Watching this with interest. Certainly a big game of brinkmanship going on that’s for sure.

There is never a good time for this kind of action to be taken and I really hope both sides sort it out, as I dont know who the winners will be but is suspect the losers will be the same as always… us!

I’m pretty sure it will – it’s not tariffs on US-designed goods, but Chinese manufactured.

The idea of tariffs is to dissuade people from sourcing from one country, and to encourage manufacturing/production in another; it’d be a pretty weak political tool if there were caveats, such as “well, it was designed ten years ago by a company in a different country, so should be exempt”.

For over a decade we’ve been on the brink of a “cottage-industry” style revolution – with people and companies having access to the machinery and equipment to produce much closer to source (3d printers, laser cutters, resin printers etc). It never quite arrived, because it’s the relatively high labour costs that has made it cheaper to still have products manufactured on the other side of the world then shipped to the final destination (despite the environmental impact).

Many people will simply look to alternative “developing” nations for manufacturing; forward thinking companies – irrespective of tariffs – with a 5-10 year plan should be looking ahead to future possible tariffs designed to offset the environmental cost of doing global business.

Personally, I’d like to see more people embracing the digital-as-a-product idea that DriveThruRPG has done so well for many years – buy the IP and the right to produce the product closer to the end user (it could be a local company, if the end-user doesn’t have the facilities to produce final goods themselves).

Tariffs are a blunt instrument with lots of unintended consequences. They are harmful in that the end user price can only go up. Very often they simply force business to change their supply chain; it’d be great if they might actually change the way we do business….

Personally I think this is probably a tempest in a teapot for 3 reasons:

1: It probably won’t really effect mini makers that much since the big market for minis is actually the UK and to a lesser extant the EU, they can just send them directly there (This blog/forum is mostly done by UKers for UKers, when WGF a Chinese tooling company had a public forum a good chunk of those folks where UKers, mantic and GW along with most of the other big players are UK companies along with their preferred mill, when you don’t have UK friendly shipping for your plastic mini KS it tends to die, etc).

2: printing card broad components should be do able in the USA (if it isn’t already happening), and if there is a demand for “special” printers  that are not in the US, I believe we still have the companies and factories capable of building them the only issue might be the individual parts, but that’s what machine shops and 3D printers are for (and I know we have both of those).

3: Finally the ball hasn’t even dropped yet and it is possible, that either China will cave or congress and the executive branch will reconsider after talking about big business.  The tabletop, toy, and general hobby markets are the small fries in this power play, I would be more interested in what the bigger markets like smartphones makers are doing. Besides China is kinda of unstable right they can’t really afford to play chicken.

And I could be totally wrong about this but I think most companies and people who are working with Chinese on KS for gaming have had some advanced warning of this, just judging  by the KS costs and shipping of the ones for plastics I have been backing.

P.S.: Nobody is going drop nukes over the plastic trade, (if they didn’t drop them it over Vietnam or the cold war,  they are not going to do it over plastic, and all the groups that actually have nukes are too scared to actually use them even when they probably should, those bombs are just glorified bargaining chips on the geopolitical poker table). Oh and the great depression at least for the USA was extend by FDR’s New Deal policies very clearly, not a trade war or isolationism (though I doubt those helped any lol).

There’s way too many causes for the Great Depression to start picking one or two.

Most Economists do not agree it was a major contributing factor. At best it was fuel on the raging bonfire but it didn’t have a massive impact.

“the view held by prominent economists, ranging from University of Chicago Nobel laureate Robert Lucas and Yale economist Robert Shiller to MIT economists Rudiger Dornbush and Stanley Fischer, is that since the foreign-trade sector was only about 7 percent of gross national product (GNP), the tariff (though misguided) could not explain much of this decline.”

That comes from the Foundation for Economic Education which was supported by Mises and Hayek so hardly a pro-Tariff Organisation.

https://fee.org/articles/the-smoot-hawley-tariff-and-the-great-depression/

@robert apologies.

That’s what I get for skimming the article on the train.

I was going to go into a long comment but I think ced1106 comment just curb-stomped “Oh,no not a tariff!” and “this trade war’s going to cause an end to hobby gaming market!”  commenters in a way that  I couldn’t (if the tariffs on China comes down to a maximum $0.05 to every to every $0.95 and have been in place since September last year  with out the general populace/ gaming community at large noticing then this isn’t even news or a real worry and BoW should probably consider apologizing for spreading fear and panic  messages that can mess up KS projects).

So instead of that  did you guys know that the Fordney-McCumber tariff actually boosted the US’s economy? or that all sorts of bad thing happened at once in the great depression due to banker shenanigans and WW1 recovery? That the Smoot tariff was just congress trying to fix things and just failing?