Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Anyone else cheesed off about the new plasma obliterator being sold out already? I mean seriously we barely even got a chance to buy it, and I bet a good percent of the people who did are just gonna throw it up on ebay for $200. (like the void shield generator). They really should just keep producing these fortifications because they'd make so much more money. Then again, I am trying to understand the business practices of Games Workshop.

Did anyone who is going to USE the model actually grab one before they were gone?

I'm pretty sure six months from now you'll hear about boxes of the thing gathering dust at local game stores.

While not wanting to come across as blaming the victim, which is absolutely not what I believe, it is the consumer that's rewarding this behaviour by buying them in this case.

Businesses are like dogs, they react to very simple stimulus. If you wish to reward good behaviour you should give them a treat (money) and if you wish to reinforce what is unacceptable you smack them over the nose with a newspaper (withhold money.)

Unfortunately, while a normal company would have channels open to understand they were likely pissing off as many, if not more, people than they were selling to with this behaviour, GW do not.

This, along with a hard core of customers who seem to swallow whatever GW serves up every week (and one or two with poor impulse control on releases like this) means that a release like this is simply a guaranteed sum of money for GW whenever they choose to release it (remember, the game is not their priority, your cash is.)

All you can do is spend as little cash with them as possible, until their sales drop sufficiently that they sully themselves by communicating with their customers and deign to find out what we think (and get out of the mindset that they know what we want better than we do.)

If they had Facebook, Twitter, Focus Groups, Beta Testing and any other number of traditional customer feedback mechanisms, they'd probably be able to figure out roughly how many to produce, even if they still insisted on a limited run, more accurately.

The only ray of hope I can offer in this instance is this isn't a LE, it's a while stocks last, and it may be that the website allocation is sold out, there is stock allocated to stores which may give you a chance to grab one.

It was supposed to go on sale at 12AM tonight too just like the Void shield. And yeah if only they had some form of social media to communicate with us, it would hopefully help..

I bought three and plan to re-sell them for huge profit.

Not just a GW problem - limited editions, etc are sadly a plague industry-wide.

Kickstarter has only made things worse on top of that too.

I just resist buying any of that stuff.

With some Kickstarters, I've had to hold myself back simply because I liked some of the offerings of the limited release, and I doubt you'll see a chance at them in the future. However, the fact that I'll pretty much never be able to convince someone to play those games makes me shrug and resist purchasing them.

With GW, it's incredibly easy to resist because they've devalued their limited edition stuff to the point of meaninglessness. The limited editions of the rules are nearly pointless unless you're interested in the art, because the rules will most likely be invalid in two years.

The models that are limited are in such small supply that nobody in their right mind expects people to have the actual model for whatever unit it is (ex. Void Shielf Generator).

And some of their releases they just do again. And again. Point: Space Hulk- somehow that's magically popped up like on three separate occasions.

If you like the model for what it is, great, buy it. But if you feel some sort of "ohh, gotta get this before it's gone!" or "people will think it's cool that I'm the only one that got this" step away from your computer, slap yourself, and realize your thinking about small, nearly valueless pieces of plastic.

K?

It's not a statement for me, i genuinely think it"s a cool model, Would've made a great center piece on the table.

Oh, I know. My comment was more just to anyone overcome with the urge of picking up something because it's Limited Edition and not on its merits. And trust me, I've done it before- bought the nice limited edition rulebook of 6th edition 40k, only for it to become valid in the half the time of any previous edition!

Yeah I get where you're coming from. I'm sure I've splurged on something limited before, although I cant think of any examples haha.

 Azreal13 wrote:
If they had Facebook, Twitter, Focus Groups, Beta Testing and any other number of traditional customer feedback mechanisms, they'd probably be able to figure out roughly how many to produce, even if they still insisted on a limited run, more accurately.

Hell, if they simply had pre-orders more than one week from the release that would probably help them out a lot.

 Accolade wrote:
I just resist buying any of that stuff.

Not hard when it's $83. It's a neat-looking terrain piece but that's way too expensive for what it is.

Hell, if they simply had pre-orders more than one week from the release that would probably help them out a lot.

this, pre-orders a week in advance does nothing. a month (or more) in advance or more allows em to PRODUCE MORE, if a product turns out to be more popular then expected.

Business practice is to keep the stock-holding as cheap as possible.

They might pick up some of the fan feedback from Facebook or their forums about how many people want them, and then produce some more?

To be fair looking at it, as well as the range of decorated tubing, they probably didn't expect to sell more than a couple of dozen.

 PrehistoricUFO wrote:
I bought three and plan to re-sell them for huge profit.

That's the cruelest post I have read on this forum in some time.

 Pacific wrote:
They might pick up some of the fan feedback from Facebook or their forums about how many people want them, and then produce some more?

To be fair looking at it, as well as the range of decorated tubing, they probably didn't expect to sell more than a couple of dozen.

 PrehistoricUFO wrote:
I bought three and plan to re-sell them for huge profit.

That's the cruelest post I have read on this forum in some time.

Serious?

You must never go into Off-Topic or Tactics haha.

If it didn't look so terrible I might be sad about it. But yes I too hate limited edition runs.

Also unless I'm mistaken usually preorders don't tend to count for actual stock. They're additional. So preorders will never reduce stock to zero before the release date. Yet all these things have been totally sold out on preorder alone.

I'm confused they're showing as available for pre-order still for me, though I completely agree that the trend of making any piece with rules a limited release is ridiculous. Unless of course it's like Infinity, where it's not really a limited as such, more of a slightly exclusive alternative sculpt since they do generics for pretty much everything at some point.

Edit: Just realised as I was hitting the post button, US is indeed sold out but UK still has stock, not that it helps you unfortunately.

WayneTheGame wrote:
Also unless I'm mistaken usually preorders don't tend to count for actual stock. They're additional. So preorders will never reduce stock to zero before the release date. Yet all these things have been totally sold out on preorder alone.

Pre-orders won't count against stock shipping out to stores. But for a one-off release, they will account for all of the webstore stock, unless they pull some stock back from stores. And that does seem to happen... we've had a few stories over the last couple of years of stores not receiving their full order, or not receiving anything at all, on popular new releases.

 insaniak wrote:

WayneTheGame wrote:
Also unless I'm mistaken usually preorders don't tend to count for actual stock. They're additional. So preorders will never reduce stock to zero before the release date. Yet all these things have been totally sold out on preorder alone.

Pre-orders won't count against stock shipping out to stores. But for a one-off release, they will account for all of the webstore stock, unless they pull some stock back from stores. And that does seem to happen... we've had a few stories over the last couple of years of stores not receiving their full order, or not receiving anything at all, on popular new releases.

It's worth noting that it is not unheard of for the stock levels allocated to GW stores to get reduced because of lack of preorders, and that stock to get reallocated to stores that did get preorders.

I legitimately had no clue about this model. I usually check out GW's website every morning real quick to see if the White Dwarf Daily is any good.

I did this literally at 6 AM my time. I am never up this early. And they are already out of stock.

I get limited edition releases and what not, but Jesus Christ. This is ridiculous. There's no possible way for the regular consumer to have got one without going second hand.

 SRSFACE wrote:
I legitimately had no clue about this model. I usually check out GW's website every morning real quick to see if the White Dwarf Daily is any good.

I did this literally at 6 AM my time. I am never up this early. And they are already out of stock.

I get limited edition releases and what not, but Jesus Christ. This is ridiculous. There's no possible way for the regular consumer to have got one without going second hand.

I'm generally in store when the pre-orders get released, and they have to have a team doing them, from the second they're availiable, to try and push enough through for people to get what they want on limited runs

Exactly, Statu. You'd need to be lined up at the store the day new things typically get released, and if you weren't there, you'd miss out entirely. That's ludicrous business practices. Creating panic in your consumer base that they can't get what they want is absurd.

GW's entire business model lately has been "We're going to scare our own consumer base into not knowing what we want to do so they panic and buy things they think they'll never be able to get again." It's so anti-consumer, it blows my mind.

The concept here is that you produce the amount of goods you can definitely sell, and you know your investment requirement and profit that will be made.

So as a company you can be pretty sure you will sell let's say 20 limited edition kits a year, selling through 100,000 units of each and making £1 million profit on each release. That should cover up the declining sales of core items.

Loads of people aren't going to want the plasma tower, or the spiky pipelines, so it doesn't make good sense to keep them in stock for ever.

 wuestenfux wrote:
Business practice is to keep the stock-holding as cheap as possible.

Good business practice is not to leave money on the table. If you had perfect stock management, your last item would be sold to the last consumer who wanted it, but as that is impossible to predict, most businesses would prefer to have a few left over than have unfulfilled demand, not only because that's generally the most profitable scenario (especially with something with the mark up of models) and it also avoids the negative psychological impact not getting something they wanted will have on your customers.

If I was selling something and ran out 15 minutes before closing, I'd probably feel pretty good about things, if I ran out before lunch time, I'd be kicking myself.

In GW's case having a profit margin of 10% and a cost of goods of 25% they cannot afford to carry much overstock in the hope of selling some more units to avoid leaving money on the table, because a relatively small unsold stock eats into the overall profit margin quite considerably.

If they, I don't know, maybe communicated with their customers, did market research and didn't keep us in the dark about new releases until 0 hours, they could predict how many they would sell. Instead, they make everything so limited that 75% of the people who wanted it can't get it. That's not good business, and their yearly financial report shows just what their customer base thinks of their business practices. Oh well, back to painting my cryx.

 Azreal13 wrote:

 wuestenfux wrote:
Business practice is to keep the stock-holding as cheap as possible.

Good business practice is not to leave money on the table. If you had perfect stock management, your last item would be sold to the last consumer who wanted it, but as that is impossible to predict, most businesses would prefer to have a few left over than have unfulfilled demand, not only because that's generally the most profitable scenario (especially with something with the mark up of models) and it also avoids the negative psychological impact not getting something they wanted will have on your customers.

If I was selling something and ran out 15 minutes before closing, I'd probably feel pretty good about things, if I ran out before lunch time, I'd be kicking myself.

The following argument is predicated on the idea that the Plasma Obliterator is a plastic kit:

I can understand limited editions/quantities when you have to order something ahead of time from a factory in China and have it shipped to you overseas. But GW makes this kit themselves. They have the molds sitting in their own factory in the UK. There is no excuse, ever, for them to do a limited run on a plastic kit, especially when they like to tout how much it costs to create plastic kits. You run out, you make more. It's like GW decides they only want a certain amount of money, even though they could easily have more. "Nope, sorry, I only want to make $10,000 in sales today, even though I've got customers lined up ready to spend $20,000." Besides, isn't one of the primary purposes of pre-ordering to determine how much product you will need to produce to meet demand?

Although, to be honest, I wasn't going to buy this particular model anyway. I think it's stupid that it costs 200+ points and has the Gets Hot! rule. So, invariably, I will be rolling a "1" on the first turn in every game I would use it.

Some plastic terrain kits were/are cast in China rather than by GW proper. IIRC the Fantasy ones were prime examples of this.

Not saying that's the case here, but it is worth mentioning.

I find it funny, I just looked this morning and saw it, it's already sold out. It sold out before i even saw it