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Hello everyone,

Ive been collecting warhammer for nearly 7 years and the prices seem to constantly be going up. Firstly why is this, and do you think they are over priced?

Thanks

Prices keep going up because of the people who let GW get away with it. If nobody had bought the PAGK at 20 pounds for 5, I can guarantee that the Immortals wouldn't have been 20 pounds for 5.

What a pointless post! Of course they're going to go up its called inflation, you don't have to collect Warhammer you choose to, its a non necessity so quit whining! If its costs to much for you just stop playing or use a 3rd parties model range.

elspedo wrote:What a pointless post! Of course they're going to go up its called inflation, you don't have to collect Warhammer you choose to, its a non necessity so quit whining! If its costs to much for you just stop playing or use a 3rd parties model range.

Wow, it didn't take long for this post to come along

But to address the first "point" you raise; the cost of GW models has risen significantly faster than inflation. The rest of your post has been addressed numerous times before, so I do not feel the need to go over it again.

Im not whining i just wanted to simply know why the prices go up. If its such a pointless post then why comment? :L

GW raising their prices can be attributed to several things;

1. Overheads (stores, staffing, Warhammer World).
2. Loss of business.

To address 1. Games Workshop have loads of stores within the UK which act as places which get people into the hobby as well as for selling the products. For these stores they obviously have to pay rent, electricity & water rates, wages for staff, transporting stock to the stores & other various expenses. Then there is Warhammer World in Nottingham which must cost a fortune to run. Thats just in the UK. Then there are the stores worldwide. The costs of running the retail arm, in terms of stores, must cost them a fortune and the expenses for running a business never go down - like GW prices they just go up.

With 1. in mind we can look at 2. GW have shown a terrible knee-jerk reaction to losses in sales - the prices go up. This, however, alienates people who don't want to pay even higher prices, so GW suffers a loss of business and ups the prices once again. This in turn alienates more people. With the price rises they're driving people away from their tabletop gaming systems. Parents won't want to spend £20 on a box of 5 plastic models, plus all the glue, paints & brushes - it was hard enough for me to get my parents to buy me a box of 10 Guardsmen when I was 12 and they said £15 was expensive back then for them.
This knee-jerk reaction can be justified because if there is less money coming in they need to find more money to cover the costs of their overheads - dropping their prices would not guarantee an influx of business and could actually lose them money over time if business did not increase.

Personally I think the moment GW lower their prices & announce it loud & clear, veterans will flock back to the hobby, parents will be happier to spend money on the figures and GW could see a boom in business...but thats just my opinion.

Yes even knocking it back a band would be good. Prices rarely do go down but they do go down occasionally in other businesses.

It would show good faith and grab people back in before the next price hike.

Yes, but not as overpriced as some people say. While it may cost GW 60 cents to make a plastic sprue, I understand there are sculptors, toolers, writers, package designers, packaging workers, and shipping costs all factored into the kit. Many companies share similar prices these days. I do think that Finecast should be cheaper, considering it's a cheaper material to make/ship though.

What Sparks said but i would like to add that they changed scope from fanatics to kids; this change alienates some and as they go further down that road mroe get alienated without decent number of new guys joining to cover the loss; thus GW makes a snowball of bad business that just rolls down the hil land gets worse.

Also they seem to have mostly abandoned their original IP. The warhammer fantasy IP seems abandoned when you look at the number of Black library books being made, the rate new codex's get launched(from this year it seems like 40k got more attention all around), and that failed MMO isn't making the IP look too good(nor what EA is doing with it but that's another thread on its own), and GW dosen't seem to give a rats ass about the IP. If they did they wouldn't be letting it go like this. But because GW seems to have abandoned the WHFB IP in favor of 40k they need to raise prices a bit more to compensate for lost fantasy revenue.

Just one great big snow ball of bad business and i do not envy the person it hits when it stops.

Varrick wrote:
Also they seem to have mostly abandoned their original IP. The warhammer fantasy IP seems abandoned when you look at the number of Black library books being made, the rate new codex's get launched(from this year it seems like 40k got more attention all around), and that failed MMO isn't making the IP look too good(nor what EA is doing with it but that's another thread on its own), and GW dosen't seem to give a rats ass about the IP. If they did they wouldn't be letting it go like this. But because GW seems to have abandoned the WHFB IP in favor of 40k they need to raise prices a bit more to compensate for lost fantasy revenue.

GW is giving 40k more attention because it sells better, I don't think you can really blame them for that. Considering how 2011 has seen Ogre Kingdoms, Tomb Kings, and Storm of Magic with a whole bunch of big monsters and new terrain sets, I beg to differ.

Brother SRM wrote:

Varrick wrote:
Also they seem to have mostly abandoned their original IP. The warhammer fantasy IP seems abandoned when you look at the number of Black library books being made, the rate new codex's get launched(from this year it seems like 40k got more attention all around), and that failed MMO isn't making the IP look too good(nor what EA is doing with it but that's another thread on its own), and GW dosen't seem to give a rats ass about the IP. If they did they wouldn't be letting it go like this. But because GW seems to have abandoned the WHFB IP in favor of 40k they need to raise prices a bit more to compensate for lost fantasy revenue.

GW is giving 40k more attention because it sells better, I don't think you can really blame them for that. Considering how 2011 has seen Ogre Kingdoms, Tomb Kings, and Storm of Magic with a whole bunch of big monsters and new terrain sets, I beg to differ.

Part of the snow balling bit. Bad choices lead to lower revenue, that leads to more bad choices, leading to lower revenue, and so on.

You think that OK, TK, and all those other cool new plastic kits were bad decisions?

Brother SRM wrote:You think that OK, TK, and all those other cool new plastic kits were bad decisions?

No; i was talking about the drop in sales leading to shifting attention. It just seems like most of their attention went from fantasy to 40k instead of fixing why WHF was doing poorly.

Sparks_Havelock wrote:GW raising their prices can be attributed to several things;

1. Overheads (stores, staffing, Warhammer World).
2. Loss of business.

Varrick wrote: But because GW seems to have abandoned the WHFB IP in favor of 40k they need to raise prices a bit more to compensate for lost fantasy revenue.

Interesting that people believe GW are actually losing business at the moment if you check out the stock prices they have risen continually throughout 2011 so they must be doing something right.

elspedo wrote:Interesting that people believe GW are actually losing business at the moment if you check out the stock prices they have risen continually throughout 2011 so they must be doing something right.

And if you look at their financial reports, they are constantly selling less and less actual product each year...

Not a business man(IT) but it looks like the numbers on the stock chart aren't all that hot.

elspedo wrote:Interesting that people believe GW are actually losing business at the moment if you check out the stock prices they have risen continually throughout 2011 so they must be doing something right.

Not so black & white as that, I'm afraid. If across a company the stores are consistantly failing to beat their previous years sales alarm bells begin to ring. What needs to be changed? What should they do? There's only so far they can push the staff to sell the stock so one of the other options is to raise their prices.

Stock prices for GW may well rise due to income from uses of their IP beyond the tabletop games - for example video games (we've had two this year - DoW2: Retribution & Space Marine). These may bring in additional revenue for the company but they can't rely on external uses of their IP so they have to look to their primary products, the miniatures. If they feel that the volume of sales is not bringing in enough money they can either increase the price of the product or reduce the price to entice a greater volume of sales.

Kinda wish that GW would do the latter though. Have they ever tried a price reduction on their range? Ever? Maybe they should try, instead of the age old practice of bumping prices up.

I'm not a financial analyst. There is a Dave the Blogger that did some interesting work concerning the financial state of GW, and a link to said Dave (i think it was dave) is in somebody's sig. If you are interested in the financial side of GW, find Dave, and read this post.

Don't underestimate inflation.




For the UK at least, GBP 20 today would have been worth just about GBP 15 in 2000 and just about GBP 10 in 1990. With the current average inflation rate over the last decades, prices double roughly every 15 to 20 years. Inflation however seems to be creeping upwards faster again recently.

First of all, inflation is not even. Not all things increase in price at the same rate.
Secondly, people here are saying that prices are increasing beyond the rate of inflation, which seems likely.
You even said that prices double every 15 to 20 years, whereas Games Workshop has doubled prices in 8-10 years.

As long as GW think they'll make more money by doing it, they'll keep putting prices up. It's not as if anyone else is selling little plastic soldiers, right?

Joey wrote:First of all, inflation is not even. Not all things increase in price at the same rate.
Secondly, people here are saying that prices are increasing beyond the rate of inflation, which seems likely.
You even said that prices double every 15 to 20 years, whereas Games Workshop has doubled prices in 8-10 years.

Sure enough. I am not saying inflation is the ONLY cause of all price increases.

But if you are looking at things over a fairly long time of several years, it is ONE factor.

And of course inflation rates vary. But an APPROXIMATION of about 3% per year describes it reasonably well for the UK at least.

Prices have risen out of all sync with inflation and costs in the last 6 years. 5 years ago a codex was $20, now they're $33/35. 3 years ago, 20 guardsmen were $30, now they're almost $50. 4 years ago 8 Chaos Space Marines were $25, now 10 are $35. These are nowhere near in line with inflation, costs, or customer income increases, and is making it impossible to get into a new army. For what a 1k Necron army would cost, I started up Infinity with enough models for several lists and two different Firestorm Armada fleets. It's getting to the point where Forgeworld is not so expensive anymore.

Zweischneid wrote:
Sure enough. I am not saying inflation is the ONLY cause of all price increases.

But if you are looking at things over a fairly long time of several years, it is ONE factor.

And of course inflation rates vary. But an APPROXIMATION of about 3% per year describes it reasonably well for the UK at least.

According to this website, inflation for the UK, before all this nonsense recession hit, averaged at about 2.5-3%.
Unfortunately there's no record of GW price increases, but I'd bet that they're much greater than that.

The prices on everything goes up over time. If you've been alive long enough that you think the price on something has gone up an unreasonable amount, it's less likely that is true than you are just old and nostalgic. It's how the human brain works.

DarknessEternal wrote:The prices on everything goes up over time. If you've been alive long enough that you think the price on something has gone up an unreasonable amount, it's less likely that is true than you are just old and nostalgic. It's how the human brain works.

Actually it isn't just nostalgia. If prices go up on eveything steadily, they grow exponentially. Hence the video above. The older you get (and thus the farther you look back in retrospective), the "greater" the more recent price increases appear in comparison to those of your youth, as the steady increase year by year (or month by month or whatever) has led to an ever steeper "growth" in absolute terms even if the "inflation-adjusted-value" remains the same (which hasn't for GW on top of it, exaggerating the perception further).

Vaktathi wrote:Prices have risen out of all sync with inflation and costs in the last 6 years. 5 years ago a codex was $20, now they're $33/35. 3 years ago, 20 guardsmen were $30, now they're almost $50. 4 years ago 8 Chaos Space Marines were $25, now 10 are $35. These are nowhere near in line with inflation, costs, or customer income increases, and is making it impossible to get into a new army. For what a 1k Necron army would cost, I started up Infinity with enough models for several lists and two different Firestorm Armada fleets. It's getting to the point where Forgeworld is not so expensive anymore.

Sadly, those 20 guardsmen are just shy of $60, not $50. I'm ok with reasonable price increases when the models are new, higher quality sculpts than their predecessors. But the guardsmen and fantasy Orc style changes are absolute insults to customers. That's where my line is drawn

ups

Zweischneid wrote:

DarknessEternal wrote:The prices on everything goes up over time. If you've been alive long enough that you think the price on something has gone up an unreasonable amount, it's less likely that is true than you are just old and nostalgic. It's how the human brain works.

Actually it isn't just nostalgia.

Look over there...it's the point you missed.

If you think prices are too high now compared to the past, it's because you're old.