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1 year agoJust a sign that what we already knew would happen, is happening. The bubble is bursting on the mechanical keyboard hobby mainstream pandemic blow up. Larger companies that rode the wave to growth are now facing some financial decisions I reckon. This story right here is not an isolated incident. IMO, there will be a slow, steady return to how things were pre-pandemic… kind of 2018/19 levels of interest.
I made a similar comment on r/mk earlier, but what surprised me, is how many companies kept their foot on the gas… and still are doing. I called this slowdown last year… loads of people did. The lockdown blow up was a craze… and all crazes burn brightly… for a short time only. Like I said. If I was a betting man, I would put money on this hobby falling back to what it was in 2018 or so by this time next year. All the commercial feeding frenzies will die off, and it will start to become a more hobby focused pastime instead of a consumer fuelled one. The more commercial side will slowly migrate back to the gaming space, and take its mass produced products with it. The only slightly worrying thing is how many respected vendors will remain? If this financial overstretching due to speculating on the extras market is widespread, there’s gonna be a lot of fiscal shock for a lot of companies. Again, this has been on the cards for some time. I can remember when extras just got vacuumed up in hours. Some even really popular sets have been sitting as in stock items at some vendors for weeks now… sometimes months. I’ve just found GMK Daifuku in stock… GMK Botanical R3 in stock… These are sets that landed weeks ago. This time 18 months ago, that would have been highly unlikely. This started months ago as well. The long lead times mean that people speculated on this ahead of time, and hoped to make a big profit on extras. IMO, it was highly unlikely this would be a situation that would last very long… it just seemed so obvious, so why vendors thought they could make longer term financial decisions based on conditions that were caused by basically locking people in their homes in front of their computers is perhaps the biggest surprise here. I would have thought they would have predicted this.
Just airing my thoughts… :)