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I really can not fathon out why they would get rid of such a popular and useful service.
Does any one know why?

Boss 'eadbreaka wrote:I really can not fathon out why they would get rid of such a popular and useful service.
Does any one know why?

To make you buy entire kits to get the bitz you need?

That just about sums it up.

Yes, but when you do the math, they made more money selling each individual part, when you added every bit in the kit together, they were making a few bucks extra.

Boss 'eadbreaka wrote:Yes, but when you do the math, they made more money selling each individual part, when you added every bit in the kit together, they were making a few bucks extra.

Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. I'm not privy to their financial statements. Maybe they kept the ones that sold online, since they still have various bitz available for each army.

Because it was difficult to run and didn't make any money.

Also it is a vets' kind of service and doesn't fit with the modern focus of GW on the new beginner market.

People who like bits don't realise how many more vanilla players there are who just use the boxed sets.

Online sellers have taken up the challenge for selling individual parts, and GW sell entire sprue frames for some armies.

They closed it because one of the more costly things when running any business is inventory. Keeping inventory is expensive and takes up a lot of room, especially when you're keeping an 'On Demand' service of basically everything you have ever made.

Now, GW's 'new' bitz service is a load of horse-gak, and there are certainly better ways to do what they do (but GW likes to swing that pendulum in everything they do, so there was never going to be a middle ground here), but their reasons for shutting down the previous bitz service were perfectly sound.

It's certainly a shame about metals, because you can't really get those.

I do know that if you look at the kits on the online bits sellers sites, you'll see some parts of kits that just never sell, hence end up in some massively cheap mountain.

GW see the future as 90% plastic.

Metals will only be used for small run models such as special characters. You only need a few per army so they are not economic to produce in plastic.

What GW could do is to produce one or two 'bitz' frames for each army, with a selection of spare weapons and upgrades.

Tau players would love a frame with the Broadside and Commander suit weapons in it, and some variant heads. They are issued as metal parts and don't go well with the lightweight plastic models. A couple of spare seeker missiles and some plastic variant drone parts and antennas would fill out the frame nicely.

Kilkrazy wrote:GW see the future as 90% plastic.

Metals will only be used for small run models such as special characters. You only need a few per army so they are not economic to produce in plastic.

What GW could do is to produce one or two 'bitz' frames for each army, with a selection of spare weapons and upgrades.

Tau players would love a frame with the Broadside and Commander suit weapons in it, and some variant heads. They are issued as metal parts and don't go well with the lightweight plastic models. A couple of spare seeker missiles and some plastic variant drone parts and antennas would fill out the frame nicely.

I'm sure when we get a new Tau codex you're going to see a great influx of Tau plastics.

Boss 'eadbreaka wrote:I really can not fathon out why they would get rid of such a popular and useful service.
Does any one know why?

It was losing money, and tying up a great deal of space, employee time, and inventory. Increased price in the cost of raw materials, and wages were a factor. Add to that an increasing amount of bits from new kits, and older molds burning out and needing replacement, and you get a large group of people working continuously to make bitz.

If you're working that hard and losing money, eventually you decide to stop doing it.

Sad, as I loved putting in orders for bitz. But understandable.

puma713 wrote:I'm sure when we get a new Tau codex you're going to see a great influx of Tau plastics.

Certainly a removal of all hybrid kits, that's for sure.

I'm expecting a new Broadside kit, a recut Crisis Suit, possibly recut Kroot (to include Kroothounds), and the new plastic release is likely to be Pathfinders.

Boss 'eadbreaka wrote:Yes, but when you do the math, they made more money selling each individual part, when you added every bit in the kit together, they were making a few bucks extra.

No , seen them charging high price for bits doesnt mean they are making good profit.
If i do the math ( or not ) i can see bit sellers pricing GW out of their own market easily.

What GW could do is to produce one or two 'bitz' frames for each army, with a selection of spare weapons and upgrades.

I've been wanting this for years, and still GW has yet to deliver. I was hopeful when they put out the battlewagon sprue as direct only, but so far that's been the only one of its kind.

I want plastic boneswords and lash whips for my warriors and MCs. If GW were to make this sprue I would buy a dozen of them.

One of the other problems, from what I heard was that the bitz were made from the entire model since they had no small casts for specific bitz, thus if one wanted 20 shields from the Dark Elves range for example...GW had to cast the mold that had the shields, which also probably included weapons, heads, etc.

At the end the consumer got the shields, and GW got stuck with bitz that were probably never going to sell, thus taking space in their inventory, time and money just to maintain unwanted porduct.

And the fact that the bitz service was often abused by GW employees, especially when you could order by weight, not by model, and entire sprues at that.

That's an utterly unrelated issue Stu.


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Sidstyler wrote:I was hopeful when they put out the battlewagon sprue as direct only, but so far that's been the only one of its kind.

No it wasn't!

Both Tyranid Upgrade Sprues and the Guard Accessory Sprue are also direct only. Sure, you used to get them in the boxes anyway - but now you get the added bonus of paying a really high premium for something you used to essentially get for free and pay more for the boxes that used to contain them.

It's great!!!


And by 'great' I of course mean 'crap'.

I meant manufacturing a sprue with the intent of selling it online-only, not taking sprues that were bundled with kits and selling them individually for a high cost.

I know what you meant.

They closed it down because it was beneficial to the consumer.

Easy, it didn't make enough money for the effort involved. Sometimes making money isn't enough, it doesn't make *enough* money so it gets canned. Why do something only worth peanuts when they churn out boxes of space marines which rake in a lot of money?

Ideally GW would work with the customer a little more. They would be prepared to do some things and offer services that didn't bring in a lot of cash because instead of always placing profit at a priority they would be trying to retain customer loyalty and create genuine hobby interest.

But as is usually the case with GW now, profit is the reason for everything. Anything where profit doesn't come first is scrapped, even when these extras would do them good in the long term.

I pulled my own bits order when I worked for GW and went to GD Baltimore. It was a pretty big room full of little bins hung on the walls and racks. We were instructed to just drop any bits we pulled and decided against getting on the floor, since putting them back would mess up the system. The doors to the place were held open by 5 gallon buckets full of bits that had been swept up off the floor!

They shut it down because of the move towards plastics (more extra bits per kit) and the cost of paying someone to match up the tons of bits and part numbers.

I don't know the details, but I think the "It wasn't Profitable" argument is probably true. Managing all the parts was probably a big hassle, and most customer service calls to GW I've either experienced or read about seem to indicate they generally didn't use the bits service to fix shipping problems, preferring to send out whole models anyway.

The guys I do some work for at Dream Pod 9 are trying to be responsive by offering some individual small parts to make conversions easier. We also, if I may be a shameless shill for a moment, added a reduced shipping option for people ordering this stuff so you don't have to pay for a big box to get a couple metal pieces and a patch or pack of decals.

It's a frustrating business, though. Every piece added is something else that needs to either be stocked or cast on demand, and casting on demand means slower ship times, which makes customers unhappy... I could think of a dozen items I'd like to add to this service, but it's tough to justify them. GW's old 'Bitz service' was amazing, and really not the 'norm.'

w00ps double post

Balance wrote:I don't know the details, but I think the "It wasn't Profitable" argument is probably true. Managing all the parts was probably a big hassle, and most customer service calls to GW I've either experienced or read about seem to indicate they generally didn't use the bits service to fix shipping problems, preferring to send out whole models anyway.

The guys I do some work for at Dream Pod 9 are trying to be responsive by offering some individual small parts to make conversions easier. We also, if I may be a shameless shill for a moment, added a reduced shipping option for people ordering this stuff so you don't have to pay for a big box to get a couple metal pieces and a patch or pack of decals.

It's a frustrating business, though. Every piece added is something else that needs to either be stocked or cast on demand, and casting on demand means slower ship times, which makes customers unhappy... I could think of a dozen items I'd like to add to this service, but it's tough to justify them. GW's old 'Bitz service' was amazing, and really not the 'norm.'

Yes, they cast up stuff they didn't need in order to get small items from the same mould, but all unwanted metal simpy goes back in the melting pot like they do with miscasts. Perhaps this is time consuming but I don't see why they couldn't find some sensible middle ground. I can see that casting whole figures simply to take their shields or spears it not a good use of resources, but surely they could simply offer *whole* figures. Many figures are single piece, or made up of just a few of parts. Could they not offer these as complete objects rather than individual items? Or perhaps they could insist on selling bunches of figures if they are infantry anf the like, so if you wanted some Dogs of War you'd have to buy several complete figures, not merely ask for 20 of their pikes. I mean someone wanting 10 copies of Nagash's left arm shouldn't expect to get very far, but someone simply wanting a figure of a certain character or regiment should be able to get it within reason.

As it is all their OOP stuff is just that, out of production and totally unavailable. There's a thriving market for OOP figures among players and I have no doubt that there are large numbers of recasts around simply to supply the demand for certain things because GW refuse to offer any kind of older figures service.

I think that they stopped the bitz service because they were tired of taking my money.

In all honesty, it's not hard to see that their old bitz service, as such, was simply not tenable. As cool and awesome as it was, and as much as I'd like it back, it's one of the few business decisions I have a hard time faulting GW for. Trying to maintain supply and distribution of several thousand tiny individual components must have been incredibly costly and time consuming, it's hard to see where they would be making anything on it.

Having to keep an on-hand stock of Lord Solar Macharius cloaks and Chaos marine bolter arm #7 and the like just isn't cost effective and would be a nightmare to manage, and casting to order would be even worse.

I'd like it back, and I normally think GW is crewed by morons, but it's hard to blame them for discontinuing the old bitz service.

Could they bring it back at least to an extent of periodically making OOP models available again? Perhaps, they probably could do something more than they are, but then again, GW is crewed by morons, and this is probably the best route given that state of affairs to ensure they don't bleed more cash by ****ing up such a program.

As others have said it was not cost efficent to do the bitz. It would cost them several thousand a year just to inventory parts that had not sold in 4 years. But even thought they did not sell, you have to inventory them with hte rest of the items.

I do miss the ability to order bitz.

With the money GW make, it shows they care about the monies more then the peoples. They could have kept it open just to gain a more popular player base as other mini companies are growing.

Meh, whatever, Im over GW. I buy Eldar and thats about it... forever.

If you guys are after WINGS then see Reaper site, they do bits for their stuff.

http://www.reapermini.com/OnlineStore/wings

Nurgleboy77 wrote:I pulled my own bits order when I worked for GW and went to GD Baltimore. It was a pretty big room full of little bins hung on the walls and racks. We were instructed to just drop any bits we pulled and decided against getting on the floor, since putting them back would mess up the system. The doors to the place were held open by 5 gallon buckets full of bits that had been swept up off the floor!

They shut it down because of the move towards plastics (more extra bits per kit) and the cost of paying someone to match up the tons of bits and part numbers.

Actually, they shut it down because all of the bitz fell off the wall in a massive disaster and it would have been financially impossible to pay the manpower it would take to re-sort all the bitz, and there was no reason to re-cast multiple pieces of EVERY METAL MODEL THEY MADE in order to support the full line of all thier bitz the way they did for the website and troll magazine.

Really, all the shelves collapsed and fell on the floor. That is the long and short of it. They sold off the bags by the pound to clean up. I got a giant bag from the 'orc and goblin' area of the pile and ended up with literally hundreds of metal squigs and black orcs. I still have piles of metal bitz from the days when I could bit by weight.

Oh... and the battlewagon that drove around and sold bitz at GW events was stolen... straight up and has never been found.

So I don't think it is as sinister as some of you guys are making it. It was simply a disaster and was too much to rebuild the infrastructure.