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Just look at battlefront, while not quite GW they are certainly starting to show GW like characteristics; dictated discount levels and their own hobby publication (WI has increased its FoW pressence by quite a bit and FoW boxsets are subscription gifts and not the diaramas that you used to get).

Along with the acquisition of GF9 they are also positioning themselves as a one stop shop hobby company.

That's true to an extent. Although, making a WW2 game you are always going to be open to competition from rivals, which will temper your ability to put massive mark-ups on the products. With the Plastic Soldier Company stuff for instance being so much cheaper (and of comparable quality), Battlefront have now had to release resin/plastic kits of popular tank lines, which apparently will be cheaper than the previous metal minis. Contrast with another company which switched from metal -> resin and obviously didn't have to make a similar concession..

I know a lot of people were worried when Wargames Illustrated was taken on by Battlefront, but to be honest there hasn't been that much of a change. The magazine is still well written, with some really good articles, tutorials, things like that. They even still advertise from rival companies. Overall and quality wise I would probably say that its comparable to White Dwarf pre issue 310 or so, when the latter magazine nose-dived in terms of journalistic content - you can certainly put your feet up with it in the evening and spend a couple of hours reading it, and I think the official scale marks it at about 2 weeks-worth of toilet reading time..

Iazarian wrote:I think the answer is obvious, most companies (people for that matter) do what they can get away with. Mantic would sell $1000 plastic individual models if they could, as would most people on here.

Which is why we are lucky that we live in free market economy I guess! GW's business decisions of late have been typical of a company that has held almost a monopoly over an entire industry - gradual updates, not really pushing development of anything forward, and overly inflated prices are all indicators of this.The wargaming market has never had such a variety of high quality products, and for every price rise, rest-of-world embargo and product quality issue, it all allows those other companies to move into the sci-fi/fantasy wargaming market, which had previously been dominated almost entirely by GW since the early 90's.

You have a really freaky avatar by the way Iazarian, it's horrible!

Looks like a 6M increase in profits?

spaceelf wrote:

Kroothawk wrote:

Currently 98% of our Hobby centres have a trained manager and over half have a named successor ready to be deployed. We believe that this will help to ensure that our sales businesses are better able to respond to under-performance and deliver consistently high levels of customer service for our Hobbyists.

So half the GW stores have a named successor for their manager to increase motivation? Seems like they liked the Dark Eldar Codex and now use Pain markers to improve staff effectiveness Explains the aggressive sales strategies by the staff.

GW needs to learn that constantly changing managers destroys communities and as a result, hurts sales.

Yup, especially when the new manager is a total zealous asshat that doesnt realize he only has to see his bosses a handful a times a year and is working for slightly better then minimum wage.

Some interesting information about GW's sales turned up recently. This is from Trasvi and Shelfunit via Warseer:

Trasvi wrote:Reading through some documents on the GW vs CHS legal debate, I came across this:
http://ia700405.us.archive.org/18/items/gov.uscourts.ilnd.250791/gov.uscourts.ilnd.250791.208.32.pdf
pg 202.
Some legal discussion of GW's financial data.
On a quick glance, it seems to say that 40k accounts for 50% of GW's sales. Possibly more to come

shelfunit wrote:Very interesting - 50.6% in 2009/2010. What seems odd (or maybe the answerer of the questions was not complete in his answers) is that they build their figures based on an "assumed trade discount of 35%" does that mean their total turnover is assumed to be sold at 35% lower than the published figures? Even the sales they get through their own stores?

EDIT: And the "page 202" refers to the document page 202, not the PDF page 202, so on the PDF go to pg 215/244.

EDIT 2: Got the bit where they "gross up" the numbers to eliminate the effect of trade discounts on the final figures.. (PDF pg219)

EDIT 3 - And on PDF pg 224 they explicitly state that "units" in sales terms "from our perspective, it means nothing"



Showing that even they think reporting an increase is unit sales is a waste of time.

 Kroothawk wrote:
Some interesting quotes:

Currently 98% of our Hobby centres have a trained manager and over half have a named successor ready to be deployed. We believe that this will help to ensure that our sales businesses are better able to respond to under-performance and deliver consistently high levels of customer service for our Hobbyists.

So half the GW stores have a named successor for their manager to increase motivation? Seems like they liked the Dark Eldar Codex and now use Pain markers to improve staff effectiveness Explains the aggressive sales strategies by the staff.

Seems like a great place to work!