ewar over at Warseer wrote:I’ve seen a lot of people talk about the growth in the table top wargame market – the anecdotal evidence that we can all see just by opening up the home page of Wayland or Dark Sphere and the huge range of new
TT games.
So I thought it would be interesting to see if there was more publically available information on other war games companies. In a 10 minute search I dug out the last 3 years financial statements of Spartan Games (publisher and manufacturer of what I would consider to be some pretty big games: Dystopian Wars, Firestorm Armada etc), Corvus Belli (publisher of Infinity) and Battlefront Miniatures (publisher of Flames of War).
Unfortunately Privateer Press is based in that 3rd world back water () where private companies don’t have to publish financial information, so I don’t have anything on them.
So if you’re interested this is the latest data I could find:
Corvus Belli
Shows some pretty impressive headline growth numbers since 2010 (the 2012 data isn’t publically available yet, which is a shame as I’d be interested to see it). Overall though you can see immediately the difference in scale between the companies – Corvus Belli revenue is circa 0.5% of
GW, also remember these are given in USD not GBP, so need to divide by 1.5 to compare.
Rebel Publishing Ltd (trading as Spartan Games)
As for Spartan, they are a bit trickier as they are able to take the small company exemption in the
UK from reporting a P&L. However there is a balance sheet which we can use to make a very crude estimate of their turnover. Their debtors balances in 2011-2013 was: £51k, £63k and £54k. If we assume a 45 day cash cycle and average receivable of £55k this translates to approximately £450k turnover.
When you think that
GW made £60k just from the sale of the limited edition cover of the recent Lizardmen book, I think that puts things into perspective a little. I’m actually quite surprised, I would have guessed Spartan to be turning over £1m+. I’m less familiar with Infinity but it seems to be very popular at the moment and again that was smaller than I thought.
Battlefront Miniatures
This one is a bit odd – the only information I could find was for their company registered in Malaysia – they also have a number of companies in the
UK and NZ but with limited financial data available. The
UK subsidiary had receivables of just £
40k and zero net assets when I pulled out their March 2012 financial statements. Still, by looking at the Malaysian data is shows they are at least turning over roughly $2m, even if it did decline 17% in 2012.
I’m not personally going to draw too many conclusions from the above but I think this demonstrates just how difficult it must be for miniature wargame companies to turn the success of their games into consistent revenue. I play Firestorm Armada – brilliant game, but now that I and 4 friends have a large fleet each we probably won’t buy anything more for it. They can’t keep up the same relentless release cycle that
GW manages which maintains its YOY turnover.
I think the same will apply for the others. People are attacking
GW for not growing in the thread about their most recent financials, but honestly from this information it doesn’t seem like the war game market is exactly exploding. Perhaps this indicates that
GWs comparative performance isn’t as bad as some are saying? Maybe, maybe not as there still isn’t enough info. However I think it at least sheds a little more light on how everyone else is doing.
TL;DR Spartan is flat, Infinity has grown significantly, Flames of War has shrunk slightly. All of them are only a tiny fraction of
GW showing they really are the whale beached in the middle of the pond. Combined estimated turnover of the other 3 companies is roughly 2% of
GW – a much smaller fraction than I was expecting in all honesty.
