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Tried to pre-order Space Hulk from Miniature Market and got this as a response...


Greetings,

Unfortunately, at this time we will not be offering any of the upcoming Games Workshop items for pre order as due to increased pricing and distribution restrictions from the manufacturer we will not be bringing on any new Games Workshop items. Please let me know if there is anything further I may assist you with at this time.

Chris B.
Customer Service Representative
Miniature Market
support@miniaturemarket.com
877.326.4429

I wonder if this was a business decision made by MM, or perhaps GW flexing their muscles due to a possible breach in distribution terms or discount prices?

It starts...

Interesting, but we don't really use emails as solid evidence in these parts. It could also be related to restrictions on quantity of the item in question.

Well, it would be a sad day if true, I always have great service when buying from them, and enjoy the discount that they have been able to pass along....without which, I would be buying much less GW product. The free shipping on orders over $99 always had me coming back.

I managed to grab the Tantive IV for X-Wing from them for $40 when they had it up for a 1-day sale...

Can't get the Reaper LTPK or Core 2014 Expansion, or Mantic KoW sets from them, either. Maybe they're gonna call themselves "Market" in a few months...

Reaper and Mantic have some supply problems from time to time, and more so whenever there is a Kickstarter going on. PP also has supply issues, though not for the same reasons.

ced1106 wrote:
Can't get the Reaper LTPK or Core 2014 Expansion, or Mantic KoW sets from them, either. Maybe they're gonna call themselves "Market" in a few months...

Ha, good point! They don't carry Flames of War either...

 Fango wrote:

ced1106 wrote:
Can't get the Reaper LTPK or Core 2014 Expansion, or Mantic KoW sets from them, either. Maybe they're gonna call themselves "Market" in a few months...

Ha, good point! They don't carry Flames of War either...

They used to, but they had a massiv clearance sale some 3-4 years back. I think it might have been a problem similar to what they facing with GW now.

I've never ordered GW products from them anyway, but I suppose they know what's best for their business. On the face of it, though, it seems like a bad move, but then again trying to sell GW online is a hassle anyway.

I wonder if these "distribution restrictions" are an effort to curtail discounting?

 Breotan wrote:
I wonder if these "distribution restrictions" are an effort to curtail discounting?

Wouldn't doubt it. Screw over independents to funnel more direct through the web store.

The more they tighten their grip the more players will slip through their fingers...

Hope the company still gets enough turnover, but reduced supply of GW minis does not bother me. Results in increased supply of competing games you'd imagine. Games made by companies that don't treat partners and customers like gak. Warlord Games basically sold me on Bolt Acton recently due to a great promotion. Going to get into that with my old man - historicals interest him where sci fi and fantasy do not. Opposite business practice to GW brining in new customers rather than driving them away.

Damn that was my favorite place to buy.

Not unsurprising - but won't affect me since I threw off the GW yoke recently. We'll see how long this lasts. with some of the decisions that GW has made recently I'm curious if this is trying to drum up business - or dig the hole deeper for an acquisition. Either way I think that Miniature Market will be fine.

I would not be surprised if they did drop GW products since it is a hassle to for them to sell it online because of corporate shenanigans from GW. Although I am not sure if it is the best business decision since then they are essentially cutting a good amount of a potential market for their competitors but I would have to see in the near future how this pans out.

There are a large amount of game stores that do not carry any GW product and somehow survive...it's almost as if GW is a tiny, infinitesimal slice of the table top gaming market...

They're still the biggest in terms of sales. Either way just seems like the GW Conspiracy video was right constantly pushing towards being the only seller of their product.

Miniature Market will be fine. They're daily sales seem to go over quite well, with popular products being gone in hours, if not sooner.

The fact that they have a 40% of WM/H sale still going on for over a month, and pretty quick restocks, tells me they've found a niche they're happy to remain in without the headaches of GW.

Then again, since they do preorders, they could've been burnt by GW on supply issues for limited items.

They have provided me two years of great GW service. This is sad but understandable.

THAT explains the 40% of WM/Hordes sale.

I was wondering if it was something like that. I mean - they're building up tons of new customers and luring customers away from other stores that offer Warmahordes at a discount.

It makes sense that if you're going to drop the biggest game around you'd invest heavily into spreading the playerbase and making a name for yourself selling the second biggest game around.


* Also - checking my trash the last "GW updating product list" (i.e. the pain in the ass excel file they have to use because GW won't just allow them to let customers use a shopping cart) was for Nagash. It had been a weekly update, but they've not updated with the last few releases.

I can only assume that they also do a lot of turnover of M:TG et al products as well. Not to mention X-Wing doing gangbusters nowadays - and the other two FFG Star Wars products directly on the horizon. Remember, the hobby space and overall spending is expanding - it's only GW that's really contracting right now.

They dropped the KoW stuff, and are dropping the Deepwars stuff too.

Huge fan of the store, but they are driving my business to the Warstore and elsewhere.

I called them to preorder space hulk and was told the same thing too.

 Phobos wrote:
They dropped the KoW stuff, and are dropping the Deepwars stuff too.

Huge fan of the store, but they are driving my business to the Warstore and elsewhere.

*shrug* - the Kings of War stuff was constantly in the clearance section. Can't blame them for dropping the line if it wasn't selling. Can't recall if Deepwars was always clearance fodder or not, but I'm not surprised that it's not a big seller.

Good for them. GW needs to take it the shorts until they reduce their prices and make a great rules set.

 agnosto wrote:
There are a large amount of game stores that do not carry any GW product and somehow survive...it's almost as if GW is a tiny, infinitesimal slice of the table top gaming market...

if by Tiny you mean Huge I'm not sure that they are still the majority of the gaming market, with so many new games coming out, but compare them to any other game and GW dwarf other companies in sales. MTG is far above GW, and any other game, so it's only in comparing miniature games is GW still king.

Stores can survive without GW. GW is teaching us that. I only carry about 40% of the GW is used to. Not by choice. GW took it all away. I have a couple dozen plastic blisters, some rotting finecast, and about half the plastic kits. The rest is "Direct order Only". And while i can get direct order, it costs more, and comes in generic plastic bags and white boxes, not suitable for a store.

My sales rep asked me why my GW sales were down. I pointed out that only carrying half the product line had resulted in half sales. For years they told stores they could sell more GW by carrying more GW. Now they take it away and wonder why their sales and my sales are both down.

Can Inquistors shoot people for being stupid? Anyone got a spifffy cap and sash, and a spare bolt pistol? oh, and probably lots of ammo, the rot has spread far in GW HQ.

 mikhaila wrote:

if by Tiny you mean Huge I'm not sure that they are still the majority of the gaming market, with so many new games coming out, but compare them to any other game and GW dwarf other companies in sales. MTG is far above GW, and any other game, so it's only in comparing miniature games is GW still king.

Stores can survive without GW. GW is teaching us that. I only carry about 40% of the GW is used to. Not by choice. GW took it all away. I have a couple dozen plastic blisters, some rotting finecast, and about half the plastic kits. The rest is "Direct order Only". And while i can get direct order, it costs more, and comes in generic plastic bags and white boxes, not suitable for a store.

My sales rep asked me why my GW sales were down. I pointed out that only carrying half the product line had resulted in half sales. For years they told stores they could sell more GW by carrying more GW. Now they take it away and wonder why their sales and my sales are both down.

I love how your posts consistently bring reality and an on-the-ground perspective to these kind of conversations.

I'm curious to know if the rep was surprised by your answer and if they seemed to have any desire to change the situation. For Direct-Only items, do GW stores have them in proper packaging, or do they have to order them in blank packaging as well?

 mikhaila wrote:

 agnosto wrote:
There are a large amount of game stores that do not carry any GW product and somehow survive...it's almost as if GW is a tiny, infinitesimal slice of the table top gaming market...

if by Tiny you mean Huge I'm not sure that they are still the majority of the gaming market, with so many new games coming out, but compare them to any other game and GW dwarf other companies in sales. MTG is far above GW, and any other game, so it's only in comparing miniature games is GW still king.

Stores can survive without GW. GW is teaching us that. I only carry about 40% of the GW is used to. Not by choice. GW took it all away. I have a couple dozen plastic blisters, some rotting finecast, and about half the plastic kits. The rest is "Direct order Only". And while i can get direct order, it costs more, and comes in generic plastic bags and white boxes, not suitable for a store.

My sales rep asked me why my GW sales were down. I pointed out that only carrying half the product line had resulted in half sales. For years they told stores they could sell more GW by carrying more GW. Now they take it away and wonder why their sales and my sales are both down.

Can Inquistors shoot people for being stupid? Anyone got a spifffy cap and sash, and a spare bolt pistol? oh, and probably lots of ammo, the rot has spread far in GW HQ.

They don't wonder at all, they know exactly what they are doing. They couldn't afford to cut off Independents overnight, they want it to happen gradually at their pace, hoover all the margin up themselves. Smaller market but no nasty third parties selling their product and making them money.

They have cut costs, they should not be looking to generate growth on the back of that but they don't seem to have any plan for it.

 mikhaila wrote:

 agnosto wrote:
There are a large amount of game stores that do not carry any GW product and somehow survive...it's almost as if GW is a tiny, infinitesimal slice of the table top gaming market...

if by Tiny you mean Huge I'm not sure that they are still the majority of the gaming market, with so many new games coming out, but compare them to any other game and GW dwarf other companies in sales. MTG is far above GW, and any other game, so it's only in comparing miniature games is GW still king.

Stores can survive without GW. GW is teaching us that. I only carry about 40% of the GW is used to. Not by choice. GW took it all away. I have a couple dozen plastic blisters, some rotting finecast, and about half the plastic kits. The rest is "Direct order Only". And while i can get direct order, it costs more, and comes in generic plastic bags and white boxes, not suitable for a store.

My sales rep asked me why my GW sales were down. I pointed out that only carrying half the product line had resulted in half sales. For years they told stores they could sell more GW by carrying more GW. Now they take it away and wonder why their sales and my sales are both down.

Can Inquistors shoot people for being stupid? Anyone got a spifffy cap and sash, and a spare bolt pistol? oh, and probably lots of ammo, the rot has spread far in GW HQ.

I can't attest to what you are seeing in your area or in your stores but GW products have always been a "nitch of a nitch" around here...well for the last 5-10 years anyway and even more so recently. Out of the 3 game stores in my area, GW products represent the minority of shelf-space in two of them. The largest store has regular warmahordes events and corporate sponsorship at a recent, very large one when PP released the newest expansion. This and the usual, regular MtG tournaments seems to be the bulk of their sales with board games and historicals coming in as well. They have information from their last league of 40k, back in 2012 and the fantasy league TBD in 2012 on their website and the monthly calendar has zero GW-based events. Though not a huge game store by some standards, I suppose, they have in excess of of a couple thousand square foot of retail space and I estimate at about 2-3000 square foot of gaming space. The smallest store has a largely unattended warhammer night once per week, in the middle of the week with MtG taking up all the scheduled table-time on weekends.

Just got the standard email of update gw products so I guess they're not stopping anytime soon.

 agnosto wrote:

 mikhaila wrote:

 agnosto wrote:
There are a large amount of game stores that do not carry any GW product and somehow survive...it's almost as if GW is a tiny, infinitesimal slice of the table top gaming market...

if by Tiny you mean Huge I'm not sure that they are still the majority of the gaming market, with so many new games coming out, but compare them to any other game and GW dwarf other companies in sales. MTG is far above GW, and any other game, so it's only in comparing miniature games is GW still king.

Stores can survive without GW. GW is teaching us that. I only carry about 40% of the GW is used to. Not by choice. GW took it all away. I have a couple dozen plastic blisters, some rotting finecast, and about half the plastic kits. The rest is "Direct order Only". And while i can get direct order, it costs more, and comes in generic plastic bags and white boxes, not suitable for a store.

My sales rep asked me why my GW sales were down. I pointed out that only carrying half the product line had resulted in half sales. For years they told stores they could sell more GW by carrying more GW. Now they take it away and wonder why their sales and my sales are both down.

Can Inquistors shoot people for being stupid? Anyone got a spifffy cap and sash, and a spare bolt pistol? oh, and probably lots of ammo, the rot has spread far in GW HQ.

I can't attest to what you are seeing in your area or in your stores but GW products have always been a "nitch of a nitch" around here...well for the last 5-10 years anyway and even more so recently. Out of the 3 game stores in my area, GW products represent the minority of shelf-space in two of them. The largest store has regular warmahordes events and corporate sponsorship at a recent, very large one when PP released the newest expansion. This and the usual, regular MtG tournaments seems to be the bulk of their sales with board games and historicals coming in as well. They have information from their last league of 40k, back in 2012 and the fantasy league TBD in 2012 on their website and the monthly calendar has zero GW-based events. Though not a huge game store by some standards, I suppose, they have in excess of of a couple thousand square foot of retail space and I estimate at about 2-3000 square foot of gaming space. The smallest store has a largely unattended warhammer night once per week, in the middle of the week with MtG taking up all the scheduled table-time on weekends.

Not talking about what anyone sees at a regional level. If you're original comment was mean't just to reflect on your guess at a local area's sales, I'm certainly not going to argue it.

My comments were based on US and Worldwide sales numbers.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Eilif wrote:

I love how your posts consistently bring reality and an on-the-ground perspective to these kind of conversations.

I'm curious to know if the rep was surprised by your answer and if they seemed to have any desire to change the situation. For Direct-Only items, do GW stores have them in proper packaging, or do they have to order them in blank packaging as well?

The sales reps at GW see very little of any of the reality of what goes on in game stores. The longer they work for the company, the more jaded they get So a lot of direct info can surprise them. Most of the reps I've worked with would love to change the current situation. But they can't. Can't usually even talk about it or buck the company line. I know it's frustrating to many of them.

The direct only products generally are never found in GW stores. When they move something to direct, it leaves GW stores as well as FLGS. They only want direct only products to go to GW stores if it's a special order, and already paid for.