This is in stark contrast to my recent experience trying to get my hands on a board game a few years ago. I chose Dragonfire, a game from 2017, and then I realized that it was almost impossible to find another expansion. So I've wanted to try Runebound since 2015 and could only get the French version and none of the expansions. There seems to be a lucrative business on eBay where people have been selling board games at ridiculously high prices for several years. The availability of board games from time to time is not great at all.
This explains to some extent FOMO (Fear of Missing) which is very common in crowdfunding board game discussions on Kickstarter and Gamefound. There is no regular "Kickstarter Exclusive" section of the game. Not all Kickstarter games are sold at retail either, and when they are, they're often only available for a limited time. You always get a settler or Catan, but not very successful games can easily disappear and remain undiscovered after 5 years.
Before Amazon, books had the same problem. Space in the bookstore is limited so they have the latest bestsellers and cool classics but no random books from 5 years ago. Amazon then came up with the long-tail business model, which showed that given the near-unlimited shelf space in its massive warehouse, the aggregate demand for those old books was still good enough to make it work. Too bad Amazon never delved too much into board games, when I bought board games from Amazon it wasn't from a third party.
