zedmeister wrote:
Ravenous D wrote:
This is required reading. especially the "Why Games Workshop is Bad and it Should Feel Bad" section.
Re-post for the workblocked (or the inappropriateness of accessing that link at work!)?
Only posting that section - its a doosey.
Why Games Workshop is Bad and it Should Feel Bad
When speaking of a company, a person is tempted to think of a large body of human beings coming together in an efficient group. The group is governed, and it is thought that someone is there to ascertain the best possible choices are being made granted the information available at hand. However, this perspective, like most of
40k's explicit war “tactics”, is absolute nonsensical trash.
Never mind that large groups are often less efficient due to the fact that most people like to agree and be part of a group, even if the group is wrong. Forget that the burden of hard work is often shrugged off thanks to the assumption that everyone else will be carrying enough of the real challenges to pull things through. Instead, focus on the fact that the people heading
GW – or most large corporations for that matter – are successful, rich, ordinary men who are blessed by good fortune in an unfair universe and probably don't realize the reality. Further, examine the knowledge that, according to Sun Tzu and a variety of psychological studies, successful rich people with the profound luck are the folks most likely to make stupid mistakes out of anyone!
Now you know why
GW (or the entire world, for that matter) is run the way it is.
A source of some debate on /tg/ is whether or not
GW is actually charging prices that make sense for the hobby. All logic points to a resounding “no”, but another interesting social phenomena is this: fanboyism is an inbuilt human process. Whenever money is spent on a good, especially a luxury item, man has a way of increasing the illusionary worth of that item.
Imagine buying tickets to see your local team play football, and they lose. It's not even a good game, to be honest. People around the country were disappointed. However, those tickets cost a lot of money, and having spent all that money for so little in return makes a person feel stupid. We grope for other things, then, to make the tickets worth while. Yes, it was cold, but your wife was there, so you bonded! The beer was too expensive as well, but they sold your favorite brand! You had an experience! It was fun! Yes, those tickets were worth it in the end.
We'll even do this with soft drinks. Even if brain probes reveal a man likes Pepsi more than Coke, going back and telling the man what he was drinking can actually alter his memory so that he remembers liking the Coke more. It's amazing.
GW products are exactly the same way. They're ludicrously expensive. Even people who support
GW fervently wish they weren't. It hurts. In a rough economy, it's hard to play the game. You spend months, years – who knows how long waiting for that new codex, it turns out to be awful compared to expectations (hello, Tyranids!), and now you've either got to suck it up and keep playing (got to buy the new Trygons, I guess, even though they aren't that great), or take a huge monetary loss and give up. Fanboyism steps in and makes it all okay. You're not just buying the models, but the game and the network utility too, so
40k is still totally fun and cool!
Big corporations, and
GW as well, are predators. They feast on fanboyism. Like the Dark Eldar, they prey on your suffering and write sick, stomach-turning poetry about the flowing, green streams of vital wealth they siphon from your being. You are a toy. That cute girl at the convenience store you see all the time? Thanks to
GW, you have to choose between inviting her to the theater and buying that new squadron of Guardsmen. Those of you scoffing at the dilemma, shut up; those Guardsmen are not going to nag nearly as much after you've had them for a little while, so it's totally a tough call.
But putty in their hands you may be, there are still some principles of basic economics that imply
GW might not be earning enough revenue, and surprisingly, they can only lose more money by raising prices! There's no real way of knowing how things really are within
GW without a look at the delicate, inner machinery they need to shoo Matt Ward's putrid, corrosive stench away from. But it does all come back to our first consideration:
GW is run by the type of person most notable for making poor decisions – successful people, and a group, no less.
The situation is thus: there is more to money flow than just the bottom line, though often it's all we think of, but basically there's income, cost, and revenue. What is of most concern is revenue, which could also be thought of as profit.
GW sells their models for a greater amount than what they cost, and the amount they make is revenue!
So now, there's revenue, and then there's marginal revenue. Revenue is just how much you make. Sell a thousand Guardsmen and make ten thousand dollars? Your Guardsmen revenue is $10,000! Marginal revenue, on the other hand, is how much you make compared to selling one less of the item. In this case, the Guardsmen have a marginal revenue of $10. Each Guardsman made a profit of $10, and if you sold one less Guardsman, you'd make $10 less. See? Easy. Well, for this simplified example anyway (in reality there are a lot of fixed start-up costs, but point made).
Now let's raise prices. From now on, we'll sell half as many Guardsmen per box, and the boxes will cost the same. Now marginal revenue is $22, because every time a Guardsman is sold, we bring in $20 per Guardsman plus an additional $2 gets saved thanks to the Guardsmen we didn't make! This is cool – we're in business, just like
GW, /tg/! Let's do that again – our customers are fans, they'll bare it! Now we'll sell five Guardsmen to a box, and we have a marginal revenue of $45!
Okay, wait, wait. I've got it. I'm a genius. Let's sell one Guardsman. Sell it for the same price we used to sell twenty of them! We're going to be rich! Marginal revenue is going to be amazing! Like, what, over a hundred dollars a purchase?
So what's our profit in the end? What! Negative? How!? We're making so much per model! The marginal revenue is so high!
The answer is simple. Not enough people are buying one crappy Guardsman for $200 dollars. A few of the fans are sticking it out, hating us relentlessly, but newcomers to the game see the price tag and run screaming. People who can't afford it leave because they have no other choice, but they're happy in retrospect. Even some of our most loyal customers finally decided to just date that girl after all – she's not nearly as pricey and they'll deal with her constant bitching. Actual revenue is at an all time low.
Believe it or not, companies really do make this mistake, albeit not to this extent (unless you check out Forge World, anyway. Anyone want a Tau Manta? Only costs more than $1,000). It's because maximizing marginal revenue is very easy. It's simple arithmetic, and if your market base is rather inelastic (and
GW's market base certainly is due to the high investment requirements of their games), a lot of times price changes won't have a huge impact, so it's easier to focus on.
GW is at some point in the middle here, where it has started to become questionable.
It's hard to say if they're making right decisions or if their pricing makes the most sense. It's becoming the status quo that their games are really a hobby of those with absurd disposable income, which is not a quality described of the young men who are presumed to make up
40k's primary demographic. It's possible that they're targeting young teens with parents who will buy the models for them, but that's hard to say as well since parents will lack the dedicated fanboyism to continually invest in the absurdly priced hobby.
Mix in unbalanced rules that unfairly favor certain factions, long wait times between army updates, inferior model quality compared to what's provided to model hobbyists outside of the wargaming industry, and
GW may have a recipe for a failing market.
In fact, by using some math and basic market theory, we can actually take a look at how much
GW is supposedly spending to bring our hobby to us.
The list below will give us some basic numbers to work with. We know that
GW currently sells its rule books at $74.25. What we don't know is
GW's actual costs or how many books they're selling. These things have an impact on the math, but we'll sort of fudge it. Now, based on that alone, we want to price our book at twice what it costs to make the thing. In the real world all this nice math has the tendency to fly apart, but generally speaking that's the ideal manner of doing things. For example:
Quantity sold: 0 Price of book: $0 Estimated cost to
GW: $0 Marginal Cost: $0 Marginal Revenue: $0 Total Revenue: $0
Quantity sold: 1 Price of book: $74.25 Estimated cost to
GW: $37.13 Marginal Cost: $37.13 Marginal Revenue: $37.12 Total Revenue: $37.12
Quantity sold: 2 Price of book: $74.25 Estimated cost to
GW: $74.25 Marginal Cost: $37.13 Marginal Revenue: $37.12 Total Revenue: $74.25
And so on. Since we're assuming that every book has a fixed cost to produce, we just get a rough idea of what it's actually costing
GW to make rule books for us. Or so such is true only if we figure they're trying to price things according to a competitive market where the consumer sets the price. Basic economics says we want to have a marginal revenue equal to our marginal cost if we want to work with a price we can't really control, and that's what this does.
See, there's a few things to consider. The first is that, in a competitive market, people are just going to buy the cheapest product. That means whoever is selling cheapest kind of wins the day, but while
GW could maybe sell their rule books at $20 each, they'd be suffering huge profit losses that are not directly proportionate to the change in price. Instead, they'll try to follow along with what the market is doing, and to their very best possible effort, they'll try to lower their costs so that the marginal costs equal the marginal revenue (or, again, their prices are basically double their production costs per item). That just simply maximizes revenue, since if they raise prices their competitors will undercut them and
GW will be able to sell nothing.
But honestly, if you've read this far, then hopefully you're braced for this shock. According to estimates from a few publishers, it only costs about $3 per book to publish 5,000 hardback books, and that cost decreases as you publish in greater bulk.
40k books do have a lot of pretty pictures, so maybe that increases costs somewhat, but again, costs generally tend to get smaller as you order more of an item, and it's pretty likely that
GW is not just settling for a measly 5,000 books internationally. They sell all over the world.
So where are all these other costs popping up that should cause
GW to spend $37 on every single book they produce? In small production quantities, we'd consider the cost of labor. Who knows how much Matt Ward demands to be paid to lick every rule book before it leaves the factory! What do the photographers want in compensation? Actually, stop. At
GW's production rates, those expense considerations become almost completely negligible. You pay Matt Ward a salary to lick all the books. It's a yearly thing. You pay him once and you're done, so by the time you've produced a million books, even if you paid Matt a million dollars to slobber on every single page, Matt is only increasing the cost of the books by a dollar each.
Margins are all that matter.
GW talks about overheads and so forth as an excuse, but that's insanity. In a perfectly competitive market you don't increase prices to cover overheads. You reduce the overheads because they're predictable annual costs that you more or less established on your own! Besides, you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily raise prices like that, seeing as how your competitors are supposedly keeping you in check! So really, what we can infer is the following:
A. Basically,
GW has no competitors controlling their pricing right now.
B. They are price gouging their players.
C. Their pricing is not directly related to their costs, and anything they say to the contrary is a big fat lie.
D. You could play another game, but all your friends are playing
40k anyway and you don't want to feel left out.
E. **** Games Workshop
This article also explains the problem with Australian prices, in a slightly less detailed manner
Eldar - 105,000pts (Estimated), 
Tyranids - 15,000pts
