Andrea Angiolino pointed me to this thread. The discussion here is very interesting, and I appreciate you worry as much as we do about the commercial health of the game.
Ares, from a distribution point of view, is essentially an American company - we do ship almost all of our production to the USA and we have a flooring agreement with Alliance. This means that typically Alliance should be the more reliable source at the distribution level, but all the other major US distributors can get stock if they order it.
There are a FEW models which are out of stock (in WW2, only the P-40 and the "green" He.111 - a few more for WW1) but the rest of the line is there in our warehouse, ready to be ordered.
Across the US borders, things are definitely more difficult - until very recently (as you know very well), we did not have a reliable source in Australia; and while we sell to two distributors in Canada, they do not stock products very regularly. In Europe, Esdevium restocks pretty regularly, but it is essentially the only good distributor we sell directly to.
The key issue is that all miniature games have a tendency, over time, to slow down in sales per model (as more models are available). And distributors tend to be very conservative, essentially just servicing pre-orders and keeping very little stock themselves.
There IS one solution to handle this - direct sales. Until now, we have decided NOT to take this road, as we believe we can - with your help and good intro products like Battle of Britain - to keep on promoting the game so that it does not end up out of stores altogether. If we started doing direct sales, stores will have even less interest in the range, and we don't think currently this is the path to go.
On this subject - Please know that we are welcome to support stores with free Battle of Britain demo kits. If you have a
FLGS in your area interested in presenting/promoting the game, he can contact us at events[at]aresgames.eu to request one.
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