Catalyst (makers of BattleTech and its two RPGs along with Shadowrun) put out a long and detailed response to the impacts of the tariffs. You can see it here.

And as someone pointed out on a thread on this on reddit, the same person literally embezzled nearly a million dollars from his own company.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/djqcob/tabletop_gaming_embezzlement_and_argle_bargle_a/

Quote from: JeremyR on April 23, 2025, 01:52:13 AMAnd as someone pointed out on a thread on this on reddit, the same person literally embezzled nearly a million dollars from his own company.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/djqcob/tabletop_gaming_embezzlement_and_argle_bargle_a/

fpbp

https://www.catalystgamelabs.com/news/tariffs-rolling-against-american-game-publishers

That's what you get for doing business with the CCP. Get better at picking your manufacturers.
Trump has been talking tariffs for years,, you've had nine years to get your shit sorted out.
 

Ahh, yet another post demonstrating that even people working full time in this industry have a very half-baked understanding of how these things work. When you half-bake the explanation, bad things happen to the mental model.

QuoteIf New Product costs $5 to manufacture (our Costs of Goods Sold, or COGS), the next decision we have to make is to set a retail price (Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price, or MSRP). Some publishers use a "5x" strategy, meaning they set New Product's retail price at $25. These companies usually sell a good portion of their product direct to consumers, the gamers, maybe through an online store, maybe through a crowdfunding platform. What they are probably not doing (or not doing well) is putting their product into retail stores or into distribution(4).

More likely, the games publisher is using an 8x strategy. (Or 7x, or 10x. Pick your multiplier and do your own math; I'm using 8x for the purposes of this demonstration.) With an 8x multiplier, the publisher sets New Product's MSRP at $40.

No. What happens is that each step in the supply chain has to increase the product's cost to cover the costs of that step. A common retail assumption (like with LGSes) is to 2X your cost to turn a profit, but most internal supply chain steps are closer to 1.5X. Coleman just pulls these numbers out of thin air when in fact they are a measure of how long and how efficient your supply chain is. Effectively, to get the multiplier, you take the average price increase (the x number) across your supply chain and raise it to the exponent of how many steps your supply chain has. My point is that the math here is actually exponential, not simply multiplicative. More efficient or shorter supply chains have huge advantages over longer or inefficient ones, even if the longer supply chain has a significantly lower starting price.

This is why I think that pivoting to print or manufacture on demand at the LGS scale is far and away the best option, and you kind of need tariffs to make that happen. Yes, there will be blood, especially from businesses which have sunk cost in the outsource model (which is almost all of them these days), but that happens every time there's paradigm shift.

QuoteChina is NOT paying the tariffs(5).

I don't know how much clearer I can say that. And yet—I expect someone will argue this exact point;I've seen it declared too many times on other websites. Apply ten seconds of reason here: If the US could force China or Chinese manufacturing to pay these tariffs (it can't) Chinese manufacturing would simply raise its cost on the American publisher, forcing it back on us. Capitalism at work.

Again, that's not exactly true.

Chinese manufacturing is an intentional economic warfare policy from the CCP. The goal is to make other nations dependent on Chinese manufacturing so that these other nations lose the industrial capacity to wage war against China. To a less extent, the CCP uses Chinese manufacturing as an opportunity to insert backdoors into hardware they ship overseas, and also employment keeps social unrest down.

For the CCP, this is not a free trade arrangement. The Chinese Yuan's exchange rate is manipulated against other currencies to make outsourcing into China easy and importing into China almost impossible. Also, China's whole industrial model is reliant on income from exports.

This is why Temu and AliExpress exist. It also means that China will be forced to respond to tariffs by increasing the amount they manipulate the Yuan (or other economic measures) which damage the Chinese economy. The key point to realize here is that this is not free trade. It's an economic game of PvP.