An incompetent American attempt at manufacturing games locally
My Year in Manufacturing & Games
Edit: Title was changed since many people don't seem to get the term 'hilariously incompetent'.
We found that producing a board game here in the states would cost us almost double what it would in China, meaning we would have to charge double in order to pay for everything.
You'd think this would be the sort of figures they'd run BEFORE buying millions in equipment.
There were so many plastic miniatures in the game that tooling alone was a crushing financial burden that would cripple the merchandise line commercially before anything else was even produced.
Injection molding NREs are high? Such a well kept secret up to now. I never would have guessed.
Neither did they.
If only there was something that's much cheaper to scale slowly over time that's actually cheaper to use until you get into some millions+ of pieces.
3D printers are the future for everyone who wants to create something and doesn't have to of money to burn (that includes from preorders, aka confirmed sales).
Is it really hilarious?
Generic dude thinks gathering a bunch of friends and buying a warehouse of machines will somehow save years of overpromises.
Sounds like the presold games were fraudulently presented, with the customer base understandably upset.
Sounds like the presold games were reasonably priced, except for their nationalist agenda driving up costs.
Sounds like the "rescue team" had no business plan and little skill or experience at production, not to mention rescue.
How does this not read like "privileged boys club miffed customers want what they paid for"? Less than hilarious in the current class war climate.
I get this impression that people in the USA simply don't comprehend how much work and money is going to be needed to "return manufacturing to America".
Perhaps this video will help: https://peertube.mesnumeriques.fr/w/4ukCr36qciYWFVGpCVPsQM
It is not merely labour costs that make production in China better for most companies. It's the flexibility that Chinese businesses show as well.
Why is this hilarious or incompetent?
It doesn’t completely sound like they knew what they were doing, but this sounds more or less in line with almost every startup I have ever worked at. It’s why most new businesses fail: Things are a hell of a lot harder than they seem, and you kind of have to be blind to that to even decide to make the attempt.
Mostly the utter lack of anything remotely resembling research or planning. By their own admission, they learnt a lot of basic facts AFTER they'd already jumped head in. How do you take on another company's liability with no idea how much it would cost to deliver on it? Set up a manufacturing process and then realise you're paying double the unit price of a factory in China? Or not even realise that there's no goodwill to be had from the former customers of the company they're taking over?
Yeah. I don’t really disagree with any of that but the first time you play chess you are going to do a bad job. It looks super simple from the outside in hindsight, but at the time it’s super easy to make boneheaded decisions. Ask me about the time we agreed to do a software project for fixed price, or put the world’s worst project manager in charge of a vital project for an important client. Or did a ton of work for which the formula which determined how much we would be paid turned out to add up to basically a handful of monkey shit every month. Shit happens. The second time around, with some experience, you’re usually able to do a better job of it.
Also for what it’s worth it doesn’t really sound like the post author’s fault, it sounds like he got hired by a company which was in the midst of trying to do some stuff which they had no qualifications for but were making a go of it anyway. And, to their credit, they were trying to build American and fulfill their obligations to some semi-related kickstarter campaigns which are both nice things for them to be making a go of trying to do.