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Over the last few years Gw has mentioned a number of times in it's quarterly reports that the market place is shrinking. Examples given are the rise of console gaming, combat card games and other gaming systems.

Having just recently decided to sell my 40k armies and start WWII wargaming (28nn & 15mm) I have found that there is a huge market place out there for this stuff. Everytime I go to the local show at Bovington Tank muesum it is packed with different manufacturers with the same sort of stuff, but all of it selling. Huge demo games take place, with mainstream rules and custom rules. From what I've heard this happens at shows all over the country, so the idea of a market place shrinking seems to totally off the mark here.

You could even compare WWII gaming to 40k in the fact that you have set forces and can't really create your own, but this doesn't stop people playing it.

What is your point? That the brass-hats in charge of GW are making excuses for their company's shrinking profits? Excuses, I mean, other than "We expected people to be happy to buy our miniatures at a premium price while providing mediocre rules, even though our marketing model makes us invalidate the in-game usefulness of those expensive models every 3 to 5 years." Or "We are out of touch with our customer base, and rather than address the concerns of long-time customers, we've been trying to develop a new market share in the 8-14 year old segment, where we are competing directly with console games and collectible cards."

Kirby & the rest have been trying to shift the blame for the poor performance for several years, but they finally admitted they were fat & lazy, hoping that the astonishing device of honesty might preserve their fat corporate paychecks for another year. Of course, they haven't actually changed the way they do business yet.

According to Tom Kirby (CEO of GW), he continues to say the exact opposite.  "'We continue to see Games Workshop as a growth business. We believe that it is
only a matter of time and hard work before we re-establish our historic linear
growth rate."

Several smaller companies have indicated that there sales have increased in recent years (Warmachine, Reaper, etc.) 

There has been speculation on this board and other message boards that WoW and console games have stolen away customers, but I've yet to see any hard evidence of this.

In short, no one knows if miniature gaming is growing or shrinking.  One company may have decreasing sales, but is that the whole market shrinking or just its competitors taking away marketshare.

 

 

That's my point. Tom Kirby tries to make out that the market place is hard, but I don't think it is. There is strong competition out there with fiction based games and the historical stuff seems to plod on with no worries, in fact there appears to be a few more manufacturers out there now.

I don't know about Kirby, but there have been a couple of articles from various sources that the RPG and miniatures hobby has been in decline, based on number of store closings, % of market etc.

Having said that, it's clear that this is a golden age of miniatures gaming (and RPGs to a certain degree). There is a huge diversity of figure and terrain makers out there, whereas once there had only been a handful. You want sci-fi prussians in 30mm scale? You got it. ACW Zouaves with kepis in 40mm? Here's three makers to choose from. Carlist Wars? Don't even get started. Spanish Civil War? Vietnam? World Wars I and II? Sci-fi? Fantasy? Cartoonish robots? Usagi Yojimbo minis? What's your pleasure?

The internet has allowed tons of these little mom-and-pop operations (some of them the brainchilds of sculptors who, at one point in their careers, would have been beholden to whoever was selling the most stuff) to sell their figs, terrain, and rules worldwide, rather than a small audience at a few shows. And those few shows continue to be huge, with lots of smaller shows dotting the landscape.

Add to that the online blogs, magazines, and websites devoted to the various aspects of the hobby (painting, battle reports, what's new, different genres, etc.) and it becomes clear that CMGs, CCGs, WOW, girls etc. are not killing the hobby.

GW's problem is that, at one point, the time everyone remembers as its heyday, it was the only game in town.* VOID and Celtos were going belly-up, Warzone and Chronopia had died, Reaper was basically doing D&D figs, VOR went the way with Ral Partha, Heartbreaker didn't have a chance, WOTC gave up on Chainmail VERY quickly...which meant that GW was the only game in town if you wanted to do 25- 28mm sci-fi or fantasy. So they got lazy. Bad rules. Bloated prices. Getting rid of fan faves (i.e. Specialist games), the watering down of WD, bad relations with retailers and etailers.

GW in large respects has turned itself around. A number of their sculpts are truly awesome and have gotten better, they have some very reasonably priced figures (whatever you think of LOTR, their plastic box sets are a steal), and the WH historicals and LOTR rules are pretty tight, as are the Specialist games. They're doing a bang-up job with retailers again. But they're playing catchup after years of pushing many a fan away, and doing a bad job of bringing in new blood AND KEEPING IT. There's other options out there now, cheaper options (sometimes), or similarly priced options that are better quality.

The hobby's fine: prepainted plastics, video games and cocaine are not doing anything to this hobby. GW just hasn't figured out what it means to exist in a world where they're not the only option. Add to that problem the glut of the secondary market: Ebay, bartertown, local auctions etc. There's so much product out there, most of which has not been updated, or even if it has still holds up fine, that there's no point to buying new (Are the new dwarves that much better than the old? Are Vostroyans that much more impressive than Valhallans, or Steel Legion?).

Now, when tin prices go so high that more and more small operators have to shut their doors because no-one's buying, or too many small-to-medium operators think they can go without a day job (or have to go back to a day job) and start losing money, or when the markets tank so bad that everyone's closing their paypal accounts, or more large cons start closing their doors because they can't bring in the vendors to pay the rent for the facility, then we should start worrying about the hobby...

*Obviously, they weren't, otherwise you wouldn't have Stargrunt, Foundry, historicals of all kinds, etc. But for huge swaths of gamers, GW was it. Yeah, maybe you bought some dusty, hidden Old Glory Normans to supplement your Bretonnians, but you never thought of using OG figs for HISTORICAL games. And by the time you picked that bag of lead out, how many boxes of Men-at-arms had you bought?

Kid Kyoto has hit the nail on the head.

GW thinks the hobby is in decline because they think they are (or should be) the hobby.

I've been TT wargaming for over 30 years. The only sector that has undergone a serious collapse is the Avalon Hill style complex board wargames. Everything else is thriving.

The WWW allows small garage operations (which most wargame companies are) to market to the same degree as the biggest companies. Most of the work designing and publishing figures and rules can be done on a hobby basis, so there are tons of small companies.

If anything, the problem now is too much choice!

Posted By syr8766 on 08/16/2007 6:15 AM


You want sci-fi prussians in 30mm scale? You got it. ACW Zouaves with kepis in 40mm? Here's three makers to choose from. Carlist Wars? Don't even get started. Spanish Civil War? Vietnam? World Wars I and II? Sci-fi? Fantasy? Cartoonish robots? Usagi Yojimbo minis? What's your pleasure?

I'm still waiting on His Magesty's Flatulent Grenediers from the War of Jenkin's Ear (in 32mm of course, I can only find them in 28mm) but generally yes.

I think mini gaming which gives you tangible playing peices and flesh and blood foes is always going to be a good counter to online gaming and the like.

This is just another excuse. They can't admit their flawed business model failed. So it has to be the fault of the "market." Why not blame it on God, Allah and Zeus while they are at it? Ends up about the same.

ender502

Posted By Kid_Kyoto on 08/16/2007 7:01 AM

I think mini gaming which gives you tangible playing peices and flesh and blood foes is always going to be a good counter to online gaming and the like.

 

Definitely.

Computer games simplfiy complex rules and minimise setup time and space requirements, but they do not satisfy the emotional quality you get from choosing and painting an army.

Board wargames fell partly because they maximise the problems of rules and setup without providing any more emotional investment than a computer game.

A recent poll by Frothers: www.frothersunite.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php indicated that a majority of those at the smaller end of the market place believed their businesses were growing, not shrinking.

Now "The GW Hobby" may be in decline, but everything else points to "the table-top wargaming hobby" growing!

I won't restate the evidence cited in posts above, but just add the point that recently Rackham and Mongoose and latterly Reaper have taken a massive gamble in investing in the new area of plastic prepaints, to various effect.  Now if this were a declining market then small-medium companies like that would no way consider even taking on such a gamble.  If the market were constricting then the smaller companies would be playing it safe and not taking any risks at all.  In fact the smaller companies would be falling like flies without reserves the size of GW's to fall back on.

Another key piece of evidence is that Salute 2007 (the UK's largest wargaming convention) was the biggest and most successful ever and GW barely registered a presence.

Nope. GW's woes are (as Kirby finally admitted in this year's report) are of GW's own creation entirely.  They carried on producing stuff they wanted to produce at a time when in increasing numbers their customers were wanting something else.

GW's problems are a result of simply not trying to compete in a marketplace that they hadn't realised was getting competitive.  In Kirby's own words they became "fat and lazy" as a corporation and took their customers for granted.

When I started war gaming (1998-1999) it really did seem like GW was the only option. I'm sure there were alternatives, in fact my local store stocked some. However, they stocked them IN the GW shelves as "Looks like a Falcon" or "Looks like a Leman Russ", which only further cemented in my young mind that GW was the be-all end-all of war gaming.
Slowly, I found the truth to be otherwise. In fact, I think I started gaming right near the beginning of GW's decline (right when third edition 40k came out, i started 40k... it's been mostly downhill after a few years of that).

I recall from a podcast talking about the great fandom, to include all nerdly hobbies. I think there are some problems particullarly in historical minatures, in that players are unwilling to play down. It used to be so much easier to creep into the hobby, people would sit down and teach you how to play. However now, if you want to learn how to play, and that requires a lot of help, you need somebody who trusts you deeply, and has a lot of free time. He's got to lend you an army, and I don't know about you, but people who actually can afford 2 fully playable armies are rare, so are people who will let you borrow 700$ worth of stuff. And you better hope that the army this friend lets you borrow is one you happen to like.

But that's not how it works anymore, I see newbies and its just brutal, they come in, stone cold, drop a few hundred bucks for an army box (that nobody has the heart to tell them that its an unplayable force of only about 750 points.) that they then put together try to play, and do nothing but get pureed in 3 turns against a cheezed out Berzerker cult army. Its no fun watching somebody else roll dice all night.

I mean when I got into the hobby it was a lot different, it was right before 3rd edition came out, and everything was equal, nobody knew the rules, nobody had figured out how to break the game yet, we all came in together and learned together.

I came in at the very beggining of third eddition (no armies were in codex form yet, it was all in the rulebook) and slowly pieced together an army. The vets crushed me and were rude. My friends my age were in the same position and we had fun learned and played together. Not much difference between my vets and yours. You will always have the guys that make getting into something hard, they are no more prevalent now then they were before.

The big difference is that 40k costs twice as much as it once did (As do all miniatures games), computer and console games are better, and computers and consoles are cheaper. Now add to that the fact that the MMO market alone is tearing the base out of the hobby industry in all its markets (From ccg's to RPG's to model games) and the fact that the current economy is not friendly to non vital spending and hasn't been since the early 2000 reccession and you have a formulae for constantly declining sales and a shrinking market share.

The shrinking market share isn't GW propaganda, its quite real. I've seen dozens of examples of it personally in my own local gaming sphere.

>>The shrinking market share isn't GW propaganda, its quite real. I've seen dozens of examples of it personally in my own local gaming sphere.

Yet if you go online you can find loads more stuff in every area of tabletop gaming than there was 10 years ago or 20 years ago (judging by magazine adverts.)

Plus, many classic games are still going, for example Battletech, Starfire, General Quarters, Advanced Squad Leader, and DBA as well as all the new stuff that has come along.

Yup, GW's shrinking market *share* is real enough. But the market ain't shrinking. It is moving around all the time though and so those that don't move with it fall behind and die, but it ain't shrinking.

The bottom line is that those at the top of the pile that is GW think they know best. Not so much from past 'success' but more in the line of buying into their own propoganda.

They are analyogous to WW1 generals, their way is the right way. And mounting losses will do nothing to change their point of view, that would force trhem to confront mental illusions of greatness that they have built around themselves.

Both GW Studio and GW head office have this same problem and feed off each other with it. Consequently they listen to anyone in the company who feeds their egos and the realists are made redundant.

Thjis is not just a rant, but an observation of the company from the outside, cross referenced with observations of people I know in the inside.