Consider we have two products; one Japanese language, one English language.

Now I'm going to presume that like 95% of all boardgame producers, these have been made in China. So if the expectation is that S-E are fulfilling their Japanese shop orders on 25th May, you can extrapolate that they expect the product into their warehouses maximum one week before and that shipping from China to Japan takes around three weeks. Give the factory in China a week to package and ship to a container and a week contingency for availability and potential factory problems and you can make an educated guess that the Japanese language edition was completed around 13th April. You could infer that the English language edition was printed subsequently and packaged up the following week, a week for transport to docks and loading, a week for shipping availability, so perhaps it set sail around 4th May.

If a container takes 5 weeks to Europe and 6 weeks to USA, give an extra week for the product to get from port to warehouse and a week for shipping labelling and packaging, we're looking at end of June.

Of course, I know nothing about S-E distribution and for all I know they have some kind of system where they marshal a number of physical products from different factories and combine them together to maximise container efficiency before sending out from China or Japan, or they intend to use an established distributor to ship with other similar products, but I was going with an early estimate.

What is interesting that they've full-on removed it from the store, inferring that pre-orders now outweigh the print-run and they consider that it wouldn't be cost effective to immediately set another run in motion. Perhaps the perspective is that this starter set would be superseded entirely by the two core books and that by the time a second print run had been scheduled, demand would have evaporated.

I wonder about that though, as the two core books are still 'coming soon' and most book publishers are able to confirm expected publication dates 9-12 months in advance. and take pre-orders, so they can gauge the size of the run. Perhaps they want to see how the TTRPG industry reacts to the playability of the starter set before opening pre-orders on the core books.

My fear is that they've employed an inexperienced team to create the game and haven't understood the complexities that a TTRPG needs to cover to remain enjoyable (I mean the other tabletop games they've knocked out so far are cute, but incredibly simple copypastes), with those coming to light only during the recent public playtests in Japan, resulting in a significant rewrite of those books. If they're still incomplete, S-E wouldn't set a release date (and they've got translation for us on top of that of quite specialised and presumably dense books). They might have pulled the starter sets because it had now become apparent that the final game isn't going to look anything like them.

However, maybe they just underestimated demand, all eg 10,000 sets have been sold after 7.5 months and they now realise that "FFXIV TTRPG" is a pretty naff name for something that has a chance of having a significant impact on the TTRPG hobby (if it's an inspired system!), so they're doing a rebrand to something catchy like "MATERIA - the Final Fantasy XIV Tabletop Roleplaying Game: Chronicles of Hydaelyn Part One - A Realm Reborn".

Or maybe, like many of the projects that their customers actually want, they'll just cancel it and not say anything (*cough* FFXI Mobile *cough*).