And the last point is key...even if you think doing this is a great idea to move manufacturing to the US, that takes time
And I suspect die making is a lot more portable than cars
And die making is a pretty niche industry. If we apply that to everything currently manufactured in China, think about how much time, money, physical space, and workers would be needed to move all those industries.
I think it would be a worthwhile endeavor only if the new infrastructure directly equated to new jobs and across the board wage increases. or a more cooperative infrastructure, so we can actually afford these things.
Oh absolutely and I’m sure they’ll try and exploit incarcerated people as a labor force too. I’m not suggesting you let them determine your future so much as you and your colleagues (including me) organizing your workplace and determining your own. especially at these imaginary new factories.
Oh I know, and agree. it would take a loooot of labor organizing to make my pipe dream happen. It’s not the intention by the powers that be in any way.
Yes, but those sets cost more than entire board games...it's not that end of the market that will he hit
If a game producer needs 8d6 per pack and expects to sell a couple of thousand copies they're not buying off Etsy
It's certainly possible to ramp up production on simple plastic products like dice or cardboard counters. They don't need complicated production systems. However this should have been thought of BEFORE the tariffs, and funding should be provided to entrepreneurs who want to do this.
With time it's possible to ramp up production on anything ..but even simple plastic products need factories, machines, staff, supply chains, distribution networks, etc...nothing is overnight other than crap AI images and bullshit
And nobody is going to be making major capital investments which take YEARS to come to fruition (and even longer to get ROI) unless there's a stable economy in the target country...
The diemaking is probably one of the easier things to source in America. There are loads of smallscale resin-cast dicemakers. The issue would still be scale though and the pricing would be significantly more expensive.
I didn't even consider the cost of resin. Though that's likely a petroleum byproduct thing, which America *does* make a lot of. Still though. Doesn't exactly turn your point around!!
It's all illogical. Take jobs back to US, workers get paid more.
But your jeans are now made by those workers in factories with more regulation (even US has more than Bangladesh) material has tariffs and jeans go up in price by more than the wages.
It's exactly why things went overseas to begin with
Almost like this whole capitalism thing is built on inequalities around which the thinnest of margins have been shaved, to the point that any disruption (including improving working conditions) is like pulling a load bearing Jenga block from the system...hmm...
It's worth remembering that the US economy is already at full employment capacity it's just not possible to meaningfully scale up production here. And in parallel the administration wants to report million of workers. Whatever the direction you're looking at it, the math do not add up.
Not a source, but there's a reason there are so many immigrants
It's the same in the UK, people saying "immigrants bad" but not wanting the jobs they do
Well tbf it does add up if you believe that Tesla Optimus robots and chatGPT AGI are right around the corner and will replace all American workers, but nobody is stupid enough to believe that, right ?
When you say "full employment capacity" does that account for people having multiple jobs, working but not having enough money to live on without going into debt, etc etc? (This is a genuine question rather than a challenge, I've not heard the claim before)
Where do you think? Incarcerated people, from the homeless and the migrants to the Black and the trans. We have legal slavery via the prison system and they're ramping up efforts to lock people up. Hella 'Made in USA' stickers mean 'made in prison.'
I might literally call what you refer to 'overemployment,' but i also believe that the amount of work 40 hours of labor requires these days (which has increased since the 70s due to tightening workplace management practices) is already too much.
This is going to be the reality for a whole lot of industries. The cost to import will be ridiculously prohibitive and the infrastructure to produce here will be nonexistent and take years, not months to build.
Costs in the US vary wildly depending on if you can use existing dies (or custom ones that work over multiple projects), keep to standard box sizes, limit non-printed components…
There are many levers.
Also, if your game won’t sell 4,000 copies, perhaps it belongs at a POD shop. 🤷♀️
I don’t understand. If the only thing increasing is the cost of the board by $1.62 and none of his other expenses are changing, shouldn’t the retail price of the board only be going up by about $3?
I was a bit confused by this at first, but after consulting with the Oracle, I think what he's getting at is that at every stage in the distribution chain a percentage gets added to the 'base cost' rather than a flat fee?
My son is a purchaser for a public infrastructure company. They buy different parts from all over the world. The tariffs already enacted have increased the parts so much they have tried to find US manufacturers. But some manufacturers have lead times of years already. Not to mention costing more $.
Plus, it takes a LOOOOONG time to spin up manufacturing if you don't have an infinitely large pile of money to throw at the problem. Given an infinite pile, it'll only take a long time.
Making "things" is really hard. The Right has totally abandoned basic stuff Larry Reed tried to teach in the 50s
the last sentence is telling... the infrastructure, and equipment simply doesn't existing in the scale needed to support real business in the US, and even if it did, the people don't exist that could do it in the timelines required...
this affects people who want physical books. Buy a PDF
Not just the timelines, but the WAGES. American factory workers average 3x the salary of those in China. And I can guarantee you they won't let those salaries eat into their profits, but will instead raise prices.
I don’t know how this collection of idiots fails to understand that manufacturing is both capital and (to varying degrees) labour intensive, especially if you have to do a major retooling or build from scratch. They seem to think you can order a flatpack factory from IKEA and then GO in like 3 weeks
had to read that several times to actually get to the end and understand because my mind was rebooting with critical errors having read "I Like the orange one"
I'm not a business person however... It seems to me that a part of the value of a game is in the IP, the rules, the art etc. Separate that from the physical production, the board, cards and pieces. If you split those things can you come up with a business model where you make money from one of them?
You can't copyright specific game rules - only specific written expressions of them. IE you can copyright "this manual I wrote" but not the meaningful content of it
Yeah, but that’s adding a large specialized workload for players vs just buying a box. I mean, I am not an economist, but you lose a huge percentage every time you make someone click through a link—can’t imagine what it’d be for that.
As noted in other peoples' responses, it already is--there's an industry of print & play tabletop board, card, and role-playing games, and there's also more than one line of miniatures published purely as 3d printer data files.
3D printers are largely made in china. While having one does give you a lot of new options, there's no part of the industry that won't be damaged by this.
There already exists a thriving pdf/POD game scene out there, and there are lots of stl designers too. So these sorts of ideas already exist - but they weren't big money earners to start with.
It's a model that makes sense to me in theory, especially with the growing popularity of tabletop simulator; friend just dropped a good bit of dosh last year to get their physical game have good compatibility with that software.
FLGS buys expensive copies of games and rents them out to players. My FLGS offers a subscription that comes with that as one of the benefits. How much time do my games spend sitting on a shelf vs being played? It worked for Blockbuster back in the day.
Not to mention that whole question of who'll still have disposable income, let alone enough to be able to buy Car Wars 6th Edition or OGRE/G.E.V. or GURPS Dungeon Fantasy.
This has been tried and the economics have completely failed, mostly because print-on-demand prices are by necessity higher than mass production prices, and because gaming stores cannot afford to also become print shops
The tariff still has to be paid on the paper, ink, and 3D filament. And because each item is being made one at a time, you don't get any savings on shared set-up costs for 100s of copies.
If you can play digitally, do it, but making 1 copy of a physical board game is $$$ if the game is $$.
You can look around for print and plays and how much it would cost to have them printed at say staples or a local print shop if you wanted to get an idea of how this is already done. I can't imagine that an FLGS could afford to add on an in-house print shop.
And time for the knowledgable people to run the printers too, so it's an ongoing expense.
Once you start looking into stateside printers, may as well have the publishers run 100s of copies. Still much more espensive than yesterday, but less than one at a time. (Assuming capacity in the US).
Next time I see Martin Wallace at a convention I'm going to ask him what this means for designers outside the US. He managed to get a Distinguished Talent visa to move here to Australia.
You may very well look back on this last 25 years as the Art Deco period for pop culture while we move into the Gremlin car era for the foreseeable future.
I would ask them how much profit they make on a game now and how much they'll make on that $40 game. I'm willing to bet they're still making a tidy sum. And if they're not then, yes they have a point. But if they're just keeping their margins healthy then their pleas are duplicitous bullshit.
I'm going to be as polite as possible in saying you don't know the economics of the tabletop gaming industry - where practically every company other than Hasbro operates on razor-thin margins - and might want to consider refraining from performative cynicism dressed up as common sense
Then I hope they survive. My whole point is that you're going to hear that very same sob story from Apple and from Lexus and from Maybelline or whomever but it'll be bullshit in most cases.
Tariffs are a tax on consumers because manufacturers don't cut their profit margin to accommodate the tariff.
Yes, and there's an obvious difference between "mega corporations producing extremely popular products" and "a raft of cottage industries operating mostly out of love for a niche product" that a Trained Economist should understand immediately
Jackson literally said that OGRE 6th edition - OGRE! One of their most famous games! - existed because he wanted people to have a nice version, and it wasn't profitable, despite decent sales.
I'd expect the bigger margins to be on the game store end and game suppliers don't necessarily want to undercut the MSRP with discounted direct sales as the stores are important to the ecosystem.
Could very well be true. Every business is going to use these horrible tariffs as a way to jack up prices because businesses exist to make profits. They don't care about you. The ones who do it just to survive and not to increase profits will be the rare decent ones out there.
Mate, that last sentence is most of the niche market industry, not even the game store owners go into that business to get rich
In any very niche market industries the number of people in it not for the money is a LOT higher as you wouldn't do it otherwise (don't ask me how I know FFS)
On average, the 25$ game that costs 3 dollars to produce, will return 3-5 $ in net revenue back to the manufacturer. From that is paid wages, rents and other expenses.
Yeah, it's like when economists who've never rolled a saving throw talk about how tariffs impact an industry like tabletop gaming. Why would they know anything about the economics of manufacturing if they're not gamers?
Feel free to show me which economist you read that's writing about tariff effects on the TTRPG and board game industry. Go ahead, I'll wait. I'm sure you're also well aware of the outsized effects of the increase in shipping rates on the industry four years ago too.
I know you're a tourist because literally nobody who has been in the trenches or even been adjacent to the trenches of the industry the last five years would say something so condescendingly misinformed. It's honestly embarrassing, something you'd see from an X101 try hard.
Actually, they don't. I said PROFIT. Staff with mortgages get paid from gross revenues. PROFIT is what is left over. Technically NO business needs to make a profit to pay its staff or expenses they just need the exact amount of gross revenues to successfully do so and not a penny more.
They'll make proportionately the same as they would have on the $25 game. Their expenses throughout the supply chain will also grow proportionately, more or less. Staff will get more money to survive/stay/thrive.
Their costs to grow further will also be proportionately more expensive.
Expecting them to tank their margins just to keep a game at $25 to the consumer is idiotic. And let's face it, even if they dropped their margins to zero, I'd bet keeping it at 25 is nearly impossible.
Of course they're doing it to keep their margins "healthy", to a point.
Printing a hardcover book costs me $27. Assuming a 25% tariff on Canada (because it requires paper that is imported from Canada) it would be $33.75 to print. Including shipping, you're looking at $43-50. Depending on location.
I literally had to pull physical versions of my book from DTRPG on the *possibility* of the tariffs.
While I built some profit into it, not nearly that much to eat that cost. I would have to raise prices to make it work. And my profit margin isn't that high on physical books.
A “tidy sum” for selling board games? It’s hard just to stay in business for a lot of people making stuff like that. A healthy profit margin just means they can pay their mortgage and stuff, maybe save something for retirement. They’re not robber barons.
so strange really that people don't understand this without being spanked badly. basic international economics... supply chains, market efficiencies. the part the Dumpster doesn't get is the usa have tremendous value that doesn't show up in the trade dollars... it's called intellectual property.
Benefits (for the FTEs)
Cost of Goods Sold (cardboard is cheap, right? Right…?)
Sales expense (including freight to distribution centers)
Marketing/eCommerce
Distribution centers
Freelance Artists
And and and….
In the grand scheme of things, SJ games is a popular, but very small company in a very niche business. They make good games, which is why they have stuck around for the last 40 years. But they're not raking in the dough.
From what I can tell, for a game company they're pretty big. Not saying they're swimming in money but 30 full time employees is huge for a board game company.
The FBI would probably have been competent. Agent Foley didn't know, at first, that his system could even *talk* to the BBS, so they relied on their Bell guy who was part of the company making "omg stolen 911!" accusations.
Hi. The USSS illegally read my email & had to pay me $5K. 👋
I wonder if it would be feasible for them to outsource to the UK or to EU ? Smaller tariffs and the infrastructure for manufacturing table top games already exists .
Well, I don't know, when I was working for a small board game company in France, they printed their games in China. So even if the tarif are smaller, there is one more step in the process...
Everything's printed in China for GW, too, and their plastic injection moulds are very expensive. I suppose they could do resin, but then so could SJG.
It gets easier when you hear Agent Foley testify that he thought he could not connect to the SJG-BBS himself because USSS computers had a different OS than the BBS computer, so they let the Bell guy do it & tell them about all the horrible hacker stuff there.
I mean, what materials, equipment are we lacking to make this happen? Obviously our labor is more expensive, but I know we have had printing companies in America.
FDT
This is just my hyper fixation for problem solving
Judging by the statement in the shared image, I think the issue is the amount of equipment. Like, I can churn a pound of butter, but only at great effort & expense. & I can't supply a whole town.
A proper dairy company has machines & automation & economy of scale on their side.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that none of SJG's games sell a million copies. Or even that all their games combined sell a million copies in a year. But maybe in ten years?
A lot. It's more than just Trump. It would be a gargantuan, many trillion-dollar shift, because you're talking about a very basic, broad set of industries: plastic, die-casting, paper products. To bring those costs down in the US to a competitive level would require colossal direct federal support.
I work in US plastics. I can count on one hand the number of employees we have under 30. Us GenXers are tired and broken, and there's no one coming up to fill our places.
That's for what we already do and not the millions of new factory workers that would be required to shift everything stateside.
I primarily create books, and for hardcover books there just is no viable option that we have found for offset domestic printing. Smaller runs of saddle-stitched paperbacks are... almost viable, I've seen quotes that wouldn't bankrupt us. But not big, hardcover books.
That would be a tough decision to make. There are a couple scholastic plants here in Missouri that I've been to that have printing and binding. I'm sure it's ridiculous
The more you make, the less each unit of a thing costs to make, generally. But there's an enormous gulf between the unit cost of 1,000 of something vs. 50,000 of something. This difference only gets more pronounced with domestic suppliers and printers. $5 per vs. $18 per, that kind of thing.
People think that all this tariff bs is going to magically open up manufacturing back in the good ole USofA. Most factories don’t have the equipment nor infrastructure to support the demand. Even if they wanted to the cost of the machines they would have to import are too high because of tariffs.
Yes, we have Haas, and Fadal (since the revival) but those aren’t cheap, and they rarely have excess capacity; the shop can’t afford the downtime (I used to be a machinist)
I’d asked a question at my initial meeting with my prosthetist a few months ago, and she answered with “42.” Her coworker gave her a blank look as I pointed at her and said “YOU. I *LIKE* YOU.”
Quite apart from that, nobody is going to make large capital investments to support this when the economy is unstable and being controlled by an unstable person.
They're just going to hunker down and try to weather the storm...
It's also the scale. I guess you could decide to start forcing more cars to be manufactured or computer chips, but this is about EVERYTHING.Cars, computers, gaming dice, drywall, dog dishes, and bookcases. You can't just start building them everywhere all at once like they are Starbucks or something
Plus, who in their right mind would be willing to make these kinds of large scale investments with an administration as bonkers as this one is? How is anyone supposed to come up with sufficiently future proof plans when the numbers may change arbitrarily at any point?
Every business is going to pull back on capital investment and just wait this out. Honestly, he’s so capricious and stupid that the tariffs might be gone in a few weeks.
On semiconductors good luck, TSMC have opened a plant in the US but because, at the scales chip manufacturing works on these days, it's a LOT more art than science they haven't actually been able to get their latest processes to actually work in that factory...
He’s right. We sell fittings for hoses and they are made in China. For some of those fittings, like the ones for hydraulic hoses, what was a $45 dollar part will likely be doubled. I don’t know if our small business owners can afford those prices. I know we can’t.
Because there will also be an increase in shipping costs as fuel costs increase. You need to figure that in to margins. And you have to figure less demand for luxury items as American consumers are now paying more for everything else, so your economy of scale goes down when you produce fewer units.
This is something SJG did not figure into his post. A 20% tariff is likely survivable. A 54% tariff is going to hurt the board game and comic industry. There is not enough capacity on this continent to print everything.
Building new factories will take years and we import a vast amount of construction materials and manufacturing equipment, which is all now hit with tariffs so those costs are going to be way up. Companies are best off waiting until Trump is out of office and someone can roll back the damage.
Even companies that already print exclusively in the US are going to have issues because we import a vast majority of our paper from Canada, Scandinavia and China. Printing costs are going to increase regardless.
Probably because it’s not just one thing in the chain increasing. My guess is that multiple points of the product lifecycle are being affected due to how our economy is structured, which result in a multiplied increase in costs.
It sounds like the game company is hoping that people are sufficiently innumerate that they can get away with a massive price hike. Just like during covid.
No, every company in the chain now costs more, from bunker fuel in the ships, to the shelves in the warehouses, and the replacement hats for the UPS drivers.
Yeah, hard disagree. Those costs will not go up immediately, and they won't go up by the amount. The cost of UPS is gas, which is mostly sourced here, and labor, which is not impacted by tariffs.
He says the cost of all those things are included. There is no reason that distribution margins or other things should go up because of tariffs. This feels like opportunistic profit taking.
Look at when inflation was highest - companies were expanding their margins, not just passing along costs.
They’re reprinting the fighting fantasy books by Ian Livingston and Steve Jackson (no relation, except that Steve Jackson (yes relation) wrote a couple of the later ones)
On a serious note: Manufacturing & logistics is hard. This probably comes as a surprise to a lot of very rich people who got rich via financial chicanery and think they're masters of the universe who can bend reality to their will just because they bought low and sold high.
It's easy to get rich by playing with money, but economic history is littered with moneymen who trashed industries out of shortsighted ignorance and/or malice.
I blame the SV bro culture of a lot of this: it's like Wall St The Sequel: an entire industry that gets rich without actually making stuff
The result is a government run by spoiled children who think they're experts at everything while knowing absolutely nothing, and proxying that unshakeable ignorance into moves like this.
I'm one of the freelance writers for SJG's TFT line and I can tell you this is a wallop. They are dead smart about the business, but even for them the margin is tight. This economy is going to destroy a lot of hobby companies, as well as strangle a bunch of crowdfunded projects in their cradles.
I've worked in print for over 25 years. I've even produced some small boardgames. We absolutely do not have the equipment to do a lot of the specialized bits people expect in a modern board game.
Even something as simple as a deck of playing cards requires a specialized machine to cut them.
Give it a year and there will not be a consumer market in the US to tap into anyway. Building up new infrastructure in the US is throwing money out the window
Thanks for sharing this. The boardgame industry has long relied on cheap labor and cheap transportation costs, a situation that was always a fragile political economic balance. Sad to see it all end so suddenly.
To make a “steelman” argument of sorts, I’m sure the retort would be that 100% of the $40 would be going into the US economy instead of foreign markets. However believing this to be good is also predicated on the belief that trickle-down economics is real, which isn’t and is a total lie.
Exactly. Charging the same tariff on finished products and raw materials actually harms domestic manufacturers MORE than offshore manufacturers. This policy is either fundamentally fucking stupid or they're deliberately creating a depression.
processors are the worst part nowadays because everybody's torn up their capacity for coarser process nodes leaving the whole market to compete for access to the same fab lines
I didn't really finish that thought, but you can't scale that kind of equipment in any kind of hurry. Especially not if the admin starts fucking with NIST like they plan to.
This doesn't surprise me, and it means that any game Kickstarters are also going to take it in the teeth. Last I checked (for my KS), it was about 5$ per game from China, and about 23 for the same exact box from the US manufacturer. Lets not even talk about what the wages would cost.
The company I work for went looking for quotes on manufacturing a relatively small-volume item in the US a few years ago. We were quoted $300,000 just in tooling costs, on something that would (in an ideal situation) move ~$30,000 gross at retail a year.
The MOQs for smaller companies have a horrible mark up.
The better deals have always been in SEA/China where the tariffs are highest whether its tooling, deco glass, etc.
To raise ‘your’ MOQ for packaging or something is to bet longevity and forecast in a risky way. But NOT common knowledge ya? 🥲
He's just saying aloud what everyone in pop culture production knows privately.
1. Consumers are gonna take a bath.
2. Companies are gonna fail, indies mostly but also weaker large ones that don't have pricing power.
3. Choices and market will shrink.
Exactly. During 1929 Wall Street crash, J Paul Getty became a billionaire by buying up valuable assets for practically nothing. In 2008, private equity &hedge funds bought real estate (particularly single family homes)which created real estate monopolies that are fueling affordable housing crisis.
We've got a really great gaming store here in town, it's not just a store but a community with nearly daily events, and I don't think they're going to survive this. They were one of my first thoughts this morning. Nearly all our local stores are going to fold. Again. Just like in 2000 and 2008.
I am thinking the same thing of a wonderful rubber stamp and craft book store in our town. Celebrated its 30th anniversary recently. Between people losing discretionary income and most of its stock being imports, I don't see how it survives.
Seriously though, all those other costs, apart from the physical product, aren't subject to tariffs, are they? So the price increase should be $2, not $15.
I don't know how $15 is exactly calculated. But it couldn't be $2 since some of the other costs are determined as a percent of the value of the item. So the increase gets magnified at multiple stages of the process.
Just to think of the retailer, it does not make any sense for them not to add a multiplier. A lot of their costs are relative to the cost of the item...the risk that it'll get damaged, or not sell, or get stolen. All of these risks are magnified when they had to pay more for the item originally.
This is going to happen to something like 66% of the industries in the USA. In 1992, P.J. O'Rourke was joking when he said, "We are not in a World War or a Great Depression, but both options are being explored." And yet, it has come to this.
Going to tip my hat to you @mightygodking.com … you know the industry well and also from the manufacturing aspect well. I am in a diff manu/distro field but it is the same math and I love ttrpgs. So cheers for putting up the info and also taking the time to de-bunk hard Qs in comments.
3) I see them trying to crash the economy and cause chaos here while looking for a way to start a war with Europe. Read the Hitler/Hirohito plan. When they said they loved Hitler, believe them. The billionaires behind him are the controllers who want to be dictators. Read his donors list.
2) and then ppl like us- over 65, with their pensions and savings in investments, SS paid into since we were 16, VA benes for the vets, Medicare and Medicaid for those who are in school or recently laid off, seniors who worked all our lives as working, voting Americans who put our country first-
I spent part of the day explaining how the tariffs are going to affect my kids who are in auto repair/perf bsiness, kids who are social workers or in medical , a nephew who is a medical researcher, kids who are in different levels of management IT positions, friends in IT, even retail, (1
=sighs= Nice going Felonious Orange. Game prices up, comic book prices up, donuts to ducats the price of books & blurays will go up too. Frickin' idjit...
Seems like the big corporations will like this as it will completely gut a lot of their competition.
End-stage capitalism, encouraged by the State.
That's fascism, you know.
It may mean less competition but they also make all their shit in China and absorbing all the extra costs is going to seriously limit their ability to capitalize on the hypothetical market opening, especially since the problem is that board game players have already been squeezed by price increases
I'm glad they're speaking out. I didn't vote for this and still don't support the fascist oligarchy. Instead of playing games on Saturday, I'm marching! https://mobilize.us/s/ImgZJs
It's still going and if you go to https://warehouse23.com , you may be able to grab some stuff before the tariff'ed prices hit. (I grabbed some PDFs I'd been looking at; raising PDF prices some is one logical possibility for buffering physical product prices from unpredictable tariffs.)
Seeing reports from the Taipei Bike Show and am like, “We’ll never see that all new stuff… and, if we do, it’ll cost an arm and a leg and another leg.”
I'm sure this is an issue with several companies. I know this small company that was forced to have their product built overseas to be competitive. Now, who knows?
yep. and thats still gonna be the issue because even if it was possible to source it here its gonna cost a ton and spinning up more capacity for it will take YEARS
Well they should have thought of that before the US elected a goddamned idiot megalomaniac. I mean, they shouldn't have because that shouldn't have been a possible outcome but still
32 years ago Steve Jackson Games won a landmark privacy rights victory against the US Secret Service. I find it ironic that Donald Trump’s regime, which is actively trampling our privacy rights, is accidentally attacking them again. I would have thought they’d do it intentionally.
I've got friends on the inside there. This is not only going to kill small businesses, but medium sized American businesses as well. Only the oligarchs will survive
@stevejacksongames.bsky.social
Have you tried Rolco games? They are in Minnesota. I used them for an indie game I made decades ago. At the time, they were very affordable. Not sure about custom design, but they had a great variety of piece types available.
This is STEVE JACKSON GAMES THE MAKERS OF MUNCHKIN one of the most well known board games ever made, like below risk and monopoly and catan likely sits munchkin
The production needed for their products is massive compatatively man.
Oh, we are very familiar with SJG. I’ve met him at Armadillo Con years ago. Got my Wil Wheaton Star Munchkin card signed. I am well aware how non-indie SJG is.
I am suggesting a domestic manufacturer, just in case. I am playing my part sharing knowledge to aid their continued success.
People like to see SJG as a small indie pub, but they're still one of the larger guys in the industry. If they're talking about this kind of effect imagine what's happening to everyone who relies on overseas manufacturing for their crowdfunded games.
I'm missing the steps in the middle. Production goes from $3 to $4.62; at $3, they were selling it at $25. Why does it jump to over $40? Would the cost of every step in the middle also jump by over 50%? (not an economist, sorry.)
Like they mentioned briefly in that post, this doesn't factor in freight costs to bring the product here, warehouse/storage costs to maintain inventory, and domestic shipping costs to distribute products to stores, all of which are much higher because they can't be outsourced and MUST be local.
Those local costs go up on their side because, as the cost of building materials goes up, the cost of existing properties goes up. Warehouse rent goes up and you have no alternatives.
Fuel and parts go up, meaning planes trucks and boats charge more to haul stuff.
Add to that retail stores see rent hikes, can't stock as much product, reducing sales channels, and thus, sales period, so each unit has to cost more to make the product viable...
Most definitely freight distribution is going to jump with tariffs.
It isn’t just heating oil (many northern states import heating oil from CAN)
Back to it: we are going to see issues with but the most common source of manufactured goods shipping aka shipping container -> fuel.
You are spot on.
And of course the manufacturing cost doesn't cover what you need to pay to artists, designers, etc
Fixed upfront cost to pay an artist for a box cover or a street cutout, that you spread acorss expected revenue from sales, they've still normally been paid
So, your sea-freight will cost them about a dollar or more per box, that's also facing a tariff and new import fees. Ground freight from the port to the distribution will soon go up, as their costs will be also rising from tariffs.
Then the distribution warehouse cost may stay the same, however they will probably raise prices due to dropping revenue from other customers in order to keep afloat. Then the cost of shipping from the warehouse to the retailers will go up, again freight costs will be rising.
And that's the steps I know about, there's more steps in there as well that I don't know about. Sweeping tariffs like this may be 20%, but it's compounded. 20% at almost every step. And that's just so SJG can get back the maybe 3 $ profit per game.
Also, the game stores buy it from the distributors for some cut of MSRP, who buy it from the publishers for some cut of *that*.
I saw some other post where a publisher said their take on a $40 game was about $9, minus their print cost of $3. So $6 to cover all the logistics, staff, office, etc.
A game store typically pays 50% to 60% of a game's MSRP, and then sells to the consumer at full price. A distributor, who sells to the game store, typically buys the game from a publisher for around 40% of MSRP. The publisher has to pay for printing, art, royalties, shipping, etc.
Even when we get these factories, it's the workforce that's the problem. The reason we sent these jobs over seas is because Americans wanted a fair wage and occasionally unionized for it. So they started shipping them off. And maybe you could get a force of low wage immigrants but, well, you know.
For small employers, yes, the labour force exists.
For the larger, Foxconn-style factory towns? No, we don't have tens of thousands of skilled people's worth of capacity, nor the infrastructure to support them
Most importantly we haven't had the political will to train and build at that level, either.
That's why China has eaten our proverbial lunch: it's not just the people, it's places for them to live, power generation for the factory and town, training, schools, roads, rail, warehouses, etc
They're been very strategic, while the US and Canada have just sat back and given a few tax cuts and low-interest loans and hoped that the magic market fairy would sprinkle pixie dust around and make it all happen.
And of course there's the REAL reason manufacturing was shipped overseas in the first place: Chinese factory workers can be paid a fraction of what an American would receive.
A Chinese factory worker averages $6 an hour. An American? Almost TRIPLE that.
**also the offset in emissions. If all the American-owned, American-centric manufacturing counted as American emissions the US would account for 80% of everything. As it stands it is only held responsible for approx. 15%
Countries are being held responsible for their emissions?! Huge if true 😃 don't worry, US will dig up all the coal and frack put all the gas ASAP to support all the new manufacturing 😬
Tabletop gaming, be it boardgames, card games, etc. is not just the company that makes the games. It’s your local game store where you go and enjoy time with like-minded people.
Tariffs are essentially hitting communities in a sense.
The only Third Space within an hour drive of where I live, other than libraries, is one single game store with tables to play and chat. It is also the only safe space for LGBT+ people to be themselves. It was already struggling. I fear for it.
because the increase also applies to every other part of the process. freight, fulfillment, etc don't stay stagnant because their costs are also going up. $1.62 is a 54% increase. rough math but a 54% increase on $25 is $38.50
Tariffs are stupid, and Steve Jackson makes great games, but I don’t agree with his math here. Shipping, warehousing and domestic distribution costs didn’t jack up 54%….just the basic manufactured product.
You left off “distributor margins”. When the cost goes up every step along the way expects to add to the price to keep their margin. Even if that’s just the publisher, distributor, and retailer (there could be more or less steps) that can snowball into a big price increase.
I noted that in my second post…theoretically the distributor should pass along the same tariff to the next level all the way to the end user….but it usually doesn’t work that way, ie more gets added at each step.
What he is correct about is the massive inflationary pressure that will be created by these tariffs as sellers of imported goods will all test what level of retail price increases the market will bear.
The fact that these MAGA asshats think we can make everything in the US is insane. The US got powerful BECAUSE OF TRADE. That’s the ONLY way. We imported our machines that made the Industrial Revolution.
But the intent is to destroy, not build. This is a Russian plan to reward the rich. That’s it.
Even if you wanted to “rebuild domestic manufacturing”, this sort of shotgun-blast-to-the-face tariffs aren’t it.
But that’s not their aim. The techbro nihilists like Musk have been explicit about their desire to crash the economic system so they can scoop up the ruins and rebuild in their image
The problem is that the a
“Age of Manufacruring” in the us as a power is OVER. We should have been competing in ways of the future: STEM and creating social systems to buffer those displaced by robotic advancement. Instead we kneecapped the educational system, made college unreachable for many 1/2
Thanks for this post. As a DnD 5e player who loves miniatures and all the accessories AND board games, this was a good way to explain how the Tariffs are going to effect gaming.
Comments
And I suspect die making is a lot more portable than cars
Trump and Co want US workers on Vietnamesewages
If a game producer needs 8d6 per pack and expects to sell a couple of thousand copies they're not buying off Etsy
But your jeans are now made by those workers in factories with more regulation (even US has more than Bangladesh) material has tariffs and jeans go up in price by more than the wages.
It's exactly why things went overseas to begin with
It's the same in the UK, people saying "immigrants bad" but not wanting the jobs they do
... Right?
https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers
Like, these tariffs are bad, but let's not defend the idea of outsourcing to sweatshops. Every country should have higher labor standards
There are many levers.
Also, if your game won’t sell 4,000 copies, perhaps it belongs at a POD shop. 🤷♀️
Making "things" is really hard. The Right has totally abandoned basic stuff Larry Reed tried to teach in the 50s
this affects people who want physical books. Buy a PDF
Though you’d still need to think about the cost of the paper, the board, the linnen or leather, the glue or the flour, the thread…
It may be a workable solution?
Customer buys a PDF from the publisher then pays a fee and the FLGS prints and provides the product.. game book, maps, figures.
Startup costs would be tough and there may be legal issues.
Hard to fight the economy of scale.
If you can play digitally, do it, but making 1 copy of a physical board game is $$$ if the game is $$.
And of course we can't depend on any level of government assistance.
Once you start looking into stateside printers, may as well have the publishers run 100s of copies. Still much more espensive than yesterday, but less than one at a time. (Assuming capacity in the US).
Whether that means go out of business entirely or finding a way to keep it together with other regions remains to be seen.
Cheaper, shittier, fewer options for most of you and super high end for the wealthy.
But, affordable or aspirational luxury goods, like people have had the last 25 years, nope.
You may very well look back on this last 25 years as the Art Deco period for pop culture while we move into the Gremlin car era for the foreseeable future.
Honestly, Martin Wallace would do a better job of running the US economy than the current clown show.
Tariffs are a tax on consumers because manufacturers don't cut their profit margin to accommodate the tariff.
In any very niche market industries the number of people in it not for the money is a LOT higher as you wouldn't do it otherwise (don't ask me how I know FFS)
(I'm mocking you, if that wasn't clear.)
It doesn't matter if they're making boardgames or rubber dogshit. Economics is economics.
Move along, clown.
SJG and other small houses exist to create niche market products that big companies like Hasbro simply won't touch as the MARGINS are too low
SJG games makes low margin—really low margin—stuff
That's the economics, and that's how silly you sound
Running with zero profit is same logic as spending the whole paycheck every week.
And I'm not arguing against profits either. I'm just saying that an honest assessment of what is paid to whom is a discussion of revenue, not profit.
Their costs to grow further will also be proportionately more expensive.
Of course they're doing it to keep their margins "healthy", to a point.
Printing a hardcover book costs me $27. Assuming a 25% tariff on Canada (because it requires paper that is imported from Canada) it would be $33.75 to print. Including shipping, you're looking at $43-50. Depending on location.
*For a 267 page book.*
While I built some profit into it, not nearly that much to eat that cost. I would have to raise prices to make it work. And my profit margin isn't that high on physical books.
If I had to factor that in, you'd be looking at probably $70/book after tariffs.
That’s all the money flowing in BEFORE cost of goods. And marketing. And sales. And logistics. And And And And.
C-suite? How about C-closet?
https://www.sjgames.com/general/stakeholders/#:~:text=2023%3A%20Executive%20Summary,to%20confusion%20about%20BackerKit%20proceeds).
30+ full-time staff (split between FTE and contract) plus a few part-time.
Wow. Think about this number: 116,666.67. That’s how much gross revenue SJG generated per F/T in 2023. Not a bad salary!
Except…
Benefits (for the FTEs)
Cost of Goods Sold (cardboard is cheap, right? Right…?)
Sales expense (including freight to distribution centers)
Marketing/eCommerce
Distribution centers
Freelance Artists
And and and….
Oh, don’t forget that C-suite. 😅
Steve Jackson makes enough to move to Georgia, but past that I couldn't say.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._United_States_Secret_Service
Hi. The USSS illegally read my email & had to pay me $5K. 👋
Wait…
It isn’t other nations ripping of the USA it’s the current potus (a con man and criminal) and his appointees.
Sometimes I hate autocorrect.
FDT
This is just my hyper fixation for problem solving
A proper dairy company has machines & automation & economy of scale on their side.
There is a case to be made for re-thinking the physical design and components we accept in board games.
(I have produced board games in the US)
“For the love of money is the root of all evil” is a solid bit of Scripture that needs better press. 📖
That's for what we already do and not the millions of new factory workers that would be required to shift everything stateside.
https://www.sheridan.com/about-us/
Wait, there are tariffs on steel imports? Grab those pickaxes, folks. Time to get mining!
Wait, the US is entire populated by passengers on the “B” Ark? Oops.
(“What’s a B Ark”? Oh sweet summer child, time to read a most wonderful trilogy of five books.)
Yes, we have Haas, and Fadal (since the revival) but those aren’t cheap, and they rarely have excess capacity; the shop can’t afford the downtime (I used to be a machinist)
They're just going to hunker down and try to weather the storm...
That's doubling down on stupid.
We *had* close to full employment already, and then the illegitimate government started abducting people off the streets.
They're creating three or four separate, intentional crises all at once.
I hate the tariffs, but I just don't see the math for that big a price increase.
It sounds like the game company is hoping that people are sufficiently innumerate that they can get away with a massive price hike. Just like during covid.
https://bsky.app/profile/boulderguy.bsky.social/post/3llyhyiabjc2i
Will it cost me 50% more to ship something via UPS? I'll bet you $1,000 it doesn't.
They're talking about a game going from $25 to $40 via a $1.50 increase in production costs.
So for board games: cards, dice, boards, game pieces, boxes etc.
All of those now have increased costs.
Now figure the cost of getting them all together.
Now the cost of shipping.
Etc. Etc. Etc...
Look at when inflation was highest - companies were expanding their margins, not just passing along costs.
I'm a Beverage Steward by trade, with a focus on craft beer sales (small batch local, not domestic like Bud).
Our Q1 meeting was nothing but preparing for higher costs.
1/3
The obvious item is the aluminum. We get that from Canada. So cans cost more. Brewing tanks cost more.
Next is wheat and barley. We import a lot of that, too. And if we wanted to grow it? Well we ALSO need Canada for fertilizer.
And it's not just Canada...
2/3
Every little thing just got nickled and dimed to hell and back. America can't just make product X overnight because we feel like it.
Every nut and bolt has a country of origin. And each tiny piece now has a huge cost.
https://www.sjgames.com/ogre/products/
(The 3e books are so much friendlier, though. I love them so.)
Turns out he's a kinda of shitty third-tier Nurgling (first term) and/or a very lesser demon of Tzeentch.
I blame the SV bro culture of a lot of this: it's like Wall St The Sequel: an entire industry that gets rich without actually making stuff
Even something as simple as a deck of playing cards requires a specialized machine to cut them.
You’re right. It’s even worse with electronics. The tariff on chips (some that we can’t get anywhere else) is higher than finished goods.
"Just make it in America", yeah sure chief.
The better deals have always been in SEA/China where the tariffs are highest whether its tooling, deco glass, etc.
To raise ‘your’ MOQ for packaging or something is to bet longevity and forecast in a risky way. But NOT common knowledge ya? 🥲
Tooling, supplies, expertise, volume, flexibility, all better elsewhere. Only downside is transpo costs, and now tariffs.
Tariffs are no plan to change that.
That's not hyperbole. My life depends on Rx's I'd bet aren't made in the US.
1. Consumers are gonna take a bath.
2. Companies are gonna fail, indies mostly but also weaker large ones that don't have pricing power.
3. Choices and market will shrink.
End game stupid trade policy no one living has memory of.
If we're burying jars of nickels in backyard (fam did this in depression), does anyone give a shit about IP?
Smart capitalists will be selling you shovels. Tbf, we'll also probably sell you a branded shovel. 🤷
I'm not sure I can take that.
"survival math" is so on point.
https://bsky.app/profile/n1bbl4r.social/post/3llyt3qjqbs25
End-stage capitalism, encouraged by the State.
That's fascism, you know.
So their competition will suffer, but they will take basically the same amount of damage when their own suppliers croak.
https://mobilize.us/s/ImgZJs
https://www.renehersecycles.com/bikes-in-the-age-of-tariffs/
All of his enablers in Congress are going to be voted out (assuming there is ever another truly free election in this country.)
Then everything changes again for the manufacturers.
You don't start by trying to take Asia.
(I always take Australia...lol)
(Now, if you had to put the extra troops continuous to generation, as a form of supply line the game changes; a lot)
#boycottUSA
https://youtu.be/UILzTTJHigw
It will kill a lot of bespoke/midsized manufacturing, irrespective of business size.
Think 1 monopoly game, not 50 versions of monopoly.
You'll have pure mass and arts 'n crafts.
Have you tried Rolco games? They are in Minnesota. I used them for an indie game I made decades ago. At the time, they were very affordable. Not sure about custom design, but they had a great variety of piece types available.
https://rolcogames.com/
This is STEVE JACKSON GAMES THE MAKERS OF MUNCHKIN one of the most well known board games ever made, like below risk and monopoly and catan likely sits munchkin
The production needed for their products is massive compatatively man.
I am suggesting a domestic manufacturer, just in case. I am playing my part sharing knowledge to aid their continued success.
Ive def seen people consider richard garfields game company the same way
Like no, the maker of magic the gathering is NOT running an indie operation lol
resale. Americans have a lot of barely used stuff to sell
Hopefully it will turn on a few lightbulbs. 🙄
https://stonemaiergames.com/the-darkest-timeline/
Fuel and parts go up, meaning planes trucks and boats charge more to haul stuff.
it's rough.
It isn’t just heating oil (many northern states import heating oil from CAN)
Back to it: we are going to see issues with but the most common source of manufactured goods shipping aka shipping container -> fuel.
You are spot on.
Fixed upfront cost to pay an artist for a box cover or a street cutout, that you spread acorss expected revenue from sales, they've still normally been paid
For modern US supply chains, all components, to work with non manufacturer DTC, manufacturing costs sweet spot is ~10-15% of SRP.
So take manufacturing hard cost and divide by .10-.15.
I saw some other post where a publisher said their take on a $40 game was about $9, minus their print cost of $3. So $6 to cover all the logistics, staff, office, etc.
That's why we've resorted to immigrants: we're at near-full employment.
You can tell the people who make these decisions aren't "details" people.
They don't want to pay for it.
For small employers, yes, the labour force exists.
For the larger, Foxconn-style factory towns? No, we don't have tens of thousands of skilled people's worth of capacity, nor the infrastructure to support them
That's why China has eaten our proverbial lunch: it's not just the people, it's places for them to live, power generation for the factory and town, training, schools, roads, rail, warehouses, etc
You are not considered 'unemployed' under U-3 requirements, the most commonly reported measure, if:
- You are not actively looking for work
- You have earned more than $20 in the last week
There aren't tens of thousands of skilled workers and support infrastructure available at a drop of a hat.
...well, not normally. Trump and co seem to be changing that.
A Chinese factory worker averages $6 an hour. An American? Almost TRIPLE that.
Tariffs are essentially hitting communities in a sense.
Here's a thread from another game company owner: https://bsky.app/profile/johnnephew.bsky.social/post/3llwxt46ua22x
Yes, we are gonna see who has pricing power and who folds (already some are).
But the intent is to destroy, not build. This is a Russian plan to reward the rich. That’s it.
But that’s not their aim. The techbro nihilists like Musk have been explicit about their desire to crash the economic system so they can scoop up the ruins and rebuild in their image
“Age of Manufacruring” in the us as a power is OVER. We should have been competing in ways of the future: STEM and creating social systems to buffer those displaced by robotic advancement. Instead we kneecapped the educational system, made college unreachable for many 1/2