You are incorrect about this. From the Peterson Institute for International Economics:
…
Stranger
All my friends love Spirit Island. I’ve only played it once, and would like to play it again, but arranging that is complicated. But, based on this thread, I decided to buy a copy before it becomes unavailable. I bought the base game plus “Branch and Claw”, at the advice of one of those friends.
(There are no tarriffs on stock already in the country. I just stocked up on face masks, too.)
It is an excellent game. The difficulty level is very tunable, with explicit rules on how to do it. And it has a lot of replayability.
There’s also a Steam version where the computer manages all the rules for you. Which brings me back on topic: I wonder if a lot of board game companies can survive with a “side” business of computerized versions. The market is very different, since most board gamers like the manipulation of physical pieces, but when physical production is costly, making sales where the marginal production cost is almost nil might be enough to keep the doors open a crack.
Oh gee, you mean NINE days, not “maybe a week”? Still, every retail etc store keeps more than 9 days stock.
I mean, Covid shut down thousands of business- mostly restaurants etc- but not in the first two weeks.
And see- game companies will have a large influx of business- until tariff-free stocks are depleted. And who knows? With the “tariffs on. no tariffs off” thing that has been going, game companies might not be seriously affected at all- maybe next week- the tariffs are gone!
Greater Than Games also had a recent hit with the two player card game Compile. The stand alone expansion was due out in the summer. Now? Who knows?
Uh, i don’t think buying stock that’s already here is really going to help them much long-term. It even medium term.
You say that like it is an entirely good thing. For any business to succeed, it has to plan. It is impossible to plan if you don’t know when or if tariffs will start or how much they will be.
It is not, not at all- which is why shutting down less than two weeks after the Tariffs took effect is foolish. Sure, the tariffs on/off make it very hard to plan, and that’s bad- but it does mean it is more advisable to hunker down for a few months until the dust settles.
Gloomhaven’s publisher says that their copies of Gloomhaven: Second Edition are effectively trapped in China as a result of the tariffs.
A friend of mine works for Cephalofair (Gloomhaven’s publisher) as their sales manager and event coordinator. None of this situation is good, at all.
Ug. I hope they can survive this. Pretty nasty that his congressional rep won’t even talk to him about it.
That depends on many things. First, when will the dust settle? What will conditions be then? Second, whaat is the current state of the company’s finances? I strongly suspect that operating at a loss for an indefinite period in the hope that things will improve does not make sense for most companies.
Yes, I mean that the tarriffs were imposed nine days ago, and not:
{highlighting added for clarity}
So your statement was factually incorrect.
There is no indication of when or indeed if “the dust settles”. The Trump regime has applied and then suspended tariffs in an arbitrary, mercurial, and fundamentally baseless manner with no apparent consideration or concern over how they would impact industries of critical economic and national security performance, much less luxury goods such as boardgames and entertainment publications. Game stores tend to run on pretty thin margins, and game publishers and distributors try to run on just-in- time inventory to minimize their exposure to changing shipping costs, competition, and other vagaries of the market. I doubt most companies in this market have months worth of cash reserves or the ability to obtain loans to cover a virtual shutdown of business for an indefinite period of time. Hence why many creators are cancelling crowdsourcing campaigns and others are declaring a default on funded projects.
Stranger
Also, board games are enjoyed by a small fraction of the population, mostly nerds. Trump doesn’t like nerds. He doesn’t care about a small fraction of the population. It’s no skin off his back if the domestic game industry dies.
And, frankly, I imagine he has absolutely no clue about its existence. Even if he doesn’t like nerds (which I’m sure he doesn’t), the situation is emblematic of what the tariffs, and the whipsaw on-and-off news regarding them, is doing to literally hundreds of industries in America which are largely populated by small businesses – about which I don’t believe Trump cares, either.
Board Game margins are razor thin and many of these publishers are small companies that are basically passion projects. A disruption of this magnitude can easy kill some of these companies in a few weeks (and it has). We saw it during the Pandemic when shipping costs exploded. That also killed some companies.
We aren’t talking about Fortune 500s that have cash on hand. These are mostly companies with a handful of employees making a product because they love it.
Goods already in transit generally do not have tariffs applied. A container ships takes 15- 30 days to travel from China to the USA. So, on all the goods that were in transit- *the tariffs really havent taken effect yet.
https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/trump-reciprocal-tariffs-work-guide-47527fbc
That is true. But game companies- assuming their goods are shipped from China by the usual manner, have not seen any tariff charges- yet.
The link you posted says that tariffs are applied on the date of entry. The shipper files what they are bringing in on advance, but they pay whatever is due when the goods enter the US. So all that stuff in transit is going to be charged the current high tariffs. (Unless the tariffs are changed again before they arrive.) According to your own link.
The only hope for Board Games is that as it gets closer to Christmas, Hasbro and Mattel go to the White House and tell Trump he is smart and handsome and leave $50 on the nightstand for him so that he exempts toys and games.
Because otherwise Trump is literally stealing Christmas. Almost all toys are made in China and stores need to order in the Summer to have inventory by Christmas. If he doesn’t lift the tariffs or make an exemption, it’s going to be a shit show come December.
Table top games created by the French manufacturer Asmodee can create games with Chinese components then export them to the US with a 10% tariff. Steve Jackson games is discovering that a tariffs are taxes on exports. Intermediate inputs are a huge fraction of trade.
You know who has thought about this? Developmental economists. Tariffs are a crude way of promoting an industry: the current consensus is that subsidies to such industries should be direct and narrow.
What about the manufacturing jobs created in the US? Will that make US workers rich? Unlikely. Manufacturing jobs pay well when the workers are productive or when they are unionized. McDonald’s burger flippers in Denmark receive higher wages than Honda workers in Alabama. Why? Unions.
The US is fantastic at designing creative board games. That’s where the value-added is. I trust there was once a day when most rolling dice were made in the USA. But nostalgia economics is not good economics.