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I think the issue was there was a huge surge around Indomitus and a lot of stores over-ordered to give themselves a buffer. However at the same time customers were also ordering copies so the stores were ordering a buffer for a market that was already ordering copies.


Once hte market was satisfied there wasn't the surge of new customers to eat up the buffer as fast. That said through the whole of this edition its still a worthy boxed set so it should sell out eventually. Perhaps only once retail becomes safer and people start going out again.



Heck even when a new edition roles over the rule book was more of a freebie in that set anyway so it will be a fantastic lore and art book along with worthwhile models. Most of those sets will likely remain current for what 10 years

 totalfailure wrote:

Actually, we do have some clues on how many there were. In the US, there were around 5600 of those silly keys available. All of those were gone, and the game was still on sale for a while after that with no key on the GW webstore. So we know GW had at least 5600+ copies in the US to sell on its own website. And that wouldn't include whatever was sent to GW and independent stores in the US. So it was a not inconsiderable number.

And it does seem someone miscalculated on Indomitus. After the initial outrage came the Made to Order. But it has not been difficult to just buy one off the shelf locally since Made to Order. A couple of my local stores still have copies.

There was 5600 keys worldwide, not for each region. There was also 1250 limited edition books, but not all of them were bundled with the game. Anyone know if we can still get the size of the shipments out of China, like how we knew the War of the Spider title back in 2020?

Smaug wrote:

 totalfailure wrote:

Actually, we do have some clues on how many there were. In the US, there were around 5600 of those silly keys available. All of those were gone, and the game was still on sale for a while after that with no key on the GW webstore. So we know GW had at least 5600+ copies in the US to sell on its own website. And that wouldn't include whatever was sent to GW and independent stores in the US. So it was a not inconsiderable number.

And it does seem someone miscalculated on Indomitus. After the initial outrage came the Made to Order. But it has not been difficult to just buy one off the shelf locally since Made to Order. A couple of my local stores still have copies.

There was 5600 keys worldwide, not for each region. There was also 1250 limited edition books, but not all of them were bundled with the game. Anyone know if we can still get the size of the shipments out of China, like how we knew the War of the Spider title back in 2020?

What would the point be of putting that number on the US website then, when orders in a good part of the world were already live and sold out before it even became available here?

 Togusa wrote:

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
I guess another big question is how the Indomnitus made to order went,

how many boxes were ordered,
how many were ordered then the individual/store decided they didn't want them after all but before production happened
how many were ordered, producted and then rejected by the individual (using handy distance selling regs)

it may be the whole thing was enough of a pain that even though it looks like they could sell a bunch more, that it isn't anthing like as clear cut when you look at the numbers from a similarish recent item

I had extreme levels of buyer's remorse for Indomitus. We had a second round of orders at our FLGS and of the 10 copies ordered, 9 still sit on our shelf.

Man get on that.
I just broke down a box of Indomitus bought for £98, and it’s recouped cost and more. £145 selling individual parts and still 3 units and 6 characters to go.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

I don't want some random to come out instead of GW and offer excuses. I want GW, themselves, to directly tell everyone exactly what drove them to stopping production and not telling anyone they're stopping productions and deleting all previous info about wheather or not Cursed City is a mainstay. Y'know, have some basic decency?

Can you find an example of a corporation doing that?

Seriously, really??? Ever heard of semiconductors?

 kodos wrote:
"too expensive to make more" is no reason why there were not enough in the first place or why there is no "cast on demand" but removing everything after the release

The reason there were not enough copies in the first place is because it was intended to be a recurring stock item. This should be self explanatory. If you are intending to sell something for the next 3 years you don't produce a million copies before the product even releases, you produce enough to maintain some degree of availability until you can release the next batch of the product. GW probably only produced something like 10 thousand copies to begin with, because they expected to continue producing it. When they came to the realization that costs prohibited the continuation of production and release, they decided to dump what they already had inventory of and then abandon the product line. Realistically, the decision was probably made weeks before release by bean counters at corporate and was likely not communicated down to marketing, distribution, and customer service until after the fact - its likely that they were probably some way into manufacturing the would-be second wave of product when the decision was made.

if cardstock is the big issue, because it was done externally and cannot be done again for now because of the pandemic, why are all the other products with external done printed paper still on the website

Could be because the cardstock in Cursed City just costs more than the cardstock in warhammer underworlds, for example. They also are likely sitting on large inventory of a lot of the other relevant items already since they are older releases that aren't in immediate demand.

To my knowledge GW never produced any figures in Memphis. I thought the early 2000’s or late 1990’s was when they where trying to set it up. When did they change over from metal to fine cast, early 2010’s?

Oh they absolutely did, the factory ran for quite some time and had at least a half dozen plastic injection machines on top of a number of metal and finecast spincasting machines, etc. I was able to find some posts by a longtime dakkite who used to work production at the factory, think his screenname was mechanicalhorizon.

 totalfailure wrote:
What would the point be of putting that number on the US website then, when orders in a good part of the world were already live and sold out before it even became available here?

Because the legal text is written with the local jurisdiction and doing specific text for each sales territory is needless work.

 totalfailure wrote:

Smaug wrote:

 totalfailure wrote:

Actually, we do have some clues on how many there were. In the US, there were around 5600 of those silly keys available. All of those were gone, and the game was still on sale for a while after that with no key on the GW webstore. So we know GW had at least 5600+ copies in the US to sell on its own website. And that wouldn't include whatever was sent to GW and independent stores in the US. So it was a not inconsiderable number.

And it does seem someone miscalculated on Indomitus. After the initial outrage came the Made to Order. But it has not been difficult to just buy one off the shelf locally since Made to Order. A couple of my local stores still have copies.

There was 5600 keys worldwide, not for each region. There was also 1250 limited edition books, but not all of them were bundled with the game. Anyone know if we can still get the size of the shipments out of China, like how we knew the War of the Spider title back in 2020?

What would the point be of putting that number on the US website then, when orders in a good part of the world were already live and sold out before it even became available here?

That was the same number on the New Zealand and UK sites when their pre-orders went up. It’s just like with the limited edition books each region gets an allotment of the print run.

chaos0xomega wrote:

To my knowledge GW never produced any figures in Memphis. I thought the early 2000’s or late 1990’s was when they where trying to set it up. When did they change over from metal to fine cast, early 2010’s?

Oh they absolutely did, the factory ran for quite some time and had at least a half dozen plastic injection machines on top of a number of metal and finecast spincasting machines, etc. I was able to find some posts by a longtime dakkite who used to work production at the factory, think his screenname was mechanicalhorizon.

Today I learned, makes me almost want to go back and see if any of my old boxes are marked made in the US.

chaos0xomega wrote:

The reason there were not enough copies in the first place is because it was intended to be a recurring stock item. This should be self explanatory. If you are intending to sell something for the next 3 years you don't produce a million copies before the product even releases, you produce enough to maintain some degree of availability until you can release the next batch of the product. GW probably only produced something like 10 thousand copies to begin with, because they expected to continue producing it. When they came to the realization that costs prohibited the continuation of production and release, they decided to dump what they already had inventory of and then abandon the product line. Realistically, the decision was probably made weeks before release by bean counters at corporate and was likely not communicated down to marketing, distribution, and customer service until after the fact - its likely that they were probably some way into manufacturing the would-be second wave of product when the decision was made.

Indomitus is the perfect example of monomentum & hype being the man reason for GW sales

everything that comes "too late" does not sell at all and GW said themselves years back that sales after the initial pre-order/release weeekends are negligible (and a product not making the money back on release is considered a fail)


so if their ESP System is really in such a bad condition that they got the numbers wrong (might haven been calculated wrong from previous sales or just given the wrong number to the facility or doubling numbers for "produced" units etc. there is a lot that can go wrong during a system change without anyone notice until it is too late) and just produced not enough boxes to make the money back on release, removing everything because they know as soon as the "hype" is gone even a made to order won't help them to reach the break even point would be a possibility

just producing less because they thought it will be possible to do more later but now have problems to find a print-shop for cardboard is not really a reason to remove it from the shop instead of list it as "out of stock"

still not explains why they think that removing evidence of their promisses instead of going directly to the costumers with "mistakes were made" as this is a Fanboy driven niche anyway
such a move might hurt them much more in the longterm than any bad "feelings" on the stock market

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Seems strange to me, surely they could just come out and state 'hey we can't do this right now because pandemic, but we will get to further print runs in 2022.' If profit margin is the problem they can increase the price. Certainly there is demand.

And then you have less to sell other items.

You DO know they can't just snap fingers and have new items come out right? When their casting machines are working non stop and still can't do enough to meet up with demand any production of cc is away from something else. Like from next new release that sells better than old item(kits sell most in first 3 month. After that it's trickle sales)

Danny76 wrote:

 Togusa wrote:

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
I guess another big question is how the Indomnitus made to order went,

how many boxes were ordered,
how many were ordered then the individual/store decided they didn't want them after all but before production happened
how many were ordered, producted and then rejected by the individual (using handy distance selling regs)

it may be the whole thing was enough of a pain that even though it looks like they could sell a bunch more, that it isn't anthing like as clear cut when you look at the numbers from a similarish recent item

I had extreme levels of buyer's remorse for Indomitus. We had a second round of orders at our FLGS and of the 10 copies ordered, 9 still sit on our shelf.

Man get on that.
I just broke down a box of Indomitus bought for £98, and it’s recouped cost and more. £145 selling individual parts and still 3 units and 6 characters to go.

I already sold everything. I left 40K for AoS 6 months ago and it's been the best decision I've made in years.

 kodos wrote:

Sarouan wrote:

So maybe you have luck and still have stock in your country ?

I don't talk about stock, but that the game can still be found in the store, anything you mentioned as "explaination" does not solve the question why Cursed City was removed from the store
not simply being out of stock, but not being there at all

only explaination is that GW will never bring it back (like your French version of Blackstone Fortress), and again, none of the problems you mentioned explains why it is impossible for GW to bring it back when there is the possibility to bring back (the english version) Blackstone Fortress (as if cardboard is too expensive and hard to get, they would have removed that one too)

While I get what you're saying, GW are not bringing back the English version of BSF either. If you're asking why they haven't removed it from the web store entirely yet, it's probably because they haven't yet got around to it. I think there's close to zero chance they ever do a new print of BSF though. For Cursed City I think they removed it as so many people were enquiring about it.

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

 jake wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

Sarouan wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
C'mon guys we heard like 2 pages ago that their whole workflow software went belly up to the point they've had to cancel new releases for the forseeable future, can we drop the evil empire/Chapterhouse/microchips in the glue applicator angles.

That is still no explenation of them being so secretfull about it and refusing to tell that everyone.

Even if someone came with explanations, you don't want to hear it. Hell even watch a video coming with one. Just because it doesn't fit your narrative and you feel better thinking they're bootlickers.

Keep wearing your tinfoil hat, then.

I don't want some random to come out instead of GW and offer excuses. I want GW, themselves, to directly tell everyone exactly what drove them to stopping production and not telling anyone they're stopping productions and deleting all previous info about wheather or not Cursed City is a mainstay. Y'know, have some basic decency?

Why do you need that information?

The game is no longer available. It possibly will be available again at some point. If it is you can choose to buy it or not.

What other information do you need? why is having it important? Why do you feel entitled to this information?

Idk I feel like a company saying why they felt the need to overnight go directly against their promises, cease communication and start rapidly deleting all evidence of them completely backtracking on their words is something that shouldn't be easily forgiven y'know? Or they could even give the bare minimum and ACKNOWLEDGE the fact they backtracked and deleted their own comments? Like, are you just going to forgive and tell everyone to move on if GW starts lying from now on and never tells you when a kit is model to be available and for how long? Are you gonna go "why do you feel entitled to that information" if GW puts out a new starter set for 40k and then takes it down at midnight and pretends it never existed?

Jesus. You're not being lied to. Circumstances changed, and the company changed their plans to match. GW never made any promises to you. They don't owe you any kind of explanation beyond "This product is no longer available". Stop acting like they're a girlfriend you think cheated on you.

 jake wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

 jake wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

Sarouan wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
C'mon guys we heard like 2 pages ago that their whole workflow software went belly up to the point they've had to cancel new releases for the forseeable future, can we drop the evil empire/Chapterhouse/microchips in the glue applicator angles.

That is still no explenation of them being so secretfull about it and refusing to tell that everyone.

Even if someone came with explanations, you don't want to hear it. Hell even watch a video coming with one. Just because it doesn't fit your narrative and you feel better thinking they're bootlickers.

Keep wearing your tinfoil hat, then.

I don't want some random to come out instead of GW and offer excuses. I want GW, themselves, to directly tell everyone exactly what drove them to stopping production and not telling anyone they're stopping productions and deleting all previous info about wheather or not Cursed City is a mainstay. Y'know, have some basic decency?

Why do you need that information?

The game is no longer available. It possibly will be available again at some point. If it is you can choose to buy it or not.

What other information do you need? why is having it important? Why do you feel entitled to this information?

Idk I feel like a company saying why they felt the need to overnight go directly against their promises, cease communication and start rapidly deleting all evidence of them completely backtracking on their words is something that shouldn't be easily forgiven y'know? Or they could even give the bare minimum and ACKNOWLEDGE the fact they backtracked and deleted their own comments? Like, are you just going to forgive and tell everyone to move on if GW starts lying from now on and never tells you when a kit is model to be available and for how long? Are you gonna go "why do you feel entitled to that information" if GW puts out a new starter set for 40k and then takes it down at midnight and pretends it never existed?

Jesus. You're not being lied to. Circumstances changed, and the company changed their plans to match. GW never made any promises to you. They don't owe you any kind of explanation beyond "This product is no longer available". Stop acting like they're a girlfriend you think cheated on you.

 jake wrote:

Jesus. You're not being lied to. Circumstances changed, and the company changed their plans to match. GW never made any promises to you. They don't owe you any kind of explanation beyond "This product is no longer available". Stop acting like they're a girlfriend you think cheated on you.

well, true if GW would have said it that way

but they try to remove all the evidence that they ever said something different than "one time only"
would not be a problem if they came out with "changed our mind and now it is gone" but going the way "we never said it is will be available afterwards" is were the hate comes from

and in this case, the hate is justified as they tried to play stupid on the costumer to cover up their own mistakes and there is no reason to accept or defend such behavior as they make products for fans (and if they think we the fans are idots who don't deserve answers but only deleting the announcements without comment, they should not be suprised of the fans react like "idiots")

 kodos wrote:

 jake wrote:

Jesus. You're not being lied to. Circumstances changed, and the company changed their plans to match. GW never made any promises to you. They don't owe you any kind of explanation beyond "This product is no longer available". Stop acting like they're a girlfriend you think cheated on you.

well, true if GW would have said it that way

but they try to remove all the evidence that they ever said something different than "one time only"
would not be a problem if they came out with "changed our mind and now it is gone" but going the way "we never said it is will be available afterwards" is were the hate comes from

and in this case, the hate is justified as they tried to play stupid on the costumer to cover up their own mistakes and there is no reason to accept or defend such behavior as they make products for fans (and if they think we the fans are idots who don't deserve answers but only deleting the announcements without comment, they should not be suprised of the fans react like "idiots")

Genuine question; where did GW actually say "we never said it will be available afterwards"? Everything I've seen posted has stated that it is not available online (which is true) and that they do not know if or when it will be available again online (also seemingly true). They have removed earlier messages because circumstances have changed and as pointed out in the Ash's video and numerous other locations that's what companies do when that happens to avoid confusion. It's not nefarious concealment so much as updating the messaging to the current reality which, unfortunately in this case, means that the item that people want is not available.

Can we speculate that there was a mistake made when they told people it would continue to be available? Sure, and those posts are strong evidence in support of that theory. However you're claiming that they have taken an action that deny that the things were ever said versus the information being removed for no longer being accurate. There's a world of difference between those two things.

Actually it's still available online in China. Make of that what you will

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Actually it's still available online in China. Make of that what you will

Wait a bloody second, how is a tabletop game about fighting skeletons and vampires avalible in a country that banned depictions of skeletons and undead in games? Is it because it only applies to video games?

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Actually it's still available online in China. Make of that what you will

It means it didn't sell so well in E. Asia

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Actually it's still available online in China. Make of that what you will

Wait a bloody second, how is a tabletop game about fighting skeletons and vampires avalible in a country that banned depictions of skeletons and undead in games? Is it because it only applies to video games?

I was wondering about that, since China evidently is very against skulls and stuff in media. Even movies have to be careful.

As I understand it skeletons are not banned in China. However the approval board that lets your product into China is very haphazard and can ban for almost random things.

As a result when something gets banned it gets noticed and one time something with skeletons got banned so everyone who wants to get into that market pulled skeletons to avoid the chance of being used as a reason.

Even though there's no actual law/restriction.

tneva82 wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Seems strange to me, surely they could just come out and state 'hey we can't do this right now because pandemic, but we will get to further print runs in 2022.' If profit margin is the problem they can increase the price. Certainly there is demand.

And then you have less to sell other items.

You DO know they can't just snap fingers and have new items come out right? When their casting machines are working non stop and still can't do enough to meet up with demand any production of cc is away from something else. Like from next new release that sells better than old item(kits sell most in first 3 month. After that it's trickle sales)

You don't get it. They have guaranteed sales here, and a hell of a lot of good will on the line. They print X copies they will sell out within the year. Sell the dam thing for $300 people will still buy it. Make it direct only to increase the margin even further. It will sell and it will appease the customer base. Because the attitude the customer base has towards GW matters quite a lot to their sales, as much as accountants might wish otherwise.

 GaroRobe wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Actually it's still available online in China. Make of that what you will

Wait a bloody second, how is a tabletop game about fighting skeletons and vampires avalible in a country that banned depictions of skeletons and undead in games? Is it because it only applies to video games?

I was wondering about that, since China evidently is very against skulls and stuff in media. Even movies have to be careful.

There you are, bringing logic to an illogical decision, again.

That ranks up there along with.... How are you selling a wargame or any product in a communist country. o.O

 Grot 6 wrote:

 GaroRobe wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Actually it's still available online in China. Make of that what you will

Wait a bloody second, how is a tabletop game about fighting skeletons and vampires avalible in a country that banned depictions of skeletons and undead in games? Is it because it only applies to video games?

I was wondering about that, since China evidently is very against skulls and stuff in media. Even movies have to be careful.

There you are, bringing logic to an illogical decision, again.

That ranks up there along with.... How are you selling a wargame or any product in a communist country. o.O

China might be communist in-name-only, but their dislike of skulls is very much real.

It's completely anecdotal on my part (more of a 'feeling' about stuff) and with no other rational to it, but I think:

The GW of 2007-2010ish would have absolutely given no information at all, sold only a small number and then 'pulled up the fortress drawbridge'. There might have been a few snide "you'll get what we give you" comments from people that may or not work for GW. Perhaps a C&D or two might be issued to a website that had some kind of leak on the news or miniature photos. The game would sell out and that would be it.

The GW of 2021 I don't think would have done this. How crazy does the above version sound now when you read it? Yet that is how things were and shows how far the company has come in terms of customer relations, social media, engagement with it's fanbase.

I don't believe for one moment those Warhammer Community comments were made as a guess or in error. I think they genuinely thought that the game was meant to remain on sale and have reprints but something has happened, perhaps what Lord Blackfang has mentioned a few times. We don't know exactly what that was, but you would have to guess that it was a big enough 'incident' that they can't promise future reprints, or at least the GW of 2021 doesn't want to give false info/promises and not be able to fulfil them.

Despite everything that has been said, I feel like eventually this game will go back on sale. And that's not White Knighting like the dude in that video, I genuinely think some hope should be given to a company that has made such an effort to improve it's customer relations over the last decade.

At this point I'm just impressed they decided to burn so much goodwill to the bloody ground by doing it this way instead of simply going "we're having sudden issues we don't know when and if Cursed City will be avalible again"

But I guess that's not as profitable as shutting up and pretending nothing is wrong to not upset the shareholders, knowing their fanbase will consume the next product anyway.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Seems strange to me, surely they could just come out and state 'hey we can't do this right now because pandemic, but we will get to further print runs in 2022.' If profit margin is the problem they can increase the price. Certainly there is demand.

And then you have less to sell other items.

You DO know they can't just snap fingers and have new items come out right? When their casting machines are working non stop and still can't do enough to meet up with demand any production of cc is away from something else. Like from next new release that sells better than old item(kits sell most in first 3 month. After that it's trickle sales)

You don't get it. They have guaranteed sales here, and a hell of a lot of good will on the line. They print X copies they will sell out within the year. Sell the dam thing for $300 people will still buy it. Make it direct only to increase the margin even further. It will sell and it will appease the customer base. Because the attitude the customer base has towards GW matters quite a lot to their sales, as much as accountants might wish otherwise.

Part of the issue may be they only have so much production capacity - we know pre COVID they were running at capacity and intending to majorly invest in expanding it, and the UK lockdown has reduced what they had.

Certainly they’ve been really struggling to keep things in stock recently (just look at all the pre-order sellouts, or the Drukhari range which seems to be mostly sold out). Most likely to ramp up production of one thing would mean reducing something else. If they oversold on preorder for CC its next planned production slot could have been some way off.

Could be that whatever incident has happened that has messed with pre-orders has brought things to ahead and they’ve had to cut something and CC is it (or they may still be doing damage control and not know the full impact so don’t want to commit to a restock timeline).

Another (slim) possibility is that there might have been bits for a restock on the Evergreen and it’s been impounded (which happened to a friend of mine).

The lack of info is pretty frustrating though.

Well, I wonder if Shadows of Brimstone from Flying Frog will see any increase in sales.

Anyone else order from ZATU in the UK? In theory I ordered while Cursed City was in stock, but a week down the line my order is still "processing".

 Dysartes wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:
When you say there were not enough made how many is that, exactly?

There is absolutely no info on how many they made. Nor is there an easy path to predict the appropriate demand during a pandemic where people are getting $1,400 checks and video cards have tripled in price.

But let's presume they make another run. How many is appropriate for that? What is the demand? Are the people complaining on the internet interested or just complaining? How many boxes will languish in stores, because people opted to not go look for them? People are making a killing on this panic, because they're going to those shops and buying out the stock and reselling them on eBay for almost twice the price.

If they wanted to establish a rough idea of current demand, they could easily run a Made to Order for it, though probably in H2 to give some of the palaver time to die down.

A M2O isn't going to pick everyone up who might want a copy, but you set some benchmarks and see if there's enough demand for it to then consider a, doing expansions; b, returning it as a BSF line item; or c, both.

But then they have to schedule a M2O during a time when they're struggling to keep regular product on the shelves.