Board games had a very bad 2020, with the industry being hit hard by Covid due to production issues and the fact that people literally couldn’t get together to play board games. Things were Looking up slightly for 2021, until freight costs just decided to shoot their way into space.
While I’ve seen publishers and retailers talking a bit about it on Facebook over the past few weeks, designer Jamey Stegmaier (his Stonemaier games Scythe and Elisabeth Hargraves span) put together a broader look on his own blog, accompanied by some data from the research company ARC Global. Cardboard Edison also surveyed companies about things like delays and price increases.
And things look … bad!
Some of the highlights from everyone’s results are:
- Delivery times are currently 2-6 weeks behind what companies would normally expect.
- Most publishers pay 3-4x as much for their shipping despite the delays, with one publisher saying so Cardboard Edison “Your shipping costs have increased nine-fold compared to before the pandemic.”
- Many publishers are now forced to increase game prices and reduce costs in other areas such as localization, as margins are reduced due to the increased shipping costs (in addition to the also increased production costs).
Note that we’re talking about freight shipping here. So not the cost you pay for a copy, but the cost publishers and manufacturers have to pay to ship container-value products all over the world. While these two things are of course linked, and the whole reason this is quickly becoming an issue is that if business shipping prices get out of hand, it will have a huge impact on a consumer’s shipping price, if not the price the games themselves (and the overall viability of some smaller publishers).
Interestingly, most of the delays and biggest price hikes are felt by companies that make games in China (which a quantity). And of course I only write about it because this is a gaming site and it affects board games, something that I am describing; Everyone who ships something around the world currently feels the same pinch.
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While this is a crisis in the short term, the hope is that delivery lines will normalize as the worst effects of the pandemic wear off. And to meet the increased demand for ships, freight forwarders will simply start building more ships to haul goods around the world.
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