Asmodee’s awful new replacement parts policy

In other news, FFG's first employee is being forced out of the company, 24 years after Christian Petersen hired him. He is gone by the end of this month.

Hell yeah

Combining some thoughts from previous posters: it does look a lot like a spreadsheet somewhere indicated that the whole customer service issue was easy to outsource to the retail end, i.e. local game stores.
This doesn't make sense from a basic business decency / common sense point of view, but I assure you neither was part of that decision.

It seems as though most posters here have misread Asmodee's policy.

• If you bought the game at a big box store -- return it and exchange it for another.
• If you bought the game at a hobby store -- show the receipt to the store, they'll request a replacement. When it arrives, exchange your defective copy for the replacement. (i.e., there's no mention of shipping your game to Asmodee.)

There are similar procedures for purchasing via websites, second-hand, etc.

To be honest it all sounds pretty reasonable. (Albeit less user-friendly than the previous "just ask us for a part and we'll send it to you" policy.)

I agree with the earlier comments, as my first impression was that, in line with other decisions, this is just a short-term revenue maximization, as there's no intent to maintain let alone build anything here, just sell it off. It was also confirmed earlier this week that all the RPGs are gone, too, though the products in the pipeline are supposedly still coming out.

I just want to take a moment to contrast this with ye olde days, as some already did. I remember having a nice conversation with Thaadd about Tannhauser boards and the odd shapes and sizes of the French boards/boxes the previous owner of the IP had used, and then she sent me another board that (not her fault by any means) had the same misfold as the original. Although far less personal, FFG sent me a complete Eldritch Horror cardboard replacement for a couple of missing/damaged tokens, including one I'd confessed to having thrown away myself.

Edit: Despite knowing I should be careful, I still managed to misspell Thaadd's name.

Shellhead wrote: In other news, FFG's first employee is being forced out of the company, 24 years after Christian Petersen hired him. He is gone by the end of this month.

That totally sucks.

ubarose wrote: This may be an unpopular opinion, but I have always felt the liberal replacement parts policy of most board game publishers was just a band-aid for shitty quality control. The first time Asmodee has a thousand games returned because they all have the same problem, they will adjust their policy.

Agreed -- maybe they are actually going to improve QC.

At some point, I would think that you would get big enough and have so many games, that it would become infeasible to keep all the parts to all the games. Probably has to be some break point where it is just cheaper to inventory the games and not store, sort, find, and ship a bazillion pieces.

I've never asked for a replacement piece for a game....I know any other areas, like LEGO, you have to have proof of purchase to get replacement pieces. Seems odd that for years, you could just email up people and ask for pieces for something that you may or may not have purchased new (I had an acquaintance who would request replacement pieces for games he bought secondhand, for instance)

It's only "infeasible" if you try to centralize everything.

They'll just cannibalize extra copies of the game that they'll need to keep in reserve. There's no central inventory of individual parts in bins.

I think Asmodee (i.e., each subsidiary individually) is going to figure out that this sucks in short order. Games won't be able to completely sell out without stopping their whole-game replacement strategy, and presumably they'll have a pile of incomplete games that were returned to them. Anyone with half a brain will offer to just send one extra red cube from one of the returned games at that point. As announced the new version sounds great for the bottom line but really isn't.

I suppose they could recombine returned copies and reshrink them, sell them as new . . .

I don't think current management is particularly interested in anything about the actual industry they own assets in, tbh.

I think the true reason behind this policy is all around counterfeit games. Imagine you buy a game off eBay, only to find it missing stuff. You then e-mail Asmodee for your replacement stuff for a game they literally did not produce. Instead, if you have to go to the person that sold it to you and request the parts/replacement game through them, if they're not legitimate then it stops there. If they are legit but somehow got a bogus copy, well then Asmodee figures out where it came from and can address it.

I agree this is not a good policy for the consumer, per say, but I don't think this is meant as an F.U. to the FLGS. I still agree the underestimate what a burden they are putting on their supply chain rather then putting an errant miniature in an envelope and sending it out.