After Years Of Courting Controversy, Catalyst Game Labs Blame President Trump's Tariffs For Battletech's Troubles

Catalyst Game Labs has made a lot of bizarre business decisions lately, turning off longtime Mech Warrior and Battletech fans from their products, but they’ve now released a statement showing trouble where they’re blaming potential tariffs and “economic uncertainty” for what appears to be upcoming troubles for the tabletop gaming company.

Battletech and Mech Warrior are long time military science fiction and wargaming properties that gamers have loved over the years, even spawning some very successful video game adaptations.

A lot of the reason for its continued success is its rich worldbuilding and novelizations from writer Blaine Pardoe, who added a depth to the mech sci-fi that few authors could have. Despite being fan-favorite writers, they do everything they can to erase his contributions and attack the sci-fi author.

The main cancellation with Blaine Pardoe started when Catalyst Game Labs decided to turn petty over Blaine Pardoe’s political leanings as the science fiction publishing industry took a hard turn left over the last decade. In a blog titled “My Publisher Canceled Me in Favor of an Activist Who Threatened My Life,” Pardoe details, “After 37 years of writing for the series, I found myself canceled for voicing my conservative beliefs.”

While this cancellation was occurring, Battletech sponsored fan anthologies featuring LGBTQ themes, working to push out other conservative gamers from their base, while maintaining writers like Bryan Young who began inserting evil gender ideology into the lore with his fiction.

All the while, CGL had a Kickstarter that took years to fulfill, upsetting fans both in its lack of timely delivery and the product that came as a result.

This year, Catalyst Game Labs decided to make a bizarre move by releasing a romance novel based on a joke at a convention Michael A. Stackpole once made, showing they have no ability to cater to their target demographic.

Now, the company seems to be bracing for economic woes and is blaming the current Trump Administration for its problems rather than reflecting on what they’ve done to kill the brand in recent years.

Catalyst Game Labs posted to their website:

Like many of you, the Catalyst Game Labs team has been watching recent economic developments. We have been hard at work developing strategies that would make our position more resilient to the rapidly changing world trade dynamics that we have been seeing.

Like much of the tabletop gaming industry, Catalyst gets hit especially hard by trade tariffs. Our industry is inherently international in nature. We are lucky that we have been able to be flexible with pricing in the past decade. However recent changes with the market have shown us that our flexibility was not quite prepared for a change of this magnitude.

With the current level of economic uncertainty, we have to make some tough decisions. In the next 60 days we will be releasing a comprehensive update for this process, including some unfortunately necessary price adjustments. These price adjustments will be applied to new products and product reprints that are directly affected by tariffs. As we adjust to this new situation, we will likely expand this policy across our entire product line in order to average out increases. We are working hard to ensure that we can keep or even improve our value contribution to you and your game tables. We have prided ourselves on maintaining our relationship with you and your local game stores throughout Catalyst Game Labs’ history and we will hope to continue that trend in the years to come.

The CGL team would like to thank you for sticking with us as we all work through this uncertain future together. We are happy to share our games with all of you and want to see our community grow through a shared love of the IPs and games we steward.

It seems they are aware they are in trouble for the brand, and potential tariffs coming in seem to be a convenient excuse for not being able to produce product players want.

We’ll see if this means shakeups and layoffs at CGL in the future, but perhaps it’s time for a content shift to appeal to its core group of gamers rather than try to chase modern audiences.

What do you think of Catalyst Game Labs blaming tariffs for their failures in Battletech and Mech Warrior? Leave a comment and let us know.

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