Final Frontier Games Reaches Final Frontier, Stops | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

Macedonian publisher Final Fronter Games has posted updates on three as-yet-unfulfilled crowdfunding campaigns for The Sixth Realm (Kickstarter link), Merchants Cove: Master Craft (KS link), and Coloma: New Prospects (Gamefound link) in which they state they “are forced to close down operations and thus unable to fulfill this campaign at this stage”, while also labeling themselves “may be [sic] the first casualties of this trade war” — although they seem more like the final casualty of COVID given how this situation started:

The original Merchants Cove campaign url=https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/512772051/merchants-cove]KS link[/url was delivered in the height of the pandemic. If you were backing projects back then, you remember the talk of how freight costs have risen overnight and some publishers were forced to ask for more money from backers. We decided back then to eat those costs in order to maintain your goodwill with us because we were building a lifetime relationship with you, and for that, you needed to trust us with our projects.

That extra cost has eaten all our profits that we had and then some. The freight costs that we planned were around $27.000. We had 9 containers and the price per container back then was around $3.000 dollars. By the time Merchants Cove was loaded into boats the bill we received was around $22.000 per container. Plus the last mile delivery prices spiked, meaning a planned bill of around $30k went to $250.000. We also received an order from distributors for Merchants Cove who by the time the game was produced they canceled part of their order because of the pandemic. So that $250.000 unplanned expenses quickly went north of $350.000.

That completely erased our profits, we had to dip into funds from our other projects [emphasis added] hoping that we would recover the losses quickly.

From that moment on, while we have hundreds of thousands in stock, we had very tight cash flow reserves, were a project or two behind, but we managed to make it work for the past 5 years, delivering games and starting to build the groundwork for a full recovery of the company.

Let me quote Pandasaurus Games‘ Nathan McNair from a March 29, 2025 post:

This seems like a decent explanation of what has happened with Final Frontier Games, although I’m not sure the phrase “a perfectly profitable business” would apply to the company after that Merchants Cove delivery, given that they apparently paid for the production of current games with funds intended for future games.

Also, the payments stated above don’t match what Final Frontier said at the time in a Merchants Cove Kickstarter update from February 2021: “With COVID and Chinese New Year, securing transit at the moment is extremely difficult — we ended up paying 5x what we normally pay to ship our games, but we couldn’t afford to wait for more ship space to open up, as we promised you this game would begin fulfilling in March.”

Other problems compounded Final Frontier’s financial issues. Development of the Kickstarter add-on “Mega Box” that would hold all Merchants Cove material “added at least half a year to the timeline of this project”; in addition, “we had to drastically increase the size of the Big Box which increased our production, freight and shipping costs”.

Due to Final Frontier’s delay in completing this project, Pegasus Spiele and TCG Factory decided not to localize the Merchants Cove material in, respectively, German and Spanish, so rather than offer backers of those editions refunds or English-language games, “we made the decision to do the localization version ourselves and provide our German and Spanish backers the version that they were promised to receive”. However:

Final Frontier took out a bank loan, and then:

That “owed money” was from CMON, which Final Frontier states “placed a fairly large order for a Chinese localization of Merchants Cove” and which Final Frontier allowed to pay in full upon pick-up rather than its standard terms of half payment prior to production and the other half upon completion. Final Frontier states that CMON has paid nothing and “stopped replying to our emails and cut off all communication with us. We have no idea what is happening, we can only assume that the tariffs that the U.S. government imposed on Chinese imports is having a detrimental effect.”

In conclusion, Final Frontier states, “While CMON was not the only party to blame for this unraveling it was the final nail.”

I’ve seen many social media posts and comments blaming CMON for the finality of Final Frontier, but given everything posted in its updates, I’d argue Final Frontier hammered in all of the other nails first, starting with the decision more than four years earlier to pay hundreds of thousands more than anticipated for shipping costs. That was the first domino in a chain that includes taking money for future games to produce games already promised, running crowdfunding campaigns without sufficient preparation, absorbing the cost and time of translation projects due to self-inflicted delays, allowing a licensing partner not to pay in advance as (apparently) all other partners had done, getting in debt to a production factory that would vacuum all future profits, and signing additional games despite not having a firm plan for production of games already underway.

On Reddit, user OddCrow claims to be Drake Villareal, co-designer of Merchants Cove and a (former) developer at Final Frontier Games, and writes:

“QML” is Quartermaster Logistics, and I’ve reached out to them for comment. I’ve also contacted CMON for comment on Final Frontier’s claims and will update this post should I hear from either party.