God Damn You, Wil Wheaton

I have a new nemesis.* His name is Wil, and he's this ridiculously popular Internet guy. He did some really cool stuff in the 1980s as an actor and now he is a blogger and writer and game designer and basically too cool for school.

He's been doing this thing lately, and it's a thing that is really good for the games industry, and I hate him for it because it makes my life moderately more difficult. He has been reviewing games. Good games. Games people then want.

And then I can never buy that game for my store again.

See, Mr Wheaton, being the incredible nerd icon that he is, has a lot of reach when he reviews a game. He gets a lot of people interested in his game, and then I have people asking me for it. Except, I'm not the only games retailer in Canada. I'm one of hundreds, and all of them are calling the same distributors trying to get a bunch of copies of whatever was just reviewed. In the past six months, I haven't had one request for Castle Panic. This week, I've had a dozen or more. And I know I'm not the only retailer who has to deal with this.
So my distributor runs out in the sudden deluge of orders, and then they have to wait for more from the producers of the game, and the producers need to wait to reprint because Wil Wheaton is something like a localized board game Armageddon.

What the hell, Wil? How am I supposed to sell people a game I can't get anymore? Why do I have to look like an idiot because you decided to like a game nobody's asked me for in months? At least send me an e-mail or something, letting me know you're going to be publishing a review of Game X so I should stock up In a big way. Or, y'know, return any of my calls. Or just to chat or whatever. Dick.**






* For the record, I actually dig Wil Wheaton, and wish him and his all the best in all of their endeavors, even those that have me fielding calls for games I don't have, or have enough of. What he's doing is great for the games industry and I'm really happy that he's devoted some of his time and energy towards introducing people to games they don't own.

** Wil Wheaton isn't actually a dick. And I've never actually sent him emails, nor phoned him. Though, having a retailer Advanced Warning list would actually be awesome.