LGS Net Income is no longer being maintained, but thank you for reading this anyway!
[Due to employment starting in late 2024 that requires me not to be publishing any hobby game industry content, I have taken down the articles from LGS Net Income aside from placeholders like this one. Read on for brief details.]
Greetings all. My name is Michael Bahr and this was my weblog. I’ve worked in the hobby game industry in various roles since 1997.
From 2012 to 2023, I owned and operated Desert Sky Games in Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. In December, I sold my business in a blockbuster deal to Tucson, Arizona-based Amazing Discoveries, making my store into their fifth location (so far!).
From 2014 to 2022, I wrote The Backstage Pass on Google Blogger to entertain readers interested in the business and hopefully let others learn how to avoid my mistakes. Over time, the Pass built far more of readership than I expected, and I was truly humbled at how avidly and graciously I was received within the industry, from publishers to distributors to media to my game-store-owning peers.
Along the way I learned immensely from peers in the industry, above all, the legendary now-retired game store owner, a man I am honored to call mentor and friend, Paul Simer. Paul taught “Net Income” as a primary goal. We as industry entrepreneurs often started out as players, and it takes a mental shift to realize that the best way to serve our player communities was by ensuring our stores earned stable, consistent net income. And that meant making the right analytic decisions.
Over the years writing The Backstage Pass, I received more and more requests for deeper guidance. “I’d pay for a seminar course in the way you run X,” they would say, where X is TCG singles, video games, or whatever I was showing great results in at the time. Google Blogger was too limited for this, so I switched to Substack and called the new blog LGS Net Income.
From 2023 to late 2024 I published hundreds of articles that were free to read and 36 deeper articles that were exclusive for paid subscribers and directly taught some component of the game store business. Given that I originally promised 10 paid-exclusive articles per year, I feel pretty good about having delivered more than triple that amount.
In late 2024, I landed a great job in another part of the industry, the kind of job that you don’t pass up. My employer needed me to stop publishing the blog, and there were enough legitimate reasons for this that I had no objection. I have saved the content in my personal archives, but it will remain offline moving forward. Years down the road when I retire, maybe I’ll write a book. We’ll see.
I hope my readers were entertained, educated, amused, and ultimately had great business outcomes as a result of reading LGS Net Income! Thank you for being along for the ride, and I wish you all the best of health and prosperity!
