Project Update: Stock in EU/UK Retail Stores
Hi, everyone. This update concerns UK/EU backers, so please disregard if you are outside of those regions.
Now that our team is back home and recovered from Gen Con, we are catching up on recent activity in the Community Tab of this campaign. While it’s already time for the latest monthly update, as promised, it has also been brought to our attention that there are several game stores across Europe that are selling the retail edition of Nature Incarnate. Our team looked into this situation and want to provide more insight.
We confirmed that in early July, we shipped retail copies of Nature Incarnate to some of our UK/EU distributors, who have since shipped them to their retailer customers. These shipments were scheduled in an effort to synchronize the expansion’s release date internationally. Shortly after these shipments left the warehouse, we discovered the issue with VAT hadn’t been resolved, but the ship had quite literally sailed.
You may be questioning how we were able to ship games to our UK/EU distributors, but not to backers. Simply put, because we ship games to a freight forwarder within the USA, we do not need a VAT number for those freight shipments. The distributor is forwarded the shipment and takes control of the inventory as the responsible importer. It isn’t possible for us to do that with the campaign fulfillment, since we would still be the responsible importer. The fulfillment company does not own the product, they are simply providing a service for us to ship out the games.
Since the retail version is already in distributor warehouses and on retailer shelves in the UK/EU, we are not able to hold sales on this product. In a previous update, we stated that we were relaying a postponed release date to UK/EU retailers, but that was said under the impression that games weren’t in-stock yet. This miscommunication is costing us now, but we cannot force our partners to hold products that they already paid for and are selling while our fulfillment timeline is still being resolved.
We understand this isn’t ideal and that some of you have already requested refunds so that you can purchase the retail edition instead. If you want to pursue getting Nature Incarnate from an alternate source and would like a full or partial refund from this campaign, don’t hesitate to email us at [email protected]. The window to request these refunds will not close until we are preparing for UK/EU fulfillment, which we’ll state explicitly once we have received work from the government entities that can assign us the VAT information we need and the products are in transit.
As for the timeline, it remains unchanged. We are still waiting for the government to approve all the documentation we submitted last month. Unfortunately there is no way for us to speed up this process, but we will continue updating you on a regular basis. As soon as we know anything, we will share it with you here.
We appreciate your continued patience and support as we do everything we can to fulfill this campaign to all of our backers around the world.
If you have any further questions about UK/EU fulfillment, please leave a comment here or email [email protected]. We’ll do our best to provide an answer as quickly as possible!
~FRG/GTG team
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