Having spoken with people I consider reliable, I’m in the position to report what I have heard.

Effectively, the Organised Play Manager for Australia has missed the deadline for ordering Store Champs kits for all FFG systems. FFG, for their part, failed to do anything meaningful about this problem or draw attention to the issue. Basically, FFG blames the Organised Play Manager, and the Organised Play Manager blames FFG.

The end result is that for all FFG Star Wars systems with 2018 Store Champ Kits (which from my understanding includes X-Wing, Armada, Destiny, and Imperial Assault) the current plan is that Australia is going to be receiving whatever can be scrounged together from the remaining kits in the US. The current projection is that Australia could be receiving as few as 2 kits per system, per state.

Let me go ahead and repeat the feature image.

At the end of the day, it’s a monumentally poor showing from both parties, and a huge disservice to multiple communities. FFG and Let’s Play Games (the Australian Distributor) really set the bar for minimum effort sometimes, and it often feels that they are successful in spite of themselves. Honestly, at this stage I can’t even say I’m that surprised.

Putting aside my personal emotions about it (i.e. I’m fucking pissed as hell), it’s also a ridiculously dumb move from both parties from a purely business perspective. Healthy competitive communities provide huge visibility to games; absolutely screwing the pooch on this is going to hurt those communities and in turn hurt their bottom line.

Bringing my personal emotions back. Seriously? My dudes, you have got to be fucking kidding me. The Organised Play Manager of all people should know how hard it is to build communities, hell he talked about how important the day to day building of player bases around the country is back in 2015. And FFG, jesus christ, you guys are a multi-million dollar company owned by an even larger multi-million dollar company. Seriously, from a cursory glance you guys were turning over $22 million dollars in 2011 before your golden goose X-Wing was even released.

Interested to see how both parties handle it moving forward.

– Intel Officer Luke

Post Script:

Just to be clear (as it was brought to my attention) the games on the November Worlds track (i.e. Netrunner, AGoT, et al) are fine as they have already had their Store Champs, and their Regional kits are on track.

Also to further explain the situation, in Australia we have multiple distributors that stores can order FFG stock from. However, all Organised Play items (such as Store Champs kits) goes through one distributor (Lets Play Games). This setup allows such problems to occur, as all it takes is for LPG to mess up and suddenly Organised Play in Australia is left high and dry. This issue is compounded by the fact that FFG has really poor awareness for such problems, so they generally fail to pick them up early.