Why Tariffs Are Killing Tabletop Gaming | Design Club

And now we're live on YouTube. Hi YouTube. Hey. Yeah, we found new ways for me to possibly break things. Uh I mean, as one does. Listen, listen. Are you really living if you're not just like trying to break the technology of multi-million billion dollar companies on the regular just by doing your job? I submit that you are not. Uh listen, you just I would concur, right? You just got to you just got to roll with it, right? Uh hello everybody. So uh a small piece of business for those on the YouTube side. Uh I I promised you Monday that I would get you all more emotes. We've now filled all of the emote slots for members over on YouTube with uh hi and pog. I don't know if YouTube pogs. YouTube tell me in the comments if you pog. Uh cuz if you tell me what a pog is. Pog is short for play of the game. Uh it's also uh sort of a um it's become a expression of joy and celebration. Um

so we have we have a matt a Matt Pog um face. Uh I will bring it up here on screen as Odin here so graciously. This is Pog. Nice. Uh and it is very much a Twitch culture thing and I don't know uh I I don't know. It's a YouTube culture thing. Yeah. If it's a YouTube culture thing. By the way, Eddie, I love how the sun has conspired against us that as we go live, it's just like, "Oh, hey, were you trying to do a thing?" Not too bad. Get wrecked. Luckily, I do have a blackout screen, so I can solve that real quick. I don't It's kind of like It's throwing minor god rays down, it really is. It's for cam camera flare. Yeah. Oh, that is really cool. I might need to get something like that. I hadn't considered like something that attaches to the window. Oh, yeah. No, it's well it's supposed to attach, but Mhm. Yeah. It's just basically it's like just a black kind of uh thing with a silver backside and has little suction cups just pop in there.

Uh yeah. Well, so uh Cox, you're quite right correct. Like most memes, Pog has descended from its original derivation, right, to like what it is now, right? So like GG used to be good game and now GG is like its own thing, right? It kind of still means good game, but it's also drifted linguistically away. I swear I'm not making any of this up. You could do a like a PhD level paper on linguistic drift in meme analysis in online subcultures. Like there is so much here that so many people don't really take the time to think about. Oh, it's very interesting. Anyway, you could do a separate collar or excuse me, a separate par no, not even parallel. Um, a separate one Uhhuh. that just took um how basically groups on the right pick a popular phrase and appropriate it to make it lose all of its original

meaning. Yes, that is well and that's actually a part of linguistic drift, right? Like Yeah, but that that's intentional sabotage of a word versus the linguistic drift that happens as a niche term broadens out and then gets more popular usage and Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny like it's not just online cultures because um uh uh in America um the word Jay originally just meant someone who uh walks across the street. Um but then it became something they wanted to criminalize. So uh government started using Jay as a pjorative and that's where jaywalking comes from specifically is because they tried to make make a pjorative out of a word that didn't mean that at all. Right. Yeah. And and the really funny part about that is that the reason that they tried to do that and we could oh Jeff this is a short this could be a short, right? Is the move from streets being shared pedestrian spaces to space being solely occupied by automobiles, right? That the street was originally for people in

carriages and to do business and to meet and to whatever and then it eventually just became a thing for cars, right? And now it's bad to be a person in the street when before the street was just part of the town, right? Yeah. Yeah. I could I could get um Jason over from Not Just Bikes to talk about it. Hey, that'd be really cool. That would be really cool. So, uh chat, uh we are today gathered here with our friend Eddie. Eddie's going to introduce himself when we actually start the recording. Don't worry. Um Eddie's great. He's written for credits in the past. He's been on Design Club in the past. We love when Eddie's here. It's going to be awesome. Um multi-published RPG author, right? And author of one of my favorite EC episodes that we did a couple years ago, which was the latigious history of Dungeons and Dragons, which Eddie with his D and D back D and D amongst other background was the one who did the research and writing for that episode. Yeah. And then Matt just threw in all the bad time travel jokes. Yeah. Right. Um Matt's job is to take a script and to um

jazz it up like that and to put it into his word or into his tone and to add in little quippy things that help make it fun along the way. Um that is actually part of his job. Yeah. Uh so today we're going to be talking about clap hands instead of jazz hand. Or was that juice hands? Hands. Uh the uh that sounds dirty when you say it. Uh the the plan for today is we're going to talk about tariffs and how they're affecting the tabletop industry with an expert in the tabletop industry. So uh that's the plan for today. Um we're going to go for a little while. After that, if you're so inclined, I'll let you all know that Matt and I will be playing the Oblivion remaster here on Twitch when we're done. Uh and tomorrow, if you are familiar at all with Claire Obscure, it is a uh expedition 33. It is a game released by a French studio that is currently trending on Twitch above

Oblivion. The Oblivion remaster came out and an original IP game by a French studio that is a turnbased RPG is trending above it on Twitch, which is wild, right? That's that's just wild. So, we're going to be playing it tomorrow. I'm super excited for that. So, that's the rest of this week. That's what's coming up right after this. That's what we're doing today. Jents, am I missing anything? Um Um I I have one minor tangent which is a literature recommendation before that. Sure. Because I've been enjoying it and I will save the results of our last well was last week or two weeks ago that we talked about alikart game development. Two last week was the backpack battles. Oh that's right. Time is a soup. By the way, my memory sale not Steam Unity sale happened and um I I can tell you how much I spent. Yeah, it's it's Oh, Eddie to catch you up. Um so I've been getting

the itch to start building something again, but I'm not up for starting yet another game studio. So I'm reteing myself Unity because I have not actually got my hands dirty in Unity for a long time. And one of the cool things about the Unity shop now is how much you can buy. Um you just put in like 40 bucks a save system will save to Steam, iOS, everywhere in the cloud backs up everything. So like it's done. 40 bucks you plug it in. You know that's three weeks of engineer time. Like click turn insert. So Will and I did an episode where basically we just walked through the Unity store looking at the kinds of things you could buy. Oh wow. And like Steam, Unity every once in a while does a sale. They're running a whole bunch of stuff at 50% off. And I ended up with a first time coupon code of 25% off my entire purchase. Oh, no. It's effective. I I'll just Well,

should I save it for on air or just finish now? No, we we we can we can talk about it later. I I did want I did want to put in before I forget it. That should be your studio name. Yags. Yet another game studio. Yags. Nice. I think I actually have a awful See, I can do a funny name as a game studio, right? Yeah. No, I mean that's never happens. Yeah, it's never happened. Not even once. Definitely never. But um Yeah. Okay, cool. So, we're going to we're going to go to black. Nobody panic. We will be right back with the beginning of the episode proper. Oh, wait. Quick book recommendation. Yes. Um, currently I believe it is trending as one of the number one Audible books, which blows my mind. I'm listening to my first um, lit RPG style basically real person gets put into a dungeon with game rules book called Dungeon Crawler Carl. And it is way, way, way, way better than

it has any right to be in any conceivable universe. Sure. feels a little bit like a John Scholsey's brother for some reason started writing about this and it's fun and I believe it is currently one of the number one ranked Audible books. Wow. Full stop. That's awesome. And it's a series. So, as a recommendation for something I never thought I would actually like but in enjoying tremendously and of course it helps that the narrator is topnotch because that always helps. Um Sean out here asking the real questions. If there's not treasure behind a waterfall, it's not a real open world adventure. We have um they have hit so many RPG tropes in here and just made them like the people are aware they're in a game dungeon. Like there ends up being a real interesting reason for this and are like playing against expected tropes andor other things. It's fairly amazing. Anyway, so

all right, two thumbs up so far. 2/ird of the way through the first book. All right. Okay. Excellent. Uh we're going to black. We're going to start the episode. Uh be right back. [Music] Good time zone, internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club, the only game design talk show on the internet that this week features a very special guest, Eddie Webb. Welcome on in, Eddie. I I like citation for that proclamation. Yeah. Okay. Well, hold on. You can answer. You're our citation, Eddie. You on any other design shows this week? If the answer is yes, I'll retract design. Okay. Yeah, I'll last week I was on different design show, but not this week. Not yesterday. you are exclusive to us. So, welcome everybody to Design Club live. This is I am Jeff Zetkin. I am the studio director of Extra Credits. Over here as always is Will, voice of

the people and our Twitch and now YouTube overlord for all of our live streaming. And we are joined by longtime friend of the show, longtime friend and successful RPG writer, designer, etc. Eddie Webb. Eddie, could you introduce yourself for a moment? Yeah. Um, uh, I have been working in the tabletop RPG industry for, just doing some quick math, 22, no, 24 years. Wow. Um, it adds up. Yeah, next year 25th, but it does add up. Um, uh, I've worked on over 200, uh, books. Um, some big ones are, uh, Vampire the Masquerade. I've worked on, um, Pugmire, which is my creator owns game. Um, I've worked on the WWE tabletop role playing games. So, I mean, just all over the map in terms of of the kinds of things I've worked on. So, you are what we would call a veteran game designer. Yes, I think that's safe to say. Yeah. Right. When I figure once you're past your first hundred, you know, right? I I was going to say no

100, you're good. I was going to say once you're older than a significant portion of your intended player base, I feel like you've reached veteran status or once you've been doing it longer than you know. Right. So, that's that's kind of cool. Career can drive easily. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. That's it. drink and drive. Not at the same time. Don't do that. Um, so today, uh, we've gathered everybody here today to talk about everyone's least favorite favorite topic to talk about, uh, which is currently tariffs. So, it's no secret that tariffs, um, have been, uh, something in the news recently. It's been something that's been going around on socials. It's been going around everywhere. And there's been a lot of what I would call sound bites um from a lot of people about it. No one in particular, but just like that's been the trend, right? People are trying to compress their thoughts into a minute long short or a 300 character blue sky

post or whatever. And so we thought we'd take this opportunity to bring Eddie on and say more rather than less because this is a big complicated issue that a bunch of different people in the tabletop space and in the video gaming space are all going to be affected by. So we wanted to take a second or not even going to are already affected by. That's true. Yeah. Are already being affected. Yeah. Um, as a quick note, Eddie was also the one who wrote our episode a couple years ago called Extinction Level Event on Extra Credits. They talked about how the pandemic was specifically slamming the tabletop game industry just because of all of the increase in shipment rates and delays and everything that was happening during then. Um, and this is almost part two of that in some ways kind of. But we we we and we I originally I remember um I had like for like a half second pitched idea maybe I could do a sequel as a 7-inute you know

uh video but then things have been moving so fast and there are so much more complicated then yeah something like this is the only way you can really meaningfully talk about it because it's it's it makes what happened in 2020 look like a dotle and I think it's also really important to note that if you're uh uh watching this on on YouTube for the first time or you're not familiar with design club That's one of the reasons that we do this format is that it takes a really long time to get a script out and get animation done, but I can get Eddie and Jeff in a call for, you know, an hour and a half to two hours and we can sit down and talk about it and that will be faster and more accurate and we can say more because the news cycle won't have changed uh by the time the the thing is released. So, unless you're saying Nintendo launching the Switch, too. I mean, yeah. Oh, poor Nintendo. Uh, by the way, if you it's it is the morning of April 24th. If you manage to get your pre-order, congratulations. I'm so happy for you. So happy for you. You and your

pre-orders. Anyway, I'm not worried about it. It'll be fine. I'll get it eventually. So, so actually as part of the not even ground rules, but background for this conversation, I think it's fair to say there's a lot about tariffs themselves and government policy that we won't be getting into. Correct. Like tariffs can fill books. And there are ways, actually, I'm going to lay this out and you guys can disagree if you want. There are ways to use tariffs to help do things like onshore production and other things. Yes, sure. But most of those require long-term planning to allow people to start acting to do what the tariff is intending to do. Yes. And so and we can talk about why we might or might want to do that but just setting up there are worlds in which proper implementation of tariffs can do can enact government policy.

Yeah. Right. I think it's fair to say for for this conversation how this particular set of tariffs rolled out in this particular environment why it is so catastrophic. We're not saying that tariffs blanketly are a problem or what not, but this specific situation is a problem. Yeah. So, what we're specifically coming down to is this is talking about how the tariffs have been implemented and are therefore currently affecting the game industry in the same way that pandemic, you know, when it came in and started affecting the industry, we weren't talking about other ones. It was this specific one that we are dealing with right now. Yeah. So, just kind of framing for anybody watching Mhm. that we are talking about the current way that things are have been implemented and what that is doing to our muchbeloved industry. Yeah. Although tied to to the pandemic thing that does mean the logical correlary is that not all pandemics are a problem that you know some pandemics are well no but but the impact the impact of that

pandemic was unique in it right all tariffs would impact the industry this impact is unique um so that wasn't trying to up or downplay the last pandemic like last pandemic was horrific you know a lot of people died yeah we're talking about the we're we're in the in the magical world where all we're looking at is the economic impact which is uh a terrible world to live in but unfortunately a necessary one if we're going to get any analysis on the impact done I think so yeah just kind of setting that because just for people watching I wanted to get that out at the beginning that that's a good point we're not going to go into a hundredyear history of tariffs or back to McKinley or you know any of the other things around it it's what's going on right now. Right. Okay. So, in order to understand what's going on right now, we need to talk about uh to lay another piece of groundwork which I think is really important, which is how does a

tabletop we we'll use an RPG. We we use an RPG starter box because that that changes things a little bit. How does an RPG starter box for a brand new RPG? We're gonna we're going to make the Hecnommancer tabletop RPG. How does real brief, how does that happen from a we we're done with the designing of the game, right? We have a finished design. We know what we want to be in the box. Mhm. We're going past all of the let's design a game, right? Into the we have designed the game and designed what we want to be phys the physical part of the game. Yes. Now what? Right. Yeah. Because now what is a big next step? That is a huge next step, right? Uh so Eddie fill us fill us in as someone who's done this uh far more than us. Well, I mean it's it's it's it's a good point because um we're also setting aside for the moment things like um uh PDF versions of games or or print on

demand versions of games because they're also not quite the same thing. So, a box set is actually a really good example. Um, because you don't call up the box set publisher and say, "Hey, I want a box set of the thing." And they go, "Cool." You push a button and then boxes happen. It's it's nothing like that. Um, let's assume a Hecnommancer has uh uh a rule book, character sheets, dice, and cardboard standies. That's a pretty simple, straightforward. Yeah. Cool. Wait, no. And I want a I want a Matt Lam uh I want a battle map put in there. Fair enough. M two and a map. Um uh so odds are pretty good. Uh you're going to get your dice manufactured one place. You're going to get uh your box maybe your cardboard standes done a different place. Your laminate map a third place and your book a fourth place. Okay. Um uh and they're all because the the dice manufacturers have no clue how to make a book. The people making books don't know

how to make cardboard into a box. They know how to make it into a book. They have very specialized machines as a general rule. Okay. Um and then uh once you find and source all those different uh we'll say printer as a collective term, manufacturers, whatever. Um you find those different printers, uh you negotiate with them all the rates to make sure that it's something that adds up to a number that you can sell. Um uh you want to the the general um industry wisdom is you want the cost to be about a fifth of what you eventually want it to sell for. Um so if you want that starter set to sell for uh $50, the cost of everything including uh shipping and whatnot should not exceed $10 per unit. And really quick in for people who aren't familiar in because this is that $10 may seem like wow you're making 80 you know or you're making a 5x off your one but this is also to account for all the time it took to design the game and build the game.

And this is also when a retailer buys the game they want to buy it for say 30 bucks and sell it or 25 bucks and sell it for 50. Yeah. Well, actually, um, usually how it works, correct me for a moment. Um, usually a distributor will buy that lot for, we'll call it, uh, 12, $13 a unit. Um, and then the individual game store will buy it at another markup on top of that. That's somewhere around $20 a unit. Uh, and I'm I'm making numbers up here, but but the point is is like um uh shipping uh goes to distributor. Uh it goes to um the the game store and then the game store sells it. Uh and they have to have enough room not only make a profit but also to occasionally uh put on sale um and still make at least some money. Uh because another piece is as as I mentioned, you get all these different manufacturers, printers going. Then they all send that stuff to the distributor who then usually by hands assembles each of

those. Uh so they usually get a line where it's like put one take the box, put one book in, put one bag of dice in, put a set of dandies in, put the map in, close it up, shrink wrap it, put it down, then just go through the next one. And that also costs money to get all those manufact and that is part of why the distributor takes as much of a cut as they do. Right. Right. Right. U because they they they are literally manually assembling it. Um and that can't start until all of those pieces come in. They can't like do it halfway. They they've got to do it all at once. Um, so if uh the dice are sitting in port while the other pieces are there, nothing's getting sold, nothing's moving. And on top of it, the distributor has warehousing costs. So if it's sitting there, you're paying for warehousing on top of that. Um, so these costs do add up. So I mean, yes, uh, uh, when I say um, you want to do 5x off of your uh, manufacturing cost for price. Um, I mean, it's not uncommon for something like that to make maybe two to

three bucks a profit per unit, right? Okay. So that means that if you are lucky enough to sell say work for two years and then sell a 100,000 copies of your game, you're making two to $300,000 for the multiple years of effort for everybody involved in putting it together. Yeah. And if that ends up being five or six people, that drops down pretty quickly, right? Because it gets it gets spread around. Even if it's not spread evenly, it still gets spread around. Yeah. Okay. So that's that's sort of how uh the the the the it's a great brief highle overview, right? We don't need to go into like dice tooling or anything like that. So right, though we will in a moment because this is going to get to the interesting part, right? Okay. So the interesting part is that um the biggest h Okay, let me back up because all of the the core cost the core cost

to print dictates your MSRP manufacturer suggested retail price. the base cost of goods sold um runs through this multiplier to make sure that everyone along the way gets part of the cut, right? That the distributor gets the cut, that the game store gets the cut, that it can still go on sale, which is sort of a theoretical cut, right? You still need to have a segment that can be taken away and sort of given to the consumer, if that makes sense. um as part of it. Um which means that if the base cost of the goods sold goes up, it carries through this whole process. Yep. And increases not only the MSRP, but at the same Yeah, you're back. The streams are having a time.

Oh, okay. Now we're where we should be. Okay. as a very brief internet hiccup. Uh yeah. Uh okay, cool. Great. We're we're back where we should be. Apologies to everyone. That was live television is an unavoidable part of doing it live. All right, let's continue. So, as many of you know, last year we ran a Kickstarter, our very first one for Extra History, and we sold history calendars, which Oh, I should have. Mine is sitting behind my green screen. Yeah, they were really cool. like and we're probably going to do another one again this year because the last one was great. We did a lot of planning and for our calendar, we had our calendar. We also had a deluxe package on the Kickstarter that in addition to the calendar had digital art of the calendar, had phone wallpapers, had physical postcards, and had an exclusive pin that you could only get in that actually here, which was wallp sitting on a pen with it long enough that we could actually use it as a wall tack to

hang the calendar. Mhm. Which was pretty cool. And so what that meant was as we were sourcing this to figure out how much do we ask for on the Kickstarter, we had to know how much would each calendar cost and for the deluxe pack in addition to the digital goods, how much would the postcards cost and the pin cost? Something about production was, you know, I'm looking at a huge spreadsheet here. The costs weren't flat. For example, if we ordered 500 calendars, our cost was X. If we could get it up to 1,500 calendars, the cost was literally half X. And if we could get But from 1500, the price point again wasn't linear linear. If we got it from 1500 to 2,000, it actually dropped by 4 cents. Where if we could do you know why you get those price breaks? Um, hit me. Um I I actually looked into this a while back. Um uh particularly with printers,

uh the big reason is because it costs the printer just as much money to turn on a machine as to turn off. So if they could turn on a machine and let it run, uh them doing 500 or 2,000 is a negligible difference to them. Interesting. Turning that off again and resetting it for another thing costs a lot of money for them, right? because you have to. So that's why they're willing to give you more of a benefit for more units because it it they get more money actually for less work. Actually, I'm looking here at a,000 it would c going, to,500 it cost us after that huge price break where it dropped. We saved 11 from 1,500 to 2,000 we saved 4 cents. From 2,000 to 2500, we actually then saved 7 cents. like they it was just it was hitting that threshold. But even the four and the seven, etc., if you're selling thousands

of a thing, it starts getting in. There were different thresholds for the postcards, getting them printed and different thresholds for the pins. Yep. So from I had a huge spreadsheet because we were looking at if we can, you know, sell this many deluxe packages, here's the profit we make. But if we can sell this many, we actually make like it wasn't a linear amount. Yeah. So people putting these together are also thinking of their print run sizes for things like the dice and the standies and the maps and the books etc. Because you might actually find a situation where ordering an extra 500 of them cost you equivalently the cost of ordering 30 more of them. And then suddenly you have an extra 470 of them that are like there's weird math that goes into finding these price breaks and lining them all up with each piece of physical goods. Yep. But also when we ordered our calendars and we got the first one sent to us, the group who sent it to us

realized they'd given us a misquote and basically it was for a less quality calendar than we'd asked for and refused to honor the actual quote they'd given us. And one of our procurement people over at Nebula, our streamer service, who also does some merch, found us a new one who could do the actual thing for the price, but it was no longer in the US. Cuz we had initially chosen a US-based manufacturer for our calendar. And instead, they were going to jack the price up like 60% to hit what we actually wanted. We found the original price that's therefore the 60% less from China because the Chinese group was set up to do that where none of the American ones were. Yeah. And this is because we started trying to go all on shore for this just to avoid weird shipping things. And it was cheaper to go to China and actually have them airship it over to us than it was to order from somewhere 30 miles away.

Yep. And that like the problem was we'd started the Kickstarter. Like we couldn't go jack up the price in the middle of this. The Kickstarter was going if the calendar suddenly cost 60% more. Our profit of this to help fund the studio is going to go down to that. So this wasn't a thing we're like, "Oh, we're going to go over to China." This was, "Holy crap, we found a stu a printer that will save our Kickstarter because the initial group we did gave us a bum order and then refused to honor the terms that they did it on." Right. So, some of these are weird circumstances, but like I wanted to bring that up as a thing that affected our studio. Yeah. So, so let's let's pull this apart a bit. Right. So obviously the reason that we're talking about this is that bit that things are being made outside the US and Jeff you correctly alluded that things are made less expensively outside the US and I think in some places. Yeah in in some places not every good or service is

cheaper outside the US. We should be clear about that. The reason that we're talking about this actually alludes to something that Eddie said, which is that the facilities and machinery and expertise to make many of the things that are involved in tabletop gaming are not to be found readily at the price that the uh the companies are used to paying or even close to it, 60% more here in the US, right? It was a market like that was I I'll let you go a step further. Um uh we get into board games specifically there are certain manufacturing needs that board games have that do not exist at all in the United States at any price. Okay. So so we so it exists in this spectrum. So all of these things are happening elsewhere in places where there is uh machinery expertise uh and labor right that is all um unique right either at the price that

it is or merely its existence right and so that's it sounds like that's really common for this industry right that um that the majority in fact I think every Kickstarter I've ever backed has has said this will be manufactured in China and here is the lead time and you know it's become somewhat of a Kickstarter tradition even um and I'm only using Kickstarter here because Kickstarter uh involves additional transparency with customers with purchasers right I don't see this for a thing that ends up at the shelf at my local game store I see it for a thing I Kickstarted because the Kickstarter will update me right um if you go buy Candyland from Target you don't know where the pieces in Candyland or risk score, Monopoly, etc. came from where on a Kickstarter, they will usually list it, right? And the Kickstarter will often tell you, all right, everything's done at the the manufacturer. It's on the boat, right? The on the boat posts on Kickstarter are like a tradition now,

right? And then like everyone celebrates when it makes it to customs and everyone grumbles when it sits in customs, right? And then it makes it to a distributor here in the US and they distribute it to or in its final port, right? Um, sometimes it all comes to the US and then goes elsewhere. Sometimes it goes straight from China to all of the different international distributors. It depends on how they have it set up. And as a quick note, historically, China is currently the country that has set up the manufacturing infrastructure. But it has changed. There was a long time when everything used to say for electronics, for example, made in Taiwan. That's a very good point. Yeah. You know, there's one of the Yeah. made in Japan. One of the parts of a global of the globalization push was to basically instead of having every country doing duplicate things to basically start pushing specialties to certain countries, you couple countries do manufacturing. You couple countries do you know mineral extraction. You couple countries do you know tech and software development. Like if you're talking about software development, there's a

couple countries that you go to for software development. Like there all of these things have become specialized. Yes. Because it was deemed inefficient for every country to do everything. Y fast forward 60 70 80 years of that and it has led to these kind of situations where you suddenly no longer have for example certain manufacturing capabilities in the US. But this would be true if you were a Chinese excuse me a Canadian company or a Brazilian company or anything else. They also wouldn't have those expertise correct and machinery and tooling because again the world has kind of and the way capitalism works has pushed it off to make it into specific areas that do it very well. Correct. And while this isn't the thrust of argument, this does also apply to the other parts of gaming, right? Um to to the video games industry, right? It's it is April 24th.

Switch pre-orders have have done their thing. Uh there is there are very clearly not enough Switch twos for all of the people who want them for a plethora of reasons. And the it suffers the same problem. People are like, why couldn't you just make the Switch 2 in the US? Well, to start with, not all the raw materials that are needed to make a switch to exist in the US. So, that's a problem to start with, right? And this this problem goes um across many industries. We're here going to focus on tabletop gaming because that's what we have expertise in. And because I think it's a very good um small like microcosm. Yeah. Microcosm, right? They are uh tabletop games are relatively simple products to manufacture. Obviously, the design is complex and play testing and all of that, but the manufacturing is a it's not an iPhone BMW. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But it has the same problems as many of them in the sense that iPhone is made a lot of the parts of the iPhone are made all over the world then combined in one place before

they're actually shipped out. The board game has the same logistical problems in a much more easily understood scale. So, by the way, some of that parts made in other places are by design. So for example, a lot of US defense contractors that assemble complex things like say a missile system or a airplane will have pieces of it built in as many states as they can so that when they need funding they can ask their state representatives. They're like, "Hey, well, if this funding gets stopped, you lose manufacturing in your state." They've purposefully spread it around. Yeah. So that when the procurement system comes time comes again, they have all of the state senators saying, "Well, I don't want to lose these, you know, manufacturing jobs in my state or and in some cases the same for things like iPhone." The fact that they can say, "Oh, you know, pieces of this were made in 40 different countries let them also say, you know, pieces of this were made in your country." Yes. Right. Yes. Exactly. It's And that has backfired in some ways, but it was also for a long time a good selling point. Yeah. Yeah. Um

anyway, so I kind of interrupted no I sidetracked this but for explanation but um I think design club what this is this is a good setup right okay so we've established that uh how games are made that they are made in places around the world because currently in the way that the world works and is set up they need to be in order for that to be up until this point until the tariffs rolled in a economically viable way to bring a product to consumers in a sustainable fashion for the companies making them. Is that all a fair assessment? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. So far, I think we're on page. So, so then, yeah, I want to ask Eddie a quick question going on this. Eddie, as a longtime maker of games, how much does, actually, how much does Pugmire cost? If I was just going to go buy the source book roughly, uh, right now, I believe we're selling it for $60. Something like that. Yeah.

Do you think if tomorrow you told people, "Hey, I'm sorry. This now this book is now $120 as many people would buy the game." God, no. Okay. So, there is a price sensitivity. There is a certain amount that people expect to pay for a certain kind of product. There's a little what's called elastic elasticity around it. You can stretch it a little bit, but for example, you couldn't come in and double it and sell as many. Well, I mean it you can't even really increase it. Like um uh price increases are are are notoriously hard to do in the tabletop sphere, but to use a more common example, people lost their minds when Nintendo announced that Switch games are going to go up in price. And it was it was like what 20 bucks more, you know? I mean, it wasn't a huge increase, but people lost their ever loving minds over it. Correct. Um because that is a common reaction. Um, there's a reason why Steam sales are so popular is because, you know, people want to feel like they're getting one over on the greedy

corporations. Even though, you know, even though, and we have to remind people of this all the time, it only counts as saving money if you play the game you bought. Right. Right. Chat, looking at you, it only counts as saving money if you actually play it. And don't just put it in the backlog pile. If you hadn't been able to come on this week, Will and I are the topic we've been planning was actually talking about the anchoring effect and the switch to exactly so you're validating probably next week or the week after we'll be talking specifically about that. But that is a good fair enough. No, that that's a good lead analogy, right? Yeah, because um lost mind when it went up. Well, certain people we like when when when you know we talked about when I did the video for the 2020 uh problems um the the game industry had a similar conversation because to reduce that video down very very much. Go watch the video. I I'm very proud of it. Um uh the c the cost of paper and cardboard primarily went up because it became scarce. Um and so therefore the bail the

ability to make a physical book went up and so a lot of publishers had to go we have to charge more for books. And when that happens eventually people get used to that. Um and so some people feel like okay the answer is well then after that's passed you bring the price back down. A that doesn't happen. Uh but b it's not just because of greed. It's also because you don't know when the next thing like that is going to happen. Um, and also a lot of times when the paper prices and car prices went up, they also didn't really come back down. So like the only people who are winning are the people who own the core resources really, you know. Um, oil often goes to these problems too. Um, so I mean like it's when you it's always a push to get that price up and it's usually uh I think it's fair to say a year to 18 months before people become normalized to new price point. Sure. Um but even then it's got to be in

increments. Um uh and a good example actually is um uh I have been reading about the uh UK comic of Sonic the Hedgehog. I swear this is on topic. I promise you. I'm willing to go for the ride regardless. All right, let's go. Um so the UK had their own week or bi-weekly uh Sonic the Comic uh Sonic the Hedgehog comic called Sonic the Comic. Um, and uh, uh, one of the things that's nice about them is that because they're out of print and no one has read, no one knows entirely where the rights are. Um, uh, it's it's it's lots of scans of the original magazine from the '90s are available pretty easily online, including, uh, the front matter where they usually have an editor talking about, you know, you know, fun kids, hey kids, the book, whatnot. Um, but they do occasionally talk about had to increase the cover cost. It's like, you know, cost of price, you know, paper's gone up, whatever. So, we had to increase the cover cost. Um, and every time they did that, they always shipped the first issue or two with a free gift as a way

to kind of make people feel like they were getting something extra for that price point, but then the free gift stop, but the price point stays the same. That was their way to handle we need to get people used to price increase. Yeah. Right. So, we have to do the same thing, right? that what value can we give to people while increasing the cost that don't impact our uh ability to make money? Right. Right. Um and that we that conversation was happen in the industry 5 years ago in 2020 and now this is a much harder one because you're right like if you increase the cost you lose customers always. It just always happens. But if you there's as you said there's weird math. If enough pe if you lose only a less people than you keep who will stay at the normal new price point you can offset that loss right so if I if I increase the price by 15% but 10% of my purchasing audience leaves I still have the potential to wind up ahead right exactly depending

upon material cost but yeah like if your actual cost went up by 10% like yeah there's yeah there's weird math around it but yes And that isn't just on like people doing price points for any product do that math, you know. It's like if we sold this for three bucks, how many people would buy it? Well, if we sold it for four bucks, you know, would a third less people buy it? You know, if it's So, you get this kind of math going on all the time as people try and figure out what to sell anything for. Yeah. Right. A and I know um a version of this happens when uh uh back when the uh iPhone app store first launched, there was a race to the bottom for a long time of everything, you know, as cheap as possible. And there was a climb for other uh uh app creators to go, we need to sell us a certain amount to actually make money. We have to convince people that a premium dollar amount is worth that. Um and now it's muddied for different reasons. But the point is is that it took a long time for people to realize, oh, just because I

get this game for 99 cents, this other game that's worth $10 is actually better and therefore worth more my time. It took a long time to get people even remotely used to that. It's still not entirely a one battle. Um, part of that was actually Apple wanted to sell everything for 99 cents because that's how much long sold for and there's a whole story there. Sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. But but I was bringing up because like there's a boil the frog thing. It's like you slowly get people increasing and they'll they'll accept smaller increases over time, but yeah, like you said, like if I if I double my price, if if I have to sell this book now for $120, um I there's no way I'm offsetting that with the amount of people I'm losing, right? I'm I'm selling probably next to no books, right? Because people do not think a 256 page fullcolor book is worth $120, right? Okay. So, let's let's let's talk about this. So, the margins are small, right? We're talking a couple of dollars to the original creator per unit sold. We're talking about a long period

of revup necessary to increase the cost. We're talking or increase the price, excuse me. The cost is dramatically increasing uh very shortly, right? Uh over a very short period of time, right? I I suppose it could be instic terms, it was essentially instantly. It instantly went from zero to 154% right now. Nonsensically high. And some people have 254% which is even weirder. Yeah. Right. Um, how does that work? Uh, there's apparently I I I I didn't do the research on this part, I admit, because I know that board games and books are exempt from this, but some areas of production have an additional 100% tariff on top of that. um based based on which I I think I think it's cars and electronics or something like that. I mean, so it's it's I didn't look too deeply into it, but yeah, some places have even more. It's ridiculous, right? Okay. So, if all of that is true, what are the recourse like where what

now? Right. Okay. So, we we have we have hectomancer. We have we have begun. Oh, let me show one extra thing in here just to make it a tiny bit more complicated. Do you remember the um that Kickstarter I talked about that we did the calendars? We sold out of them and had to order another batch to get to bring into the store because the store we put them in, we'd asked them to hold x amount back for everybody who pledged on Kickstarter. They didn't. So, we ended up with a tiny amount of people that hadn't gotten their calendar and couldn't because we were out. So, we had to do a reorder. So, we did a reorder and we ordered some more cuz like, hey, we'll sell them. So we ordered them from the original printer. They got put on the boat and then the tariffs came in. So we had already ordered these, paid for them, they were shipping. So the escalating cost of the tariff literally was an instant thing.

Like they were on the boat coming over. It wasn't like we could be like, "Hey, you know, let's reconsider this." They'd already been printed. We already had the invoice. There was going to be the tariffing fee as soon as they came in, right? So, so let's let's So, this the just saying those tariffs weren't doing what if the theoretical thing was we should onshore more manufacturing, right? The instant version of that basically left no time for it. like it was something else entirely. Let's real quick just dive into the mechanics real of this because I think it's important. So tariffs in this case are not paid by the um tariffs are not paid in the country of origination, right? They're not paid in China. You don't pay the printer more in China for the good. It's paid as a customs duty when it enters the United States. Which is why being on the boat matters because there's no

money due except to the people like the the the uh freight cost, right, is paid when you load it and it goes to the place and then when it gets there, that's when customs and uh import fees and tariffs and duties and all of that is due in the country where it's landing. Yeah. So, and and and to be clear, um I if that happens, um if it lands and uh the uh person who ordered that stuff goes, I'm not paying that money, it doesn't get shipped back because that's another cost. Someone it gets pulled. It gets destroyed. Yeah, that's correct. So, uh because no one wants to hold it because again, warehousing fees, right? All of all of this is money moving around. So, so basically it is pay it or lose it. Correct. Yeah. Right. So what now? Right. What what are so so let's for us we paid the fees so we could put the thing in the count in our store and fulfill our obligations to our

people. And luckily there was enough margin on that that we didn't come in at like 150. We came in at like something lower that we will at least not lose money on it. Okay. So so so the options are are as follows. I I think I think so uh American companies wanting to sell games to an American audience of tabletop gamers have the following options and we can we can sort of go through them. One they could do what it is theoretically being encouraged to do with the tariffs and onshore production. We've discussed that that's not really viable in the near or even uh significant. My guess is if somebody was interested, you could maybe even get a venture fund to back you. You could go stand up facilities and in somewhere between two to three years, y have a facility up and running that could do the kind of manufacturing or board games in the United States, but

that's one facility, right? So like yes you you could do that by way multiple people could do this but my guess is it is a 2 to three year setup time to put it together find the facility get all of the equipment get it all in installed and then train up the people on how to use it and even like beforehand figuring out what you need to buy the right stuff andor make the right stuff bring it in like the setup time for that isn't like oh let's go set it up it is a multi-year process process involving significant amounts of capital before you ever see any sort of return and hiring the right talent to do it. And let's pretend for a moment that we could freeze the industry. That we could say that every board gamer was cool with not buying any of the game that not participating in their hobby monetarily for 2 to 3 years and would all immediately return to that

hobby in two or three years when manufacturing gets on to the US. This is a completely counterfactual hypothetical by the way. There's no way in the world that would happen. But it's a best case. right through a best case and every studio could pause and not have to pay their employees for 2 to 3 years while we waited. Also counterfactual, the price would still go up. Y the price would still be higher in 2 to 3 years than people left it, right? Uh of necessity because of the cost of goods sold and the multiplier and all of those things and inflation in two to three years. Who knows what that's going to be? Um right. So the the cost would still go up and people would still you would still lose people even if they were frozen, excuse me, with no other influences for those two to three years because the cost was going up. Right. Right. Yeah. And that would also assume, okay, this is going to be we're going to get slightly into the politics

here, a consistent and long-term plan. Correct? Because if if somebody had come and said, "Hey, three years from now, we're going to be putting 100% tariffs on all of these things. You have three years to get your house in order and onshore more things." That would be enough. And said, "And we will not back down." You know, that would be enough time to for entrepreneurial people go get things set up. And companies would start planning against what those groups were going to charge. They'd weigh it against the, you know, 100% tariff coming in. They do the math and they would plan out their budgets and their operating costs around that. If that got said and then two months later they're like, "Oh, it's going to be 150%." And then two months later like, "Oh, it's actually only going to be 50." All the people trying to do the planning of should we go build these things and invest in this also have a chance to get effed over because if there's no stability, you can't go take something that's going to take years to

set up and say this is what it's worth investing my time and money in. Yes. So the instability in the in the landscape of international trade right now is part of the problem and is working against people actually doing the setup of things like somebody who could do these kinds of books or these kinds of dice or these kind of sies or these kinds of maps y in other places. Okay. So so let's let's pull this apart a little further too. So, let's assume that companies are going to try and play ball, that they are going to try and manufacture in the way that they have always done and find a way through spreadsheet wizardry to make the math work. They're gonna try and make all of the math work in such a way that they can make enough profit to keep their company sustainable, that they can uh still sell the product at a price the consumers will buy and the consumer won't be bucked by a sudden doubling of price, right? Where in the spreadsheet math

does the money for, we're going to keep the numbers really simple. We're gonna say 100% tariff, right? That's that is it's easy math. It's easy math. It's for the sake of argument. The numbers are fluctuating and will probably be different when you're watching this if it's not April 24th. Okay. Um Right. Where is there flex to do this? Right. Or is there flex to do this? Right. That's that's sort of what do you mean by flex? Where is there uh room in the budgeting in this magical spreadsheet wizardry to accommodate 100% tariff? get on on the initial good making it into the United States. Let's talk about that then. So, say Eddie's planning to sell his pack for $60 and that's everything involved in it. So, that means we know that it can't cost more than $12 tops. Mhm. So, if we're and let's say he's come in under that, he's

managed to do it for 10. I'm just throwing out some pretty reasonable. Yeah. Um, so, okay, the 100% tariff isn't on the $60 thing. It's on the actual cost of what he's manufacturing. So, what he would be looking at is saying the $10 is going to go up to 20. And I need it to be at 12 or under to fit the rest of these. And if he can't do that, that either mean, so we know, so say he was making the $3 profit at $12 and if it he could do it for 10, that means he's making $5 profit instead of $3 profit on a per book he sells basis. Mhm. If that cost goes from 10 to 20, he's now losing $8 for every book he sells, assuming that they can't raise the final price of the books enough to stretch it out that the distributor and then the retailers,

we each also need to do a multiple on top of that. Like there might be something where the distributor is like, well, you know, I'm willing to buy this instead of for 12 for 15. We could eat up to $3 on this to keep continuing. I'm giving an example. Right. Right. Cool. Now he's only losing $5 per and like you know or maybe they can convince the stores to instead of buying it for 25 and going to 50 to buy it for 30 and go to 50. And so that might let the distributor move their five up. So theoretically at 100% if the store made less money, the distributor made less money, and Eddie was willing to make like a dollar per book that the math might shift up enough if you could get all of those people to agree. Right. And they probably won't. Right. Right. And so so like Jeff, Jeff Jeff's case is a good one, right? Um actually Eddie, did I do roughly the math right on how that would have to work? That's I mean

yeah but made up for made up numbers yet that that works about right. I mean you know but that's also I think we're kind of where where uh Will's going here is that um that's assuming that everything else is also static which is not going to be true either because the distributor is probably going to have increased costs because they have to you know they also have resources they need to acquire some of which is going to be overseas so that's also going to get tariffed. The game stores are going to have to get some resources that may have to come from overseas so that might get tariffed. So, like everyone's costs are going to increase on top of all of this stuff. Um, so yeah, I mean like if if they can make if they can fudge their numbers to make less money, that's that's a nice thing to have, but they're probably not for perfectly mundane reasons that aren't just like, well, no, screw you. It's it's no, I I just can't I can't make that work, right? Yeah. Okay. So that leaves uh sort of this and and uh we should also clarify one of the reasons that none of the um that that flex room that we're talking about doesn't really exist is

that none of this exists in a vacuum, right? None of this exists in a uh in a vacuum of uh people are only buying board games and are otherwise you know everything else is the same. Right? One of the problems is that uh the reason that no one is willing to eat those cost decreases is that volume of board games sold will due to external factors that are not directly the tariffs on board games go down. Right. Right. because the money that I whether you just spend on a board game now has to go for food or rents or correct and and this is because let's let's talk about this part of it um which I think is a very salient point there is there have been suggestions and again this is largely in the soundbite social media crowd right um that uh well why not just make the consumer pay the full amount of the tariff at the at at the end of the chain right that if people and and this is

this is the idea Right. Um and so let's let's examine that world just ever so briefly. Uh that gets in the face of the um that gets in the face of the cost elasticity problem that we were talking about, right? That gets in the face of um oh the the multiplier math, right, for the MSRP. Actually, the big one that puts the entire burden of the collection on the retailer. Yes. In other words, you're telling the game store and you'd have to charge the 60 plus the extra 10 cost, but what that means is it's the board game store respon or the, you know, game store responsible for all of that and anything they don't sell or anything that happens along the way, they're stuck with that inventory plus the $10 cost on top. It's basically making them take all of the risk, which is something that most mom and pop or even broad, you know, more

national stores. They also don't have that in their budget. Right here, here's the other one. By the way, this is this is this is where that this gets a little weird. Um, if you there's the problem with tax on tax. There's sort of a problem with tariff on tariffs as well. I'm going to keep the cat from meowing on air. Yeah. Uh, that's um that's part of this equation, right? That there is there's also a world where because you're charging it at the point of sale, you need to charge more to cover the tariffs on the value that you're charging the consumer. that gets a little esoteric. Just know that if you do it that way, it will be more than the the listed tariff as an increase. Right. Right. But but but I mean I think there there's a psychological thing that you're talking about here which is valid is that um so I for those for people who don't know watching the stream, I'm actually living in the UK now despite what I sound like.

Um and uh so we do have tax on items here. It's called that but it's rolled into the cost of the item most times. Um, so if I if something's listed for4 pound, I pay4 pound. I may actually be buying it for £350 with 50 50 p of that, but I see four pounds, I'm paying4 pound, so I don't think I'm paying tax. Right? In the US, sales tax is by state, so it gets added on after the cost. If you're adding a tariff on top of that, what the consumer is going is, oh, this book says it's $60. I have $60 in my pocket. I'm going to go pay for that. No, actually have to pay 85. and they're and and they're going to blame the store owner for not accurately their product. But if you put a sticker on that saying this is actually cost 85, not 60, the customer is not going to pick it up because like why am I paying more for the thing? The book says $60. Why am I paying 85 for it? Yeah. And by the way, this is so common that they've had to make regulation against it. Like

if you go look at air like there was one for airline pricing like this is a $400 ticket and then you know you put it in your card and it's like here's the fuel search charge, here's the tax, here's the so- and so, here's the so and so and your $400 ticket is now $542 and you're like where did all that come from? Like it's the surprise people hate surprise costs. Like the Expedia travel website, one of their selling points is when you look at a hotel on Expedia, they will list the entire cost, the tax, the city charge, the you know resort fee, whatever it is, is the price you're seeing is the actual price you will pay. Like it's become that that's actually a selling point. We can tell you what your actual cost is so you won't be surprised. Like, yeah, that's the world we're living in is that that has become a selling point of knowing what the actual price is, right? Here's another one. And this one, uh, thank you. Thank you so much to Demon Works, uh, over in in Twitch chat. I'll put it

I'll put it on screen because I think this is an absolutely incredible point. Um, so, so let's let's go to your local game store. Let's go to your local game store and think about the number of games on the wall. Most most of them. We'll go with most of them are made in China because China is a place that specializes in this kind of manufacturing and that's where it's made. Not all of them. Nope. So now there's an additional thing that has to get covered which is they need to know how much tax to charge based on country of origin for each product in the store. And this is on top of the work that uh local game store employees are already expected to do. Think about your local game store. Think about all the things your local game store employee already has to do. Think about them also having to worry about country of origin for every game. Think about when they mess it up and the

store owner then has to actually balance their books against it. Correct. Right. it becomes uh there's I actually get you a a real world example of that because again I I I I live in the UK um and so if you want a example how this works we could talk about Brexit right um there are websites that are like you know European websites that going because of the Brexit tariffs we just won't ship to the UK anymore sorry UK customers we can't sell to you because of Brexit um and that is already happening in a lot of places where a lot of non US companies are just going we're just not selling to the US anymore. That's just it. It is no longer worth our time. Correct. Right. Because and and theam again the Brexit examples and ones that you give are we we don't have the overhead to handle the paperwork and it's purely paperwork for a lot of the stuff. It's like it's not a huge cost change. It's just there's additional paperwork that they don't have the overhead for. So yeah, I mean it's it's it's it's not even a financial cost. It's a logistics cost on top of

everything else. And again, it's all going to be at the point of sale. Now, I will quickly mention since we're in this very topic, um that uh Backer Kit just uh yesterday, today, double checking real quick uh last week. Okay, so a few days um they have rolled out a tariff manager. Um so for crowdfunding campaigns, if you're using backer kit, you can tell people, okay, we're ready to ship to you. So we can we can manage tariff by country because yeah everyone has to put their country for shipping address. So you can say cool everyone who's going to the US add this percentage on and give them this notification as to why they're at having to pay this and it's listed as a separate item when they check out this is how much pay for tariffs. So already got a tool for that. I've actually heard of a couple of companies setting up so that they now have fulfillment centers in the US and out of the US so that the fulfillment centers out of the US can have things shipped to them. Like if something going to Canada, you can put a fulfillment center in Canada and

therefore doesn't get the tariff from the US because it never came into the US, right? This of course involves you setting up an entirely new fulfillment center just which is additional cost just to get around. But it's like it is crazy the workarounds we're already seeing people well but again like Brexit has shown an example of how this has already happened right because uh in Ireland Ireland's uh a lot of Ireland that I'm going to really reduce here and I apologize to all my Irish friends. I'm going to be very reductive to a very complicated situation. I apologize but Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland's the Republic of Ireland is in the EU. Northern Ireland is in the UK and Brexit. There is not a hard trade wall between those two part two countries for very complicated reasons. Um very so right. But um the point is is like what what you could do is if you lived in Republic

of Ireland, if you order from the UK um you would there would be additional search charge and usually paperwork involved with that. um even if you ordered from Belfast, you're driving down the road, right, as it were. Um but uh you know, there's still a charge. So in Ireland, when I lived there, they actually have an entire set of websites that do virtual addresses where literally um you go my house is in Belfast. The Amazon in the UK sends it to Belfast and then this this this company then drives it over the border effectively. Um and it gives you a very small charge. It's less than the amount you would have pay otherwise. I suspect some kind of virtual address is probably going to start happening. People are going, "No, no, I totally we we're shipping from Canada, you know, and so we, you know, we got on a boat, shipped it across, you know, nets in Canada now, so officially we're shipping from Canada. We're not shipping from the US, so there's no tariff here." You know, I expect that kind of stuff's going to start happening once people get the logistics in place, right? Okay. So, and and um actually, quick question.

Oh, I'm clicking the wrong thing. Isn't that smuggling? Great question. Technically, I am not a lawyer. Next question. Right. Right. I mean, the fact Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yes. I mean, the fact I was able to use this myself uh in 2017 and was perfectly legal. Seems like they had found a way around it. But again, the part of the reason why I was able to do it is because that situation is so complicated. Most people are just like, I guess. You know, it was the I'm not touching this with a 10ft pole. Yeah. The um Yes. Uh correct. So, all right. So, we're talking about a lot of um things pain and suffering that people are going through, right? Backer kit has a new thing where you can pass the cost on to backers if you need to or if you decide that that's the route you want to go. Jeff's talking about the, you know, the the the paperwork. We've talked about some of the paperwork. So, if you're not getting the money

from, and we should also address, there's also this belief um that is largely brought on by political rhetoric that the tariffs are paid by someone in the country of origin of the goods and not the person receiving them. Right? That's also not the case. We can go deeper into the reason some other time if we need to. Even if it was if the manufacturer was like, "Hey, we're going to charge you $5 per calendar." And then this comes on, they're going to say, "Oh, I'm sorry. We are now charging you because of this $10 per calendar." It's not like they're going to eat the cost. Correct. Because they have no reason to, right? So even in that case, ultimately the consumer will still end up and the and the manu uh the the commissioner, right, of the work, right? The company that is commissioning the the product to be made and the consumer ultimately end up bearing the weight of those tariffs regardless of who is officially paying them. Just so we're all on the same

page. So if they don't do all these things, then they go out. Well, let's talk about what's happened from this. Yeah, let's talk about this. So let me start with one I know that the softball tee it up to hand it over to Eddie to take a big swing. Yeah. So, one of my buddies that I was on an advisory board with a couple years ago for a fun startup, his job, check this out, for a cool job. He runs a company that if you want to sell something on Amazon, they are an advertising marketing specialist company. You can bring your product in and they will optimize it for the Amazon store. They will help you get your shots, your product shots. They will help you to how to do the right listing. They will basically make it so that you're you can sell well on Amazon. It's like having somebody walk you in and say this is how you do a Kickstarter or this is how you do anything or that's what he does. he or his whole agency and he has a lot of small companies that basically

have found a cool thing and get it manufactured in China, bring it in and this guy helps them optimize their store to sell, you know, their backyard croquet sets or, you know, any anything that they're doing. I was chatting with him yesterday. He said in the past 30 days he has had three clients, excuse me, in the past week or two he's had three clients give 30-day notice that they are going out of business. That it isn't worth thinking to trim down. It is three clients have told him 30-day notice because that's in our contact contract. We are officially going out of business because of the new costs. So this isn't a theoretical that is talking to my buddy three of his own clients are now going out of business specifically because of this right um Ricardo the um president over at Hit Point Press who we were working with for their Humblewood um Kickstarter which is going on right now

um was quoted in Polygon and we were chatting with him because their Kickstarter went live like two or three weeks ago. go and they were trying to figure out what they needed and like they couldn't delay it. They had everything else moving. They've been hired publicity for it, everything. They were trying to figure out what their books were going to cost because they needed to be able to set a Kickstarter price so that people could pledge and get a package. And like they were just having to guess and they're making their best guess. And if things go poorly, like that's a small publisher of cool things that might get completely effed over because they didn't guess high enough. But if they of course put it too high, nobody's going to pledge to their Kickstarter. Yep. A and and and I really dislike in a world of uh analytics and pricing models and data tracking and trend tracking, right?

There's all of we we have what more than a dozen years of Kickstarter history. We have all this data about board game trends and and board game purchasing habits and board game geek and all of this stuff. And some of the best minds in the business who run some of the most reputable small studios are resorting to I guess we'll just guess. Yeah. It which is it. Yeah. Which is its own cause. Right. So uh Eddie, you you brought us a couple of stories about the the what if they can't keep up. Yeah. A few a few. Right. I'm underelling it. Yeah. So, so behind the scenes, um the I got a Google document a couple days ago and it's like here's five or six points things we talk about and I dumped like a page and a half of links. Yeah. No, it's good. And and I read I read pretty much everything you you you sent us to so that to help us catch up because Eddie Eddie's the expert here and knows like I didn't know that some of these websites existed uh when I was looking into this.

So, it was very helpful. Nice. Um um so I mean like yeah, so like uh like uh we said is some companies are dead. Um, Borlandia, company maybe not many people know about, Borlandia has shuttered themselves. Um, a company more people are probably familiar with, Greater Than Games, who make Sentinels of the Multiverse. They're done. They're all unemployed. Uh, so that's not a um, oh, we're declaring bankruptcy and restructuring. No, they're they're just done, right? Um, one thing we haven't talked about uh much is in the midst of all of this before the tariff stop happened, Diamond Distributor, who owns Alliance, who handles most of the tabletop distribution in the US. Oh, that's right. I declare bankruptcy in November, December, and they went through bankruptcy courts and now there's a lawsuit going on about who's legally labeled allowed to buy them. So, that's a whole another problem that has nothing to do with tariffs. that's also making US distribution difficult. Um but uh I mean there are

some options. Uh one is uh uh the uh Cormare cosmir. I never get it right. Cosmir role playing game. Brand Brandon Sanderson's is that Brandon Sanderson making it. He licensed it to the company. Brotherwise Games printing for Yeah. Yeah. Uh because IP law. Um uh so um they did a really nice breakdown of what they're planning to do. Um which again with Will said a certain amount of we're just guessing here, right? And they're being open about that. Um but they they have a plan like we're going to do our digital stuff is fine because digital is exempt from tariffs. Um uh we're going to look into our fulfillment plans so that way uh we can try to get as much fulfillment done intern you outside the US for international backers. That way, um, non US backers are getting fulfilled from a non- US distribution area. Um, and that should happen on time. Uh, the US

fulfillment is just going to have to wait until, uh, we figure this out and we're to keep making it. That's and that's their plan. Um, which, uh, it's a very nice document. It's very out. Has lots of good points, but ultimately comes down to, um, everyone else outside the US, we're pivoting a little bit. the US actually as as we were having this conversation I learned uh thanks big thanks to to YouTube chat uh cool mini or not is doing a huge restructure and layoff like that's that's now that that that was like uh five hours ago right so four hours before we started this conversation right yeah I'm not surprised I've been hearing rumors in the back channel about us not necessarily been in the best shape since the pandemic and let's let's talk about that real Part of the other problem is this is not again none of these things are happening in isolation and we would be while we're trying to focus on tariffs as a cause of

this uh problem right and analyze the way the tariffs are caused part of the underlying problem is that the industry was already unstable the indust let me talk about war chess for a moment so as the studio director of extra credits and extra history one of the things that I try and do and I've done this for every company I've ever run because this is just best practice is you try and have a certain amount in the bank. A lot of game studios like I call it a war chest because like when I first was working for Sony and then for Monolith that's what they called it. So that's how I learned right like Monolith is actually a good example. Monolith Productions, which I was working at back in the early to mid 2000s. Um, I was on a DC game. They were making Matrix Online. They were making Fear and Condemned. They were basically they would save up off of the game they made. And that was how much money they had, which was how long they could pay

people to make their next game before they had to go shop for a publisher to give them the rest of the money to make the game. And then the money they made off of that would give them enough runway to go make the next one. They called it building up the war chest. How much money do we have in the bank that can pay people before we're screwed? Um, and whether any company you work at has that. They don't generally tell their employees that because sometimes it's a very scary number when you're like, "Wait, you guys have two months worth of money in the bank and if we don't get a new thing, we're all out of business." Like that is way more common than anybody knows. Yeah. So yeah, one of the things that you try and do as a studio head is you try and make sure you have the biggest war chest you can in the bank so that if something catastrophically bad happens, like say Rob, our lead writer for history, got sick and we couldn't for some reason contract with any of our backup writers. We have backup writers just for this reason and Rob stopped writing scripts

for a month. Well, without scripts, we can't do voice over. Without voice over, we can't do animation. Without all of that, we can't put out a video. Like, we might stop. Again, we have backups for this, but just giving that as an example. That's what you have a war chest for to make sure you don't just have to say, "Hey everybody, sorry. We're done. Go find a new job." The pandemic for the board game industry wrecked everybody's war chests. Just straight up. very responsible companies that had been very tight on their budgeting to build up the war chest so that they would have that runway spent a lot of it during the pandemic trying to go as long as possible without firing employees. Those, by the way, those companies that were the ones that were extremely studious and financially responsible and saved up big war chests are the ones that survived as companies through the pandemic, right? The alternative and we're out of business because no one is gathering in places,

no one is going shopping for luxury goods recreationally right now, etc., etc., etc. A and really quick um slight pivot, but you will notice that from 2021 till now, the huge uptick in IPbased tabletop games that are going through Kickstarter because all those companies like we need to get fast wins to build that war chest back up. So yeah, we're gonna do the cash in baby. Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna do um you know the the Avatar tabletop role playing game. We're gonna do uh Dark Souls tabletop game. You know, because that that nostalgia of the people love those properties will back them. They'll want to get an increase in thing increase in in results of that. Um they can use that money to then invest in the games maybe they want to make or to keep things afloat. And then this comes along just as they probably start building that back up. Mhm. And and so related to that, we go to uh Stone Meer Games. Uh they do

Wingspan, probably the game that most people will recognize. Um they're getting a class action lawsuit together against the president. Um uh they uh announced it on the 21st. Um and by the time we're recording this, uh the they said anybody else who wants to join this lawsuit can. Um 3 days later, it's like our law firm has said, "We have enough people. We don't can't take anymore. Thank you for your time." That's how big of a response they've gotten. Uh but in their notes, uh they marked that uh of all the stuff they've already printed, nothing new, but just all the stuff that's already like uh uh already in the process of being printed or ready to ship out, one a half million in tariff costs for them. That that's that that's a huge there's no there's no war chest that covers a one and a half million hit, right? For a tabletop board game group. Yeah. No studio even look at that and go wait a minute what you know right and so it's not merely this event right it is it is

as with all things this event in this time in this fashion right especially because one of the things that um if this were a one-time thing if this were a one-time we know this is the end of it we know it's going to be stable after this one event, there is a possibility that additional venture capital, additional backing, maybe you go take a loan out from the bank against your house mortgage or something, which is, by the way, sounds super scary and is way more common than I think any of us would like it to be. Um, oh yeah, the um the and this is where the instability comes back into play. No one is going to give them money because this is so unstable because this industry right is having this instability due to factors that they don't control right there's no way that uh I can't see a venture capital firm being like quick note if you lend somebody money you want to make it back plus some that is generally

that's how it works right because if you don't by the way then you don't have money to lend to other people right like right so so there's no way that I think any reasonable venture capital firm thinks that cool mini or not or you know Orlando or any of these other companies that have been experiencing this financial trouble and have gone have exhausted all of their other options right the reason that they've exhausted all their other options is because the people who have money won't lend it here because it's not a sound investment because of the instability right not because those companies did anything wrong to be clear the good money right now is in going and saying do we think it is worth building the infrastructure that all these people will have to use at another time. Yeah. Mhm. And like uh again this was things that we had a solution previously um because before the pandemic uh as moday was being very aggressive buying up board game companies because they're trying to do exactly this. It's like let's get a whole bunch of board game companies under one umbrella. We can

share distribution sources. We can share uh production resources. We can make those games uh uh more cheaply at a large scale and then therefore each studio makes more money. Um and then the pandemic hit and because Aset was so big and had done that they were able to absorb a lot of that but but over the past several years As been starting to bleed off some of the studios they picked up. Um and so because they got saddled with all the debt from the VC firm that owned Asmoday but well there's that too right. Right. I mean there are other factors too of reasons but yes uh um but but so you know uh as mod if it had if it hadn't had that 2020 hit and that other VC hit might have been in the position to do exactly that we could buy up uh greater than games we could buy up cool mini or not and then get them through but they can't now because they're also struggling you know cool mini or not also did some of this too right so like it's it's turtles all the way down you know on some level yeah so so that's sort of turtles that's a shell game, Eddie. Oh boy. Uh, we needed that.

Yeah. Um, so, okay. So, I think we've covered most of the uh the analytical basis of what is currently happening, right? That is how tariffs work, why tariffs are such a problem for the board game industry, all of the ways that people have tried to get through the tariffs. I'm going to now open it up for a little bit of uh forecasting, okay, which is kind of, you know, is a little dark. Where do we think this goes from here? Right. Do what do we think happens to the industry? So, one thing we've actually had a good example of this. Was it um which was the one a couple years ago that during the pandas was it darkest dungeon board game? What was the one that basically from the Kickstarter? They're like they had a big one but then all the costs rose cuz like it doubled because they asked all the backers to pay more. Yeah. And they basically came back to their backers and said we are going to go out of business if we cannot get you to pay more. And they didn't say it as well as they could have, but their basic line was we know you we promised

to sell this to you for X. It's now X plus Y% on top of that because otherwise we're out of business. Nobody gets anything. And that was not terribly wellreceived. I mean, it was true from their part. like they were in a really awful situation where they'd collected the money for knowing things were going to cost X and suddenly things cost Y and they looked at that and said, "Oh, if we pay that, we're out of business." Like, uh, similarly, uh, the robot board game um, also uh, funded around I think they put it either right before right in 2020. Um, same thing. the cost that they handled it, I'll just say not as well as they could have. Um, and they don't exist anymore, right? They're done. Um, they they did not survive that. Uh, and that was like we've been saying like, you know, that was one set of factors. Now, those set of factors on top of this set of factors, you know, that there's

we're going to lose more companies. I mean, that's just straight up. I mean, I don't want to doomsay too much, but it's just going to happen. Um right now uh uh Sephilopair who do Gloom Haven um they they just did an interview the CEO did an interview uh where it is they h they have a bunch of stuff for Gloom Haven too that's just sitting in a warehouse in China. Uh luckily they they weren't on the boat yet when this happened. Um so the the is not actually shipping right now. Uh but like it's the we either we can sit on that we can afford the cost for that for a while. we can't afford the again 1 million I believe or 800,000 something like that a very large number of just the tariffs so like they're just sitting in in China waiting right um big enough that they could probably do that for a little while but not too long or they're going to concentrate on selling it to everywhere except the US well that's another part right um it might just be that they're like over time they will just try and keep selling

it to Europe and Canada and you know other people who like that property here here's sort of Yeah, go ahead. I was I was say like so that's way my next forecast like I think uh Euro gaming is going to skyrocket again um because uh uh Europeans are going to start selling games to Europeans in other parts of the world um and that's going to really take off um and sadly uh American game design is going to get a bit more isolated. Um I do think uh there's going to be an increase in uh digital and print on demands production because one of the nice things about POD is that uh particularly uh Lightning Source which is one of the bigger uh print on demand companies um they have printers all over the world. So if I get a POD book here in London um it's getting printed somewhere in the UK. It's not getting printed in the US. So I don't have to worry about that. People in the US can have there are printers in the US. They can get a POD book shipped within the US. So POD is going to be a big way around that. But you know, some people

don't like the quality of of print on demand. So that's going to be another challenging point. And that will also apply, by the way, to miniatures. Um I've recently found a studio that's done that's licensed out their print on demand files for um miniatures for fantasy miniatures because I wanted to paint some fantasy minis and I was looking around to see what was around and they make really cool uh Was it Hero Forge or somewhere else? Oh, somewhere else. Uh, it's a I forget the name of the company, but I found a printer in my state that makes them, right? That makes them and it's, you know, a day of shipping plus print time. So, that may also be a thing. Um, weirdly, all these options, by the way, are more expensive than people are used to paying. Correct. Um, weirdly, by the way, one of the companies that might come out looking good or ahead, uh, is Games Workshop. Um because Games Workshop minis are all made in Nottingham uh in the UK. They're not made in China. So they they may

weirdly end up being sort of a stable factor in tabletop cuz we haven't talked about war games, right? We're just talking about board games. War games are sort of a weird fusion hybrid under tabletop RPGs and board games in that they include most of the components of both of those for I bet they still get their books printed in China even if they make their minis in. up. That's a really great point, Jeff. And no one's really sure where they get them printed. Uh uh yeah, I don't know if Hang on. I can go behind the green screen and pull I have my I have my combat patrol thing here, so I can check to see where they get it printed at. Um manufactured in Nottingham, actually. Oh, great. They've got a printer in Nottingham. Okay. So So they they might be a company that comes out. Okay. But others won't. I think War Games Factory tried to move to the US. uh at one point, but the the minis industry uh is going to be a thing. And then the other one, right? Uh and um we've been bringing it up a couple of times is and this is sort of the

unavoidable truth. One of the other pains that this industry is going to be going through is because tariffs don't just apply to board games, the purchasing power available to consumers will decrease because cost of everything will go up. Right. So, uh I think less discretionary spending means correct. And so what I think we're also going to see because people have uh less discretionary um spending is we're going to see a rise in very compact, very high quality focused games that don't do the big Kickstarter box with 10 million miniatures anymore. We're going to see a lot more stuff where the they expect to sell a lot at a lower unit cost. because that is a way that you can um accommodate some of

this, right? Because people generally don't think of cost and percentages, they think of it in absolute terms. So, if you make a very small micro game or some other smaller kind of game that can absorb the tariffs, people might pick that up, right? When they're My forecast going actually off of that is more large print run games. I think we're going to lose a lot of the small ones like you'll still be able to go to Target and find Clue. Yes. Because Clue is a stack like Monopoly is actually a little harder but not that much. I'm just like thinking of pieces in their risk. You know, we're going to find these big games that they can go print a couple of million copies at a time to get their remember at the beginning we were talking about how costs go down the more you print. games that can afford to print, you know, Mattel and Hasbro games that they can afford to print millions of these at a time and basically bring in and pay the tariff fee because their cost was so low to begin with because of the quantity that they were producing. And they're

already doing equivalently a very high markup for what's actually in the box. And so I suspect we're going to see a lot more of those. But we're going to lose. People are willing to bet on a thing they know more to pay for a thing they know more about than to experiment on a risky thing when money is tighter. Yes. Right. Um one uh one one thing I do when I think about uh tips role playing games, I always try to keep an eye on the comic book industry because there's a lot of overlap. Uh they both require specialized printing. Uh they they they largely sell to a fairly niche audience. Um, and so, uh, in partic also for personal reasons, uh, I've been keeping an eye on the recent, uh, Skybound Transformers Kickstarter. Um, they are reprinting all of the original Marvel comics run, both the US and UK comics, um, and beautiful big books. Um, they they announced it, uh, Januaryish. Um, so right before I think the terrorists were announced. And so I have been keeping an eye on what those price points are actually going to be. And they launched with about the same as

they did last year with their G.I. Joe comic Kickstarter. Um, which it was a bit of a surprise to me. Um, uh, but I think because it's Skybounds and ultimately, you know, on some level they're also image two relatively large companies. I think you're right. It's the we can print a whole bunch of these and just eat the eat the difference and not lose money. Um, and that Kickstarter is about I think right now close to $3 million. Um, so I mean they gambled on this is going to be pretty big. So, we're just going to leave the costs as they are and just see what happens because we can do that volume and and we can get there and be fine. Um, I don't think I don't think Skybound sourced a non-Chinese printer. I mean, like most comic books are printed either in China or the US. And most of the specialty books, the leather bounds, the um uh the the pages that have the metallic edging, the sewn in uh bookmarks, all that stuff generally is done in China. Um, so if

and these are beautiful leatherbound books, so that's probably where it's getting done. Um, so I mean you're right, like the bigger companies are going to be able to just accept the difference um and and get that huge backstock of of content in and just they're they're trading the uh pair for warehousing costs, but for them long term that'll make sense. They'll ride it out. But yeah, anybody below that major corporation level who have huge warehouses who can order millions of units, they're going to struggle. Um, and they're going to have to to pivot to, like you said, selling outside the US. Um, and while I mean Europe, Europe is a strong market. Um, uh, Japan and Korea are all strong markets. Collectively together, they're roughly about the same as the US. So like you can't offset the US market that much, right? And a couple years from now, this may be different. You know, maybe this does cause people to go build the actual facility,

manufacturing facilities here that allow for these to be printed because right now we're talking in a scenario where they literally do not exist in the United States. So it is not an option for people to say, "Yes, I will do so." And if so, what we might end up is a winter of a couple years where it's just trash for those kind of people. And eventually, if those facilities stand up, you might see somewhat of a resurgence. But if that happens, we're going to see a lot of companies go out of business because they're not going to have the funds to last to that point. There's also, and I um I think that the the scenario you're suggesting does exist. I also think there's kind of an oraoros problem where if I'm forecasting two or three years out to stand up this facility, I also have to predict will there be demand for that facility in two or three years. And if the whole industry is crumbling because they can't make products for 2 or 3 years. It may simply be that people don't believe that

the demand for the facilities will be there so they won't begin at all. And that I don't know what the analysis on that is. Oh, and as a quick aside to that, if these facilities do get stood up, they're going to be looked to done in the way that is the most long-term profitable, which means you're not going to be bringing in 50 people to run a print shop. It's going to be three and the rest is going to be automated. It's all going to be done with robots and software. You're not bringing jobs in. Oh, yeah. This kind of thing. Yeah. Because people are looking for how do I make this sustainable long term for the investment that I'm doing? And that in this day and age is automation, robotics, and software. Yeah. Mhm. It is no longer people going and manually print setting things in the way you might think. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, if you want another example of what this could look like, I mean, let's look back to uh the writer strike um the WGBA writer strike. um because there was like about 6 months

they were on strike um which nothing was getting done and then they had to ramp back up after that. Um and we're just now kind of getting out of that drought of of media. Um that was a six-month hit. You know, we're looking at possibly much longer time period for that. Um so, uh you know, theoretically for companies that are confident they can survive it, yeah, you know, they can continue to make stuff. Uh um like I said, Brandon Sanderson is not going anywhere. So, of course, they could they're pretty confident they can keep making uh the games they're working on because even though they're working through a different company, there's going to be a demand there and we'll get through that. So, we can keep we keep our developers working and keep making stuff. There's a lot of other people are going to be like, I don't know if I want to keep doing this. And a lot of them are just be like, even if they could survive it, I could just go get a job at a bank, you know? Um, so I mean we're gonna we're going to have a huge hit in creative talent as a result of that just because of the the anxiety and stress of trying to survive all of this and the anxiety stress of the people that you want to sell it to giving you crap online because you're not doing it as fast

enough or you're not doing it in the right country or you're not doing it at the right price point. Um, that that's going to wear away people. So there's going to be a psychological cost to all of us too. Again, we saw in 2020 I talked about in that video in 2020 we're going to have another round of that again. And some people who survived the first one may not survive the second one just so I was a bad choice because people actually died in the pandemic um and are still dying um but more to say that as a company they won't last through as a result is because they just won too many hits. So I mean right but but I I say all of that because I don't think the industry is going to die right um for a lot of reasons. one, uh, it's it's easier than ever to make your own game. Like, you know, uh, a few hours on computer, tossed up on it.io, you have a a customer base. I mean, it's really trivially easy to make a game of any kind. And I think that will always persist and continue. And I think those

small indie games will probably rise in popularity to a certain degree because they're much more accessible. Um, also when people are stressed and troubled, uh, board games and video games and tabletop games are all they're a luxury, but they're a good value for money luxury. Um, so short term they'll take a huge hit, but long term they'll recover faster because it's the yes, it's $100, but $100 that like gives me months of entertainment versus $100 is maybe a night out and that's it, right? Yeah, I I buy all I buy all the D and D books and now I have me and three friends and you know me and four friends and have a campaign and that is that is $100 thing versus like an expensive dinner out. Yeah. And you're like, "Yep, maybe one less expensive dinner out and or whatever the thing is." And also because these games are are meant to be socially played and collaboratively played, um it's not uncommon for people to go, "Okay, you know what? we chip in 25 bucks to get this $100 game that we're all going to play. Um, so value for

money, these things do provide more entertainments than a movie or a night out or whatever. So they do recover faster. Um, so I I I don't think it's going to be like the industry is doomed. Uh, but specific companies are going to go away. Certain products are going to go away. A lot of talent's going to be lost. Um, so it's going to be a hard road. But there were some things avoid like people are going to go for less risky things because it's harder to do. Yeah. Yes. Um uh a friend of mine told me recently about a psychological thing called uh expand and exploit. Um is that when we're feeling comfortable and confident and uh uh we feel like everything's going okay, we as human beings like to expand our horizons. We like to try new things. We like to go out and check out that restaurant we've been meaning to. movie later, pick up that book that's maybe really challenging, see some challenging media. When we're stressed out, uh we exploit. We f we we take go to things that we know comfort us and mind that. We watch

The Office yet again on Netflix. We uh read a book that we remembered from childhood. We buy that game that reminds us of a thing that we loved 20 years ago. So what's going to happen is uh so I say exploits in this very context because the game industry will move to exploit mode not in the exploiting the customer but rather exploiting known reactions. We know this will do well. We know a reprint of the Transformers comic will do well. We know that a board game based on a very good selling video game franchise will do well. We're not gonna do necessarily uh small woodland animals trying to explore their environment in a tactical game. You know, that kind of game wouldn't necessarily fly now. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that I think is a good place for us to to end our discussion. Eddie, thank you so much for lending your expertise to this. Uh Jeff, as always, thank you. And to you, our viewer, thank you so much for for tuning in. If you

have um I I've been I've been telling the breakfast crew this normally YouTube comments are pathy oneliners. I invite you to say more. If you want to engage in good faith with this whole topic, talk about the future of the board game industry. Express how you think this is going to come out. I invite you to use the comment section to say more to have a conversation uh in good faith about this topic because I think this is a big thing that's going to affect all of us uh in the coming uh months and years. Uh, thank you so much for joining us as always. Uh, and we will see you all next week. Not sure for what, but we'll be here. Uh, all right everybody, you will see Eddie around because Eddie is Eddie is part of the extended crew. Eddie will be back for all right. Uh, until then, please take care of yourselves. Please take care of each other. We'll see you next time. Say bye to the people, Jeff. Bye to the people, Jeff. [Music]

But we didn't leave. Haha. Haha. Secrets. All these like Yeah. flashy intro and outro things. We We built that a bit ago because we wanted to actually It makes it specifically for like where we clip, like where the show starts and ends. It gives a very clean start and end that's easy to find as we're kind of putting this up for production. Yeah, just go to the black screen. Cut there. Boom. Yep. Exactly. And it's already cut. I I'm just going to remix it later and throw it up. Um, yeah. Thanks, chat. I This is, by the way, this is probably one of the more difficult conversations to have and uh both chats engaged in really good faith in talking about this. So, yeah, very good job um to everybody. Yeah, thank you. This is I mean, this is tough, right? Yeah. I need suggestions. By the way, I haven't yet made a thumbnail for this. I've been trying to think of a like I with the text I'm okay with, but the picture that we put on to basically help sell this idea. I want

Okay. Okay. Hear me out. Hear me out before you judge this. All right. I want a picture from a muppet's Christmas carol, right? Of the ghost of Christmas yet to come, right? Doing the long finger point at the grave and the the ghost of Christmas yet has to come. You know how it has the blank face? It's just tariffs and then the picture is it's pointing at the thing and it just says tabletop games and it just has it at the gravestone. That's what I want. It's not a good one. One change. No, one change that the gravestone is in the shape of a mele. Oh yeah, it's good. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. That's 100%. Okay. Hold on. I have to look up Christmas. Ghost of Christmas future yet to come. Yeah. Yes. Oh, okay. Big, close, scary. Darker than I remember. Oh, yeah. No, Muppets. Muppets Christmas Carol. Okay, reminder. A Christmas Carol is like barely a story that's appropriate for kids. And in my

opinion, and the opinion of many others who have excellent taste. A Muppets's Christmas Carol is the authoritative on-screen version of A Christmas Carol. Like, there just aren't any others. That's true. Right. Yeah. Okay, great. Awesome. So, okay. I I have a picture. Yeah. Let me see what I can do on this. Yeah, that's a challenge. Yeah, it is. Um, this is the point where we're going to say goodbye to Janet. A reminder, Matt and I are going to be playing Oblivion here in a little bit on the uh Twitch channel. Um, so if you'd like to join us for that, come on over. Otherwise, we will see you all, Janet, Monday for breakfast. Matt and I are going to have a lot to talk about. We're going to talk about how poorly the Switch 2 pre-orders went. Uh, not in so much as we're going to talk about the Switch 2, but we're going to talk about why pre-ordering games in the US sucks. Um, that's a whole problem. Uh, so we're going to talk about that. We're talk about a bunch of other stuff. So, please join us for breakfast on Monday. Uh, everybody say bye, Janet. My dad.