Blue Panther Games Made a post to their FB page regarding the issue- which I thought was a good relevant discussion:
""April 3 at 10:03 AM ·
Before we get started, this is an economic discussion, not a political one.
We have been asked by many folks recently what the effects of tariffs will be on game prices. Unlike most publishers, we started as game printers and continue to make the vast majority of the components that go into our games in the USA. That includes, boxes, maps, countersheets, rules, etc. So for us, the answer may be different than a publisher whose main print source is not located in the USA. Tariffs are likely to have a smaller impact on us than someone who prints their games in China or Poland or India. This is one of the advantages of print-on-demand and local sourcing.
That does not mean that costs on some things will not go up for us. For example, we use a specific brand of canvas for alot of our game boards. The canvas is made in a few places, including China. The price has been going up before any talk of tariffs and will probably jump again.
Almost all supply chains are global - this is less true of the stuff used in games like chipboard and paper, but there are still some chemicals used in the manufacture of paper and chipboard that are only made in a few places, and in most cases these places are outside the US. So we have spoken to suppliers that may be affected by tariffs and are in a waiting game - no price increases yet.
In some cases, increasing tariffs 100% may not even have much of an effect. Consider everyone's favorite - wood cubes - ubiquitous across multiple game genres. Can't find anyone who actually makes colored cubes in the US (we've tried). Used to pay companies that kept a large stock on hand and sold to consumer/wholesaler at reasonable prices. Once our game volumes got to a certain point, we decided to source cubes ourselves directly from China. For argument's sake, let's say someplace in the US will sell you a cube for 5 cents if you buy a few hundred of them. If you order 10000+ you'll pay more like .0.5 cents per cube in China (or usually less).
Say there's a 100% tariff today - so cubes are now 1 cent each .So even with shipping from China (which doubles the price again) bringing the total cost to 2 cents per cube, I'm saving 80-90% with no tariff and 50-60% even with 100% tariff. Makes no sense for a gamer to do this. Makes alot of sense for a game printer with 400+ titles (an ever increasing number of which use cubes) to do this even with the tariffs. If a game has 100 cubes, my my production cost goes up $1. We have absorbed larger cost increases before by getting more efficient (did you see what happened to wood during Covid?), buying better/faster equipment, etc to reduce the costs I can control within our own facility.
The current global supply system is the result of decades of policy and decisions. It's not going to be unravelled or completely reversed with short term tariffs. In some cases long term tariffs may not help much either, if there is no domestic industry in that sector to begin with. Some industries will have to rebuild from scratch. Is there a semiconductor factory in the US that can match the current capabilities of the factories in Taiwan? Probably not. Will there be one in the US, spurred on in part by tariffs? Probably yes. But how long will it be before that new US factory is actually making those high tech semiconductors in volume? 5-10 years.
Within certain parameters under our control, tariffs will not require us to raise prices. It is with some irony that I realize even with 100% tariffs, we could save some money by getting some work done outside the US - but it would require changes to our business model and cash flow. We'd be more dependent on "big hits" and "crowdfunding" and every game will have to sell better than the one before it. One of the things we consider a core value is to provide an opportunity for new publishers and designers to get their games out there with high quality components without having to invest their life savings or mortgage the house. If we were to source overseas, we would lose flexibility and the ability to help new companies at a reasonable price.
There are some things left to do on the operations side that can take our costs down and increase our flexibility and at the very least, keep our costs the same, possibly even take them down a bit. As volumes grow, we can get better pricing and we can buy more efficient equipment that makes what we had 5 years ago look like bow and arrow tech. There's opportunity and room for growth for us and our (current and potentially new) publisher clients in this market still.
So are tariffs good or bad? I would say if a US publisher imports their games, tariffs are at best a small negative impact on prices.
IF you're a publisher outside the US, they could be worse than that."
