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 vipoid wrote:

 SilverDevilfish wrote:

Fantasy example but:

http://www.blacklibrary.com/Downloads/Product/PDF/Warhammer/Ogre-Kingdoms.pdf

Yeah... Jervis note pretty much validates your entire post.

Why?

It demonstrates perfectly what he was saying.

We'll leave you the "freedom" to do this, but you're a bad person if you do.

So, what's the point? Either have the guts to undo your mistake, or else leave it alone. Don't just dump the problem on the players.

Well, the Jervis quote in there consists of two parts.

A) "we" (!) decided that it does not give Ogres an unfair advantage.

B) "I personally" would recommend you don't do it for background reasons.

Seems to be clearly delineated between (a) not a problem from a pure game-play perspective (in the aggregate decision/opinion of the team), but (b) in the personal, subjective opinion of but one among several game designers, not really going with the fluff.

That isn't necessarily a bad approach to FAQ.. e.g. don't change it unless it is truly necessary from a game-play perspective, but keep it in mind background-wise for future iterations of the rules. The alternative, wild FAQs left and right for "fluff-reasons", even if they aren't strictly needed, isn't too enticing either, I find.

 Jancoran wrote:

...but they didnt. What aCTUALLY happened is 6th Edition cost them ALMOST half the value of their stock vlaue and stockholders went berserk and demanded the rules get fixed so just one year into 6th, 7th Edition development started.

As said above, 7th Edition must've already been at the printers, when the stocks dropped.

It should also be noted, that a fair part of the drop in stock was due to the fact that GW decided to not pay out dividend with said report, which in turn caused many large fonds and automated portfolios to auto-sell, because they always sell stocks without dividends. Of course, that decision by GW was in turn based on falling sales/large new investments, but it wasn't a hugely surprising or unexpected thing.

Finally, some 24% drop in stocks isn't, in stockmarket-terms, a massively huge thing. Especially for a, all things considered, small company like GW that is overall still writing black numbers.

If you can't ride out bumps like that with smaller companies, you shouldn't be investing. Overall, with a company like GW, institutional shareholders aren't going to bother to fly to Nottingham to bang on the table. They tell the intern to sell those shares, or they don't. Or they might be sold / bought along with a gazillion other shares, if they fail to meet / meet certain criteria.

And in that light, GW stocks did double over the past 5 years after accounting for the more recent dip, and it used to pay regular dividends. So it isn't a bad (though not spectacular either) little share there, if they go back to solid dividends.

Lanrak wrote:
@Wonderwolf.
The reason GW rushed 7th edition out, was due to the poor sales figures that 6th edition had.
GW has suffered declining sales volumes for the last decade, and only recently has the fall in sales volumes has accelerated to the point it has caused reduced profits.

When the games market has been growing for the last 3 years, and all companies seem to be expanding APART from GW.
GW plc position looks less favorable.

Well, the (non-digital) "game market" has grown almost exclusively due to the massive steam engine that is MTG and a renaissance of board games. Miniature games probably haven't seen any of that growth. PP and Wyrd Games have probably bled sales as much as GW did.

To adapt to this trend, GW (PP, etc..) wouldn't need to fix their "mass battle games"; they'd need to do a CMON (and to a lesser extend Mantic) and go for "board-game"-hybrid style games over mass battle games in general, or at the very least incorporate CCG-elements into the miniatures game, as FFG did with X-Wing.

Either way, I am not saying GW isn't in trouble. Just that even if GW loses further sales, stocks drop, etc.. you still won't see activist shareholders flipping through rulebooks to turn it around. Talking about the guys who invested in GW, rather than those running it, it just doesn't work like that.

 jonolikespie wrote:
Looking at ICV2 however, I really don't think you can doubt that the Hobby is growing. A decent amount of that could be trading card games, but double digit growth for about 5 years strait and an estimated doubling of the wider hobby since 08 is MASSIVE.

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/28119.html

From this very article...

Collectible games and board games were driving the growth through the holiday season, with sales on market leader Magic: The Gathering continuing to rise, and a hot new entrant, the My Little Pony CCG debuting at #4 in the hobby.

With #4 in the Hobby overall, the My Little Pony CCG is probably bigger than 40K atm (which in turn is still #1 in miniatures). Either way, with games like that in the mix, I doubt the ICV2 article allows you to deduce much about, say, Warmachine or Infinity. They might suffer as much or more as 40K.



Also, over a period of 5 years, GW did not shrink. Over the 5 year period referenced by ICV2, GW grew by around 100% even after accounting for the most recent dip. So even after the most recent dip, GW is still outperforming the market.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:


Unless you mean their share price... but their share price growing doesn't mean they themselves are going, it just means people are willing to pay more money for their shares.

Fair enough. My fault. Shares rose by 100%. Full year revenues rose from 110 Millions GBP in 2008 to 135 Millions GBP in 2013 in constant currency. So 22% growth. (with both financial years ending in May the year after.. no numbers for the full year or 2014 yet).

Still not shrinking though. And, more importantly, a minor fish in the huge pool of "Hobby" as measured by ICV2, whose numbers aren't very informative for the minor sub-niche of miniature games. That ICV2 growth, if driven by things like MTG or My Little Pony CCG just doesn't tell us much about the relative growth of, say, Malifaux vs. 40K. Sorry.

Also note that ICV2 measures are based on surveys/estimates among their partners and associates, which do not include the GW retail chain.

ICV2 would measure a drop in sales of GW-products, if GW shifted their emphasis from independent retailers and retail chains (e.g. Forbidden Planet) towards their website and their stores, even if total GW sales through all their channels remained constant or possibly even went up (disproportionally through their own channels).

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

Wonderwolf wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:


Unless you mean their share price... but their share price growing doesn't mean they themselves are going, it just means people are willing to pay more money for their shares.

Fair enough. My fault. Shares rose by 100%. Full year revenues rose from 110 Millions GBP in 2008 to 135 Millions GBP in 2013 in constant currency. So 22% growth. (with both financial years ending in May the year after.. no numbers for the full year or 2014 yet).

Yeah my mistake, it was flat when normalised with inflation, not at constant currency.

Also it was 123.5m ending 2014, so your figure drops to 12% if you actually take this year in to account, which is less than inflation of the GBP (from the calculator I used).

ICV2 numbers arent normalised with inflation either.

And again, with ICV2 numbers being heavy on things like MTG, etc.., there is no way to conclude that, say, Wyrd Games or PP are doing better than GW. The thing to take away from ICV2 is that CCG and Board Games are hot. Look at the most recent CMON Kickstarter. That's the kind of games that miniature game companies will probably need to embrace to catch that broader trend described by ICV2.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:


I'm not pretending to be an economist. I think most predictive economics is stupid actually I was just pointing out that 100% share price growth is not the same as 100% company growth, one is what share holders think you're worth (typically in the longer term) and the other is how much money the company is pulling in now compared to what it was pulling in before (in rough terms of course)

Well, I apologized for my mistake for the share price.

But you are still insisting on the fallacious comparison with ICV2 surveys. It's like comparing 2 energy drink t companies. One is shrinking, the other doesn't disclose numbers, and then go out claiming that energy drink company 2 must be outperforming energy drink company 1 massively, because the market for all beverages is growing.

That's a false conclusion. It's entirely possible for all energy drinks to be down, even in the broader context of all beverages being up, especially if the examples highlighted to illustrate the best success stories in the "all-beverages"-market are consistently the total opposite of energy drinks.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Lets be clear here, I never brought up the ICV2 numbers... I'm simply trying to straighten out the comparison.

Fair enough.


Than lets be clear.

- GW was not shrinking over the 5 year period.

- The ICV2 report offers no clue, as to whether GWs (undisputed) problems are GW-specific or symptomatic for all miniatures and mass battle games, the runaway success of CCGs and board games notwithstanding.

 Blacksails wrote:


Fantasy Flight has also stated big growth, though I imagine that's split between their board games, card games, and RPGs. However, I wouldn't discount the success of X-Wing, which in a few years has skyrocketed to one of the top selling miniature games.

Yes, but if ICV2 is to be believed, we have examples of games like My Little Pony CCG, which beat 40K in half as many years as X-Wing is around, which is still behind 40K.

And X-Wing, arguably, is a game designed to capture that "board game and CCG"-trend that is driving the hobby, as it does have a CCG-component.

The challenge for companies like GW thus likely isn't "balancing" their behemoth of a mass battle game. That one is probably dying, whether the rules are good or not.

The challenge is to diversify into smart, small "hybrid"-games like X-Wing, perhaps Deadzone, etc., which appeal to the growing board/card-game crowd, while allowing GW to shift some miniatures.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

Wonderwolf wrote:
- GW was not shrinking over the 5 year period.

When people say GW is shrinking they mean they are selling less product at higher prices (probably) to less customers and (probably) well behind the overall wargaming market and (definitely) less than the overall "gaming" market.

Well, but than the comparisons with ICV2 or similar numbers(e.g. alleged Corvus Belli growth) are again flawed. If they report "growth", they report revenue, which could equally well include price increases, etc..

Infinity miniatures for example aren't cheap, and also easily cost 2x or even 3x what they did cost 3 or 4 years ago. And FFG's X-Wing game is earning them alot more per customer than the kind of board/card-game they made (a bigger part of) their living with a few years ago.

 Thud wrote:


How about the 2007-2008 numbers then? I.e., your cherry-picked example: corrected for inflation, that equals £128.4m.

That'd be a net decrease in revenue.

But hey, let's cherry-pick the other way. GW peaked in 2004. Corrected for inflation they then had a revenue exceeding £200m.

38% decrease in net revenue over ten years. Good times.

I didn't cherry pick. I picked the numbers that corresponded to the ICV2 report that was quoted, which covered a 5 year span (up to 2013, not yet reporting 2014, thus presumably starting 2008) and was likewise not adjusted for inflation.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Thud wrote:
[

And as for the shareholders, since some people were talking about shareholder activism and gnashing of teeth. Heh. The largest shareholders, except for Kirby himself (with about 6.7% of the shares), are all hedgefunds. What that means is that once the share value drops below, or goes above, a predetermined (by them) value, they'll sell. Overworked and underpaid interns update the buy/sell values based on dividend payouts, and maybe future outlook if the guy in charge of interns decided they should work some overtime and learn something new. Beyond that they literally could not care less about GW, Kirby, or how many editions of 40k are put out every year.

Yes. And as I've pointed out, stocks dropped mostly because GW decided to not pay dividends recently, rather than any moderate decline in sales. No dividends is often an auto-sell for certain funds, often even legally, as they are in turn legally bound to pay dividends to those that hold/invest in their fund.

 Azreal13 wrote:

Suffice to say, there's more to the subject than "big numbers = better" and this is a subject that requires as much precision as possible, and I see an awful lot of (often logical, but still) assumptions and "stands to reason" type statements.

Fair enough, if there is more to it than "big numbers = better", we can close those silly comparisons with ICV2s report and you've proven my point.

 Azreal13 wrote:

Let me just explain that one of the first things you're taught (or I was at least) when studying the stock market and PLCs is that the general trend is always up. Comparing numbers from 5 years ago with numbers today and saying "it is bigger, therefore growth" is an oversimplification to the point of being inaccurate.

Fair enough. People brought up the 5-year report from ICV2, so that was the context we talked in. If those 5 years aren't a good measure to work in, we can close those silly comparisons with ICV2s report and you've proven my point.

 Azreal13 wrote:

When taking all relevant factors into account GW have, to all intents and purposes, been treading water for some time. The other factor to consider is that nobody cares about 5 years ago (in an investment sense) what is a much louder, more in your face state of affairs is that YOY they dropped a substantial percentage in profit (which isn't inherently scary, because companies spend money on stuff that impacts their profit for long term growth all the time) and, more importantly, a significant drop in revenue - despite price increases that are often well above inflation. This is a scary fact because that means, for the first time in many years, people gave less money to GW. There's no massaging that or dressing it up, it is a bad thing.

Nobody is denying that. But the proof that GW's poor performance is running against the trend of other miniatures games companies (not CCGs, board games, etc..) cannot be found in ICV2s report. GW's performance might be symptomatic for mass battle miniature wargames as a whole, notwithstanding the success of MTG, etc..

 Azreal13 wrote:

When you then factor in the information we have about the broader market, ok we can't speak about specific figures for the private companies, but look at Kickstarter, the amount spent on projects in this sector is free to research, and is substantial and growing, it get's scarier. People aren't spending less on tabletop hobbies (trying to take wargaming as a separate market is a bit fallacious TBH) they're spending MORE!

Well, the information is not as obvious to me. My Little Pony CCGs is bigger than 40K now. Great. How people deduce growth for Privateer Press from this information is beyond me. And large-scale wargames seem to be doing exceptionally poorly in Kickstarter, both absolutely and relatively to the more hybrid-/board-game style games (e.g. Gates of Antares vs. Zombicide), which would actually imply that mass battle wargaming as a whole is in decline (in favour of board-gamey smaller-format games).

 Azreal13 wrote:

GW has a problem.

Yes. But what is the problem

Is their problem that they make a bad mass battle game, or is the problem that they make a mass battle game?

Talys wrote:

WayneTheGame wrote:
GW seems to consider the internet as some sort of fad and because they operate in an insular manner where they live in their own bubble, they have closed virtually all communication channels because they think that if they can't hear any complaints, then none exist.

Well, no, because they do have a web store. What I don't understand is why in Europe people can buy things from FLGS online, but not in North America. The times I have emailed customer service, they have been extremely responsive and helpful (not to mention FedEx'd me replacement parts).

Because EU regulations puts limits on what GW can ask for/demand/try to get away with in a trade contract with an independent retailer. North America is more hands off as far as regulations go, thus companies can put pretty much whatever they want into contracts. If GW puts a clause into a contract with a FLGS that prevents them from selling their stuff online, said FLGS just hast to take it (or refuse to sell GW products at all).