View from the Game Store is a weekly(-ish) column by Marcus King, owner of Titan's Entertainment Cafe in Battle Creek, Michigan.  This week, Marcus looks at what makes a hobby game store a hobby business, or a professional one.

In almost no other industry I have been involved in do we see "Retail Store Owners" who get involved in their business quite the same way we do in the game industry.  It's very common for someone who owns a game store to have been a gamer, who thought it would be 'fun' to own a game store and so they opened one.  They had twenty thousand dollars or less; found a spot and signed a lease and there you go.  That was how I got started, to be sure.

Ever known a guy who owned a McDonalds?  I know three people in the area who own McDonalds franchises.  None of them decided to open a franchise because it sounded like fun or because they just really liked cheeseburgers.  I also have a friend who owned a Subway Sandwich Shop.  He was not just a big fan of subs or sandwiches.  These four people have one thing in common: They wanted to own a profitable business first and settled on what kind after much research on investment costs, franchising fee's and what might be available to them.

Now have you ever known a game storeowner who just wanted to own a good retail business?  Did research into franchising, the local markets, the local economy and found that a game store was precisely what the neighborhood they were in needed and so opened one?  Me neither (although I do have a couple friends who come close -- but they both were specifically interested in owning a GAME store, the research they did was the location and financing type).

What does that say about the game industry as a whole?  I dunno.  But I can tell you that while you might get a lot of respect from a bank or the chamber of commerce or suppliers if you own a McDonalds or Subway -- that is generally not the case with owning a game store.  My bank thinks my store is a hobby business.  Not a hobby shop but a business which exists only because it is the OWNER'S hobby to OWN that business (and to be clear,  I am not saying that my main suppliers -- ACD, Alliance, Diamond, GTS, Premiere -- do not respect me, but other suppliers do not.  More in a minute on that).

My bank looks at my shop, which may do a million dollars in sales in 2011, and they see a little podunk shop with bad lighting and poor service.  Because they have dealt with thousands of stores like that, whose owners owned those shops because doing so was their hobby, not their profession.  And because they've never been IN my business to learn otherwise.  See, I fall into a 'category' -- and real businesses, like McDonalds and C-Stores and Pharmacy's fall into another category.  Not because of anything other than perception of what we sell.  I mean, what serious person could make a living selling comic books and games?  (My mother always wanted to know when I would get a 'real' job).

In business this is apparent to me in many ways.  In the way my bank will not even consider a small business loan even though I have 24 years of business experience, and 8 straight years of profits to show.  But also in how I call a national coffee supplier -- and they refuse to make weekly deliveries to my store even though they have 14 other stops in my town.  The message is: You do not own a REAL business.

Even some of the publishers I deal with think of game storeowners as 'other' than industry professionals.  Retailers are not allowed to have a vote in the game industry's primary trade organization: GAMA, the name of which is the Game Manufacturers Association.  The message is clear.  Retailers are not quite worthy of being viewed as professionals.  Frankly, having visited many other stores in my tenure in this industry, I can understand that.  I see owners at registers who don't greet you when you come in, or worse yet, follow you around because they didn't recognize you.  I see shops where the owners smoke inside.  I see shops where the lighting is dim, the staff dressed in vulgar T-shirts and ratty cut off jeans.  And since many owners enjoy running their shops that way, there is nothing wrong with them doing so.

I just prefer not to be painted with the same brush, thank you very much.  My staff wear uniforms similar to those worn at Best Buy -- blue polo shirts with the company embroidered logo on them for staff, long sleeve dress shirts for managers.  We have ample lighting, clean floors and bathrooms, and well laid out store with no boxes sitting on the floor -- ever.

As many of the retailers I know prepare to gather at Gen Con this year to discuss forming a Game Retailers Organization -- it is my hope that such an organization can become reality.  And, that in so doing all game storeowners can be viewed by others as professionals.  Including shops like mine and all others.

I wonder what the game industry would look like if my store was the example of a lower end store, instead of a higher end store.  What would our industry be like if the barrier to entry to owning a game store was as high as that of owning a Subway sandwich shop, instead of being much lower than owning a comic book shop?

Maybe I should be careful what I wish for....

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.