ESDs and Uk/Europe distribution

[oliverhenshaw]

Having followed the collapse of RPGA UK and the formation of Raven, and the Wizards supply problems of the last year, I'm now left wondering whether anything will ever happen to make Wizards $5 ESDs available to most of the world.


As i understand it, sometime last summer, Wizards stopped their distribution chain to europe (I'm a little fuzzy, but I'm reasonably sure whatever counts for the uk counts for europe).

Subscriptions, at least to Dragon, continued as normal - Dragon was posted to subscribers and in my experience arrived not too long efter it's release in the us.v But in shops, it was a different story. There were increasing delays, and products and magazines released this year took about a month to appear on shop shelves - e.g. Deities and Demigods.

This seems to have been because third party suppliers were struggling to cope with filling the gap left by wizards. And it's something they've only just got on top of - I've seen the Dragon hunting issue of dragon in birmingham about a week after my housemate got it in the post, Faiths & Pantheons and SBG are both on shelves relatively soon after their release.

I don't know what the situation is with Dragon yet, of whether the terrible distribution problems to many rpga uk subscribers have cleared up.


So, for other uk types (or europeans), my question is this - what's the supply situation like near you. Has it improved? Was it ever bad? Am i completely wrong?

And what about ESD's. Are the inhabits of every country bar four denied the right to by them because of caprice or a reason linked to distributors? I've scanned through the end user license agreement and see no reason why they can't be exported to all these countries. What's with that?

 

[Bagpuss]

Could be due to our data protection laws in the UK, I know that was a problem with the UK RPGA and why members didn't get their magazines, or access to the US website, as they couldn't transfer member info to the US as the US isn't a "safe" place to store personal data.

But since I can buy other stuff on-line from the US I'm wondering what I can't get ESD.

Its probably a tax issue, if ESD's are treated like software they will probably have an import tax, which would make them unprofitable. Although the RPG-Now shop doesn't seem to have this problem. Perhaps because their legal department isn't as big and they don't realise they are breaking a law (I hope this isn't the case, if it is please ignore this paragraph if you are a UK Customs Offical.)

Who knows? Well WotC know but they aren't telling. Its always in the process of being sorted out.

 

[Aitch Eye]

Sometime last year someone from Wizards posted here on ESD's being unavailable to the rest of the world. I believe he said something to the effect that the ESD program just wasn't a big enough deal for them to go to the trouble of trying to deal with the tax laws of all the different countries.

I don't know if things have changed since then, or are likely to.

 

[Hawkshere]

WotC did explain the ESD issue. If I remember correctly, it amounted to international taxing laws. The reason RPG-Now can do this easier than Wizards is related to the size of the companies. Huge companies like Hasbro fall under a completely different (more regulated) set of tax codes. So even though the ESD business is very small, it's taxed as if it was Hasbro business.

Which totally sucks, I'm sure.

 

[oliverhenshaw]

That makes sense. I wonder if wizards could license out their ESD distribution to a third party who wouldn't then have that problem.

It's possible that the fact hasbro sold off their electronic games division might make that difficult in some way, though.