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During my hiatus from all things Warhammer, there was apparently someone in charge named Kirby.

Kirby seems to be universally divisive...

So who was he, and what did he do to gain the ire of the community?

He's a good boy, and I will accept no slander!

Kirby was, to my recollection without Googling, the head honcho of GW for 7th Edition 40k and some time before. He viewed GW as a model company-not as in "We make cool minis and fun games and good stories," but in a "We make minis and nothing else ever matters, and also we're so big in our niche we don't have to do research or get data or anything."

And, while I actually liked 7th Edition, I am 100% capable of admitting it was a HUGE mess. Like... Lots of cool ideas. But a lot of really, REALLY bad implementations.

Others will be along with more info, I'm sure.

Kirby? Ah yes, the man, the myth, the lawsuit machine. Former CEO, universally adored in the same way root canals are. He’s the one who thought the best way to grow a hobby was to sue fan sites, wall off their IP like it was Fort Knox, and treat customers like an inconvenient side effect of selling models. Basically, he turned GW into the Apple of toy soldiers — except without the charm, design sense, or ability to pretend they cared.

‘We don’t do market research’ – His proud battle cry. Why bother listening to customers when you can just tell them what they should want and then raise the price on it?

One-Man Store policy – Nothing says ‘we’re a community hobby’ like firing staff and leaving one poor soul to run an entire shop alone six days a week.

Finecast (aka Failcast) – Marketed as a premium replacement for metal. In reality? Warped, bubble-filled junk sold at a markup. Collectors still wake up at night in cold sweats remembering it.

Price hikes – Annual increases so aggressive you’d think the models were made out of gold.

Specialist Games purge – Blood Bowl, Necromunda, Battlefleet Gothic, Epic… all killed off because apparently they distracted from selling Space Marines by the bucket load.

The Kirby Doctrine – An actual investor statement declaring GW wasn’t a games company but a miniatures company that happened to print rules. Translation: ‘The rules are an afterthought, just buy more plastic.’

IP enforcement lunacy – Remember when GW tried to trademark Space Marine and went after a tiny ebook writer? Or when fan sites got legal threats for daring to use common sci-fi words? Yeah, that was Kirby’s GW.

Customer hostility as a business model – If there was ever a philosophy that could be summed up as ‘shut up and give us your money,’ this was it.

Sorry I'm as big a white knight for GW as you can be. But legitimately this guy was super terrible for GW.

Tom Kirby came to Bryan Ansell era GW around 1986 as TSR UK closed and was part of the management buyout in the early 1990s.

I want to say that Kirby was instrumental in turning GW's finances around and basically saving the company - polices like the "one store staffer" might sound harsh but they are also a reason that GW stores are one of the few still left on a decent part of the highstreet when a huge number of even very major stores are now closed down. Indeed we can see many other retail outlets have adopted similar one-staffer policies to survive.


Kirby was also on board when GW established much of its distribution and expansion system that the company runs on today.


He wasn't all evil; he established a functional company groundwork that really has let GW thrive. The problem is he was very much a "by the numbers" person who also wasn't as adaptive.

Jammer87 does good summary of many of the points that summarise Kirby's management team approach to handling the firm. It was very much looking at sales figures; the raw sales data and the back end with a focus on investors, profits and all. This resulted in policies like short term specialist game releases (one box and done); of over-investing in the best selling product line (Marines) and under-investing in others.

Basically because the management team was disconnected from the customers GW coasted on its inertia for a long while, whilst at the same time burning bridges with customers and not really understanding the why of what drove sales.



So he wasn't all evil, personally I think he was just a staffer who wound up in the wrong position with a skillset and attitude that worked great for structural company elements, but was a disaster for customer facing and customer awareness.
I think one of the greatest evils was the managements focus on attacking the internet and resisting it. At a time when other firms were latching onto it; GW was all but avoiding it and even got to a point of sending threats to news sites posting rumours and leaks. Those were the days you stayed up late to view the New Zealand website when it updated on Friday night to see what was going to be up for pre-order on Sunday. Yes you really did have to do that!


Also note I kept putting management team in there - Kirby was the head, but I doubt he was doing all this on his own; there were other managers beneath him that were part of that culture of running GW.

Kirby was very successful in driving people away to games like X-Wing, Warmachine, Saga and Kings of War, so for the overall hobby he wasn't all that bad .
Games Workshop at some point under Kirby only had positive growth because of their licenses, their main business was stagnant because of only looking at numbers and not doing any marketing.
The irony is though, 40Ks model quality reached their all time Zenit under Kirby. New GW being even more predatory with its Business practices (and after a break returning to yearly price rises), enforcing no models no rules and monopose models, and of all things sticking to Kirbys 3year editions in the end drove my gaming group away from GW.

He was a soulless corporate suit. Good with the business side, crunching the numbers, and making the ledgers work. But he was very detached from the actual hobby side. He said a lot of crazy things, and as a gamer, a lot of what he did was just baffling. A lot of what he did seemed to be to make short term profits, while shooting the long term in the foot. Things like hyper focusing on marines, alienating the users, etc. He did grow the company, and leave it in a financially solid placce though. He may not have understood the hobby, but he did his suit job well enough to keep the ship afloat in some troubled times. But it was good he was replaced before his antagonistic mindview pushed all the fans away.

He’s the reason GW is the juggernaut that it is.

Going waaaay back? That 4th Ed WHFB and 2nd Ed came as big boxed sets with sample/starter armies? That was Kirby. The increasing push to move to plastic? That was Kirby.

GW expanding from cottage industry to one bigger than the UK Fishing Industry began with, you guess it, Kirby. He modernised it, driving it for a good couple of decades, always expanding, rarely borrowing to do so.

Of course, in the later days it wasn’t all plain sailing. But he still steered GW through the global financial crash. And eventually? I’d argue the company simply outgrew him. He never struck me as really understanding or embracing the digital world. He was a titan of his era, but that era had basically ended. Whilst we could certainly argue he stuck around for too long? I don’t think being outpaced by the world and the success of the business you’ve helmed is necessarily a damnation on the person.

Also heck he landed that huge Lord of the Rings contact under Kirby too - and whilst GW was not prepared for the sudden fall off of customers; they did secure that licence and have maintained it too. Which is really abnormal for film licences. Normally those are super short term for a specific film and then its all switch to the next new film. Yet here we are today and whilst Middle Earth is on product rotations and such its still supported with new content by GW

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

Of course, in the later days it wasn’t all plain sailing. But he still steered GW through the global financial crash. And eventually? I’d argue the company simply outgrew him. He never struck me as really understanding or embracing the digital world. He was a titan of his era, but that era had basically ended. Whilst we could certainly argue he stuck around for too long? I don’t think being outpaced by the world and the success of the business you’ve helmed is necessarily a damnation on the person.

I think its a touch more than that - as others (and myself) have said. It's not just that he was outpaced by the world changing; he was just entirely disconnected from the actual customers and hobby side of things.

Which when you consider how GW hires staff and their overall product focused approach to things is really strange to see happen at the very top of the company.


The worse part was he intentionally separated himself and his management too; no community surveys, no customer feedback. GW might not have had much on the internet; but they had staff in shops and on the phone - they had ample avenues to pool huge amounts of customer feedback and data and he refused it. Some separation is important, indeed healthy for a firm so that it can look at its own books and finances with an impartial view. So that it can make hard choices on the product line for the health of the firm.

But yeah Kirby took that just one step too extreme. Honestly he might have lasted longer if he'd had a strong second who picked up on that slack end and focused on the consumer experience, feedback and needs and drove that agenda alongside; but my impression is Kirby built a team around him at the top who shared/mirrored/echoed the same viewpoints.

Kirby, Kirby, Kirby, it's the name you should know. Kirby, Kirby, Kirby, he's the star of the show!

Kirby is responsible for some of the dumbest business decisions GW has made in the last 20 years.

He is also the reason why GW is still around and has had the success it has had in the last few years.

So he is a very divisive figure overall.

He did also give us some of the best investor report preambles, too.

Like the one about how people predicted that the crops would burn and there would be cries of woe, or along those lines.

Pretty funny stuff.

 Overread wrote:

I think one of the greatest evils was the managements focus on attacking the internet and resisting it. At a time when other firms were latching onto it; GW was all but avoiding it and even got to a point of sending threats to news sites posting rumours and leaks. Those were the days you stayed up late to view the New Zealand website when it updated on Friday night to see what was going to be up for pre-order on Sunday. Yes you really did have to do that!

It's worth noting that a lot of the competition that embraced the internet have been largely destroyed by it as discount sites devalued their product and destroyed their distribution network. Building up and maintaining these things in addition to investing in manufacturing and infrastructure has put them miles ahead of the competition in the long term.

It's very clear that Kirby was great at logistics but didn't have much care for the immaterial. A businessman and a dealmaker but not someone who cared about entertainment and community. The game itself was honestly terrible at a time when game design was seeing huge innovations across the industry and communication/community management was a constant disaster at a time where the internet was making global communities the norm.

So from a business standpoint he was smart, savvy and building a successful company. The products sold were great but putting them on the table required playing an outdated game that felt like the only real design effort was how to exploit the people who played. Kirby was a man who built a great stage but wasn't particularly interested in putting a show on it.

True story about the man; he never used his staff discount, and always paid full price for his own hobby. I served him a couple of times in the short time that I was in the Nottingham branch.

This is the only Kirby that matters.

DISCLAIMER: I never worked for GW; I have just read a lot of interviews with people who have.

Bryan Ansell, Kirby’s predecessor as GW CEO, for all his many virtues, left at just the right time, and Kirby arrived at just the right time. Ansell’s centrally controlled management style meant that all decisions went through him. He approved sculpts; he gave the thumbs up on game mechanics; he wrote rules expansions. His creative involvement was key to Warhammer’s early period of intense innovation and evolution.

Ultimately, though, Ansell’s management style was unsuited to expanding GW into an international corporation. Kirby, for all his faults listed in the above posts, was the right executive for that job. He was capable of delegating work in a way that Ansell was incapable of. This gave GW the capacity to expand into the global juggernaut that it currently is.

Yeah. Whilst the assessment of Kirby’s last few years is accurate? I don’t think it’s fair to judge him solely by those specific shortcomings.

He’s still the guy that took GW from a cottage industry business to a world leader.

That’s not to say he was possessed of a unique ability, just that he was absolutely the right person at the right time for Games Workshop. Without him? Whilst I think GW would still be around in some form or other, it very likely wouldn’t be the size it is today. He laid that groundwork. He drove the games to be more accessible, and with it the hobby.

It’s a shame he eventually pooped the bed. But to judge him purely by that poop isn’t entirely fair.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Yeah. Whilst the assessment of Kirby’s last few years is accurate? I don’t think it’s fair to judge him solely by those specific shortcomings.

He’s still the guy that took GW from a cottage industry business to a world leader.

That’s not to say he was possessed of a unique ability, just that he was absolutely the right person at the right time for Games Workshop. Without him? Whilst I think GW would still be around in some form or other, it very likely wouldn’t be the size it is today. He laid that groundwork. He drove the games to be more accessible, and with it the hobby.

It’s a shame he eventually pooped the bed. But to judge him purely by that poop isn’t entirely fair.

Well, it surely sounds like he should have been replaced about 5 years earlier.

Certainly I think he did hang around too long.

For me the issues began when WD went Weekly, and Warhammer Visions become the monthly.

You can kind of see what the idea was. But neither provided what White Dwarf had. Which for me, was the sign he’d lost touch with the customer.

Overall, what’s done is done. The important thing is GW seems to be in very safe hands these days.

As someone who’s sick of the looming shadow of GW throughout the rest of the hobby, I’m not a huge fan of Kirby’s ‘successful’ years, either. He created a harmful juggernaut, made it beloved, then he almost killed it and left it as a tainted thing.