Reply To: US tariffs and trade woes for gaming

[limburger 22101xp 0]

I kind of hope that we as consumers simply take a good long look at our expenses and focus more on hobby instead of instant-gratification.

ie : create your own terrain instead of buying ‘ready made’ bits where possible.

There’s still some aspects where we can’t afford to buy used or build things from scratch, but I’d say it never hurts to do some thinking as it will help our own enjoyment of the hobby long term.

I’d say the biggest issue with the planned tarriffs as of now is the uncertainty of when these things will be applied.
That’s the killer, especially for small companies that don’t have a buffer to take a hit like that when they can’t afford to wait for the tarriffs to go down.

Some of it sounds more like an attempt at bluff poker that is designed to manipulate the stock market instead of an actual threat that will be executed. The orange cheetoh casually talking about how a few of the rich folk visiting him had made a few hundred million dollars worth of profit in the past few weeks is an indication of that play.

Even before the clown took over I wasn’t a fan of USA based kickstarters as the customs duty, VAT and handling fees are always an unexpected surprise when things get shipped. Brexit has been the only thing that had an actual impact on the hobby from my perspective. The bigger companies have been able to find ways to reduce the impact and the smaller ones were never really set up to do international shipping anyway due to the low volume they produce.

Mantic’s news was interesting. It looks like the USA market is the only one getting hit by the problems as IP products are done in China, but everything else is done in the UK.

I wonder if we’re going to see similar actions to the EU based hubs that the bigger UK companies have created to reduce impact of Brexit.

Heck, I’d say it would be good for our hobby in general if those small/medium companies would find ways to co-operate when it comes to shipping products. An Amazon-like concept without the greed would be amazing. I bet that even the big boys would beneift, but I doubt their shareholders would want to entertain such a concept as they’d rather dominate than share market space.

I wonder if something similar would help solve the rather unfair pricing for Australian region. And that’s before considering the rest of the world (Russia ? Asia ? Africa ? South America ? … they’re all rather unknown within this hobby … )