Dear Sir,
It is with regret that after 23 years of loyal custom I feel compelled to cease purchasing Games Workshop product and look for alternatives elsewhere. Despite the abiding appeal of your games and the settings thereof, I can no longer support a company whose business decisions are so flagrantly to the detriment of their customers.

I appreciate that Games Workshop is a business and must make a profit. I further understand that as a publicly traded company, you have an obligation to your shareholders – but if your decisions (designed it seems purely to prop up short term profit margins) lead to the alienation of your customers and a continuation of the falling sales volume you have experienced for many years, then I see no long term future for the company.

It is a fact – and one that you and your colleagues have stated publicly – that you rely on the goodwill of your customers to advertise your product through word-of-mouth recommendation, yet your actions often indicate nothing but contempt for the hopes and expectations of those customers, as examples:

1. Your ‘Specialist Games’ range has clearly become a dumping ground for games that you no longer wish to support yet are unwilling to remove from sale in spite of repeated claims to the contrary.
2. An inability (or simple refusal) to write balanced and tightly-worded rules to reduce disagreements between players and to facilitate better tournament play, justified by the tired trope that players can create house rules for anything they don’t like – despite the fact that having better rules in no way prevents the creation of house rules by those inclined to do so.
3. A release schedule which consistently leaves some factions without an update for entire editions of their associated game and many units having rules but no representing models.
4. Spates of ‘Cease and Desist’ orders issued by your legal department to companies who are in many cases filling in the blanks left by your release schedule. A classic case of trying to deal with symptoms rather than cause.
5. Paranoid levels of secrecy regarding new releases and increasingly heavy-handed attempts to thwart the release of information, as if having people excited about forthcoming releases and spreading the word about them is somehow detrimental to sales.

Your most damaging decisions, however, have come with price. Like-for-like prices have risen almost 600% over the last 25 years, despite the UK inflation rate running at 160% over the same period. The growth of your company should have led to economies of scale, particularly when associated with a move to cheaper casting materials – first with plastic and most recently with ‘finecast’ resin. However, whilst your plastic kits are cheaper than the metal equivalent of those models, they remain twice (if not more) as expensive as comparable multi-part 28mm plastic kits made by your competitors. In contrast your ‘finecast’ kits are more expensive than their metal equivalents and are receiving worryingly bad reviews from independent sources with regards to their casting quality.

Your latest round of price increases, coupled with the change to ‘finecast’ has led some products to receive an effective 30% price rise – in the current economic climate people simply cannot afford these kinds of increases.

Finally, the embargo on independent retailers shipping outside of the EU has made the hobby prohibitively expensive for many in the affected territories, particularly in Australia and New Zealand. Your public statements regarding independent retailers are frankly offensive – surely all avenues that allow people to participate in Games Workshop’s games and other hobby activities are of benefit as this will grow your customer base? The notion that somehow buying from an online retailer is damaging to ‘the hobby’ is absurd. If it is not economically viable to run Games Workshop stores in certain territories, why not work with local independents or gaming clubs to raise the profile of your games? Simply trying to force people to pay prices they cannot afford will lead to fewer customers and hence less of the ‘local support’ you claim to cherish.

The culmination of all these decisions has reached a head in the last fortnight and has given rise to an outpouring of feeling I have never experienced before. To try and get a measure of the mood of the gaming community I conducted an online poll through the ‘dakkadakka.com’ website (one of the leading online forums for discussion of Games Workshop products) which garnered 565 responses over a 5 day period with the following results:

106 people (18.76%) stated that they had already ceased buying Games Workshop products before the latest price rises, with a further 94 people (16.64%) saying that they would no longer buy in the future.
66 people (11.68%) stated that they would make one last purchase to complete existing projects but would make no further purchases whilst 167 people (29.56%) said they would remain as customers but would spend less in the future than they presently do.
116 people (20.53%) stated that there buying habits would remain unaffected with just 16 people (2.83%) planning to increase their future spending.

In summary 35.40% of customers who responded to this survey will no longer spend money with you, 41.24% will spend less than they had otherwise planned with only 23.36% spending as much or more than before. Whilst an individual letter can be ignored, surely these figures should make you aware of the depth of feeling against your decisions?

In closing, I wish to extend an olive branch. It remains my firm belief that Games Workshop can regain the custom of those like myself who have decided that we can no longer support the company and are looking instead at wargaming pastures new, but only if it is willing to change and truly willing to address the needs and concerns of its customers. I and many others would be happy to engage with you and work with you to overcome these problems, but you must open the door for us to walk through.

Regards,

Thank you for your letter in which you described your concerns regarding Games Workshop’s strategy. You raised a number of issues and I will do my best to address them.

First, as for our product releases and rules, the last thing we are trying to do is treat our customers with contempt. Quite the reverse. Come down to Nottingham and talk to us if you have any doubts on that score. When Jervis says he will speak to anyone regarding their concerns, he is serious about that. I see him most weeks in Bugmans having coffee with experienced customers like yourself to learn what your suggestions are.

The simple fact is that we cannot possibly make everything that every customer wants as there is a limit to how much our Studio can design or our factory make. We have to make choices about what products we release and when. Specialist games is a good example. We would love to have another go at one of these, but there are other exciting projects that we have to deliver first.

That’s not to say they will never be revisited, as we showed with Space Hulk, it’s simply a case of priorities. That’s why we keep them in the range, so that at some time in the future we have the option to come back to them. We are not trying to be disrespectful to fans of these games, many of whom will love the other new stuff we do as well. It’s just that they are not top of the list right now.

As for the legal action we take against infringers, I don’t think we have any choice. They have taken, without our permission, intellectual property which our design teams have taken years to develop and have used it for their own commercial purposes. That is clearly morally and legally wrong. If companies want to make product using our intellectual property then they should approach us for a licence, like Fantasy Flight Games have. Provided they meet our quality standards and our minimum royalty requirements, then we will consider them. But they can’t simply steal from us and expect us to ignore them.

As for secrecy about new releases, what we have found is that the more secret we keep things, the more excitement there is about a launch. Space Hulk was a great example of this, as was Finecast. Some people love to know in advance what is going to happen, of course. But as you point out in your letter, we are a commercial organisation. And what we have learnt is that the more information that is leaked in advance, the weaker the launch. The more secret we keep it, the bigger the launch. We are not being paranoid, it just makes sense for us to do it that way, nothing more than that.

Next let me deal with price increases. We review our pricing each year. In doing so we take into account the costs of designing and making the product, raw material costs, support costs such as staff salaries and rent for our Hobby Centres and of course any quality improvements we have designed into the products.

All of these costs have increased in recent years, particularly raw material costs such as tin and plastic which have increased far faster than our retail prices. The reason that we have been able to absorb much of this cost pressure is that we are constantly investing in technology and training to deliver greater efficiency in our manufacturing and design processes. We have also worked hard to keep our staffing to a minimum in all areas, from hobby centres to production lines to offices.

However, the one area where we will not compromise is quality. Every miniature we have released since you started in the hobby has delivered an improvement in quality. Our plastic sets, paints, scenery and hobby products are incomparable compared to then. I’d argue that our product quality has improved at a far faster rate in recent years than our prices.

Finally, I’m not seeking to offend anyone when I say that European trade accounts have not invested in growing the customer base outside Europe. I’m simply stating the facts. If we had not taken action to enforce our European trade terms, they would have continued to undermine the very accounts you suggest we work with to support clubs in places like Australia and New Zealand.

Those local Australian and New Zealand accounts have worked hard over the years to build up their customer base by word of mouth and running events. As have our Hobby Centres which have recruited tens of thousands of customers through introductory activities, painting lessons and beginners programmes. It’s because we want to have a vibrant customer base in Australia in twenty years time, that we are taking legitimate action now to support local accounts and Hobby Centres.

Hopefully that helps to explain the reasons for each of the decisions we’ve made. I’m sorry that at the moment you are unhappy with us. It certainly wasn’t our intention to upset you. What I hope comes across is that whenever we are faced with difficult choices at Games Workshop, we always seek to do the right thing for the long term. That may make us unpopular with customers from time to time.

However, we believe that the choices we have made will enable us to keep making fantastic miniatures and games with outstanding service from local accounts and Hobby Centres. And, if we keep doing that consistently well over time, in the long term there will continue to be a great Games Workshop for current and future customers to enjoy.

Yours sincerely

Mark Wells