Always cool to have new readers

This blog gets very little publicity I only expect friends to poke in every once in a while. I suspect the bulk of my 8k+ hits probably came from random spiders and spammers. Akismet does help me weed out a whole TON of porn and pharmaceutical ads. And then the occassional Google searches for the Haley Starshine cryptograms… And quite rarely I might write something half useful that gets indexed.

Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting the response I got from this post I wrote on Legio.

I checked my Statpress. I think Edwin might have been Googling for the address of Battlefront’s Shah Alam factory or something. Unexpectedly, my blog came up on the first page of the search. And for some reason, he clicked my page, and read it.

It must not have been pleasant to find a complete stranger calling him a megalomaniac. I did try to make the reference so obligue that only a scant handful of people who’s neck-deep in KL’s boardgaming sub-culture would even know who I was talking about.

It’s true that I have judged him without ever having met him. And perhaps unfortunately, the crowd that I hang with will always be negative towards him.

I hang at Wolf’s shop, where Edwin was a one time customer, and henceforth competitor. Maybe he saw Wolf’s range of games to be rather limited and thus invested in a side business to import games in greater quantities and reach a wider audience.

But boardgames have been more expensive since he took over. Well, cost had gone up. On top of that, Wolf is terrible at math, and had been selling at wafer thin margins without checking if he was doing it profitably. So really, a businessman can’t be blamed for that.

I hear that he has exclusive distributorship from certain boardgame companies. Power to him. And with this status, he was handing out warning letters to anyone else who tried to bring in any games without going through him. Wolf just gave up selling boardgames for a while. Besides, his usual customs had been lured away by the ‘steep discounts’ (off elevated list prices) from Edwin already. Settler’s Cafe, which was a boardgame themed cafe operating at Damansara Jaya some time ago, understandably obtain their copies of games from their Singapore franchise. They got a letter from Edwin for that. Nothing wrong here. He has the right to look after his business. He may or may not have overstepped his rights, but using a little bit of intimidation can’t hurt his attempt to position himself at the top of the food chain. Probably a well calculated move. Nothing wrong here.

Wolf did research, took some risk, and brought in new games from Rackham and Battlefront. Sold groups of players on these games. Built a small community. Then someone else muscled in on the market, sold for cheaper, drew Wolf’s customs away until he gave up. Then prices jumped up. Wolf doesn’t know how to run with the leads he built. Edwin is the cannier businessman. There’s nothing wrong here. I’m perfectly sincere about this.

It’s sad that instead of building a more varied and broader gaming community, the few businesses are sniping each other for the same small pool of players. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not wrong. Business is business.

Edwin used to partner up with Games Circle. He needs a brick & mortar company to get his distributorship. Each party had something the other party needed, so it was a pretty sensible agreement. But that partnership had since dissolved. Something about some investments being audited as being irrelevant to core businesses or something. This is just what I hear, so it’s not verified.

But during that time, there was animosity between GC and everyone else, Comic’s Corner, Settler’s Cafe, and Wolf. That was L’ Petit’s grief, who had grown up with the various iterations of GC over more than a decade, but it had suddenly become hostile to him when he started working for a ‘competitor’.

Instilling paranoia and divisiveness in our tiny gaming community? That’s not smart business at all. Probably pettiness.

Then there was that thing when he poached a staff from Settler’s Cafe. Giving the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he discovered some potential in the young man and wanted to groom him in sales. And maybe it’s just coincidence that when Settler’s started going south, he also changed his judgment of the young man and released him into unemployment limbo.

Also heard a story of how he gave grief to his supplier. He had a 2 page ‘long’ order with one item of everything. But couldn’t wait his turn behind other pallet-sized international orders, and had to call in and give grief. Well, he IS the distributor of the game in Malaysia, but seriously is that any reason to ‘flex’.

It’s also true that he gives 100% consignment to retailers. But it’s equally true that he won’t be able to get shelf space for his products if he didn’t. Boardgames is such a narrow market that it’s not really feasible for many stores to stock them. Those stores are doing HIM the favour or else his stocks won’ t get much exposure. Once he walked into a random Comics Corner and wanted to take back some of his goods. “These are mine and I can take it back.” Without offering any documentation that he’s taking back his consignment? Is that proper business procedure? Or was he trying to pull a fast one when there was only a lone, goofy-looking store clerk at the counter.

His grandiosities are also inexplicably genetic. I heard the story of his son walking into a store, saw a group playing a boardgame, demanded that one of the players scoot over, and he took over that poor kid’s game. It’s like he thinks himself the crown prince, heir to the little kingdom of all boardgames in Malaysia, and he has the mandate to lord the peons around. He tried to lead an alliance to gank the owner of the boardgame, but he got wiped instead cos nobody liked his BS attitude. He left in a huff. I don’t know how old he is, but he sounded like he’s 9.

Upon all these stories, I built my impression of Edwin. Some of these stories show that he’s no more than a canny businessman doing his best in a very niche market. Other stories, paint him as a petty and unlikeable character. I hear all these stories, but I’ve kept myself from telling them here, cos I don’t know who might drop in and read this. But since some odd chance has let the cat out of the bag, I might as well make my case more clearly.