October 7, 2009: Making Games Safe for Children

Are your games safe? We thought they were, but back in 2007 there were a series of product recalls that led the U.S. government to give us a new law (Public Law No: 110-314), commonly known as the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. The CPSIA is a source of personal stress for me at the moment because I'm dealing with trying to cover safety testing costs without increasing the MSRP on our games. And these costs aren't minor; for a game like Munchkin Quest we're looking at somewhere around $3,000 to $4,000 for the CPSIA testing. That's a significant increase in our production costs, and is a lot for us to absorb, but for the moment we're going to try to cover these costs without passing the increase on to the players.

I expect there will be more to say about the CPSIA and its impact on our games, but for as long as possible we're going to continue working on our planned releases and not let safety testing costs affect our game component plans. I'm looking at this very closely, both on my own and with the assistance of our printers (including Grand Prix International, the company we've worked with on several releases over the last few years), and I promise that we'll do everything we can to continue improving the physical quality (and durability) of our game components.

-- Phil Reed