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£100k all up is not that much for a company the size of GW.
Plus, I think the figure is doubtful. They can do things like store anniversary models which don't see high volumes of sales at all.

Gitdakka wrote:
.

Oh and with metal they cant sculpt all of those stupid jumping poses wich would be another advantage.

My metal Seraphim disagree with you.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
£100k all up is not that much for a company the size of GW.
Plus, I think the figure is doubtful. They can do things like store anniversary models which don't see high volumes of sales at all.

Those have a different sales appeal.

Your standard Cryptek? Necron players might need a couple, especially as we’ve now four flavours to choose from.

Anniversary Cryptek? He’s limited edition. Some like their limited editions, because they’re limited editions. This is why I have both flavours of Termie Chaplain, both Catachans, The Noise Marine, Red Gobbo etc. In short, by slapping limited edition on it, you widen its appeal well beyond those that might find a use for it game to game.

They’re also a cost sink in certain ways. Bait to get us into the stores on their big day. Buy a bit more than usual. Get folks revisiting with new events and stuff etc.

Spoletta wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:

 Dolnikan wrote:
Designing also isn't that insanely expensive, and this 50k was basically sending greens to a company and getting the molds in return.

This.

People seem to forget that GW have their own tooling facilities on site. Do you really think they would be producing limited, one off and anniversary minis in plastic were it prohibitively expensive for them?

I was considering only internal work obviously. Honestly I would be surprised if between workhours and tooling, a model of that quality doesn't cost at least 100k from the moment where it is a scribble on a whiteboard, until you have it in your hands.

I imagine it's 'expensive' to literally any other company, but when you're GW and you know that every single box of that SUPER LIMITED ONE-TIME ONLY!!! Primaris is going to be sold, it doesn't really matter. Plus people ordering them probably buy more stuff from the webstore to get free shipping, or are convinced by a staffer in-store to buy something in addition to it.

The real point is that the characters are expensive because people have shown they will pay it. Charging less than you think the market will bear would be leaving money on the table.

It is kind of a hard to make an army without them, when GW writes the rules in a such a way that the whole army rule set revolves around characters, their auras and buffs.

Plus there is always that problem of people who already are in the hobby and already did pay their 35$ or more per one, not being so open that people that come after them just get their characters for less, unless they are recasts, but then the accepted cost just drop to what ever the avarge of a recast cost is.

Kayback wrote:

Gitdakka wrote:
.

Oh and with metal they cant sculpt all of those stupid jumping poses wich would be another advantage.

My metal Seraphim disagree with you.

Hehe yeah forgot about those. I guess old metal gargoyles would qualify aswell?

Karol wrote:
It is kind of a hard to make an army without them, when GW writes the rules in a such a way that the whole army rule set revolves around characters, their auras and buffs.

Plus there is always that problem of people who already are in the hobby and already did pay their 35$ or more per one, not being so open that people that come after them just get their characters for less, unless they are recasts, but then the accepted cost just drop to what ever the avarge of a recast cost is.

Actually there is one army, that has a relatively well working option to be built out of 1 singular box.

Karol wrote:

Plus there is always that problem of people who already are in the hobby and already did pay their 35$ or more per one, not being so open that people that come after them just get their characters for less, unless they are recasts, but then the accepted cost just drop to what ever the avarge of a recast cost is.

This attitude (From those people, not from you) is always sad to see. I am always happy to let people, particularly younger players, do whatever they need to do in terms of proxying or kitbashing to represent their faction on the table. It would be sad not to encourage them by saying they had to pay the full whack.

 Da Boss wrote:

Karol wrote:

Plus there is always that problem of people who already are in the hobby and already did pay their 35$ or more per one, not being so open that people that come after them just get their characters for less, unless they are recasts, but then the accepted cost just drop to what ever the avarge of a recast cost is.

This attitude (From those people, not from you) is always sad to see. I am always happy to let people, particularly younger players, do whatever they need to do in terms of proxying or kitbashing to represent their faction on the table. It would be sad not to encourage them by saying they had to pay the full whack.

It's really sad when you have people who behave like that, angry that anyone might have even something cheaper or better than they had.

i prefer if people bring kitbashed charachters, or modified 3rd party miniatures. Often some of the most creative stuff happens there. Also GW has a recent really unfortunate streak of DYNAMIC stand on hands upon stone higher position posing for their HQ recently... which just doesn't fit, unless it's a harlequin.

But then again i am propably not really a veteran anymore and more torwards grognard.....

Hah, I am definitely in the grognard category! Some of the plastic HQs are really nice. But sometimes I do feel like all the extra base stuff is just to make it look bigger to justify the higher price.

I'm never unhappy to get a plastic HQ in a start collecting box though.

 Da Boss wrote:
Hah, I am definitely in the grognard category! Some of the plastic HQs are really nice. But sometimes I do feel like all the extra base stuff is just to make it look bigger to justify the higher price.

I'm never unhappy to get a plastic HQ in a start collecting box though.

I agree, the SC box HQ's were doubly sweet, especially when you start kitbashing
And abbadon most certainly tramples on the poor marine sod for excactly that reason... (tbf i kitbashed mine and i am guilty as charged but i feel the endproduct for once was worth the price.... still in hindsight i shouldn't have bought him..)


that said, since i now start a rather wierd GSC project i allready got plans for the flag bearer ....

However the fact remains, that Nids can run a full army with 4 boxes of nid warriors, which i personally find awesome and i am constantly tempted to get myself the 3-4 boxes i'd need to start a warrior army.

I play 7thed ,solo, and my armies are 100% painted and 99% complete. Im done with GW. The price structure is showing nothing but contempt for the buyer. The genstealer cult guardsmen box was the one that really did it for me. An ' upgrade' and heavy weapon sprue were added at no cost, but the AM box was the same price !. Goes to show how little in cost plastic means to GW.

To be fair the cost of plastic is absolutely negligible for the price of the kit.
However your example does show an almost total separation between content of the box and asking price. Cadians are priced that way because it's the standard infantry box. £22.50 is what people will pay for a basic infantry box. Simple as.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
£100k all up is not that much for a company the size of GW.
Plus, I think the figure is doubtful. They can do things like store anniversary models which don't see high volumes of sales at all.

It seems pretty ballpark to be honest.

Iirc the Land raider was something like £250k back fifteen or whatever years ago when it was rejigged. Now adjust for inflation and £100k is pretty damn good.

A lot of man hours and tech time goes into these that folks on the buying end don't see. Even if all you consider is man hours going into this (and a mighty £10-£20/hour) of the various people's and departments, and at just a guess (because I'm not in thr industry), I would assume this factors to artists time, writers time, quality control, quality assurance, manufacturing, supply chain shipping, further storage etc, and that's just the routine 'cost of doing business' before we even think.about getting it to a store.

In big business, £100k doesn't go far.

And fair enough, £100k isn't much, but they're running a lot of £100k projects and if they can't be bothered recouping their investment there's no point .

The marging for selling through a store should be around 25% of the final cost of the kit.

Out of 25 euros, 5 or more are VAT, which means that the actual price is 20. The store buys them at 55% of the cost, so GW sold it at 11. Storage, packaging and trasportation and you are easily down to 9, materials, machine operation costs/maintenance and involved personnel cost and you are down 8.

All this without including marketing costs.

Obviously when they sell directly from the web shop, margins are far higher.

Arbitrator wrote:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
So, uh, support the competition instead of GW then? When the competition is good enough to challenge GW, then it will have worked, but I don't see how competition simply not being up to standard yet is anything but their own issue?

Yes, I do support the competition and as has been said by multiple people in this thread that no matter how 'good' the competition is that unless people are simply willing to try those other products, it doesn't matter if you've got the best wargame on the planet with the best sculpts ever - people need to actually buy into it and put down their 40k/AoS for five minutes and not go running back when the new edition lands for no other reason than "It's 40k."

Alternatively, have you considered that the reason people aren't playing the competition is that it *isn't* good enough?

Like, I know it's awfully convenient to say "the only reason people aren't playing those games is because they're unwilling to try them", but have you considered asking *why* people are unwilling to try them, and why that answer could very well be "it's just not enough to interest them"?

If you've got the "best" wargame with the "best" sculpts, people would absolutely play it - because in the sake of this argument, you've defined this as objectively the best game, with objectively the best models - this game being the best *is* a fact. In the context of your imaginary "objectively best" game, people would play it, because it's objectively the best. And there's your problem: no such objectively "best" game exists.

Am I saying GW is objectively the best or good? God no, far from it. Am I saying that some people find them the subjectively best compared to others? Absolutely. And if other games want to dethrone GW, they need to appeal to those people better than GW does.

Not Online!!! wrote:

Karol wrote:
It is kind of a hard to make an army without them, when GW writes the rules in a such a way that the whole army rule set revolves around characters, their auras and buffs.

Plus there is always that problem of people who already are in the hobby and already did pay their 35$ or more per one, not being so open that people that come after them just get their characters for less, unless they are recasts, but then the accepted cost just drop to what ever the avarge of a recast cost is.

Actually there is one army, that has a relatively well working option to be built out of 1 singular box.

2 boxs.

bat702 wrote:

 JohnnyHell wrote:

bat702 wrote:
maybe im wrong and it really is super hard to get the resin into that shape, or maybe it takes a whole machine per each when the other machine can print like tons of infantry squads, but 40 dollars for a character with no weapon/war gear options..

It’s 2021. They’ve been doing this routine for over 40 years. Is anything on your post news to anyone?

not trying to be rude or anything, but they seriously hire internet trolls in russia, id know cuz iv survived over 10,000 e-brawls in league of legends

Right, you might want to read rule 1 of this forum. Just a thought. Because you were directly trying to be rude.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

Am I saying GW is objectively the best or good? God no, far from it. Am I saying that some people find them the subjectively best compared to others? Absolutely. And if other games want to dethrone GW, they need to appeal to those people better than GW does.

It has nothing to do with good or bad, and everything with monopol or close to monopol on players. There can, and probably are, better games then w40k. And they are cheaper, and the quality of models can be good too. It doesn't matter, if there is no one to play the game with. It is like apple products and the US, or specific types of sport in different countries. Ski jumping is popular here, there club, trainers, sponsorships, schools that teach you etc if the same person would decide that they would rather enjoy a life career as a currling team members, then good luck to their parents or spouse supporting them all their life financialy.

There is no dethroning of GW, other then the hobby ending up dead.

I dunno why people are having an argument about whether they need to price them that high. Historically, characters were priced at about twice the price of a normal trooper. Now, they are priced at 5-10x the price. That's all the information you really need, unless you think that GW was selling their characters at a loss before (lol...).

 JohnnyHell wrote:

bat702 wrote:

 JohnnyHell wrote:

bat702 wrote:
maybe im wrong and it really is super hard to get the resin into that shape, or maybe it takes a whole machine per each when the other machine can print like tons of infantry squads, but 40 dollars for a character with no weapon/war gear options..

It’s 2021. They’ve been doing this routine for over 40 years. Is anything on your post news to anyone?

not trying to be rude or anything, but they seriously hire internet trolls in russia, id know cuz iv survived over 10,000 e-brawls in league of legends

Right, you might want to read rule 1 of this forum. Just a thought. Because you were directly trying to be rude.

I thought your original post was toeing that line myself.

Karol wrote:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

Am I saying GW is objectively the best or good? God no, far from it. Am I saying that some people find them the subjectively best compared to others? Absolutely. And if other games want to dethrone GW, they need to appeal to those people better than GW does.

It has nothing to do with good or bad, and everything with monopol or close to monopol on players.

But that's the thing. The only reason this "monopoly" (which isn't a monopoly at all) exists is because that's what the players have chosen, because for whatever reason, 40k is the most appealing game to them.

It's got everything to do with what's good or bad *enough*. Clearly, 40k is good *enough* to keep people playing, and other games aren't good *enough* to dethrone that.

There can, and probably are, better games then w40k. And they are cheaper, and the quality of models can be good too. It doesn't matter, if there is no one to play the game with.

Why is no-one playing these games if these games are so good? Because they're not good *enough* for those people.

I imagine there is a graph one could plot of "quality of game" vs "interest in the game", where a game with high interest needs low quality to be "popular", and vice versa - so clearly, it's a case of those low interest games not being good *enough* to break that barrier.

I'm not saying that, for example, a low interest game is any better or worse than GW, but I am saying they clearly don't have what it takes to be good *enough* to be "popular".

It is like apple products and the US, or specific types of sport in different countries.

Neither of which are anywhere near a monopoly at all.

Me showing up to a football club, asking if people want to play cricket, and no-one wanting to isn't football having a monopoly.

There is no dethroning of GW, other then the hobby ending up dead.

There absolutely is. The question is how many people actually *want* to dethrone GW. As it stands, people seem to be happy with GW's stuff. If something else comes along that makes them happier, sure, that might change, but until something else does, GW have earnt their spot.

I've asked people why they're not interested in trying another game.
"I don't like the rules" is rarely the reason given.
It's normally "I like the theme/models of 40k". This includes when I'm asking about something like 40k which uses exactly the same models, but whatever.
Another common one is that not enough people play <insert game here> compared to 40k.
Or that they don't want to invest any money in the system. (But they won't play with my collection either).

So I think you're objectively wrong that quality of game and player base are directly correlated.

As I already said.

If I'm satisfied with the product on my hands, I don't have much interest in branching out toward other solutions.

During 7th there were a lot of players looking around for other games, because they were not satisfied with what they had.

The market right now is surely polarized toward GW games. But it is in no way a monopoly. If GW games lower in quality, they start bleeding players to the competitors. For GW to keep the players, she has to invest in quality and new products. She doesn't get to keep them just because she is the only one around.

In some ways quality is subjective. Some people like all the stuff I hate about 40K, and would hate games that I enjoy.

It is a lot of mental effort to learn a new system and some people can't be arsed I would say, just as a general principle.

I distinctly remember when GW started doing the single-frame plastic characters (original plastic Banshee, Chaos Sorcerer, Tzeentch Sorcerer, Necromancer, etc.).

I was a massive proponent of those releases, even though, at the time, I didn't play Warhammer Fanatsy and thus had no use for these models. I bought them anyway, because I wanted to support such a venture (and I found ways to slot them into other games, especially the 40K RPGs and Old Skool Warhammer Quest). I felt this change was a huge step forward for GW (especially after the absolute debacle that was FineCost), as we could get plastic characters to replace metal/resin ones, especially great for things that didn't really have options but would be better in plastic.

Best of all, they were damned cheap. Like sub AUD$20 for those initial releases.

If only we'd known where it would lead - mono-pose characters that have their options stripped away, now for prices reaching into the AUD$60's and higher.

It's like they have to take every good idea they have and corrupt it into something worse...

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

It's like they have to take every good idea they have and corrupt it into something that extracts more money from the player base...

Fixed.

Best of all, they were damned cheap. Like sub AUD$20 for those initial releases.

If only we'd known where it would lead - mono-pose characters that have their options stripped away, now for prices reaching into the AUD$60's and higher.

The ridiculous aspect of this is those models are still around, and still cheap. The tzeentch sorcerer, necromancer, wraith and banshee are still for sale, and still $15, a far cry from the $30-35 (or even $40) per character standard these days.

Even in AUD$, the DE sorceress is just $22.

It makes the absurd prices even worse, because even now they can still keep the overcharge for characters down if they want to.