Exilian
Game Design and Project Resources: The Workshops Quarter => Tabletop Design - The Senet House => Topic started by: Jubal on May 21, 2019, 02:10:11 PM
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I thought this was an interesting piece:
https://www.highlevelgames.ca/blog/4-reasons-to-fear-an-rpg-industry-extinction
Basically the tl;dr is that if the US, the biggest market for RPG products, starts slapping a 25% import tax on toys and games from countries like China, where most of the actual manufacturing happens. The upshot in an industry as low-margin as RPGs will be to massacre the small players (because it still won't be profitable to produce stuff in the US, it just won't be profitable to make things in China either).
Thoughts on this? (NB - please keep the thoughts to the impact of this on the gaming world: if too much discussion happens on the pure politics of tariffs, I'll have to split it off and take it to the debate area)
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I don't think I've ever played a Chinese made RPG.
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I've never played a Chinese *designed* RPG (which I'd like to, I think it'd be interesting getting more non-Western designers/perspectives in games generally), but it's printing, minis, all that kind of stuff that many if not most Eur & US tabletop game manufacturers get done in China. I'm sure I have got boardgames made in China, don't think I've got any RPG books but then I don't actually own many of those (and the ones I have are mostly PDF). Smaller creators especially rely on the cheaper manufacturing China offers, I think. Of course, there are some pretty problematic reasons why Chinese manufacturing costs are lower, but given Eur/US manufacturing costs aren't dropping, it's tricky to see how smaller businesses can make things work with this change.
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It's probably best not to rely on slave labor for our games lol
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It's probably best not to rely on slave labor for our games lol
Is a fair point. I guess we'll see a lot of moves to producers just e-publishing everything.