't have the newest stuff, you're not going to be able to make any money on it and the older stuff is harder to find now because more people have come into the game. So, the supply and demand situation is is a little bit more challenging and flesh and blood's a game that doesn't rotate.

Games that have rotation and we'll see some of this with Swoo. We we'll definitely see some of this with Lorcana are going to deal with fluctuations for boxes as well. The same thing with Lurcana. Jafar sold really well for us, but we had to change our mindset to how many boxes do we want and how many are we going to sell within the first 30 days. Azerite was sort of the same and Arches before that as well.

Understanding the TCG market and ordering the TCG market based on where you can maximize your profit is really important. Like if your inventory is going to be dead after 30 days, why do you want any of that inventory? ordering with the mindset of of making sure that you can maximize your profit during that period of time and then taking those dollars that you had and then reinvesting them in a way where you can continue to make money. That's sort of the name of the game. That's what we're dealing with in general. That's that's how things should go around here. But you have to be able to have the headsp space as a retailer to make those adjustments and see that stuff happen in the marketplace. And if you aren't, and you're treating every TCG the same, and you're treating them all as if they're going to sell the same way that everything else does, or if your idea is that every set's going to every card game and every set's going to perform the way that Magic and and Pokemon do, that's a really really hard hill to sort of be on. You're going to you're going to find yourself drowning in an inventory, and if you don't make those adjustments, it's not going to work out for you.

I mean, it's no different than what we do in the other spaces of the store as well. So, if I take a look at board games, if I take a look at role playing, if I take a look at miniatures, there are certain board games and there are certain miniature games and there are certain role playing games that are just going to frankly and flatly outperform what the majority of the rest of the board games that I'm going to sell are. Well, I'm going to stock those with a little bit more depth and a little bit more width, and I'm going to slow down with those other things. So, if something comes in and it's a new release and it sits on my shelf for 30 to 60 days and I got two copies of it in and I sold one of them, I'm probably not going to reorder the second one to hope that it's going to sell, right? So, you have to use a little bit of uh discernment and a little bit of understanding on how to maximize those things.

So, why then if a game has boxes that go to zero or to very little profit after the first 30 days, would you want to continue to carry that sort of thing? Well, obviously I've got, you know, a week or two weeks or 3 weeks or four weeks of profit that I can make on those boxes during that period of time. And then I've got single sales and I've got acquisition that I can do. And then another part of it is pre-releases and events. So there's a bunch of money that I can make on events and then hopefully you've established a community throughout the sales for that set where you can continue to have weekly events where people are coming in and engaging. If you got leftover product from before, you can use those packs as prize support as part of that part of that sort of ecosystem of how to get rid of some of those product some of that product that's maybe not as maximized as well on your shelf as it would be for organized play support and things like that. And you keep the community engaged until inevitably the next set shows up and then we go through this process all over again.

But like satisfaction for me is taking a look at the macro number of what a set did over a period of time as opposed to trying to look at it and going, "Oh, I'm going to sell this box of cards for the next 12 to 18 months." The amount of sets that that happens for there's a consistency for is pretty small.

The other thing that comes up a lot of times is, you know, I have employees that talk about um you know, taking some of these Final Fantasy uh collector's boxes and putting them putting them aside, waiting for them to appreciate in value. Yeah, you know what? these these Final Fantasy collector's boxes 12 months from now I'm going to look at those things and and they're going to be worth more than what they are today. How much more? I don't know. But the reality of it is I can harvest the revenue from that. I can reinvest it 3 4 5 6 10 12 times between now and then and I probably can outprofit whatever the appreciation is going to be of those boxes as a business. Now, if you're a customer, you're a collector, you're somebody that's just like sitting on that stuff. And the idea is I'm going to buy one box to to open and I'm going to buy another box to be able to sell in a couple of years or a year. And I I've got this this small cache of boxes that are sealed that I'm going to use to pay for, you know, my hobby and my habit while I'm in the middle of this thing, then then that's great. But as a as a retailer that's doing this kind of stuff, I like to have active capital. I like to have working capital. A lot of times, you know, if my investment over a period of time isn't better than 8.5% on something, then why am I not just putting my money in the market and waiting for it to do something rather than reinvesting a product? It's the idea that I can continue to profit, continue to profit, continue profit, and go through that life cycle of being able to do that.

Now, some things are more obvious than others, but if everybody is sitting on Final Fantasy collector's boxes, you're not going to see that appreciation occur unless there's a massive buyout, and there's all sorts of stuff that sort of come into play when it when we start talking about that thing.

So, I'm not the largest account that any of my distributors have. Uh, I might be the largest brick-and-mortar store that some of my distributors have in terms of volume that we do and in in account size, but there's definitely online sellers that sell a lot more than I do. There's definitely brick-and-mortar stores that sell a lot more than I do if they're online focused and they only have brick and mortar hours maybe a couple of times a week, but what they do is they do volume selling and they don't maximize their their their profit as best they can. They just worry about moving units and move and and moving on.

What I'm seeing right now on these new games is massive, massive allocation. My allocation numbers on Gundam have been pathetic and my allocation numbers that I'm seeing on Riftbound have not been anything that I've felt positive about. So, there's definitely concern that I have with regard to Riftbound. Hollow Live was a little bit different. I managed to scoop some of that up that was sort of hidden away at a place that I hadn't bought from in a long time, but lo and behold, they had some boxes, so we hopefully should be okay. I I don't know what the life cycle of Hollow Alive is going to be like. I'm not familiar with with that market space and it's not a place that we've really engaged in outside of selling the Weiss stuff that we sold. And we did well on the Weiss stuff, but it's I think it's an upfront selling thing. I don't know if it's something that we're going to have consistent weekly events for.

And like I'm looking for games that I can either sell and maximize my profit on launch or I can sell maximize my profit on launch, sell singles, and then continue to run events and build a community around that so that I can keep doing that over and over and over again. Part of the challenge for for these new games that are coming out is that inevitably if if I'm seeing the growth that I'm seeing in sales for TCGs in general, inevitably everybody else is seeing those numbers as well. So if I'm seeing this kind of growth and I'm not selling as low as I could possibly sell and there's other people out there that are selling lower than I am at a higher volume than I am, then no doubt they're ordering more than I am as well. And if everybody's sort of going to the troth to do that thing, then these allocations are going to occur because everybody has more money. So, they're reinvesting into things outside of what they what they generally spend their money on.

So, Magic and Pokemon is is is brainless ordering right now. Like, you just order as much of it as you possibly can. You're going to sell through it for the most part, especially these bigger, higher volume sellers. You know, Flesh and Blood has been that for the last couple of sets. Uh, One Piece has been that pretty consistently. Though, I will say that One Piece is starting to slow down, at least for us. Like, I'm allowed I'm I'm getting more product than I've gotten before. I think that their focus is a little bit better than what it used to be. So the numbers are are are tweaked a little bit. I think they're not printing as much Dragon Ball as they used to and they're not printing as much Digimon as they used to. And apparently they're not printing as much Gundam as they used to because the numbers that I'm getting are a pittance compared to what I ordered.

Now the sad part about that is if you go back to my videos and you look 12 to 14 months ago, I was talking about how excited and enthusiastic I was for Gundam. We sell a lot of Gundam models. We got a bunch of crossover when it comes to that sort of stuff. So now I'm looking at what my Gundam numbers are and we ran the release event and we we hyped up the thing and we did the demos and all the stuff that we were supposed to do. And now I'm looking at what I'm potentially going to make on this thing and I'm going, does it even make sense for me to continue to have a community or to look to have a community here?

Part of the draw for CCGs for us is not just selling the sealed product up front. That's great, but I want to have a robust singles economy as well because inevitably I'm going to have players that are going to look to jump ship all the time. And people that jump ship in general as t as far as TCG goes, maybe they're going to open a box or they're going to open two boxes or whatever, but they're they're on the hunt for singles. So, if I don't have enough sealed product where I can crack those for singles to facilitate selling singles so that people can buy complete decks in the store and I don't have enough sealed product to be able to give out for prize support for organized play events for a period of time that lasts until the following the next set comes out. The intelligent thing for me to do as a retailer is to not waste any of my time, my effort, my resources, my demo experience getting my customers or employees involved or educated about it. It's just set it at the highest market price that I can possibly sell it, sell it at that price, and then move on to the next thing.

Now, I have no shortage of, in fact, we're looking at we're looking at another expansion, believe it or not. So, 2 years into this new space, we're looking at another expansion, either another 3500 ft² or another 7,000 ft². And part of the reason why is our event space is full every single night of the week now. And the majority of the fullness comes from TCG Player. It's people that are actively playing card games. So, I have no shortage of customers coming in for these games that even though I'm getting allocated some amount on Magic and some amount on Pokemon and some amount on some of these other games, I still have enough to be able to do what I want to do with my business. I still have enough to open singles. I still have enough for prize support. I still have enough to sell Sealed. I still have enough to take that money and to try to reinvest it in this. But with these newer products that are coming out, if I don't have enough stuff to do that out of the gates, then I don't want to commit to spending the time to get my customers engaged with product, then I'm not going to be able to sell them. Cutting out space on my event calendar, which is going to have to come from seats that already have asses in them right now because we have no shortage of people that are already playing the games that I have.

Lana is going to come out with Fabled uh right around Gen Con. We're going to give that game another swing during that period of time and see what rotation looks like. So, we're going to lean into that again and we're going to see what we can get. We have a decent size community for that, but I think it can expand a little bit.

If I look at what our one piece is tracking at, it's really good. We've got up numbers when when we talk about flesh and blood. Magic Pokemon Yu-Gi-Oh, no problem with with attendance for that. And Swoo was massive this weekend. Now, I think some of that has to do with the proximity to worlds. Some of that has to do with the sets being a little bit better. Although, not to get into too much of a tangent, they still have set architecture problems with that game. They still have problems with their leaders. They still have a whole bunch of things that they could do with SWOO to make SWOO better. But despite all the missteps and the challenges that they had and the things that they can adjust to that game, uh people are still showing up, which sort of speaks to how fun the actual game is itself without them bringing a lot to the table all the time with these new sets and different things like that and still having some real challenges. this last set is real challenging as far as leaders go. So hopefully um they've worked on their math and they're changing up some of that stuff moving forward and I'm positive they have a team that's there that can that can do that.

So um you know we're we're still uh strong supporters of the Star Wars Unlimited game. Um we're going to give Lurana another try. They've got new people at the wheel over there that's that that happened a couple of months ago or probably almost a year at this point. And um certainly leaning more into the TCG side of things than the Disney folks side of things, which for us as a store is going to make it a little bit more uh compelling, a little bit more attractive to sort of be able to manage the expectations of the customers that are coming in the door.

I if I look at my allocation from these suppliers and I'm getting cut 86% of what I tried to order and I'm only getting 14% from some suppliers when I'm talking about these new card games that are coming in. I'm not sure where to go with that. I don't have enough product to be able to do singles. I don't have enough product to meet the demand of pre-orders. I don't have enough product to be able to sell to my employees at a way that's conducive for them to get into the game, for them to champion the game. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me if I'm going to be cut that deep on these games to put a bunch of extra effort into stuff when I can just sell those box at market price, take that profit, reinvest it in the games that I have that are selling well for me that I can get product support for.

And the reason this is happening is exactly what I talked about. If I'm up this much, then those other bigger places are up this much. Well, what are they doing? there is a certain cap and there is a certain maximum marketplace value that you have on that. So what they're doing is they're doing the same thing that we're doing which is you're widening your your product selection and you're getting into these other games. And if you want a perfect example of that, you can watch Alpha Investments and you can look at what Rudy's doing. Rudy has decided that despite his misgivings on not wanting to get into games that he doesn't think has any longevity, he's swinging at a bunch of these products and he's a massive buyer when it comes to these sort of things. So, he's going to be trying out a bunch of these new TCGs. Well, that's a brand new buyer that's coming into that space. Well, if he's doing that and he's as technical about this as as it gets with with regard to profit and supply and demand, then everybody else is sort of doing that as well. So, the demand is bubbling up. But the reality of it is even with the demand being what it is, if there aren't events because there aren't support for those events, then the game's not going to carry long term. First set will be great. Second set will be a little bit worse. Third set will be a little bit worse because what I saw in the Star Wars Unlimited example was we lean into that really heavily because I thought it was a great game. And unlike what we're dealing with when it comes to the conversations about Riftbound and Gundam, most of retail at that time said the game was They didn't like the art. They didn't think it was going to be impressive. They didn't need another Star Wars game. Well, they were wrong. The first set sold astronomically well. We were able to capitalize on that. We sold the we sold the product really, really well. But now looking back in hindsight and reading what the responses were from those retailers that missed out on the first set and they came in on the second set and the second set wasn't as good as it is now because of the amount of supply that was in the marketplace. Those boxes went to zero very quickly. The product was not gated. The demand didn't eat that up. It was the wild west as far as that goes. Now the second set has rebounded since then. Not because I think it's that much stronger or it's in line with what the first set is, but some of that has to do with how bad the the third set was.

Twilight was an absolute disaster and the same sort of happened there as far as supply goes. They still don't have their supply under control over there. there there there's there's still some problems and I think that you know when I look at that game interesting as carbonite has been there's a lot of people that would never buy a non-carbonite product when it comes to swoo because there's no reason to because they only want to collect hyperspace borders on their cards and they can just get those in the beginning. So what's happening is there's a false value to what the non-carbonate boxes are because your hit rates aren't as high as what those ones are. You don't get the prestiges mixed in there. There's a bunch of challenges that you run into for that and they're printing a shitload of that stuff. Which is why when you look on TCG Player and you compare JTL Corset versus JTL Carbonite, you see a vast difference in the profit that you can make on those products as a retailer. Well, it's not going to take that long for people to understand that. This is what we started to see when collector's boxes came out for Magic and they had limited cards in those and everybody started buying collector's boxes and you saw draft boxes go way down and you saw set boxes go even lower and collector's boxes was where the money is. Well, now carbonate boxes where the money is and and ordering the the plane boxes doesn't make a ton of sense financially as a retailer when we look at those things.

So, dealing with these allocations, I have no doubt that more people have more money so they're buying more things. So that's exactly what we're looking to do as well. The difference between volume sellers and box sellers and things like that is we're carrying a lot of the load in our stores when it comes to uh running events and different things like that. So it would be really nice if some of these publishers and it's hard to do uh when it comes to Gundam and it comes to Riftbound out of the gates because they don't have any event data, right? So other companies before have taken a look at allocating product to stores based on what their event attendance is, what their community engagement is, and so on and so forth. It's not a perfect solution. People can always play with those numbers. They can put fake fake names in. They can do all kinds of stuff to sort of mess around with that. But there's some parameters you can put in there to figure out and sniff out whether those things are legit or not. but dividing up the dividing up the product and allocating in a way where the people that are engaged with building communities have some sort of prioritization uh to make sure that they've at least got product to support their organized play events for the period of time that they're going to have organized play products.

The other challenge too is there's no doubt in my mind that there's some gray market movement that's happening here. There are distributors that are getting allocations of this product and they are selling them out the back door. there there's no there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that that's happening. There's a lot of money to be made here. The other thing that's happening a lot with this stuff, especially the allocated product, is we'll see our wave 1 pricing come in and then there's a magical wave 2 restock and we're getting dinged with somewhere between a 10 and a 15 and a 20% increase in what our cost is to get that sealed product in. Sometimes it's higher than that. When they get restocked from certain places, we see that number jump consistently. Now, I get it. the market is saying we're making we're making this amount of money in there and distribution is a tier that gets the least amount of profit for the product that's sold. But at the same time, if we're going to get hit with those increases the way that we have been, then it's going to have to pass itself through to the marketplace and you're gambling on the order when it comes to that. Now, most of that stuff has been brainless. So, I get it. Distribution should make their money where they can. If they wanted to charge me more as a retailer instead of and do that instead of selling it out the back door for maximus maximum profit, I'd have less of a problem with that. I'm not sure what their terms of services with regard to the contracts they have signed with some of these publishers, but chances are Amazon stores of their own or white label stores of their own are probably a violation of that. But where's the motivation for any of those publishers to slow down the amount of product that they're buying at this point?

The other thing to touch on briefly too is we're not seeing the adjustments on pricing for tariffs that we've started to see on on the board in the board game side of things. Miniatures is coming in the book side of things. It's starting to happen, right? We're starting to see these increases in prices anywhere from 15 to 30%. You know, card supplies have already been there. Like we've been dealing with that for Ultra Pro and and Dragon Shields and a couple of others. We've started to see those numbers start to tick up and things like that. And and by and large card games, we haven't seen that. Now, I think with this wave of new card games, we're starting to see the price per pack move up a little bit, and we've seen a little bit of that happen with the other games as well. It's sort of naturally happened because the supply is so much lower than what the demand is now for Pokemon that Pokemon pack prices have gone up by themselves without any real MSRP associated with them.

TCGs are on fire. They're selling very well. these new ones coming into the coming into the space. Though they have a whole bunch of hype and there's a lot of excitement, there's a lot of enthusiasm for those for those games. If there's not enough product that's landing at the brick-and-mortar store level for those people to sell to make the profit that they need to make on those games to make it worth it to run those events to make sure that you have product support for those events and you can open up enough product on your own to be able to sell singles. We end up in a situation that we ran into with Altered a little bit in that I couldn't sell singles for Altered. Well, if you cut out onethird of the way that I'm going to generate revenue, and sometimes it's even more than that based on what the margin is on singles, you've lost the ability to profit the way that you can on that game compared to other games. That doesn't mean that I'm not going to carry the game. That doesn't mean that I'm not going to sell the game. What it means is that I'm not going to support the game because I don't have the tools I need to support the game, which is product. So, if I don't have supply, I can't have singles. I can't sell sealed. I can't sell product to my employees. I have to be market price. I can't edge out anybody in the local area, let alone the the national area, because I've got a little bit more supply. I can't play around with my singles pricing. I can't maximize what I want to do in organized play without this supply. And it's just a it's a strange situation to be in given that we've got two games that are super compelling that have had a lot of hype. There's a lot of marketing dollars. There's a bunch of team members that are there that are really bringing those games up. And then to see these allocations end up coming through the way that they are, it's deflating. The enthusiasm for those end up going down.

I I mean, retailing, it's a hell of a lot easier when I don't have to focus on singles or events or demos because I'm just going to sell as much of it as I possibly can at the market price and then move on. But there's no reason to have support there if I can't have enough product for singles and I can't get stuff that I need for organized play. So, it doesn't make it a real TCG. and these other games that I already have based on the numbers are killing it. So, I would survive perfectly fine without adding another TCG to the marketplace. We're doing we're doing great with the ones that are that are already there in existence that I already have relationship with that I'm still getting the product that I need to to be able to do everything that I need to do with that game.

So, I'm going to wrap it up with there. Feel free to stay on. Uh I'll do 22 23 minutes of uh AMA after this. Uh we'll be back again for another episode at some point. My schedule's a little bit weird now. I leave. I'm on vacation next week. Then I go to Vegas for the swoo thing. Then I'm in Gen Con for a week. And then when I get back from that, I got to go to Minnesota for my other store out there. So, it'll be a couple of weeks before we get this next one out. Um, feel free to comment in there if there's specific topics that you'd like me to talk about. I'm happy to talk about whatever you like. So, until then, happy gaming everybody. Thanks.