We’ve got good news and bad news.

We always do the bad news first…

The Bad News:

There were delays with the printer that were out of both our and their control. They’ve done right by us and recovered from those delays as fast as possible. Our original production complete date was to be Early October. Thanks to those delays, our new production complete date is Mid-November.

To make up for that delay, we made a plan a few weeks ago to air freight everything directly to our fulfillment partner and start shipping at the end of November. Due to the small size and weight of the game, we estimated that it would’ve only cost us a bit more than we planned to spend. We’d be slightly over budget, but it seemed well worth hitting our delivery window. That would’ve meant that the November Shipping tiers would be 100% on time and the January Shipping tiers would be EARLY.

However, thanks to the current volatility of air freight and how close we are to the holiday season, the air freight price came in 4 to 5 times our original plan. That means the $0.40 per game that we originally budgeted would now be almost $2 per game. Considering the fact that we’re only charging $9 for the game with free shipping to US addresses and covering VAT for EU backers, we just can’t justify spending the money in that way. We HATE to not ship in November. But the price to making that date is that this project will go from just about break-even to being a large loss for a company our size.

We set out to bring you a solid game at a very good price, and we’re okay just barely breaking even on the project. We hope that you’ll meet us halfway and tolerate receiving your rewards a little bit late. Thank you, as always, for your support. We really couldn’t do any of this without you.

The Good News:

We’re planning to ship in January, so it’s only a 30-45 day delay from our original schedule. Also, the final Production sample arrived TODAY!

Here it is:

Other News:

• We’re going to push back our next project a bit to be sure we’ve fully delivered Inoka first. But if you’re interested in seeing what’s coming next, check out http://archravelry.com.
• Production on the art book is moving along. As soon as we have some visual samples to share, we’ll do that as well.

That’s it for this update.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please feel free to reach out.

Thanks!

– Team XYZ Game Labs