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GW just doesn't need the 3d printing market. They've got global distribution and are making millions from the bigger physical production side with the top end product for that market - plastics.

They are at the golden position every other firm in the industry honestly wants to be in. GW doesn't have to come down to 3D printing. Not unless it becomes as common as microwaving your food and even then "microwave dinners" never replaced "real food"

 NAVARRO wrote:

 Overread wrote:
I'd just like to point out that 3D printing is honestly on the dwindling side of things. It's still growing but its growth is massively slowed compared to the pandemic times and even not that long after.

A lot of 3D print creators are struggling and are starting to shift more toward trying to get into the physical market. Ergo 3D printing is just another manufacture method.

The other factor is burn-out on customers - customers who can buy 1000s of files really cheaply burn out under the weight of unprinted files. It's not like a mountain of unbuilt plastic which they can sell off secondhand and then fund more purchases. Instead they are more likely to drift away form purchasing.

So the whole customer cycle is vastly sped up.

It's not impossible, but honestly physical production still beats it by an insane margin on sales and I don't see that changing for a long time. 3D printers have to get insanely easier to use and simpler and cleaner and the resin has to get a LOT safer (ironically the thermally cured resins that are totally skin safe are even more dangerous in liquid form)

Also its in the realms of digitally generated and distributed asset, AI will further compromise those endeavours.

GW will probably avoid STLs as much as it can, specially knowing how easy their IP will be distributed and copied by other individuals if they go that route...

Tarifs will be passed on to US customers for sure.

Note: on the point of how dangerous these resins are for your health Im baffled how those managed to get into peoples households and unregulated sellers are distributing cured/uncured/weird resins/mixes? prints with little/no quality control... For me the fun stops when health risks are involved to this level.

The tarrifs will likely be passed on to all customers as a guess.

Like most piracy, 3d printing boosts GW sales, I am sure of it. It keeps people in the ecosystem and makes it easy to find players for other players who do buy plastic. Every person who is printing 40k knockoffs is a person not buying Star Wars Legion or whatever the indy fad is these days. It's also an efficient way to plug holes in the range that could otherwise frustrate players into quitting, eg. in early HH 2.0 your melee legion options were mostly either 3d print (at least weapons) or just not play.

While 3D printing models here and there is time consuming and messy, if someone is planning to take on a whole new army, the equation balances out much better. Much cheaper, even factoring in buying a resin machine, protective gear and all consumables, and the printing, cleaning and prep cycle doesn’t take any longer than building kits.

The you then have a handy tool to build bits and bobs when you want. Also enables easy customisation if you don’t want to follow one of the established sub-factions. However, yes, it is a faff to get your head into.

 Altruizine wrote:
Sorry, what? They were in their worst shape in 2007 rather than in 2014-2016 when at one point they were weeks away from bankruptcy?

Source: https://youtu.be/-63A7cDkOm8?t=274

What's your source, your gut? Elvish intuition? A spot of edibles of an evening?

I'm a big fan of Peachy's videos and that one in particular. I think they give a lot of insight into GW that has sometimes been missed.
But equally the details of that video have been picked over in the past 2 years. The difficulties they talk about are quite reasonable - as said I don't think 2015/16 was a good time for GW. But I think they are something of an exaggeration (i.e. being 4-6 weeks away from shutting the doors etc).
Or - and this is completely possible - indicative of a cockup in short term cashflow.

As for why I think 2007 was the low point. Well there's this thread:
https://bolterandchainsword.com/topic/384964-2007-games-workshops-worst-year-explained-by-rick-priestley-not-me/
I'm not here to argue their argument about the rise and fall of LOTR - but the facts seem reasonable because there's also companies house. Which you can go through here:
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02670969/filing-history?page=1

In 2007 GW made a pre-tax loss of £2.9 million.
In 2016, they made a pre-tax profit of just under £17 million. And about £16.5m in 2015.

Accounts can hide a lot of sins. Short term cashflow issues for instance would not appear. But other things sort of would.
Peachy says someone told him they were £15m in debt. Well... not according to these accounts, unless I'm missing something. I imagine what they instead meant was that GW was owed £15 million by say their customers that they urgently needed to get in.

The 2007 accounts by contrast indicate that GW was using various credit and working capital facilities (Banking Facilities - Page 10) which resulted in a financial cost of £1.1 million.
This compares with 2016 finance costs of just £5k - suggesting they had essentially no debts at all.

If memory serves, monies were borrowed to pay dividends.

I know that did happen, but not sure if we’re talking about the same debt.

But, traditionally, GW hasn’t really borrowed to expand, giving it a resilience that highly leveraged businesses don’t when things go wrong.

Yeah its one of their core strengths - a lot of big highstreet names fall apart when sales take a dip not because the sales VS operational costs results in debt, but because they already have huge debts from loans/investors and such which they'd used to expand before.

GW expands with investments from their own profits. So if things take a downturn GW can just downscale themselves. They don't have a huge loan or investor breathing down their neck demanding repayments. They also don't have that ticking time bomb of the debt holder suddenly calling it in in one big go because their finances are on the rocks and they need the money back "now".

GW could potentially have grown faster with such investment; but it could also have fallen like most other big highstreet names with just one economic downturn. Instead GW tends to grow during them (hobbies do well in a crisis) and with no debts they can just use profits how they wish.

 kronk wrote:

 The Phazer wrote:
Again, the fact that the web store is terrible since the last redesign is a very real millstone around the company,

So I'm not the only one. I HATE the new webstore design. The older one was easier to sort, browse and find units I might be interested in but forgot about or didn't know about. I've come across AoS models I've purchased for DND this way, and I don't know squat about them. Now, I just google the exact mini I want or log in on pre-order day. No more browsing for me on that horrible design.

It does have the bizarre rule that each iteration has been worse than the previous one. Few companies can claim such a trajectory...

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 kronk wrote:

 The Phazer wrote:
Again, the fact that the web store is terrible since the last redesign is a very real millstone around the company,

So I'm not the only one. I HATE the new webstore design. The older one was easier to sort, browse and find units I might be interested in but forgot about or didn't know about. I've come across AoS models I've purchased for DND this way, and I don't know squat about them. Now, I just google the exact mini I want or log in on pre-order day. No more browsing for me on that horrible design.

It does have the bizarre rule that each iteration has been worse than the previous one. Few companies can claim such a trajectory...

Some marketing genius will twist this and claim its a feature rather than a fiasco XD

The site freezes if you are using the search function, the other games are hidden in unclear menus etc etc its really not fit for purpose.

 LunarSol wrote:
Webstore sales being down is likely a good thing. Strong distribution channels provide security for the kind of large production runs GW needs where direct sales are a lot more reliant on producing to demand.

As for Kirby, he was just mostly a quarterly growth style CEO playing the numbers game. It definitely helped the company grow but wasn't sowing the kind of seeds needed to do much more than increase profits at the cost of political capital until things collapse, hopefully after you've sold to a bigger fish.

A lot of the current success comes from Rowntree investing in things that aren't directly tied to the bottom line. There's been so much community marketing and licensing outreach that has expanded the brand. Kirby is absolutely right in that few of their customers play the game, but he sorely misunderstood how much those customers cared about the game they're not playing and the vibes around it when they buy product.

Webstore sales being down in percentage terms would mean you have strong developing independent distribution channels. Being down in real terms means you're just doing a bad job of selling things via your webstore, especially after you spunked several million up the wall redeveloping it for seemingly negative ROI.