Quote from: Omega on April 05, 2025, 04:57:45 PM

Quote from: Daosus on April 04, 2025, 11:26:00 PM

Quote from: JanDevries on April 04, 2025, 03:38:09 PMThat link says the price for a smyth-sewn, 48 page hardback is $268.50.

Edit: and that's digest sized.

That's for one.  There is a setup cost.  If you increase quantity to 100, the price goes to $9.53 per book.  At 1000, it's $7.28.  Not cheap, but not crazy expensive.

Does that include shipping? Moving the books can jack the price in freakish ways.

The possible speedbumps would be...

A: shipping to you.
B: shipping to the customer.
C: shipping to overseas customers. This one has killed quite a few KS games as no one thought to check and it can be insanely high to ship. And theres possibly customs too to worry about.

Nope. Shipping is just under 17 bucks on top of that, to the US (presumably from the US).

RPGs and tabletop games are about the easiest thing to move to the US these days. The best 3d printers for printer farms are now being made in the USA: https://blog.prusa3d.com/we-are-now-manufacturing-3d-printers-and-filaments-in-the-usa_99148/

Print on demand and PDFs are well established these days. There are plenty of people making money in tabletop gaming without bulk printing product from China. If SJG can't adapt, then it'll just be an opportunity for the new players that are already doing things differently to shine.

Supposedly Nike may stop selling shoes in the USA as per analysts. Pretty wild that abortion was conservative/authoritarian in China. I'm a radical moderate and all these tariffs are going to create a mess for quite a while before people can even begin to resolve them with inventive solutions. Say what you will, every company in the USA has provided figures in the 45-60% price increase range. Regardless of what happens with tariffs, I expect prices to jump like some sort of massive, countrywide price-fixing scheme. It's not illegal when the whole country does it, right? 

Quote from: D-ko on April 06, 2025, 09:11:08 PMSupposedly Nike may stop selling shoes in the USA as per analysts. Pretty wild that abortion was conservative/authoritarian in China. I'm a radical moderate and all these tariffs are going to create a mess for quite a while before people can even begin to resolve them with inventive solutions. Say what you will, every company in the USA has provided figures in the 45-60% price increase range. Regardless of what happens with tariffs, I expect prices to jump like some sort of massive, countrywide price-fixing scheme. It's not illegal when the whole country does it, right? 

I used to work at a Just For Feet before they went bankrupt. The average Nike product cost 1/4 (clothes, regular shoes) to 1/20 (Jordan's) of the price it was sold for and they had the most returns. I'm not worried about that market.

I legitimately hope Nike is driven straight out of business by this, they've deserved it for a long time now for hawking their sweatshop slave labor garbage for a premium price.  It takes some real effort to stand out as unambiguously evil among large corporations, but they somehow make it look easy.

Yea it would be really satisfying if Nike took it to the face on this, but just don't think it's in the cards.  Their products are so wildly profitable.  There's honestly a bunch of things that aren't even gonna be subject to tariffs, like "books as a class even if they are for a game" that I don't think any of these shitty companies and people will actually be hit by these in any meaningful way.

Still, it would be nice.  Nike, specifically, should be harried and given no rest or quarter if possible.

Quote from: Banjo Destructo on April 03, 2025, 02:10:43 PMHere are the numbers: A product we might have manufactured in China for $3.00 last year could now cost $4.62 before we even ship it across the ocean. Add freight, warehousing, fulfillment, and distribution margins, and that once-$25 game quickly becomes a $40 product. That's not a luxury upcharge; it's survival math.

By that math, the price should go up to $27 MAX. IF SJG charges $40 they are lying to the customers.

Sadly, I see many businesses doing just this.

Quote from: Godsmonkey on April 07, 2025, 01:49:52 PM

Quote from: Banjo Destructo on April 03, 2025, 02:10:43 PMHere are the numbers: A product we might have manufactured in China for $3.00 last year could now cost $4.62 before we even ship it across the ocean. Add freight, warehousing, fulfillment, and distribution margins, and that once-$25 game quickly becomes a $40 product. That's not a luxury upcharge; it's survival math.

By that math, the price should go up to $27 MAX. IF SJG charges $40 they are lying to the customers.

Sadly, I see many businesses doing just this.

Let me do some back of the envelope math here, because I am starting to think there is a serious opportunity for market disruption via Print on Demand.

I saw a commentator (would need to double-check my history to remember which) who pointed out this was about Munchkin. A game which is literally nothing but playing cards. We are literally talking about a box containing 304 custom playing cards, so we are talking about $0.09 per card at the current price increasing to $0.13 per card.

I want to remind you that the cost per page from a standard inkjet is about $0.25 tops. Let's up that to $0.50; estimating really high here makes sense because of quality paper and these prints will use a TON of ink, which is not cheap. A standard sheet of paper can fit about 10 playing cards, depending a bit on the dimensions you use. That means a standard inkjet printer will cost about $0.05 per card and you can sell them for $0.09 at current prices. You can even automate the card cutting process. I don't think anyone seriously doubts that will be a tough automation task.

The tariffs add just enough leeway for LGSes to switch from carrying physical inventory to Print on Demand. Go to the geek shop. Hang out with friends. Have zero day shipping on your games. Almost zero game store space is taken up with physical inventory, which means that LGSes can convert most of their storefront floor space into rentable game rooms.

This is very much shaping up into a major market disruption win.

Quote from: Fheredin on April 07, 2025, 03:13:04 PMThe tariffs add just enough leeway for LGSes to switch from carrying physical inventory to Print on Demand. Go to the geek shop. Hang out with friends. Have zero day shipping on your games. Almost zero game store space is taken up with physical inventory, which means that LGSes can convert most of their storefront floor space into rentable game rooms.

There's already a lot of miniature Patreons with cheap commercial licenses. $35 a month for Epic Miniatures and your store can 3d print and sell minis, terrain and dice towers for customers on demand. You could also run paint classes, sell the paint, etc.

It could probably use a good open source or commercial kiosk system where you can browse STL files and put in an order. But the core local/store manufacturing infrastructure exists, we're just still in the "print cheap stuff overseas and ship it" model.

Gaming will absolutely still thrive though no matter what happens with tariffs. Hopefully it continues to have a solid store focus in the future as well.

Edit: also with minis, there's a lot of up-sell potential here as well for the local store: priming, painting and so on.

Quote from: D-ko on April 05, 2025, 04:46:22 PMNobody understands the working conditions of factories in the USA. It's literally worse than other countries. Prisoners ask to go back to jail. The bathrooms are full of graffiti warning workers to quit before they get financially trapped there for life. Machines are operating on DOS OS. Hydraulic cutters are leaking oil everywhere. Blood gets dripped onto the merchandise due to clumsy workers being overworked, promised a normal workweek 'someday' but that's actually when they get laid off instead. Everybody is fucking and cucking each other in the bathrooms when they're not smoking and it's so loud that your boss has to yell at you just so you can hear them. All this in the middle of the night. By the end of the workday, your hands can't physically open and close all the way in a normal fashion. It's terrible.

I've spent a considerable amount of time in American factories.

The bathrooms didn't have any graffiti. Computers on the factory floor are running outdated operating systems, but it's Windows 7, not MS DOS. You certainly do see oil and grit, but no it's not leaking all over the place. I'm sure there are injuries, but I've never seen an open wound or blood. Can't speak to "normal work week" because I don't track anyone's hours. Never seen any sex in the bathrooms, but that doesn't mean it's not happening on the night shift. Nobody smokes indoors. It is definitely loud. Heavy machinery makes noise. There are definitely people in the factory who go home sore.

The production floor is a rough environment, but it also has rough, tough guys working there. These two things go hand in hand.

By the standards of the factories I've been in, you're wildly exaggerating. I'm not calling you a liar. America is a big country. What you've described does match up with the description a UAW friend gave of his work environment. I suspect that labor unions have something to do with this, or maybe more accurately, the hostile nature of negotiation between labor unions and businesses.

Instead of worker safety, the union negotiates for expensive, top shelf health insurance packages that the company has to pay for. The company then decides this health insurance counts as doing their due diligence on worker safety. Got hurt on the job? Fuck you, you've got the best health care coverage on the planet. The working hours is a similar situation. The union negotiates for pay and hours for its members, but in exchange they're committed to providing a certain amount of workers. The union could split those hours up among a larger pool of workers, but they want to offer their members 6-figure salaries. You get that money, but you're getting worked like a dog.

This also does touch on outdated and damaged equipment. Unions try to block new equipment that improves workplace efficiency, because that new equipment means fewer hours to pass along to their members. The maintenance workers who are supposed to repair that equipment are also union, and they're moving at their union pace. A damaged piece of equipment means that the guy at that station gets to ride the clock until it gets fixed, so he may not even report it. He sits on his ass doing nothing until his supervisor asks why he's not getting any work done.

One thing that definitely happens regarding equipment is that businesses are often more interested in investing capital in foreign countries. They're allowing their American factories to decay while they build new ones overseas. This is true of both union and non-union factories.

Quote from: Jaeger on April 04, 2025, 04:12:33 PM

Quote from: Coffeecup on April 04, 2025, 09:04:58 AMI also think that this will be an opportunity for some. Of course the customers will have to pay.
I doubt that there will be zero cost increases.

Last time when Trump introduced tariffs for steel and aluminium (and I am aware that Biden didn't take them back) the prices for e.g. washing machines Made in SA went up.
..

Biden didn't take them back for good reason; because the steel tariffs were good for the USA:

Quote"Trump implemented a 25% tariff on steel imports in March 2018. His reasoning was related to national security, along with a desire to get US steel mills operating at 80% capacity or higher.
Naturally, the critics of tariffs would argue that steel prices should have increased by 25% or more post-tariff, but even though steel prices increased through the summer (steel prices had already been skyrocketing pre-tariff too) and then began falling substantially. US steel prices eventually fell to price levels much lower than pre-tariff prices.

Why did the price of US steel decrease? Domestic manufacturing of steel increased by nearly 10% for the 2 years post-tariffs. Production rose to 86.6 million metric tons in 2018 and 87.8 million metric tons in 2019, before cratering in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Production bounced back in 2021, as American steel mills produced 85.8 million metric tons of raw steel that year.

This means the 2018 tariffs worked — US manufacturing of steel increased and US steel prices dropped lower.

So now you have a concrete example from the 2018 tariffs that show the critics were wrong. The tariffs led to lower prices, increased American manufacturing, more government revenue, and the creation of American jobs. Also, US inflation (CPI) fell from 2.1% in January 2018 to 1.6% in January 2019, so the tariffs didn't lead to higher inflation either.

The USA will win any tariff war because it has been losing the free trade war for decades. America has literally nothing to lose in this regard."

For table-top gaming:

If domestic manufacturers scale up to meet demand we will see a similar effect. Prices will come down so that games can be made in the US for a reasonable price.

This is an empirical good for the USA. The more jobs that come back into our economy, the better for us in the long run.

Apologies since this is a couple pages back. But I believe some of these people are so captured by their ideology they would refuse to work with domestic companies just to try to make Trump look worse. The hope is there's enough moderates or people lying about their true beliefs for that not to happen.

My thoughts on this, some have been covered already.

1) Tariffs are only on the import of items produced in China and other companies; NOT the manufacturing by slave labor, NOT the domestic shipping, not the "warehousing fees", NOT the distribution or advertising.  So an increase of about a dollar and a half to $4.62 translates to a $15 increase from $25 to 40?  This Steve Jackson math is only for the gullible people who share their ideology.

2) We can't make our games in America.  Why not?  "There's no infrastructure."  Then create it!  Obviously there's a new demand to meet.  The infrastructure is never there to support the massive upheaval the left's intrusive social conditioning requires.  Suddenly latent consequences matter.

3) They produce a house organ for one of their RPGs.  It's published in America by an American company.  I hear that they want to raise prices on this purely domestic product.

4) When Biden presided over the shipping crisis, and four years of the highest inflation numbers ever in America, they fail the intellectual honesty test.  They said it was a hardship and it's all temporary, and they didn't blame anyone.  I saw a post on their forums along the lines of "People get what they vote for."  I said to myself, "That won't last long."  It didn;t.

5) They already are into both 3D printing and offering STL files as alternatives to miniatures, and digitize their new stuff and much of their GURPS catalog so they can make loot selling non-inventory products.

6) They recorded a loss in 2023, while their guy was in the White House eating pudding.  SJG went from a company that made fun games in the past to one too mired in their fringe politics to be innovative.  They're now infested with diversity hires at all levels, peddling their agenda, so politics will trump running a business productively.  Petitioning congress won't save them.

Let's face facts: It's all about access to child slave labor.  It kind of makes sense that Stevie left Texas to move to the land of cotton.

Quote from: JanDevries on April 04, 2025, 03:38:09 PM

Quote from: Brad on April 04, 2025, 02:42:19 PM

Quote from: JanDevries on April 04, 2025, 02:28:25 PMPOD quality is ass, though. Don't need coffee table books, but smyth-sewn binding is objectively better than a POD glue job. Whether it's a 90-page book, or especially if it's larger, it's going to last longer. I'd argue that this is MORE important for books that are gonna get used, rather than sitting on a shelf and looking pretty.

No disagreement about POD vs. sewn bindings. However: https://mixam.com/

I am sure more places will start offering that if the demand is there.

That link says the price for a smyth-sewn, 48 page hardback is $268.50.

Edit: and that's digest sized.

For single and very low numbers of books, the number is crazy.  Print a large run and watch the cost per book melt away.  I use Mixam for my RPG book production.  I've seen the wild price fluctuations between printing 1, 2, or 7 books, and printing 100, 300, or more books.   It's strange, but definitely Mixam is for larger print runs.  And it's totally domestic, so the price increases per year have only been limited to reflect Bidenflation.

Trump just upped the China tariff to 104%.

Quote from: Godsmonkey on April 07, 2025, 01:49:52 PMBy that math, the price should go up to $27 MAX. IF SJG charges $40 they are lying to the customers.

Sadly, I see many businesses doing just this.

Deliberate fear-mongering trying to fool people into thinking that the tariffs apply to MSRP...

The left, and blackpill Rinos are trying to hit the panic button to see if public pressure can get GodEmperor 2.0 to stop.

Quote from: Gooberguh on April 07, 2025, 07:07:59 PMApologies since this is a couple pages back. But I believe some of these people are so captured by their ideology they would refuse to work with domestic companies just to try to make Trump look worse. The hope is there's enough moderates or people lying about their true beliefs for that not to happen.

You would be correct.

SJG is too small to hold out long. But certain corporations can hold out for a bit, and some will try self-sabotage to see if they can induce enough panic to get the status quo back.

Quote from: DocJones on April 08, 2025, 02:44:03 PMTrump just upped the China tariff to 104%.