11 hours ago, Ralgon said:

While true, from a larger business perspective having an over glut of stock is going to kill the game far faster than under stock. You'll always have new or returning players if the game mechanics and rough balance is sound. You can't recover from financial backers forclosing because the revenue streams is still on the shelf instead of being there to pay them...

I fail to see how having too much stock will kill a game faster than having no stock at all???? with no stock you have NO returning players and NO new players.

Desire to play the game competitively dies and people move on to other games.

If you have a good game back yourself to make enough of it. FFG seem to be treating Legion like a board game where you can run stock levels down to zero before you reprint because there's no issue with a board game being out of print. when a live, evolving tabletop minis game regularly has stock issues, particularly if its Tier 1 competitive units that are out of stock it turns players away from playing it when they get beat by things they cant even buy themselves to compete.

I feel like FFG want to play with the big boys at GW, but they keep being made to look like novices when they cant keep stock on the shelves when their competitors can keep stock lines full on the shelves.

FFG are amazing game developers and designers, hence why I love so many of their games, but its so frustrating when they cant get their logistics sorted.

They have the rights to the worlds most saleable IP with full confidence in their work from Lucasarts, They should back themselves to make enough of their popular game that these sort of product shortages don't happen.

A large stock ties up warehouse space, capital, and can get taxed. At some point the over stock has to be unloaded which means heavy discount. Stores hate that, since those discounts are probably less than what they paid wholesale for it. Now you have retail outlets hating on you cause they have to tie up shelf space and capital in goods that may never move. It destroys trust in that manufacture and certainly makes those stores not support the game. So yes, having just enough stock is best. Being under stocked is better than over stock. Can always make more, eventually. If there is too much stock, not only is that lost money, at the very least capital is tied up, but the game itself looks like a loser. If a game sells out, it looks like a winner.

Kick starter solves this problem by making people buy the game a year or more in advance. The customers money gets tied up in that case, only the sold units are made and don't have to exactly warehouse anymore longer than it takes to ship it out. Kick starter has it's own problems but is still a popular means of selling/making games.

Strawman alert? I don't think anyone is saying that retailers should have heaps of stock. The actual issue is that Asmodee doesn't have the stock prepared to restock retailers in even remotely a speedy manner. And while obviously you don't want to put money into a significant overproduction that won't be sold any time soon (or ever), that's a health of your company issue, not a health of your game issue, and having just enough equals having slightly more than needed most of the time. It's fine to be conservative on your first print run as long as you have a second one lined up quickly thereafter, but after that you should have resupply coming in like a well-oiled machine - in general and especially in this particular business. It's a simple fact that FFG has transitioned to mostly making LCGs and Star Wars tabletop wargames, and yet they still treat all of their products like board games. And this goes a step further: One natural reason why you rarely see anything other than limited print runs go out of stock for long among any of the European tabletop companies of all sizes is that most of their stuff is made at home (mostly England, followed by Poland), including the vast majority of their plastic. Outsourcing minis production to China is quite boardgamey.

3 hours ago, twincast said:

Strawman alert? I don't think anyone is saying that retailers should have heaps of stock. The actual issue is that Asmodee doesn't have the stock prepared to restock retailers in even remotely a speedy manner. And while obviously you don't want to put money into a significant overproduction that won't be sold any time soon (or ever), that's a health of your company issue, not a health of your game issue, and having just enough equals having slightly more than needed most of the time. It's fine to be conservative on your first print run as long as you have a second one lined up quickly thereafter, but after that you should have resupply coming in like a well-oiled machine - in general and especially in this particular business. It's a simple fact that FFG has transitioned to mostly making LCGs and Star Wars tabletop wargames, and yet they still treat all of their products like board games. And this goes a step further: One natural reason why you rarely see anything other than limited print runs go out of stock for long among any of the European tabletop companies of all sizes is that most of their stuff is made at home (mostly England, followed by Poland), including the vast majority of their plastic. Outsourcing minis production to China is quite boardgamey.

And a big part of the problem. It's well known projects can jump the queue or even delay competition in those markets if the right $$$ is thrown to the right people.

Hi. Sorry to butt in to the economics debate, but I just got in to Legion after a few years of X-wing. Been a lot of fun painting models for the first time, and the few games of Legion I've played have been great. Really glad to see that both are still doing well and that they have a multi-year plan for both games.

I'm a huge supporter of xwing moving to a second edition. It fixed so many things, and created a sturdier and more dynamic game. A lot of those lessons clearly went in to the designing of Legion.

Supply may be an issue, but growing up I never thought I would be in to miniatures games, and I'm just glad both exist and that they introduced me to such an awesome style of gaming and community (all people met at xwing league nights have been amazing).

So here's to the next couple of years of hoping models are at the stores, painting minis, spending time with buds, and playing with Star Wars toys.

On 3/16/2020 at 8:51 AM, Mokoshkana said:

Alliance performs distribution in the States. You should rethink that earlier assertion that Asmodee owns everything but the factories...

No longer as of July 1. Asmodee has rolled out its own distribution in the States.

https://www.asmodeena.com/en/news/2020/3/17/asmodee-usa-direct-distribution/

Quote

Asmodee USA Distribution will begin selling direct to all retail channels starting July 1, 2020. Its current distribution agreement with Alliance Game Distributors expires on June 30, 2020. As Asmodee USA transitions to a full-service distributor for all channels, retailers can expect an expanded Sales team capable of supporting retailers with best-in-class service.

6 hours ago, kris40k said:

No longer as of July 1. Asmodee has rolled out its own distribution in the States.

https://www.asmodeena.com/en/news/2020/3/17/asmodee-usa-direct-distribution/

Yeah, that's great come July 1, but it's not July yet, is it?

9 hours ago, Mokoshkana said:

Yeah, that's great come July 1, but it's not July yet, is it?

Now you are just being pedantic. Asmodee spinning up distribution capabilities in the US was not a secret.

9 hours ago, kris40k said:

Now you are just being pedantic. Asmodee spinning up distribution capabilities in the US was not a secret.

The point is that you can hardly blame Asmodee for the stocking issues; they haven't assumed control yet!

4 minutes ago, ClassicalMoser said:

The point is that you can hardly blame Asmodee for the stocking issues; they haven't assumed control yet!

Yes, you can.

Asmodee owns distribution in the UK and Europe. You can blame them for the issues there.

As well, now that they are taking over control in the US and cutting out Alliance, you can expect it to what ... get better? They are doing a smashing job already.

Asmodee and their choice of manufacturing is the common factor, not their distributor.

Ultimately, they are responsible for their business choices and failures.

Yeah, you can't blame the distributor when they have no stock. FFG tries real hard to error on the side of under producing rather than over producing. Lack of product is the norm for them. These are niche games and you just have to except that is the way it is. Preorder what you want. Best you can do.

Look ffg doesn't have all the money in the world. Any time they get something produced they have to pay companies in China before it gets to the board game store and they get a return on investment. If they invest too much and say a shipping strike or global pandemic happens they could go under from not being able to pay their overhead or future projects could suffer. It's easy to say that they should be doing x, y and z but no of us have the full picture so it's purely conjecture.

Clearly, only the most extreme defenses and criticisms of Asmodee are correct.

On 3/14/2020 at 2:59 AM, buckero0 said:

Someone seriously mis-estimated the need for xwing players to repurchase ships. There's an excess of used ships and there is no real advantage other than optics to purchase previously released ships for x wing. They have admitted as such and basically cancelled and rebooted the x wing game production. They are only going to release new ships from now on(which is what they should have done) so no surprise that x wing is flagging in sales

sounds about right. lets see where they go with this.

34 minutes ago, zwara81 said:

sounds about right. lets see where they go with this.

Well supposedly there's new CW ships coming out. And by the end of the year there's going to be all things Mandalorian (xwing, legion, outer rim, etc)

2 hours ago, buckero0 said:

Well supposedly there's new CW ships coming out. And by the end of the year there's going to be all things Mandalorian (xwing, legion, outer rim, etc)

I don't think they can even do any new stuff for Outer Rim, can they?

2 hours ago, twincast said:

I don't think they can even do any new stuff for Outer Rim, can they?

I could see them doing a Mandalorian themed expansion with the razor crest, Din Djarin, Cara Dune ect.

6 hours ago, twincast said:

I don't think they can even do any new stuff for Outer Rim, can they?

Why would you think this?

My store still hasn't gotten ths B2 Battle Droids that have been on preorder with us for over 3 months.

only got a third of the order of the Phase 2 Clones, and they were two weeks late....

and only one store in town got the new tank....... out of four stores that carry the game heavily, and they only got two of them from an order of 10.....

and now everything is cut off for who knows how long.

guess I'll throw this game into the never getting more stuff pile like the rest of FFG's Star wars lines