Logistics challenges across the world are accelerating, especially in the last 2 months. The rapid increases in costs and inability to get reliable shipping containers is the worst we’ve seen in at least 11 years; fortunately, we continue to find avenues to bring our products to market and understand we are in a good situation compared to many other publishers due to our scale of operations.
We were hopeful that costs would stabilize and potentially reverse; however, it appears it will be at least several more months and probably until the end of the year until we know where pricing will stabilize.
We are therefore adding a temporary surcharge of 5% to all of our products to the distribution channel in the US starting on June 26th. While an MSRP increase on the surface may appear to be an easier solution, we are hopeful that this is in fact temporary and if not will allow us time to discover where they stabilize.
Additionally, we will be adding surcharges to our ecomm store to account for this increase as soon as we’re able to enable the functionality across our products.
Price increases are never great news, but we wanted to be transparent with you about causes and our view on the duration of these increases. As such you should expect increased prices at your local games stores and ecomm while the world tackles these transient price increases with logistics. Please have patience as this plays out over the next few months – all publishers will have issues and you are bound to see a variety of different responses predicated on capabilities, company size, release type (board game, TCG, minis, accessories) and release schedules.
This is not how we want to do business, but we hope you understand that we are not taking these decisions lightly and look forward to a return to logistics certainty in the coming months/year.
We understand our customers and partners are facing incredible challenges as well and we hope to provide more positive news in the coming months and appreciate your support and patience as we work towards improving the situation.