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 frozenwastes wrote:
They've simply exhausted their playbook at this point.

What do you mean playbook? There is no playbook, there is simply kirby handing off the ball to a wide receiver to run straight up the guts.That's a winning strategy, and let no one tell him otherwise.

Checked out GW's performance over the last two years over on the Bloomberg website. It has a really nice graphic for the last four reporting periods. Revenue and profit are represented with bar graphs. Profit margin is represented by a bright blue line. That bright blue line looks like the terminal arc of a ballistic trajectory. Others have mentioned it before, but when you see it represented it does seem to portend a swift decline. I can't put a link for some dumb reason, but if you can go to Bloomberg or google search Games workshop stock and click the Bloomberg link, you'll see it.

Looks really bad.

Warlord Games sums up the big thing that GW are missing.

I'm looking to buy a Fallschirmjager box set, it costs £76, a mixture of metal and plastic models, 40 figures, a vehicle and a heavy weapon and makes a 1000pt force. On top of this I got the rules in Kindle format, £1.89, same for the German codex. Further to this I can use the force with other 28mm WWII rules.

It's a no brainer

 Ferrum_Sanguinis wrote:
Was one bad selling product (Dreadfleet) really enough to scare GW into never overproducing an item again to the point of under-producing everything? Did they really lose that much money with Dreadfleet?

Given their typical cost of goods of 25% of the retail price they would have lost money if they sold under 25% of the production run of Dread Fleet. But obviously the point is to sell the maximum possible. I have no idea how many they did sell.

Seeing that Space Hulk sold out quickly and is still much sought after on eBay several years later, there is no doubt that GW left money on the table with that release and badly over-estimated the chances of Dread Fleet.

There are some suggestions by people earlier in this thread that GW's current "limited edition" production scheme is as much caused by a lack of manufacturing capacity as by lack of appetite for risk.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
I'm sure people thought TSR were to big to fall but they did, despite being huge. ...

I'm sure GW are aware that a major product failure could sink them. So they are paralysed, unable to do anything brave. ...

They've barely made a new game in ten years. ...

There's a lack of confidence in investing in game systems beyond fantasy and 40k, ...

To me this is a huge part of the problem. GW have this massive expensive chain of shops and (ignoring Fantasy, which I am sorry to say has become a minority thing) they have basically one product to sell, 40K.

They don't want to or can't make something new, so they are trying to cram as much variation into 40K as possible, and recycle the customer base of basic game. That doesn't work and we are seeing the results now.

 Ketara wrote:
GW still has a few years window to turn all this around. They have the facilities, the lack of debt, the in-house production expertise, and the brand. The question, is whether or not they are able to do so. With Kirby relegated to being Chairman, he will doubtless be attempting to to control whoever is appointed to replace him as CEO. This is not an uncommon thing to occur in the world of business. The question will be whether or not his replacement will wrest control away from Kirby, and if that replacement will have different ideas on how to run the company.

Yes, I agree with this too. The big danger is that Kirby and his kronies will have a massive influence in appointing and "guiding" the new CEO, so I don't have a lot of hope that he will revolutionise the company quickly enough.

 Ferrum_Sanguinis wrote:
Was one bad selling product (Dreadfleet) really enough to scare GW into never overproducing an item again to the point of under-producing everything? Did they really lose that much money with Dreadfleet?

There's also The Hobbit "limited edition" starter set.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

 Ketara wrote:
GW still has a few years window to turn all this around. They have the facilities, the lack of debt, the in-house production expertise, and the brand. The question, is whether or not they are able to do so. With Kirby relegated to being Chairman, he will doubtless be attempting to to control whoever is appointed to replace him as CEO. This is not an uncommon thing to occur in the world of business. The question will be whether or not his replacement will wrest control away from Kirby, and if that replacement will have different ideas on how to run the company.

Yes, I agree with this too. The big danger is that Kirby and his kronies will have a massive influence in appointing and "guiding" the new CEO, so I don't have a lot of hope that he will revolutionise the company quickly enough.

I don't know about kronies but Kirby is the Chairman and a major Shareholder. His influence will be great notwithstanding the fact that he will almost certainly select candidates, probably oversee/carry out meetings with candidates and present the proposed candidate to the board/shareholders.

I doubt this will be left to HR...

 loki old fart wrote:

VanHallan wrote:
Yeah, but what kind of an idiot would purchase a GW franchise?? I wouldn't.

People who have previously run a successful GW shop, before the rot set in.

Why would they want to limit themselves to just GW though? It might make sense given enough perks, but the mono-brand store is less practical now than it used to be and I'd hope any business savvy manager would set up a generic FLGS and sell as broad a range of stuff as possible.

I think they could get away with a GW store-in-store setup; rent some space from a larger hobby chain (or dare I say it, Toys R Us) and set up a small GW counter. Apple do it in PC World for instance. It gets them some increased exposure, and presumably still allows them to run without any staff (as they can use the big stores sale points). What they desperately need now is cost reductions and exposure.

 notprop wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:

 Ketara wrote:
GW still has a few years window to turn all this around. They have the facilities, the lack of debt, the in-house production expertise, and the brand. The question, is whether or not they are able to do so. With Kirby relegated to being Chairman, he will doubtless be attempting to to control whoever is appointed to replace him as CEO. This is not an uncommon thing to occur in the world of business. The question will be whether or not his replacement will wrest control away from Kirby, and if that replacement will have different ideas on how to run the company.

Yes, I agree with this too. The big danger is that Kirby and his kronies will have a massive influence in appointing and "guiding" the new CEO, so I don't have a lot of hope that he will revolutionise the company quickly enough.

I don't know about kronies but Kirby is the Chairman and a major Shareholder. His influence will be great notwithstanding the fact that he will almost certainly select candidates, probably oversee/carry out meetings with candidates and present the proposed candidate to the board/shareholders.

I doubt this will be left to HR...

One of the complaints about GW's corporate governance that most of the board have been there for a long time, longer than recommended by UK guidelines, and probably have got institutionalised. Naturally Kirby says this is Great News! Hence the "kronies" fear.

He didn't seem positive he'd remain chairman. If he loses that too there might actually be a little hope.

On top of the gaming side of things which everyone has mentioned above, I always wondered why GW™ never did more on the hobby accessories side of things. They really dropped the ball on things like airbrushing and high quality gaming mats.

Instead of being able to get a quality airbrush (which can be exceedingly inexpensive as our friendly Chinese producers have confirmed) and compressor they gave us the Citadel™ Spray™ Gun™ for £20, which uses compressed air from Citadel™ Spray™ Gun™ Propellant™ for only £6. I really can't imagine they make that much money on those pieces of gak. Compare that with the airbrush and airbrush accessory market that is booming right now.

And don't even get me started on those ridiculous Citadel™ Realm™ of™ Battle™ boards. Available at the low low price of £175-£200. Why wouldn't they just come out with a bunch of £30-£50 gaming mats in a variety of styles? I imagine that gaming mats would have been marketable to much wider portion of their custys. Something that would have allowed people to play the game pretty much anywhere, and when finished gaming takes up virtually no space, so the kitchen table can become the kitchen table again.

As much as I enjoy their products, I have to say a troop of dim-witted monkeys could have done a better job managing the company these past years. What a fething fiasco.

There are still successful Independent stores that sell only GW products, least here in Sheffield UK.
I don't buy there though as they sell at full retail =P. Down t'other way there's one with less stock, but always 20% off retail.

As for money, I have friends spending 300-500 dollars on Zombicide KS's. So. Yeah. Maybe it's not so much of a issue for us. Maybe GW should do KS for new products - People be crazy when it comes to 'exclusives' and discount as not yet released with rules. KS is a pretty clear indicator that models sell well without rules tbh.

 Ferrum_Sanguinis wrote:
Was one bad selling product (Dreadfleet) really enough to scare GW into never overproducing an item again to the point of under-producing everything? Did they really lose that much money with Dreadfleet?

Well, I think GW is well aware what the customers want.
For this, they only need to statistically evaluate the amounts of products sold.
I cannot imagine that they don't do this.

So more Space marines then.

Youwanityougotit!

 Crimson wrote:

Backfire wrote:
And one-man stores are too small to maintain active playing community by themselves (after all, you need tables to play on).

Which is why the one-man stores are massively stupid idea. The big benefit of having their own chain of stores is providing gaming space and building the player community focused exclusively on GW's games. And of course people walking in the store and seeing the games actually being played is great advertisement. But if you cannot do that, then there's little reason to have this expensive retail empire.

I agree in principle, however in fairness to GW, the larger stores and battle bunkers must have often been running at considerable loss. Basically, they have been like FLGS's without much of the FLGS revenue sources (comics, trading cards etc). Advantage of one-man stores is that they can be located on much more visible places, a large store with large gaming space cannot, lest its rent becomes astronomical. Whether maintaining a small store around essentially as an oversized billboard is worth it, is another question. Personally I'm bit iffy on that. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

As for the other things...

-Dreadfleet. Sad thing in it was that people had been bemoaning why GW puts so much attention on Space marines. As soon as Dreadfleet came out, people complained why GW had wasted resources in designing something that wasn't Space Marines. Now, the game itself had some obvious and not-so-obvious failures (most notable perhaps was that the game's visual design was meant to please everyone, resulting to visual mish-mash that pleased no-one), without which it surely would have been better received. Unfortunately, it's failure probably convinced GW that releasing anything outside main ranges was not worth it. It was mentioned, by the way, that last edition of Blood Bowl was bit of similar story. It was much wished about, but when it came out, it sold poorly: existing 40k and WHFB players weren't interested and Blood Bowl veterans already had the teams.

-Kirby casually dismissing Tolkien license. I say good that at least there he is honest. Why lie about how "valuable" and "prestigious" the license is when it obviously has been tanking for years? It's time to put down that good old dog. The material is exhausted, there isn't going to be new movies around for new licensing possibilities. Well there is Silmarillion, but nobody wants to see Peter Jackson's take on Silmarillion.
(Silmarillion would actually provide tons of material for a tabletop game, however).

-Gateway games. I don't recall from my last GW store visit, but I understand that FFG Warhammer licensed games are not carried there? If not, it is criminally stupid. Such an arrangement could only benefit everyone involved.

-Computer games. I think many people are overestimating the licensing opportunies. It's not like computer gaming firms are lining up in Nottingham to beg for Warhammer licenses. The main reason why there aren't more Warhammer themed video games is likely very simple: the companies don't have interest.

-Expenses. This years' financial report had two signifant expenses - the website and severance payouts - which totalled over £8 million. Now, likely every financial year has also some "exceptional" items (more severances, legal costs etc), however probably not as big as this year. It won't help sales, but the profit margin should remain healthy for some time if they run a tight ship otherwise.

-'Messias' titles. As I pointed in other thread, the GW is not about to run out of potential releases which could be big sellers. Most notably, sales of Stormclaw and new Dark Vengeance come to next financial report, then there's potentially Sisters of Battle, new WHFB edition and so on. Of course, they could mess things up royally, but the idea that they're exhausted the potential is silly.

-Release schedule. Whereas it could be seen as cynical cash grab (probably because it is), it must be pointed out that in the days of yore, slow codex update schedule was the biggest frequent complaint about GW. Imagine where we would be without it: Tau would be the newest codex, no Eldar, SM, IG, Orks on sight.

More big plastic kits could help prop up sales in the short term, if they'd only bite the bullet and do plastic Thunderhawks and Titans, FW be damned their parent needs the cash now.

I keep seeing a comparison between the £150 million refit of the Marks and Spencer website and the £4 million refit of the GW online store, the two are not directly comparable as they are completely different orders of magnitude of organisational change.

MS involved moving supplier for a website having nearly 15 million annual visitors, setting up internal teams of over 50 people, building new relationships with new suppliers, deploying custom hardware (like giant iPhones) and new processes to their thousands of stores, upgrading warehouse and backend systems, creation of new mobile and tablet apps, implementation of a "big data" CR system to offer custom discounts, etc. etc. over a 2 year period.

GW burnt through £4 million in six months implementing a simple, and frankly ugly webstore based on an off the shelf commerce solution (ATG) that has plugged into existing systems for a far smaller product range and a fraction of the user base.

Its like trying to compare Chapter House's costs to market for a model against GW's costs, interesting, but it doesn't really tell you a lot.

I am not sure that the big kits appeal to a large enough number of people.

After all the Knight Titan, though well received, obviously did not save the sales figures this year, even though they can ally with any Imperial army or be an army by themselves.

Looky Likey wrote:

MS involved moving supplier for a website having nearly 15 million annual visitors, setting up internal teams of over 50 people, building new relationships with new suppliers, deploying custom hardware (like giant iPhones) and new processes to their thousands of stores, upgrading warehouse and backend systems, creation of new mobile and tablet apps, implementation of a "big data" CR system to offer custom discounts, etc. etc. over a 2 year period.

GW burnt through £4 million in six months implementing a simple, and frankly ugly webstore based on an off the shelf commerce solution (ATG) that has plugged into existing systems for a far smaller product range and a fraction of the user base.

Yes. That's why GW webstore costed 4 million instead of 150 million. The point is that corporate webstores do run in multi-million price tags. The price GW paid is not exceptional. Though, I hoped they had picked another visual: the present one is boring and sterile. I guess that the graphic designer sold it to them as "trendy, sleek and modern". Yawn.

Re: big plastic kits, I gather the problem is they're very expensive to design. I don't know if it's comparable, but here's quote from Forge World:
"Warlord Titan? Big kits are a balance of cost in time vs how much they’ll sell realistically. For instance the Manta took one and a half years for Will Hayes to produce, during which time he wasn’t getting much else done. Could he have made fifteen other kits that would have sold more in that time? That’s the numbers they run and why big kits are rarer. They do want to make a Warlord though."

 notprop wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:

 Ketara wrote:
GW still has a few years window to turn all this around. They have the facilities, the lack of debt, the in-house production expertise, and the brand. The question, is whether or not they are able to do so. With Kirby relegated to being Chairman, he will doubtless be attempting to to control whoever is appointed to replace him as CEO. This is not an uncommon thing to occur in the world of business. The question will be whether or not his replacement will wrest control away from Kirby, and if that replacement will have different ideas on how to run the company.

Yes, I agree with this too. The big danger is that Kirby and his kronies will have a massive influence in appointing and "guiding" the new CEO, so I don't have a lot of hope that he will revolutionise the company quickly enough.

I don't know about kronies but Kirby is the Chairman and a major Shareholder. His influence will be great notwithstanding the fact that he will almost certainly select candidates, probably oversee/carry out meetings with candidates and present the proposed candidate to the board/shareholders.

I doubt this will be left to HR...

I don't have vastly high hopes in this regard either. But then again, it wouldn't be the first time a Chairman appointed a CEO they think they can control who says all the right things before landing the job, and then swiftly does a 180 degree turn once they're suitably ensconced. I think people who are of the CEO type/calibre often have a desire to do things 'their' way, as opposed to dancing like a puppet according to somebody else's intentions.

Backfire wrote:

Yes. That's why GW webstore costed 4 million instead of 150 million. The point is that corporate webstores do run in multi-million price tags. The price GW paid is not exceptional. Though, I hoped they had picked another visual: the present one is boring and sterile. I guess that the graphic designer sold it to them as "trendy, sleek and modern". Yawn.

Re: big plastic kits, I gather the problem is they're very expensive to design. I don't know if it's comparable, but here's quote from Forge World:
"Warlord Titan? Big kits are a balance of cost in time vs how much they’ll sell realistically. For instance the Manta took one and a half years for Will Hayes to produce, during which time he wasn’t getting much else done. Could he have made fifteen other kits that would have sold more in that time? That’s the numbers they run and why big kits are rarer. They do want to make a Warlord though."

I'm in the field myself and have done nothing but large bluechip corp sites for the last twelve years, I have done far more with the same budget as GW. Current project is a bit more expensive, 12 month change window, rewrite of 10,000s of pages of content, many user facing apps all connecting to backend systems that need rewriting, a complete new style guide writing, etc. for a household name. I'd suggest my current project is several orders of magnitude more complex than GWs yet our burn rate per month is considerably less, GW spent over £600k a month on a website development that has no content outside the items for sale.

The actual design looks like they had a friend of a friend do it rather than employ an agency based on portfolio, this is still common even in big firms and would fit GW's MO when it comes to hiring people.

The Warlord and the Manta are many times bigger than the Thunderhawk or Warhound, plus both already have existing resin kits to base off if needed. I agree that the Knight can't have been a giant seller, but I know when it launched it sold very well. It is the ongoing sales of that kit that have let the side down, if GW or FW had produced upgrade kits then I think it might have been different, they have hamstrung themselves by not offering more options in the book. Chapterhouse fiasco strikes again.

Backfire wrote:
The price GW paid is not exceptional.

Having been involved in a website installation at a £105m turnover UK multi-channel high street retailer with a HO in London, what GW paid is substantially more than it should have done for a company of it's size and complexity. And that was a website that has forums and articles and other social stuff on top of the transactional piece (and the transactional piece is more complicated than GW's because of sales and deals).

Something that seems interesting to me from the Chairman's gibbering is the Non Executive Director who came in last year. Everyone saw that she had a background in acquisitions and mergers, and Dakka went ballistic (Hasbro are coming! Hasbro will save us! They are The One True Way and will destroy Kirby and Save The Hobby! Hasbrohasbrohasbrohasbro).

Well, it turns out that it was nothing of the sort. They haven't even read her CV. This in itself is baffling, but does put paid to some of the "they're preparing for a takeover" rumours.

I take the "we don't read CVs" with a pinch of salt.

You don't run a £130 Million (well, a bit less now) international business by appointing senior managers whose CVs, experience and skills you know absolutely nothing about.

At the coal face level I think it is more likely to be true. Most people find it much easier to work on things they are enthusiastic about, and the amount of skills required is a lot less and can be taught relatively quickly.

Graphite wrote:
Something that seems interesting to me from the Chairman's gibbering is the Non Executive Director who came in last year. Everyone saw that she had a background in acquisitions and mergers, and Dakka went ballistic (Hasbro are coming! Hasbro will save us! They are The One True Way and will destroy Kirby and Save The Hobby! Hasbrohasbrohasbrohasbro).

Well, it turns out that it was nothing of the sort. They haven't even read her CV. This in itself is baffling, but does put paid to some of the "they're preparing for a takeover" rumours.

Or they wanted to hide the fact that they're desperately hoping to be bought out before it all comes crashing down so saying "we didn't even look at the resume of the NXO we hired" seemed like a better option.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I take the "we don't read CVs" with a pinch of salt.

You don't run a £130 Million (well, a bit less now) international business by appointing senior managers whose CVs, experience and skills you know absolutely nothing about.

At the coal face level I think it is more likely to be true. Most people find it much easier to work on things they are enthusiastic about, and the amount of skills required is a lot less and can be taught relatively quickly.

No. Attitute over skill. It may hold for the red shirts.

But I guess its not enough at the top management level.

 Baragash wrote:

Backfire wrote:
The price GW paid is not exceptional.

Having been involved in a website installation at a £105m turnover UK multi-channel high street retailer with a HO in London, what GW paid is substantially more than it should have done for a company of it's size and complexity. And that was a website that has forums and articles and other social stuff on top of the transactional piece (and the transactional piece is more complicated than GW's because of sales and deals).

How does that fit with the timescales though? Shorter programme = more cost?

I know construction rather than computers but you can throw bodies at a job to reduce the time at a increased cost. I would assume that this could be the case if the original site had allot of data to process over to a new one?

Looky Likey wrote:

Backfire wrote:

Yes. That's why GW webstore costed 4 million instead of 150 million. The point is that corporate webstores do run in multi-million price tags. The price GW paid is not exceptional. Though, I hoped they had picked another visual: the present one is boring and sterile. I guess that the graphic designer sold it to them as "trendy, sleek and modern". Yawn.

Re: big plastic kits, I gather the problem is they're very expensive to design. I don't know if it's comparable, but here's quote from Forge World:
"Warlord Titan? Big kits are a balance of cost in time vs how much they’ll sell realistically. For instance the Manta took one and a half years for Will Hayes to produce, during which time he wasn’t getting much else done. Could he have made fifteen other kits that would have sold more in that time? That’s the numbers they run and why big kits are rarer. They do want to make a Warlord though."

I'm in the field myself and have done nothing but large bluechip corp sites for the last twelve years, I have done far more with the same budget as GW. Current project is a bit more expensive, 12 month change window, rewrite of 10,000s of pages of content, many user facing apps all connecting to backend systems that need rewriting, a complete new style guide writing, etc. for a household name. I'd suggest my current project is several orders of magnitude more complex than GWs yet our burn rate per month is considerably less, GW spent over £600k a month on a website development that has no content outside the items for sale.

The actual design looks like they had a friend of a friend do it rather than employ an agency based on portfolio, this is still common even in big firms and would fit GW's MO when it comes to hiring people.

The Warlord and the Manta are many times bigger than the Thunderhawk or Warhound, plus both already have existing resin kits to base off if needed. I agree that the Knight can't have been a giant seller, but I know when it launched it sold very well. It is the ongoing sales of that kit that have let the side down, if GW or FW had produced upgrade kits then I think it might have been different, they have hamstrung themselves by not offering more options in the book. Chapterhouse fiasco strikes again.

Already said this but it was an Oracle Professional Services job, using one of Oracle's high end platforms.

Kirby just likes to shoot the gak a bit in his preambles.

A management that appointed senior staff without checking their credentials would lay itself open to a charge of misfeasance.

Backfire wrote:
Advantage of one-man stores is that they can be located on much more visible places, a large store with large gaming space cannot, lest its rent becomes astronomical. Whether maintaining a small store around essentially as an oversized billboard is worth it, is another question. Personally I'm bit iffy on that. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Beyond clusters of shopping centre kiosks (mobile phone accessories, cupcakes and nail bars), I genuinely can't think of any stores that are single staff. Some newsagents appear to be single staffed but there's usually someone else floating around too. There must be reasons that the single staff store isn't more common. Yes it lets them set up more stores in smaller locations, but by the way the rest of the corporate world shuns it is must be completely impractical. Having a store closed 2 days a week for time off, or for annual leave, or having to close the store for lunch and bathroom breaks is madness.

My mrs works in a store smaller than most GW's, selling jewelry, and there are seven staff. Manager, assistant manager, supervisor, 3 full-time and 2 part-time, with at least 3 in at any point (2 on floor + another to cover breaks). They've probably got a higher turnover than a GW store, but sell items for less and spend at least as much time per-customer as a GW would. This store is maybe 200ft away from the GW store I used to visit all the time in the 90's, which had 3+ staff and was always packed (and shut down at least 10 years ago, I was past it multiple times a week).

-Dreadfleet. Sad thing in it was that people had been bemoaning why GW puts so much attention on Space marines. As soon as Dreadfleet came out, people complained why GW had wasted resources in designing something that wasn't Space Marines. Now, the game itself had some obvious and not-so-obvious failures (most notable perhaps was that the game's visual design was meant to please everyone, resulting to visual mish-mash that pleased no-one), without which it surely would have been better received. Unfortunately, it's failure probably convinced GW that releasing anything outside main ranges was not worth it. It was mentioned, by the way, that last edition of Blood Bowl was bit of similar story. It was much wished about, but when it came out, it sold poorly: existing 40k and WHFB players weren't interested and Blood Bowl veterans already had the teams.

Dreadfleet tanked because it had 2 critical flaws: As a game, it sucked. There was no strategic involvement, everything was too random, you felt you had no control over it and the games took hours. It was also completely unsupported; no expansions or blisters or anything. It held it's price until people started playing it, now I can buy it unopened for half or RRP. It could have been brilliant, but it seemed completely phoned in. Wasted opportunity.

-Kirby casually dismissing Tolkien license. I say good that at least there he is honest. Why lie about how "valuable" and "prestigious" the license is when it obviously has been tanking for years? It's time to put down that good old dog. The material is exhausted, there isn't going to be new movies around for new licensing possibilities. Well there is Silmarillion, but nobody wants to see Peter Jackson's take on Silmarillion.
(Silmarillion would actually provide tons of material for a tabletop game, however).

Do you mean GW's take on the license has been tanking? From what I can tell LOTR is as big as it ever was, and GW managed to turn it from a cheaper 3rd system to an unused relic by pricing the hell out of it .

-Gateway games. I don't recall from my last GW store visit, but I understand that FFG Warhammer licensed games are not carried there? If not, it is criminally stupid. Such an arrangement could only benefit everyone involved.

They don't. I've no idea why not but it really is stupid.

-Release schedule. Whereas it could be seen as cynical cash grab (probably because it is), it must be pointed out that in the days of yore, slow codex update schedule was the biggest frequent complaint about GW. Imagine where we would be without it: Tau would be the newest codex, no Eldar, SM, IG, Orks on sight.

I don't think I've seen anyone really complain about the release cycle. The cash grab was what seems to be releasing 7th Edition months early to drop it into the 2013-2014 annual report.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 notprop wrote:

 Baragash wrote:

Backfire wrote:
The price GW paid is not exceptional.

Having been involved in a website installation at a £105m turnover UK multi-channel high street retailer with a HO in London, what GW paid is substantially more than it should have done for a company of it's size and complexity. And that was a website that has forums and articles and other social stuff on top of the transactional piece (and the transactional piece is more complicated than GW's because of sales and deals).

How does that fit with the timescales though? Shorter programme = more cost?

I know construction rather than computers but you can throw bodies at a job to reduce the time at a increased cost. I would assume that this could be the case if the original site had allot of data to process over to a new one?

It'll take a similar number of man-months, just with more men, to a point. So if you can throw more people at it, the total cost remains more or less the same (with an increase in management). In this case, it was probably something that only took 6 months anyway, so they won't have paid to rush it along; they won't have been paying for double-shifts or overtime or fancier plant to speed up the work.

rich1231 wrote:
Already said this but it was an Oracle Professional Services job, using one of Oracle's high end platforms.

Then they were robbed, Oracle's eCommerce platform was based on the ATG product GW were using before, not the most complex of upgrades, and if I remember correctly they didn't transfer across the old accounts or orders for either end customers or trade accounts, making it even simpler. A quick look on linkedin and the inhouse web dev team seems to be five people + team lead, thats some expensive contractors/supplier as the internal team isn't big or likely to be well paid based on GW's IT adverts I've looked at.

notprop wrote:How does that fit with the timescales though? Shorter programme = more cost?

I know construction rather than computers but you can throw bodies at a job to reduce the time at a increased cost. I would assume that this could be the case if the original site had allot of data to process over to a new one?

Depending on the scope you can reduce timescales by adding more teams although the integration phase at the end is more work as is the management. However throwing more bodies at simpler projects is often counter productive as only so many people can work at one piece of functionality at a time. Imagine if your customer said that your estimate to build a wall took too long and that you had say two people working on it. Doubling that to four might have a short term boost but wouldn't they get in each others way after a short period? Would they work to the same standard? Would all the bits of the wall match up?

As I've mentioned above if I remember correctly there was no data migration outside of loading the products, everybody needed new accounts. Loading the products is a simple (ish) job as you can freeze what changes so it can be done ahead of time. Migrating user accounts needs an outage (store would be down) and is often best done at the point of switch over, much harder.

Why do I always have to leap to the defence of Dreadfleet? Why

It was great to play, great to paint, and great to make huge profits from

I gave my nephew a spare copy, and he loved it. Ok, he's only ten years old, but that a pivotal moment in his life, and the gateway to the hobby we all know and love.

I'm getting OT here, but Australians only have themselves to blame regarding the GW situation down under.

Is it Kirby's fault that the Australian economy is booming, exports are up, and the average wage is high. GW changed their pricing policy to cash in on Australian wealth.

Oz, if you want to point the finger, blame your own successful economic policy these last 20 years. Think of the children