I used to buy board games from the US because even with shipping they tended to be cheaper than local sellers and had much more variety (I got Wingspan from the writers of the article, excellent game). Bought my last couple of games just last week. I'll have to look elsewhere now.
The article addresses the false dichotomy peddled by proponents of tariffs. The option isn't "foreign jobs v US jobs" it's "make part of it abroad" v "make all of it in USA" v "don't make it at all"
Free trade allowed new products, and existing products at lower price points to simply exist.
The closing statement was a more cogent strategy for building manufacturing in the USA (from a tabletop gaming person!) than anything we’ve heard from those in charge in 2025.
It's giving too much. The US should not manufacture games, whether by subsidy or tariff. Full autarky is bad policy for the US.
What it does get right though is policy certainty is important. Tariffs won't bring back much manufacturing if capital thinks that they're going to be revoked, either by congress/courts or by the next administration.
How many of those projects are actually being completed? These articles tend to tout announcements, and the projects tend to fall through.
Just looking at the first article from FT:
LG - committed to a new manufacturing plant in TN... in 2017. Completed in 2019. Both under Trump. Expanded more a few years later - under Biden. What is the status on their 2023 commit?
Hanwa - Georgia facility opened in 2019. Under Trump. What is the status of commits under Biden?
LONGi - this is the only one of the three I can find immediate evidence for following-through with their factory in Ohio (joint venture with Invenergy/Illuminate USA)
The U.S. can't "reward" local manufacturing (through subsidies, etc.) enough to offset the absolutely massive subsidies that China gives out like candy. (See, e.g., what China has done in the solar panel and steel spaces. Conservative estimates place the value of Chinese subsidies in those two markets alone at nearly $1 trillion dollars over the past decade.)
The point of tariffs is to eliminate the financial benefit of using lower-cost foreign providers for sourcing products for local sale.
The problem with the Trump tariffs are not that they exist, but that they are being thrown about without any thought into who or what should be subject to tariffs.
The big issue AIUI is die-cut cardboard. The vast majority of modern board games come with several sheets of it to punch out small pieces (think coins or victory point chips).
Producing these (and other game components) requires specialized machinery which isn't made in the US. So even if someone did want to set up a board game manufacturing company in the US, they would now be hit by tariffs as they bought the machines they need.
Stegmaier says that possibly games where all the components are cards will be less affected, as there are companies in the US printing playing cards.
Die cut is one way to do it, but there are other approaches. I worked in a Christmas card factory for a bit and there are a lot of ways to make patterned bits of flat paper. The point about machinery import costs is spot on though.
The article and follow up comments addresses that. As an example when talking about just the box the game comes in, "the quotes I’ve gotten in the US–even from companies that specialize in making boxes–are literally almost the cost of making the entire game". He also mentions that some of the machines needed to make certain pieces don't exist in the US and would have to be imported from China, and thus you'd have to pay tariffs on the machines.
He does mention that he's started to think about fundamentally redesigning his future games in a way that makes it possible to cheaply manufacture and package them in the US.
I think the problem is mostly plastic components, especially miniatures. These requires injection molds and then manual labor to remove the parts from the sprues, clean them and glue them together (as miniatures are expected to come assembled in board games).
I think the labor cost alone makes it not possible to manufacture them in the west. But also ignoring that, consider that injection molding for miniatures can be more expensive in the west in itself. Usually because factories work on a different scale and have higher requirements for minimum order quantities, but also because they do not work usually with miniatures so they would need to adapt their tooling, expertise and know how for this specific kind of product.
Imagine a factory injection molding chairs suddenly receiving a quote for a bunch of miniatures, they can do it, but they are going to charge you for the time needed to figure out how, and for the changes in the lines.
Consider also that usually miniatures 3D files are stl or obj because they are sculpted, while the factory might work only with cad as that's the standard in manufacturing. These two are radically different and there is no easy conversion from stl to cad, which would require it being re-modeled in most cases.
Also, with a chinese factory you can expect to give them 3D files and they will take care of everything (designing molds and avoiding undercuts). I'm sure this has separate cost in the west as it involves a specialized expertise which is for sure more expensive than in China.
One of the problems is industries just take so long to start. They need enough scale to start creating sub-suppliers that spot efficiencies that are worth exploiting to pull costs down. And board games are probably not the tentpole product to do that, if there is one at all.
What's remarkable is that the cost of software companies will rise dramatically simply because cost of laptops, office chairs, tables, electric cables will rise.
At that point, it might just be worthwhile to develop 100% abroad and then sell in the US with a one-time tariff rather than pay for itemized tariffs/US greedflation.
The cost of laptops etc. is not even a rounding error in the cost of making Microsoft Office. The biggest two costs are labor and nowadays, compute for AI.
True. I'm not so sure about this. But the pure imported hardware cost is probably just a few 10s of millions, maybe 100 million or so. For office alone.
It's the cost of setting up and running the data centre that costs money. This is once again has a significant labor component.
Yes my example was smallish. Laptop itself doesn't matter as much as the general cost of doing anything in America due to tariffs. And yes, that includes higher health insurance costs, higher server costs due to cloud providers raising prices, and higher cost of literally holding office space.
All of these would be cheaper in any other country. The choices are endless.
If other countries are sensible, they'd tax (er tariff) American software companies - because a large amount of software is less useful than goods.
A 20% tax on Facebook and Google isn't going to do anything. A 20% on Office 365 is meaningful but only until they find software alternatives from anywhere else in the globe.
As for the US, O365 will not be more expensive but the cost of producing O365 will be. It will be up to execs to determine if they want to pass the costs to the shrinking number of businesses or if they want to eat the cost of production at the expense of shareholders.
Either way, American society is going to eat the cost, either in loss of customers or in loss of 401k.
If other countries are sensible they'll create funds to contribute to the domestic development of AGPL licensed alternatives as well funds for the development of domestic data centers with the eventual goal of banning the use of American based cloud software altogether.
But that isn't the only option that's available to these other countries:
> Dubbed a “bazooka” by some EU officials when it came into force in 2023, the ACI allows the bloc to select from a wide range of retaliatory measures, such as revoking the protection of intellectual property rights or their commercial exploitation, for example, software downloads and streaming services.[0]
Maybe it's time for other countries to respond by taking the copyright off of American media and setting up their own affordable streaming sites to a global market.
If other countries took the copyright off of American media I would completely support making it illegal to export to them. That would just be theft. Hell, for some people that would probably be enough to justify war.
This is certainly a take when China has effectively been doing this for decades. Good luck winning and enforcing a copyright case as a US company in a Chinese court.
The other countries might not place tariffs on tech company products but they can damage these companies in other ways.
I believe the European Union actually has a specific type of anti-tariff policy that they could implement that would eliminate intellectual property protections of software or entertainment companies from countries engaging in trade wars. It’s an option of last resort and I don’t think the EU would actually implement it in response to the Trump stuff but if they did it could be devastating for Silicon Valley and also for Hollywood.
> What's remarkable is that the cost of software companies will rise dramatically simply because cost of laptops, office chairs, tables, electric cables will rise.
I think this is incredibly unremarkable. These are all fixed costs. It's variable costs, like wages and fuel, that drive everything up. If a table costs twice as much you might buy a slightly lower quality table, or you might be fine.
Also consider secondary effects. If you have a steel tariff anything that uses steel is more expensive. A lot of things use steel, so a lot of things get more expensive. Now thr sellers of those things have to make their stuff more expensive, at some point this increases some of the costs of a service company, e.g. energy bill, rent, the cost of computers and office stuff. A VFX company is more far removed from the steel market than a steel shop would be, but it still is not totally decoupled.
But we are not talking about a tariff on steel, we are talking about a tariff on everything.
I guess our trading partners should lower their tariffs/margins to a level that makes these US importers and publishers able to take a healthy cut, or we can assume they don’t mind the drop in orders to their factories.
Very few supplier industries run with a 54% margin such that the supplier can eat that and stay in business, so less orders is better than more orders that lose money on each order. For many products the margins even at the end are in the single to low double digits. This means costs go to consumers, which practically translates to inflation and decreased spending, which leads to stagnation etc. The analysis that this will stifle game makers is pretty likely true, and I see no future where the economics of that moves supply chains state side in our life time.
People always talk about companies having low profit margins. Whenever any tax or expense falls on these companies, folks point to the low profit margins and say the expenses will go to the customer.
And yet these low profit margin corporations have executives and CEOs making millions of dollars a year. It doesn’t make any sense. Why not just pay the executives and finance people less?
(My comment does not apply to the small business board game company the original op thread link was about. My comment is only a direct reply to what this other comment is saying)
In a company where the revenues are tens or hundreds of billions and the profits are billions, the CEO’s salary is 0.1% or less of the conversation. It’s rounding errors. Then you talk about 54% of revenues, it’s catastrophic multiples of profit (I.e., insolvency threatening losses).
I think you are deeply disconnected from manufacturing if you think most of the companies in the value chain have CEO making millions.
Most of the intermediaries are SME. Despite what you might believe from the media, SMEs are the heart of the economy for most actual people. Their share of jobs is far higher than their impact on GDP and they have neither the means nor the know how to optimise their supply chain like large corporations.
Most SMEs CEO earn less than a software engineer. There is absolutely no way they can take the hit without passing it to customers.
> My comment does not apply to the small business board game company the original op thread link was about. My comment is only a direct reply to what this other comment is saying
The other comment is directly targeting companies which are in every points similar to the small business board game companies.
I don’t understand your disclaimer (which I somehow missed when I replied first) nor why my reply is downvoted but so be it.
I don't agree with high CEO pay, but in the general case even with very-well paid CEOs, if you took their salary and divided it out to the other employees entirely it isn't that much. Apple for example, Tim Cook's salary is every employee at the company making about $450 extra a year.
The US is unreliable to do trade with, so I'd simply look to diversify my customer base to not be at the whim of an erratic old man with a narcissistic personality disorder.
In the end I am pretty sure the US can't be avoided, but today the US made sure that those who had good ties to it got punished and the world will remember that. I would like to think the world might ask it self if the USD should be still be the lead currency.
The rest of the world wasn't at fault that US capitalists decided to outsource their manufacturing base to cheaper countries. I guess someone in the US got damn rich doing precisely that. Those are the people you should blame.
Additionally tarrifs cut two ways, if countries react as tou would expect them to. The EU got the biggest single market in the world, and the US just made it harder to sell their stuff there — again, beyond pure costs, reliability is an issue in itself. Why would the EU buy something from the US when products from elsewhere have less tariffs and you don't have to deal with the scenario of an erratic political leader making it up as he goes which makes it somewhat impossible to rely on a plan.
Having bad leadership is a thing that costs a nation dearly. I don't see why the rest of the world would feel inclined to carry that cost.
I used to buy board games from the US because even with shipping they tended to be cheaper than local sellers and had much more variety (I got Wingspan from the writers of the article, excellent game). Bought my last couple of games just last week. I'll have to look elsewhere now.
The article addresses the false dichotomy peddled by proponents of tariffs. The option isn't "foreign jobs v US jobs" it's "make part of it abroad" v "make all of it in USA" v "don't make it at all"
Free trade allowed new products, and existing products at lower price points to simply exist.
The closing statement was a more cogent strategy for building manufacturing in the USA (from a tabletop gaming person!) than anything we’ve heard from those in charge in 2025.
It's giving too much. The US should not manufacture games, whether by subsidy or tariff. Full autarky is bad policy for the US.
What it does get right though is policy certainty is important. Tariffs won't bring back much manufacturing if capital thinks that they're going to be revoked, either by congress/courts or by the next administration.
This is why they distract you with pronouns.
https://www.ft.com/content/b1079606-5543-4fc5-acae-2c6c84b3a...
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2184
https://www.investopedia.com/biden-s-parting-gift-to-small-b...
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/biden-...
https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration...
How many of those projects are actually being completed? These articles tend to tout announcements, and the projects tend to fall through.
Just looking at the first article from FT:
LG - committed to a new manufacturing plant in TN... in 2017. Completed in 2019. Both under Trump. Expanded more a few years later - under Biden. What is the status on their 2023 commit?
Hanwa - Georgia facility opened in 2019. Under Trump. What is the status of commits under Biden?
LONGi - this is the only one of the three I can find immediate evidence for following-through with their factory in Ohio (joint venture with Invenergy/Illuminate USA)
It really isn't.
The U.S. can't "reward" local manufacturing (through subsidies, etc.) enough to offset the absolutely massive subsidies that China gives out like candy. (See, e.g., what China has done in the solar panel and steel spaces. Conservative estimates place the value of Chinese subsidies in those two markets alone at nearly $1 trillion dollars over the past decade.)
The point of tariffs is to eliminate the financial benefit of using lower-cost foreign providers for sourcing products for local sale.
The problem with the Trump tariffs are not that they exist, but that they are being thrown about without any thought into who or what should be subject to tariffs.
What would it cost, realistically to print and publish these in the US? Is it not mostly just laminated paper on cardboard with some resin pieces?
The big issue AIUI is die-cut cardboard. The vast majority of modern board games come with several sheets of it to punch out small pieces (think coins or victory point chips).
Producing these (and other game components) requires specialized machinery which isn't made in the US. So even if someone did want to set up a board game manufacturing company in the US, they would now be hit by tariffs as they bought the machines they need.
Stegmaier says that possibly games where all the components are cards will be less affected, as there are companies in the US printing playing cards.
Die cut is one way to do it, but there are other approaches. I worked in a Christmas card factory for a bit and there are a lot of ways to make patterned bits of flat paper. The point about machinery import costs is spot on though.
The article and follow up comments addresses that. As an example when talking about just the box the game comes in, "the quotes I’ve gotten in the US–even from companies that specialize in making boxes–are literally almost the cost of making the entire game". He also mentions that some of the machines needed to make certain pieces don't exist in the US and would have to be imported from China, and thus you'd have to pay tariffs on the machines.
He does mention that he's started to think about fundamentally redesigning his future games in a way that makes it possible to cheaply manufacture and package them in the US.
I think the problem is mostly plastic components, especially miniatures. These requires injection molds and then manual labor to remove the parts from the sprues, clean them and glue them together (as miniatures are expected to come assembled in board games).
I think the labor cost alone makes it not possible to manufacture them in the west. But also ignoring that, consider that injection molding for miniatures can be more expensive in the west in itself. Usually because factories work on a different scale and have higher requirements for minimum order quantities, but also because they do not work usually with miniatures so they would need to adapt their tooling, expertise and know how for this specific kind of product.
Imagine a factory injection molding chairs suddenly receiving a quote for a bunch of miniatures, they can do it, but they are going to charge you for the time needed to figure out how, and for the changes in the lines.
Consider also that usually miniatures 3D files are stl or obj because they are sculpted, while the factory might work only with cad as that's the standard in manufacturing. These two are radically different and there is no easy conversion from stl to cad, which would require it being re-modeled in most cases.
Also, with a chinese factory you can expect to give them 3D files and they will take care of everything (designing molds and avoiding undercuts). I'm sure this has separate cost in the west as it involves a specialized expertise which is for sure more expensive than in China.
Btw here's a nice writeup from a person that tried to open a game factory in the USA, he doesn't even mention plastic parts though. https://www.superheumann.com/post/my-year-in-manufacturing-g...
One of the problems is industries just take so long to start. They need enough scale to start creating sub-suppliers that spot efficiencies that are worth exploiting to pull costs down. And board games are probably not the tentpole product to do that, if there is one at all.
"If a game costs $10 to make in China"
It doesn't though. It costs a certain amount of Yuan. About 70CNY
Therefore to make the numbers add up now they need $5 to buy 70CNY
Which means to make China a viable source, the exchange rate needs to go from 1:7 to 1:14.
Those Chinese Sovereign wealth funds need to be more generous with their CNY if they want to keep the manufacturing.
The USD is currently sharply devaluing, and Trump appears to be quite keen on this idea. China attempting to keep up would cause all sorts of issues.
The rest of the world will just cut out the US. Trade isn't over because the orange throne commands it.
Even the creative industries are feeling the change. Spin up Netflix and you'll see Korean and Japanese series on the front page.
What's remarkable is that the cost of software companies will rise dramatically simply because cost of laptops, office chairs, tables, electric cables will rise.
At that point, it might just be worthwhile to develop 100% abroad and then sell in the US with a one-time tariff rather than pay for itemized tariffs/US greedflation.
The cost of laptops etc. is not even a rounding error in the cost of making Microsoft Office. The biggest two costs are labor and nowadays, compute for AI.
However compute power will get significantly more expensive due to tariffs on components. So your argument is somewhat contradictory.
True. I'm not so sure about this. But the pure imported hardware cost is probably just a few 10s of millions, maybe 100 million or so. For office alone.
It's the cost of setting up and running the data centre that costs money. This is once again has a significant labor component.
Yes my example was smallish. Laptop itself doesn't matter as much as the general cost of doing anything in America due to tariffs. And yes, that includes higher health insurance costs, higher server costs due to cloud providers raising prices, and higher cost of literally holding office space.
All of these would be cheaper in any other country. The choices are endless.
> The cost of laptops etc. is not even a rounding error
In general it's not treated that way. Getting a $10 cable at work even though your salary is $80,000 can be hard
One of the biggest costs is bureaucracy.
Given other countries will have reciprocal tariffs and/or higher taxes I'm not sure why they will be cheaper it's a complex change going on.
So my question is when other countries start counter tariffs on services.
Office 365 is now 25 % more expensive.
If other countries are sensible, they'd tax (er tariff) American software companies - because a large amount of software is less useful than goods.
A 20% tax on Facebook and Google isn't going to do anything. A 20% on Office 365 is meaningful but only until they find software alternatives from anywhere else in the globe.
As for the US, O365 will not be more expensive but the cost of producing O365 will be. It will be up to execs to determine if they want to pass the costs to the shrinking number of businesses or if they want to eat the cost of production at the expense of shareholders.
Either way, American society is going to eat the cost, either in loss of customers or in loss of 401k.
If other countries are sensible they'll create funds to contribute to the domestic development of AGPL licensed alternatives as well funds for the development of domestic data centers with the eventual goal of banning the use of American based cloud software altogether.
But that isn't the only option that's available to these other countries:
> Dubbed a “bazooka” by some EU officials when it came into force in 2023, the ACI allows the bloc to select from a wide range of retaliatory measures, such as revoking the protection of intellectual property rights or their commercial exploitation, for example, software downloads and streaming services.[0]
Maybe it's time for other countries to respond by taking the copyright off of American media and setting up their own affordable streaming sites to a global market.
[0] https://archive.ph/PNXt6#selection-2171.0-2175.232
If other countries took the copyright off of American media I would completely support making it illegal to export to them. That would just be theft. Hell, for some people that would probably be enough to justify war.
This is certainly a take when China has effectively been doing this for decades. Good luck winning and enforcing a copyright case as a US company in a Chinese court.
Would you recommend similar actions from countries that have more stringent intellectual property laws than the United States?
Why or why not?
The harmonization of EU IP laws with American ones was a quid pro quo done in exchange for the adoption of free trade agreements.
If America doesn't want to hold up their end of the bargain why should Europe?
I would hope they at least reverse copy right duration back to something sane like 20 years.
The other countries might not place tariffs on tech company products but they can damage these companies in other ways.
I believe the European Union actually has a specific type of anti-tariff policy that they could implement that would eliminate intellectual property protections of software or entertainment companies from countries engaging in trade wars. It’s an option of last resort and I don’t think the EU would actually implement it in response to the Trump stuff but if they did it could be devastating for Silicon Valley and also for Hollywood.
> What's remarkable is that the cost of software companies will rise dramatically simply because cost of laptops, office chairs, tables, electric cables will rise.
I think this is incredibly unremarkable. These are all fixed costs. It's variable costs, like wages and fuel, that drive everything up. If a table costs twice as much you might buy a slightly lower quality table, or you might be fine.
I'd say your money is best spent on lobbying.
I've never seen a corporate or government policy that doesn't allow for exemptions if the correct rings are kissed.
In fact, its often the point of a policy.
It's a Goods tariff
They don't (directly) impact service imports like games, VFX, or outsourced software.
Edit: I'm wrong. This article is about tabletop games, not video games. Maybe a title change in HN would be helpful?
Reading before commenting would be helpful. It is very clearly stated in the article.
Also consider secondary effects. If you have a steel tariff anything that uses steel is more expensive. A lot of things use steel, so a lot of things get more expensive. Now thr sellers of those things have to make their stuff more expensive, at some point this increases some of the costs of a service company, e.g. energy bill, rent, the cost of computers and office stuff. A VFX company is more far removed from the steel market than a steel shop would be, but it still is not totally decoupled.
But we are not talking about a tariff on steel, we are talking about a tariff on everything.
I guess our trading partners should lower their tariffs/margins to a level that makes these US importers and publishers able to take a healthy cut, or we can assume they don’t mind the drop in orders to their factories.
Very few supplier industries run with a 54% margin such that the supplier can eat that and stay in business, so less orders is better than more orders that lose money on each order. For many products the margins even at the end are in the single to low double digits. This means costs go to consumers, which practically translates to inflation and decreased spending, which leads to stagnation etc. The analysis that this will stifle game makers is pretty likely true, and I see no future where the economics of that moves supply chains state side in our life time.
People always talk about companies having low profit margins. Whenever any tax or expense falls on these companies, folks point to the low profit margins and say the expenses will go to the customer.
And yet these low profit margin corporations have executives and CEOs making millions of dollars a year. It doesn’t make any sense. Why not just pay the executives and finance people less?
(My comment does not apply to the small business board game company the original op thread link was about. My comment is only a direct reply to what this other comment is saying)
In a company where the revenues are tens or hundreds of billions and the profits are billions, the CEO’s salary is 0.1% or less of the conversation. It’s rounding errors. Then you talk about 54% of revenues, it’s catastrophic multiples of profit (I.e., insolvency threatening losses).
I think you are deeply disconnected from manufacturing if you think most of the companies in the value chain have CEO making millions.
Most of the intermediaries are SME. Despite what you might believe from the media, SMEs are the heart of the economy for most actual people. Their share of jobs is far higher than their impact on GDP and they have neither the means nor the know how to optimise their supply chain like large corporations.
Most SMEs CEO earn less than a software engineer. There is absolutely no way they can take the hit without passing it to customers.
Ah alright. I don’t know too much about this which is why I was asking. Thanks for the reply.
> My comment does not apply to the small business board game company the original op thread link was about. My comment is only a direct reply to what this other comment is saying
The other comment is directly targeting companies which are in every points similar to the small business board game companies.
I don’t understand your disclaimer (which I somehow missed when I replied first) nor why my reply is downvoted but so be it.
I don't agree with high CEO pay, but in the general case even with very-well paid CEOs, if you took their salary and divided it out to the other employees entirely it isn't that much. Apple for example, Tim Cook's salary is every employee at the company making about $450 extra a year.
The US is unreliable to do trade with, so I'd simply look to diversify my customer base to not be at the whim of an erratic old man with a narcissistic personality disorder.
In the end I am pretty sure the US can't be avoided, but today the US made sure that those who had good ties to it got punished and the world will remember that. I would like to think the world might ask it self if the USD should be still be the lead currency.
The rest of the world wasn't at fault that US capitalists decided to outsource their manufacturing base to cheaper countries. I guess someone in the US got damn rich doing precisely that. Those are the people you should blame.
Additionally tarrifs cut two ways, if countries react as tou would expect them to. The EU got the biggest single market in the world, and the US just made it harder to sell their stuff there — again, beyond pure costs, reliability is an issue in itself. Why would the EU buy something from the US when products from elsewhere have less tariffs and you don't have to deal with the scenario of an erratic political leader making it up as he goes which makes it somewhat impossible to rely on a plan.
Having bad leadership is a thing that costs a nation dearly. I don't see why the rest of the world would feel inclined to carry that cost.