GW half year report 2025/2026

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**Mentlegen324**

Is the not including full credits really a recent change? I was under the impression it's something that happened years ago, at least for rules and book publications and such.

**Gimgamgoo**

Ashiraya wrote:

GW pivoting into AI would be a death sentence. The reason they get away with their high prices is because of their (well-earned) reputation for high quality miniatures. Sharp details, with well thought through design. Mishaps happen (Coteaz) but those mishaps stand out all the more and are so memorable because they are rare. Almost all GW releases are excellent.

The moment that reputation of quality crumbles, that perception, GW is going to lose a lot of money. Their games have too much momentum to just die, but at minimum they would lose a lot more sales to third party, older recasts and so on. I have very often gone deliberately for GW over cheaper knock-offs or prints because the GW stuff simply looks better, less overly busy than some larger rival designers, but still sharp.

When that goes? It's an uh-oh situation. It really has to be stressed. GW's rules writing is inconsistent at best and isn't what anyone is here for. The lore attracts a lot of peripheral interest but isn't in itself the moneymaker. The miniatures are the key to it all. And I think GW knows that and is very keen to not risk their well-proven golden goose on the newest hype machine.

I agree in the instance that it would cause an outcry, and yes, GW have their reputation as a producer of "high quality miniatures". However, GW fans are GW fans. After the outcry, the fans would turn to the defense of GW saying how awesome the new models are. We all know this would happen.

Anyway, doesn't AI just "steal" ideas from things already designed? In other words,GW AI would most likely be ripping off existing GW stuff. No different to them using copy/paste in a digital program.

**Lord Damocles**

beast_gts wrote:
flaherty wrote:
The "creators get death threats" argument is old and potentially apocryphal, based on the Matt Ward UM Codex from six editions ago.
You can Google to see what happened with the Warhammer Adventures books a few years back, or look at some of the current comments around Custodes.

And yet non-rule books are still credited. Hmm...

**deano2099**

Gimgamgoo wrote:
Ashiraya wrote:

GW pivoting into AI would be a death sentence. The reason they get away with their high prices is because of their (well-earned) reputation for high quality miniatures. Sharp details, with well thought through design. Mishaps happen (Coteaz) but those mishaps stand out all the more and are so memorable because they are rare. Almost all GW releases are excellent.

The moment that reputation of quality crumbles, that perception, GW is going to lose a lot of money. Their games have too much momentum to just die, but at minimum they would lose a lot more sales to third party, older recasts and so on. I have very often gone deliberately for GW over cheaper knock-offs or prints because the GW stuff simply looks better, less overly busy than some larger rival designers, but still sharp.

When that goes? It's an uh-oh situation. It really has to be stressed. GW's rules writing is inconsistent at best and isn't what anyone is here for. The lore attracts a lot of peripheral interest but isn't in itself the moneymaker. The miniatures are the key to it all. And I think GW knows that and is very keen to not risk their well-proven golden goose on the newest hype machine.

I agree in the instance that it would cause an outcry, and yes, GW have their reputation as a producer of "high quality miniatures". However, GW fans are GW fans. After the outcry, the fans would turn to the defense of GW saying how awesome the new models are. We all know this would happen.

But the problem is the GW models would no longer be better than any other models, because everyone would have access to the same AI. GW might have a small head start as it can train a model on its digital sculpt files, while other producers would have to 3D scan a load of GW models, but ultimately GW's competitive advantage goes away.

Albeit this could well happen if the AI gets good enough anyway, even if GW don't start using it.

**Apple fox**

deano2099 wrote:
Gimgamgoo wrote:
Ashiraya wrote:

GW pivoting into AI would be a death sentence. The reason they get away with their high prices is because of their (well-earned) reputation for high quality miniatures. Sharp details, with well thought through design. Mishaps happen (Coteaz) but those mishaps stand out all the more and are so memorable because they are rare. Almost all GW releases are excellent.

The moment that reputation of quality crumbles, that perception, GW is going to lose a lot of money. Their games have too much momentum to just die, but at minimum they would lose a lot more sales to third party, older recasts and so on. I have very often gone deliberately for GW over cheaper knock-offs or prints because the GW stuff simply looks better, less overly busy than some larger rival designers, but still sharp.

When that goes? It's an uh-oh situation. It really has to be stressed. GW's rules writing is inconsistent at best and isn't what anyone is here for. The lore attracts a lot of peripheral interest but isn't in itself the moneymaker. The miniatures are the key to it all. And I think GW knows that and is very keen to not risk their well-proven golden goose on the newest hype machine.

I agree in the instance that it would cause an outcry, and yes, GW have their reputation as a producer of "high quality miniatures". However, GW fans are GW fans. After the outcry, the fans would turn to the defense of GW saying how awesome the new models are. We all know this would happen.

But the problem is the GW models would no longer be better than any other models, because everyone would have access to the same AI. GW might have a small head start as it can train a model on its digital sculpt files, while other producers would have to 3D scan a load of GW models, but ultimately GW's competitive advantage goes away.

Albeit this could well happen if the AI gets good enough anyway, even if GW don't start using it.

The current Ai models that GW could use need massive amounts of data. GW hasn’t produced enough. It’s why they constantly scrape websites for anything remotely new.
GW would probably be better making a random space marine bits button that just at a click puts a bunch of pre-made bits other and start from there. Which I believe they basically allready use as a starting point in someway.

**Tyel**

This just seems to invite "when is AI, AI."

I mean GW already uses digital sculpting. I imagine they have computer programmes to work out how to carve up minis into twenty bits so you can pack sprues as densely as possible. Would "AI" improving this task count? Would it ruin GW?

Ultimately AI isn't going to remove the selection element of art. An AI can create hundreds, thousands etc of versions of a mini, but the skill will be selecting the best one. It GW can consistently do that over their competitors they will retain an edge. There's also just a branding element and at some level you know the real version Vs the knockoff.

Arguably you've already seen this. There are/have been various studios which have produced (imo) as good or better hand crafted metal minis as GW. But this is expensive, and when they've tried to move to plastic and digitalisation the quality has usually collapsed. AI might I guess allow you to skip this learning phase but not completely convinced.

**kodos**

deano2099 wrote:
But the problem is the GW models would no longer be better than any other models

GW model design isn't better than any other models, it isn't even really good any more since they started to have designers only working on parts of the models that are combined by someone else into the final model

GW has the advantage of fully control the process from design to manufacturing, so can easily correct any mistakes a long the way (like if the sprue layout causes issues for the final model and they need to re-cut it)

But the design the same with a different skin on most models and far from being better

And having the final assembly of parts from a database, or adding a new skin to an existing base model would be done by AI or a human would not make any difference.
Same way adding a another Bolter version to the database be done by AI by merging existing Bolter designs into a new one, or by a human would make no difference either for the final result

and nobody would notice it as nobody cared about the copy&paste stuff they are producing for years now anyway

**Da Boss**

There's so much that goes into one of these modern kits that I feel like you can't criticise whether a model is "good" or not without looking at a bunch of different factors.

Like there are some objective factors - is the detail crisp, are there many mold lines, is the sculpt designed to keep them in unobtrusive places.

Then a lot of subjective ones - does the model look good? Do I like the aesthetic? Is it good that it's a multipart monopose with lots of pieces or not? Modular and less dynamic vs. highly dynamic but monopose?

To me, these days, GW is clearly a leader in the objective measures of quality, but my subjective taste means I don't like a lot of the miniatures they produce because I don't like the pose or the design and I pretty much universally hate putting together their new kits because of how tedious and fiddly they are. But I can see that if you like that jigsaw puzzle assembly and your taste is different to mine, you'd think they were the best figures on the market.