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Schwickey
9
Oct 27, 2016
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aaaaaabi
19
Oct 27, 2016
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SchwickeySame thing seems to be happening on the Terraforming Mars drop... sold out everywhere and now they are trying to find copies: https://www.massdrop.com/buy/terraforming-mars-pre-order/talk
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Seriously, Jamey is a good dude who runs a small business in a niche market based in no small part on reputation. Bulk Deal Resellers may be able to pull the whole "We don't need the manufacturer/publisher's blessing" routine when it comes to knives, pens, and blockbuster, million-unit cornerstones like MtG, but designer tabletop is small enough that it is absolutely the publisher who calls the shots on in-demand goods. Scythe had around 17,000 backers, so Jamey probably printed something like 20-25,000 copies. (I recall him writing that the margin on Scythe was smaller than normal due to the increased component quality so he did a smaller initial KS fulfillment + retail run.) That left maybe 8,000 copies of Scythe for retail distribution.
For the Distributor to mislead MassDrop that they would receive enough to fulfill their Drop until this late in the game is absurd; Jamey is one of the best communicators in the business and I can't imagine a single Distributor was in any way caught unawares that they were going to come in short on fulfillment. Which means that either MassDrop didn't back down during the initial kerfuffle of their own accord because they thought they had a reliable source (and didn't bother to do due diligence with the Distributor), or the Distributor sent MassDrop whatever was left at the end of retail fulfillment LIKE ALWAYS.
Because that's how Distribution works. Keep the reliable orders from retailers coming in by reliably and predictably filling multi-SKU orders to keep them happy, then clear the racks by selling the leftovers to Bulk Purchase sites. Imagine if word got around that a particular Distributor helped MassDrop fulfilled 461 preorders for 'The Second Coming of The New Hotness' and 230 stores that ordered two copies from that Distributor only received one (or worse)? That Distributor would see a huge falloff in orders as Retailers dropped them like a bad habit for another outfit.
Tabletop as a whole just this past year turned a $billion per annum. Mass market chicanery like MassDrop tried to pull here isn't going to work yet (if ever). They're fools if they think they'll EVER fill a SMG Drop now that Jamey has had this experience. Distributors won't risk having a big multi-SKU order taken elsewhere because they lost a contract with SMG over MassDrop.