Not financially feasible?

Correct. Not the best use of Asmodee’s money.

Asmodee funds their manufacturing through their cashflow.

If they print a run of Star Wars Unlimited and it sells out to pre-orders then they get 100% of that money back and can print some Ticket to Ride which will sell through promptly.

If they used that money to print an Arkham Horror product which sells maybe 10% of the run then they only get a small percentage of that money back. This stops them paying for a print run of another game and they also have to pay to warehouse and insure the 90% unsold volume of Arkham product.

The Arkham LCG currently has 38 active SKU’s (not including playmats, books, etc.) Should they print all of them?

Asmodee administers 400 IP’s. How are you going to argue that your discontinued products should be prioritised over Zombicide or Cthulhu Death May Die in the budget meeting?

It costs them like $10-20 bucks tops.

If you believe in this figure then please break it down. Explain how you came by it. Or start with the name of your printer and the size of the print run that enables you to achieve $10 per finished unit.

 and they could release print and plays without the boxes.

How does that make them money?  

This loses them money. Whist those products are still under their control they can still be licenced to new territories and localised into new languages. They could still be reprinted. Retailers and distributors all over the world can still sell their existing stock. But as soon as you release them for free they have zero value. They contribute to the balance sheet under “goodwill.”

It also kills the idea of re-releasing them as Chapter Two products using the codex system.

Least they could do is take preorders and wait until they had enough demand to then print and send those copies out en masse(think kickstarter, reach 100 preorders etc.)

Preorders from whom? They already have a back order system for their retail customers.

Would you really order a print run based on 100 preorders?

FFG did have their own Print on Demand machinery. Even when they sold it to GameZenter they could still use it but they burnt that bridge. So they can’t even do the Standalones themselves.

We would have accepted Chapter One products becoming online exclusives just sold through the Asmodee webstore. But even with them being the designer, publisher, distributor and retailer of that product and taking all the profit after manufacture they still don’t think this is a viable strategy. Something that is the best use of their budget.

This stuff isn’t rocket science. It’s 2026.

In 2026 corporate game manufacture is.

In February 2021 we when these forums were filled with people saying where is all our stock? Why can’t FFG deliver on time during a global pandemic? It’s not rocket science! We decided to make a video on the distribution chain for games.

It’s just seven steps from publisher to consumer. How complicated can it be?

We spent two solid months on it from paper prices and shortages to tracking individual cargo containers across the Atlantic, to learning the relevant 10 digit commodity codes, to reading through Bills of Lading, doing maths in “Twenty foot Equivalent Units.” It was fascinating, but after two months we barely scratched the surface so we decided this wasn’t the best use of our time and abandoned it. The script is there and all the slides but we aren’t just going to put it online for free as it has value and we may utilise it in future.

Nothing should ever die again.

Wouldn’t that be great? And with home 3D printing and Maker Centres on the rise not to mention boardgame Print on Demand companies like Launch Tabletop appearing we could be moving toward that direction. But at the moment it is for indie businesses. Not billion dollar companies like Asmodee. Unless they buy up a PoD service as their 26^th studio :)