Thread by @wendoverpro

Thanks for all the support on this! Really encouraged by demand so far.
If you're interested, I'll do a little logistics thread to explain why it takes so long to get stock, why international shipping rates are so high, and what we're doing to try to solve both problems...

https://twitter.com/wendoverpro/status/1859288187706728718

To get to the point where we can ship it out to you, the game first needs to be produced in Asia which takes about a month. Then it has to be shipped by sea to the US, which takes another month. Then it has to be processed at the warehouse, which takes another week or two.

So we did the first order with the manufacturer about a month ago, but on that we had to be a bit conservative as to not pay for a ton of stock that we might not sell (turns out more of y'all wanted this than we ever anticipated.)

To get this in the hands of some of y'all by the holidays, we were able to convince the manufacturer to get 500 done early and paid extra to ship them to the warehouse by air. Those sold out in 27 mins, and the rest aren't going to arrive at the warehouse until early-January.

We're already more than halfway sold out of the early-January stock, but we're already in contact with the manufacturer to try to up that initial order to get even more in stock by early-January, rather than having to wait even longer.

Another hurdle is international shipping rates--we hear you, they're wayyyyy more than ideal. Part of this is due to the fact that the Nebula store has you pre-pay customs duties, rather than pay them on arrival which you would in some other circumstances. But not all of it...

Even excluding customs fees, shipping costs are high. Part of the way that major online retailers solve this is by having warehouses all around the world. Also, larger retailers are often able to set up more complex shipping systems that lower costs through economies of scale.

With the time we had to get this ready for launch by the season, we were unable to set up a better distribution system for outside the US. But thanks to the high demand on this, we're hopeful we can and we're already exploring how to set up a European distributor. Scale helps.

So that's to say, if you want this but the shipping cost is just too high to justify, we hope we'll be able to bring it down through time. No guarantees, but we want to lower it as much as you want us to (after all, the lower the shipping cost, the higher the sales!)

Really appreciate everyone's understanding about the challenges of doing this at a small scale. We really wanted to keep this in-house at the start so we could make the best game possible, but that does make distribution a bit more challenging!