CMON Helps to Sink Small Games Company

Obviously tariff shit going on behind the scenes but CMON ghost small company Final Frontier Games and help put them out of business.
Bunch of pricks

www.kickstarter.com/projects/512772051/m...-craft/posts/4362303

They had issues before CMON, too. But good on them for not launching another campaign to use as funding for their ugly pirate game.

Yeah, they fell into the trap of robbing new projects to pay for old, all because they decided to eat the inflated COVID shipping costs without passing any along. Companies need to learn that goodwill won't feed their families...

I am now worried about CMON's ability to stay in business if they're resorting to actions like this. I've got a few things in the pipe with them, but such is the way of things these days...

Read that story on Reddit this morning. I don't think it's really accurate to blame CMON if Final Frontier was a) kiting checks and b) was willing to negotiate a new contract in the middle of the project that gave better terms (money at the end, rather than half up front) to one of their main vendors. That's just bad business, on top of the points that CD made about eating all of the shipping costs and so forth. These people were more concerned about what people would say about them on social media than with running an actual business that wanted to stay running. Other companies have eaten some of the increased expenses while still passing some along without being savaged by all but the most entitled of customers. Unless you're in a position like Leder, who have a constant source of cash flow in the form of Root, you have to draw lines somewhere. If your games are good enough, people will eventually forgive you for not taking all of the bullets that would otherwise kill you.

As CD suggests, CMON is likely doing this because their cash flow is already negative (given the financial reporting issues that emerged last month) and because their entire business model is now completely crippled by not just the existence of tariffs, but the constant threat of them, as well. The reality is probably that CMON simply couldn't pay the bill, not that they decided that they could leave a business partner out to dry because it was convenient for them.

Jackwraith wrote: Read that story on Reddit this morning. I don't think it's really accurate to blame CMON if Final Frontier was a) kiting checks and b) was willing to negotiate a new contract in the middle of the project that gave better terms (money at the end, rather than half up front) to one of their main vendors. That's just bad business, on top of the points that CD made about eating all of the shipping costs and so forth. These people were more concerned about what people would say about them on social media than with running an actual business that wanted to stay running. Other companies have eaten some of the increased expenses while still passing some along without being savaged by all but the most entitled of customers. Unless you're in a position like Leder, who have a constant source of cash flow in the form of Root, you have to draw lines somewhere. If your games are good enough, people will eventually forgive you for not taking all of the bullets that would otherwise kill you.

As CD suggests, CMON is likely doing this because their cash flow is already negative (given the financial reporting issues that emerged last month) and because their entire business model is now completely crippled by not just the existence of tariffs, but the constant threat of them, as well. The reality is probably that CMON simply couldn't pay the bill, not that they decided that they could leave a business partner out to dry because it was convenient for them.

Sorry, have to disagree. Keeping a small business (any business really) going is keeping your customers happy - it is very easy for them, and anyone, to see during the COVID shipping catastrophe the great response game companies that ate all/most of the increases received from customers opposed to the savage response companies that asked for/demanded extra payments. Yes, they may have been sailing close to the wind but they were still running a viable company and never would considered that one of the stupidist world leaders ever would tank the US economy so quickly.
And giving CMON a new deal would easily be seen as keeping on the good side of a major player and (hopefully) banking goodwill from it in this still very small industry.

And that's fine. We can disagree about what might've been the wiser path for FF because neither of us knows their finances or were present when they made those decisions. I think they screwed up. You think they were charting the more positive course. But I think the larger point still stands: You can blame CMON for "helping" FF die, but the reality of the former's situation even prior to the Toddler-in-Chief is that they likely simply don't have the cash to pay the bill; not least since they were blaming on missing out on reporting deadlines because they don't have enough finance staff to pay for the reports, which usually means they can't pay the bill of the outside accounting firm to prepare them. That's not CMON letting them die on the vine. That's CMON dying with them. And, again, if FF weren't already kiting checks to stay alive, I'd have more sympathy for them but that seems like more of a self-dug hole. You can certainly argue that CMON's habit of doing the same thing (kiting checks) is now killing them, too, and you'd be absolutely right.

It's really sad to see a small box like Final Frontier get let go like that... especially when it relies on bigger partners. CMON could have handled it differently, clearly. I'm disgusted for the team behind Merchants Cove. This is the kind of stuff that kills passion in the industry.

And here it comes: www.cmon.com/press/an-update-on-our-inte...s-and-company-focus/

Our CMON community means a lot to us, so we felt it was important to share with you some difficult decisions at our company today. Given global conditions, and most notably the situation with tariffs, CMON has decided to focus on our current commitments to our customers and partners, and prioritize the timely delivery of existing projects. So effective immediately, we will be pausing all future game development and new crowdfunding campaigns until trade conditions have stabilized.

Unfortunately, this involves extremely difficult staffing decisions, affecting all of our creative teams with reductions. We did not make this choice lightly, and our thoughts are with everyone impacted. We are incredibly grateful for their roles in our success over the years, and these talented people will be missed both professionally and personally.

The industry continues to rapidly evolve, and unpredictable situations like the recent tariffs, or COVID just a few years ago, present challenges for everyone in board games. With that said, it is our responsibility to take these difficult measures to ensure that we can keep current projects on track and deliver them in a timely manner. We will of course resume new development as soon as possible.

Please rest assured that these decisions will help ensure that we keep our commitments to our backers, partners, and community.

Really, it is the responsible thing to do right now, regardless of poor past decisions.

now is the perfect time for locally printed small games to flourish.

Yes, Chea-Pass games!!!

https://www.highnoongame.com/post/the-boardgame-industry-is-burning

This a perspective from another party in the table top game industry.

That dude is a Trumpanzee grifter who used AI to write the bulk of that post because he really doesn't know jack shit about shipping codes or imports or anything like it. The tariffs aren't related to HTS. They're based on section 99 classification which is much broader and has nothing to do with a code dodge. He also fundamentally misunderstands MFN (most-favored nation status.) Included in that ignorant rant (Dunning-Kruger!) is his statement about how he supports "reciprocal tariffs" to make a political point. It's someone justifying King Oompa-Loompa's idiocy because he believes in the orange messiah, not because everyone else in the industry is inherently stupid, corrupt, incompetent, or some combination thereof. He's the equivalent of a vaccine denier crowing about how he was right because RFK got appointed.

Rliyen wrote: https://www.highnoongame.com/post/the-boardgame-industry-is-burning

This a perspective from another party in the table top game industry.

Bit of an arrogant rant 'it wouldn't have happened to me so they were idiots to let it happen to them' and seemed to keep well away from, as Jackwraith mentioned, another arrogant person who thinks he can fix American issues all by himself with guaranteed strategies that no one had thought of before. He, and Jackwraith previously, does have a valid point that they trusted too many people in the industry - that may have been naivety or having a good heart or maybe even a calculated gamble to keep their company running and their backers loyal (and not out of pocket), in the end they have found out that even in this business hard-nosed assholes finish better than nice guys.

I have seen posted today that CMON's ponzi behaviour seemingly has caught up with them and they are stopping all new projects and cutting staff
www.cmon.com/press/an-update-on-our-inte...s-and-company-focus/

Here's an opinion on the Tariff turmoil, and the bigger shit likely to follow (like another container price rise tsunami), from the CEO of rising game development company Into The Unknown:

In Search of the Silver Lining
Hello gang! After last month’s call to action I’ve received a ton of topic suggestions from you for the column, it’s clear you want me to dive deeper into the nitty gritty of our processes, methods, inspirations. And I’ll get to those, as I love to talk about our craft and muses.
However.
Are you ready to read another op-ed about Trump’s tariffs that shook the boardgaming industry? I hope you are. Because we need to! And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a great primer on the subject from none other than Jaime Stegmaier of Stonemeier Games: here and here . If you want a second opinion, or ten, W. Eric Martin from BGG has been collecting roundups from the industry, like this one here .
Anyhow. I’m not here to repeat those talking points. As of the time of writing this piece, the US tariffs on Chinese goods remain at 145%, which is a de facto embargo on trade. Companies (from all industries) have responded by either raising prices, postponing delivery and warehousing goods in China, or outright canceling print runs, orders and projects.
The tariffs will come down eventually, as their existence, at this level, is a death sentence to global trade and a death knell of the US economy. When will they come down? The erratic nature of the current US executive makes it impossible to answer precisely. It can be as early as next week, or drag on for weeks, or months.
During this time, your game deliveries will be delayed, and retail prices will go up. Some companies, especially those with little cashflow, those predominantly dependent on the US market and those dependent on retail, which will be more affected than crowdfunding, may scale down their operations or fold completely. Not necessarily because they ran out of money, but because the prospects of profit will dwindle, and the investors may move on to more lucrative sectors.
What will happen next? I’ve read some ill-informed posts on BGG trying to find a silver lining in some kind of ‘only the strong survive’ culling, which, supposedly, would give rise to a new breed of leaner, meaner game companies, to better games or some other win for the backers/clients/customers.
There will be no such win. The more publishers and creators leave the business, the less choice you will have as a consumer. The less game companies and games on the market, the more monopolistic the practices of those who are left will become. The less games are published, the higher the prices that will be asked for the games that do. The games that will not be published, those that some cheerfully claim will be ‘culled’, will be the niche titles, the experimental titles, the original titles, the ambitious titles. What will continue to be published, will be safe bets; cheap retail games (now will lower quality components), new release in legacy brands (you better want that next Monopoly and Pandemic!) and IP based tie-ins (you better want that next Mandalorian Monopoly and Pandemic: The Handmaiden’s Tale!). Brick and mortal stores will start closing. Prices of games in the US will, on average, go up. Prices of used games in the US will, on average, go up. Simple supply and demand. The community of US boardgame enthusiasts will shrink and with them will shrink their collective bargaining power.
Those proclaiming the death of crowdfunding will also be sorely disappointed. Crowdfunding, and direct sales, are better suited to weather the storm, as those two delivery channels are less reliant on supply chains, retail markups, and direct shelf exposure. Tariffs will have a smaller impact on CF companies, like ours, because we are dodging the retail markup requirements, and we always organize our own distribution and are not reliant on putting games on shelves to make a sale. We are simply more flexible, the trait that allowed us to survive the pandemic, the logistics crisis, the breakout of the war in Ukraine and the Red Sea crisis unscathed. Soon you will be able to add the Trump Tariff Crisis to that list.
The one thing that you will see less of? Crowdfunding games coming to retail. That will become rarer, and those unwilling to engage with CF campaigns will have even less choice.
Most, if not all, of these consequences, will continue even when the tariffs are dropped. Some of this comes from the unreversible nature of the supply chain disruption that is happening now (which is estimated to be bigger than that of COVIDs), but will be felt in the coming months, while some will stem from the lessons the industry takes from this whole situation. Business will make safe bets will lower print runs because the specter of another round of tariffs down the line (next year, of maybe in 2028?) will make them wary of risks. Sadly, you can expect another bump as soon as the tariffs are dropped, because when all that warehoused product sitting in China ships all at once, container prices will soar.
All that is to say is that boardgamers in the US will be affected by the tariffs, one way or another. There is no silver lining here, no great reward for those who endure these pains. No pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Whoever is saying otherwise, is trying to sell you on something.
On a personal note, Into the Unknown will be affected too, like every other boardgame company. We already have a plan, we have reserves, we will endure, just as we always had. We also don’t plan on switching our publishing profile – we’ll continue to develop giant, ambitious, original story-driven games (though I’d love to make a Transformers game one day!).
If there is anything I would like for you to take away from this op-ed is to understand that the tariffs will have a lasting impact on your hobby, that the hobby will survive (is this the silver lining we were looking for?) and that, just like during COVID, you should support the publishers, developers, designers and reviewers you value, so they can continue to deliver the things you love.
Take care everyone.

@Jackwraith

I remember when this site remained mostly non-political with its rants and the site flourished. Then came the political hackery and the site was hollowed out. I invite you to call him a cunt rather than a Trumptard, Trumpanzee, or what-have-you. I'm sure you feel strongly about this but alienating members here isn't a great way to engage. I dislike at least 75% of Trump's policies and truly think he is a bad actor in many ways, but I don't need to shit on friends by association because they feel differently.

Let's talk tariffs.

First, we have always had tariffs, and Biden added them. So did Obama. Half the candidates on the D side talked about trade policy which included tariffs. So, let's not pretend that tariff is a bad word.

Here's the thing that everyone needs to get their hands around: We got a tax hike, and a much needed one. The rich will soon get another, I suspect, or the middle class and poor will get cuts. At some point, people are goin to have to realize that this is just a consumption tax.

That said, it's a needed one. We allowed our friends to tax us and disadvantage us since the end of the war to stop the spread of communism and get everyone hooked on dollars. It worked to bolster their economies and transfer jobs to other countries, as well as tangentially open their markets to our sales. Clinton, however, made the mistake of thinking that Chinese would open their borders and become a free country by simply making them rich. Turns out we just handed them the keys to our kingdom and gave them the skills and weapons to kill us.

I don't know what you do for a living but I deal in commodities and 100% of my business is in industry. I have watched every single industry hollowed out by two factors: automation and outsourcing. The idea was that new technologies and inventions would create more jobs than we lost...but they didn't understand at the time that it would also completely cripple our supply chain. Not only that, but to a large degree China never opened its markets, and those markets that did open were filled by their domestic manufacturing stealing our IP and patented devices and selling them locally.

That's fine and dandy but the thing that we REALLY fucked up was outsourcing our raw materials and infrastructure to create primary raw materials.

America cannot currently produce almost anything.

We cannot make most auto parts because we get our metals overseas, our rubber overseas, our petroleum and lithium greases overseas, our plastics overseas, literally everything. We literally don't even have the dies to cast the housings anymore.

The most important aspect of this is that we cannot make chips, computers, phones, tablets, and servers in the United States. Almost all of this we import, and even if we wanted to assemble them here we couldn't without importing virtually all of the parts.

This race to the bottom started by Jack "The Devil" Welch and his need to suck the dick of his investors has ended up with us completely powerless to defend ourselves in war, completely unable to heal our sick, and completely incapable of even beginning to solve these problems.

Trump, in the worst and most haphazard way possible, has awakened our country that we are literally completely fucked. We need to restore our manufacturing base as soon as possible, and this is starting with grants. What you may not know because it isn't being advertised is that raw materials manufactuers are being quietly subsidized to bolster America's ability to self-sustain. Compounding pharmacies AND precursor companies are being funded. Smelters are being funded. New chip manufacturing is being funded (although the expertise is still all in Malaysia and Taiwan).

If this all ends up with a balanced budget and surplus pay down of debt, I will eat my hat and proclaim that the Republicans finally got their heads out of their asses, but in the meantime I will be happy to know that we are FINALLY recognizing that we are one generation away from the US's financial collapse.

Sorry if our board games are more expensive but I honestly don't care if luxury goods become more expensive if the cost will get us closer to being a functioning economy capable of defending itself.

You'll notice that my post wasn't directed at Rliyen, but the author of that absurd rant. You may also be aware of the tendency of many to suggest that things remain "non-political" as a way of keeping minority opinions from being heard. With that in mind, I know that you and I have precisely zero to discuss on the general topic, since our visions of the world order (the "spread of communism", etc.) are never, ever going to mesh.

The only thing I will take exception to is that anyone suggesting a positive aspect to any fragment of what is currently happening under this administration. Bronzo the Clown isn't just 75 percent a bad actor. He's a narcissistic buffoon who has no interest in anything but the graft and having people blow smoke up his ass while he steals their (our) money. But he's now surrounded by bigoted fanatics and eugenicists like RFK who are doing enormous damage to this country while some people suggest (like that guy did) that it's some kind of necessary evil to save the nation from some darker (pun very much intended) future. Not having it. Anyone who speaks a single positive thing about that clown or anyone associated with him is not someone I'm going to have a civil conversation with. They're Nazis. Full stop. And anyone who doesn't resist them and everything they stand for is part of the problem.

You want to talk games? I'm all about it. You know I've always respected your opinion on that topic. (Re: your post in the Playing thread, I'm also a HUGE fan of Pan Am, and I largely detest train games.) The site didn't become "hollowed out" because of political discussions. It died a slow death because the Web changed, people moved on (like to Discord), and now Shellie has stepped back from the site. I've seen it happen to a lot of formerly great places. Those, too, had nothing to do with political opinions; the restraint of which are almost always the preference of those who happen to share the identity of those who control most of the money, as you and I both do (the identity, not the money.) That's the last I'm going to speak on it.

Anyway, good to see you here again. Not sure how long this place will last (i.e. when Shellie is going to call it quits on paying the bills; I haven't talked to her in a couple months), but until then I'm going to try to inhabit the Playing and Trading threads.