Hey everyone,

Marcin here, CEO of Gamefound. First of all, let’s define the current situation – the US president just yesterday announced additional tariffs on China. In total, tariffs on goods produced in China will be 54%. It is worth noting that the majority of board games / tabletop products in the world are manufactured in China.

These tariffs are applied to the production cost, not the cost of the final goods. But even so, depending on margins, they can mean roughly 10-20% increased costs in the final price.

Additionally, it is important to note that over the past month, US trade policy has been very chaotic and constantly changing. We are definitely not going into politics – but in the past 2 months, tariffs on China changed from 10%, to 20%, to now – 54%.

We have no idea if it will stay at that level, go higher or lower, or what will happen in the next 2 weeks. Unfortunately, this situation creates EXTREME disruption to all businesses and creators on Gamefound as well.

While there is a very limited amount of action we can take as a platform – we want to clearly communicate how we plan to assist creators and backers.

All of these features are currently planned / work in progress:

So that creators will be able to include tariffs in new campaign prices. This will mean that, as a creator, you will be able to have a single SKU but multiple different prices for different countries.

This should make life easier for manufacturing and preparing campaigns.

If the creator is in a position to ask backers to cover their portion of the new tariffs, we want to make sure that the process will be easier for both the creator and the backer.

We want to create a new email flow and tools that will make the whole process more transparent.

We will also work on better tools for managing refunds and making it easier for backers and creators to communicate in that regard.

We would also like to talk to industry experts and create a general document outlining a knowledge base or best practices for smaller and larger creators.

But – we would also love to hear your suggestions here in the comments – perhaps there are some good ideas that we, as a platform, could implement to make the best out of this situation and help both backers and creators.

We also want to strongly highlight that the situation is developing, and we really do not have a clear picture yet, as the details are scarce. Tariffs might get revoked, there might be a special exemption made for toys / board games, etc.

But we wanted to communicate our plans and ask for your ideas. We will closely monitor the situation and remain agile in our development plans.

This will definitely be a hard situation to navigate for many creators, but we will try to help as much as we can.

Best regards,

Marcin Świerkot

CEO of Gamefound