Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne looks at a recent Games Workshop lawsuit targeting counterfeits and infringers, and adds thoughts on Free Comic Book Day and the latest on China tariffs.
Last month, Games Workshop sued a large number of online sellers in U.S. federal court, alleging trademark infringement and false designation of origin (claiming the products are official Games Workshop products when they are not, i.e., counterfeiting). The company asked for the list of defendants to be sealed until they could be identified (apparently many are identified only by Seller ID) and served to avoid tipping them off about the investigation.
Now that it has been a week, I have a few more thoughts about this year’s Free Comic Book Day event:
1. As is typical, most of our guests came in solely for the freebies. Sales were certainly good, better than 2024 (but down from 2023), but just over half bought anything. I did see a good number of kids, so I hope they get into the comic reading habit.
2. Speaking of kids, we had a larger number of all-ages comics compared to last year (though it’s not clear why DC Comics decided to mark Superman’s Good Guy Gang as a teen book rather than all ages), and the Pokemon Nanoblocks were a big hit, though we have not seen any increase in Nanoblock sales since then.
3. Once again, bundling books made it much easier to check in and sort books. However, there is no need to both bind the bundles with plastic bands and wrap them in shrink-wrapping. One or the other will be fine, thank you.
I was going to take a break from tariffs this week but then, showing just how fluid the tariff situation is, President Trump made an off-the-cuff remark saying he would consider dropping the tariff rates he has imposed on Chinese imports from 145% to 80%, sending both markets and businesses into a tizzy. Given that negotiations just started, that is a pretty large number to toss out as a reduction, leading me to expect that the number will drop even further. This also shows the problem the Trump Administration has created, not only with the game industry but with the U.S. economy, namely how do businesses adjust their pricing and/or supply chain when the tariff amount could change based on President Trump’s whims tomorrow? This is why the power to levy taxes, which tariffs are, is vested with the Congress, specifically the House of Representatives, where such taxes can be deliberated before their imposition, preventing just the sort of situation we are seeing now.
Comments about FCBD, tariffs, Games Workshop knockoffs? Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Source: ICv2
