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 (http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2014/01/some-thoughts-on-gw-financials.html)via Bell of Lost Souls
And the after effects already begin:
GW Germany closed and armies discontinued (http://natfka.blogspot.com/2014/01/gw-changes-stores-closing-and-armies-no.html) via Faeit.
Yet there are those among us who knew this was coming (http://warhammerarmiesproject.blogspot.com/2014/01/dark-times-ahead-at-gw.html)
and already,
the community is taking a stand (http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2014/01/editorial-i-for-one-welcome-our-new-to.html) 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 (http://www.wwwargaming.co.uk/Basilean/cat1585668_2163355.aspx) (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.
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?
Oh, would that be space marines? I wonder if that "heavy technology-fantasy emblems/insignia" mix was 40k's originality.
Isn't their stock down just because in a few years, hobby shops will own their own 3D printers and the only figures people will be buying will be generic 3D printing files they can use? The prepackaged miniatures thing is going to be dead soon, unless they come painted, and I don't doubt a 3D printer that can paint them as well is far behind.
Lacking the business acumen to make sense of the news, all I can say is "serves them right." Shitty company from a casual customer's POV. Hope something good comes out of it, but I don't think that's likely.
Quote from: ForumScavenger;724837Isn't their stock down just because in a few years, hobby shops will own their own 3D printers and the only figures people will be buying will be generic 3D printing files they can use? The prepackaged miniatures thing is going to be dead soon, unless they come painted, and I don't doubt a 3D printer that can paint them as well is far behind.
At that point it would be wiser to just sell codexes. Just make sure they are high quality pdfs that are well balance out between armies. Then it is a battle over which company has the more awesome setting.
Personally if that is the case ForumScavenger it looks like a bright future for the customer, but a shitty future for GW. Then again GW had it coming for a long time.
This took longer than I expected. They have been on a downward spiral quality-wise for years. It appears to have just caught up to them. I just hope their novels line is not wiped out. I think that is their best product.
Quote from: ForumScavenger;724837Isn't their stock down just because in a few years, hobby shops will own their own 3D printers and the only figures people will be buying will be generic 3D printing files they can use? The prepackaged miniatures thing is going to be dead soon, unless they come painted, and I don't doubt a 3D printer that can paint them as well is far behind.
3d printing is still too unreliable. Or too expensive for the required detail.
They are improving gradually and in just 3 years the striation problems are getting less and less on some of the lower end machines and is apparently gone on some of the top end machines.
Cost for detail and bitchyness of the process are still problems though.
3 years from now? Who knows.
Still it will get there at some point in the near future which will make GW obsolete unless you do something drastic like improve their books. Which with the current CEO that might be actually hard to do.
3d printing is also pretty slow and designing stuff requires a pretty sound knowledge of 3d CAD programming and the limitations of the proccess. I also expect that the manufacturers to take a cue from the printer industry with machine specific proprietary material cartidges with prices that make Games Workshop look like a non-profit charity. I honestly expect home 3d printers to be the next breadmaker. Hot for a couple years and then dirt cheap and often found at garage sales. Never mind the proprietary issues that will blossom around the files as the industry grows.
I'm not saying it couldn't happen. I'm not saying it wouldn't be cool. But I am saying there are obstacles on many levels that make me wonder if it will be viable for gamers. Yes I know that War of Kings is 3d printing their entire range. We'll see how that goes.
At any rate if GW was reasonable in their pricing it probably wouldn't be an issue given the economies of scale involved. I'll accept that people who won't pay $50 for a box of figures probably won't pay $5. Perceived value is a real issue here. Heck I've been in the business of selling lower priced figures for two years now and frankly most gamers just don't care. GW's prices are well within their pocket money range. They'll bitch and whine about them of course but they won't turn the screws and take their money elsewhere.
But yes, it would be nice if GW woke up and realize they're finally headed over the cliff.
Maybe it is time for GW to just end? Wouldn't that wake people up and go shop to other places? They got to get their warhammer fix so might as well buy models that almost look like warhammer models.
I don't know, the roleplaying industry pretty much laid down to die when TSR went under. Here was this grand opportunity and nobody was in position to seize it and it almost seemed like the industry just clenched and balked at the time.
What Games Workshop really has to offer is a widely accepted standard.
The problem with the proliferation of standards is that trying to create a new standard only adds to the problem.
IBM faced a similar problem once upon a time.
(friend of a friend tale coming up!)
I recently read an anonymous post in a conversation from a Games Workshop shareholder who stated that GW couldn't give a rats ass about 3d printing and it is not deemed a threat. I can't find it now though.
Where ever you go on line though, no one (not even the fans) likes the company, or the way in which they are perceived to be gouging their core market every time a codex comes out. It appears as though they have a very bad image right now. Naive? Now? What about forever??
GW were a great company until they merged with citadel and started focusing on mini based games.
Without GW we wouldn't have Rogue Trooper, Fury of Dracula, Block Mania, Judge Dredd, Chainsaw Warrior.... these games were how I spend summer holidays between rpgs and the beach from the ages of 12 - 17
Re 3D printers - I suspect that small press producers with high-end printers selling boutique miniatures to the public is a lot more likely than is a 3D printer in every home. Lots of small companies, like the small pewter minis companies that currently exist, and costs only slightly below current pewter minis prices, which are around $6-$8 a figure. At the same time the availability of cheap 50p hard plastic miniatures from metal presses have exploded in the past few years from Mantic, Perry Twins, Warlord etc, and those metal molds will be around for decades.
I don't know if Reaper's current model of $3+ for soft plastics will remain viable, they seem to be trading off the rep of their pewter minis. I saw a player pay £2.50 for a Bones Elf that was nothing special, but it was individually packaged and sold alongside the pewter, and priced accordingly. My 50-75p Mantic figures (undead army box of 110 is RRP £50) have detail rather better than the Reaper Bones figures that are sold individually for around £2 or more.
Quote from: jibbajibba;724961GW were a great company until they merged with citadel and started focusing on mini based games.
Without GW we wouldn't have Rogue Trooper, Fury of Dracula, Block Mania, Judge Dredd, Chainsaw Warrior.... these games were how I spend summer holidays between rpgs and the beach from the ages of 12 - 17
GW always was the parent to Citadel.
Around issue 90 of WD they stopped focusing on other people's RPGs. Around issue 100+ they sidelined their own RPGs and pushed towards their wargames. In a couple of years they'd massively cut down on words and replaced them with pretty photos and adverts for their own stuff.
Yeah, GW were a great company, and a lot of UK gamers feel let down, me included. But that was a couple of decades ago, and I'm over it.
Still have originals of Fury, Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper, etc.
Quote from: S'mon;724981Re 3D printers - I suspect that small press producers with high-end printers selling boutique miniatures to the public is a lot more likely than is a 3D printer in every home.
Having talked to employees in a "proof of concept" 3D shop in New York, I'm inclined to agree.
I'm actually looking forward to eventually getting a custom set of miniatures printed that match my very specific monster preferences for D&D. I don't even mind the striation, I find it sort of charming in a "16-bit
Final Fantasy graphics" sort of way.
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;724994Having talked to employees in a "proof of concept" 3D shop in New York, I'm inclined to agree.
I'm actually looking forward to eventually getting a custom set of miniatures printed that match my very specific monster preferences for D&D. I don't even mind the striation, I find it sort of charming in a "16-bit Final Fantasy graphics" sort of way.
Apparently some Wal-Marts are setting up 3d scanning booths that for I think 40$ will make a very life-like colour 3d printed mini of you somehow. Think the figure was 100mm or taller though. Not sure.