Home › Forums › News, Rumours & General Discussion › BattleTech: Mercenaries – CGL does a shipping booboo? Internet rages! › Reply To: BattleTech: Mercenaries – CGL does a shipping booboo? Internet rages!
Kickstarters used to include shipping as part of the pledge, but there’s been several reasons not to do so :
(1) kickstarter takes a percentage of the money. Services like backerkit take some as well I think.
(2) since the pandemic shipping costs have exploded (it was too expensive to ship empty containers back to China as well)
(3) shipping costs have become unpredictable. It’s nice if you predict 10$ and shipping is 10$ or less, but it can kill projects/companies if shipping costs double or triple (which kind of is what happened with Darkest Dungeons).
(4) Brexit has been a royal rodgering for everyone involved as companies needed to reinvent the wheels and find their own way through the red tape.
So plenty of reason for companies to delay charging shipping costs until the last possible minute.
Any ‘free’ shipping is simply costs that companies either factor into the regular price or are able to absorb if they’ve got a good buffer.
Shipping from the USA has always been expensive. Or at least the first Blood&Plunder was pretty expensive even pre-pandemic.
I think it is kind of silly how regional hubs can ‘reduce cost’ when the goods are still getting shipped from A to B, except on paper they make a detour via C. It’s almost as if companies get punished for selling directly to consumers …
@pagan8th yeah Darkest Dungeon. They even did it for wave 2. I suspect several factors were at play with shipping being a killer for the company. It reminded me that even ‘successful companies’ can fail to predict risk accurately. I doubt it was malice (as some folk like to imply).
