Report To The Stakeholders

[Steve Jackson]

It is ever in our minds, believe me!

I will be at UKGE this year, and who knows what I will learn?

[David Johansen]

Back in the day, miniatures companies and even rpg companies licensed their products to companies in other countries rather than paying shipping costs and tarrifs. If I understand rightly, and my information is often dated, there's a tarriff on games that doesn't or didn't apply to books that lead to the move away from boxed sets.

Maybe the way shipping and manufacturing work now, it's time to revisit that approach.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by David Johansen

Back in the day, miniatures companies and even rpg companies licensed their products to companies in other countries rather than paying shipping costs and tarrifs. If I understand rightly, and my information is often dated, there's a tarriff on games that doesn't or didn't apply to books that lead to the move away from boxed sets.

Maybe the way shipping and manufacturing work now, it's time to revisit that approach.

For the UK, value-added tax applies to "games" at 20%, but not to "books." In the late seventies and early eighties, Games Workshop were a general games distributor and publisher, and did UK editions of some Chaosium titles. Later, they switched to only doing their own stuff.

Their reprints don't seem to have competed very successfully with imports (they re-arranged RuneQuest II, which did not help), and with the vastly larger range of games on the market now, I can't see it working again. What the UK seems to need is an efficient importer and distributor. Esdevium Games acquired a near-monopoly (apart from WotC products) and then stopped trying.