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.

Hi guys,
In my opinion GW, with its last releases, is proposing exaggerated prices! This trend has been going on for 1.5 – 2 years.
(i.e. Space Marine Centurions 62€; Space Marine Captain 25€; High Elves Phoenix 46€).

In Italy, with 62€, you can buy enough food for a week! Warhammer is a wonderful hobby but let’s not forget that.. is all about plastic toys, 25 mm tall!

Do you think they’re worth the cost, or you share my opinion?

Ciao!

I should move to Italy!

I remember the day Bryan Ansell decided to double all GW prices overnight...

Its a business, they will squeeze all they can out of it and have been doing for decades.

When I started a figure was 45p each... when they went to 55p we were aghast.

If you dont like it, play something else, GW is not the only game and many are much cheaper.

Its a moot point for me, I think the figures look poor on the whole, but then 1988 was the high point of Citadel figures for me and my rose tinted glasses....

My favorite thing about GW's prices is that they have opened up the market for competition in a way that would not have been possible had GW not started protecting their margins with large price increases.

Now small producers can bring figures to market at a price that makes their businesses viable despite their lack of economies of scale. Had GW kept their prices competitive and did their best to compete with new players in the market by strangling them of their margins, we might not have had the massive increase in alternatives.

Each new price hike for each new release simply opens the door to the market for new participants giving us all more options.

I'm not a millionaire and I still play GW games. I think they're pricey, but I just don't buy as much as I used to.

Frozen wastes makes a great point also. I have definitley branched out to other games (mostly board games like Zombiecide and Dreadball) as GWs' prices go up. That being said, I doubt I will ever drop GW. Even if they go even higher in price, I still have plenty of models to play with.

 frozenwastes wrote:
My favorite thing about GW's prices is that they have opened up the market for competition in a way that would not have been possible had GW not started protecting their margins with large price increases.

Now small producers can bring figures to market at a price that makes their businesses viable despite their lack of economies of scale. Had GW kept their prices competitive and did their best to compete with new players in the market by strangling them of their margins, we might not have had the massive increase in alternatives.

Each new price hike for each new release simply opens the door to the market for new participants giving us all more options.

Exaltworthy.

As long as the big fish keeps pushing the envelope (metaphoric bliss!) with how expensive they can make their product, then it's going to make the initial buy-in for smaller companies and cottage industries more viable.

Dreamforge, for example, have tried and been highly successful. I really look forward to many more companies coming forward with alternative minis and, as GWs own aesthetics have shifted towards a younger audience (apparently) I hope to see more gritty or realistic minis from these companies for those seeking that look.

And, of course, more competition means better pricing for the buyer, which we should all welcome.

Judging by GW success, probably most of the boardgamers find these prices fair, indeed.

I sometimes wonder if this success is due mainly to the product quality (high for sure) or to the "sales power" on the territory (shops, retailers, ads...).
Probably GW is the only miniature brand managed like a normal consumer goods company: others are often "homemade".
Bhe.. praise to the owners!

anyway, I still believe that a plastic toy dinosaur is not worth 65€ but of course, it s only my personal opinion )
Thank god they sell Island of blood! that's a deal

LOL, If you think Warhammer is expensive, you don't know very much. Try 5th scale cars, remote control airplanes, Video games, Golf, owning a boat, and so on which can cost of thousands of dollars a year to maintain.

Hobbies can be expensive.

raffaello.b wrote:
Hi guys,
In my opinion GW, with its last releases, is proposing exaggerated prices! This trend has been going on for 1.5 – 2 years.
(i.e. Space Marine Centurions 62€; Space Marine Captain 25€; High Elves Phoenix 46€).

In Italy, with 62€, you can buy enough food for a week! Warhammer is a wonderful hobby but let’s not forget that.. is all about plastic toys, 25 mm tall!

Do you think they’re worth the cost, or you share my opinion?

Ciao!

The truth of the matter is, that this type of gaming is a dying breed. GW realizes that they have a quantity of players locked down & as zealous as a certain tech company with a fruit for a logo. There might be some people with IQ's around average room temperature claiming that any hobby is expensive, but this hobby is niche & the more GW alienates youth (of whom, can rarely afford the rise in costs), the less you will see & hear regarding this game. What they are doing, as others have mentioned, is opened up the window for third party minis (of which it is not hard to claim proxy for). It will get to a point, where the legal fees to pursue every IP-knock off will run the purse dry (of which, I gleefully await).

So, I apologize that your economic scenario cannot match the greed that is entailed by a company, but realize, that the whole game is about building a narrative (i.e, using your imagination), which, it won't be too hard to replace that pristine premium price tier unit with whatever you'd like.

Grad student, and still find money for warhammer. Not as much as I would like (FW causes me to homer gurgle) but it is still worth it.

Also to the above point. People have been saying that GW is going to die for nearly a decade, and yet I still have no problem getting a game and meet plenty of people who are only a few years in to new.

Gone are the days of starting a new army from scratch for me but I can still buy things slowly overtime and still feel like I am getting my value out of it.

 Leth wrote:
Grad student, and still find money for warhammer. Not as much as I would like (FW causes me to homer gurgle) but it is still worth it.

Also to the above point. People have been saying that GW is going to die for nearly a decade, and yet I still have no problem getting a game and meet plenty of people who are only a few years in to new.

Gone are the days of starting a new army from scratch for me but I can still buy things slowly overtime and still feel like I am getting my value out of it.

You misread a bit, which is ok. I can clarify, though. 10 years ago, the possibility of producing third party plastic/resin minis was not cost effective for any start up (plus GW had a lock on the market). Now, with the advent of cheaper materials & production methods, GW will be forced to combat the uptick in off-shoot models with more legal take-downs / threats. Already available, is the new SM codex for the ipad on several hosting servers, etc. It doesn't take a grad student to see the end result. Either GW keeps the lawsuits coming (in which they will have to, to protect their IP) or you'll start seeing the same level of knock offs on ebay when you search for "wayfarer" sun glasses.

My income is well above the poverty level & with no student loan debt, at 24, I can afford several 2000 point armies in a heartbeat. It doesn't change the fact that this level of dissent is not uncommon to this forum, nor to the world & the desire for alternatives will always be there.

Cheers!

Going by the new SM releases, I think the pricing has gone to new levels.

One plastic character model - $30
10 plastic marines - $40
5 plastic special marines - $40 to $50
3 plastic brick marines - $78
1 plastic tank - $58
Codex - $58

Disregarding all the other costs, the fact I have to shell out $50+ to just see if I want to play the army is stupid.

Yea! Another GW pricing is too high post!

Personally I have to agree only becuase I am not a millionaire. But I do think GW knows what they are doing and that is cater to the rich crowd. Complain all you want about price but their limited edition codex are flying off the shelf.

I think the current trend will deter new/existing players from GW. New players will shin away from a new army IF they figured out how much an army really costs with paint/models x 3/suppliments. Verterns still play the game becuase they paid comparitivly little in the past for their armies. Most of then I don't think are willing to start a new army from stratch.

GW has moved its product line from expensive for the general public to 'so expensive I really need to take a good long look at this before commiting' for the general public. Of course the well off won't be affected and continues to buy as though nothing has changed.

What book publisher releases its main series of novel in chapters for $3.99CAD? and novellas for $69CAD?

As frozenwastes pointed out GW prices has persuade me to look into alternatives and I am glad for it. I have now supported multiple kickstarter and happy the see my money going much further then it would if I continue to buy GW for my hobby.

Despite all this I don't expect GW to go anywhere soon in the near future, they have 25 years with 40k and the history and fluff are the best in the market. There are still rich people grabbing all the CE products. I for one am not entirely out of GW yet. I still buy the odd model here and there and I am not a millionaire, but only selectively and after a lot of thought.

raffaello.b wrote:


In Italy, with 62€, you can buy enough food for a week!

Well my Mum spends about £110 on weekly shopping, and £ is worth more than euro.

Though I do agree some of GW's prices are insane.

 sing your life wrote:

raffaello.b wrote:


In Italy, with 62€, you can buy enough food for a week!

Well my Mum spends about £110 on weekly shopping, and £ is worth more than euro.

Though I do agree some of GW's prices are insane.

You appreciate the cost of living varies from country to country right?

 azreal13 wrote:

 sing your life wrote:

raffaello.b wrote:


In Italy, with 62€, you can buy enough food for a week!

Well my Mum spends about £110 on weekly shopping, and £ is worth more than euro.

Though I do agree some of GW's prices are insane.

You appreciate the cost of living varies from country to country right?

Yea, but the cost of food in england is probably more important than the cost of food in italy.

Not to an Italian!

nkelsch wrote:
LOL, If you think Warhammer is expensive, you don't know very much. Try 5th scale cars, remote control airplanes, Video games, Golf, owning a boat, and so on which can cost of thousands of dollars a year to maintain.

Hobbies can be expensive.

None of which are at all relevant when we're talking about wargaming.

 azreal13 wrote:
Not to an Italian!

Unless the Italian lives in England !

Gw are pricey, but the price of everything has been shooting up in the last few years, and often well above inflation as corporations try and squeeze more and more out of us.

The thing that is important to me is value. It takes me an hour to earn £30. I realise I have a pretty decent job though. For that hours work, I can have several hours of pleasure assembling and painting a tac squad, and many hours more using them in games. That's reasonable to me,
But if I were paid a fiver an hour, I might not see south value in it. I'm certainly not a millionaire, but I still see value in it at this point.

 Rayvon wrote:

 azreal13 wrote:
Not to an Italian!

Unless the Italian lives in England !

Touché.

I will give you that, but it still doesn't stop what I was responding to being one of the most naive things I've read on this forum in possibly ever.

J Class yachting is so expensive a hobby that only multi-millionaires can afford it.

Kick a can street football is so cheap a hobby that everyone can afford it.

Neither of these are of any relevance if what you want to do is the wargames hobby.

After seeing the SM prices I do think that they are starting to get on the high side especially for a casual player like myself. I still love the 40K universe and it's fluff though so I will continue to play.

 sing your life wrote:
Well my Mum spends about £110 on weekly shopping, and £ is worth more than euro.

I assume, from your context (quoting your parents' food costs, not your own), this represents food for a family, not a single person.

Although somewhat dependent on what you're buying - modified by diet, fanciness of food, cooking ability (take-away will be much more expensive than cooking for yourself), etc - it should be pretty easy to buy a single person's weekly groceries for the price of a box of Centurions - and you'd quite possibly have a decent amount of change.

EDIT: And, I suppose, region of the country. I'm generally talking about the south of England - living costs are different in other parts of Britain.

frozenwastes wrote:My favorite thing about GW's prices is that they have opened up the market for competition in a way that would not have been possible had GW not started protecting their margins with large price increases.

Now small producers can bring figures to market at a price that makes their businesses viable despite their lack of economies of scale. Had GW kept their prices competitive and did their best to compete with new players in the market by strangling them of their margins, we might not have had the massive increase in alternatives.

Each new price hike for each new release simply opens the door to the market for new participants giving us all more options.

This is very true, and a consequence that GW surely should have anticipated. This is actually more proof for the theory that the current GW leadership is positioning the company to be sold to Hasborg or some other mega toy company. Because if they cared about long term viability then why literally open the market for competitors? Because Kings of War would not have gotten off the ground 10 - 15 years ago. Today, they are growing, in no small part due to GW price increases.

nkelsch wrote:LOL, If you think Warhammer is expensive, you don't know very much. Try 5th scale cars, remote control airplanes, Video games, Golf, owning a boat, and so on which can cost of thousands of dollars a year to maintain.

Hobbies can be expensive.

I despise this red herring more than anything. The cost of an unrelated activity has no bearing on whether or not an individual item is expensive. The logic is so flawed, it is beyond repair. It is like saying if you think a Porsche is expensive you should try buying a Lear jet - what has that got to do with anything?

 Kilkrazy wrote:

J Class yachting is so expensive a hobby that only multi-millionaires can afford it.

Kick a can street football is so cheap a hobby that everyone can afford it.

Neither of these are of any relevance if what you want to do is the wargames hobby.

What if you want to war game on your yacht? This is important stuff!!!

 Chris_P wrote:
After seeing the SM prices I do think that they are starting to get on the high side especially for a casual player like myself. I still love the 40K universe and it's fluff though so I will continue to play.

I actually think the Tac Squad, in terms of value, is amongst the best that GW offer, perhaps in the industry. Certainly there aren't many other kits that offer as much play value and choice I can think of outside of perhaps the Dreamforge Troopers.

In fact, the middle ground of GW's range I really have little trouble with, ~£20 for a functioning troop choice in plastic, normally with options, I don't have a huge problem with, especially when they can reliably be obtained for a discount.

The extreme ends (ie individual foot models and large kits) are where it starts to get silly, perhaps some of the Elite choices too.

They have priced me out the market. But then again I am priced out the video games market as well.
While people still pay for models they will make them. When they stop paying for models they will make them in China and not pass the cost savings on. That's business.
Maybe with financial backing some of the smaller games will become more popular and Gw may be forced into re thinking their pricing strategy.
Gw used the money from floating on the stock market to invest in New equipment to make the models which is why we have big kits today. That means we have to pay for it
Back in the 90s when I worked for them the main target audience was young teens and we were told to sell to them. (That's how it felt to me anyway so i left)
An army= £300+
Hours of hanging out with my mates playing a top notch game= priceless

nkelsch wrote:
LOL, If you think Warhammer is expensive, you don't know very much. Try 5th scale cars, remote control airplanes, Video games, Golf, owning a boat, and so on which can cost of thousands of dollars a year to maintain.

Hobbies can be expensive.

So if a company starts selling their frozen pizza for 40$ at the grocery store it's not fair to call it overpriced since $200 scotch exists? Got it.

nkelsch wrote:
LOL, If you think Warhammer is expensive, you don't know very much. Try 5th scale cars, remote control airplanes, Video games, Golf, owning a boat, and so on which can cost of thousands of dollars a year to maintain.

Hobbies can be expensive.

Well, I suppose the point is that GW stuff has moved 'class' of hobby. I've got other expensive hobby stuff that I do - motorbikes, travel etc. GW used to be something you could spend pocket money on, without hundreds of pounds and a dent in the bank balance, although I acknowledge those days are long gone.