For those that didn't hear, GW's stock is down 25% in one day.  I thought I'd post some information from the blogosphere for convenience.

GW Financial information and commentary via Bell of Lost Souls

And the after effects already begin:

GW Germany closed and armies discontinued via Faeit.

Yet there are those among us who knew this was coming

and already,

the community is taking a stand and picking up the pieces.

Thank you for all these posts.  Lets hope that GW gets it shit together.

Aren't they a horrible company that has only succeeded because they have a near-monopoly on the market?

Well, they sure did that to themselves.

 "I know a good idea. Lets prevent the people that play our games from buying our stuff from online sellers. Gee thats a great business move for a geek hobby. And while were at it, lets totally alienate all our existing fanbase every 5 years and piss everyone else off by not even attempting to balance our armies. That will go well with our publishing model of taking 3 or more years to actually publish the updated rules for armies for a single edition. And just in case anybody still likes us after that, well switch to plastic and double our costs at the same time! Woo! Business Acumen!"

If fantasy does go under, Im hoping KoW will stick around to fill the void. Its got a solid system that just needs a bit of flavour injected, and thier models look better every year. All for half or less of GW.

What is KoW?  Not trying to insult, but I really want to know what it is.

Thing is people do in fact love Warhammer, but the company is just...  There is no nice way to put it.  Game Workshop is just fucking stupid.  They pissed of their fan base which is dumb.  They jack up the cost of their products which is even dumber.  Let their lawyers go on a suing rampage which does nothing good for their already shitty PR.  Their CEO only gives a damn about making money and that fucking hurts for any hobby company.

The only thing that is keeping them a float is Fantasy Flight Games for the warhammer rpg series.  Yeah when another game company is keeping you alive you know your in some deep shit.  Not to mention it is the most well known game in town that most people know of.

Kings Of War I believe.  A rival miniature game that is less expensive.

Quote from: gonster;724731Kings Of War I believe.  A rival miniature game that is less expensive.

Thank you very much.

Yes, sorry, Kings of War is what I meant. They're a young company, but growing pretty fast.

But I do enjoy Warhammer quite a bit. Price and incompleteness aside, I find 8th edition quite a well designed game, and GW makes some gorgeous models.

Quote from: Snowman0147;724730The only thing that is keeping them a float is Fantasy Flight Games for the warhammer rpg series.

What no. The thing keeping them afloat is Warhammer 40,000, you know the most successful fantasy wargame and miniatures range in the world?

Quote from: TristramEvans;724738Yes, sorry, Kings of War is what I meant. They're a young company, but growing pretty fast.

Company name is Mantic. They do the best Undead models on the market. I also have their Elves, and my Basilea (human Paladins, Angels etc) set arrived yesterday. I'm not sure about their ruleset, which uses Units rather than individual figures, but the minis themselves are very nice. Another great company is Perry Miniatures (the Perry twins), which does historical minis; I got their historical medieval plastics for my son, and recently got & painted their fantastic Mahdist Ansar plastics, which thanks to variable heads cover a vast range of underserved types such as ancient Egyptians, Nile Arabs, and generic fantasy desert tribes, as well as Nubians/Sudanese from ancient times up to the Battle of Omdurman in 1898.

Quote from: soviet;724755What no. The thing keeping them afloat is Warhammer 40,000, you know the most successful fantasy wargame and miniatures range in the world?

Try reading the full paragraph before you take a single sentence.  I also noted that GW is also the most well known company in terms of war gaming.

Beyond that point you are right.  Warhammer 40K is keeping them alive mainly because it is the most well known war game.  Those video games kept them in the spot light and those RPG games made by Fantasy Flight Games is doing a wonderful job as well.

Though that leads to my point.  What is Game Workshop doing to help itself?  Cause I notice all they are doing is hanging by the 40K thread and letting other people sell the game.  Fantasy Flight Games are doing well with the 40K franchise.  They even went back to the drawing board with Dark Heresy 2 beta due to the fact that the majority of customers did not like it.  They just avoided their own down fall.  So why can't Game Workshop?

I can't believe it took this long for the chickens to come home to roost. Shame about Bretonnia and tomb kings though, I was fond of the former and the latter were quite flavorfully distinct from bog standard undead.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;724794I can't believe it took this long for the chickens to come home to roost. Shame about Bretonnia and tomb kings though, I was fond of the former and the latter were quite flavorfully distinct from bog standard undead.

Note none of thats confirmed yet, and one of the sites says those eumours come from a German site thats been saying it for months. Theres every chance those games might just go to web-only ordering and make thier return sometime later, just like Dark Elves did.

Here's a pretty good bit from an rpgnet thread on the subject:

Quote from: Stantz;17531482Wooo, boy. I've been in that meeting enough times. The short of it is that the standard business-school forecasting model puts games as a product, rather than a communication medium (which is as close to "socially networked activity" as you get in non-bullshit and non-proprietary business models). This means, for anyone who bothers to do the math, the network effect of having more players is done on the "producer-consumer" social advertising model, rather than a squared-utility social network model.

Mind, that's among people who do the math. They are very, very few. It's more common for a tiered business strategy to be rejected based on gut instinct and fear. Some of the most common reasons are:

"Wait, you want us to make less profit on our best selling product?"
"We already have people that are willing to pay the current prices, so we don't need to lower them any."
"Most of our profit comes from heavy consumers. All we have to do is target them, and the casuals can sort themselves out."
"If casuals are going to come and go, why do we care about goodwill from them? We only have so long to profit from them."
"If we make the entry-level experience really crap, it'll encourage more people to make the jump to premium. We can even keep most of our content premium, besides a token demo."
"If we establish a cheaper starting price, we're just training users to expect cheaper prices. No one will ever pay a premium!"
"We're a game for the hardcore. We'll never get enough users for this plan to work."

And, above all

"This proposal has a chance of making us money months down the line. We're losing money now. We need to fix that before we can start looking at radical ideas."

Thing is looking at 25% stock market lost I would start radical things cause the current path is not working.