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Based on my understanding of Paizo's financials, they are not even remotely close to having the funds to set that up now. They have a bunch of looming issues, not least of which is catching up with cost of living increases.
Setting up an overseas hub would be a major lift, and introduce scaling hurdles at every turn. I wouldn't expect them to even seriously contemplate it unless the OGL-driven sales increases from January continue for the next 5+ months, and even then only if there's hard data about EU demand.
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Just wondering if there is a possibility that there will come a EU distribution hub? At this moment I am for the most part buying the pdf products, because shipping them to Belgium is just too costly. (And because I rather use pdf at a session than a book.
But I do like to have the books nonetheless. Just to appreciate and leaf through. So I was hoping with new growth and intrest their might be a possibility that an EU hub comes along to lower those shipping taxes and I can start taking subscriptions.
Thank you for your input. Is there a local game store we can reach out to for you?
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Not to be a downer, but BattleTech (i.e. Catalyst Game Labs, which is doing staggeringly well at the moment) and I tentatively think might be a bigger company overall (maybe?) hasn't even really managed that. It's a sore point with EU/RoW customers. Shipping from the US is absolutely insane (especially when shipping TO the US is not as remotely bad). CGL also seems likely to be stuck with FedEx on some sort of contract, because I can't otherwise understand why they have been silent on issues when customers are reporting how much FedEx are extracting the michel. ($120 to ship a less-than-$20 PLASTIC figure[1]. It cost me in the UK only about £20 or so to send a model of what would be about the same weight TO the US. (Notably? About the same as it cost to send to Austraila, LITERALLY the otherside of the world.) And we're talking here "weight of packing exceeds weight of item" levels here.)
It's not a new issue, either, sadly; a few or few back, Paizo had one of their clear-out hardcopy sales, *and even at 50% off* is was cheaper to buy the PDFs than get the books, because the shipping was ridiculous.
(It didn't use to be this bad, I do have some hardcopy stuff, though we're going back maybe ten-fifteen years.)
[1]If I believed what a list of their prices are/were when someone dug it up, they wanted to charge something like $50-70 dollars to send a *letter* to CANADA, which doesn't even have the excuse of even being overseas.