Reporting on the impact of the US-China tariffs on the tabletop gaming industry is an increasingly bleak job. Yesterday, I wrote about the creators of Wingspan feeling forced to try to "sue the president" to survive. Today, one of the most well-known companies in the industry is essentially going into standby mode until things improve.
You'll likely recognise CMON from either its hugely successful line of Zombicide games, more recent hit Marvel United, or one of its many lavish Kickstarters, including one where you could pledge for a plastic Galactus the size of a toddler. Older nerds might remember CMON as a website where people could post pictures of their Warhammer minis, but since 2012 it's been a huge presence in the world of board game publishing.
But in an announcement on its official site today, CMON says that it is "pausing all future game development and new crowdfunding campaigns" and making "extremely difficult staffing decisions", including laying off a number of team members across all its creative teams. The plan is to focus on existing products and the delivery of projects already in motion (such as DC comics-based zombie game DCeased) "until trade conditions have stablized".
The reason is specifically stated to be "global conditions, and most notably the situation with tariffs", and the reasoning is easy to understand. With US tariffs with China currently at an apocalyptic 145%, and the future incredibly uncertain, it's not a sensible time to be putting any board game into production or to be crowdfunding based on predicted manufacturing costs. The smart play would seem to be battening down the hatches and waiting out the storm, hoping that it's resolved sooner rather than later.
The question is how long a company like CMON can survive that. Up to now, it's run two to four multi-million dollar Kickstarter campaigns each year, and though it does still have a significant presence in retail stores, that's a huge chunk of income to lose, even for a short period. Regular crowdfunding has become the lifeblood of a significant portion of board game publishers—now that the risk and cost associated with such projects has become untenable, many other companies will be facing their own lose-lose scenarios.
Meanwhile, despite recent suggestion from Trump that tariffs with China could decrease, the trade war seems to be continuing to heat up, with Chinese officials announcing that they won't even come to the negotiating table until the new tariffs are all removed.
