Publishers Talk More about U.S. Tariffs | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

When the first U.S. tariffs on goods from China were put in place in February 2025, the tariff was only 10%, and when I spoke with publishers at GAMA Expo 2025 about tariffs in late February 2025, some companies ready to fulfill crowdfunding campaigns seemed satisfied (if unhappy) to eat the cost rather than ask backers for more funds.

Then the tariff was bumped to 20% on March 4, 2025 — only to then skyrocket to 54% on April 2, 2025, which makes eating the tariff cost far less palatable for those fulfilling crowdfunding campaigns or in the midst of them right now. In his Keyside crowdfunding campaign that’s running through April 14, 2025, designer Richard Breese of R&D Games posted an April 3 update that states:

On April 4, 2025, China announced retaliatory tariffs of 34% on all U.S. goods as of April 10, one day after the new U.S. tariffs are scheduled to go into effect.

In an April 3, 2025 post, Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games writes:

Many publishers find themselves in this situation, having ordered product months or years ago that now bears a ballooned price tag that might carry them to asphyxiating heights. In a comment on my previous post on this topic, designer Breeze Grigas wrote:

Grigas added, “All we can do is ask for more pre-orders and find other ad hoc ways to mitigate the amount of extra money we’re going to have to charge existing backers.”

Chris Solis of Solis Game Studio is taking a similar approach, launching a “Tariff Import Sale” on April 3, 2025 with this explanation: “We have over 8,000 games leaving our factory in China this week and now need to cover a massive import bill. We’ve made a few bundles of games we already have here in the U.S. to help us combat this existential threat to our business. Get some great games, help an indie publisher survive!”

As for future plans, Solis says, “[Tariffs] will force me to hold off on printing any new titles for a long while. Our upcoming Kickstarter [for Space Lion 2: Leon Strife] will be cancelled and a game about to go to print will be cancelled. It is impossible for me to print these right now without going out of business immediately.” Solis Game Studio will still attend Gen Con and PAXU in 2025 — presumably because of contract clauses like this: “Cancellation of space will result in the forfeiture of all monies previously paid to Gen Con” — but appearances at other non-local shows will be cancelled.

An April 4, 2025 article from Matt Ott of the Associated Press details the sharp fall in the U.S stock market over the past two days, writing:

On the topic of fewer goods, whether due directly to tariff costs or knock-on effects to U.S. household incomes as a result of these tariffs, many publishers are doing the same as Solis Game Studio and cancelling new products or re-assessing their viability. “We are likely to put crowdfunding plans for new things, such as the Dice Miner expansions, on indefinite hold”, says John Nephew of Atlas Games. “Role-playing game products that can have substantial digital book sales and cost effective print-on-demand production options in multiple countries may deserve more attention.”

Changing the “delivery method” of a game might be possible in some cases, akin to what the world went through in 2020 when COVID-19 encouraged a huge growth in print-and-play games and livestream get-togethers, but that won’t be possible for existing stock of physical games. Writes Nick Case of UK publisher A-Muse-Ment, “Selling to the U.S. has always had financial issues and problems with the distance from the UK, but these tariffs impose the final straw. Whilst the tariffs remain, shipping to the USA will not be an option.”

Marcin Świerkot, CEO of the crowdfunding site Gamefound, writes that “While there is a very limited amount of action we can take as a platform – we want to clearly communicate how we plan to assist creators and backers”, with one of its current planned/in-progress features being the “[p]ossibility to have different prices for a product depending on the country of the buyer…o that creators will be able to include tariffs in new campaign prices. This will mean that, as a creator, you will be able to have a single SKU but multiple different prices for different countries.”

Świerkot optimistically concludes, “This should make life easier for manufacturing and preparing campaigns.” In theory, sure, but this presumes that tariffs won’t change again between the end of a campaign and fulfillment — which is the situation many publishers face right now.

“I have copies of Cretaceous Rails landing in the U.S. today, April 2nd, to fulfill a Kickstarter campaign”, says Alex Wolf of Spielcraft Games in response to a survey I sent to game publishers. “I still don’t know exactly how much I will pay in tariffs. This has impacted my budget significantly for the foreseeable future, and I have taken a step back from a few games that I was considering publishing and localizing. The copies that I have sold into distribution have gone from making money to losing money, but I have decided to follow through with those sales without retroactively raising prices.”

Wolf plans to demo at Origins and Gen Con, but won’t have a booth selling products, and as for what comes next he says, “I don’t know what to anticipate. I don’t even know if there will be any tariffs two weeks from now. The real problem is that I don’t have reliable information to make an informed decision regarding the long term.”

I’ve heard from many others publishers and will post more of their thoughts, plans, and adjustments in the days ahead.