WarStages Update #46: Brexit is killing us… but the end of the tunnel is finally in sight

First of all, sorry for this long silence. Once again we’ve been dancing that crazy dance of: “Oh, ok, we are good to go, let’s post an update” and the next day “Noooooo, everything has changed again!!!”

The short version is that we now think that the European, Australian and New Zealand shipments will be dealt with before the end of the month.

If you want to know more details, here it is:

Australia and New Zealand

On June 15, our distributor told us that the container was to reach Australia on June 17. Allowing time to go through customs and barring any weird issues, it would get to the warehouse on June 24 and then shipment is slated to begin.

And this is what we received on June 29:

We’ve checked the backers’ data and everything was in order.

On July 7, it looks like they are about to start shipping.

It means that it is reasonable to say that everything should be delivered in that area of the world around the end of July.

Europe

We are still working with our fulfilment center in the UK to move your shipments in bulk to Germany in order to avoid the sticker shock of having to pay VAT on your pledged Cathedrals.

While this situation has been going back and forth for several months, they are not yet confident that sending the parcels to Germany would work correctly tax wise.

In fact, despite working with our distributor, we have not yet been able to recover the USD $4,600 from the time our goods were shipped pre-Brexit in the UK which was then a member of the European Union (as are we). Accountants on both sides of the pond disagree on how to correctly claim this amount back.

Here is a sample of the Kafkaian conversations I’m having regarding VAT (Value Added Tax). Please note the title of the person to whom I am writing!

This person is the accountant of a company who receives and sends worldwide shipments all year long!!!

So not only are we out of that initial import VAT, but it seems like we could also be out of the same amount when the goods ship out from the (now ex-EuropeanUnion) United Kingdom and back into the European Union into Germany. So, kissing $4600 goodbye once is one thing. Kissing it goodbye twice is plain bad business.

Since everything is still so opaque, we also want to make absolutely sure that you won't get charged any additional VAT when the postman comes to your door.

And so, to prevent this happening, our distributor recommended that we wait a bit more before shipping to Germany, and here’s why:

As you can see, nothing is simple.

I won’t get into the details of the solution they are suggesting because it is all about changing the route taken to go from the UK to Germany and leveraging various specificities of the different countries the shipment will go through.

But to get to this conclusion has taken hours and hours of conversation and enquiries. If you remember our last update, we even hired an agency specialized in VAT but their conclusion was: "we don't know"....

So we had to find the answers by ourselves working with partners who are as lost as we are.

As of today, I am still waiting for a shipping date for this shipment. We got a message one week ago saying they were in the process of booking the truck that will transport everything to Germany:

So things keep on moving forward but everything just takes forever. Here’s yesterday's update:

It is extremely frustrating, but it looks like there is not much more we can do at that stage.

Things are so slow to move that I am currently looking for our own transport to move the goods to try and speed things up.

We would like to do more with WarStages but...

With all this mess, we’ve been left with very little time to work on other aspects of WarStages. The truth is that it has taken so much of our time and resources that apart from our 3D printables Patreon, Raging Heroes have not been able to do much more this year.

We were hoping to launch our game during the winter but it was clear that we wouldn’t have neither the time nor the energy to do it properly. And if you follow our regular releases, you probably have noticed that we haven’t released a lot of really new miniatures in our webshop this year.

Of course, this is not only because of the time spent on resolving the WarStages situation. There have been many other factors that have made this year a strange one. One of them is that we’ve had to part ways with many team members and bring in new ones. Finding new crew mates and getting them up to speed sometimes feels like it just takes forever. And then, as it is for many other companies, the Covid situation has slowed so many things down.

So we’ve focused mostly on solving the WarStages problems and on running our Patreon as it has been our main revenue source to keep the company running while things are getting back to normal.

Assembling the kits

This brings me to the assembly of your kit.

First of all, make sure to bookmark and check out the assembly videos we prepared for you, with the full Playlist on Youtube.

Then, we've received several requests for additional assembly instructions and we are working on that to make the building of your Cathedral easier.

We are working on new PDF files that will show you how to take what you've built following the videos and assemble it into the full Cathedral kits.

We’ll have these documents soon and will share them with you as soon as they are ready.

Conclusion

So, even if it is at a very slow pace, we are still moving forward and we are now very close to the finishing line.

We are persevering on getting this project completed, come hell or high water. You can depend on it. We are well aware that we are not giving you as much news as you would like and we are deeply sorry with that.

But as you can see there is really not a lot of new information to share, everything is so crazy slow.

However, we are now at the very last step of the process and the shipping should be finalized in the next coming weeks.

Once again, thank you for your patience. As soon as we have some tangible news, we’ll post another update.

Questions? Problems?

Please contact us directly at RagingHeroesTeam@gmail.com