We have had previous threads on GW. I never got into Warhammer, 40k or any of their other games. Most of my friends did. I know from them and the web that GW had a golden goose and basically got greedy and killed it. Plus, they switched to a new wonder plastic for their miniatures. It melted if left in sunlight too long.
An email I got from SleeveKings, which I mostly use for card sleeves but they also distribute games. The US Tariffs & Sleeve Kings in the USA – sleevekings
Long blog, but a paragraph regarding the cost of a $50 game and basically a 100% tariff:
“So what if we want to make the same $8 difference from the $20 we used to get from the distributor and the $12 ($10 direct cost + $2 shipping from China to the USA) we used to get? Then our cost + profit would need to be $20.20 + $8 = $28.20. So our MSRP would need to be $70.50 to get a 60% off price of $28.20. We would then need to raise our prices by 41% (from $50 to $70.50) to keep the same margin on the distributor price.”
I missed the edit window
For a while in the 90’s, TSR was lawsuit happy. They sued fan sites, a European mytholgy site which used the word “kobold”. They even sued a Tolkien fan site for using the words TSR stole from Tolkien.
At the same time, White Wolf’s official site offered out of print books as free PDF’s, included list of fan site with descriptions and links, and had a hidden link which lead to a pege of weirdness.
[Moderating]
Just a reminder that there are plenty of other threads on the tariffs, but this specific one is in the Game Room, and therefore it should be focused on the impact on games and gaming, rather than a more general discussion of tariff-related issues.
Or we could end up in a massive trade war, and games made in the US become prohibitively expensive in every other place. The game industry is pretty international. A game that can only be sold in one country has a much lower chance of succeeding than one that can be sold everywhere.
This will really hit the Kickstarter market.
Those games often sell because of the buzz they generate with images of sculpted miniatures, oodles of colorful boards and many uniquely crafted playing pieces. The game can be good in it’s own right, but to see market at all this way they first have to generate a swell of support and cash.
We will see few willing to risk more money for less product.
Especially mid-kickstart games.
I knew about the first but not the second. According to my buddy, 3D printing will or has killed the Warhammer profit machine- comes out with a set of rules and figures to match, gamers build the best army possible, next- change the rules, and new figures so the old armies are obsolete- rinse and repeat as often as possible.
But thanks for the second tidbit, I did not know that!
Yep.
Indeed.
I have four games which I supported on Kickstarter or Backerkit, which are currently in production:
- A board / miniatures game (DC United) with tons of cards and plastic minis
- An RPG (Household Vol. 2) with a number of books, cards, custom dice, and plastic minis
- Two RPGs (reprint of the old Elfquest RPG, and an expansion for Coyote & Crow) with a number of books, maps, etc.
All of them are being produced in China. I suspect that there will be significant hiccups and surcharges involved, to get those into my hands.
What a mess. To complicate things, I think I see at least one CMON game on your list?, and they seem to be struggling.
Best of luck, I know the wait can feel really long on those sometimes.
Well, back when your EPA wasn’t gutted, maybe.
Free League is running a Kickstarter for their Alien RPG game. While not a board game, the set comes with miniatures, custom dice, cards, a dial counter and other stretch goal tchotchkes besides “Here’s a book”. Two things going for them is that they are an established company versus some hobbyist’s dream and they have nearly $1.9mil pledged right now on a $50,000 request. Obviously that $1.9m needs to pay for everyone’s pledge rewards but it hopefully gives them some cushion. They say that they’ll be eating the costs of any tariffs for the Kickstarter though may need to adjust prices on future products. They’ll also be shipping US product to a distribution center so no individuals are getting a box from Lithuania with a customs bill attached.
The cost of the new tariffs will be paid by Free League at the point of import, i.e. when the games are imported to the US from the countries where they are manufactured: the EU (Lithuania) for the books and China for the boxed sets. While this may certainly have long-term effects on our future plans for things like manufacturing, shipping and pricing, it will not have any immediate effect on this Kickstarter.
I’m in tech too. There are 3 major problems in the tech labor market.
- H1B Visa abuse
- Offshoring of IT jobs
- AI
Offshoring of light manufacturing has no correlation at all to these problems. Bringing factories back here isn’t going to protect a single white-collar job from being lost. We absolutely need to change our policies in these 3 areas, these jobs are the kinds of jobs we absolutely need to retain.
If we build more factories here, especially if they are non-union, it’s almost certain that they will be primarily staffed by migrant workers, just like in our agriculture and food processing industries. These are the stereotypical “jobs that Americans won’t do”. Barring and deporting these migrant workers will drive more of that work overseas because Americans won’t do it. If we see a bunch of laid off American tech workers filling these jobs we are royally fucked.
There is an inherent flaw in this logic. Maybe not exactly a flaw, but they ignore the possibility of changing their wholesale business model away from a percentage-based margin. It would be a massive headache of course, but they could certainly change the pricing model they use with the distributors to make the tariff a direct passthrough. Using this model, the wholesalers and retailers are dramatically increasing their profits on the back of that artificially inflated MSRP.
I certainly don’t agree with the tariffs at all, but I get annoyed when the affected businesses are misleading in their arguments. That said, I’m sure sleevekings and their peers have little leverage when working with the big box stores and Amazons of the world when it comes to renegotiating the wholesale model.
The other article goes into more detail about that: The Math of Tariffs – Stonemaier Games
Assuming a game that previously cost $10 to make and is now subject to a $5 tariff (this was from before the jump o 125%):
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.
The Solution?
Let’s try a different proposal where the publisher simply eats part of the tariff cost and the distributor and retailer pursue a middle ground increase:
$15: production cost (publisher pays the manufacturer $10) + tariff cost (publisher pays the US government $5) $23: distributor cost (distributor pays the publisher, with the publisher eating $2 in tariff costs) $30: retailer cost (retailer pays the distributor, with the distributor adding a small amount) $60: consumer price (consumer pays the retailer)In this scenario, if a retailer spends $1000 on 33 games, their revenue is now $1980. That’s a lot closer to the $2000 they would have made by spending the same amount in the pre-tariff scenario. Also, importantly, in this scenario the publisher is making up for eating part of the tariff by increasing their direct sale revenue (MSRP goes from $50 to $60). I think this is the most reasonable approach to this tariff debacle.
Its funny because the abuse of H1B visas really is taking our jobs away- not strawberry pickers or toilet cleaners. And yet the GOP is 100% behind them.
Yup, this should the #1 economic issue raised in debates. But it almost never gets any airtime. These visa holders are taking high paying jobs, stagnating wages, consuming desirable housing, and eventually they leave and take their earnings and new skill home with them. It’s all negative for us and there is no real shortage of specialized workers here.
Negative for us workers- but all pluses for the employer, who will pay them far less.
And have a borderline criminal amount of control.
I used to work with a bunch of h1b visa holders. We joked that they were “green card slaves”, because they couldn’t just quit. But all the guys i worked with eventually got their green cards and stayed in the US.
I don’t think anyone will get an h1b visa to make board games in the US, though. I’m not sure what skills are needed for that. Mostly, i think you need machinery. Machinery to make dies and to injection mold figures. Probably a few low wage workers to pour plastic beads into vats and remove and package the pieces at the other end.