Apparently they’ve pulled out of recent GBs they were set to be the US proxy for. They’ve set their discord to read only and deleted general chat. And their ticket system says it’s full and can’t accept new ones.
It would seem they are still selling and shipping in-stock products, but my two GBs thru them, GMK Moonlight and Hubble, haven’t had updates in quite some time.
Just 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.
Spot on, they’re not the first and won’t be the last. I wonder who will be left when the dust settles.
The classic hobby drama: Hobby has a surge in popularity, Very Small Business bites off way more than they can chew, Very Small Business collapses and/or ghosts while owing people a bunch of money/product.
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... :)
Yea I remember when I got into the hobby there were basically zero in-stock gmk sets or higher end boards. People wanted $100 over msrp for used items on mechmarket. I had to wait and be fast enough on an extra drops of each to pull off my first build. Now you got keysets and boards that delivered months ago and still have extras available.
But we don't know these guys situations, who knows, maybe they quit their day jobs to pursue this, they probably weren't in a position to think about it as rationally as you are.
The part that shocks me even more than that is how clamming up and going unresponsive is becoming the go to signature move. You think it would be common sense that to come out ok on situations like these you have to get ahead of it, going silent and just letting people gossip and speculate is just going to make things worse. Even if the situation was horrendously bad, you'd still be better off communicating.
Look at the Aeternus guy, he stole all the gb funds bc he had a "personal emergency". Dude was so beloved by the community that he still has people to this day defending him online even tho he ghosted months ago. Chances are had he just been upfront he probably could of set up a gofundme and got whatever money he needed, I literally don't even understand the logic hoops these guys are jumping thru.
Like I'm guessing the reason my GMK Moonlight from Mechs&Co hasn't shipped is they probably never ordered the deskmats and absorbed the funds since that was the one thing that was on them to order. If I just had a way to contact them, hell, I'd tell them to just cancel the deskmat and keep the money and send me my base set. But I can't. We're an understanding community, we get it, but it's like people are going out of their way to put themselves in the least defensible position possible.