Wizards of the Coast Says That China Tariffs Will Have Minimal Impact on D&D

Official Dungeons & Dragons products should largely be unaffected by the ongoing US/China trade war. During today's Hasbro earnings call, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said that the only Wizards of the Coast products manufactured and shipped from China are the D&D boxed sets. While this means that the upcoming Heroes of the Borderland Starter Set could have a higher price than usual (Wizards has made no price announcement as of yet), it does confirm that Dungeons & Dragons will largely be unimpacted by the ongoing trade war between the US and China.

Due to the large print runs, Wizards usually taps domestic or continental printers for its various D&D products. English language D&D books (at least the ones on my shelf) all have "Printed in the USA" in the credits page.

The wider board game publishing industry has been hit hard by the ongoing US/China tariff war, with products manufactured in China receiving a 145% tariff upon entry into the United States. Several publishers with RPG products, including CMON, have announced layoffs and changes to manufacturing plans as a result of the tariffs.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The one benefit the megacorp might give the industry is, if the megacorp is importing RPG books as books rather than game accessories (and thus avoiding tariffs), it may presumably be easier for for smaller companies to point to that if customs gives them any trouble on this front.

The megacorp just said almost all their RPG product (particularly their books) do not require importation. So I don't think that's relevant here.

 

[jgsugden]

There are a lot of people making dumb statements. They don't factor in the indirect costs, for example. Last I checked, they print books. Even if printed in the USA, the lumber comes largely from across national borders in order to make those books.

Also, they sell to stores that sell games - and we're seeing those retail avenues disappearing - and that is accelerating. Small shops are closing, big retailers like Bordlandia are closing.

Executives say what they can to keep the bonuses coming as long as possible. They tell investors what they need to keep the stock price up as high as possible. When someone has every incentive to lie ...

People need to look at this world and see the changes as they occur. They need to stop listening to predictions from biased speakers. We threw integrity out the window in the 80s (or earlier).

 

[Sacrosanct]

It's the smaller publishers I worry about. Which in the TTRPG space, is everybody other than WotC/Hasbro. Hasbro might be okay, but this is bad for the industry. Companies are going to go under, stores might close, folks are going to lose jobs. It's already happening.

I was considering doing a boxed set for when I release Bubgears&Borderlands 2e. Now? Nope. At least not like I had planned. I still want to do it, but it's going to be a limited run (100 copies), and assembled by me, to keep costs down. I have equipment to do a decent sized chunk of the production myself. But I'm still looking at about $100 retail per box (includes 5 books, maps, dice, punchouts, and minis).

TLDR version: Less product available, and at a higher cost.

 

[Sacrosanct]

There are a lot of people making dumb statements. They don't factor in the indirect costs, for example. Last I checked, they print books. Even if printed in the USA, the lumber comes largely from across national borders in order to make those books.

Which is so weird to me, seeing as how I live in Oregon, where one of our top products is lumber...

 

[Henadic Theologian]

If I'm Hasbro, I'm delaying the Box set to later in the year and seeing what product I can bring forward in it's place. So maybe if development allows for it, I switch either Shadowmoore or the FR with the Box Set. These tariffs simply are not sustainable, so waiting till later in the year for the box set is a really smart bet.

 

[mamba]

There are a lot of people making dumb statements. They don't factor in the indirect costs, for example.

more importantly, Hasbro is creating a lot more than just D&D, so while WotC might even be safe (no idea where Magic cards are being printed), that still does not mean that Hasbro is.

 

[Parmandur]

I mean, they've licensed minis and fancy versions (B&G). Where are those printed/manufactured?

Yeah, but Hadbro doesn't pay for those, they just collect the license fees. Hasbro is protected from risk there.

 

[Parmandur]

more importantly, Hasbro is creating a lot more than just D&D, so while WotC might even be safe (no idea where Magic cards are being printed), that still does not mean that Hasbro is.

Magic is also printed locally: Magic prints at such scale that it is affordable affordable them to print domestically.

That's the thing, the big corporations in this field are the ones who were able to afford not outsourcing due to economies of scale: the smaller indies are the ones who turned to international printing to keep up. So for gaming as a field, the amount of hurt here is inverse to the scale of the company...

 

[tetrasodium]

Important thing to remember about wotc/Hasbro that is different from other rpg community companies. It costs about 20,000$ to ship one of those big shipping containers from China to the US∆. If you have the sales volume to be doing that a few times a year then you probably also have the sales volume to shift that 20k to towards paying a domestic us factory worker who produces about a shipping container a year and not have things hurt as badly as smaller companies trying to do the same with lower volumes

Which is so weird to me, seeing as how I live in Oregon, where one of our top products is lumber...

Amazon exploded the volume of cardboard required at an extremely rapid pace. I would imagine that general hatred of those impossible to open plastic blister packages and trend away from them further stressed supply of domestic cardboard. In totally unrelated news though, I've seen multiple stores with signs in the toilet paper isle saying all of the toilet paper they stock is made domestically

∆ a number i saw in some news about USTR proposed port fees.

 

[jgsugden]

Which is so weird to me, seeing as how I live in Oregon, where one of our top products is lumber...

And yet Canada provides 70 to 80% of the US softwood lumber. The US is incapable of producing enough lumber to meet our needs. If we tried, we'd destroy our forests at a rate that we could not rebuild. We'd fail because that rate would not be sustainable. We'd meet our needs for a few years ... but then ... we'd be screwed.

There is a massive amount of information surrounding how these tariffs impact us. You can't know it all. However, there are plenty of economists that have the tools to tell us more than we can possibly know on our own. When you go to the ones without a reason for bias (so not a mouthpiece for Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, etc... for example, international coverage), you get a VERY grim picture.

God I wish we still had real, unbiased, Walter Cronkite style news in the US.