Dead Space 3

[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.

[gu8]

could you tell me what are the latest quantities remaining please ryan?

[Treehouse_Ryan]

Originally Posted by gu8

could you tell me what are the latest quantities remaining please ryan?

About 700 in total.

[Chargersfan57]

Originally Posted by Treehouse_Ryan

About 700 in total.

I ordered mine yesterday so it looks like I just got in on this in the nick of time!!! I originally ordered with the game but money being as tight as it is I cancelled and reordered the add-on.

I've been replaying though DS2 in anticipation and I must say it's a great franchise.

Thanks for the info Ryan. What you've done, even as little as posting information, goes a long way with collectors! So to you Ryan.

[tonybsg]

Originally Posted by Treehouse_Ryan

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....

Ryan, thanx for your answers as well.

Regarding international orders, ofcourse some extra charges are acceptable under any countries' laws.

The thing you should do, is under any circumstancies DO NOT use any express shipping option from companies like UPS, DHL, FEDEX.

In many countries they charge not only the taxes that expected by law, but also some other handling fees that are almost what you pay for the item!!!

If i'm not mistaken XPO International are partners with USPS, so if you use the simpliest method of shipping, then we receive the items from our local post office with no problems and no additional charges that are not expected.

With XPO I never had any problems, except for some cheapest items, I have bought the CE of The Art of the Mass Effect Universe which was around $100 if i recall correctly.

Furthermore, I have tons of orders from amazon.com, videogamesplus.ca, american ebay sellers etc and when they use standard shipping options, I never have a problem.

In addition to that you should check out AmazonGlobal program, which gives you the opportunity to pay in advance an import fee and what you see in the checkout is the final paypent. They probably have a deal with the courier companies.

I understand that amazon is huge, so another example is the Irrational store which have the same option, prepaid import fees while they use DHL as a carrier and an express shipping option with standart cost of $35.

[Madigan]

Yeah, UPS, DHL or Fedex are a nightmare for international customers, sometimes their handling fees cost more than the product itself (200% more in some cases).

USPS all the way

[Dreamcazman]

I feel sorry for those of you in Europe who have to pay fees on imports.

I guess that's another benefit of living in Australia, anything under AUD$1000 doesn't incur any extra fees no matter how it's delivered.

[Letrico]

mate cazman, they are planning to put import tax on anything above $60.