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[deleted] t1_j60nyn9 wrote

Three guesses what the contents of this thread are. Let's guess...

"Why don't they just make more"

"Group buys are ridiculous... why don't they make them first and then sell them in stock?" Whoever 'they' are.

"It's all a scam... they could make loads of them, but they do this to artificially raise the price"

"gatekeeping"

Amma right?

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yot_gun t1_j61118c wrote

all 4 points are valid. waiting 2 years for plastic sets is ridiculous and should not be the standard. im preording KEYBOARDS (manufactered from 0 to a full keyboard) and it takes less than 4 months for it to be produced and QCed.

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Silentism t1_j62vwx7 wrote

Not exactly. You can't just simply make more keycaps, that's not how production works. I think PBTFans is a similar example to making keycaps first and selling them in stock, since there's quite a bit of stock sold at vendors and from KBDFans after the GB, but the tradeoff is less designs for how much they can produce. Arguably better or worse considering how many different GMK sets are released vs PBTFans, but I feel that argument could have more factors to it.

Absolutely right 2 years of waiting shouldn't be the standard though, nor was it ever intended to be. I think there is some leeway to be given since they did struggle with keeping employees during the pandemic, but I also think its GMK's fault for taking so many projects maybe during that time and after. GBs are a result of the community just wanting to take customization to a higher level back in the day with keycaps community members designed themselves, and getting people to join them was the only way to make that happen. 3 years ago when I got into the hobby people talked about how these GBs took like 9 months on average, but that's also when the hobby blew up at the beginning of the pandemic and now here we are at 2 years for recent sets.

At the very least they're putting out sets faster, and they even announced they put in a massive amount of money into more sorting machines, so I'm hoping the sets on the bottom of the queue aren't 2 year waits.

I'm just trying to say its not super unreasonable, just super unfortunate.

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