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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cergorach" data-source="post: 9704074" data-attributes="member: 725">While consumers are better protected in the EU specifically (the EU is not the whole of Europe), that has limitations, especially during bankruptcy!I live in the Netherlands (EU) and when a webstore goes bankrupt, they are not only allowed to keep taking orders they can't realistically fulfill, they are required to keep taking orders they can't realistically fulfill. I've been on the consumer end of this before. If the company owner doesn't do this, they can be held personally liable for the debts. The reason why people start limited companies is to isolate your personal assets from your business assets, so when things go wrong, you can't be easily held personally liable. So this is how it works always! Not just often, always! You often don't hear about it in the media because most other businesses are a bit more professional then to start gofundme's...And normally in the US you pay with a credit card, so you take it up with your cc company and chances are that you get your money back. Credit cards in the EU, specifically the Netherlands are not the default payment method online, it's done via direct bank-transfer (often via Ideal), so the bank does not have the ability to get your money back and you're not insured. So as a consumer, you're money is gone and you're not getting the product. Did you warranty products with the store (consumer warranty protection is with the store that sold you the product), you're not getting your product back. Store bankrupt, no more consumer protection warranty for you. So much for better protection for consumers from (big) businesses in the EU... Just because we're protected in certain ways does not mean we're protected in all the ways.When you send money, when you send product, it's no long your money or product. When a company goes bankrupt, there's a LONG line of creditors, and the priority order is generally from biggest to smallest. When it's a webstore, it's generally the consumers left holding the bag, with a wholesaler it's generally the small companies sending stock holding the bag.Some numbers for the Netherlands: In 2024, 1 in 540 companies went into bankruptcy. We have 2.3+ million companies in a tiny country of 18 million people. Just look up the bankruptcy numbers in the US, how many companies there are, etc. So a TON of companies go bankrupt every year, and the same things happen, Diamond isn't an exception, it's the rule.~65% of the businesses here are small to medium businesses. Often run by people that might have just enough business sense to stay afloat, but certainly no deep knowledge of how things actually work (legal). They tend to run on assumptions and often get into huge troubles when their assumptions don't match reality. They often either don't have the resources to spend on experts in a specific field or are just plain unwilling to spend that money. No wonder they get in trouble... Like this.I've been running a business for 25+ years, in the early 2000s I operated a webstore for pnp RPGs. I still had my dayjob luckily, because I made mistakes running a business, I paid for them with my own money. I eventually stopped selling pnp RPG books because other accessible options that were often cheaper became available (the main reason why I started the webshop was because there were no cheap easily accessible options available). I have considered running a physical store full-time, and running a pnp RPG publishing company, I never did because from the leasons learned, the risks were to high and the payoff too low. I have been IT freelancing for ~17 years, and you sometimes just don't go with a client or supplier because you don't trust they are either around long enough to pay/supply you or if you expect legal trouble with earlier interactions. Especially with suppliers you spread the risk and if you can't you'll have an exit strategy in place. This is something which larger companies often plan for, smaller companies often don't unless they hire out for such expertise.Way too many people here are judging with their gut, instead of what's the law, or how to actually run a business. Is it fair? Hell no! But you should know that before actually starting a business. As someone from IT, I would say: RTFM! before starting a business.What I don't get is that this happened before (see the example earlier in the thread, but it happened more often then that), didn't they learn from that (publishers I mean)? Green Ronin has been around for 25 years, Chris Pramas and Nicole Lindroos have been in the business for ~35 years... They should have learned by now... I can only assume that they took calculated high risks and that went wrong. This happens. You sometimes (need) to roll the dice, and sometimes that won't go so well. The art of (staying in) business isn't maximizing profit, it's minimizing risk.The reason why I responded to this thread is because this 'news' is all over the Internet and most twists that are given is "Diamond is bad!", as if this is news... Diamond has been in business and Diamond was already a crap company way before Green Ronin or Enworld existed, and companies kept using them, while they knew they were bad news. Just talk to some retailers that did business with them in the 80s and 90s... And what got my hackles really up was that the reporting 'news' sites essentially framed Green Ronin as blameless victims. Diamond F-ed up, but so did Green Ronin, and I don't see Diamond running a gofundme... Don't get me wrong, Green Ronin did/does some amazing stuff, the launch of WFRP 2e, The Book of the Righteous, Freeport, etc. I own them all! But they F-ed up as well and are now dumping that soley on the goodwill of the fans.</blockquote>

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