While I don't have any insider news, I think I recognize the pattern, as it happens to be the same one we observed with computer game companies: While of course the pandemic overall was a bad thing, and also did a lot of economic harm, it also was an absolute windfall for a few industries, especially those that provided entertainment for people in lockdown. Game companies, both digital and analog, made more money than ever before. And then the pandemic ended. But many of those companies hadn't just put away the extra money away for a rainy day; instead they had invested it to grow their companies, as if those extra earnings were just the beginning of a a new normal. Regression to the mean can be a bitch.

I'm not saying that every game company acted that way, but enough did to create a trend. The pandemic-induced extra demand dissipated, the companies that had counted on it lasting are now in difficult financial position. The tariff announcements and evolving trade war just made it clear to some people that they were already in an untenable position, and had to change things.

Having said that, the announcement of CMON to stop crowdfunding new games makes sense to me. I was reading the risk section of some recent new crowdfunding projects, and many of them said that they believed that the tariffs would go away soon, and people shouldn't worry for a new project that will take a while to produce and deliver. That smelled of both naivety and desperation to me. I am not currently backing any crowdfunding board game projects that don't have a plan to deal with the tariffs if they don't miraculously disappear. Making problems go away by ignoring them rarely works, even if Trump has a history of frequently changing his mind.

Shipping traffic departures from China to the US have already plunged. If tariffs would end tomorrow, there would still be some disruption, because there would be fewer arrivals for a few weeks, followed by a spike of goods sent when the tariffs drop. Right now, China and the US can't even agree on the basic fact of whether they are negotiating or not, China says no negotiations are ongoing. To me that doesn't sound like the trade war ending soon. On May 2 the end of the "de minimis" exception goes into effect, which means that 145% tariffs would be imposed on millions of Temu and Shein parcels every day. Theoretically. Practically the US doesn't have the manpower, so either Temu and Shein stop sending parcels, or those parcels will be stopped at customs for an unknown amount of time. Sometimes in May you will see news reports of empty shelves, as some inventories will run low.

Right now, nobody knows how long the trade war with China will last. But the longer it lasts, the more serious the consequences will be, even if it gets resolved eventually. Detailed data from China are difficult to get, but there is obviously a limited time where you can keep producing and just warehouse the produced goods while waiting for an end of tariffs. Even the end of the trade war is likely to be a big mess, as restarting shipping and trying to catch up on lost time will be somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible.

You might think that Christmas toys are produced by elves in workshops at the North Pole. But in reality, 80% of toys sold in the US are made in China. And due to the slowness of shipping and distribution, the Christmas toys are produced in summer. Which means that if by summer the trade war isn't over yet, the Grinch will steal Christmas, and toys will be expensive and in short supply in America. China manufactures and exports over 70% of the world's toys, it isn't as if they could easily be replaced by production from elsewhere.