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I am not surprised at all.

I have been tempted to buy something from almost every release this year if I am honest, apart from the primaris releases anyway.

It seems that for every person like me, recently put off 40k by primarchs returning, primaris marines or just the direction of the story, there seems to be quite a few others either returning or starting up just because of these new additions.

They are no longer just relying on one or two cash cows either, since the specialist games was announced thay have taken most of my money.

 Baragash wrote:
Forge World is just a division/brand, it isn’t a separate company.

This is correct. I went back and checked the financials from last year and they list all subsidiaries and there was no mention of FW. They do explicitly state how much FW revenue grew so it is included in the numbers.

Personally 40k has taken a path I'm not interested in since 8th edition started receiving codices, but I see a lot of 40k interest at the stores I visit.

 TheAuldGrump wrote:

She is also a gamer - but not a 40K gamer. Oldcromunda and GorkaMorka are the only 40K type games that she has played. (You know - I never realized that Mad Max: Thunder Road was a chick flick until my wife and three other women watched it, and decided that, yes, they would like to play GorkaMorka. )

Maybe they would like to play Dark Future too http://pro.bols.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/dark-future-horz.jpg

They do be better off with Gaslands.

Well, I still have my GorkaMorka books, and the campaign was... fun for everyone but me. (Narrative campaign - my mob was the one that I wiped out to show how tough the bad guys were... (Necrons... Old school Necrons.))

The Auld Grump

It's amazing how doing the corporate equivalent of pulling your head out of your backside makes it easier to breath. I'm glad GW is doing well and hope that they don't backslide into the stupidity of the Kirby era ever again.

With all the ways to play now a days, and things like Kill Team being the subtle killer to get people to start new armies, not to mention the revival of old classics like Blood Bowl and Necromunda, that GW is making money hand over fist.

Hell, bring back Battlefleet Gothic and all the cool things I stared at when I was a kid but couldn't afford will be making me throw out cash left and right.

 Crazyterran wrote:
With all the ways to play now a days, and things like Kill Team being the subtle killer to get people to start new armies, not to mention the revival of old classics like Blood Bowl and Necromunda, that GW is making money hand over fist.

Hell, bring back Battlefleet Gothic and all the cool things I stared at when I was a kid but couldn't afford will be making me throw out cash left and right.

They are bringing back BFG, but it's been postponed because of the success of the other Specialist Games. It's going to be Heresy focused though.

 Crazyterran wrote:
With all the ways to play now a days, and things like Kill Team being the subtle killer to get people to start new armies, not to mention the revival of old classics like Blood Bowl and Necromunda, that GW is making money hand over fist.

Hell, bring back Battlefleet Gothic and all the cool things I stared at when I was a kid but couldn't afford will be making me throw out cash left and right.

It really should not come as a surprise that GW's growth is still high. I've pointed this out before but if they had continued to grow at the same rate as the pre-Kirby greed era then they would still be making more profit than they are now (and lets not forget they are helped by the UK exchange rate even after you've considered things on a like for like basis).

However the biggest shift is the sales mechanic they employ. Apart from a few exceptions most of the sales they generate now have multiple sales opportunities. This allows GW to maximise the profit from any one set of models.

Kill Team is a prime example of this. All the miniatures are a cross over from 40k. Most of them miniatures sold in Kill Team are old. The upfront capital costs are all paid for, the only new items being the scenery (which if the old ruins mold has worn out is something you would have to do anyway). Hence the only real cost are the rules and literature creation. Fundamentally then Kill Team gets you to spend £50 for their cost of the new packaging and a few pamphlets and pieces of card.

This isn't a criticism as it is a decent business strategy for a while (though EA games, BSG games and so forth have seen big drops in sales from similar approaches in slightly tweaking previous work and putting it back on the market). Other examples of doing a little but giving gamers just enough is Wake the Dead, Tooth and Claw and so forth.

Now there are few unique models with no cross over potential are Necromunda and Blood Bowl (but then releases on these are highly separated) and also Adeptus Titanicus (but it breaks slightly on this one as both sides have the same models and as we have already seen we are likely to see plenty of variants).

So I think GWs sales strategy has changed. It's no longer sell lots of new stuff at very high prices, it is sell lots of old stuff at reasonable prices whilst slowly cycling high priced new models into the fold (which then become the old stuff and so on). It is a sounder strategy if you want to maximise the profit from any one indvidual model. Those that want the new bling shell out on the new stuff as it arrives. Those that are more price savvy wait and then pick up the new models when they are 'discounted', but GW gets more sales from each individual model.

In comparison in the Kirby era we saw plenty of new models priced highly (noting model prices now are still higher) but they were all 'new' and not really reused. Hence if the sales flunked on any release there was no planned way of recovering this loss, this was particularly prevalent for WFB where basic unit costs were staggering when you considered the numbers you needed.

drbored wrote:
Here's the thing guys, each CEO in GW has taken the helm at a time when GW was on the verge of implosion. When Tom Kirby came in, GW was about to fall under the weight of all of the bloat that they'd pushed out. Kirby came in and cleaned up shop. He shut down stores, streamlined the company, and pushed them forward through several editions of 40k and Fantasy.

Kevin Roundtree did much the same. Tom Kirby was just a little out of touch, but a lot of GW's success right now was built when Tom Kirby was still CEO. A lot of the miniatures we're seeing now were being designed when Kirby was still at the helm.

Kirby stepped down as CEO in 2015. Arguably his decision was probably made at least six months prior to that, given the legalities of being a publically traded company/the fact he was initially just interim CEO in his second period and the handover period needed. I'd say it was highly doubtful he was involved in the Primaris ideas, GW doesn't have that long lead times - they can push out a whole edition of their games within a year or two of planning, while still maintaining all their other product lines. The last thing Kirby was probably involved in was Age of Sigmar and we know how divisive that was and still remains to be.

This is a man who closed Specialist Games, likely killed Fantasy when there were plenty of ways the game could have been retooled to meet the AOS objectives, claimed the company was a miniatures first company and that the games didn't matter, closed down all social media interaction, presided over the buggering up of BL for a few years, relied upon a strategy of constantly increasing prices to offset reduced volume, was highly aggressive over any rumours - depriving the company of building any hype/marketing and regularly refused to give interviews to the press . He certainly didn't 'save' GW when he became CEO in 2000, he was responsible for causing the issues of the mid 00s, when the company expected the LOTR gravy train to continue indefinitely and were woefully prepared for when their revenues tanked. Nothing that has been done since Rountree came in, bears any mark of Kirby given his past actions.

He was legitimately an awful CEO, he wasn't even that great from a shareholders perspective. The most annoying thing about him, considering he throughly pissed off the majority of the company's customers is the fact he's got filthy rich out of it. He just sold a tranche of shares for £20m.

That business model also benefits some (not all before anyone jumps in) gamers.

For instance, Kill Team uses my existing collection, but also serves as a way to use the bare bones of a new army I’m working on. No longer do I need to spend £300 just to get a force to a usable state.

Kill Zones are also a neat way for me to add yet more terrain to my collection, and get more variety for Kill Team. If they can port that ethos over to Blackstone Fortress’ forthcoming expansions I’ll be a happy bunny.

I had a look in a GW store the other day (I'd say first time in about 5-6 years) and I have to say.. wow!! It's absolutely incomparable to how it used to be. There was just so much 'stuff' and it really did look like it had turned back into an Aladdin's cave once more, the shelves were over-flowing with fantastic artwork and cool looking miniatures.

Looking at the new Warhammer Quest (the 40k one) and how characterful the miniatures are - 'battle robot', some ratling brothers etc - it all looks like so much fun.

Yes it's still very expensive, but there are now cheaper ways to play (those board games for example, or the kill team sets). So many of the 'get started' type painting sets, it really looks like they've thought about getting people in with easy access options.

So for me, it's not at all a surprise that GW is going better financially, and significantly so from the sounds of it. Rather than flying round in ever decreasing circles, doing nothing new and then wondering why the sales were dropping, they've taken positive steps of bringing back all the fantastic games designs from the old ranges, but also letting their design guys loose with their imaginations with things like the new Warhammer Quest set. Even AoS (which I have to be honest, I disliked the concept of when it first appeared) has now become its own distinct setting and again the artwork and concepts just looks so cool.

GW is still the big gatekeeper and gateway into wargaming & modelling in the UK at least, and while they shouldn't be expected to do it all by themselves its good to see they have moved things in a better direction, and are helping to assure this kind of pastime for a good few years yet.

 Mymearan wrote:

 Crazyterran wrote:
With all the ways to play now a days, and things like Kill Team being the subtle killer to get people to start new armies, not to mention the revival of old classics like Blood Bowl and Necromunda, that GW is making money hand over fist.

Hell, bring back Battlefleet Gothic and all the cool things I stared at when I was a kid but couldn't afford will be making me throw out cash left and right.

They are bringing back BFG, but it's been postponed because of the success of the other Specialist Games. It's going to be Heresy focused though.

Like Adepticus Titanicus making it Heresy focused means that GW can get away with a full game launch with less models and sculpts needed. If the game takes off well and gets long term support and sales then they can easily expand it; because like the titans, the warships don't change over the 10K years from the HH to the 41st millennium. So GW can easily just roll the timeline forward and add the Xeno factions at a latter date.

And if it fails GW can lower investment and keep it ticking over or end it and the game ends on a positive note because its still functional.

Necromunda did this by having new factions tied to new books. It was messy and more expensive, but it meant if GW stopped at any point the whole game was released and functional at any one point in time (more or less). So again we see this approach that lets GW expand a specialist game easily, but which is also cautious enough to give GW some safety brakes which they can deploy which won't actually leave as bad an experience for fans of the series.

The company was founded by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston who owned Games Workshop for a number of years. They eventually sold it to Bryan Ansell who ran/owned citadel miniatures at the time. It was under Ansell’s stewardship that Warhammer Fantasy Battle was created by GW legends Rick Priestley and Richard Haliwell. Warhammer 40K came a number of years later along with other greats like Space Hulk (Richard Haliwell again).

In 1991 Tom Kirby led a management buy out of the company from Ansell. From 1991 to 2015 when Rowntree took over Kirby was the top person and heavily involved in the running of the company either as CEO or Chairman (and sometimes both!). I feel that he initially did a lot of positive things, Warhammer 40k 2nd edition and Warhammer Fantasy Battle 4th edition (the first boxed versions of the games) were a direct result of his strategy at the time and this is when I first got into the hobby. A lot of the specialist games came along during this period as well; Man ‘o’ War, Epic, Necromunda, Moirdheim (Blood Bowl had been around a while), etc. The Lord of the Rings then arrived on scene a number of years later. This is when I think things started to go wrong. LOTR initially brought more sales and more people into the hoppy but I think the company’s focus went far too much towards LOTR during this period at the expense of their own IP games, especially the specialist games which all drifted into the background and were given minimal support.

There does seem to have been a lot of unnecessary bloat as well such White Dwarf having numerous different publications for UK, USA, Europe all with different employees etc. When the LOTR bubble burst the company was in a LOT of trouble and actually made a loss in 2007. I think that around this time Mark Well’s took over as CEO. Huge cuts took place and a lot of people were made redundant (including GW legends like Paul Sawyer), specialist games were abandoned completely while the company focused on 40k, Fantasy and LOTR. The company returned to profit but I think it stagnated during this period and became a lot more insular. Mark Well’s left in 2013 before another period of bad results and stock market slumps. Kirby seems to have been at a loss during this period and some of the stuff that was going on beggar’s belief. Shutting down of all social media, White Dwarf weekly, black library in a mess, Warhammer Visions!!!!!! If Kirby had stayed in charge I think the company would have been in serious trouble and could even have folded.

Rountree thankfully took over and has worked wonders! Long may it continue and I hope he stays at the helm for many years to come.

So in short, I think Kirby started off well, lost focus and then turned into a complete disaster! He has however made himself a multi-millionaire out of the company and was a driving force behind its large expansion in the 1990’s.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
'Spose it's easy to keep doing well when you raise your prices world-wide in areas like FW overnight.

Hard to tell if that's achieved a net gain or a net loss. I know a lot of people aren't buying (legit) FW any more.

Not surprised really. The old GW spent years starving their fanbase, without foresight. So when the new GW came in, with all of their changes, everyone feels like it's a feast.

It's good of GW to say "Don't expect this to last". Better prepared than unaware.

 ProtoClone wrote:
Not surprised really. The old GW spent years starving their fanbase, without foresight. So when the new GW came in, with all of their changes, everyone feels like it's a feast.

It's good of GW to say "Don't expect this to last". Better prepared than unaware.

Prepared for what? Unless Tom Kirby is suddenly and unexpectedly offered the CEO chair again, and Alan Merret pops out from behind his shoulder cackling evilly, there is zero reason to expect policies to revert to what they were under the old regime. There is no pattern here.

Edit: I completely misinterpreted this!

Pretty sure he's referencing growth. Not policies.

 Mymearan wrote:

 ProtoClone wrote:
Not surprised really. The old GW spent years starving their fanbase, without foresight. So when the new GW came in, with all of their changes, everyone feels like it's a feast.

It's good of GW to say "Don't expect this to last". Better prepared than unaware.

Prepared for what? Unless Tom Kirby is suddenly and unexpectedly offered the CEO chair again, and Alan Merret pops out from behind his shoulder cackling evilly, there is zero reason to expect policies to revert to what they were under the old regime. There is no pattern here.

GW is prepared for their vast growth in sales and customers to drift and reduce over time. They don't expect to keep up this volume of production either. Right now they are pushing out products every single week of the year near enough. That's a huge amount of strain on their end and its also flooding the market somewhat. Right now it makes sense. GW is launching a lot of new specialist games and 40K and AoS are going though big edition changes.
But in time GW expects to ease off this fast release rate and expects customer uptake to slow down. This expected slowdown is important for GW to be ready for. It was the (albeit VERY sudden) slowdown from Lord of the Rings sales that unseated the company before and led to a lot of problems. GW learned hard from that lesson and I don't think they want to even risk revisiting that era of mistakes and financial flow problems.

 Hulksmash wrote:
Pretty sure he's referencing growth. Not policies.

That's my read on it

8th has pulled in a mixed bag of lapsed and new players

SG's has had the nostalgia crowd spending and cheerleading others in

Low(ish) buy in stuff like KT and Shadespire is helping the 40k/AOS or nothing (or worse other company stuff)

But there is at some point a plateau, hopefully as they've acknowledged it'll happen they wont repeat mistakes of product overload that other games companys have fallen from

I dunno.

They’re experiencing frankly ridiculous growth. Like, completely insane growth.

Their caution is investors isn’t ‘we’re going to stop growing in a bit’, so much as ‘look, this is aberrant growth. We expect it to be significantly smaller before long’.

That’s not the same as shrinking.

Consider it this way. At the moment, they’re releasing the real classics in terms of Specialist Games. Games they used to do, and nobody really properly replaced when they withdrew them. So for now, they’re met with solid sales from old grognards like myself getting a bit of nostalgia in.

But in years to come, that will of course drop off somewhat. Once the nostalgia wears off. The games will still grow, in theory. Why? Because they’re not the main systems. Their buy-in cost is far, far lower. For anyone looking to dip their toe, they seem a better fit. And once that’s done, you’re more likely to convert them to Main System players.

So there’s plenty of options to buy in now, and a decent variety of price points. That helps maintain steady growth. But the boom we see these days naturally cannot last. And there’s nothing wrong with that.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
This was being typed before Turnip Jedi managed to post

Also Privateer Press went and messed up their own side of things for a bit what with iffy plastics; a messy MKIII launch and the scrapping of their forums (mostly) and their PG scheme. So I bet there's a return wave of Warmachine and Hordes players making a renewed glance in GW's direction.

Because for all the growth in the market that has happened over the last 10 years or so, PP was still the other big name in the game.

 Overread wrote:
Also Privateer Press went and messed up their own side of things for a bit what with iffy plastics; a messy MKIII launch and the scrapping of their forums (mostly) and their PG scheme. So I bet there's a return wave of Warmachine and Hordes players making a renewed glance in GW's direction.

Because for all the growth in the market that has happened over the last 10 years or so, PP was still the other big name in the game.

I sort of did but AoS currently seems a little jumbled as to a starting point and so similar to 40k to my untrained eye that sticking with what I know in Hordes seems easier

 Mymearan wrote:

 ProtoClone wrote:
Not surprised really. The old GW spent years starving their fanbase, without foresight. So when the new GW came in, with all of their changes, everyone feels like it's a feast.

It's good of GW to say "Don't expect this to last". Better prepared than unaware.

Prepared for what? Unless Tom Kirby is suddenly and unexpectedly offered the CEO chair again, and Alan Merret pops out from behind his shoulder cackling evilly, there is zero reason to expect policies to revert to what they were under the old regime. There is no pattern here.

Well, for sales to slow down, of course. Others have put it better than I. Good day.

 Azazelx wrote:
Hard to tell if that's achieved a net gain or a net loss. I know a lot of people aren't buying (legit) FW any more.

*raises hand*

I ain't buyin' FW any more. I refuse to pay more for the same product. If it were available from shops here then there is some cause for import duties increasing the price (I acknowledge that we live on the other side of the planet and shipping costs money), and I simply will not accept FW's utter bull gak excuses ("Oh, but now you don't have to pay currency conversion fees!" - who gives a flying feth, the price went up as much as 77% on some items!).

animal310 wrote:
The company was founded by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston who owned Games Workshop for a number of years. They eventually sold it to Bryan Ansell who ran/owned citadel miniatures at the time. It was under Ansell’s stewardship that Warhammer Fantasy Battle was created by GW legends Rick Priestley and Richard Haliwell. Warhammer 40K came a number of years later along with other greats like Space Hulk (Richard Haliwell again).

In 1991 Tom Kirby led a management buy out of the company from Ansell. From 1991 to 2015 when Rowntree took over Kirby was the top person and heavily involved in the running of the company either as CEO or Chairman (and sometimes both!). I feel that he initially did a lot of positive things, Warhammer 40k 3rd edition and Warhammer Fantasy Battle 4th edition (the first boxed versions of the games) were a direct result of his strategy at the time and this is when I first got into the hobby. A lot of the specialist games came along during this period as well; Man ‘o’ War, Epic, Necromunda, Moirdheim (Blood Bowl had been around a while), etc. The Lord of the Rings then arrived on scene a number of years later. This is when I think things started to go wrong. LOTR initially brought more sales and more people into the hoppy but I think the company’s focus went far too much towards LOTR during this period at the expense of their own IP games, especially the specialist games which all drifted into the background and were given minimal support.

There does seem to have been a lot of unnecessary bloat as well such White Dwarf having numerous different publications for UK, USA, Europe all with different employees etc. When the LOTR bubble burst the company was in a LOT of trouble and actually made a loss in 2007. I think that around this time Mark Well’s took over as CEO. Huge cuts took place and a lot of people were made redundant (including GW legends like Paul Sawyer), specialist games were abandoned completely while the company focused on 40k, Fantasy and LOTR. The company returned to profit but I think it stagnated during this period and became a lot more insular. Mark Well’s left in 2013 before another period of bad results and stock market slumps. Kirby seems to have been at a loss during this period and some of the stuff that was going on beggar’s belief. Shutting down of all social media, White Dwarf weekly, black library in a mess, Warhammer Visions!!!!!! If Kirby had stayed in charge I think the company would have been in serious trouble and could even have folded.

Rountree thankfully took over and has worked wonders! Long may it continue and I hope he stays at the helm for many years to come.

So in short, I think Kirby started off well, lost focus and then turned into a complete disaster! He has however made himself a multi-millionaire out of the company and was a driving force behind its large expansion in the 1990’s.

Agreed, he actually wasn't that bad in the 90s but the company was rather different back then, run much less corporately until around the turn of the century. Hell they used to have random sales when they'd throw a load of stuff in a box and give like 75% off it and you'd have more than one employee in a store, it still hadn't shaken off it's past as being run for gamers by gamers.

The turn of the century and introduction of LOTR was when the company started to get more corporate and when the LOTR bubble burst everything went to hell. While struggling through the aftermath of that, Kirby seemed to take all the wrong lessons from the experience and doubled down on all his worst ideas, perhaps because a lot of the 'old crew' had left by this point and been replaced by business types rather than people who had a connection to the product and community. It should also be noted that while Wells was CEO, Kirby was Chairman so still had significant influence given his position and history at the company.

Kirby’s latter days have somewhat damaged his initial good.

Remember, he was the man behind boxed games, like Warhammer 4th and 2nd Edition 40k. In his day, he modernised the company, and allowed it to ultimately continue on to this very day.

Of course, he modernised then stagnated, which isn’t good or useful. But he wasn’t universally bad.

The trouble with the LOTR bubble was it burst far faster than anyone expected. Literally ‘here today, gone tomorrow’. Yet perhaps perversely, it lead to restructuring that was well underway by the time of the global financial crash.

And don’t forget, it was under his stewardship that the decision was made to expand via cash reserves, rather than borrowing. That meant their expansion was ultimately sustainable. Consider Woolworths in the U.K., and other high street giants that sunk around 2007/2008. All of them went under due to debt. When sales shrank, they couldn’t service the debt, and due to bank jitters, couldn’t refinance.

So whilst he was a right bellend in the last days, he wasn’t the universally toxic entity many seem to think.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
So whilst he was a right bellend in the last days, he wasn’t the universally toxic entity many seem to think.

Pffft! Blaming everything on a bogeyman is a perfectly fun and acceptable passtime.

The best one for me really was the social media thing though. You have an extremely passionate and excitable community and you choose to interact with them as little as possible.
I mean, I know a few people in this community probably could do with a few pointers on basic human interaction, but still...

Why would you not do that? Would suggest at the very least a leadership who was extremely out of touch.

I think part of the isue was that when GW did its community interaction early on they didn't have staff experienced in handling online community interactions. So it fast became very troll infected and hostile. They basically tried to train the dog that is the online community and got bitten and hid up.

GW of today has more experience in handling an online community, they still make mistakes, but they are not running amock plus their multi-platform approach (podcasts, facebook, youtube, direct, video, twitch) is hitting on so many fronts that that in itself helps deflect things a little.

 Hulksmash wrote:
Pretty sure he's referencing growth. Not policies.

Yes indeed, very sorry for my daft interpretation!