4 hours ago, BrobaFett said:Without a true ISBN number Barnes and Noble cannot purchase Armada stock, and it appears that the only non-wave 2 or earlier products with a true ISBN are the campaigns. This is, of course, based off me physically checking with Barnes and Nobel and confirming yep, nothing released after ISD/MC80 or Rogues and Villains other than the campaign even listed on their stock list. So this seems, essentially, like a complete over blow of the situation.
B&N will severely discount their stock, but that is their prerogative and why FFG shifted to the "protect the FLGS" sales model which included shutting retailers like B&N out of purchasing stock through their ISBN agreements and disallowing those huge price cuts to continue on new stock. FFG may have made huge missteps the last few years that are pretty indefensible, but to say they pandered to B&N at the expense of FLGS' is just misinformation. If anything, the critical way they failed FLGS' is FFGOP's complete inability to function on any sort of level that would help their games to flourish and foster game communities. But FFGOP and FFG are 2 different entities.
Yea, I was talking about the past year of
X-Wing Releases
, which have been shucked by B&N either early, discounted, or both.
Including the most recent Wave 6 expansions, which debuted at B&N last week and aren't expected to hit anywhere else until the end of this week or possibly next. For instance:
I don't know what you think FFG's "protect the gamestore" strategy or policy entails,
@BrobaFett
, but this is not the first time B&N has violated the official street date release with X-Wing Products and it's still happening as of this past week's newest wave... so... ? And when B&N released the X-Wing Clone Wars stuff (whatever wave that was), it was available effectively at 50% off of MSRP with the BOGO promotion they were running, so not sure what "disallowed price cuts" you are referring to... ??? This isn't some fluke... as B&N has been at this for the past few X-Wing releases, and FFG/Asmodee certainly hasn't appeared to deny them the right to order product or anything like that...
So, I think the burden of proof that FFG is "protecting gamestores" is on you... what policies does FFG have in place? What incentive is FFG providing to buy from the FLGS? Bear in mind, FFG has recently starting offering excluisve promos for some games if you preorder directly from FFG/Asmodee themselves (e.g. LotR), and every FLGS owner I've talked absolutely despises Alliance (the distributor FFG/Asmodee uses), since the minimum purchase order is burdensomely high and since it seems that often when their is a stock shortage, big box stores with huge orders get their product first and small FLGSes just looking to order a few copies of each new thing gets the shaft.
