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I'm inclined to agree with the people that say its a time investment you pay for, i love the hobby always have i started when i was 8, its much better than computer games as once i have completed it i am very loathe to play it again (unless its something good like Fallout 3 or FF7, i completed my 15th play through this weekend)

i still play with models i bought years ago, and in some cases prefer them, i have 5000ish (i have never bothered to total it up) of space marines and the amount of time and enjoyment i have got out of using far outweighs the cost, even things i only get out in really large games, like the land raiders and techmarines and massed characters all in the same army etc

likewise for the other stuff, sometimes i get so burnt out with an army (like dwarves/orcs and goblins/eldar) that i just don't want to play them and sell them on, and using the money to raise a new army i want to do or add the models to do a new build of an existing army (with the sale of my dwarf army i bought 25 assault marines to do an assault marine army that was rather successful and won me many a game)

of course getting into the hobby is tough with some of the initial costs, such as glue, paint, clippers, codex's, rules and figures, however just have a budget, and sat for example, if you want rules and some dice etc to start you off buy ABOR and a starter paint set (the one that comes with glue) and you can have enough to begin playing some basic mission to learn the rules etc and that only comes to £65, then if you say dont want the orks or marines, or in fact both, sell them on and use the money you've just generated back to start another army that you want to do, you've learnt the rules, and made some money back from your original spend to put it into the army you want to do, agreed after that you've got the cost of the army, but again if your short on cash, buy the codex figure out want you want, and scour trade forums like here and ebay, theres always bargains to be had for large lots of cheap models.

and if you didnt like it from your initial spend then the hobby isnt for you and just put the lot back on ebay and again get some of your initial spend back to spend on something else

weed gets my vote

Squig101 wrote:I see your coming from more now john, however, for ork(such as myself) players the battle force is awful

I don't play green, so I wouldn't be able to say.

I do play SM, and the SM box is pretty good. I'd rather see the Combat Squad and Scouts replaced by a 2nd Tactical Squad, or a Dev squad, but it's close enough to being right.

Bottom Line = When put into perspective the GW hobby is only moderately expensive. There are far more expensive hobbies than this one.

Yeah, I hear prada bags can run almost as much as a daemon army!


There are a tonne of hobbies cheaper than this one too. The argument isn't whats more or less expensive, it's "is this one too expensive?".

konversionz wrote:"if the Perry twins can sell boxes of 42 Napoleonic models at £15 (http://www.perry-miniatures.com/index2.html) "

Well if you wanted to recreate waterloo you'd need 72,000 of them so i'm not sure thats so cheap

Lets do the maths... (well, I'm bored, so bare with me !)

Victrix are event cheaper at £19.95 for 52 models. So that equates to £27,623.07. However if you were buying THAT many models, I suspect you'd be able to negotiate a sizeable discount, at least equivalent to wholesale - say 40% - so that takes it down to £16,573.84.

Now, at my current rate of painting that is 5 models per week (max, often its a lot less, but for the sake of the example, lets say I can paint 5 models a week in the 2-3 hours I get to paint), so that equates to 276 years's worth of work, or £16,573.54/276 = £60.04 per annum.

Seems pretty affordable to me!

Although of course, I'd have to invent some means of living far beyond my 3-score-years-and-10, which might take some time out of my painting schedule, but if patented could generate some income to offset the costs of the project...

I stopped smoking weed three days ago because I officially Can't Afford Jack. --EDIT: I don't drink American booze--
Paypal is a different thing though; I've only bought GW products online for quite a while, excepting the FLGS for occasional paints or spur-of-the-moment purchases. Before our dollar fell off the hill it was getting up around 9:10 to the greenback, which made the Warstore extra good stuff. I wish I could go back and order two Windrider boxes before people started panicking and upsetting everything.

ShumaGorath wrote:

Somnicide wrote:Hmmm... New army or 30 high quality glossy new porn mags...

Seriously, they are a business, they price what the market can bear. They have costs, as a public held company they are required by law to do their best to make a profit. If you don't like the game (or can't afford it) the find another hobby.

Well part of the argument is what can the market bear? They aren't exactly doing stellar as a company right now, and raising prices in a time of economic loss isn't exactly a wise decision in many regards.

As opposed to Wizkids and Rackham who are pictures of health?

The fact that Wizkids is now more or less defunct, and Rackham is up to some seriously dodgy moves (Phoenixing the company anyone?) suggests that the market itself is somewhat volatile, and certainly GW's current tribulations cannot be blamed entirely on their prices.

You also made quite a leap of logic about people no longer buying in claiming they just sell up and move off. The vast majority of people I know who no longer game *still* have their armies. After all, it gave them hours of fun and enjoyment when they were active, and they also put time and effort into painting it. This is also why there are very few ex-gamers compared to lapsed-gamers. When I worked for GW, you'd get at least 2 or 3 people a week dropping in saying they used to play wandering back out with the new rulebook.

haha@osbad.

Nice one

A lot of people spend over 3000$ a year putting cancer in their lungs or more drinking themselves into stupors..

My rationale is until 40k is more expensive than smoking it's not that bad

Is is for me. Well, kind of.

£11 gets me 50g of Golden Viriginia which will last a fortnight.

$11.50 got me a wife!

From Russia.

Thats nothing. Madonna got a son from Africa for nowt!

This 'the market is shrinking' talk doesn't really wash with me. Wizkids shut up shop at the same time as PP released Monsterpocalypse and Blizzard(?) released World of Warcrack figures. The 'clicky' market seems to be about whatever the new thing is; Wizkids haven't had a new thing for a couple of years now. The 'clicky' games are under new management so to speak rather than gone away.

Rackham's problems were entirely self created by their own mismanagement of the C3 / C4 crossover and they seem to be out of those woods now primarily on the strength of AT-43 sales.

The only place I ever hear about a shrinking market is from GW zealots. The market is in fact diversifying, check out all of the internet based companies turning out high quality figures and the new breed of plastic historical miniatures companies, their market is clearly growing.

It seems to me that the ‘shrinking market’ fallacy is the same as the ‘Pokémon’ fallacy. GW still needs to realise that their market is shrinking because they're doing it wrong.

Didn't say it was the only cause though. Same thing goes for Wizkids and Rackhams recent woes.

To look at something in isolation is largely a fools errand. The conclusion might well still be right, but without contrasting and comparing with a wider view, you cannot say for sure!

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Didn't say it was the only cause though. Same thing goes for Wizkids and Rackhams recent woes.

Your snide remarks aside you didn't 'say' a great deal. For what it's worth you're not the only place I've come across this, but you are part of the same demographic.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:To look at something in isolation is largely a fools errand. The conclusion might well still be right, but without contrasting and comparing with a wider view, you cannot say for sure!

You should glue a copy of this to the top of your keyboard.

The thing that bothers me about the huge price rises is
believe it or not,actually using them in a battle.
Will they get damaged,will the paint chip,will some
unscrupulous person.... I have been putting the finnishing
touches to my Space Wolf army.The one figure I won't be
buying is Logan Grimnar,because I can't justify spending
that much money on a single figure.If I did buy it,I
wouldn't use it, just in case something happened to it.
I would suggest keeping your spending on metal figs to
a minimum,and try to build your forces from the plastic
sets.

Sorry, but that's not for me. I get a lot more satisfaction out of always collecting the coolest miniatures possible for my army, regardless of cost. I get into bidding wars on eBay for just the right figure to add to my squads. I tried the "cheap-ass" army for my WHFB Chaos army, and I never play with it any more, because the models don't excite me.

What do you think is going to happen to Logan? If the paint chips or he breaks, you just touch him up or repair him. It's no big deal.

For what it's worth. I personally don't believe "the market" is shrinking. The reason I believe it is because I look at my own behaviour as a some-time customer of GW and other gaming companies. Now its difficult, if not downright silly, to extrapolate one's own experience and assume everyone else behaves the same way, but bear with me on this for a moment.

I am a human being (no!!) and in common with most human beings, my personal preferences became pretty fixed in my teenage years. There have been extensive experiments and papers on this in relation to tastes in music, so I presume this also holds good for other tastes - such as in literature and in hobby time.

In other words, if as a teenager, I develop an enjoyment of tabletop wargaming, then as an adult, while I may come and go from it, I will always have that affection for it. That is my basic thesis. Once a gamer, always a gamer.

Now. Of course we have GW's supposed market data that tells them that they have bags of customers that buy into their systems for 2 years, then burn out and are never seen again.

Quite probably that is a fact. Lots of anecdotal evidence from blue shirts to support it.

BUT. That is looking at things through GW's eyes. Not the market's eyes. GW have absolutely no data on the number of their customers who get fragged off for whatever reason at 18, BUT at 30 start buying stuff off the internet from discounters, or move on to shows, or just move on to other gaming systems or whatever. They know how many customers stop buying from their shops, but that is a far cry from knowing how the market behaves, and says as much about the level of focus on teenage boys, and how that can alienate other demographics from their shops than it does about customer buying patterns.

I firmly believe that most (not all, of course) one-time gamers who weren't just in it because it was what their group of friends was doing at the time, but actually got into gaming in some depth as a youth, will be what we might call a "gamer at heart". They may continue to game in various arenas, they may move on to other hobbies, but they have found it to be a hobby they enjoy, and there is every possibility that given the right opportunity they will continue to play tabletop games on and off until the day they die.

That is what I define "the market". It's not quite the true economic definition of "the market" - which is the amount of money spent on a particular set of products in a year. Rather it is perhaps better described as "the potential market". And because it only decreases at the rate gamers die, and it increases at the birth rate - it will continue to grow, statistically, for the next few decades, until the "demographic time bomb" finally goes off and the UK population starts shrinking again.

Now clearly, GW only service a fraction of this customer base, as does any individual company, and a given customer will dip in and out of buying products from any one company as time goes by. BUT, they will always remain as a "potential customer". They are always available to be tempted into buying some new product or other IF they can be persuaded to.

The only supporting evidence I have towards this thesis, is that when you look at large non-GW-specific gaming events (such as GenCon in the US, and Salute in the UK), year on year they are growing in popularity. They are not fizzling out through lack of numbers.

That would indicate to me that every year there are more and more "gamers" around in the US and the UK. Any given company, such as Wizkids, GW, Rackham, PP or whoever may struggle at a given point to entice those gamers to dip their hands in their pockets, and in any given year, the combined companies may not convince us to part with more money than we did last year and we may buy computer games instead (or whatever is our personaly next-best alternative), but we'll be back next week, month or year, and if they can tempt us, we will buy. On the other hand, if their offerings are looking stale, then we will not buy, because we are just one mouse-click away from buying something else with that money which we believe will give us more fun - whether it is another company's products, a comic book or a bottle of wine.

Attracting customers out of this pool is a tricky matter, and I believe because of the internet, and the growth of accessibility to a much wider range of product, such matters as reputation for support, value for money and perceived quality are more important than they have ever been. Taking Rakham as a case in point - their ditching of 3rd ed totally destroyed their reputation for support, their new plastics were judged to be of variable quality, and their new prices are (at least here in the UK) considered by many to be excessive for what you get. No wonder they have struggled to reinvent themselves and make a profit in this geek-niche micro-industry.

I think GW underestimated the importance of high quality rules to their customers, and still underestimate the impact of price. I think Rackham misjudged human nature and how vindictive people really are when something they love has been taken away from them. I think Wizkids ran out of creative steam and couldn't come up with a decent enough product to compete any more. All of these individual company misjudgements do not indicate a shrinking market. Merely that at the higher levels of management in these companies there is a disconnection from their customers. And that in comparison to many other market segments, gaming companies really rely on the long term loyalty of their customer base to their particular brands.

well, you cant say they are ripping people off, cuz they dont point a gun at you and force you to buy it, you yourself make that choice.

as for me, i think GW has improved with its prices. Mainly on the plastic kits, i jus tlove how they're priced. as for metal, well, metal is metal so i think its fair that they raise the price on that one, and i avoid metal kits like the plague.

I think for the price of the hobby, its worth it. you get a the creative freedom with the models you have, makes you have inclined with your artistic side (for me) and nerd side.

back then i had 10k points worth of chaos space marines, and my dad had some personal religious conviction and we burned all of that in a barrel, i aint crying, its a choice, and so is getting and spending on this hobby.

enmitee wrote:back then i had 10k points worth of chaos space marines, and my dad had some personal religious conviction and we burned all of that in a barrel, i aint crying, its a choice, and so is getting and spending on this hobby.

Did your Chaos Marines repent before they died?

rackham would do much better if they allowed independant stockists to sell their products...or if they already do they should make it clearer to people.

They do allow indie stockists to carry them - for instance I can get them from Travelling Man and from Forbidden Planet B&M stores in the UK, as well as from arcaneminiatures.com online.

What I think happened was that Simple Miniatures Games used to be their UK distributor, but they got shafted when Rackham axed Conf v3 and they got lumbered with an unsaleable stock of old metal minis that took ages to shift.

I believe that after that episode SMG stopped carrying Rackham stock.

I believe (though I stand corrected) that up until recently UK suppliers had to get their stock from FFG in the US, hence its very high price here due to non-EU import duties.

I am hoping once Rackham get their act sorted out and have re-established a reputation for reliability stock will become more available and, please God, slightly cheaper when indie stores can deal with an EU-based distributor again.

@OP

GW prices have always been considered expensive, even back in the day when I started the hobby during Rogue Trader. Sure, prices have gone up since the days of the 30 Beakie box set, but compared to everything else, GW has always cost a premium.

What my friends and I did was to play the games using armies that were cheaper to obtain. This resulted in a lot of Space Marines vs Genestealer Cults matches (because Beakies, Terminators, Genestealers, and Genestealer Hybrids were cheap and plentiful from the RTB01 Box Set and Space Hulk sets). It wasn't until later that we could afford to bring Eldar (which were nearly all metal at the time) and other armies into our games. Heck, my current Tyranid army is still primarily made up from those same Genestealers and Tyranid Warriors from Space Hulk, Genestealer, Deathwing, and Tyrannid Attack box sets.

What I am trying to say is that you can enjoy the hobby on a budget, but you'll have to avoid the expensive armies, such as the Necrons and the Sisters of Battle (or anything that requires a lot of metal miniatures to be successful) and focus on ones that you can build the core from Box Sets like I did. If my friends and I were starting today with the budget we had back then, we would likely see a lot of Space Marines vs Orks matches.

I know that you have started building a Necron army, and I know that you have invested a lot of time, money, and emotion already into it. I have no solutions for you and you will likely have to find a way to work it out, just like how I had to deal with the problem my own way when I was younger. But I do think that you took a more difficult path by starting Necrons. When I look at the current Box Sets, I can see that you can build a viable Space Marine army for less than $400 U.S. retail, by buying two Starter AoBR sets and a SM Battleforce (and that leaves you with a good start for an Ork army for a future army or as trade fodder, as well). Over time, add in a Terminator Box Set to give yourself three Terminator Squads with all the varying options (Heavy Flamer, Cyclone, and Assault Cannon), a Dreadnought Box Set to create the option of fielding three Dreadnoughts with varying options (Multi-Melta, TL Lascannon, and Assault Cannon), and a Devastator Box Set to add to the Combat Squad that comes in the SM Battleforce to make a full ten man Dev Squad with two pairs of different Heavy Weapons. That gives you a lot of options that, in my opinion, would do well in the current rules setting. And I think it would all come together for around $500, which is less than your 400 pounds.

Sure, it's another Spase Marinez (hurr!) army, but in truth, it is a solid army and one that is perhaps the most affordable in the hobby. Once you can afford more, then you can come back to armies that demand a higher price to collect.

Trust me, you have a lot of time, and sadly, before you know it, you will be like the rest of us: with too much crap unpainted and too much money spent on the hobby.

Forewarning: TLR ahead.


I've been engaged in the hobby for a number of years, and just came back to it after a long hiatus. We had price complaints back then, as did other people. I have price complaints now. However, the OP specifically and this thread in general are hovering around the edges of two topics: 1) are the prices too high for GW products and 2) why are prices so high?

Now, I'm no certified expert in finance or economics, but I know a fair bit. I'm also not a GW employee, but I can look at stats and numbers and analyze a situation just like everybody else. So I think we can look at question (1) first.

The question of whether GW products are priced too high or too low could be referred to as their competitiveness. In order to determine their competitiveness, we have to look at their competitors: other hobbies typically engaged in by a majority male demographic that I'll generally refer to as "gamers" (other people might have less friendly slang names for us). I've seen some comparisons to golf and whatnot in this thread, and to me that doesn't jump out as a direct competitor amongst the "gamer" demograpic. MMO's, P&P RPGs, video games, DVD/Blu-ray entertainment, movie showings, etc. are the true competitors.

So, we might have figured out what the competition is, but how do you truly compare items of varying cost and quality? Personally, I like to break things into a sort of lowest common denominator. For me, that's time. Cost per Hour Entertained (CHE) for short here is essentially how much cost per hour of entertainment do I incur. E.g.: If I go to the movies at a decent quality theater, I get approx. 2 hours in return for around 10 USD, or $5 per hour. Not bad. Buying a movie is even cheaper, though the initial investment can be higher. For example, if I purchase a DVD at $15 and only watch it once (again using a 2 hour average for run-time), my CHE is $7.50. Watch the movie again though, and is cut in half to $3.75, a trend which continues with each viewing.

Now that we've found our cost comparison, let's examine GW versus a competitor. Let's pretend for this scenario that my friend and I were new to the hobby, and looking to have a playable game for the cheapest cost possible. That generally indicates an AoBR purchase. Given that there are two of us, I think it is relatively fair to assume that we either split the cost of the box, or both buy one. The cost to me is therefore either $30 or $60, respectively. Using the latter example of $60, I'll compare that with the easiest CHE to compute, going to the movies at $5/hour entertained. Here is where it begins to get fuzzy, because we all cut out, trim, file, assemble, and paint at different rates, so I'm going to have to make assumptions. So let's assume that I can cut out and trim all of the AoBR models in 1 hour and file & assemble them over the next 2. I think that's a decent assumption. What that means is that so far without any painting or game 1 being played, I'm at $20/hour of entertainment. Not horrible, but still 4x the rate of going to the movie.

From here, let's say that my friend and I skip painting because we just want to play, and jump right into a game of 40K! He doubles up on AoBR orks and I double up on SM (since we both bought the box) and thus we get a sizeable (if unbalanced) game going. I'm not the fastest and neither is he since we're learning the rules, so this medium-small game nets us a 3 hour game. My CHE is now down to $10/hour (6 hours entertainment/$60 AoBR set). 2x the movie price, we're getting there! Having enjoyed my first game, I spend 2 hours that weekend painting the miniatures, bringing my CHE down to a competitive $5/hour. Every game played from then on only makes my investment more worthwhile.

Now, we have the confounding variable that shows us that we must buy Codices, more models, paints, tools, brushes, etc. thus increasing cost. However, the underlying point I'm trying to make is this: if you feel they aren't competitively priced, play more! Every extra game played lowers your CHE, your cost per hour of entertainment; therefore prices become more competitive the more you play. Just like an MMO or the bought DVD, instead of the fixed cost of going to the theater.

Now, as to question (2) (Why does GW price so high):

I think there are a number of possible explanations for this. I'd like to examine this by speaking to the most recent price hike. If one looks at the GW Investor Relations page and find the 5 year report, we can see revenues down 40,000,000 GBP since FY 2004, and a net loss in FY 2007. There are likely multiple explanations for both the peak revenue in FY 2004 (LoTR:RoTK released around this time) and the following decrease in revenue.

One thing to remember is that while capitalism presumes ongoing growth of market, there is at any given time a discrete amount of dollars out there being spent on "gaming." As the possibilities for "gaming" grows, the dollars at any given time become more spread out. WoW released around 2004, for example, and could be siphoning those "gaming" dollars away from GW games.

The point is, GW is on a downward slope of revenue in a world of increasing costs, and is beginning to show losses. This bodes poorly for the company but bodes worse for the prices given to the gamer based on historical trends at GW in regards to pricing. What I mean by that is this: GW seemingly attempts to make up for decreases in revenue via increases in price in order to maintain overall margin. Instead (and this was touched on earlier in the thread by somebody), a wise decision might be to decrease price to increase volume. Presuming that the "gamers" are willing to purchase GW products given a competitive price, a decrease in price would make more "gamers" believe that the product is competitively priced. More volume would thus be sold, and since GW has many costs such as plastics which are variable, their margin would improve even if revenues remained slightly lower. Basically revenues would pick up slightly from increased volume, but not a lot due to decreased price. This marginal increase would be offset by decreasing costs, providing for improved margins overall.

Essentially, it appears to me that GW is operating from a revenue-based model instead of a profit-based model. This is interesting, considering they are publicly traded.



Anyway, don't know if anybody will make it all the way through that. I hope you do and it sparks your brainpans a bit...