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Even thought the entire thread is designed to be a moan-fest (which I fully acknowledge taking part in!) we should steer away from just complaining about prices, as it usuall becomes an argument that goes nowhere.

We should be sharing other things that have changed over the years which make us feel how we do.

 tyrannosaurus wrote:
I did a small comparison of prices in the early 2000s and what prices adjusted for inflation should be now and the price increases are generally way above inflation, although it varies markedly between different models which shows that the level of price increases are completely arbitrary.

What's really driving up price increases however are the mugs that pay for limited edition codexes for double the price for an extra dust jacket. The message this sends to GW is that their customers are prepared to pay a ridiculous premium for very little. It seems as though everything released now has a limited edition option. This in turn drives other prices up as GW realises just what it can get away with [e.g. 5 man kits with 10 head options and 20 weapon loadouts along with a 50% price increase]. Prices will stabilise when customers stop buying and not beforehand, and if you want it to change, maybe you need to be more discerning abut what you will and will not pay for.

We've not agreed on much that I've noticed dude, but this I can get behind.

It's why I've substantially cut my spending in GW product for the last two years or so, and it is my fervent hope that the drop in revenue represents an appreciable number doing likewise. Not because I hate GW and want them to fail, but I want them to get the message and take a hard look at what they do.

If it doesn't work, well, no matter, I'm happy in my hobby without being overly tied into the HHHobby, if it does, well great. If the message is being sent, and GW refuse to hear it, then they do deserve to fail.

 azreal13 wrote:
*sigh*

I'm not getting involved in all this again.

Believe what you want to believe, if you are interested in my thoughts in the matter, browse through any of my posts on the subject from the threads in N+R or General Discussion.

From about two months ago.

Forgive me for disagreeing if it's raining just because I felt a single raindrop. I'm a firm believer that patterns are needed to establish if something is an event or a trend. We can all agree that 2013 ended poorly but without knowing why, or if it's a larger trend keeps me from prepping for GW's funeral.

So here's what the last 5 years for GW looks like after adjusting everything up to 2013:


Now you'll notice a couple things here: first I focused on 4 factors: how much GW took in (Revenue), how much they spent making it (Cost of Sales), how much was left after discounting the cost of making it (Gross Profit) and how much they kept when all the other deductions finally came out (Loss/Profit attributable to Shareholders aka Retained Earnings).

And yes, Revenue is mostly flat over a 5 year period, but this is what happens when you inflate all the numbers, shifts get smaller and it flattens out.

What I noticed is that Gross Profit matched Revenue point for point in how it shifted up until 2012. After that the Cost of Sales actually bumped up enough to break the pattern. I believe this is when GW moved to the more detailed and expensive plastic molds which increased the relative cost. The dip fro 2009 and 2010 I believe is largely from GW moving away from metals and making most of the metal models direct only to reduce how many they'd have to cast, reducing their production costs at the time.

While Retained Earnings have gone up from 2007-2010 this was all attributable to them recovering from their major loss in 2007. After that Retained Earnings match the movements of Revenue more closely, and thus are fairly flat when inflation it taken into consideration.

This tells me that GW isn't doing things to artificially inflate their retained earnings to look healthier in the long run, nor does it seem they're actually do anything to disguise how things are working for them at the moment. However, it also tells me that while they are putting more money into the company (through retained earnings) each year, they're not really showing signs of actually growing, something I think most of us are pretty aware of.

So in short, GW mostly appears to be holding. They aren't really shooting themselves in the foot with anything to push their numbers while screwing themselves in the short term, but there isn't any real signs that their customer base is growing faster than they're turning them over either (and vice versa).

I repeat, two months ago called, it wants its discussion back.

The problem with the argument is that you can't really put a value on things bought with a disposable income.

Now marketing practices like cutting the amount of models in a box but keeping the same price....that's less of a price hike (though it still is) and more of just a plain dirty business move.

Oh, and point of order, 2012 is when they started including cost of development in cost of sales, that's what caused the bump, and that's a fact lifted straight from their report. Nice speculation though.

 azreal13 wrote:
I repeat, two months ago called, it wants its discussion back.

You brought up that I was looking at numbers that weren't inflated, I said I was going to inflate them and take a look and I did. Just because you talked about it with other people two months ago doesn't mean I can't have my own opinions about it, or actually provide an something that shows how much things actually moved once inflated.

Price raises only go so far with the revenue. If revenue was actually climbing because of price rises then after inflating it then it shouldn't be so flat over a 5 year period. Same for Retained Earnings. GW isn't losing (yet) but they're not gaining (yet) either.


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 azreal13 wrote:
Oh, and point of order, 2012 is when they started including cost of development in cost of sales, that's what caused the bump, and that's a fact lifted straight from their report. Nice speculation though.

They've never had development costs or R&D listed in their reports before so I guess they were in Operating Expenses instead in the past. I was considering it was related to the kits as 2012-2013 is when we started seeing the more heavily detailed kits in the new releases (whose molds should cost more to make) so that was speculation, yes but I freely admit it. It doesn't shift retained earnings any though so I'm willing to bet that it was already accounted for.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AegisGrimm wrote:
The problem with the argument is that you can't really put a value on things bought with a disposable income.

Now marketing practices like cutting the amount of models in a box but keeping the same price....that's less of a price hike (though it still is) and more of just a plain dirty business move.

Yeah, that really didn't make any sense to me why they did that with Dire Avengers.

 ClockworkZion wrote:

 azreal13 wrote:
I repeat, two months ago called, it wants its discussion back.

You brought up that I was looking at numbers that weren't inflated, I said I was going to inflate them and take a look and I did. Just because you talked about it with other people two months ago doesn't mean I can't have my own opinions about it, or actually provide an something that shows how much things actually moved once inflated.

Price raises only go so far with the revenue. If revenue was actually climbing because of price rises then after inflating it then it shouldn't be so flat over a 5 year period. Same for Retained Earnings. GW isn't losing (yet) but they're not gaining (yet) either.

Never said they were. You've assumed because I've taken a pessimistic stance with regard to the implications of the interim report I'm predicting the doom of GW.

Never been the case, just assumption on your part.

 azreal13 wrote:
Oh, and point of order, 2012 is when they started including cost of development in cost of sales, that's what caused the bump, and that's a fact lifted straight from their report. Nice speculation though.

They've never had development costs or R&D listed in their reports before so I guess they were in Operating Expenses instead in the past. I was considering it was related to the kits as 2012-2013 is when we started seeing the more heavily detailed kits in the new releases (whose molds should cost more to make) so that was speculation, yes but I freely admit it. It doesn't shift retained earnings any though so I'm willing to bet that it was already accounted for.

Of course it was already accounted for, it's the same cost, it's just listed elsewhere, it won't have any affect on the bottom line. What it does mean is now their cost of sales gives us a really clear idea of what GW spend in order to manufacture their product from square one - which pretty much torpedoes the old GW defender argument of "they cost more to make than you think because of XYZ" The kits cost very little to produce in relation to their RRP - if they're under pressure to increase prices (as opposed to just increasing them because they can) then it is purely down to their other, bloated cost base (ie the stores) which we've already covered, the production arm of GW sans the retail element, assuming a decent third party retailer network had been cultivated in lieu of their own, would be a very healthy company indeed.

I apologize, usually when GW's finances come up the stance that they're disguising flagging sales with price increases comes up, but if that was the case we'd see a disconnect with Cost of Sales moving a differently than Revenues, but it seems to be pretty well fixed to being a percentage of Revenues without any real deviancy.

It was interesting to look at though as it does confirm GW is largely basically "holding" with losses of customers being largely matched by gaining customers but neither out-pacing each other in at the moment.

You're not accounting for the fact that cost of sales covers a much wider range of costs from 2012 onwards, but remains consistent.

This means that those costs are either insignificant or the production costs fell significantly, and those extra costs shored up the difference.

 azreal13 wrote:
You're not accounting for the fact that cost of sales covers a much wider range of costs from 2012 onwards, but remains consistent.

This means that those costs are either insignificant or the production costs fell significantly, and those costs shored up the difference.

Without more information on what's going on behind the scenes there isn't a real way to describe what happened there with only 2013 as a point of data there.It's possible it has to do with the mass retirement of a lot of metal models that were phased out between then and now for instance or the switch to designing most of the plastic models through CAD has reduced material costs on making new models (since they don't need to sculpt, cast and then reduce the model for example), but without anything concrete it's hard to really be certain without more data.

At least, as far as I can tell, pre-2013 the prices weren't being artificially driven up to hide flagging sales like claimed (I remember seeing claims about this for a few years now, if GW has started to do it, then they've just started, and then 2014's EOY statement will make that fairly clear).

There's a document circulating which was accidentally released as part of the CHS case before being retracted.

I suggest you track it down, as it does give a break down of unit sales by SKU for the US.

It does NOT make for impressive reading.

Volume is down, prices are up, costs are down, yet profit isn't increasing, revenue is down for the first time in a long time, yet, given global economics just now offering plenty of reasonable options, GW/Kirby chooses to offer a mightily implausible justification (and, let's face it, judging by the share movement since, nobody bought it either)

There's plenty of ways to interpret the information on hand, but to me, anyone trying to put any sort of positive spin on it seems to be reaching from where I'm standing.

 azreal13 wrote:
There's a document circulating which was accidentally released as part of the CHS case before being retracted.

I suggest you track it down, as it does give a break down of unit sales by SKU for the US.

It does NOT make for impressive reading.

Volume is down, prices are up, costs are down, yet profit isn't increasing, revenue is down for the first time in a long time, yet, given global economics just now offering plenty of reasonable options, GW/Kirby chooses to offer a mightily implausible justification (and, let's face it, judging by the share movement since, nobody bought it either)

There's plenty of ways to interpret the information on hand, but to me, anyone trying to put any sort of positive spin on it seems to be reaching from where I'm standing.

I'm not trying to spin it either way honestly, just trying to refrain from passing judgment without knowing all the facts. I don't feel the board knows their ass from a Snotling honestly but I don't know if I'm willing to drive any nails in the coffin just yet. I've got my opinions, but without all the facts I don't like to claim any of them as facts. Guess I like to play it safe and watch things unfold more than fight for either side.

I am curious for which year the sales data is for as 2011 was a year we see a dip in Revenue so if it's from the same year then it's nothing they're hiding anywhere in terms of sales.

 azreal13 wrote:
There's a document circulating which was accidentally released as part of the CHS case before being retracted.

I suggest you track it down, as it does give a break down of unit sales by SKU for the US.

It does NOT make for impressive reading.

Volume is down, prices are up, costs are down, yet profit isn't increasing, revenue is down for the first time in a long time, yet, given global economics just now offering plenty of reasonable options, GW/Kirby chooses to offer a mightily implausible justification (and, let's face it, judging by the share movement since, nobody bought it either)

There's plenty of ways to interpret the information on hand, but to me, anyone trying to put any sort of positive spin on it seems to be reaching from where I'm standing.

I remember seeing that document and really wish I knew where I put it. There was some amazing stuff on there, like selling single digits of some of the less popluar, yet-to-be-updated boxes in a year.

 Zarynterk wrote:


Anecdotal evidence at best; a good chunk of people? I have to tell you, the local gaming store in my town can't seem to keep units on the shelf and there is a GW store within 15 mins from it as well as two other local stores within 30 mins. So my evidence would lead me to believe, a good chunk of the people I see pay the money.

If they can't keep it on the shelf, they are not ordering enough. GW will sell you as much as you'd like for your store.

Also, what is with people claiming you're not allowed to complain? This "welp, buy it or don't, but shut up" attitude is gross.

All of these irked me about GW, but the one that makes me rage face the most, and most often, is when they switch their paint lines. They have done it four times since I started this hobby, and every time they do it, I have to try to find a color that is close to a color they used to have. They aren't just changing bottle shapes and color names; they are changing the actual pigments themselves, which makes matching colors between paint line editions a motherfething pain in the hoop. And the rat-feth-suns-a-bastiches always seem to swap paint lines while I am in the middle of painting an army. They can't do it during those periods when I am between painting projects, oh no... gotta wait till a change in Snakebite Leather will hurt the hardest. Or completely drop pink from their line, despite Slaanesh armies being a thing they have rules for.

This habit of theirs has forced me to do partial re-paints of four armies so far. I'm starting to think GW is doing it on purpose to honk me off.

Brother Gyoken wrote:

 Zarynterk wrote:


Anecdotal evidence at best; a good chunk of people? I have to tell you, the local gaming store in my town can't seem to keep units on the shelf and there is a GW store within 15 mins from it as well as two other local stores within 30 mins. So my evidence would lead me to believe, a good chunk of the people I see pay the money.

If they can't keep it on the shelf, they are not ordering enough. GW will sell you as much as you'd like for your store.

Also, what is with people claiming you're not allowed to complain? This "welp, buy it or don't, but shut up" attitude is gross.

Not once did we ever say shut up? I was simply saying, complaining for the sake of complaining is unhealthy thats all lol.

Brother Gyoken wrote:

If they can't keep it on the shelf, they are not ordering enough. GW will sell you as much as you'd like for your store.

Actually. No, no they won't. OK, let me rephrase that. They will send you all the fairly low demand stuff you want, but the high demand stuff often has a limit on it, and the direct order stuff is limited as well.

 Coldhatred wrote:

Brother Gyoken wrote:

If they can't keep it on the shelf, they are not ordering enough. GW will sell you as much as you'd like for your store.

Actually. No, no they won't. OK, let me rephrase that. They will send you all the fairly low demand stuff you want, but the high demand stuff often has a limit on it, and the direct order stuff is limited as well.

This is 100% accurate, which agains points to the fact that GW stuff still sells even with the price hikes.

The thread title with "dislike" is a bit strong.

Maybe "not as favorable as competitors"?

What may bother them is that other gaming companies are getting my hobby dollars more.

I would say if their target is new gamers, most of what is out there now is more "accessible" than GW product.

Good to see the other analysis that they are pretty much stable so I can continue to get some mileage out of my "old" armies.

squidhills wrote:
All of these irked me about GW, but the one that makes me rage face the most, and most often, is when they switch their paint lines. They have done it four times since I started this hobby, and every time they do it, I have to try to find a color that is close to a color they used to have. They aren't just changing bottle shapes and color names; they are changing the actual pigments themselves, which makes matching colors between paint line editions a motherfething pain in the hoop. And the rat-feth-suns-a-bastiches always seem to swap paint lines while I am in the middle of painting an army. They can't do it during those periods when I am between painting projects, oh no... gotta wait till a change in Snakebite Leather will hurt the hardest. Or completely drop pink from their line, despite Slaanesh armies being a thing they have rules for.

This habit of theirs has forced me to do partial re-paints of four armies so far. I'm starting to think GW is doing it on purpose to honk me off.

Use Vallejos. That is what I do, and each time GW switches their paints I continue using the equivalent I have been using.


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 Zarynterk wrote:

 Coldhatred wrote:

Brother Gyoken wrote:

If they can't keep it on the shelf, they are not ordering enough. GW will sell you as much as you'd like for your store.

Actually. No, no they won't. OK, let me rephrase that. They will send you all the fairly low demand stuff you want, but the high demand stuff often has a limit on it, and the direct order stuff is limited as well.

This is 100% accurate, which agains points to the fact that GW stuff still sells even with the price hikes.

If what you're saying is true, then it wouldn't point to anything of the like. If quantities are extremely limited, it isn't hard to sell them.

"hate" isn't the right word.

There are several things on that list which I am NOT a fan of (finecast, price hikes, etc). But I wouldn't say I "hate" them. It's more like being mildly irritated.

Now the moment I became extremely irritated was when they posted the "roll for it" decision in one of the FAQs. That has got to be the lamest way to solve a rule issue. Going along with this is a complete lack of FAQs in over a YEAR. (and, no, I don't count the minor FAQ updates last september which covered a serious game change mechanic as a real FAQ.)

So I've had to answer a question for myself: is the game still worth playing if the producer (GW) continues to publish poorly edited rulebooks while refusing to fix well known and glaring issues?

At the current time my answer is Yes. If "7th", or whatever it is, rolls out and the situation becomes worse then I'll find something else to do.

Why did anyone who voted in this thread actually come into a forum about Games Workshop's game Warhammer 40k? Do you really hate yourselves that much?

I don't troll around MLP sites telling people how much I loathe their hobby. That's not a good use of time for anyone involved.

 DarknessEternal wrote:
Why did anyone who voted in this thread actually come into a forum about Games Workshop's game Warhammer 40k? Do you really hate yourselves that much?

I don't troll around MLP sites telling people how much I loathe their hobby. That's not a good use of time for anyone involved.

People complain because they care. That's the sign that there is trouble. They are concerned because they feel less and less committed to the game, and they enjoy it less and less. Furthermore, so many of the changes and price increases are stifling any newcomers to the hobby, that has people worried.

We're in real trouble once people stop caring enough to complain.

 TheSilo wrote:

We're in real trouble once people stop caring enough to complain.

I don't think of a forum reasonable enough to read would be considered trouble.

That doesn't even make sense as a sentence. Typo, beer or appalling punctuation?

 TheSilo wrote:

 DarknessEternal wrote:
Why did anyone who voted in this thread actually come into a forum about Games Workshop's game Warhammer 40k? Do you really hate yourselves that much?

I don't troll around MLP sites telling people how much I loathe their hobby. That's not a good use of time for anyone involved.

People complain because they care. That's the sign that there is trouble. They are concerned because they feel less and less committed to the game, and they enjoy it less and less. Furthermore, so many of the changes and price increases are stifling any newcomers to the hobby, that has people worried.

We're in real trouble once people stop caring enough to complain.

There is a "rule" that exists in the Military: "Privates will always complain. It's when they stop you need to worry."

Why did anyone who voted in this thread actually come into a forum about Games Workshop's game Warhammer 40k? Do you really hate yourselves that much?

Because up until 6th edition 40K, I really loved the game. Some of the things that had been changed in 5th I didn't really like, but it's nothing close to the storm of feth since 6th edition came out. I love painting and modelling within the game universe, but good god, the game is basically being run by a sales team this edition, not a design team.

Not one thing in the poll was in existence before 6th edition. So it's basically a poll about whether you like 40K, but hate everything that has happened since 6th dropped.

When they first messed up Tomb kings and everything warhammer started to become less grim dark.

 AegisGrimm wrote:

Why did anyone who voted in this thread actually come into a forum about Games Workshop's game Warhammer 40k? Do you really hate yourselves that much?

Because up until 6th edition 40K, I really loved the game. Some of the things that had been changed in 5th I didn't really like, but it's nothing close to the storm of feth since 6th edition came out. I love painting and modelling within the game universe, but good god, the game is basically being run by a sales team this edition, not a design team.

Not one thing in the poll was in existence before 6th edition. So it's basically a poll about whether you like 40K, but hate everything that has happened since 6th dropped.

Indeed.

What exactly does one expect to find in a thread titled "When did you start disliking GW?"?