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The problem I see with Sanctus Reach is that it is the first box to include the mini-rulebook. Aside from the 22-ox codex box, this is the earliest way to get this version of book.
So, SR's sales have been great, as I for one bought it to get that book.
Later boxes of the same type will not be the first, and will sit on the shelves gathering dust.
But, with this not being a starter set, with the templates and dice, new players will get put off with all the add-ons needed, and it'll fail there, too.

As for some of the models in the SR box being limited editions, they've forced people to but half an army just to get it.
You want a Warboss? Pay the Grott tax to get it, and hope you can sell off the SW and rulebook.

We wrote:
Wow GW just can't win. The box comes with a mini rulebook that everyone was complaining they couldn't get. Well guess what, now you can.

It also comes with some cool mini's and is a nice little starter set for people to get into the hobby. If you don't want or need it then don't buy it.

Ignoring the fact it's sold out. What if I want the mini rulebook but not the mini's? Yes I could go down the route of buying the set and selling off the bits, but it's a complete pain even if it gets me the rulebook for free (I can buy the set for £60, and sell each army for £30 without any real difficulty).

So we're still complaining because we still can't get the book. And will do until the release it in another year or so for £30 like they did with the last one.

They release limited edition stuff like any other company, to create a sense of urgency to get people to buy their stuff and make money. It's the same reason Kickstarters give out limited edition stuff if you pledge certain levels. It's the same reason info-mercials tell you supplies are limited call now.

Unfortunately the sense of urgency from GW LE sales is that even core items (like templates, codexes and starter sets [ just because it's not got dice doesn't mean it's not a starter]) need to be impulse bought immediately or you'll have to do without forever. Handy if you're say on holiday or new to the HHHobby unless you like paying over the odds on eBay.

Most companies that do LE stuff tend to make them cool but non essential; alternate sculpts or covers for instance, and with kickstarter it's an incentive to back rather than waiting for retail. But it tends to be stuff that's generally a limited edition and not a "well we'll run off a batch, but since most sales are done in the first month we're unlikely to run another batch".

Edit: the books and characters are already on eBay. If I can get one for under £20 then I'll certainly be tempted. Can anyone confirm if it's the full rules?

I play both orks and SW so I'm a happy camper. Discounted models and a rulebook, plus 2 sweet looking HQ's? Yep I pre-ordered that bad boy the moment I could.

Herzlos wrote:
Edit: the books and characters are already on eBay. If I can get one for under £20 then I'll certainly be tempted. Can anyone confirm if it's the full rules?

I checked that the other day, and both it and the BRB were 208 pages long.
But, I can't find that on the SR page, so it must have been in a rumours page, or on an announcement email.

So basically people are annoyed they didn't get in quick enough...


I feel for you, but seriously, thats the way Limited Edition tends to work.

I wouldn't worry, looking at how well this one sold i'm sure they'll do other sets for other armies. Im really hoping they do anyway. Little campaign sets are a great idea.

Reinforcements for your army (or the start of a new one) and a campaign to play with your mates.. Whats not to like?

 MagicMan wrote:

I feel for you, but seriously, thats the way Limited Edition tends to work.

It's not really how limited editions tend to work. The DV limited edition is how it's normally done. You have an LE version with a slightly higher sticker price and the LE characters thrown in, and when it sells out you release a standard edition with a lower sticker price and no LE stuff.

With this approach you either get the limited run set for £75, or have to buy it all piecemeal for nearly £200 (as you can't buy the mini book separately) which isn't very beginner friendly (you have sticker shock and the hassle of recreating it).

The same has happened with various gaming essentials, which means people feel pressured to impulse buy in case they want to play _____ in the future (mission cards, Vortex Templates, those power generator things, Stormtrooper and Knight codexes) because they just won't exist in future. Whilst that's good for GW in the short term, it's terrible for them in the long term due to annoying customers and not actually having stock to sell. The long tail is normally where companies get most of their money, so I don't understand why it's not the same for GW.

 wuestenfux wrote:
The new Stormclaw box in 40k is limited edition as were other products of GW in the past.

GW Logic : why would you sell 10,000 Void Shield Generators if you can sell 1,000 of them ?

 wuestenfux wrote:
What's the whole thing with impuls buys? Does it make sense in the miniature market?

Impulse buying makes a lot of sense in the miniature market. You go to your FLGS because you planned to buy one boardgame, and you just buy one boardgame and two extra minis.

But one doesn't need a PhD in rocket science to understand that luxury products and impulse buying are often mutually exclusive.
Hey, honey, look, there's that luxury car dealer on the other side of the road, I feel the urge to buy an Aston Martin.

In GW's case, let's just say impulse buying may not work if you're trying to sell BMW cars with Aston Martin pricetags that can only be bought in your own dedicated stores.

Why wouldn't you make, distribute, store and sell 10,000 high price tag bulky resin models that might not have that uptake? Limited labour and resources for production, cost and risk of not selling during a recession I would imagine.

Sell 1,000 units, bank £60k+ and gauge demand for future releases. Seems like a sensible thing to do when there is significant cost cutting in the business.

Finally, I walked into an independent store here this lunchtime and managed to buy one of these boxes albeit I can't collect it until Friday at midnight. Cost me less that Wayland, GfG and Dark Sphere to boot.

I'm not sure this limited product is as limited as some might believe.

 notprop wrote:
Why wouldn't you make, distribute, store and sell 10,000 high price tag bulky resin models that might not have that uptake? Limited labour and resources for production, cost and risk of not selling during a recession I would imagine.

Sell 1,000 units, bank £60k+ and gauge demand for future releases. Seems like a sensible thing to do when there is significant cost cutting in the business.

What's stopping you making them in batches of 1000, only commissioned when you have <10 in stock, or produce them on-demand with a "availability: 4 weeks" like they did (still do?) with the metals?

If all 1000 sold, why stop making them when you still have the moulds?

Production and resources will be planned and allocated ahead of schedule.

There might have been a window where a resin casting guy/team had slack.

It could have been a run of models done by an apprentice.

Once done they go back to Finecast or FW products.

Also Resin mould have a much more limited life span than metals.

There are plenty of practical reasons to do a product such as the Shield Generators on a limited run.

There are less for the Stormclaw to be limited, but the obvious "stop gap for a DV book change over" seem like a sensible enough one for GW.

Hey I just spent £60 to get a mini rulebook so what do I know about sense....?

one thing to keep in mind is shelf space, and production.

from GW end if they release more of these mini campaign sets that have two armies how many will there eventually be? How much shelf space is that at a GW store ontop of the other models/kits?

probably too much.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

kb305 wrote:
ive noticed lots of people who love to bitch, then also buy everything.
kinda funny.

ive noticed lots of people who fail to read the post above theirs.

He smelled ham, he got excited.

 Yonan wrote:
People often mischaracterise our stance as being "GW is the devil and do nothing right we want them to fail". It's pretty silly as we love 40k and want GW to improve it - when they do things like this box we say so.

In another thread az said something along the lines of:

"I spent the weekend painting a bunch of [GW miniatures]. I sure do hate 40K!" in a wonderfully sarcastic manner. I can add to that:

I spent almost all of last week writing rules for one of the 40K RPGs. If I hated 40K, why would I do that?

It was a Decimator Daemon Engine.

40K is still the game I play most frequently, and the only system I paint models for (X Wing doesn't really require too much painting.) I have never once said I boycott GW, in fact, much like your point, I feel positively reinforcing things I feel are what I want more of is probably more important than not buying things I don't like, because GW have no way of detecting a sale they didn't make.

I do get really tired, as I'm sure many others do, of constantly being mischaracterised, misrepresented and misunderstood by people who feel compelled to defend the indefensible, but then, they don't really have much else to fire back with!

As for the LE stuff? Well, I've said before, GW are massively risk averse, and I'm pretty sure they're willing to sacrifice sales rather than risk over-spending on inventory they have no method of shifting thanks to their self inflicted "we don't do discounts" nonsense. It will be an easy theory to test, assuming this is the first in a series, as any future releases will get larger print runs and won't be as hard to obtain.

What would be nice are the models that are in the Kit that are Limited, if they were released in clampacks. I am guessing thats just the warlord model for both sides in the kit as the space wolves models are probably the forth coming SW kits other than the warlord model in the limited box.

 notprop wrote:
Why wouldn't you make, distribute, store and sell 10,000 high price tag bulky resin models that might not have that uptake? Limited labour and resources for production, cost and risk of not selling during a recession I would imagine.

If only there were some way for companies to communicate with their customers. Maybe they could publish a periodical, or set up some sort of viewable page on this newfangled inter-computer thing that everyone's talking about, where people could see upcoming releases and give feedback on them so that said company could gauge potential interest in purchasing those releases when they are ready to go.

Alas, such things are still the province of those ridiculous space-fantasy books all the kids are reading.

Sell 1,000 units, bank £60k+ and gauge demand for future releases.

Miss out on all the other sales that you could have made if you had produced more...


Unless you're specifically intending a product to be rare, if it's selling out in the first hours of release, you haven't made enough of them. You're winding up with a whole bunch of customers who would have handed you money, but now can't.

So no, that's not a sensible thing for a company that is struggling for profit.

Let us not forget Black Industries where the RPG sold out in pre-order and they immediately closed down the division and outsourced production to FFG. While I'm glad the end result is FFG having made a lot of books, GW seems to have alarm bells go off whenever something sells too well.

Jervis once bragged about how Epic: Armageddon did 600% of their sales targets for pre-order and the first release.

Stop! Raise the price! Close down the division! Sales are too good!

All the selling out of SR in pre-order will mean to GW is that next time they release a box like that, it'll be at a higher price. The demand is there, after all.

I have to admit I love GW's limited edition books.

I used to have all of the Limited Liber Chaotica boos and the Hardbound/sleeved Visions of Heresy books.

Sadly they were all in one box that got stolen when I moved :(

They're just too damn expensive to try and collect now.

People love to say GW is here to make money and... you know I don't think they are.
I donno what they're doing but it can't be going as well as it could.
I mean yeah they're a miniature company but... don't people generally, I donno, need an incentive to usually buy a crapton of really expensive models?
Just because they are there, does not mean I will buy it.
I have no issue with a company trying to make money, but at least try and do it well. I give my money to Privateer Press because I feel they try, that they have some semblance of caring of their customer base, not the weird almost dislike GW has of theirs.
I have a hobby that I buy things to just set somewhere and admire, my dolls. And I forge a narrative with them too!
Good times.
Point is, if you don't control the market, you can't act like you still do.
Any GW stuff I have these days (mostly for painting), I buy second hand, and it's slowly getting phased out for cheaper games like Kings of War.

We wrote:


News flash, GW is out to make money.

Uh, Earth to Meekus , duh , okay I knew that!

I love when people use 'GW is out to make money' as some kind of defense.

I really, really want to give GW my money, but I am not seeing any value in what they are producing recently, or the value is overshadowed by other things, so they aren't getting any cash from me.



*Actually I lie, they will be getting some money from me next pay when I scoop up the last of the old LotR stuff from my local store, but a hundred dollars every month or so is nothing compared to my current gaming budget.

I have a question for those moaning about the lack of access to a rulebook.

You have just made a book. It's going to be your best seller. You print up thousands, because, hey, it's going to make you some serious money.

Now your customer base starts to ask for a paperback, because the hardback is too big. Do you

A. Immediatly produce a paperback. You'll end up with stock, expensive to produce stock, left on the shelf.

B. Wait until your Hardback sales start to slow, then produce a cheap to manufacture paperback.

There has been a market for the smaller rulebooks for a long time, where did you get the idea that the demand only came about after the creation of the hard back? If GW can't accurately determine production targets they should talk to their customers more.

You haven't answered my question.

I'm not interested in what GW should have done, I simply want to know what they should do now.

They should know that customers want a smaller book, and have them ready to launch after the initial demand for the big book has peaked (say, 1 month, so they should be out now).

They could wait a bit longer to fix any errata before the 2nd run, but that should only be an additional month behind the 1st run, assuming any sort of playtesting or review was done.

Hopefully they didn't just realise customers want a small book, since the customers have always wanted the smaller books (it's why I bought the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th & 6th edition box sets).

In short: What should they do now? Either [A] release the "Rules" hardback on it's own for about £30 (in line with the higher end of other companies books) or [B] Release the mini "Rules" book for about £15 (again on the higher end of mini rulebooks from other companies).

 jonolikespie wrote:

I really, really want to give GW my money, but I am not seeing any value in what they are producing recently....

Really, so what?

Has anyone spotted that complaining about a product selling out.. and complaining that a product has no value are, you know, somewhat contradictory?

Complaining when GW do stupid things is fair enough. But complaining when they produce good, unexpected, VFM products just shows you're an old grump.

The Division Of Joy wrote:
I have a question for those moaning about the lack of access to a rulebook.

You have just made a book. It's going to be your best seller. You print up thousands, because, hey, it's going to make you some serious money.

Now your customer base starts to ask for a paperback, because the hardback is too big. Do you

A. Immediatly produce a paperback. You'll end up with stock, expensive to produce stock, left on the shelf.

B. Wait until your Hardback sales start to slow, then produce a cheap to manufacture paperback.

I think B is already here. That's why they've released a set with the paperback and Dark Vengeance is about to be re-released with the paperback. Because they know the big rulebook tapers off. They've done it for 2 or 3 editions before this.

Also I think you've missed an option.
C. Sell the rules as a stand alone book. They've already got it printed on it's own.

 Hivefleet Oblivion wrote:

 jonolikespie wrote:

I really, really want to give GW my money, but I am not seeing any value in what they are producing recently....

Really, so what?

Has anyone spotted that complaining about a product selling out.. and complaining that a product has no value are, you know, somewhat contradictory?

They aren't contradictory. Selling out has nothing to do with the value, which is a personal thing. It's bad business sense to release stuff that some percentage of customers find poor value, and it's bad business to release stuff that is required but unavailable (like most of the Bretonnian range).

Complaining when GW do stupid things is fair enough. But complaining when they produce good, unexpected, VFM products just shows you're an old grump.

No-one has complained about them producing good, or VFM products. When they do they, they get praised. The SR box set has made me consider starting Space Wolves, since I can get that starter force for essentially £20 more than the rules cost (£60 Vs £40 via an independent)

The Division Of Joy wrote:
I have a question for those moaning...

When you stop using loaded language, sure.

Herzlos wrote:

 Hivefleet Oblivion wrote:

 jonolikespie wrote:

I really, really want to give GW my money, but I am not seeing any value in what they are producing recently....

Really, so what?

Has anyone spotted that complaining about a product selling out.. and complaining that a product has no value are, you know, somewhat contradictory?

They aren't contradictory. Selling out has nothing to do with the value, which is a personal thing. It's bad business sense to release stuff that some percentage of customers find poor value, and it's bad business to release stuff that is required but unavailable (like most of the Bretonnian range).

Complaining when GW do stupid things is fair enough. But complaining when they produce good, unexpected, VFM products just shows you're an old grump.

No-one has complained about them producing good, or VFM products. When they do they, they get praised. The SR box set has made me consider starting Space Wolves, since I can get that starter force for essentially £20 more than the rules cost (£60 Vs £40 via an independent)

Plenty of people are praising the Stormclaw set. Plenty of people are hoping they'll do more campaign boxes. And plenty of grumps are being grumpy.

And of course selling out has to do with the value. Do the math on the set; there is a substantial saving. We've sold our old rulebook (which is poor value), and will get a bunch of orks, and probably a cash surplus at the end. There will be more unique figures, and more cheap rule books around, and that is a good thing for everyone.

 Hivefleet Oblivion wrote:
Plenty of people are praising the Stormclaw set. Plenty of people are hoping they'll do more campaign boxes. And plenty of grumps are being grumpy.

The only grumping I've seen about SR are: That it's a limted run and that it's the only way to get the LE figures or mini rulebook. All are valid concerns. Why should you have to buy another rule book to get a character, or why should you have to buy 2 starter armies and a campaign book to get a mini rulebook? What someone joining the hobby in a few months wants the character or mini book? Will they think that's a good thing or a stupid decision?

I think it is a good idea in the sense that GW can control the production budget very precisely. They make say 5,000 copies costing them perhaps £80,000 to produce and can be sure they will sell the whole consignment quickly and net £312,000 revenue (ignoring VAT).

This is especially true when the set in production is of limited appeal; in this case for example only Space Wolf and Ork players who bought the first Red Waaagh box are likely to be interested in Stormclaw, who clearly are a minority of the entire user base.

On the whole I think it is a good idea especially for these campaigns, and I think the campaigns are a good idea. Although I am not interested in Space Wolves or Orks, I expect there will be other campaigns for the rest of us.

The actual bad thing IMO is making your core rulebook a limited edition. I know the full slipcase set costing £50 is always in print, but there are lots of people who won't buy that and want a cheaper version. Until they get it, they are not likely to buy other 40K stuff. (That is me at any rate.)

However it does at least show that there is a mini rulebook in existence. There was an ugly rumour a few weeks ago that the mini rulebook was going to be a crippled version missing a lot of the rules.