If you’ve been following Far Away on Kickstarter, you know we’ve had some unexpected issues with international shipments. Some (not all) of our backers were charged customs fees. We are refunding those fees to both backers and anyone who ordered the game through cherrypickedgames.com (this very site). Please send us the receipt or charge information, and we’ll refill your pockets.
CPG believe strongly in transparency, so we wanted to describe why we think this happened and what steps we’re taking to avoid this in the future. Most of the Kickstarter/preorder postage was purchased through PayPal. This gave us a slight discount in addition to letting us print postal labels at home (we didn’t do this for Conspire, thus earning enemies at the post office). PayPal also provided the customs forms for international orders. We suspect some missed setting or deficiency in the software lead to the end-customer customs charges.
In the short-term, we’ll work with USPS to determine how we can ensure a single-payment shipping solution for international customers. Longer-term, we’ll research fulfillment companies for future Kickstarter projects. Our older games never had the sales to justify using such services (we tried for Drink!, but did not meet the order minimums. We also try to avoid third-party services as part of CPG’s ethos. We like minimizing the people that come between you and your new game. That’s why we pack up every game and hand-deliver it to the post office. In general, it reduces costs and keeps us involved with the entire process. However, if our international demand grows, we may not have a choice but to involve a third-party. Shipping across a border is expensive without riding on a larger company’s plan (full disclosure: our website’s international shipping charges are less than the actual costs – we do that because we want the few customers who order this way to actually get a copy).
We’ll get the current round of customs issues sorted out. Know that our desire is for you to play our games, not pay for them. We need to make a sustainable business to continue making games and paying the artists and designers that make them special. We promise that business need will never come at the cost of being unfair to you. By the next game, we’ll have a much better shipping strategy to reflect our ever-growing audience.