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This will be the third time they have destroyed Specialist Games, and they have grown exceedingly efficient at it

 AegisGrimm wrote:
At least Heresy Miniatures has a set of absolutely awesome Delaque stand-ins. Other than weapons options and nostalgia value, I think they surpass GW's actual models.

Yes! They're great. I've got 'em all!

Everyone go buy them now!

Charax wrote:
This will be the third time they have destroyed Specialist Games, and they have grown exceedingly efficient at it

Haahahah! That's great.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 AegisGrimm wrote:
At least Heresy Miniatures has a set of absolutely awesome Delaque stand-ins. Other than weapons options and nostalgia value, I think they surpass GW's actual models.

Yes! They're great. I've got 'em all!

Everyone go buy them now!

I absolutely love the fat guy with the missile launcher. That would be such a cool centerpiece for a gang. I am thinking of getting a couple of Delaques from Heresy. I am using my old Necro Delaques (and some even older plastic Hybrids) for a Genestealer cult, when playing games using the "In the Emperor's Name" ruleset, found here: http://thegamesshed.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/in-the-emperors-name/

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 AegisGrimm wrote:
At least Heresy Miniatures has a set of absolutely awesome Delaque stand-ins. Other than weapons options and nostalgia value, I think they surpass GW's actual models.

Yes! They're great. I've got 'em all!

Everyone go buy them now!

Wow, they're pretty characterful. Love the one sparking up!

I've converted a few of them to have more "proper" 40K weapons. One has a bolt pistol & chainsword. I gave another a meltagun. I've used them in Necromunda, I've used them exactly as Grimm has, as Genestealer Cultists or Hybrids (they work so well, ditto for the GW Delaque models) and in games of Dark Heresy (the guy lighting up made a great sentry - one of the players casually offered him a Lho and got some good information out of him).

yeah... why couldnt we live in a world where this was happening to the damn hobbit crap they are trying to sell...

never once has that crap that takes up half the stores interested me, such a shame it basically replaced gorkamorka, necromunda, morheim ect

such fond memories of mordhiem, and would you believe it,

I got started in an gw store campaign! OMG the sheer improbability of being lured into a game by something as off the wall as providing a way to actually play that game...

sigh

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
I think the hidden costs for GW regarding Space Hulk was the rest of the contents, not the models. I suspect the printing of all that nice glossy, embossed cardboard was the real money sink. Of course, this means GW could have done the smart thing and simply continued to sell the model sprues separately. But that would have been the smart thing.

Or, made the floor and corridor tiles in plastic since their tooling cost is potentially much lower than the outsourced printing.

Just a thought.

~Eric

I personally think GW is going out of busniess. I believe they are stating they are cutting the specialist line to remove as much stock as they have to get what they can for it. I think the releases of 8th edition WFB and th 40k being it is as quick as possible release which has not been normal for them... i believe if you had a business with shareholders and you see the end of the road.. you release all that you have idea wise and model wise (and notice there are a lot of limited and running out of stock issues) to get all you can from people before you go down... like a sinking ship.. the crew without lifejackets drowning... and they try to throw out everything they can and pull everything down with them.

I hope i am wrong. I am not a business man, however unless you have a lot of disposable income releasing wfb and 40k books every other month and all the models they releasing quick... they expect you to have $$ all the time or they are just throwing out their hooks to get what they can b4 their demise...IMHO.

too bad about specialist games.. i wanted to get a BFG fleet... oh well not now i guess... i have hard time affording anything anymore from GW.

This is a good little article on why GW is in trouble: http://thefrontlinegamer.blogspot.ca/2013/05/how-can-you-tell-when-business-is-in.html

 Spacewolfoddballz wrote:
I personally think GW is going out of busniess. I believe they are stating they are cutting the specialist line to remove as much stock as they have to get what they can for it. I think the releases of 8th edition WFB and th 40k being it is as quick as possible release which has not been normal for them... i believe if you had a business with shareholders and you see the end of the road.. you release all that you have idea wise and model wise (and notice there are a lot of limited and running out of stock issues) to get all you can from people before you go down... like a sinking ship.. the crew without lifejackets drowning... and they try to throw out everything they can and pull everything down with them.

I hope i am wrong. I am not a business man, however unless you have a lot of disposable income releasing wfb and 40k books every other month and all the models they releasing quick... they expect you to have $$ all the time or they are just throwing out their hooks to get what they can b4 their demise...IMHO.

too bad about specialist games.. i wanted to get a BFG fleet... oh well not now i guess... i have hard time affording anything anymore from GW.

There is so much wrong with this post in a business sense that I don't know where to start. But everyone is entitled to their opinion.

 AlexHolker wrote:
The more copies you make, the thinner you spread that overhead cost, and the better your profit margins are. Hence why arbitrarily limiting the number of copies produced is stupid.

That doesn't factor in the printing costs, production capacity taken or storage/distribution. The comment mentioning cannibalisation of sales is also valid as they'd essentially run an internal competition between their products.

And I don't know how any of it relates to what I said.

I think "preparing for sale" as a result of the senior management choosing to retire is a far more likely explanation than, "oh GW is going out of business!"

It still doesn't make anything less sucky for us though.

While the loss of Specialist games was not unexpected, I can't really put into words how odd it is to see it officially being shut down. I'm coming up on almost 20 years of playing GW games, and while I still have the same friends who all got into the games together that long ago, almost none of us still play the "core" games, but nearly all have interest in the Specialist Games. I think GW really overlooks the wider fan base with moves like this. Not everyone may keep playing and building large armies year after year. But they may stick with smaller "board game" size games, or just Black Library novels, or whatever it may be that keeps them being a customer of Games Workshop.

However, by abandoning Specialist games, GW has ruled me out as a future customer. If they rerelease Blood Bowl, it will be my last major purchase. I'm not even angry about it, because as I said, the writing was on the wall for SG for a long time, but the SG community has kept these games alive, and I have no doubt they will continue to do so. I may be all but done buying from GW, but it sure as hell won't stop me from enjoying Necromunda!

 Hulksmash wrote:

 Spacewolfoddballz wrote:
I personally think GW is going out of busniess. I believe they are stating they are cutting the specialist line to remove as much stock as they have to get what they can for it. I think the releases of 8th edition WFB and th 40k being it is as quick as possible release which has not been normal for them... i believe if you had a business with shareholders and you see the end of the road.. you release all that you have idea wise and model wise (and notice there are a lot of limited and running out of stock issues) to get all you can from people before you go down... like a sinking ship.. the crew without lifejackets drowning... and they try to throw out everything they can and pull everything down with them.

I hope i am wrong. I am not a business man, however unless you have a lot of disposable income releasing wfb and 40k books every other month and all the models they releasing quick... they expect you to have $$ all the time or they are just throwing out their hooks to get what they can b4 their demise...IMHO.

too bad about specialist games.. i wanted to get a BFG fleet... oh well not now i guess... i have hard time affording anything anymore from GW.

There is so much wrong with this post in a business sense that I don't know where to start. But everyone is entitled to their opinion.

I understand it is probably "wrong" and my opinion, however seeing how I look out of the box at things its the way i see it. I hope it is not the case as i have played the games since 1990. As a side note however it should be looked at that a lot of companies that think they are doing good business have been failing left and right in last few years and making poor business choices (sure there are other factors).

If they are not going out of busniess that is great!



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 Compel wrote:
I think "preparing for sale" as a result of the senior management choosing to retire is a far more likely explanation than, "oh GW is going out of business!"

It still doesn't make anything less sucky for us though.

I agree that could be as well. Then again perhaps they are on to something being that they have shown profit from another post i saw awhile back... at least for last year and that is impressive seeing the economy in general (at least from my limited view lol).

Even more sad times

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I've converted a few of them to have more "proper" 40K weapons. One has a bolt pistol & chainsword. I gave another a meltagun. I've used them in Necromunda, I've used them exactly as Grimm has, as Genestealer Cultists or Hybrids (they work so well, ditto for the GW Delaque models) and in games of Dark Heresy (the guy lighting up made a great sentry - one of the players casually offered him a Lho and got some good information out of him).

How easy to convert are they? Do they take to GW weapons without a terrible amount of effort? Been thinking about grabbing a few of them for Alpha Legion auxiliaries, but I definitely would like to make them fit a little better with some GW bits.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I've converted a few of them to have more "proper" 40K weapons. One has a bolt pistol & chainsword. I gave another a meltagun. I've used them in Necromunda, I've used them exactly as Grimm has, as Genestealer Cultists or Hybrids (they work so well, ditto for the GW Delaque models) and in games of Dark Heresy (the guy lighting up made a great sentry - one of the players casually offered him a Lho and got some good information out of him).

I don't know why but I never even thought of using them as Genestealer Cultists.

 Darth Bob wrote:
How easy to convert are they? Do they take to GW weapons without a terrible amount of effort? Been thinking about grabbing a few of them for Alpha Legion auxiliaries, but I definitely would like to make them fit a little better with some GW bits.

The ones I've converted are usually the ones that aren't holding rifles or anything like that - the ones with outstretched arms and whatnot. I'm lucky in that I have a prodigious collection of Necromunda weapon bits from multiple sets of new Orlocks, Goliaths, Redemptionists, Van Saars, Ratskins, Arbites, old school Necromunda weapon sprues, and even a few Mordheim Amazon sprues, so finding weapons that fit their scale was really easy (no big Marine hands or anything like that). Plus lopping off Guard hands for Laspistols or Chainswords was easy as well.

All it needed was a little green stuff and it was easy.

Hmmm... do I sell my Epic Tau or do I try in earnest to finish the army?

I'm glad I recently got my Warmaster Lizard man, chaos, and demon armies picked up. I had the feeling this was going to happen. Other friends have pretty much all the other armies because of the same suspicions. It's too bad more people didn't play because Warmaster is one of their best games.

 Ravenous D wrote:
This is a good little article on why GW is in trouble: http://thefrontlinegamer.blogspot.ca/2013/05/how-can-you-tell-when-business-is-in.html

Except that he completely misses the point on the Faeit issue. The problem was not that the published the photos. The problem is that they published the photos prior to the release date of the magazine.

The problem was free advertising. And GW thinks there must be a law against unauthorized advertising as it hurts the companies decline

Uuugggh... this finally got me to pull the trigger on getting a box of the Redemptionist resculpts. I feel filthy now.

 Hulksmash wrote:
There is so much wrong with this post in a business sense that I don't know where to start. But everyone is entitled to their opinion.

This is, broadly speaking, true but meaningless. What they're not entitled to is having their opinion not pointed and laughed at, you see.

See the problem I see is a majority of people seem to be lamenting the models they planned to buy at some undetermined point in the future. GW can't turn a profit on somedays and wishlisting, so all of this putting off until later thinking is what caused this.

Imperial Deceit wrote:
See the problem I see is a majority of people seem to be lamenting the models they planned to buy at some undetermined point in the future. GW can't turn a profit on somedays and wishlisting, so all of this putting off until later thinking is what caused this.

Certainly the lack of actual purchases had an impact. I think a lot of the frustration comes from everything being dropped without notice. A few months notice and a last hurrah still would have been disappointing, but people could have at least been able to buy things that they had wanted. As with a lot of what GW does, it's not so much what they do but how they do it.

Imperial Deceit wrote:
See the problem I see is a majority of people seem to be lamenting the models they planned to buy at some undetermined point in the future. GW can't turn a profit on somedays and wishlisting, so all of this putting off until later thinking is what caused this.

Except I have been buying specialist games in recent months. You could say the same thing about basically the entire GW range, outside of the first couple of months they are released, they are just sitting on the shelves waiting for someone who has planned an army to actually come buy them.

People typically buy things over time, not all at once. Sometimes someone might drop $1000 to buy a a whole army in one hit, but I think that's the exception rather than the rule. My Tyranid army has been bought over, oh I dunno, maybe 6 or 7 years, and it's still not complete, there's still models I "plan" to buy once I've finished painting other things.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lansirill wrote:
Certainly the lack of actual purchases had an impact. I think a lot of the frustration comes from everything being dropped without notice. A few months notice and a last hurrah still would have been disappointing, but people could have at least been able to buy things that they had wanted. As with a lot of what GW does, it's not so much what they do but how they do it.

Basically this. I can understand them dropping lines that aren't making sales (I think they're idiots for not promoting them more and not giving the games an actual chance, but I can understand dropping something that isn't making good sales). What pisses me off is the lack of warning. These models have been up for years and years and some people have been spending years and years slowly collecting them, not giving a couple of months notice is a big "screw you" to those customers.

I agree that the suddenness has probably caused panic is people who thought that they would be able to buy the models when they got around to it, but those who actually played the specialty games probably have 90% of the models that they need/want because as someone stated earlier it does not require a lot of models to play most of the specialty games, and as GW is in the business of moving models this doesn't lead to high volumes of sales. Hopefully this will end up being a positive move, using the space and machinery that was set up from for these low selling products to make other models. (I certainly have a few gaps in my codex that need some models.)

Imperial Deceit wrote:
...as someone stated earlier it does not require a lot of models to play most of the specialty games, and as GW is in the business of moving models this doesn't lead to high volumes of sales.

That was always the problem for the different Specialist Games when they were newly released. Everyone bought the gang, fleet, or team they wanted, and that was it. Without the continual introduction of new rules, new models, etc., like we have in 40K and WFB, sales drop off significantly not long after the game has been released. The problem, however, is that GW responded to that by simply shoving the particular game into the corner of their website and forgetting about it. Instead, the smart thing to do would have been to rotate the Specialist Games into a consistent release cycle. If GW had followed a plan of releasing one SG say, every nine months or so, with followup releases, updates, and support, and then replacing it with the next SG after that nine months, they would have been making lots of money on a consistent cycle.

It was only a matter of time. Games like BloodBowl have been better supported by 3rd party manufacturers than by GW for years.