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Decrepit Dakkanaut






Omadon's Realm

nkelsch wrote:

Regardless... Online Forum goers is a biased sample set because everyone in it share a common demographic. It would be the same as if everyone being polled was a specific race, income level, age or shared some other particular demographic and then it was tried to extrapolate to people not represented in the sample.


Even just the 70k that are registered on the forum is a sizeable number for a demographic of the fairly small worldwide number who play wargames.

Your objection holds the same validity as 'this survey can't be valuable because it only contains answers from people who answer surveys, which is a skewed demographic'...


This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2013/04/13 03:20:08




 
   
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What significance/size/impact is the 'online community'?

Less than we think, but more than GW does.
   
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Omadon's Realm

 Kingsley wrote:
 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
 Kingsley wrote:
Now, I do know a bit about what the average 40k player thinks, and I can relate that fairly effectively,


Everyone claims intimate knowledge of this mythical creature... State your credentials?


I've been in the hobby for 15 years and played in multiple stores and across multiple states, at everything from a "pickup game in my backyard" to a major GT level. My depth and breadth of experience means that I know a fair amount about the way the game looks and the way people evaluate it. Note also that I don't claim to be an expert, just someone who knows a bit about the way people think. Lots of people are just as qualified as I am.


I've been in the hobby for 25 years, played in multiple stores across multiple states of the US, also played extensively across the UK, been a home player with friends, store player and tourney player, know several of the ex-design team as mates, worked in retail management for a multinational, worked as a corporate complaints resolver/troubleshooter for a larger multinational, reported to directorship of same large multinational and have been in the broad church of customer service senior management for the last 12 years.

I am certainly not claiming I'm expert either, but I am keen on why you think that you can say 'well, I know what GW's player base is thinking', yet if I say something negative about GW, I'm a part of 'that internet thing that does not speak for GW's player base'? Read what I wrote in the paragraph above, I'm not a slouch at this, I've got a fairly bloody formidable skill set and a half operational brain to boot.

I'm glad you have a sound level of reasoning behind what you say, know what, so do I... I think you and some others see people leveling legitimate complaint in GW's direction and decide, due to your preconceived prejudice, that they are all daft louts. That would be your loss and your mistake, many of the people on this forum are erudite and fairly educated in making their judgement as a consumer, the forum as rabid horde of maladjusted creeps that don't actually game is a poor picture that might have held but a fraction of legitimacy some years back but it's long past that now. This forum's membership is climbing continually and has been going uphill at a rate of knots for the last 3 or 4 years, it's in a steep climb, because the internet is so absolutely available now and that's not going to go away, it's just going to keep climbing.

Forums and social media are entirely mainstream, if my dad can operate skype, you can bet your crown jewels that the majority capable of playing wargames in the first place have also mastered the use of the internet and have found this place and others like it. The claim this is some fringe, some lonely little outpost of lunatics, is derisible.

Sometimes, just sometimes, when a number of people on this forum are raising caine, they are doing it because they have a valid reason. Not all of them, some folks just like to rage at the company for anything and I've clashed with one or two when praising something good, but GW's not been doing something good in terms of wider corporate strategy or policies, for a long long time now.



 
   
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 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
nkelsch wrote:

Regardless... Online Forum goers is a biased sample set because everyone in it share a common demographic. It would be the same as if everyone being polled was a specific race, income level, age or shared some other particular demographic and then it was tried to extrapolate to people not represented in the sample.


Even just the 70k that are registered on the forum is a sizeable number for a demographic of the fairly small worldwide number who play wargames.
I think when we talk about "size", "impact" or "significance" we are talking about 3 very separate things.

"Size" might be 70k people, but how many of those are active? How many have even glanced at the forums in the past month? How many read more than just 1 forum? Those are the things you need to talk about if you want to consider "impact".

"Significance" is another kettle of fish altogether. Significance, IMO, is more about how reflective the online community is compared to the community as a whole. Even if the online community is small, if they are representative of the views and opinions of gamers world wide, they are significant.
   
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Businesses who are ignorant of the effects of an online community that is deals with their customer base, to put it bluntly are idiots. The interactions of social media that communicates with each under in different types of platforms, is the way of the 21st century.

The significance is there. And businesses who understand this will use this set of information/data as a tool within their overall marketing/PR strategy.

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 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
I've been in the hobby for 25 years, played in multiple stores across multiple states of the US, also played extensively across the UK, been a home player with friends, store player and tourney player, know several of the ex-design team as mates, worked in retail management for a multinational, worked as a corporate complaints resolver/troubleshooter for a larger multinational, reported to directorship of same large multinational and have been in the broad church of customer service senior management for the last 12 years.


This is why I don't call myself an expert-- there are (almost) always people out there with more experience!

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
I'm glad you have a sound level of reasoning behind what you say, know what, so do I... I think you and some others see people leveling legitimate complaint in GW's direction and decide, due to your preconceived prejudice, that they are all daft louts. That would be your loss and your mistake, many of the people on this forum are erudite and fairly educated in making their judgement as a consumer, the forum as rabid horde of maladjusted creeps that don't actually game is a poor picture that might have held but a fraction of legitimacy some years back but it's long past that now. This forum's membership is climbing continually and has been going uphill at a rate of knots for the last 3 or 4 years, it's in a steep climb, because the internet is so absolutely available now and that's not going to go away, it's just going to keep climbing.


When I see people leveling legitimate, well-reasoned complaints in GW's direction, I agree with them. For instance the Space Marine copyright issue is absurd and I generally agree with the criticisms thereof. My problem instead lies with people who level illegitimate or ill-reasoned complaints or have an overall attitude where anything GW does is bad. For instance, people saying that Tau selling out is the result of GW being incompetent. While the distribution issues are obviously not ideal, typically products selling out is considered evidence of their popularity and quality, not how incompetent their designers are.
   
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 Kingsley wrote:
 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
I've been in the hobby for 25 years, played in multiple stores across multiple states of the US, also played extensively across the UK, been a home player with friends, store player and tourney player, know several of the ex-design team as mates, worked in retail management for a multinational, worked as a corporate complaints resolver/troubleshooter for a larger multinational, reported to directorship of same large multinational and have been in the broad church of customer service senior management for the last 12 years.


This is why I don't call myself an expert-- there are (almost) always people out there with more experience!


But please, reread what you wrote previously that made me respond with my own credentials, you said, essentially, 'I know about GW hobbyists', the implied message in that is that you were running up against and felt it your duty to 'combat' folks that don't. I'm one of the people you've jumped on in prior threads to dismiss our reasoning as nonsense. I'm not of the extreme of dislike for the company and if I think it's making a shrewd business move, I'd be the first in the queue to congratulate them, but they really haven't been of late, certainly not in terms of long term retention of business or growth, all the signs I see point to cash grabbing, forcing the share value up and profits at the cost of the health and survivability of the company. You may want to now return with 'but all this was being said in 1992' and you'd be right, except in who's saying it, it's not just the disgruntled saxon teeshirt wearing old metal guy who was kicked out for never buying anything and wanting to cover the store table in gakky ral partha skeletons 'counts as' because he's too cheap to buy a necron army, we have clear figures stating that the production rate of GW is in a decline and the company is only making profit now by hiking and drastic cuts. The company looks highly unwell to me, know something? That upsets me a great deal. Because I have had a love affair with their product for the majority of my life. I'd love to see the company back in health, but part of it's sickness is it's policy, it's stance and it's unwillingness to admit that it has a problem.

Despite being a public company, it's being steered directly by Tom Kirby, a man who intended to retire 5 years after he took control of the business from Bryan Ansell, 20 years ago but who has held on because he's making more and more private money and finds that far more appealing than allowing the company to effectively evolve and remain competitive. I think either you or Bryllcream said the company has no real rivals and, I honestly think, atm, you're right... but the barbarians are at the gates, they are beginning to form a cohesive threat. Do you know what will empower them? Forums like this one, because yes, noone else in the other firms will be opening own product stores across the continents, noone else is that stupid. They will simply market product through indy stores and let the indy store owner take all the business risk and pay the staff wage. Little Timmy will indeed go to a GW store, have his intro game, have mum shell out for a boxed set and one day, in the not too distant future, he's going to come home, google '40k', find this or another forum (as GW refuses to maintain their own presence) and find a mini company that produces figures as good and far cheaper, he'll be treated to it painted up on the forum and praised by others, he'll learn that as there is no regular gaming in GW stores, he goes to an indy store or a club, who allow him to use whatever reasonable minis he wants... Then GW will find it's self in real trouble.

I've been saying for a while, GW should just sell off ever damned store, work out a buy out option for it's store managers or interested parties and have a % of shelf space as theirs and the rest be the store owner's prerogative to stock with whatever else he or she wants to sell, effectively rebirthing small indy stores across the UK and parts of America. And then they can just get on with making 'the best model soldiers' as they've claimed. The stores are the millstone around the company's neck, along with a culture of absolute certainty and self-praise at senior level.



 Kingsley wrote:

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
I'm glad you have a sound level of reasoning behind what you say, know what, so do I... I think you and some others see people leveling legitimate complaint in GW's direction and decide, due to your preconceived prejudice, that they are all daft louts. That would be your loss and your mistake, many of the people on this forum are erudite and fairly educated in making their judgement as a consumer, the forum as rabid horde of maladjusted creeps that don't actually game is a poor picture that might have held but a fraction of legitimacy some years back but it's long past that now. This forum's membership is climbing continually and has been going uphill at a rate of knots for the last 3 or 4 years, it's in a steep climb, because the internet is so absolutely available now and that's not going to go away, it's just going to keep climbing.


When I see people leveling legitimate, well-reasoned complaints in GW's direction, I agree with them. For instance the Space Marine copyright issue is absurd and I generally agree with the criticisms thereof. My problem instead lies with people who level illegitimate or ill-reasoned complaints or have an overall attitude where anything GW does is bad. For instance, people saying that Tau selling out is the result of GW being incompetent. While the distribution issues are obviously not ideal, typically products selling out is considered evidence of their popularity and quality, not how incompetent their designers are.


This is an excellent example to talk about. Yes, there are certain posters who just hate and hate GW and call a pox on it's house for anything, they are actually very few, in fact only one regular poster springs to mind that will always hate anything to do with the product, company or people. And you're right on about that being annoying, but he's in the right more than he's in the wrong... (my own pet hate is the utterly gakky things people say to the design team when they make something they don't like, 'pumbagore looks terrible' is fine, Gary Morley still being maligned for nagash, something he made years ago and was forced to change by a certain manager is not, nor is the endless gibbering about Matt Ward, the guy wears a waistcoat ffs, he's obviously got something going for him - also he writes a fairly decent codex, just gets too carried away in the background stories).

Let's talk about Tau, let's put this into a business perspective. Games Workshop have been in this business for 30+ years, they have evolved over this time, they have released armies along the new codex and new minis in a wave style for around 20 of those years. That's a formidable length of time to get this down and running like clockwork. Now, if they're like most companies, you do two things constantly and without fail, Root Cause Analysis and Process Improvement, you constantly dissect and break down what's going on and you look at ways to streamline and evolve the process. This does not appear to be happening with GW's releases. Let me list some factors I think should be considered.

1. This product has no shelf life, it won't go off in a month, it's going to sit and sell comfortably over time, there will be an initial rush to buy but then a steady seller. You are therefore unlikely to make 'too many' of the product.
2. This line of product has gone a long time without update.
3. Has any customer base feedback taken place?
4. Previous sales figures for the line.
5. Have the games being played altered to make this a more popular choice?
6. Are specific models in the line liable to be a 'prime mover'? (oh, you know, massive giant robot gundam thing covered in guns, or also on consultation with the design team, which of the models have you given excellent new rules to?)
7. Have we received any feedback from the advertising? Positives/Negatives?

How many of these factors were considered? I'm willing to bet that it was fewer than half. You may disagree, know what? Doesn't matter.

You've told me that Tau sold out due to popularity.
How do you know that? Mikhaila, one of the most respected store owners on this forum posted in absolute anger that product simply wasn't available to him and until something altered at the distribution or manufacture level, that was a truth. (I am glad he and other stores got their product after all, but some hairy times for small business there).
You have come forward, Kingsley, with an absolute, 'tau sold out due to popularity'.
I don't buy that for a second. If all the retailers got their product as expected, lined their shelves with product and the product flew off them in a flurry of bank notes and foamy mouthed joy, then absolutely that's the case, but this was a problem, from where I'm sitting, something went wrong, either with corporate prediction, manufacture or distribution.

If corporate said 'make 50000 riptides' and preordering and store requests came to 60000, that's a corporate fethup.

If corporate said 'make 50000 riptides' and manufacture miscounted and only made 40000, that's a manufacturing fethup.

If corporate said 'make 50000 riptides' and manufacture made 50000 riptides and distribution sat 20000 in a warehouse gathering dust, that's a distribution fethup.

Whatever the cause, the lack of communication over the issue is a corporate fethup.

Want to know why you saw all manner of conspiracy theories spring up like fungus? It's called a mushroom culture, not just for customers, but associated businesses as well. Everyone outside the upper tiers of the company are kept in the dark and fed gak.

In a vacuum of information, people start trying to work out what's happening, in light of previous aggressive stances in other aspects of business and other relations, many will produce some very interesting ideas.

And that is, again, a corporate fethup. GW has removed it's methods of communication and sees no need to explain anything, the company has retreated behind it's much proclaimed 'moat and wall' and, in the absence of communication, the worst assumptions flourish.

That remains the company's fault and problem, not the individuals on the forums who are trying to understand what's going on. It is a poor relationship and it is a poorly run company.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2013/04/13 13:45:31




 
   
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 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
But please, reread what you wrote previously that made me respond with my own credentials, you said, essentially, 'I know about GW hobbyists', the implied message in that is that you were running up against and felt it your duty to 'combat' folks that don't.


There are a lot of people on Dakka who I think have a "local shop only" perspective. There's nothing wrong with that, except a lot of them seem to think they know the score for everyone else...

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
I think either you or Bryllcream said the company has no real rivals and, I honestly think, atm, you're right... but the barbarians are at the gates, they are beginning to form a cohesive threat.


I hope they do. GW could use some direct competitors to force them to up their game.
   
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 Kingsley wrote:


 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
I think either you or Bryllcream said the company has no real rivals and, I honestly think, atm, you're right... but the barbarians are at the gates, they are beginning to form a cohesive threat.


I hope they do. GW could use some direct competitors to force them to up their game.


The thing is, it seems like the direct competitors are following suit, not just in prices but other habits, and people are so anti-GW, they have rose-colored glasses for some of the other products and companies.

They see what the market can bear, and what GW can get away with and like any business will milk thier customers as much as they can get away with. Every action may turn off a few customers, but there is a tipping point. If one company goes over, the others will know exactly how far they can go.

GW makes a 50$ single model, but another company makes one the exact same size and Price point and they are cheaper and GW is a rip off? GW screws FLGS by refusing direct sales of a book and shorting them on Tau releases so people buy directly from the company and harm FLGS, but when another company launches its 4th kickstarter in less than one calendar year to starve FLGS sales and suck the money out of the market, they are innovative and FLGS needs to adapt or die? GW sucks because they stifle creativity and hate 3rd party companies, but other companies ban 3rd parties from their official events and are just as draconian or even more-so than GW in regards to official models.

All the companies are exactly the same, and the larger and more successful they become, the more like GW they act. Not saying GW is great, I just don't get all the pole-riding of the other companies which are on the same path, just a few steps behind.


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 Kingsley wrote:
 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
But please, reread what you wrote previously that made me respond with my own credentials, you said, essentially, 'I know about GW hobbyists', the implied message in that is that you were running up against and felt it your duty to 'combat' folks that don't.


There are a lot of people on Dakka who I think have a "local shop only" perspective. There's nothing wrong with that, except a lot of them seem to think they know the score for everyone else...


That's not dakka, that's the internet, that's people. Religion, politics, lifestyle, we're all working on the notion that we've got a lot of it down and others would be a lot happier if they did it like we did it. The variable in that can be measured by knowledge base and demonstrative success. If I were in the hotseat for GW, I'd be less concerned with the things people on the internet were variously complaining about and instead worrying about all those people complaining. I would not be dismissing them all, I'd be researching outreach to the online community and looking at ways to make it all feel like a special snowflake, because ripples of dissatisfaction on dakka and elsewhere spread, I might even go the extra mile and see if their concerns were valid about my company. Complaints are free feedback, if there is correlation between complaints, you can ascertain if your corporate boat has sprung a leak and work to fix it, if there are literally thousands of complaints to the company about pricing, given the relationship between the number of complaints being a litmus for the far larger number who will simply walk away, then it's worth working on price reductions or holding the price steady instead of the dismissal of complainants as 'those people who like to complain', because they are, but they give you a canary in a coal mine warning on issues.



 Kingsley wrote:

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
I think either you or Bryllcream said the company has no real rivals and, I honestly think, atm, you're right... but the barbarians are at the gates, they are beginning to form a cohesive threat.


I hope they do. GW could use some direct competitors to force them to up their game.


We absolutely agree here, the best and finest thing for GW would be to routinuely face off against two or three actual competitors, for mini production btw, not rules, as that is where the corporation keeps it's eyes focused.

You know, given the recent moves we're seeing in technology and quality from small companies and such, I think we are on the cusp of it or very nearly. And I can't wait to be a gamer when we are finally given the choice we want and GW is finally forced to sell it's product in a competitive market. It will be a golden era for us and it will either reshape GW into a healthy company or it will break them and allow better to be spawned in the wake of the die-off. I just hope the IP survives that, I'm very fond of it.



 
   
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Or, perhaps:

Manufacturing said "we are making as many as we can and you have sold them all". This is generally considered a good thing e.g. see the iPhone! Not everything goes to motive i.e. done "on purpose" and not every business forecast is perfectly accurate.

A point you have made that I think is spot on is that GW is a direct retail competitor with their resellers and distribution partners. That relationship usually ends badly and explains why simple issues such as this beget so many conspiracy theories.

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:



If corporate said 'make 50000 riptides' and preordering and store requests came to 60000, that's a corporate fethup.

If corporate said 'make 50000 riptides' and manufacture miscounted and only made 40000, that's a manufacturing fethup.

If corporate said 'make 50000 riptides' and manufacture made 50000 riptides and distribution sat 20000 in a warehouse gathering dust, that's a distribution fethup.

   
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 Kingsley wrote:
For instance, people saying that Tau selling out is the result of GW being incompetent. While the distribution issues are obviously not ideal, typically products selling out is considered evidence of their popularity and quality, not how incompetent their designers are.


I would have thought the problem was obvious. While you claim that them selling out shows success and is really good, it's meaningless unless you know the volume produced and how it compares to other ranges recently produced. Either GW produced the usual amount and the demand was excessive, which shows a lack of foresight but could be excused, or they had a much reduced production run as compared to normal meaning that they ran out. Have there been some FLGS saying that they didn't receive much stock? Now that isn't a good thing, it shows that GW either don't have confidence in the product or they are specifically cutting back production because they, perhaps, can't afford to have any stock sitting around unsold, for whatever reason.

Simply, if they under produced the range and it all sold, that's not a good thing. You keep mentioning the 'sold out' success, but you don't know the context. If they sold out because GW ran low production then all it means is that they failed to produce enough to meet the standard demand for their models. Any fool can 'sell out' of a product fast by only producing enough to supply half the market.
   
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As I mentioned above, this is an argument that treats production as both infinite and easy to manage, and they are decidedly not. You are making a pretty wild leap to conclude that they either "don't have confidence" or they are "cutting back on production" for financial reasons. There are a myriad of other possible explanations that are, in my view, much more plausible. And let's keep in mind the temporal component - a temporary stock shortage is much more likely to be a simple problem of logistics. A permanent or continued shortage would likely be a symptom of manufacturing shortfalls. It is a great idea to do all of your manufacturing in-house until you reach capacity and cannot expand locally to meet demand, for instance.


 Howard A Treesong wrote:
 Kingsley wrote:
For instance, people saying that Tau selling out is the result of GW being incompetent. While the distribution issues are obviously not ideal, typically products selling out is considered evidence of their popularity and quality, not how incompetent their designers are.


I would have thought the problem was obvious. While you claim that them selling out shows success and is really good, it's meaningless unless you know the volume produced and how it compares to other ranges recently produced. Either GW produced the usual amount and the demand was excessive, which shows a lack of foresight but could be excused, or they had a much reduced production run as compared to normal meaning that they ran out. Have there been some FLGS saying that they didn't receive much stock? Now that isn't a good thing, it shows that GW either don't have confidence in the product or they are specifically cutting back production because they, perhaps, can't afford to have any stock sitting around unsold, for whatever reason.

Simply, if they under produced the range and it all sold, that's not a good thing. You keep mentioning the 'sold out' success, but you don't know the context. If they sold out because GW ran low production then all it means is that they failed to produce enough to meet the standard demand for their models. Any fool can 'sell out' of a product fast by only producing enough to supply half the market.
   
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Jack_Death wrote:
As I mentioned above, this is an argument that treats production as both infinite and easy to manage, and they are decidedly not. You are making a pretty wild leap to conclude that they either "don't have confidence" or they are "cutting back on production" for financial reasons. There are a myriad of other possible explanations that are, in my view, much more plausible. And let's keep in mind the temporal component - a temporary stock shortage is much more likely to be a simple problem of logistics. A permanent or continued shortage would likely be a symptom of manufacturing shortfalls. It is a great idea to do all of your manufacturing in-house until you reach capacity and cannot expand locally to meet demand, for instance.



If I know my production team can make 300 items a day and our reports indicate we will sell 3000 items on the week of release, then I have my production team create items for 20 days in advance, to cover the release week forecast, any additional sales and, as I mentioned in a previous post, lining shelves for some time, as this is a long term sales item and has no expiry date. These are not ice sculptures, this product is made of plastic, it'll be being dug up for hundreds of years by future archaeologists.

Why, short of incompetence somewhere, was this not accomplished by this multinational corporation? Production failed for this line, in simple corporate terms, someone fethed up somewhere in the line of production of product. I'd agree that it's a logistics issue, which means their data mining sucks arse, which may, very strongly, point to a company that is failing to connect to it's customer... I wonder how they could change that eh???




 
   
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 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
 Kingsley wrote:

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
I think either you or Bryllcream said the company has no real rivals and, I honestly think, atm, you're right... but the barbarians are at the gates, they are beginning to form a cohesive threat.


I hope they do. GW could use some direct competitors to force them to up their game.


We absolutely agree here, the best and finest thing for GW would be to routinuely face off against two or three actual competitors, for mini production btw, not rules, as that is where the corporation keeps it's eyes focused.

You know, given the recent moves we're seeing in technology and quality from small companies and such, I think we are on the cusp of it or very nearly. And I can't wait to be a gamer when we are finally given the choice we want and GW is finally forced to sell it's product in a competitive market. It will be a golden era for us and it will either reshape GW into a healthy company or it will break them and allow better to be spawned in the wake of the die-off. I just hope the IP survives that, I'm very fond of it.


That's my hope as well. I'd ideally like to see three or four "big companies" all competing with one another to develop more advanced miniatures, rulesets, etc. With the increased accessibility of manufacturing technology eliminating many of the startup costs that have historically made starting a new game very difficult, I think we have a serious chance of seeing a golden age of miniatures gaming where customers are spoiled for choice.
   
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Sure, I don't disagree with you, but this still assumes that our fictional manufacturer could simply decide to advance production by twenty days. Maybe so and maybe no, we don't have any visibility into the manufacturing cycle. And again, you are going straight to incompetence. Is it not also possible that they are a blowout success that they had no reason to anticipate? Is it not also possible that they simply produced what they always produce for a new release, and sold it through faster than expected? You would call that incompetence, I'd call it business-as-usual forecasting, a very common occurrence when planning and budgeting. BAU might very well represent the best they can do from a production capacity standpoint, we don't know.

I think the possibility that they have had a runaway hit with the Tau is at least as plausible as managerial incompetence or some semi-incoherent Kirby retirement conspiracy (not that you have advanced the latter theory, but we've seen it in this thread). In any case, an interesting discussion. I suppose we will have to wait for the next financial report, or perhaps the one after, to have any real information to unpack for clues.

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
Jack_Death wrote:
As I mentioned above, this is an argument that treats production as both infinite and easy to manage, and they are decidedly not. You are making a pretty wild leap to conclude that they either "don't have confidence" or they are "cutting back on production" for financial reasons. There are a myriad of other possible explanations that are, in my view, much more plausible. And let's keep in mind the temporal component - a temporary stock shortage is much more likely to be a simple problem of logistics. A permanent or continued shortage would likely be a symptom of manufacturing shortfalls. It is a great idea to do all of your manufacturing in-house until you reach capacity and cannot expand locally to meet demand, for instance.



If I know my production team can make 300 items a day and our reports indicate we will sell 3000 items on the week of release, then I have my production team create items for 20 days in advance, to cover the release week forecast, any additional sales and, as I mentioned in a previous post, lining shelves for some time, as this is a long term sales item and has no expiry date. These are not ice sculptures, this product is made of plastic, it'll be being dug up for hundreds of years by future archaeologists.

Why, short of incompetence somewhere, was this not accomplished by this multinational corporation? Production failed for this line, in simple corporate terms, someone fethed up somewhere in the line of production of product. I'd agree that it's a logistics issue, which means their data mining sucks arse, which may, very strongly, point to a company that is failing to connect to it's customer... I wonder how they could change that eh???

   
 
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