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 John Prins wrote:
Keep in mind that for a lot of the things you mention GW is merely licensing stuff, which means money flows into the company and another company takes the risks and costs.

Firstly, this ^.

Secondly, most of this stuff isn't a new thing for them. GW licensed video games, clothing, accessories, mugs, and the like have existed off and on(or continuously in the case of video games) since the early 90's. GW's done the school club support thing before, just on a smaller scale. They even attempted to have action figures made in the 90's and had a licensed line of polystone statues available at mass retail in the early 2000's. It's not GW that's changed, it's that the market is more willing to support "nerd stuff" and GW is following trend(quite late at that!).

The "hobby" already collapsed back in the late 90's(seriously, there was a huge diversity of games back in the mid-90's) and came back strong since then. If/when the market no longer supports this style of expansion, GW will just shrink back to the Main 3 like they did when they cut Specialist Games the last time and be no worse for wear.

I don't foresee AR as being any sort of threat. Even when the tech advances, it's still going to have that "trying to live in two worlds" issue that's caused it to fail every time. It's too much video game for tabletoppers, and it's too much tabletop/toys for video gamers. For example, as much as I'll personally miss owning phys reps of the upcoming ships, Starlink made the smart choice to go full digital from now on. It's a good game, but physically using the ships/guns slowed down the game to the point that even people buying the toys just used the digital copies they unlocked.

They used to sell a spraygun, which is an unadjustable spray device that you use for base coating a color you can't find as a spray paint.