Today marks the last day of trading for Fortress Games in Townsville, formerly the Games Exchange.
All being packed up and moved out tomorrow.

Sad news.

I'm happy that my local game store (really a comic store that has games) seems to be doing ok -- not super-great, but ok. Comic books give him a stable revenue base, with Friday night and Saturday Magic tournaments bringing lots of people to the store.

It used to be that our gaming groups spent pretty heavily as well -- but there hasn't been much we've invested in for a year or more. No one made the transition to 4.0 or Pathfinder. So we're now the poor relations (but the store owner is a roleplayer, so we still get the late slot on Fridays and occasional Saturdays).

Steve

This is always a sad deal. My local store seems to stay afloat with war games (WH40k and similar) and board games with RPGs being much less of the sales. They also recently partnered with someone that opened up a CCG store next door with an adjoining doorway. This has helped to supplement, I believe, and also helps with the fact that my FLGS owner refuses to sell CCGs and deal with the Pokemon-type crowd.

I'm expecting two of the gaming stores in town to close before too long.

One is really a comic-book store that's had majorly declining sales for the past couple of years. The owner has talked about selling off the store more than once, but he really doesn't want to sell it to anyone competent, for reasons that I can't explain. His gaming selection includes some White Wolf, a smattering of Rifts, and an overdose of 4E D&D. He has two employees, one that can't be arsed to do anything but read the comics books as they come in. The second is a bat-crap insane Liberal (At times) who openly harasseses military men who try to shop, which sadly tended to be the majority of their business.

The second is a bit more of an established gaming shop, but they've all but abandonded carrying any gaming books and rely on Magic: The Gathering tourneys to keep them around. The owner, who really was keeping the place together, passed away in January and the store has been hemmoraging customers since. It's hard to imagine a scenario where the store (and the now-owner, the wife of the deceased) can survive.

Our last FLGS closed down last month. Now its just two Games Workshop stores (plus one bookshop that had two of the D&D 4e core books last time I looked). All the gaming business has moved on-line, which is good for prices but not so good when it comes to connecting players.

Mine has been growing for ages;
http://www.sentrybox.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go5WlI2tXr4

Is there an employment correlation? Alberta's oil and gas industry is going gangbusters and Canada wasn't so much hit by the global financial meltdown.

Obsidian Portal and Pen and Paper Games bot are international, though most of their members are U.S. The only way to change that is to add your name to the fray.

We lost two game stores last year. The one about a mile from my home and the other main one across town both closed. They were the two largest ones in the Denver metro area. There is one about 35 miles from here, but what a drive. Went up there a couple of months ago and took me almost an hour and a half to get there. Only took an hour to get home though.

At the last con I met the owners of a new store only about 10 miles away, but they are a small store, set in the basement of a larger store. Only have a single room and only one small table for gaming, mostly Magic I have heard. One almost has to go online to buy stuff now, and be born with gaming friends, or inherit them. Finding gaming friends online is not as easy as it should be, neither is it easy to find them at cons.

I have decided to attempt to convert non-gaming friends ...

Maybe if they enjoyed movies like the Lord of the Ring. or Aliens, or Underworld, or Serenity, or Star Wars or Trek, or Avengers, or Game of Thrones, or any one of the many computer games that relate in some small way to face to face pen and paper games. I suck at these kind of transformations. But I would think most people could do a much better job at recruiting people to set around the table with.

I am going to attempt the board game routes.

The biggest online gamer connection is I think PenandPaperGames dot com. I have been on there for years. Even found a couple of gamers on there once, but they moved to Illinois. Too far to game f2f.

Have had a game listed since I registered. Have like 1600 views on the game description thread, and over 5000 on my profile, but only a few have posted or PM'd to actually game.

Think the problem is that gamers know what they like and don't like. Board gamers don't generally do rpg. And wargamers don't generally rpg. And rpg'ers are a picky lot. Like I just do not like Western, Steampunk, or high powered High Fantasy. I run a real dark and gritty low fantasy game. That seems to be not popular now. With the Game of Thrones on right now, I would think it would be more popular. So, I just got the new rules and am going over them. Looks like I may ditch my thirty year old fantasy world for Westros.

Back about ten years I used to run a sci-fi game as well as the low fantasy game. That was for me very difficult to keep switching gears. Running one genre, the low fantasy game, allowed me to be in the low fantasy game frame of mind all the time and that made thinking up plot threads much easier. Stuff would just come to me all day every day and I would write it down in a notebook and polish it up at night. Loved that game. But people moved, wife put feet down, kids were born, and jobs changed. Now I am setting with a game and no players. Hard to get motivated when there is no light on in that tunnel.