Made In USA
For everyone waiting on Eat Electric Death! our fearless leader recently posted an update in the forums on its status, which goes as follows:
We are getting very close now. We have had some problems with costs, with proofs, with the box, with suppliers . We are working to resolve. It is going much slower than we ever anticipated and I apologize for the delays. As soon as I have a semi-firm date I will post it here, along with a press release. This should happen this month, hopefully sooner than later.
We are very careful with our board games. Unlike computer games, patches aren’t an option.
This being only our second board game, and with the quality we had with Lock ‘N Load, we are being careful to get the quality we want at a cost that makes the developer money and is reasonable for the consumer. Unfortunately, we have had supplier issues throughout and we have hesitated taking this to China or Hong Kong for control reasons.
Please be patient we are making progress.
So yes, unfortunately it has been delayed longer than we’d like, but on the upside we’re trying to keep the game’s manufacturing in the US. I know there are a lot of gamers out there who are getting fed up with game production moving to China, especially when you end up with issues like Tide Of Iron’s warped boards (corrected before release, but how much money did Fantasy Flight Games lose on having to do that? And oh, they got burned again with the starters for Mutant Chronicles, having to redo those too…) or the chemical stench of Z-Man’s Duel In The Dark. And then outside of game production you have Chinese toys potentially poisoning children, Chinese pet food killing pets, and even Chinese made blood thinner killing eighty-one individuals around the globe.
While I don’t know if we can promise to keep future manufacturing inside the country, I know we’ll do our best to do so.
Hi,
Replace all occurances of “China” with “Japan”, subtract 40 years from every date and everything you wrote is applicable again.
The point I want to make is that China is at the same stage Japan was in the early sixties :producer of cheap crap. Prediction : they’ll be forced by market forces to upgrade the quality with as a net result that by 2050 China will be producing high quality products … at about the same price as it can be made in the US. As economy is not a zero-sum game, I fail to see a problem in that.
Greetz,
Eddy Sterckx
Comment by Eddy Sterckx — 5/8/2008 @ 4:01 am
I don’t recall a rash of deaths based on Japanese products, ever, though. China isn’t producing cheap crap per se, but rather they have absolutely no quality control, along with all the problems a massive Communist bureaucracy brings. Plus, there is always the question of whether some of this is deliberate as part of a shadow war.
Comment by Scott — 5/8/2008 @ 7:41 pm
China will make strides, but it’s worth pointing out (says the guy working on a WWII Pacific game, can you tell what’s on my mind these days?) that the period when Japanese goods were “cheap crap” came after Japanese industry (and many of it’s skilled craftsmen) had been bombed flat by Curtis LeMay et al.
Prior to WWII, Japan was able to build some very good hardware. At the start of the war, they had the best carrier-based fighter (perhaps “best fighter” period) in the world, the best destroyers, best torpedoes, possibly the best heavy cruisers (thanks perhaps to a not-so-strict adherence to the limitations treaties…) and an excellent bomber fleet. Not to mention some pretty innovative submarine designs. They had problems with efficient production, and the quality wasn’t uniform (Japanese tanks were pretty bad, for example), but Allied pilots who saw a Zero in 1941 probably didn’t call it “cheap crap” (the word “crap” may have come to the pilot’s mind, but in a slightly different context…).
None of which is to say China won’t learn to produce quality products. Just that Japan maybe had a bigger head start (interrupted by a minor setback between in the 1940’s) that we usually think.
Comment by John Hawkins — 5/9/2008 @ 4:17 pm