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I don't like to brag, but I've made the switch to Flames of war and can get a 1500 point force for around £30
So, yeah, put that in your pipe GW

Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:I don't like to brag, but I've made the switch to Flames of war and can get a 1500 point force for around £30
So, yeah, put that in your pipe GW

As long as you are not buying battlefront minatures....-shuters at their prices-


I have also made the switch to historicals over the last year, and my only complaint is that I didn't do it sooner. =oÞ~~~ Force on Force is better then FOW [/joking] Actually I can't say that in all honesty because i've never played FOW WWII just isn't my thing. Now Vietnam... there's a fun place with lots of interesting toys

I'm buying from Plastic Soldier Compnay.

Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:I'm buying from Plastic Soldier Compnay.

Smart man =o]

FabricatorGeneralMike wrote:

Worglock wrote:

H.B.M.C. wrote:Finecost was a good excuse for a price increase, just like white metal before it.

The best excuse for a price increase is noticing that people still paid the increased prices after the last price increase, and the one before that, and the one before that.

Point of note: You're going to buy more Games Workshop stuff in 2012 than I am. Guaranteed.

I'll take that wager...what should be deal be? Whomever buys more GamesWorkshop PLC merchandise (including FW and BL, ebay purchaces and secondhand models) shall be flogged at dawn,leave dakka forever or how about has to admit that GW isn't perfect and that Finecast is not 'Fine'? Hell I'll even spot you a hundred american dollars....

I also call bull on the long term players putting up with the price rises. According to GW most people don't play any GW system for more then 18 months. They soon bore of it and GW's mission statment is to wallet rape those people for every dime in the mean time. I know thats what it was like when I was there. Ignore the long timers get those kids hooked on intro games, sell starter box to parent. String the kid along until he gets fed up with GW then fine another little timmy to hook into the GW plactic crack 'Hobby'.

Don't worry locky, I like ya, this place wouldn't be half as interesting without yourself and Kan around. =o] Merry Ho Ho Dakka.

The prices are tough to swallow. I like this hobby and 40k, but I am a teenager with little money at any one given time. It makes me really have to think about which kit to buy in terms of value. It's taken me about 3 years to collect 2000 points of Marines, and my Eldar force could take even longer.

Oh, and where did you find that stat for the time spent playing a GW system? Just curious.

filbert wrote:
The justification is, as ever, that some people continue to pay the prices...

Well, except they don't.

GW publishes their annual and semi-annual revenue in their corporate filings.

Latest: 121.6m
The year previous: 123.5m

If this years prices are on average 8% higher than the previous year, that means that they sold around 9% less product. Either the same amount of people are buying less or less people are buying or some combination of the two (the most likely).

I've worked both as a corporate and private practice accountant. The first thing an account will tell you when your profit is nearing a loss is that you could probably do a small price increase and you won't lose too many customers. The problem is that GW finds themselves in this situation year in, year out. They keep looking at the equation "revenue = price x units sold" and thinking that if they increase their price, their revenue will go up!

Is 8% accurate? Or have the prices gone up more like 10%? Also remember, that this compounds every year. So if they drive away 9-10% of their sales every year with price increases, in 6 or 7 years, they'll have cut their customer base in half! They've been doing it for almost 10 years now. And at the same time, they've been dropping customers who were into Lord of the Rings.

They don't raise prices every year because people will keep paying. They raise prices every year because they feel they have to in order to support falling revenue. Which then *causes* falling revenue, so they raise prices again.

If you take a look at GW's revenue numbers, if the same number of people were buying the same amount as 6 years ago, they'd be making twice the money at current prices.

What I've found locally is that there is a critical mass in a gaming community. That if the amount of people that show up for gaming days, tournaments, leagues, post on message boards organizing local games, etc., drops low enough, the community for that game sort of dies off and ceases to be vibrant. I'm guessing that it's not simply a matter of everyone's local GW gaming community losing half its players, but some losing none, others losing 80%, others losing 30% and so on, to average out, around the world with GW have half the customers they did just 6 years ago.

But if they lowered their price to where they're turning a decent profit, low enough to please customers, would they be better off?

I have to post in this to harp about the most beloved of Tyranids....the Lictor.

In 2nd edition this critter came out, originally priced at about £12. By the end of 2nd edition he was sitting at a healthy £15 price tag.
His 3rd edition descendant....cost £8!
His 4th edition descendant...cost £8 originally, hopped to £10, hopped to £12.50 and with Finecast went to £15.50!

Sometimes I don't know what GW's pricing model is apart from possibly on some sort of drug.

DoctorZombie wrote:But if they lowered their price to where they're turning a decent profit, low enough to please customers, would they be better off?

The issue would be how good are they are then going out and obtaining new customers or grabbing back old customers? If they lower their prices and get their message out and engage with gamers, they'll likely be better off. If they just lower their prices, and keep on business as usual, probably not.

Again, it must be remember that this is the same firm that borrowed money to pay dividends, so...

DoctorZombie wrote:But if they lowered their price to where they're turning a decent profit, low enough to please customers, would they be better off?

I think that without revisiting the entire process that made them into the international company and taking a hard look at product design from the ground up, that reducing their prices wouldn't help them much at this point.

The damage to the customer base has been done. They've already more than cut it in half over the last ten years. I don't think dropping prices now would do much more than scuttle their revenue even further.

They need to look at the customer experience and revisit it from initial contact on through collecting an army and playing their games. Right now they have the idea of the game so they can sell some miniatures but then they expect more than half (Jervis said two thirds) of their customers to never actually play their game and then expect their average customer to quit the hobby within two years of their first purchase. Given that, it makes sense to jack up the price of the starter sets to get the most money possible out of the average customer who will never, ever reach a full 1500-2000 point game.

My guess is that they are going to continue raising their prices 8-10% a year for the foreseeable future and concentrate on getting the most money out of people before they quit.

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that I pay less for some things now than when I started back in '98 or so. It's mostly down to having joined the EU and getting a stronger currency, but there have also been noticeable price drops for some models when they went form metal to plastic. Never mind the quality increase and loads of extra bits.

Absolutely true. Tyranid warriors, for example, are a hundred times better than the old metal ones. Some people's currency shifts have led them to pay a more fair price, while others get gouged like Australia & Canada.

DoctorZombie wrote:

FabricatorGeneralMike wrote:

Worglock wrote:

H.B.M.C. wrote:Finecost was a good excuse for a price increase, just like white metal before it.

The best excuse for a price increase is noticing that people still paid the increased prices after the last price increase, and the one before that, and the one before that.

Point of note: You're going to buy more Games Workshop stuff in 2012 than I am. Guaranteed.

I'll take that wager...what should be deal be? Whomever buys more GamesWorkshop PLC merchandise (including FW and BL, ebay purchaces and secondhand models) shall be flogged at dawn,leave dakka forever or how about has to admit that GW isn't perfect and that Finecast is not 'Fine'? Hell I'll even spot you a hundred american dollars....

I also call bull on the long term players putting up with the price rises. According to GW most people don't play any GW system for more then 18 months. They soon bore of it and GW's mission statment is to wallet rape those people for every dime in the mean time. I know thats what it was like when I was there. Ignore the long timers get those kids hooked on intro games, sell starter box to parent. String the kid along until he gets fed up with GW then fine another little timmy to hook into the GW plactic crack 'Hobby'.

Don't worry locky, I like ya, this place wouldn't be half as interesting without yourself and Kan around. =o] Merry Ho Ho Dakka.

The prices are tough to swallow. I like this hobby and 40k, but I am a teenager with little money at any one given time. It makes me really have to think about which kit to buy in terms of value. It's taken me about 3 years to collect 2000 points of Marines, and my Eldar force could take even longer.

Oh, and where did you find that stat for the time spent playing a GW system? Just curious.

It's what I was told by my manager during my first day 'indoctronation'.

I personally believe the two biggest GW mistakes where, Axing Specialist Games, and 'The annual GW PLC (C,tm) price adjustment". From what has been said on the subject the bean counters decided that they where not turning enough of a profit on the SG to keep them in the stores. Then after they where web only they stagnaited until the community took over and have made them into a classic. While they might not of been 'big sellers' what they did was keep people in house. When you get bored of 40k,Fantasy or LotR (and you well it happens to all of us maybe burnedout is a better term) you look for something different. Epic armageddon, BFG, Mordenhiem, Blood Bowl all these are very different games to the main line big three. They have different pricing structures, model counts, they range from skirmish sized to huge armies in epic. But they did one critical thing they kept people in house. You didn't have to go to a different company to find something different. What seems to hapen now is the pricing structure convinces some people that they don't get percieved value in GW's products. So they go looking for a different gaming experience. I might not of said that well but im shure you get the point.

As for pricing, when I was young ( yeah yeah I know...) most sets where within pocket money range. I could go down there with $20-30 dollars and walk away with alot of different stuff. In canada the prices are just so high that most parents dont send there kids out with $50-100 bucks spending money. If they could of kept the pricing down to what a average teenager would have in his pocket on Saturday afternoon I don't think they would have this precieved anamosity towards them. GW is still turning a profit at the moment, but they seem to be loosing customers and making up the shortfall in price rises.

I do have one question for you though, will GW's prices ever reatch a point where you will choose not to buy there stuff anymore? When it enough ,enough? I believe alot of GW's customers have reached that point where they said to themselves "They what how much for that?!?" Funny story about that, I was at a FLGS (Imperial hobbies in richmond, they have a huge %50 off boxing week sale going on out there, great store if you are in the lowermainland I would suggest you check it out, they have WAYYYY more then GW stuff almost anything you can think of) and my friend said look at the price of this. Cannius Wolfborn for $58 dollars (and in Finecast to boot) I actually started to laugh and the lady behind the till saw what I was looking at and asked me " yeah we have been having alot of problems with finecast. We have people bringing them back 3 or 4 times. I'm not impressed with the stuff." So just another circumstancial story from some random guy on the internet.

mortetvie wrote:Please note I have been talking about the plastics, not finecast. I have no experience with finecast and am not too enthused on investing in any finecast models anytime soon.

Finecast is still one of the biggest jokes GW has ever played. Oh well. *sigh*

What really gets me is the HOBBY tools GW has. So overpriced, not better quality at all. The brushes are junk. I just tell everyone to go to a hobby store. You are getting the same quality *better usually* for a fraction of the price.

Example. Went to a comic book store selling GW basing grass/rocks/sand etc. Then went to a hobby store and got multiple bags for basing for around 10 bucks. In contrast to a tiny plastic amount of material for 8 bucks. If I got the same amount of material from GW I would have spent around 40, probably more.

Units go up and up, always. That is just part of the situation. Until people no longer buy the product.

Prices in Australia have gone up between 10-15% in the last 3-4 years. I know it is still relatively cheap in Sweden, about half the price of the product you buy downunder.

When I started this hobby in 1999, a box of 19 soldiers was $25. A few years later that went to $30 with the excuse that the raise was to offset the money lost on metals. A year later metal model prices were raised. A few years later, that price went to $35 with the exact same excuse as before, to offset losses on metal models. The next year...

After the second round of this I moved to only buying from independent retailers or 3rd party sales like bartertown and ebay. Luckily I found a supplier who gives me 30% off so I'm still paying about what I paid back in 1999 for a box regiment. Granted that money starts to go up as GW repackages their boxes with fewer models at a higher dollar per model.


Back in 1999, a plastic model cost $1.32-$1.56 total for most boxes. Now the current retail price per model for CORE units is $2.90 per model(Orc Boys). Keep in mind that 10 years ago less money bought you more models($25 for 19 versus todays $29 for 10).

I've gone out of my way to make sure that I give GW as little money as possible while still enjoying their game. And that is my relationship with them. Love the game, despise the company.

So I urge you all, if you MUST buy GW products, do it the smart way, get your 30% off or buy second hand(you can still get NiB secondhand models all the time on ebay and bartertown).

FabricatorGeneralMike wrote:[ I do have one question for you though, will GW's prices ever reatch a point where you will choose not to buy there stuff anymore?

I've been buying through 3rd party, second hand and counts-as (i.e boxes of plague monks for wracks) to make my army as cheap as possible. So already basically.

XCom wrote:What really gets me is the HOBBY tools GW has.

I'll give 2 exceptions to this. The side cutters aren't too much over the price of others I've found locally (50p to a pound more) and I find the shape they have more comfortable than others, and the pinning drill. It's a .3 to 3mm hand drill that comes with 6 1mm drill bits. It's actually cheaper and better than hobbyshop ones I found, as while an individual drill was half the price, you need 2 (a .3 to 1.5mm and a 1.3 to 3mm) hand drills, then buy the pack of bits on top.

The rest isnt worth it at the money though.

Actually, seafreight shipping is a lot faster and cheaper than you think (used to deal with seafreight a lot).

The cost of shipping and tax does not account for the difference at all.

However, when you take into account that cost of property (especially retail property), wages, etc are much higher you start to see where the cost difference comes from.

Except it doesn't. The prices are higher in Brazil, South Africa, New Zealand, Japan and so on... and not all those countries are making 'double' what the US/UK makes in wages.

Prices can be consistent the world over. Just look at Lego.

Aerethan wrote:When I started this hobby in 1999, a box of 19 soldiers was $25. A few years later that went to $30 with the excuse that the raise was to offset the money lost on metals. A year later metal model prices were raised. A few years later, that price went to $35 with the exact same excuse as before, to offset losses on metal models. The next year...

After the second round of this I moved to only buying from independent retailers or 3rd party sales like bartertown and ebay. Luckily I found a supplier who gives me 30% off so I'm still paying about what I paid back in 1999 for a box regiment. Granted that money starts to go up as GW repackages their boxes with fewer models at a higher dollar per model.


Back in 1999, a plastic model cost $1.32-$1.56 total for most boxes. Now the current retail price per model for CORE units is $2.90 per model(Orc Boys). Keep in mind that 10 years ago less money bought you more models($25 for 19 versus todays $29 for 10).

I've gone out of my way to make sure that I give GW as little money as possible while still enjoying their game. And that is my relationship with them. Love the game, despise the company.

PM me and tell me the link of the people that get you like 30% off. I still think a local friends store has about the same discount. Either way the prices are killing me for my nids! Plus aside from ebay where would you recommend getting Metal models? I hate finecast, so much.

So I urge you all, if you MUST buy GW products, do it the smart way, get your 30% off or buy second hand(you can still get NiB secondhand models all the time on ebay and bartertown).

PM me and tell me the link of the people that get you like 30% off. I still think a local friends store has about the same discount. Either way the prices are killing me for my nids! Plus aside from ebay where would you recommend getting Metal models? I hate finecast, so much.

Hi all.
Can I do an overview of the last 30 odd years of GW ?

Mid 1980s GW sold a wide range of products , Citadel and Marauder minatures, for RPGs and some table top games they produced ,some they just stocked in store.

At this time thier products were sold at competative prices , as they were competing with other LFGS.

Thier customer base was mainly late teens and early twenties.(Students and or friends/relations of students.)
The focus was on entertaining games with strong narrative coupled with good quality minatures.

By the early 1990s GW had consolidated its stock to GW /citadel products only in thier stores.
Warhammer 40k and EPIC were the 'big three.'And a wide range of '3D RPG games' (from Dark Future to Blood Bowl.)

GW also realised that younger siblings of gamers were a valuable resource , and thay teamed up with MB games to recruit 8 yeatr olds and over with the exelent 'Space Crusade and Hero Quest.'

With a wide range of games with strong narrative supported with a range of good quality (for the time ) minatures .GW had acess to a wider spectrum of gamers/collectors and DOUBLED thier turn over every 3 years from 1988 to 1997.

By the late 1990s, the accountants realised that the more minatures that were needed in a game the better sales of minatures would be...
Taking this SINGLE truth out of the mix of important truths that grows a customer base of a hobby company.
And using it in isolation has simply desimated the customer base GW built up over the previous decade.

Without the 'gate way games' GW looses out on a large amount of potential customers.
Without the 'specialist games ', GW looses vet players to other systems and companies.
Without the interaction with the older more experianced gamers positive word of mouth turns into negative word of mouth.

When Mr Kirby stated GW plc were in the buisness of selling toy soldiers to children.
The products were available at pocket money prices .
Having wriiten the 40k rules with such a heavy stragegic focus ESPECIALY for children, since 1998.(Simple game play and over complicated rules.)
Most older gamers find the rules a bit un rewarding to play.(No more than a' beer and pizza' type game.)
But thats ok as long as GW plc still price thier products at pocket money level.....


Catachan box of 20 was £12.(60p each!)Pocket money price.
A box of 5 marines (combat squad) was £6(£1.20 each)

Infaltion in the same time period was 42%(UK gov figures.)
So they should be £17.04 for twenty Catachan and £8.52 for 5 marines.

What are the actual prices now?
Ill go have alook see...back in a mo.
I KID YOU NOT!

£36 for 20 Catachans and £15.50 for 4 marines.

So that means you are now paying about twice as much as you were for the SAME minatures taking inflation into account.

I know some people (thier parents) can still afford GW prices .
But gaming is a social hobby , if the active gamers drops below a certain amount the group simply switches to the next most popular game.
And as the distribution of weath is not even , the higher the prices go the greater the reduction in affordability.
Remember only 5% of the population of Britain earn over 50k a year.

So every shift in 'earning band' excludes an ever larger proportion of the population.
GW plc will have to up prices even higher to cope with this phenomenom.

I am sure some people can afford to pay £250 for a box of 10 Space marines .And they can justify spending this much on thier hobby.
And this is absolutly fine.
But how many are able to do this , and will it be enough for GW plc to survive?

The studio staff and store staff generally do a great job and are decent people to deal with.
However the corperate greed and blinkered decision making is destroying GW IMO.

I heard a theory once that these price increases are to eventually make LGSs to stop carrying GW products by making the people shopping at an LGS pay more, adn then GW lowers their direct price to make buying direct look better.

I think GWs prices are a pain but I see a few problems with many of the analysises here. While you can say a $10 kit should only be $19 today due to inflation... there are three problems with the assumptions. First that GWs original valuation was correct. Next people have asserted that that GW should only be expected to trend there prices following the average inflation, but many of the petroleum, metal, and paper products GW uses have inflated above the rate of inflation. Next there is a false parallel being drawn; simply because a kit was called a Rhino then and another called a Rhino now doesn't make them immediately interchangeable. You maybe comparing an apple to an apple but one of those apples kinda shriveled and old; the two are not equal.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

DoctorZombie wrote:I heard a theory once that these price increases are to eventually make LGSs to stop carrying GW products by making the people shopping at an LGS pay more, adn then GW lowers their direct price to make buying direct look better.

That's funny. Basic economic principle would actually dictate once they've eliminated market competition while assuming no major loss to consumer base that's when they should raise prices, due to the consumers now single source dependency.

H.B.M.C. wrote:Except it doesn't. The prices are higher in Brazil, South Africa, New Zealand, Japan and so on... and not all those countries are making 'double' what the US/UK makes in wages.

Prices can be consistent the world over. Just look at Lego.

QFT

If lego can make there products cost the same ((or really close to the same) price ALL the way around the world, why can't GW?

yes, yes I suppose laziness is stopping them...

The facts of the matter are simple as far as GW pricing goes -

1. They have raised their prices wildly far in excess of what inflation would dictate for the past several years. Some of this is explainable in terms of cost of raw materials and other commodities going up, some of it is not explainable (at least in satisfactory terms to most of us lol) i.e finecast - Cheaper material, lower quality assurance, higher prices.

2. They also have wildly disparate pricing structures for various international zones, which they seem to be in no rush to correct, as a matter of fact, they implemented business practices trying to block 3rd party distributors from shipping outside their 'area' in order to make sure customers pay their local going rate. This is debatably 100% their decision and right... but an example that really irks me personally is that they will charge an australian double for a BL digital download compared to the US, when they are both downloading the same content from the same server... there are no additional charges or in my mind excuses for this. That is just straight up greed IMO.

And that is pretty much the top and bottom of it really... the only thing to debate is how you feel about it, but the facts of what they have done, and comparing them to 'normal' business practice is pretty self explanatory when the details are examined.

DoctorZombie wrote:I heard a theory once that these price increases are to eventually make LGSs to stop carrying GW products by making the people shopping at an LGS pay more, adn then GW lowers their direct price to make buying direct look better.

While that may increase *very* short term profits, it'd effectively kill them as LGS's are where most people play and where kiddies without credit cards to go buy stuff.

If GW edges out LGS's anymore than they currently do, I'll be switching game systems completely. It's bad enough that they open GW stores literally down the street from already established LGS's.

Aerethan wrote:If GW edges out LGS's anymore than they currently do, I'll be switching game systems completely. It's bad enough that they open GW stores literally down the street from already established LGS's.

What's weird is that they often open stores in backcountry areas with a sparse population and leave huge metro areas completely untouched. They've got them in small towns in tennessee, north carolina, colorado, and a lot of stores in a couple big cities (LA especially) but *nothing* in many states or other large cities. San Diego for instance has ~3 million people in the metro area (half the population of tennessee by itself). There's 5 stores that carry GW stuff IIRC, and only 2 within main population bounds that really have play space and consistent gatherings and carry full product lines, and no actual GW stores.


The way they decide where to open locations doesn't seem to make any sense. They'll open them near existing LGS's and drive them out basically to cash in on a small increase in revenues on an already existing playerbase, and leave huge areas and population centers with little or no presence at all.

Yeah my local GW store in Mission Viejo is the only one in southern California south of Irvine which I thought was weird. That store is literaly down the street from an LGS(granted that has no gaming space) that has been here for 15+ years.

there are no non GW store where I live that sells their products, or any wargaming stuff as far as I know...

I buy alot of my stuff off EBay from US/UK
way ceaper, even WITH the postage!