November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming

Read this article on the Illuminator.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

Applause for a realistic and considered explanation.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

Really well stated.

How anyone can believe that anyone other than the consumer is paying the tariffs I don't know. Would you pay to go to work?

Tariffs are a sales tax, and all sales taxes are regressive. Tariffs will hit struggling families and small businesses worse than the big players.

I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that far less gets done than has been talked about. And learn how to be vocal...

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

Thank you for explaining, and speaking out.


We -- consumers as well as manufacturers -- are in for a world of hurt due to the misunderstanding of how tariffs work and who they will effect.



If anybody needs to look up the email addresses and office phone numbers of elected officials, may I be so bold as to suggest this site:



https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

Tariffs are designed to be equalizers. We enjoy super low rates for things coming from China.

The THREAT of tariffs on many will cause a company to change its manufacturing processes. If not, then the tariff will result in making that product less competitive to something produced in this country.

For something that is not currently produced in this country, this has the effect of raising the price of that item and making it more likely to have competition enter that is locally sourced.

Tariffs are usually threats to elicit change, but in the end they may raise prices to make it possible to produce things in a richer, local economy.

I don't know how important it is to make things here rather than there when it is games, but I sure believe that high tech things should not be relied upon from China. Perhaps getting our reps to understand they should pressure the most important industries and leave the light hearted ones alone.

Targeted tariffs, as it were.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

Money is pretty fungible so pointing to one variable is probably going to be an oversimplification. I don't know, but it seems like high freight yet lack of competitive local manufacturing points to something not working correctly already. A lot of proponents of tariffs claim they protect against an unfair race to the bottom.

SJG has put out a couple political posts this past week, and in my opinion, they weren't particularly presenting nor inviting sophisticated takes. That worries me a lot more than news of a necessary price hike. If it came to that, it doesn't seem like SJG would be uniquely affected, so they could move forward unburdened by what has been the status quo.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

I got to admit I wasn't fully aware of the tariff issue. Thanks for pointing that out.

This can work. Elected officials often check the numbers/statistics of what their constituents say.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

SJ Games has survived forty years of nonsense including the Secret Service Raid, they'll probably survive any coming tariffs. But there are other small companies without the advantages SJ Games enjoys, and they'll go away when their clever $15 card game goes to $25 and people feel like that's too much and buy something else.

Hopefully the tariffs will be small and targeted. People say lots of things during the election that evaporate later.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

Tariffs can be used for various purposes, but in fundamental design they're just a tax on a particular class of economic activity, and like any such tax, it has two effects: it raises money, and it suppresses that that type of economic activity by making it more expensive to carry out. Broad tariffs tend to be relatively bad for the economy compared to other types of taxes that raise similar amounts of money, which is why they're disfavored in the modern world.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

Oh, how I wish that were the case. Remember, our biggest leaders are our board games - and the reality is that there are very few options for making board game components (especially plastics) at a competitive cost in the United States.

Books? Absolutely. Cards can be printed easily in the US as well. Since I became CEO, I've shifted quite a few of our book prints to US manufacturers. I'm actually a big fan of Made in America when and where I can.

We don't use a lot of plastic components in our games. Ogre and Car Wars are the two main ones that come to mind. But get this: a 2-part injection mold (which is the standard mold for the types of plastics we use in the gaming industry) usually starts at $90,000 and can run up to $250,000 for one mold here in the US. Overseas? $10,000-$15,000. (I do a lot of plastics with some of my other companies.)

The other real concern is if across-the-board tariffs are put into place. That means an extra tax on top of everything imported to the US - be it a finished product or the materials to make a product. The US is the second largest importer of paper (and paperboard). The cost of the paper our US manufacturers use to make our books here in the US will go up. Sure, it will have less impact than a broad tax on a finished item, but it's still an increase we have to bear the burden of.

Another thing I haven't seen many people talk about is just how long it takes to bring a factory online. Or where do we get the resources to manufacture an item if the core materials aren't even produced in the number we need stateside?

I've been planning for this potential eventuality for the last year. But my more considerable fear, outside of increasing the price of our games, is the expendable income the average American family will have to buy games when the cost of everything else goes up. That is more than just a problem for SJGames. It's a problem for the game industry at large.

However, as the CEO of SJGames, it was still my duty to inform you, our most ardent supporters, of the reality of the situation we collectively face.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

I am happy that y'all are making the difficult plans for the excessively uncertain future post-January. I'm hoping to make some purchases before then, though I doubt I'll be able to sustain y'all single-handedly. (I'd put a whole bunch of heart emojis here if I could figure out how to use heart emojis...)

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

This post sounds rather alarmist. Maybe it is time to look at other east asian countries? Why are you doing business with a country who uses slave labor anyway? Maybe you would make more money doing it yourself, and even more by printing game pieces for other companies as well? It can't be ONLY Steve Jackson Games having this problem.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

Don’t fret yourself. SJGames will figure some way to keep selling us games. And the political posts are harmless.

Exactly. (And, I see what you did there. 🙂)

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

Sounds like an ideal opportunity to move GURPS into the modern era and make it fully electronic, with support for VTTs and having the ability to integrate the system into the online world.

I'm in Australia, so it's already too expensive to import hard copies here.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

Tariffs were promised for all imports to the USA.
See post #10 above: printing in the USA is workable, but prices charged for the steel molds needed for making plastic game pieces in the USA are six to 25 times higher than in China.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

From what Meredith said, books are not the major problem. I’d guess there are competent, affordable printers in any large country, and Meredith says she’s shifted a lot of that to the States already. It’s the games with plastic components that have the most serious problems.

Of course, Munchkin is the company’s biggest cash cow, and that doesn’t use much plastic, so that’s good. But if paper costs rise significantly, things may get hairy.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

Why would other Asian countries suddenly be able to offer cheap plastics manufacture?

Given the price difference quoted between Chinese and American plastics work, I’d have to guess that China has a large, efficient base in the sector with major economies of scale. (I can’t imagine that lower labour costs have much to do with this specific issue, though I’m open to correction.) Nobody else, east or west, is going to be able to match that from a standing start in less than years, if ever.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

You might find this article interesting: https://www.industryweek.com/the-eco...-china-cheaper

tl;dr it’s not just lower labor costs, but the other factors don’t exactly endear one to the Chinese gov’t.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

I have always liked how SJG is fairly open about their operations and the various things both good and bad that impact sales and prices.

The US spent several decades getting into this addiction to low cost China stuff and it will take a while to reverse it. In many cases, we are discovering that we don't even have the factories capable of making the stuff needed to build factories. So to build a factory to replace Made In China stuff, we have to buy the factory parts from .... China.

Also, shipping costs are probably not going to get lower. The recent contract with the longshoreman unions on the US east coast for example. And the pollution agreements on bunker fuel that mostly eliminated the use of cheap high sulfur dregs from refineries and requires low sulfur fuel that costs a lot more. Seems that clean air has a cost. Not a complaint, I like clean air. (Oddly as a bizarre aside, it seems that the elimination of sulfur from shipping fuel has increased planet temps as sulfur dioxide is a cooling gas. https://www.livescience.com/planet-e...study-suggests )

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

Card printing is very specialised. As far as I recall there's one plant in the US that can do it in quantity and to a workable standard, and since it was bought by Asmodée it doesn't take jobs from anyone else. One in Belgium. And a whole bunch in China and Korea. There are some eastern Europeans trying to get up to speed, but they aren't there yet and that doesn't help the US anyway.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

All art is political.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

SJG taking the time to tell us (their fans and customers) what they are working on to hopefully avert the worst of this. I applaud them for doing that. It isn't necessarily political, as it will affect the bottom line of SJG and they are planning ahead as much as possible.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

At the end of the day, Tariffs are protectionist in nature, and their intent is to level the playing field in the long run. Certainly, there are short term disruptions resulting from any new tariff imposed on any product or raw material, but the effect in a country the size of the USA is to provide significant incentive to increase (or commence) local production. Yes, it's true that local production will be more expensive overall than products produced in a command economy like Mainland China (slave labor is awfully cheap in the long run), but frankly I'm willing to pay a little more to make slave labor unproductive.

Having said that, there are also other factors to consider -- such as that local businesses generate local tax revenue which might reduce the burden on individual tax payers a bit, and local businesses generate local jobs, and so on. Never forget that any decision is never taken in a vacuum (at least, it shouldn't be) and that downrange consequences and outcomes should be considered too. I note in passing that the current administration kept the previous administration's tariffs in place in almost all cases -- which might tell you something about how they were working.

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

Well, no, their intent is to protect local businesses from foreign competition. There are a variety of reasons for doing that, but they only "level the playing field" is when they're retaliatory in nature (i.e. the foreign competitor is being granted an advantage, and the tariff is compensating for that advantage).

Re: November 10, 2024: The Reality Of Tariffs In Tabletop Gaming
 

This is a sound, non-partisan summary of the use and impacts of tariffs, with a link to the underlying peer-reviewed paper.

https://news.gsu.edu/2024/10/15/are-...r-the-economy/

I think it's a very good summary, particularly in that it highlights that short term tariffs, designed to protect an industry *whilst it makes changes to address the underlying imbalances* can be useful. However, ongoing tariffs where no changes are made have a net negative impact. Introducing tariffs without clear plans to restructure are not economically sound. They may have local political value (clearly, demonstrably, they do), but that's because that vast, vast majority of the public don't understand how they work and/or some do understand but don't care because they just want a quick fix with no effort that costs *someone else* money and not them (which is very short sighted and ignores the broader economic impact). All sides of politics are guilty of pandering to the short term political impact.