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So, as far as I understand:
1. The aim of the GW is profits NOW (short term profits),
at the cost of their games' balance, players' feelings (=lost customers) or whatever (long term profits).
2. They are not dumb. They might be following some perverted form of alien logic of their xenos masters from Zeta-reticuli or whatever, but they are not idiots.

Some of their policies, however, don’t make sense to me whatsoever. Lets consider Tyranids releases. The last codex was released, together with Hive Guard, a perfect anti-mech unit, with “Buy me suckers” written all over it; and some other pretty awesome models (trygon). However, models for some other clearly awesome/popular units were not released for a long time (tervigon) or at all (drop spore, DooM, Tyranid prime); leaving no option but to convert / buy from other retailers (loss of both short and long term profits, as anione using it will already have got the models by the time GW releases them at last).
This seems in direct contradiction with my premises 1 and 2; which means that I’m getting something wrong.
Any ideas?

Why are you asking us? None of us are on the board of GW, nor are we on any of their design teams.

Anything you're going to find here is rampant speculation. Emotionally charged rampant speculation, most like...

Odds are that they have a plan, and none of us will know what it is. If they don't have a plan or are making a mistake, then so what?

Ratliker wrote:So, as far as I understand:
1. The aim of the GW is profits NOW (short term profits),
at the cost of their games' balance, players' feelings (=lost customers) or whatever (long term profits).
2. They are not dumb. They might be following some perverted form of alien logic of their xenos masters from Zeta-reticuli or whatever, but they are not idiots.

Some of their policies, however, don’t make sense to me whatsoever. Lets consider Tyranids releases. The last codex was released, together with Hive Guard, a perfect anti-mech unit, with “Buy me suckers” written all over it; and some other pretty awesome models (trygon). However, models for some other clearly awesome/popular units were not released for a long time (tervigon) or at all (drop spore, DooM, Tyranid prime); leaving no option but to convert / buy from other retailers (loss of both short and long term profits, as anione using it will already have got the models by the time GW releases them at last).
This seems in direct contradiction with my premises 1 and 2; which means that I’m getting something wrong.
Any ideas?

1. Correct.
2. Semi-correct. It's very easy to make the arguent that any business plan that sacrifices long-term profits for short-term profits is not very smart.

As for the Tyranids, my understanding is the models at some point were held up due to advice from legal counsel involved with their copyright infringement lawsuits. (Details can be found in the Chapterhouse thread)

However, there is also clear evidence that GW believes their own hype. All too often they get caught up in the idea that they are a "premium brand" (a word from someone that used to turn a crank in a major company's propaganda machine: anytime a company starts referring to itself as a "premium brand", it means they recognize that their own product is no longer viewed by its customer base as being worth its price and are thus trying to pass it off as a status symbol, a la Coach Louis handbags or other idiotic products with obscene markups beyond the averages of their utilitarian contemporaries. But, I digress...)

There is also the possibility that GW had adopted a wait-and-see policy: they release a codex and then release the models in waves, watching to see how well the previous wave sells before creating a new wave of models. If the codex itself doesn't sell well, then it is unlikely that any waves not already produced ever will be, because GW is aware that there is limited desire for them. Think of it like a movide studio waiting to see the box office results before deciding whether to shoot a sequel. However, this possible explanation is entirely conjecture, though it does mesh with #1 & #2.

Games Workshop is a public company traded on the LSE, so theoretically we could do anything we want if we bought controlling stake or if we opted for a vote in the Annual general meeting, in which we could revamp to board, fire the CEO etc.

Simply putting it, GW is in the hands of the public (shareholders) not the CEO nor the board, and thats something people forget a lot of the time. And even if some person loyal to the company's current dogma had 51% ownership, we the shareholders could always go for a vote by shareholder, in which the amout of stock a person had would not matter.

 dakka farta wrote:

Simply putting it, GW is in the hands of the public (shareholders) not the CEO nor the board, and thats something people forget a lot of the time. And even if some person loyal to the company's current dogma had 51% ownership, we the shareholders could always go for a vote by shareholder, in which the amout of stock a person had would not matter.

Nope. The number of votes you get is usually proportional to the number of shares you have. The exception is that sometimes there are classes of shares that are worth more, which often happens when family-run companies go public, so the family can continue to control the company.

So, at a minimum, you'd have to buy half the outstanding shares to decide GW's strategy; good luck with that.

So you want people to flame about why GW are dumb?
Reported.

The manual accreditation programme for directors in my country (malaysia) states that if a sizable amount of minority shareholders are unhappy with the current governing of a company they can vote in a similar way to Cooperatives with each shareholder having one vote. That policy may differ in other countries though.

And Testify i am not saying GW are dumb at all, i am only giving a theoretical way to change the management.

 azazel the cat wrote:

Ratliker wrote:So, as far as I understand:
1. The aim of the GW is profits NOW (short term profits),
at the cost of their games' balance, players' feelings (=lost customers) or whatever (long term profits).
2. They are not dumb. They might be following some perverted form of alien logic of their xenos masters from Zeta-reticuli or whatever, but they are not idiots.

1. Correct.
2. Semi-correct. It's very easy to make the arguent that any business plan that sacrifices long-term profits for short-term profits is not very smart.

I hate to say it, but #2...is actually VERY common at large corporations.
As a strategic business consultant (fancy talk for my job of talking to people disconnected from the realities of what their company is actually doing) I work with a lot of companies, and I see this ALL THE TIME (i.e. I don't work for a single company, I work for dozens of large ones...thus get a lot of exposure to this type of thing).
Many people would say "but that is dumb..." well, yes, it is, but there is a (bad) reason....and here is the cause...its mainly publicly traded companies.

See, in the knee jerk world of quarterly profits and market expectations, companies are constantly trying to jump through hoops to generate good short term numbers..."we need more revenue X this quarter...." often, to the detriment of long term profitability.
Sometimes its just short sighted or bad business sense - other times is just having to focus on short term priorities at the expense of long ones....which ironically is also bad business sense, but sometimes its at least an active choice....

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program of little plastic men...

 dakka farta wrote:
The manual accreditation programme for directors in my country (malaysia) states that if a sizable amount of minority shareholders are unhappy with the current governing of a company they can vote in a similar way to Cooperatives with each shareholder having one vote. That policy may differ in other countries though.

And Testify i am not saying GW are dumb at all, i am only giving a theoretical way to change the management.

Why do you want to change the management? Especially if they're delivering dividends and can expect to make profit in future.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

davethepak wrote:

I hate to say it, but #2...is actually VERY common at large corporations.
As a strategic business consultant (fancy talk for my job of talking to people disconnected from the realities of what their company is actually doing) I work with a lot of companies, and I see this ALL THE TIME (i.e. I don't work for a single company, I work for dozens of large ones...thus get a lot of exposure to this type of thing).
Many people would say "but that is dumb..." well, yes, it is, but there is a (bad) reason....and here is the cause...its mainly publicly traded companies.

See, in the knee jerk world of quarterly profits and market expectations, companies are constantly trying to jump through hoops to generate good short term numbers..."we need more revenue X this quarter...." often, to the detriment of long term profitability.
Sometimes its just short sighted or bad business sense - other times is just having to focus on short term priorities at the expense of long ones....which ironically is also bad business sense, but sometimes its at least an active choice....

The awful thing about capitalism is that it works

The decisions by Tom Kirby (Chair) and Mark Wells (CEO) don't make sense if you assume they want to maximise the total profit for GW, as profits are basically flat for about 7 years. They make sense if you assume that Tom Kirby as major stockholder wants to maximise dividends to stockholders though, with only the bare minimum invested in a.o. getting new customers. Currently Tom Kirby alone gets about 1% of all revenue or about 10% of all profit.

I don't want to change the managment at all, i only gave a theoretical way to do it (i'm sorry if i did not make that clear earlier)

 Kroothawk wrote:
The decisions by Tom Kirby (Chair) and Mark Wells (CEO) don't make sense if you assume they want to maximise the total profit for GW, as profits are basically flat for about 7 years.

What source do you have for this? I can only see an unrcited wiki mention.

The source is the financial reports by GW. Osbad made a graphic out of it (the burgundy line meandering below 15 Mio GBP, dark blue one being the total revenue in current prices):
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/30/385538.page


Be aware that every profit is given to the shareholders, including Tom Kirby.
He owns "2,131,394 Ordinary Shares, representing approximately 6.75 per cent. of the issued ordinary share capital of the Company."
http://investor.games-workshop.com/2012/08/10/directorpdmr-shareholding-6/
Earnings per share for the current report 46.8p (2010=36p), so he decided to get 997,492 GBP (2010=767301 GBP) out of company money ... in addition to his salary that was raised by IIRC 10% last year and currently is 352,000 GBP.

 Testify wrote:

 dakka farta wrote:
The manual accreditation programme for directors in my country (malaysia) states that if a sizable amount of minority shareholders are unhappy with the current governing of a company they can vote in a similar way to Cooperatives with each shareholder having one vote. That policy may differ in other countries though.

And Testify i am not saying GW are dumb at all, i am only giving a theoretical way to change the management.

Why do you want to change the management? Especially if they're delivering dividends and can expect to make profit in future.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

davethepak wrote:

I hate to say it, but #2...is actually VERY common at large corporations.
As a strategic business consultant (fancy talk for my job of talking to people disconnected from the realities of what their company is actually doing) I work with a lot of companies, and I see this ALL THE TIME (i.e. I don't work for a single company, I work for dozens of large ones...thus get a lot of exposure to this type of thing).
Many people would say "but that is dumb..." well, yes, it is, but there is a (bad) reason....and here is the cause...its mainly publicly traded companies.

See, in the knee jerk world of quarterly profits and market expectations, companies are constantly trying to jump through hoops to generate good short term numbers..."we need more revenue X this quarter...." often, to the detriment of long term profitability.
Sometimes its just short sighted or bad business sense - other times is just having to focus on short term priorities at the expense of long ones....which ironically is also bad business sense, but sometimes its at least an active choice....

The awful thing about capitalism is that it works

Yes capitalism works, especially since 20 000 children die of starvation each day.

 Kroothawk wrote:
The source is the financial reports by GW. Osbad made a graphic out of it (the burgundy line meandering below 15 Mio GBP, dark blue one being the total revenue in current prices):
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/30/385538.page


Be aware that every profit is given to the shareholders, including Tom Kirby.
He owns "2,131,394 Ordinary Shares, representing approximately 6.75 per cent. of the issued ordinary share capital of the Company."
http://investor.games-workshop.com/2012/08/10/directorpdmr-shareholding-6/
Earnings per share for the current report 46.8p (2010=36p), so he decided to get 997,492 GBP (2010=767301 GBP) out of company money ... in addition to his salary that was raised by IIRC 10% last year and currently is 352,000 GBP.

I fail to see what's wrong with that?

Trying to determine business logic with GW is very difficult. This is the same company that has repeatedly spent more on dividends than it has made in net profit (often in fact *BORROWING* money to pay it, a completely non-sensical act from a business perspective), which happens to convenieintly double or triple Mr.Kirby's salary.

In short, no, they may not be stupid, but they very obviously have multiple conflicting goals at different levels of the organization that aren't necessarily tied to the welfare of the company.

Ratliker wrote:1. The aim of the GW is profits NOW (short term profits)

They are a business so no surprises there.

Ratliker wrote:at the cost of their games' balance

No, their games have never been balanced.

Ratliker wrote:players' feelings (=lost customers)

Every product is going to dissatisfy some and satisfy others; that's how the world works. Portraying it as GW specifically hurting everyones' feelings is a fallacy; most people I know are happy with their products.

davethepak wrote:

 azazel the cat wrote:

Ratliker wrote:So, as far as I understand:
1. The aim of the GW is profits NOW (short term profits),
at the cost of their games' balance, players' feelings (=lost customers) or whatever (long term profits).
2. They are not dumb. They might be following some perverted form of alien logic of their xenos masters from Zeta-reticuli or whatever, but they are not idiots.

1. Correct.
2. Semi-correct. It's very easy to make the arguent that any business plan that sacrifices long-term profits for short-term profits is not very smart.

I hate to say it, but #2...is actually VERY common at large corporations.
As a strategic business consultant (fancy talk for my job of talking to people disconnected from the realities of what their company is actually doing) I work with a lot of companies, and I see this ALL THE TIME (i.e. I don't work for a single company, I work for dozens of large ones...thus get a lot of exposure to this type of thing).
Many people would say "but that is dumb..." well, yes, it is, but there is a (bad) reason....and here is the cause...its mainly publicly traded companies.

See, in the knee jerk world of quarterly profits and market expectations, companies are constantly trying to jump through hoops to generate good short term numbers..."we need more revenue X this quarter...." often, to the detriment of long term profitability.
Sometimes its just short sighted or bad business sense - other times is just having to focus on short term priorities at the expense of long ones....which ironically is also bad business sense, but sometimes its at least an active choice....

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program of little plastic men...

This this this for the love of God this. I work for a small, publically traded company and6 I can't tell you how much I see this every day a our ridiculous meetings about ebitdaa (not a typo) and arpu, it's agonizing