So, we’ve got a number of games we’ve announced recently.   Gatsby today, Shackleton base a few weeks ago as well as a couple of unannounced games we are still planning on releasing this year.   Is it possible tariffs could go away?  Sure, for whatever reason tech companies are allowed to make money in China and its possible toys and games could get a carve out as well – and I hope we do.   But I am not going to pause my company and hurt our games or our customers waiting to see if things improve.

We are keeping our prices pretty low – 25 dollars games are largely becoming 30 dollar games.  70 dollar games 90 dollar games.  We are not trying to recover our margin, just cover the tariff as close as possible or in some cases outright eat the tariff ourselves.

We are also in a broadly good position because we can make these choices.  Some publishers are sitting on product they literally cannot afford to import and are left with no choices.  So please, dont use this post as an across-the-board solution to tariffs.  There is no one size fits all answer to this.  This is a solution that works for us.   Im not here to tell other publishers and business owners how to survive.  This is what works for us and what makes sense to me.

We want to print games, we want gamers to enjoy themselves and I would like to do so at the fairest prices possible.   For our upcoming titles they fall into three broad categories:

Games we already paid for

There are several Games – Gatsby, Shackleton Base, Paper World, Kado and a few surprises that we signed contracts to localize into English either in 2024 or early in 2025 before there were tariffs.   These games have been paid for already or are already under contract that will already require future payments.  

This left us with two choices: abandon the games in China and make no money for the foreseeable future on them or import them and pay the tariff.  We chose the latter and I think it’s the right call.  We won’t make money from these games.   But we won’t make money on these games leaving them in China either.

I don’t want to get into specific math because there are some trade secrets here that are my partners and not my own around the cost of goods and what they charge for games, but what I can say is this:  In every single case I believe we will earn revenue that is greater than the tariff and shipping cost we will be paying.   That is my entire calculation: does this game generate positive cashflow for Pandasaurus?  This means I am largely ignoring the cost of printing the game and considering that money that is gone no matter what.   I’m paying for the games if I import them or not, so the calculation has to be:   Is it financially better to import the games and sell them than to abandon them in China and in each case that is true.

There is a secondary reason to do this:  these games are good and they deserve to be played.  And if the games reach y’all and you love them and the sales are great we will have to then figure out if there will be a way to reprint them.  In some cases there will be, in others it may be impossible to reprint until tariffs are done.  So if you want one of these games, I would order now because any reprints will have to be calculated very differently and I’ll have to consider the full cost in my decision of whether or not to print them again.

One of our upcoming games originally had pre-orders for nearly 12,000 units.   I had not printed enough to fill the orders.   Then with tariffs I needed to raise the price and that caused my orders to drop to a third of where they had been.  Now?  I don’t think we printed enough of it but I have no orders for more.  So I would strongly suggest pre-ordering anything you see from any company that you want because some of these games may be one and done for the foreseeable future.

Games we're going to make less margin on

In 2021 during the shipping crisis a lot of publishers chose to stop printing games.  It seemed sensible but we did not.  We plowed through, kept printing our evergreens and our new games and figured out how to tighten our belts elsewhere.   The games will go up in price – but not as much as you may think.  Only 20-30%.  We are aiming for dollar margin not margin percentage.   So for a printing of Game X if I expected to make 25,000 dollars in profit I will adjust the MSRP so that I make 25,000 dollars in profit.   This means I will be spending more to make the same amount of money – but I am willing to do that because I think its what is fair to our customers.  Its not fair to us as a publisher, but I truly believe passing those costs along under a multiplier to make the margin percentage the same will have a twofold effect:

1. Hurt consumers far more than they should.
2. Crater the sales of our games.   I don’t think anyone is clamoring for 60 dollar Machi Koro or 50 dollar beacon patrol. So, we’ll keep prices as close to the same as we can to maintain as much sales volume as I think is possible.

New Games where recovering as much sunk cost is for the best

New Games are going through a few changes: value engineering to remove expensive components or make it possible to produce the games outside of China.

Of our upcoming games 3 can be produced easily in Europe and one could be produced in the US potentially.  2 have to be produced in China – and in a move that is even surprising me – that’s what we will do if we must.  We will have to eat a lot of margin and we’re not going to recover a lot of expenses that we already paid for – art, development and more – but again go back to the first example – at this point its not about making a profit – its about getting back as much cash as we can – and will these games print ready and with 10s of thousands of dollars in art, development and graphic design already completed it makes no sense to me to abandon these games.

Oh so tariffs are not that bad?

No.  They are awful.  They are costing you money, they are costing people jobs and they are absolutely causing us to delay some projects that we cannot make work even given everything I said above.  There will be companies that are bankrupted by this.  People will lose their companies, their livelihood and creators will be forced to stop creating games full time or even part time as a result of tariffs.   This is a tax on you imposed by our government and you should be upset by it.   But its not your job to keep the industry alive, that’s our job for those of us who work here.   Keep playing games, keep checking out new games and please consider buying a copy of every single game we make.  Or two.  You know, for gifts.