Delay in Upcoming Releases

[Kyle]

Hey everyone,

Despite wanting to stay in our own alternate universe, the real world sometimes makes that impossible. Like many other industries and companies, our production schedule has been impacted by the safety measures taken to help control the coronavirus epidemic.

We are doing our best to keep everything on track, but health and safety come first; as such, our upcoming releases for February and March might be pushed back a little bit. We will keep everyone updated as we get more information.

We thank you for your understanding during this time; stay safe, and we wish the best for all those affected by the virus.  

[farmoar]

19 minutes ago, Kyle said:

Hey everyone,

Despite wanting to stay in our own alternate universe, the real world sometimes makes that impossible. Like many other industries and companies, our production schedule has been impacted by the safety measures taken to help control the coronavirus epidemic.

We are doing our best to keep everything on track, but health and safety come first; as such, our upcoming releases for February and March might be pushed back a little bit. We will keep everyone updated as we get more information.

We thank you for your understanding during this time; stay safe, and we wish the best for all those affected by the virus.  

to anyone thinking of complaining about the delays, that would be quite the "first-world problem", and you probably shouldnt talk about it

[theamazingmrg]

36 minutes ago, farmoar said:

to anyone thinking of complaining about the delays, that would be quite the "first-world problem", and you probably shouldnt talk about it

Yep.  If you pay attention to even the tiniest bit of global news this really won't come as a surprise.  And honestly, restricting the spread of a disease is the only responsible action to take, even if it means delays for our toys!

[Artiee]

Yes.. Important for Health issue.   Unfortunately it's still par for the course.

[theamazingmrg]

15 hours ago, Artiee said:

Yes.. Important for Health issue.   Unfortunately it's still par for the course.

And yet I've had all of the M3E releases except for January's exactly when they should have turned up.  So not par for the course really at all.

 

Of course, if you're in North america there are clearly distributor issues that go way beyond Wyrd's ability to deliver anything, but here in the UK I haven't had an issue as long as I've pre-ordered everything through my FLGS who can be relied upon to actually order from the distributor.

[Nagi21]

41 minutes ago, theamazingmrg said:

Of course, if you're in North america there are clearly distributor issues that go way beyond Wyrd's ability to deliver anything, but here in the UK I haven't had an issue as long as I've pre-ordered everything through my FLGS who can be relied upon to actually order from the distributor.

I mean NA is a very large share of Wyrd's market if not the largest one so I would say a healthy majority is used to things like this being par for the course.

That being said, while I will be the first to note Wyrd's issues with distribution and deadlines (and have), this is affecting basically every game company that has any step of production in China (read: all), and so for once I can definitely not blame Wyrd in any way, shape, or form for the upcoming delays.

[dancater]

Seriously not much Wyrd, or anyone else, can do concerning supply side problems, at least short to medium term. The coronavirius in particular is understandably problematic if, as Wyrd and many other companies do, China is a major manufacturing/shipping hub. Keeping us informed, complying with WHO and national advice and directions and doing the best they can to keep themselves safe while supplying us is what I hope for, and what this post indicates.

Given that for a lot of folks this is a matter of health and livelihood, and potentially life and death, and for me its a matter of getting my plastic toys at the expected time I'm going to pretty much be quiet.

[Scatterbrain]

Thanks for letting us know. 👍

[Hot4Perdita]

Again, another of the many reasons for American companies to start manufacturing their products at home instead of China! 

[solkan]

1 hour ago, Hot4Perdita said:

Again, another of the many reasons for American companies to start manufacturing their products at home instead of China! 

Quoth the Basse sprues:  Made In Thailand.

 

[Hot4Perdita]

3 minutes ago, solkan said:

Quoth the Basse sprues:  Made In Thailand.

 

Did not know that. I don’t have the Basse figures, but all the ones I have built have been China.

[dancater]

23 hours ago, Hot4Perdita said:

Again, another of the many reasons for American companies to start manufacturing their products at home instead of China! 

Assuming there is a US manufacturer that makes mini's of the quality Wyrd requires, I've heard many commentators state that there is not much high quality plastics manufacture available in the US. 

My bet is that Wyrd would simply not have the capacity to run its own manufacturing, probably not enough orders to support a third-party producer solely on its own orders. Is there a high quality plastic mini's manufacturing company in the US at all currently, I have no idea, how would you begin to set something like that up given that it has a large initial cost outlay and potentially limited profitability.

Then once they find a company they need to exit any current manufacturing agreements, then make new contracts with a US supplier, then quality control production (remembering this is also likely to include boxes and cards), then start actually manufacturing on mass. This is likely to hugely interrupt the supply process. More than currently?? Maybe, maybe not, but they have not hit a single expected delay but a series of cascading unexpected one, if asked mid-last year no one would have anticipated this, now of course its obvious but got to love hindsight.

So assuming you could do all of this within a reasonable framework your next issue is costs, no idea how a US manufacturer would compare to an Asian based operation but if it costs more I'm guessing you'd see as many complaints about price increases as you have about shipping delays.

Finally, yes a US manufacturer may speed things up, but that is also assuming that the molds and plastics are US supplied, otherwise the delay is potentially merely moved. Furthermore Wyrd is international so moving from Asia to the US may not improve the shipping costs and delays situation worldwide.  

Would it be great for US gamers, and potentially a number of US workers, for manufacturing to operate out of the US, yes. Same as it would benefit the EU if Wyrd moved to Europe, which has potential rail freight access across Europe and Asia. 

So would this maybe make things better, yeah, maybe, I guess. I have no doubt Wyrd would love to have everything in-house and localized, who wouldn't, it would provide the best control. But the fact that Wyrd does not clearly indicates that availability and cost issues of some sort exist. It's easy to say that something should be done in 'x' way, but if the infrastructure doesn't exist or is simply uneconomical then, well Malifaux is magical, our world unfortunately is not.

If I'm wrong and Wyrd has ignored excellent US based manufacturing alternatives which are accessible and affordable (does anyone have evidence of this??) then fair enough to complain they should use the resources available. But as many unexpected issues as have occurred (coronavirius, US/China trade conflict, extreme climate events etc) the entire relocation of your manufacturing base would be hugely complicated and expensive and cause massive delays. If I was Wyrd I'd constantly be looking at options to reduce these issues (as I'm sure they are) but I'd also be extraordinarily careful before I sank the ship I'm sailing on in the hope that a better ship is just on the horizon, its pretty easy for a smaller company (like they are) to vanish very quickly, this is already certainly hurting them. 

I'm happy to be patient and to support a game I love, through the largely unanticipated supply troubles currently impacting many companies, in the decisions they make, absent clear evidence of stupid business practices which hurts both their company and my enjoyment (through delays and such) in obvious and clearly avoidable ways.

And yes I'm aware that GW has a very different company model concerning supply and production. But they are bigger and a much older company and they've suffered through many of their own problems. 

Magic wands aside I'm prepared to believe that the recent events have been unexpected, unavoidable and we all just need to endure them.

[Hot4Perdita]

A Google search for “Plastic injection molding in USA” returns numerous results. The USA certainly has the companies that could produce these products. There is one reason, and one reason only that they outsource to China: Its cheap. That’s it, nothing more. I hope the President stays tough with China, or will continue to see our manufacturing outsourced there. They undercut us every chance they get.  Maybe if there are huge tariffs levied on Wyrd products from China, they would get smart and manufacture their products in their own country. For comparison, GW and Warlord are UK companies, and they manufacture in their own country. I respect them for that. I’d gladly pay a few more dollars a box if Wyrd made their products here, and I think everyone else would too. Heck, thousands of people pay sometimes almost $50 USD for one single Warhammer character model, why wouldn’t anyone else spend a bit more for their Malifaux models? 

[ebolazaire]

*Places an order for Hamelin*

[Nathan Caroland]

5 hours ago, Hot4Perdita said:

A Google search for “Plastic injection molding in USA” returns numerous results. The USA certainly has the companies that could produce these products. There is one reason, and one reason only that they outsource to China: Its cheap. That’s it, nothing more. I hope the President stays tough with China, or will continue to see our manufacturing outsourced there. They undercut us every chance they get.  Maybe if there are huge tariffs levied on Wyrd products from China, they would get smart and manufacture their products in their own country. For comparison, GW and Warlord are UK companies, and they manufacture in their own country. I respect them for that. I’d gladly pay a few more dollars a box if Wyrd made their products here, and I think everyone else would too. Heck, thousands of people pay sometimes almost $50 USD for one single Warhammer character model, why wouldn’t anyone else spend a bit more for their Malifaux models? 

 

Sorry, but I addressed this the other day elsewhere as well. 

GW, and several other companies people keep touting as doing it in their backyard, actually do produce tooling, plastic, packaging, printing - etc, out of China as well. Mostly scenery and larger kits, but it certainly isn't all UK all the time. I know because I've been in the factory while the tools are cut, the product made, and boxes and boxes of product sitting to be sent along. Not a big deal in the least, but certainly not the '100%' that people like to tout. 

We also work out of China, Thailand, South Korea and right here in the backyard, 'Murica!'. Of course we could be a bit obtuse about it and pull one over on folks with 'Designed in America' or 'Assembled in America' but all that means is that its come from some other place and 'put together'. Hell, there are another half dozen ways to swing that cat. 

 

[SerZaka]

6 hours ago, Hot4Perdita said:

6 hours ago, Hot4Perdita said:

I’d gladly pay a few more dollars a box if Wyrd made their products here, and I think everyone else would too.

 

As an European customer I would not xD 

[ShinChan]

7 hours ago, Hot4Perdita said:

A Google search for “Plastic injection molding in USA” returns numerous results. The USA certainly has the companies that could produce these products. There is one reason, and one reason only that they outsource to China: Its cheap. That’s it, nothing more. I hope the President stays tough with China, or will continue to see our manufacturing outsourced there. They undercut us every chance they get.  Maybe if there are huge tariffs levied on Wyrd products from China, they would get smart and manufacture their products in their own country. For comparison, GW and Warlord are UK companies, and they manufacture in their own country. I respect them for that. I’d gladly pay a few more dollars a box if Wyrd made their products here, and I think everyone else would too. Heck, thousands of people pay sometimes almost $50 USD for one single Warhammer character model, why wouldn’t anyone else spend a bit more for their Malifaux models? 

And GW manufactured in China for a very loooooong time, and they still do most of their models outside of the UK.

Now compare this company: https://investor.games-workshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019-20-half-year-report.pdf to Wyrd

It's like comparing Amazon to your local warehouse, no sense. And as it was pointed out, even if the miniatures are made in the US, probably the plastic would come from China or any other country. The operational costs of having the same production in the US is easier 2-3 times the ones in China. And maybe you as an US citizen would be happy to pay an extra "Made in USA" fee (that it wouldn't be only 2-3$, count more on a 15-25% increase at the very least), Wyrd sells worldwide, and even importing it to Canada or Mexico would be expensive (and your president made it worse), so I can't imagine how much would it be for Europe or Asia. So your "extra couple of dollars" could just kill the company sales everywhere but the US (and maybe UK, due to Brexit).

Thousands of people pay those amounts for those ultraexpensive miniatures from GW, because GW has hundreds of thousands of customers and has been in the market for 40 years.

[dancater]

Also a search on the internet for something can produce dozens of results but does not tell you anything about the validity of those results, like using Wikipedia as a primary reference source, what appears does not necessarily correlate with what is.

The question you'd need, I'm I'm sure Wyrd and other companies have to some degree done, to check the costs, capacity, quality and standards of every potential company, which alone is a significant time and cost outlay. Everyone go onto e-bay and type in great painted miniatures or something similar, sure some of them are amazing (and usually expensive) some of them are.... less spectacular, but plenty of evidence that e-bay is a primary source of great painted miniatures.

I'm not running a miniature company, I'm not wrestling with production processes, costs, delays and customer complaints, Wyrd is. I don't think Wyrd is focused solely on profit (hell if I was I'd quit and look to get a paycheck from Amazon over the agony of running a gaming business, that ain't the fast track to riches, its as much about passion as profit, probably more) and again I'm certain if they could they'd in-house as much as they were able, it would reduce so much anxiety, if it didn't create equal anxiety that you'd crush your own market.

Wyrd are medium sized participant in a niche market, they have limited leverage on all fronts (customers, producers, warehousing, game stores etc) and that foundation is pretty small to begin with, certainly out in Australia there is not a huge gaming market and more stores fail in 5 years than succeed. So yeah, until I get a demonstrable reason to believe Wyrd is simply profiteering (which I 100% think they are not) at the detriment to the overall benefit of customers and the local (global) market then I'm trusting them to do the best they can even if that involves the occasional cluster f**k.

Also I'd happily pay more if Wyrd produced there mini's in Australia, damn the reduction in shipping costs alone mean they could add 25% and I'd still be paying less, perhaps we should all demand that gaming companies open a production facility in every nation. 

[korgal]

Hello, I just saw that the Misaki box is no longer in the upcoming section for the month of April. Can you tell me when it is scheduled because on the wayland games site we can always preorder.

Thank you for your information.

[Ming]

Will there be updates in the Upcoming schedule?

[Nikshe]

What about new Dashel and Internal Investigation boxes? They were February releases, now they are March releases. But it is April already and Firestorm shop says that "The manufacturers aren't even sure what the current release date is for these at the moment". What is the status of this boxes?

[dzlier]

On 4/8/2020 at 4:51 AM, Nikshe said:

What about new Dashel and Internal Investigation boxes? They were February releases, now they are March releases. But it is April already and Firestorm shop says that "The manufacturers aren't even sure what the current release date is for these at the moment". What is the status of this boxes?

Well those two are up on the store now at least. More than you can say for all the Neverborn boxes in the March/April release schedule ;(.

[korgal]

do you know when the profile cards will be translated into french please?

[korgal]

Can someone give me an answer please ? ^^