26 minutes ago, JohnnyUK said:

Just to be clear, I didn't say there wasn't enough to meet (customers) demand. I said that not all resellers are going to get the full quantity they ordered on day 1.

So, for example, if a fictional company had sold 20 units on pre-order but had ordered 100 from the distributor to cover pre-orders and a few months of stock, they may only get an allocation of 80 units. Not everything they asked for, but more than enough to cover the pre-orders and post release sales. Resellers often order more than they need, sometimes because they've been stung by allocations before, so over order in anticipation that they'll get less than they ordered because of allocations, which in turn causes allocations!

This is assuming that all resellers are ordering significantly in excess of their pre-orders.

My local store tends to only buy maybe 5-10 extra sets on top of pre-orders, since they don't have a ton of extra storage. So if they have 15 pre-orders, order 20 copies and only get 13, some people aren't getting their pre-order, and they won't have anything to sell to walk-ins. I imagine many other smallish FLGS are in a similar situation, since many have minimal back areas that are essentially large closets. The online retailers with warehouses are a separate matter of course.

It's happened before with other releases when they get shorted, since it's not like their order to the distributor communicates how many pre-orders they have. Distributors are the ones who decide who gets shorted, meaning they may favour the big stores which are in the situation you outline (ordering well in excess of their pre-orders), hurting the small stores that didn't order large amounts of excess since they couldn't handle the volume.

Indeed. They are clearly not great at getting their ducks in a row.

I mean, the FFG front page is just full of the wrong franchise for this release window. It's as if there's no joined up thinking between departments. It is frustrating when so much wargaming community building is off the back of gamers saying, "Check this out."

17 hours ago, Jedirev said:

Indeed. They are clearly not great at getting their ducks in a row.

I mean, the FFG front page is just full of the wrong franchise for this release window. It's as if there's no joined up thinking between departments. It is frustrating when so much wargaming community building is off the back of gamers saying, "Check this out."

That's not really new though. They tend to post up the articles well in advance (I think in part because they are written well in advance of when they are posted, then put in an automated scheduler). The main evidence I have for that is the Rebel troopers detailed look article had the wrong release date (what everyone assumed was the original release date before delays happened/FFg switched to always vague windows) on it for the original core set when it was initially posted. FFG quickly fixed the article once the "issue" was realized