We’re excited to (finally!) let you know Steamforged has acquired the Street Masters board game range and IP from Blacklist Games.
It’s a highly rated, much loved board game that many of us are personal fans of, and which we’re genuinely thrilled to add to our library. We’re very much looking forward to sharing our plans with you for the future of the game.
As some of you will know, there’s been a delay between finalising the acquisition and today’s announcement. It’s been hard for us to keep this news quiet — especially because the Indiegogo campaign, Street Masters: Tide of the Dragon, is still waiting to be fulfilled — and we’re glad to finally be able to shed some light on the situation.
We want to do everything we can to make sure backers of the Indiegogo campaign aren’t left high and dry. So, after we’d acquired Street Masters and gotten access to all the details, we immediately started analysing the inventory to figure out exactly what inventory there was to fulfil the outstanding pledges. With our Kickstarter experience of 15 fulfilled campaigns, we’d estimated this would take a few weeks to a month at most.
It was at this point we discovered some things we hadn’t been made aware of upon purchasing the IP, which turned this into a far more complex and lengthy process than it should have been.
Once we got stuck into the details, it became clear the inventory was spread out across multiple warehouses around the world. There were also unpaid storage bills we needed to negotiate and, due to a miscommunication with the supplier, two items hadn’t been manufactured.
Thankfully, because we have good, long-standing relationships with fulfilment partners, we were able to agree deals which would let us secure the available stock, while making sure the various companies were treated fairly. Many thanks to Quartermaster, Aetherworks, and VFI.
There are some final hurdles we still need to clear, but we didn’t want to keep you waiting any longer for an update. What we can confirm at this stage is we’re now confident that enough inventory a) does exist, and b) is available for us to fulfil the Indiegogo campaign.
Our next major hurdle is to get that inventory to the right places. Right now, it’s spread across the globe, but now we know what exists and where it needs to be, we'll soon start moving boxes to get backer rewards to the right hubs. This is a costly process and will take a little time, but again, we've been able to cover this by working with our partners.
We're also working with those partners to calculate rates for shipping pledges from the hubs to backers. Right now we don't have a clear idea of this, but we should have more details soon.
If you’re a backer of the Indiegogo campaign, we’d ask that you be patient just a little longer while this is completed. We will send out an update to all backers once everything is ready to begin the process of fulfilling the campaign.
In the meantime, we’d greatly appreciate you holding fire on sending any emails or messages. Until we clear the final hurdles, we won’t be able to give you any answers other than what’s been said above.
Otherwise, we’d love to welcome you into the Steamforged community. You can find links to all of our channels here on our Linktree.
