I just got an email from Steve Jackson Games and the message is posted on their website.
Excerpts:
A product we might have manufactured in China for $3.00 last year could now cost $4.62 before we even ship it across the ocean. Add freight, warehousing, fulfillment, and distribution margins, and that once-$25 game quickly becomes a $40 product. That’s not a luxury upcharge; it’s survival math.
The entire board game industry is having very difficult conversations right now. For some, this might mean simplifying products or delaying launches. For others, it might mean walking away from titles that are no longer economically viable. And, for what I fear will be too many, it means closing down entirely.
The past decade has felt like a golden era for tabletop board and roleplaying games. Target stores sell eurogames. YouTube has shows of people playing roleplay games. There’s so much innovative and availability compared to the late 20th century.
Is that all going to disappear in the new climate of trade wars?
I don’t think it will disappear, in part because of the rise of print-and-play games and distribution via PDF of most roleplaying game books and supplements, but high quality Euro-style boardgames, for which the components are typically sourced in Asia (and many of the designers of those games are based in Central and Eastern Europe) may become more expensive and difficult to find.
However, I’ve noted that a lot more Kickstarters are trying to find sources of domestic publishing and game production because of the already rising costs and delays of international shipping going back to the Covid pandemic, and perhaps one tiny bright spot is that this may encourage domestic entrepreneurs to develop this capability. And frankly, despite the costs of these games going up, people seem to be willing to Kickstart or buy premium components, so all things being equal (i.e. assuming the economy doesn’t go completely to shit, which is a big question mark), these are really ‘luxury’ items that people are often willing to spend a premium to get the best experience to have wooden or metallic components instead of cardboard punchouts and cheap injection molded plastic figures.
Cars and their complex supply chains are one thing, but it seems to me that board game components are primarily cardboard prints, plastic, wood and occasionally stamped metal. I know we’re quite far behind China in manufacturing capabilities, but can’t we at least make those here?
Among all the possibly affected things, board game pieces don’t seem like they’d be terribly hard to re-shore and start making here. Maybe it’ll decrease the months-long lead time it takes to ship games by freight, too.
Their games tend to be simpler (in terms of production values and complex pieces) than many others, but it still seems like a pretty vast chasm between even a complex board game and the simplest car.
According to the Game Manufacturers Association, there isn’t much capacity here, and where it does exist, it’s already more expensive than importing. Or, as Steve Jackson says:
Over the last few days, I have been talking at length with my factory representatives, figuring out how much of an item I need to order now to offset any expanded costs later. In addition, we are looking at where we can move manufacturing to outside of China (hard mode, not a lot of places outside of China or Europe produce boardgame components at the scale our industry uses).
When was the last time you looked at a board game? It’s not that you’re entirely wrong, but there are a slew of board games with very high quality components. Look at anything produced by Days of Wonder, Fantasy Flight Games, CMON, or a few others and you’ll see they’re much higher in quality than the Monopoly, Life, and Sorry games most of us grew up with. It’s not necessarily that we can’t make those here, it’s that we can’t make them for a reasonable price.
In the short term we might not be able to make them at all. I like to paint miniatures, and most of the companies I purchase from manufacture somewhere overseas. It might be Great Britain or China, but the only large miniatures company I occasional purchase from is Reaper Miniatures. They have a manufacturing facility here in the United States (Texas), but even they had to rely on Chinese labor to fulfill their Kickstarters over the last few years. I don’t know if they’ve moved all of their manufacturing capabilities to the United States yet or if they still rely on China.
The same is true of role playing games. I think a lot of D&D books are printed in the United States, but many other games are printed in China, and in the short term there might not be enough facilities in the United States to print these games. RPG books are much, much higher in quality today than they were in the 1980s with full color books being pretty much the norm now.
The long and short of it is a lot of game companies are going to go out of business if this tariff nonsense lasts for too long. A lot of local retailers will likely go out of business as well. I expect to purchase fewer gaming products this year.
The simple fact that the general public is going to be much poorer thanks to the tariffs means that luxury goods like games are going to take a hit. People are going to be using what they have, not buying anything new. They’ll need to save their money for basics like food and housing.
Bingo. Even if tariffs somehow didn’t affect the price of games, in uncertain economic times I will definitely be curbing my spending habits for non-essentials. I plan on going to a game convention this year, the first one I’ve been to in more than 20 years, but I might cancel my plans depending on how the year plays out.
Right, but isn’t the whole point of the tariffs (in theory) to spur domestic production again?
I’d love to see more “printed in the USA” games, especially if that can help make gaming-adjacent other production careers (printing, woodworking, CAD, machining, etc.) more viable again. I’m not sure if the tariffs would actually succeed at that (as opposed to just making all the board game companies go out of business since nobody can afford board games anymore)… but that’s at least the supposed goal… right?
Last week? …checks BGG… 70 games or so, including several dozen added in the last couple years. Waiting on several more still in production from Kickstarter, and have gotten similar emails from their producers warning about possible surcharges from the tariffs.
I’m hoping that medium-term to long-term, we’ll see a more robust domestic games industry, not just limited to the designers and IP owners at the top but all the working-class industries that could support them domestically.
But short term, yes, I’m sure the prices will go up I’m hoping the industry survives.
I already had to first downgrade and then altogether cancel my Nature pledge due to financial issues (more my own than the tariffs, though). I’m not happy about this situation, and tariffs aren’t the bet I would’ve taken. I didn’t vote for the dude. I’m just hoping there might be a silver lining to all this. Probably not =/
In order to spur US production, people would need to have capital available to start such a thing up, plus the cost of home-based production would need to fall below that of tariffed production, in fact enough below it that it would generate a profit to attract that investment capital. And the risk would be that the tariffs go away, leaving useless (overpriced) capacity.
Then what? If the tariffs are permanent, US board game buyers will be paying a lot more for their board games, or not buying them at all.
And on top of that, why do I care about domestic production in an area where it’s so much cheaper to buy from abroad?
‘Need’ is a relative term but for sure the offset printing industry has declined, not only because of offshoring but because there is so much less printing of periodicals and other four-color printed products, and the rise of (relatively) high quality print-on-demand (POD) services. However, these do not match the quality in either print or binding as dedicated offset printing, and are not suitable for volume printed packaging needs.
A survey of the current state of offset printing in the United States:
Will these tariffs encourage this kind of manufacturing to return to the US? That’s the broad idea, but it seems unlikely, especially in the short term. It would require enormous investment from companies rolling the dice on a currently incredibly murky, unstable future—and the equipment they’d need to even get started would itself need to be (you guessed it!) imported from China at enormously inflated cost.
“I’ve gotten quotes,” says the Steve Jackson Games statement. “I’ve talked to factories. Even when the willingness is there, the equipment, labor, and timelines simply aren’t.” Stonemaier Games even links to a specific case study—the recent efforts of a start-up called Quimbley’s Toys & Games that describes its ultimately failed attempt to produce games on US soil as “digging our grave”.
That’s echoed by Justin Jacobson of Restoration Games, speaking with BoardGameGeek: “Most folks don’t realize that it is literally impossible to manufacture most hobby games in the US, even if you didn’t care about reducing profit. I mean literally impossible.”
They get more into the math of multipliers in a follow-up article:
Finally, let’s get to tariffs. The first scenario is to pass the tariff up the chain.
$15: production cost (publisher pays the manufacturer $10) + tariff cost (publisher pays the US government $5)
$25: distributor cost (distributor pays the publisher, with a $5 increase to account for the tariff)
$30: retailer cost (retailer pays the distributor)
$55: consumer price (consumer pays the retailer)
While this isn’t impossible, the burden of risk and cashflow is disproportionately placed on the distributor and especially the retailer. This is the economics of survival, not greed. If a retailer has $1000 to stock their shelves, previously they could buy 40 games (and if they sell them all, their revenue would be $2000). Now they can only buy 33 games; if they sell them all, their revenue is $1815. Same exact investment, $195 less revenue. Month to month, that’s a losing proposition.
Here’s the full-multiplier scenario:
$15: production cost (publisher pays the manufacturer $10) + tariff cost (publisher pays the US government $5)
$30: distributor cost (distributor pays the publisher)
$37.50: retailer cost (retailer pays the distributor)
$75: consumer price (consumer pays the retailer)
In this scenario, if a retailer can spend $1000 on 27 games, their revenue is now $2025. That’s just barely over the $2000 they would have made in the pre-tariff scenario.
Why would a publisher feel the need to use the full multiplier instead of only passing on the tariff cost? Revisit the publisher economics described earlier: If a publisher wants to make 10,000 units of a new game, they now need to invest $150,000, not $100,000. The reinvestment cost for a reprint of 5,000 units is now $75,000. In the best-case scenario where they actually sell all 10,000 games and reprint 5,000 games, a publisher would end up with $25k more than pre-tariff. So while there is a solid case for publishers to increase their distribution price a little more than the cost of the tariff, applying the full multiplier probably doesn’t make sense.
You need economic stability to invest in building production capacity. That’s one thing we are sorely missing right now.
If you wanted to build and protect a domestic plastic component industry, you’d do it gradually, with subsidies and other incentives, and long-term contracts that look solid and real. The conditions that make people say, “this is a place i want to invest money, this is a place i want to seek work doing”.
You might protect an existing industry with tariffs. But wildly oscillating tariffs (that also affect the raw ingredients or components that manufacturer needs) are the opposite of the way to build domestic production.
I was having this exact conversation with a friend of mine a few days ago. No one is going to invest the capital to build out manufacturing plants for these kinds of components* without some level of assurance and trust that the investment will pay off, and that they won’t be left holding the bag, with a plant that no one will use, when the tariffs are rescinded in six months, or a year, or two years.
*- And the board game industry is probably just one of hundreds of types of products where the actual manufacturing of them was largely, if not entirely, offshored decades ago; bringing them back wouldn’t be easy or fast, even if there was a robust, trustworthy government program to support it.
Also, there’s the ultimate question…why would we want to onshore these factories? Even if we snapped our fingers and had these factories up and running domestically, they’ll generate a small number of low paying jobs right up until the point when they are fully automated out of existence. The benefit of producing domestically for many things, especially low-tech stuff like games, is negligible and in lots of cases the pollution created would have a net negative effect.
There are definitely some sectors where domestic production should be heavily incentivized, notably heavy manufacturing and tech, but that’s less to create jobs and more to protect IP and secure supply chains.
This is basically the same stupid conversation as we had with the coal miners. Sure, we can continue mining coal in order to pollute our waters, destroy our lands and kill hundreds of workers all to protect a few thousand low wage, low skill jobs. Or we could pivot to building high tech products that require new supply chains, research and raw materials that we can then sell globally while creating higher paying skilled jobs that are more stable and safer. Now, I suppose this argument isn’t compelling to a 55 year old coal miner with no will or means to get retrained, and I sympathize, but for everyone else this should be a no brainer.
I’m hoping the industry survives.