Ghool wrote:

Greenfield wrote:

 Ghool wrote:
That Saudi Asmodee deal fell through, and now it is saddled with billions in debt.
I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t get downsized and sold off in a few years.

You're confusing Asmodee and the parent company Embracer. Embracer purchased Asmodee a few years ago, then ran into difficulty when the Saudi investment feel through. They just spun Asmodee off as an independent company on the Swedish stock market. Asmodee took a share of the parent company's debt with it as part of the spin-off but it's effectively an independent public company again, solely concerned with tabletop games.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/EMBRACER-GROUP-AB-61747448/news/Asmodee-starts-trading-today-on-Nasdaq-Stockholm-after-spin-off-from-Embracer-48988104/

And they were saddled with Embracers debt of billions. No?

 warboss wrote:
I hope this doesn't bring a new wave* of crowdfunding defaults. Cmon was pretty much the come back kid story with an almost perfect record so far.

*if you know then you know and I see some fellow forum old farts who probably do.

 ced1106 wrote:
Haven't been paying attention, but BoardGameGeek should have the latest on Asmodee and investors. Vaguely recall that the investors were from Saudi Arabia and/or Asmodee was seeking to sell of its gaming investments.

I regularly see CMON at retail, and it has partnered with SPIN games, whoever they are. IMO, That's better than some companies that only use KS for their expensive high-end games.

MD3 didn't have enough mini's for me, and I haven't been interested in their KS since White Death. Bought some Marvel United and Marvel Zombicide retail, though.

 NAVARRO wrote:

 warboss wrote:
I hope this doesn't bring a new wave* of crowdfunding defaults. Cmon was pretty much the come back kid story with an almost perfect record so far.

*if you know then you know and I see some fellow forum old farts who probably do.

Surprised people still remember new wave.

ArminTamzarian wrote:

 ced1106 wrote:
Haven't been paying attention, but BoardGameGeek should have the latest on Asmodee and investors. Vaguely recall that the investors were from Saudi Arabia and/or Asmodee was seeking to sell of its gaming investments.

I regularly see CMON at retail, and it has partnered with SPIN games, whoever they are. IMO, That's better than some companies that only use KS for their expensive high-end games.

MD3 didn't have enough mini's for me, and I haven't been interested in their KS since White Death. Bought some Marvel United and Marvel Zombicide retail, though.

Yeah the gaming community doesn't seem to be very aware of Spinmaster. They are actually a much larger company than CMON, valued around $3 billion. They are a toy company that makes childrens toys for big box stores like Walmart from really big brands like Batman and Paw Patrol. It seems like they have a license to make Marvel and DC games and are outsourcing those to CMON as like a tiny niche developer. For that reason, I would think the DC/Marvel projects might be a little safer. It's funny gamer people are always like "whats a Spinmaster?" but I'm pretty sure they have more reach than CMON.

 NAVARRO wrote:

 warboss wrote:
I hope this doesn't bring a new wave* of crowdfunding defaults. Cmon was pretty much the come back kid story with an almost perfect record so far.

*if you know then you know and I see some fellow forum old farts who probably do.

Surprised people still remember new wave.

 warboss wrote:
Look on the bright side... At least you likely got the 40% off discount with that huge sale they had right before they folded and then didn't deliver on due to bankruptcy. If you ever get anything, it'll be at great discount if you don't consider inflation!

I just barely missed out on doing a big order but couldn't justify another one with my student loans when every time I opened my closet I saw 2000pts of unopened plastic nids staring back at me since their previous sale.

 Theophony wrote:

Oh well, I enjoyed ASOIAF and Zombicide plus a few others.

Just confirmed via their pending kickstarters merchants cove, Coloma, sixth realm etx

Dear backers,

We have devastating news to share with you about this project and the future of Final Frontier Games.

Due to the situation in the world, the tight cash flow that we’ve operated under in the past period and most importantly because of debtors from which we cannot collect money, we are forced to close down operations and thus unable to fulfill this campaign at this stage.

What led to this? CMON, who has placed a fairly large order for a Chinese localization of Merchants Cove, has not paid us and on top of that stopped replying to our emails and cut off all communication with us. We have no idea what is happening, we can only assume that the tariffs that the US government imposed on Chinese imports is having a detrimental effect.

We waited until the last day to receive the money from them, when it was possible to deliver this campaign with their funds. That day has officially passed. The fact that they haven’t replied to multiple emails sent to multiple people including to one of the owners of the company, tells us that we won’t be seeing that money any time soon. While this amount may be “peanuts” for them, it has created a cascading domino effect on us.

Because we can’t deliver this game to you, we cannot in good conscience launch our next game which was planned for next week – knowing where this is headed. Since that campaign is out of the question, the dominoes have started to fall.

We can no longer sustain keeping our employees. Tragically, we are forced to lay them off, after so many years working together. An amazing group of people with which became extremely close friends.

Fulfillment centers, who have been pretty understanding of the situation, started sending invoices for the stock we have with them. They’ll start selling the non-kickstarter stock we have with them in order to cover their expenses.

The bank has started knocking on our doors to collect the loan that we took last year.

In very short order, the little cash reserves that we had and the capital in stock in the warehouses, started leaking without any immediate income because the bank is forced to collect, so even in the extremely unlikely event that they do decide to pay tomorrow, we are afraid it might be too late.

We cannot understate the gravity of the situation and the suddenness of the fall of the company. We are emotionally devastated, sad, we are hurting, we are angry and there is a big hole in our hearts that will take a long time to overcome, if ever. Just recently we were tweaking ads for our next campaign, talking with reviewers, preparing for production on our other games, developing our future projects and entering a distribution partnership with QML, something that we had lacked for 4 years… hoping that the payment will come through.

All our dreams and hopes vanished. 10 families that put food on the table through Final Frontier Games that had stable, creative and good paying jobs are now faced with extreme uncertainty with no financial stability. We are truly living in the darkest timeline.

While CMON was not the only party to blame for this unraveling it was the final nail.

We are truly sorry that we won’t be able to make good on the promise we made with you.

We will now go more in detail to what led to this situation. The original Merchants Cove campaign was delivered in the height of the pandemic. If you were backing projects back then, you remember the talk of how freight costs have risen overnight and some publishers were forced to ask for more money from backers. We decided back then to eat those costs in order to maintain your goodwill with us because we were building a lifetime relationship with you, and for that, you needed to trust us with our projects.

That extra cost has eaten all our profits that we had and then some. The freight costs that we planned were around $27.000. We had 9 containers and the price per container back then was around $3.000 dollars. By the time Merchants Cove was loaded into boats the bill we received was around $22.000 per container. Plus the last mile delivery prices spiked, meaning a planned bill of around $30k went to $250.000. We also received an order from distributors for Merchants Cove who by the time the game was produced they canceled part of their order because of the pandemic. So that $250.000 unplanned expenses quickly went north of $350.000.

That completely erased our profits, we had to dip into funds from our other projects hoping that we would recover the losses quickly.

From that moment on, while we have hundreds of thousands in stock, we had very tight cash flow reserves, were a project or two behind, but we managed to make it work for the past 5 years, delivering games and starting to build the groundwork for a full recovery of the company.

Moving forward to this campaign, Merchants Cove: Master Craft.

While we had planned accordingly for the production of the game, numerous unexpected things happened especially with the Big Box.

As you remember, tweaking the Big Box took an extremely long time. We cannot blame Game Trayz for this, they had their own issues to deal with, but the fact was that just the development of the Big Box added at least half a year to the timeline of this project, and when one projects stalls, every other projects stall, while bills are coming in and must be paid. Also we had to drastically increase the size of the Big Box which increased our production, freight and shipping costs.

Just before we started production of this project, Pegasus and TCG factory decided not to proceed with the localization of the game even though we promised German and Spanish versions of the game to you during this campaign. We cannot blame them for this, the project took too long to complete and they have to set release schedules. If a game is delayed they need to quickly fill that calendar with other projects.

And again, we were forced to make a decision. Do we continue building trust with you or share the bad news to our German and Spanish backers that they won’t be getting the games in their respective languages, but in English.

Our guiding star was that backers come first, even in situations above the company. Because there is no company without backers.

So we made the decision to do the localization version ourselves and provide our German and Spanish backers the version that they were promised to receive.

That meant, hiring and paying translators, hiring and paying editors, hiring and paying graphic designers to implement the changes. That also meant paying more to the factory for these copies compared to English ones, due to the small quantity and due to the setup costs that the factory incurs due to printing a different language game. So instead of tens of thousands in profits from these deals, we were tens of thousands in the negative because of this, plus a substantial delay because of the time needed to scramble and find people to do the translations.

Even with all these issues, we managed to pull through. We took a bank loan, we worked with the localization partners that stayed with us, production was complete and the games were starting to be loaded on boats.

For our other outstanding projects, the factory gave us a very long repayment period, basically producing those 2 projects at their expense and we repay the costs everytime the company incurs profits until the balance is settled. With a plan in place for production of those games, and the profits from the excess copies of Merchants Cove by selling it to distributors as well as the localization deals that we put in place for Coloma and The Sixth Realm, there would have been enough funds to deliver those 2 projects also. The restructuring of the company was put in motion not just to deliver what was promised to all of you, but to speed up the delivery time of our projects and focus on long term growth. We brought more work in-house, we signed 6 amazing games for the next 3 years, we were even in on-going discussions with investors who wanted to invest in the plan that we set in motion. We spent the whole of 2024 negotiating and working on the restructuring.

All of these plans came crushing when we realised that we won’t be able to collect the money we are owed. With localization partners, the terms are almost always the following. They pay 50% of the invoice before we start production, and 50% once production is complete.

We didn’t receive a cent from CMON. They requested a change of terms midpoint where the invoice will be paid in full before pickup. We agreed. This is CMON, we were so proud that we would be working with one of the giants in the industry. Because again, we were building trust and we saw them as a huge long term partner that will help in our growth. Our hands have been tied, because technically there is no timeline when they can pick up the games. They can pick up the games in 2 years from now and there’s nothing we can do about it. On the contrary we will probably be hit with storage fees for their games. The fact remains that they haven’t even bothered replying to our emails as of recently.

What’s next? We don’t know. We are devastated, emotionally, physically, mentally. We are hurting. We are sorry. This trade war, which affected us indirectly, is having real life consequences. We can assume that is why they are not picking up the games and not paying. But, we felt that we deserved a reply to our emails especially after we explained what would happen.

Every day that this lasts is hurting people you know. We may be the first casualties of this trade war, but if this lasts we won’t be the last.

We can’t ask extra money from you in order for this project to be delivered, because we are not sure your money will be safe, especially in the event we are forced to file for bankruptcy. We have accounts to settle with our warehouses, we have a huge loan that the bank will try to collect, we are in no position to take money from you even if you wanted to.

We simply don’t know. We are living our worst nightmare and we are in no position to think straight at this moment.

We feel devastated.

We will ask you for some time to pick up the pieces, pick up ourselves and to wrestle emotionally with what just happened.

We are in absolutely no position to make any promises. We will work on finding partners that might be interested in some of our IPs, or to buy out the whole company and that way work on solutions for you receiving the games from our outstanding projects, but this will take time.

We know that you are angry, we know that you are hurt, we know that your first instinct may be to lash out at us in the comments section, messages, emails. And you will have every right, but we ask that before you do, remember that there are human beings on the other side of the screen that will be reading this, gamers like you that did their best and that are emotionally and financially devastated. We lost everything we built in the past ten years. Our company, which was a labor of love, our employees, our jobs and what probably hurts the most, we lost you.

Words cannot express how sorry we feel for this.

We hope that we will find some kind of a solution for you to receive your rewards.

When and if there's news to share with you, we will do so.

Good Afternoon. We wanted to give you a quick update on the Final Frontier situation as posted on Kickstarter today.
Frankly, this has come as something of a surprise to us as well!
As you might expect, calls are now being made to establish the facts and we'll have discussions on where things will go from here. Unfortunately as it stands the simple answer is that we don't have any clear answers for you at the moment,
We do have the stock onsite and questions will be asked if you can send us the money directly to ship your copy, regrettably we do not have authorisation or the means to do so this at this time.
I will add we would hope to have more information in the next couple of weeks, but that's by no means guaranteed. When we have an update to share, we will update backers individually using our Project Management Software and via Facebook. {quote]Good Afternoon. We wanted to give you a quick update on the Final Frontier situation as posted on Kickstarter today.
Frankly, this has come as something of a surprise to us as well!
As you might expect, calls are now being made to establish the facts and we'll have discussions on where things will go from here. Unfortunately as it stands the simple answer is that we don't have any clear answers for you at the moment,
We do have the stock onsite and questions will be asked if you can send us the money directly to ship your copy, regrettably we do not have authorisation or the means to do so this at this time.
I will add we would hope to have more information in the next couple of weeks, but that's by no means guaranteed. When we have an update to share, we will update backers individually using our Project Management Software and via Facebook.

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:

while it could just be a big firm behaving badly towards a small one, CMON not paying for something that isn't intended for the USA (so no tarrif worries on this stock) suggests they may not have the funds to so so

Thank you for contacting us. If you would like to know the facts, we placed a ~$65,000 order with Final Frontier in March 2023 for a translated version of Merchant’s Cove. After repeated delays from their side, production was only completed in April 2025. Per our agreement, payment was due upon completion and before pickup.

We were still reviewing final files, of which some components were incorrectly printed in English, and were actively in communication when they said they would close their company.

To be clear, we never canceled or refused payment, and no copies were delivered to us. While the situation is unfortunate, we do not believe their claim accurately reflects the cause of the Merchant’s Cove Kickstarter fulfilment issues.

Hope this clarifies

An Update on Our Internal Teams and Company Focus
April 24, 2025
Our CMON community means a lot to us, so we felt it was important to share with you some difficult decisions at our company today. Given global conditions, and most notably the situation with tariffs, CMON has decided to focus on our current commitments to our customers and partners, and prioritize the timely delivery of existing projects. So effective immediately, we will be pausing all future game development and new crowdfunding campaigns until trade conditions have stabilized.

Unfortunately, this involves extremely difficult staffing decisions, affecting all of our creative teams with reductions. We did not make this choice lightly, and our thoughts are with everyone impacted. We are incredibly grateful for their roles in our success over the years, and these talented people will be missed both professionally and personally.

The industry continues to rapidly evolve, and unpredictable situations like the recent tariffs, or COVID just a few years ago, present challenges for everyone in board games. With that said, it is our responsibility to take these difficult measures to ensure that we can keep current projects on track and deliver them in a timely manner. We will of course resume new development as soon as possible.

Please rest assured that these decisions will help ensure that we keep our commitments to our backers, partners, and community.