Ron Catapano of Comics Plus in Mount Holly, New Jersey saw Daniel McAbee's comments on CCG release (see 'Daniel McAbee of The Tangled Web on Yu-Yu' and 'Score Explains Yu-Yu CCG Rollout.') and feels that specialty stores have an important impact on CCG sales:

In reply to Daniel McAbee of The Tangled Web, you are not alone! We won't receive our Yu-Yu cards until the next wave, but it doesn't matter too much because we won't be supporting the game anyway.  We decided when Yu-Gi-Oh! came out that we would not support any game that didn't support us as a specialty shop.

The makers of these games haven't yet realized that specialty shops can cut the life span of a popular game by 6 months to a year by not supporting the game.  This is why Wizards of the Coast games do better than most, Wizards does a better job of supporting specialty shops - so we do a better job of expanding their fan base by supporting their games.  Yu-Gi-Oh! (a hot property) is just about dead after a little over a year while Pokemon lasted over 3 years.  Even with Wizards turning Pokemon back to Nintendo, I still sell as much Pokemon as I do of the latest Yu-Gi-Oh! set.

For us to support a game we have to be able to get the product easily and at the same time or sooner than mass market stores.  We also have to be able to compete on price and still make enough profit to keep tables in our store for gaming instead of filling the space with more products for sale.

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