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GW was always the biggest, but it still only accounted for something like 10-20% of the market at its peak.

If they do everything right and fix prices and the game, they'll likely become bigger again and become the default gateway.

They'll take some market share for people who have overlapping interests or just go with the consensus, but they still have far too many gaps in the market - like historics to completely take over the market.

Some people like GW games.

Some people like other games.

GW making their customers happy isn't going to wipe out satisfied customers of other games............as they like those games.

Herzlos wrote:
GW was always the biggest, but it still only accounted for something like 10-20% of the market at its peak.

If they do everything right and fix prices and the game, they'll likely become bigger again and become the default gateway.

They'll take some market share for people who have overlapping interests or just go with the consensus, but they still have far too many gaps in the market - like historics to completely take over the market.

Really? Where's this Billion Pound a year wargaming industry you intimate exists?

GW have no comparable competitor in terms of scale at £100M+ per annum.

The nearest I am aware of is PP and their turnover was reportedly $15M a few years ago, of course WM3 wont be helping this!

Re Historical I'm not aware of any makers on a more industrial scale other than Warlord or Battlefront. Warlords turnover is less that £5M based upon Dunn & Bradstreet reports, Battlefield are less than this even factoring EU back to NZ..

The only other thing I can think of is perhaps distributors or perhaps Wayland but these will not be markedly bigger than the companies feeding into them.

I know people like to demonise GW but they really do form the backbone of much of the sector.

Nonetheless they really are the big fish in this little pond.

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:


Aye. But Mantic's mini quality isn't exactly known to be sterling. Get what you pay for as they say.

There sci-fi stuff (which is what we are comparing) is perfectly good quality

 ChaoticMind wrote:



Except in this case this is (almost) a fair comparison. A better example would be Enforcers $20 / tactical squad $35 (last I knew) and peacekeepers $20 / Terminators $50. Mantic's hard plastic enforcer kits are almost perfect analogues to the equivalent vanilla marine kit in terms of contents and quality.

I think the new TS stuff is a perfectly fine comparison, as they are the latest space marine/terminators GW has made and are an indication where future marine prices are headed.

And tac marines are 40$ currently

 Sarouan wrote:

Mantic Sci-Fi line is more recent, and it shows in quality. The forge fathers, the enforcers, the vermins...they're nice, even if sometimes they look cartoonish. Still, quality of their plastic is different. I can tell by working both GW and Mantic - it's not the same feeling.

There is also a difference in quality with plastic. And it also has a price.

The quality of the plastic is practically identical. You might prefer GWs designs and that is a perfectly fine subjective feeling to have, but I cant tell any big difference in the material quality and certainly not one that allows to 2 or 3 times the price difference

 notprop wrote:

Herzlos wrote:
GW was always the biggest, but it still only accounted for something like 10-20% of the market at its peak.

If they do everything right and fix prices and the game, they'll likely become bigger again and become the default gateway.

They'll take some market share for people who have overlapping interests or just go with the consensus, but they still have far too many gaps in the market - like historics to completely take over the market.

Really? Where's this Billion Pound a year wargaming industry you intimate exists?

GW have no comparable competitor in terms of scale at £100M+ per annum.

The nearest I am aware of is PP and their turnover was reportedly $15M a few years ago, of course WM3 wont be helping this!

Re Historical I'm not aware of any makers on a more industrial scale other than Warlord or Battlefront. Warlords turnover is less that £5M based upon Dunn & Bradstreet reports, Battlefield are less than this even factoring EU back to NZ..

The only other thing I can think of is perhaps distributors or perhaps Wayland but these will not be markedly bigger than the companies feeding into them.

I know people like to demonise GW but they really do form the backbone of much of the sector.

Nonetheless they really are the big fish in this little pond.

I think we're at cross purposes; GW is no doubt the biggest individual wargaming company, potentially by an order of magnitude. But there are a huge number of smaller companies (in the low thousands), so even being a huge company they don't have anything like as much market share as you'd assume. We had a thread on here/Warseer a while back and I'm sure it was calculated to about 10-20% of the market.

GW has a revenue of about $150M, with a dozen or so companies with revenue in the $1-10Ms, hundreds in the $1000-1m range, and hundreds more in the <$1000 range.

 ulgurstasta wrote:

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:


Aye. But Mantic's mini quality isn't exactly known to be sterling. Get what you pay for as they say.

There sci-fi stuff (which is what we are comparing) is perfectly good quality

 ChaoticMind wrote:



Except in this case this is (almost) a fair comparison. A better example would be Enforcers $20 / tactical squad $35 (last I knew) and peacekeepers $20 / Terminators $50. Mantic's hard plastic enforcer kits are almost perfect analogues to the equivalent vanilla marine kit in terms of contents and quality.

I think the new TS stuff is a perfectly fine comparison, as they are the latest space marine/terminators GW has made and are an indication where future marine prices are headed.

And tac marines are 40$ currently

 Sarouan wrote:

Mantic Sci-Fi line is more recent, and it shows in quality. The forge fathers, the enforcers, the vermins...they're nice, even if sometimes they look cartoonish. Still, quality of their plastic is different. I can tell by working both GW and Mantic - it's not the same feeling.

There is also a difference in quality with plastic. And it also has a price.

The quality of the plastic is practically identical. You might prefer GWs designs and that is a perfectly fine subjective feeling to have, but I cant tell any big difference in the material quality and certainly not one that allows to 2 or 3 times the price difference

I bow to your greater familiarity with Marines of any flavor, I haven't really looked at them in a couple years. I was thinking in terms of universal "core" of an army rather than where GW wants to shift the price-point.

I'll also second that sculpt is the only difrence. The quality of Mantic's plastic VS. GW VS. Wyrd VS. most plastic models is negligible. The only plastics with significantly worse quality I'm familiar with are Restic/PVC/Board games when poorly thought out.

I think for the industry as a whole it's helpful to have a healthy GW, that has a lot of capital, using its retailers to help bring people into the wargaming hobby. (I know this is more of a UK thing, as I've read the US has a lot more indie stores).

A lot of those gamers go on to other games and systems, and I think the snap growth of a lot of those other systems over the past decade has been people from that pool.

Eventually they move to historicals which are a kind of separate industry (and massive outside of the fantasy/sci-fi scene) but I think nonetheless benefit from that steady flow of new blood coming in.

Shub-Nullgurath wrote:

The idea that Mantic makes low quality miniatures is a really bad meme:

Mantic Zombies - 40 miniatures for £29.99

Spoiler:

GW Zombies - 20 miniatures for £20.50

Spoiler:

You're getting Mantic's much more detailed miniatures for £5~ less.

Sure, there are some ranges that are a bit gonky (elves and Basileans come to mind) but the same can be said of a lot of GW's fantasy stuff.

Nope, it's generally accurate. Mantic's stuff varies wildly in quality. Your cherry-picked example of the Zombies is a little misleading, too. GW's zombies are one of their oldest remaining plastics, and look as they do because they were designed to be cross-compatible with the Skeleton Horde/Skeleton Army-style skeletons, which were one of GW's very first plastic boxed sets from the mid-1980's
http://solegends.com/citboxes2/skeletonhorde.htm

Mantic's Zombies are one of their best plastic kits. Oddly, they were also one of their first, but they're much better than the sci-fi zombies. Unfortunately, Mantic's zombies are very limited in terms of poseability and number of optional parts. You pretty much need to start swapping in Mantic Ghoul parts (another good kit, and IMO with a better aesthetic than GW's current plastic ghouls, though again - technically inferior).

Overall though - GW"s stuff is leaps and bounds better than Mantic's. I've got buckets of both, and Mantic are slowly improving (albeit with a kind of "two steps forward, one step back, and a hop on the spot" gait), but GW's new stuff is also improving, and much more consistently.

@Azazelx. They weren't. The Skellies were updated before the Zombies.

On the note of prices, surely they're charging for much more than the input costs of their models right? At the end of the day they're selling molded plastic sheets and I don't see how that can be all that expensive. I remembered building an Abrams model several years back with my dad and looked up the price of it: $20. When some ork boyz I just bought set me back a little more than $30 something's not right to me. I imagine sales would soar if they even slightly lowered prices.

 GreatGranpapy wrote:
On the note of prices, surely they're charging for much more than the input costs of their models right? At the end of the day they're selling molded plastic sheets and I don't see how that can be all that expensive. I remembered building an Abrams model several years back with my dad and looked up the price of it: $20. When some ork boyz I just bought set me back a little more than $30 something's not right to me. I imagine sales would soar if they even slightly lowered prices.

There's some false equivalency going on there, that Abrams is likely carried in major national chain stores and probably has 5-6 competitors whose only big difference is how they cut it up. Meanwhile legally nobody else can create a copy of those Orks even if they cut them up differently. So the orks will always be more expensive for the same amount and quality of plastic. Your right that most of the cost is not in materials but even if all costs are the same the orks are always going to be more.

That said GW is still nuts, They're trying to sell things at a one and done price 5-6 times to their customers. Wyrd gets away with equal or higher prices because 95% of the time once you buy it you will never need a second. (4 kits out of 210+ that are outliers requiring just the right list to regularly need that second box) They either need to slash prices or make the game smaller in scale (Hero, 10-20 grunts, and a tank)