Dead Space 3

[ingmar1988]

Some companies that send a lot of orders international mark down value and send as gift.

[Treehouse_Ryan]

Originally Posted by Biggav4000

I agree with Mortal on this my koa was damaged too,will you be keeping a few tins back for replacements in case any are damaged overseas or in the US ?

Originally Posted by LowlyAssassin

i`d assume either
they have a small 1 -2% excess of the stated quantity to cover breakages
OR
they would recall damagaed ones and replace the broken parts for undamaged parts
OR
they would hold 1?2% back in order to cover DOA`s and then after a month release these for sale either straight sales or to a waiting list if they sell out

Yes, the KoA editions were not as protected as the should have been, which is why extra effort was taken this time to make sure that didn't happen.

Our policy for replacements on limited items is to not sell as many as we made. We generally don't produce more than the stated number of something. For nearly every limited item, we produce exactly as many as the edition size and then hold back as many as we think will be necessary to use as replacements. Once everyone seems to be sorted out, we'll quietly sell whatever leftovers we have, or have them sent to the office for giveaways, etc.

For this CE, we produced exactly 5,000 and will use a percentage of them as potential replacements or open them up for parts in the unlikely event that something has gone wrong with just one item. The exception to this is the postcards. Turns out you can't get just 5,000 postcards printed, so we ordered more than that and will put them on the store separately sometime. I promise this is the only item in the whole collection that has a larger run, and nothing else will be available separately.

Originally Posted by CrixDoomsday

Guys i first time ordering from them. Do u know if there will be any custom fees? Packtage will have any information for customs? i dont want to pay any aditoonal cost... never had to - yet. But if i have to pay 25% then just kill me already

Originally Posted by ingmar1988

Some companies that send a lot of orders international mark down value and send as gift.

Canadian orders will not have to pay duties because we were able to work it out in the shipping method.

European orders will owe duties, and we have a proper customs letter.

I may or may not have done the gift thing for the small-time orders I used to pack up and ship out myself at a previous job, but we would get in a ton of trouble if we did it at this scale. Also, since we have a warehouse and tax-presence in the UK now, anything not completely above board would sink us....

Sorry for the additional costs, but we don't have a lot of options.

[adam1289]

Surprised that this still hasn't sold out, does anyone know how long it took the Dead Space Ultra Limited Edition to sell out?

[ingmar1988]

Originally Posted by Treehouse_Ryan

Yes, the KoA editions were not as protected as the should have been, which is why extra effort was taken this time to make sure that didn't happen.

Our policy for replacements on limited items is to not sell as many as we made. We generally don't produce more than the stated number of something. For nearly every limited item, we produce exactly as many as the edition size and then hold back as many as we think will be necessary to use as replacements. Once everyone seems to be sorted out, we'll quietly sell whatever leftovers we have, or have them sent to the office for giveaways, etc.

For this CE, we produced exactly 5,000 and will use a percentage of them as potential replacements or open them up for parts in the unlikely event that something has gone wrong with just one item. The exception to this is the postcards. Turns out you can't get just 5,000 postcards printed, so we ordered more than that and will put them on the store separately sometime. I promise this is the only item in the whole collection that has a larger run, and nothing else will be available separately.





Canadian orders will not have to pay duties because we were able to work it out in the shipping method.

European orders will owe duties, and we have a proper customs letter.

I may or may not have done the gift thing for the small-time orders I used to pack up and ship out myself at a previous job, but we would get in a ton of trouble if we did it at this scale. Also, since we have a warehouse and tax-presence in the UK now, anything not completely above board would sink us....

Sorry for the additional costs, but we don't have a lot of options.

I was wondering, if you have a warehouse in UK now, wouldnt it be an option to send everything to UK first and than distribute over europe?

The thing is with taxes, its not the biggest problem. The problem is also the postal company charing 12.50 euro for receiving the payment. If you could send through uk you would prevent that, and just let us pay the taxes by a little bit higher shipping cost. Also that way the packages dont get stuck in customs which can take a while in some countries!

ps: ryan thanks for your replies, very very awsome. Wish more companies would take the time to do this!
Also, would it be an idea that you pitch new idea's for a next CE at this forum to get input from real collectors?

[Treehouse_Ryan]

Originally Posted by ingmar1988

I was wondering, if you have a warehouse in UK now, wouldnt it be an option to send everything to UK first and than distribute over europe?

The thing is with taxes, its not the biggest problem. The problem is also the postal company charing 12.50 euro for receiving the payment. If you could send through uk you would prevent that, and just let us pay the taxes by a little bit higher shipping cost. Also that way the packages dont get stuck in customs which can take a while in some countries!

We talked at length about this. Here are most of the reasons it's a problem:

* Fairly substantial additional costs to ship them to the second warehouse and pay another team to count and inventory and store them. Would either have to eat those costs and lose margin for those units, or charge more for them to make it up. If this was the only problem, we would have eaten the charges in order to provide much better service to you all....

* Getting the tins over to the UK and through customs would take enough time that no one would get theirs until well after they beat the game and started to care less about it all. It post-poned the shipping date by a minimum of three weeks, but it easily could have stretched longer....

* If we have Tins in the UK warehouse, they have to be sold to only international customers because we owe VAT on anything that moves out of that warehouse. So the number of tins over there have to exist independently of the number of tins in the US warehouse, which means we have to decide up front how many we're sending over, and that means the UK/US inventories would sell out separately from each other, and if we over- or under- estimated how many would sell to each region, we'd have either dead stock, or other logistical problems. We didn't have any information on which to base this decsion because the KoA editions weren't allowed to be sold internationally, so we'd have had to make an already tough decision on the back of zero data.

* Assuming we have two sets of independent inventory now, we have to make the website able to track both and offer them to the right people at the right times. if the stocks weren't handled separately, some extras in the US would be able to be sold to someone expecting them to come from the UK, which is a problem on its face, but is also a nightmare from a taxes/shipping-rate point of view. To make the website do this, we'd need to either create a third item - "Add-On (Int'l Shipping Option)" or something - in order to track its inventory separately. But how many people do you think would get that wrong? The alternative is that we have another whole website, like on the BioWare and PopCap stores, where you have to know to toggle your site preference by clicking an icon in the header, and then it's set in a cookie, but if you don't explicitly do this, you don't get access to the UK inventory. Oh, and this store would only have one item in it, because we don't have other Dead Space gear in the UK at this time, so you'd have to jump through that hoop a couple times to reset yourself from being locked into that second store so you could see the other Dead Space (or etc) stuff we're going to put out....

So, yes, our international distribution needs some work before it's practical for you guys (or us, really). The good news is that we're exploring a lot of different options here, and are working really hard to get it under control (someone's coming in for a meeting about some of this later today). But we definitely couldn't work it out in time for it to matter for this project.

If anyone has a lot of experience with this, or has bought from US companies that have a less painful process, PM me with some details and we'll track down everything we can....

Originally Posted by ingmar1988

ps: ryan thanks for your replies, very very awsome. Wish more companies would take the time to do this!
Also, would it be an idea that you pitch new idea's for a next CE at this forum to get input from real collectors?

This is tricky, on account of how much money the publishers invest in these games. While I think it would be incredibly valuable to do that, I don't know if it would be possible to solicit ideas without essentially leaking information about whatever deal we have to do one well ahead of time.

I'd love to talk to everyone here about general things that they like and dislike. Or if you guys wanted to speculate publicly about possible CEs we could do based on what games we already have stores for, I would read those and chime in vaguely wherever I could, but it's very sticky ground.

At the very least, I'd love to work out some exclusive content for you all, in terms of maybe announcing the next one here first, or working out an interview you could post that has content other media sites wouldn't, or getting someone an early sample to post an exclusive unboxing or something....

[ingmar1988]

Originally Posted by Treehouse_Ryan

We talked at length about this. Here are most of the reasons it's a problem:

* Fairly substantial additional costs to ship them to the second warehouse and pay another team to count and inventory and store them. Would either have to eat those costs and lose margin for those units, or charge more for them to make it up. If this was the only problem, we would have eaten the charges in order to provide much better service to you all....

* Getting the tins over to the UK and through customs would take enough time that no one would get theirs until well after they beat the game and started to care less about it all. It post-poned the shipping date by a minimum of three weeks, but it easily could have stretched longer....

* If we have Tins in the UK warehouse, they have to be sold to only international customers because we owe VAT on anything that moves out of that warehouse. So the number of tins over there have to exist independently of the number of tins in the US warehouse, which means we have to decide up front how many we're sending over, and that means the UK/US inventories would sell out separately from each other, and if we over- or under- estimated how many would sell to each region, we'd have either dead stock, or other logistical problems. We didn't have any information on which to base this decsion because the KoA editions weren't allowed to be sold internationally, so we'd have had to make an already tough decision on the back of zero data.

* Assuming we have two sets of independent inventory now, we have to make the website able to track both and offer them to the right people at the right times. if the stocks weren't handled separately, some extras in the US would be able to be sold to someone expecting them to come from the UK, which is a problem on its face, but is also a nightmare from a taxes/shipping-rate point of view. To make the website do this, we'd need to either create a third item - "Add-On (Int'l Shipping Option)" or something - in order to track its inventory separately. But how many people do you think would get that wrong? The alternative is that we have another whole website, like on the BioWare and PopCap stores, where you have to know to toggle your site preference by clicking an icon in the header, and then it's set in a cookie, but if you don't explicitly do this, you don't get access to the UK inventory. Oh, and this store would only have one item in it, because we don't have other Dead Space gear in the UK at this time, so you'd have to jump through that hoop a couple times to reset yourself from being locked into that second store so you could see the other Dead Space (or etc) stuff we're going to put out....

So, yes, our international distribution needs some work before it's practical for you guys (or us, really). The good news is that we're exploring a lot of different options here, and are working really hard to get it under control (someone's coming in for a meeting about some of this later today). But we definitely couldn't work it out in time for it to matter for this project.

If anyone has a lot of experience with this, or has bought from US companies that have a less painful process, PM me with some details and we'll track down everything we can....



This is tricky, on account of how much money the publishers invest in these games. While I think it would be incredibly valuable to do that, I don't know if it would be possible to solicit ideas without essentially leaking information about whatever deal we have to do one well ahead of time.

I'd love to talk to everyone here about general things that they like and dislike. Or if you guys wanted to speculate publicly about possible CEs we could do based on what games we already have stores for, I would read those and chime in vaguely wherever I could, but it's very sticky ground.

At the very least, I'd love to work out some exclusive content for you all, in terms of maybe announcing the next one here first, or working out an interview you could post that has content other media sites wouldn't, or getting someone an early sample to post an exclusive unboxing or something....

Thanks for your reply, i really see its much more difficult to do than it seems, but great to hear you guys are at least thinking it all through!

On a second note, i think it would be really great to have an exclusive unboxing/interview/reveal or something like that. Would be very awesome if something like that would be possible!

For me personally it would be also very interesting to see how you come up with a CE, how do you determine what you will include. And maybe to see items/idea's that didnt make the cut or see the prototype of items you worked on...stuff like that is super interesting.

[Venner]

Originally Posted by Treehouse_Ryan

At the very least, I'd love to work out some exclusive content for you all, in terms of maybe announcing the next one here first, or working out an interview you could post that has content other media sites wouldn't, or getting someone an early sample to post an exclusive unboxing or something....

That would be awesome.

[ElectronicElation]

Hey there Ryan,
Been checking out all the posts you have made and I'm impressed at all the great lengths you are going to to help out the members of this community and collector's in general. You are who a lot of PR rep's should be taking notes from. Picked up the Dev-Team add-on and am eagerly awaiting it's arrival already. My KOA edition arrived heavily damaged as well. Well of course that's in the eye of the beholder huh? As collector's on here when it's damaged it could be a dent/scratch, a corner bent in. . . or mauled by a bear. Who knows. But since we are all truly collector's on here when a product arrives damaged it's heartbreaking because the term "mint" makes us salivate. hehe I'll be interested to check out the packaging as well and looking forward to future releases through Treehouse.

Originally Posted by Treehouse_Ryan

At the very least, I'd love to work out some exclusive content for you all, in terms of maybe announcing the next one here first, or working out an interview you could post that has content other media sites wouldn't, or getting someone an early sample to post an exclusive unboxing or something....

I would love to help you out in this area. I mean come on! For selfish reasons why wouldn't I want an early release?!? That's a no-brainer. But I actually do have a youtube channel called ElectronicElation
(http://www.youtube.com/electronicelation)
It's a little bit popular and have done unboxing's before.
(Example unboxing vid - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcM3yTtMdeM
Would LOVE to do one for anything you wanna throw my way or let me know if I could help in any other ways in this regard and would of course not mind doing it to shamelessly bring CE.org into the spotlight/Treeehouse.