Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

The Spikey bits blog, wrote this,, it just came up on my facebook feed:

http://blog.spikeybits.com/2013/07/wargames-are-we-all-ferrari-collectors.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SpikeyBits+%28Spikey+Bits%29

I have to say, this article hit me, because today is my birthday, and I'm deciding how to spend my birthday money. This, and Christmas, are really the ony times I can expand my Warhammer armies. And I just decided I had enough. I'm priced out. I had the option of spending my birthday cash on some boxes of Games Workshop's Warhammer, and I went for a Bandai 1/48 Gundam kit instead, to the tune of $107. The new Riptide suit is $85 and it's tiny, the new Eldar is $115 and it's half the sixze of the Bandai 1/48 scale Gundam, which is much higher quality and has fully posable joints. Games Workshop is just soaking the customers at this point and it's ridiculous.

Looking back at my GW purchases, I make the odd bits purchase on ebay, but for the last five years or so, it's been core boxes or nothing. I bought five boxes of Battle for Macragge, five boxes of Black Reach when it was $50, three boxes of Skull Pass, one box of Island of Blood and one box of the LE Dark Vengeance, I bought three boxes of Escape from Goblin Town, and I'll probably buy two more, but only because it tanked, and it's being blown out online for $75, and I can flip the spare rulebooks and Thorin's Company sprue on ebay to reduce the cost further.

My GW purchases are getting less and less each year. Last Christmas I asked for $100 worth of Infinity and today I bough a 1/48 scale Gundam for $107. Buying more GW wasn't even an option. Things like the Reaper Miniatures kickstarter proide so much more value it's a joke.

I have to say, that's it, I'm out.

So I gotta ask, how have your purchases worked out over the last five years. Are you all still Ferrari collectors?

Genuinely curious.

--Chris
www.chrisvalera.com

Edited by Mannahnin

 Aerethan wrote:
I'd have to sit down and take a long look at my last 5 years of paypal history for most of my purchases.

So like 2-3 new armies over the last five years, that seems to be the pattern. I start armies, but I never finish them, and the price seems tyo go up by the day...

 purplkrush wrote:
I know you can get sucked in and over buy and such but with a fairly robust second hand market, great deals abound. I personally just pull a small amount a week from my paycheck and that's more than enough for me to buy anything I want from GW. Budgeting is important and giving myself space between having money and making purchases lend itself to smarter and fewer buys. Does it annoy me to see these increases at a rate I find to be stupifying? Yup, but it's not really expensive unless you're one of those people who buy whole armies at a time. Try painting them entirely at the limit of your own quality and I'm sure the pace of spending will slow to a more reasonable level. But that's advice for people who are getting in or staying. Sorry to hear you're leaving us, but I understand entirely. I've cut my budgeting for movies by over 75% and find myself much happier for the loss.

If you go to cons, then yeah,. you can still get a deal, but on ebay, everything is very overpriced. I blew out some stuff on ebay and it all went for nothing. I had rare stuff too, old Zoats, Fantasy Adventurers, old Epic, and it all went for nothing. I blame the slow economy; nobody has any spare money to spend. I think GW is really just cannibalizing their fanbase. Only the core box sets are worth it, and sometimes not even then. I want a second island of Blood set, and some more basic Clanrats from island of Blood, but that's it. I want more Escape from Goblin Town box sets, but only if I can get them for $75 and flip the rulebooks, and the Thorin's company sprues, ie, only the goblins and terrain.

I used to buy multiples of the core games, now I can barely manage. I think GW wants it this way. I think they want you to buy just one core game, and then a bunch of add-ons, or not even that. Their business model revolves around a new crop of customers coming in to buy the core game. Maybe they stick around, maybe they don't. It doesn't matter either way, there's always a new crop of 12-year old coming in.

It amazes me that most businesses place such a premium on customer loyalty, and business books say it costs 10 times as much to acquire a new customer , as to retain an existing customer, but GW is oblivious to it.

The fact is, they're positioning the company for a sell-off, and damn the short term consequences. Higher prices and one-man stores are where it's at for them right now.

--Chris
www.chrisvalera.com

2x210 wrote:
I don't get this post at all.

You obvioulsy don't have a job since you only get money during Christmas and your Birthday, or if you do have a job you are struggling since once again you only get extra cash as gifts.....

40k is a hobby, therefore it shouldn't be an "expense" its something like shooting or fishing or even rebuilding old muscle cars, something you do when you have the time and the money.

The economy has been terrible for the past few years. Some of us are out of work, or find work only sporadically.

2x210 wrote:
I'm getting so annoyed with this Wahh GW is so expensive I can't afford it wahhh threads.... Its a hobby and comparably speaking its not even that expensive, for the price of say one nice rifle you can have about 4000pts of an army, the rulebook, and your codex... For the price of golfing memberships and clubs you could buy a whole company of Space Marines.

If you want cheap, buy some legos, download the Brickwars rules and have at it

Nobody is talking about "cheap." We are talking about "value" and the fact that GW has priced many loyal customers out of the hobby.

Legos are too toy-like for my taste. I liked Mobile Frame Zero, but only if they made them as model kits.

--Chris
www.chrisvalera.com


Automatically Appended Next Post:

775B53 wrote:
here we are for dakka's weekly "who else hates GW?" thread. They are mostly all the same, thinly-veiled with different titles.

I"m here to help break the echo-chamber.

Prices have gone up...so buy less. $50 for a kit is not a problem if you aren't the type of player who simply buys the newest power army (which you probably won't even paint anyway). And if you can't spare $50 a month you are definitely in the wrong hobby, because that is pretty affordable with even a part-time job. Spend more time on your kits and get your money's worth instead of just slapping them together like toys.

Also, I am tired of subjective statements being taken for granted and going unchallenged. "Gundam kits are superior quality to GW." In what way?

Are you serious right now? The tolerances on a gundam kit are light years ahead of what GW puts out, and always have been. Even a $15 gundam is better than anything GW puts out. The Japanese model kit industry, in general, is better. GW goes on and on in White Dwarf about their new-fangles sliding core technology that makes hollow barrels on a Baneblade, Japan had that figuredd out 10 years ago. It's not even close.

You don't get extra pieces, but the gundams are designed to be the one character, and nothing else. Although sometimes you get extra hands, polycaps and accessories.

If the Gundam's aren't so great, why does the new Tau Riptide not have polycaps and full posability? You have to physically cut the model pegs to get it to pose.

775B53 wrote:

And how much does your $100 investment in the gundam get you? You have a model you can put on your shelf to look nice. The wraithknight and riptides you deride in comparison can function as display pieces, but are ALSO usable in as many games as you can fit into your schedule. You can take them to any store that runs GW games and be able to use them. GW offers ubiquity for the gamer; Gundam is purely for the modeler. GW, satisfying both the modeler and the gamer, gets the advantage from me.

You can easily use a Gundam in any mecha game, or D20-Future. You can even play it as a titan in 40K, if you don't mind the universe-bending.

And that's where your argument falls apart; Bandai makes a 15-inch tall fully posable plastic model kit, and nothing GW puts out comes close. The Riptide and Wraithnight are about the same cost for one-third or one-half as much plastic. You may get extra bits, but the gundam comes in many more pieces, with polycaps, in colored plastic, and is fully posable.

Don't even try it, the GW stuff is ridiculously overpriced.

775B53 wrote:

And why is this always framed against GW alone? Where is the comparison between Gundam kits and PP's single pose, flat resin bricks they call colossi? I'll tell you why, it's because the people who post these kinds of things are purely pushing an anti-GW agenda/rant, not interested in real discussion.

But even those Collosi you hate so much come in cheaper than GW's titans. I do with they were in plastic and had more poses, but I say that about a lot of PP's stuff. Mainline stuff like Trenchers and the Menoth rocket guys should be available in plastic. The Menoth priest and chor should be in plastic because it's nigh-mandatory. PP has made stride, releasing their stuff ion resin-plastic, but it hasn't gone far enough.

But GW is the market leader, and for better or ill, they're what everyone compares themselves to.

--Chris
www.chrisvalera.com


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 ThouShallNotHeal wrote:
It's a shame, for the most part they are excellent models.

They're getting better, but there are still issues. There are woeful gaps on the Land Raider tracks, you can even see them in the finished model, and Finecast is just awful

LOL at that one kid that tried to say they were better than Gundams, or anything Japan puts out.

--Chris
www.chrisvalera.com