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 Yonan wrote:
He didn't seem positive he'd remain chairman.

Sounded rather like fake humility to me. The 'Oh, if you'll have me!' that actually means 'Yeah, we all know that I'm the guy!'

Looky Likey wrote:

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.

You could do the migration by freezing account edits before the switch, and with everything scripted it could be done in a couple of hours, especially if you transfer everything over at one point and then just migrate any modifications made after the first transfer.

Though they still had 2 days of downtime during the switchover?

 wuestenfux wrote:

 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.

No, those numbers show what your existing customers choose from your offering.

They do not tell you what those customers would also buy, given the chance, or what they would rather buy, or why they bought what they did, or what it would take for customers in your market who are other companies' customers to buy from you instead, etc., etc.

The sales numbers are just the tip of an iceberg, but Kirby thinks he can run GW like a company producing necessary goods - we make stuff people need, and people will buy it. What he fails to understand is that even if gamers were the freakish addicts he thinks they are, they could always get their fix from the dealer at the next street corner if they want.

To be honest, I think "by gamers for gamers" is a recipe for financial disaster, but not knowing your market AT ALL and glorying (I just had to borrow that) in your ignorance is incompetence of the highest order.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
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

Try again.

Australian prices are following the same pricing strategy they did in the early 90s, when Australia's economy sucked hard.

You know, at least try to know what you're trying to act knowledgeable about.

Account information would have been a few hours work max.
Password migration on the other hand wont be and will likely be a massive pain.

Downtime was likely to have been a DNS contingency.

Ok I could be wrong here, but I think @Do_I_Not_Like_That was taking the rise out of GW not Oz... even if his economic understanding Oz maybe be off

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.

I don't know about overseas, but my understanding is that this is exactly the opposite of what has been happening here in Oz. The bigger stores were in the high profile shop spaces in the big malls, and they've been downsizing into smaller stores in more out-of-the-way locations.

So they lose on both fronts... No more gaming space to entice a regular clientele, and greatly reduced walk-ins.

-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

I don't recall seeing anyone complain that Dreadfleet wasn't a Space Marine release. The 3 main complaints I saw about Dreadfleet when it was released were -
- While it was pretty, the game wasn't actually very good

- It was a new WHFB naval game that flew in the face of established fluff instead of being a re-release of Man'o'War
and
- It wasn't Blood Bowl, as the rumour-mill had been asserting strongly that it would be for more than 6 months by that point.

After the huge success of Space Hulk, people were clamouring for a similar treatment to be given to any of the other Specialist titles, although Blood Bowl's continuing success despite being out of print for a decade seemed to focus more attention on it specifically... And instead, GW gave us a new game that nobody wanted.

The silly thing is that without the Citadel Exclusive Veil of Secrecy shortening the time from big reveal to actual launch, people might have had fewer issues with it. For many, it was the lack of communication from GW despite the active rumour-mill that let them get so excited about the possibilities, and as a result were so let down by getting something different from what they expected.

-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.

Sure. Except that they decided to couple finally increasing the release schedule with doubling the price of the books, and throwing out an endless stream of (pay-to-access) DLC.

One step forwards, two steps back.

 insaniak wrote:

 Yonan wrote:
He didn't seem positive he'd remain chairman.

Sounded rather like fake humility to me. The 'Oh, if you'll have me!' that actually means 'Yeah, we all know that I'm the guy!'

Could very well be right, was pretty hard to tell what the intent was from a lot of that preamble. Days of entertainment value though!

rich1231 wrote:
Account information would have been a few hours work max.
Password migration on the other hand wont be and will likely be a massive pain.

Downtime was likely to have been a DNS contingency.

Password migration could have been avoided, set it to something random and sent everyone out an email with a link to reset it.

 insaniak wrote:

 Yonan wrote:
He didn't seem positive he'd remain chairman.

Sounded rather like fake humility to me. The 'Oh, if you'll have me!' that actually means 'Yeah, we all know that I'm the guy!'

Given that he owns a substantial number of shares and has been with the company for 20 years (?) in normal circumstances Kirby would be an excellent choice for a non-executive chairman of the board.

 Wolfstan wrote:
Ok I could be wrong here, but I think @Do_I_Not_Like_That was taking the rise out of GW not Oz... even if his economic understanding Oz maybe be off

You're not wrong. Just some harmless banter with the Australians and GW. On the other hand, I do sympathise with them and I'll say one thing about Australian customers (when I had my ebay shop) I never had a single problem with them.

Anyway, back OT. What we're witnessing is the slow, managed decline of GW. When, (and it is a question of when, not if) GW eventually keels over, there will be a short term shock, but as always, somebody else will fill the void, and we can all live happily ever after. It's been a couple of years since I switched from GW to FOW. I'm still here, still breathing, still living day-to-day no problem.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 -Loki- wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
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

Try again.

Australian prices are following the same pricing strategy they did in the early 90s, when Australia's economy sucked hard.

You know, at least try to know what you're trying to act knowledgeable about.

No offence intended.

Backfire wrote:
-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.

Please don't conflate things that have nothing to do with one another. Dread Fleet failed on its own merits (or lack thereof), not because it wasn't Space Marines. A company that had any sense of what it's customers want (rather than assuming the customers will buy whatever the company makes) would have found out what people wanted rather than just blindly throwing a box at everyone and expecting us to lap it up.

 insaniak wrote:
I don't know about overseas, but my understanding is that this is exactly the opposite of what has been happening here in Oz. The bigger stores were in the high profile shop spaces in the big malls, and they've been downsizing into smaller stores in more out-of-the-way locations.

Yup. Hornsby store? In the main Westfield. Not in a premium location (that would be EB's location right at the entrance to the foodcourt), but it was in the main drag. It's now gone, they didn't open a new one. Chatswood, probably the most successful GW, had a prime position. Now it's a 1-man store in a part of Chatswood where all the other store signs are in Korean. NorSyd? Gone. Parra? We couldn't find it last time we were there, only the empty shell of where it used to be. I know the City store is still around, but the Good Games nearby is doing better.

Herzlos wrote:


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.

About 10 years ago I did summer work at a chain off-licence, and that was one-man stores (though there was a regional relief staffer to cover the one day off per week). That chain was Unwins, who died off about a year later.

I think the core problem with Kirby is he's mired in the view that GW is a miniatures company. While this is no shocking revelation about GW's view of the market, I think it is the crux of the problem. I would wager that Kirby views the actual games as something that happens off to the side and of interest to only a few hardcore nerds, much like it would have seemed back in the late 80s when there weren't fully fleshed-out ranges for anything. The models are the only things that matter in this world view.

It's true to an extent that a cool model will move units regardless of rules, but a solid rule set with good models and a rich background is the actual Holy Trinity of doing well in this business. GW has the latter two, but seems to be on a sharp decline on the first. Dreadfleet, as much as it's been brought up, is a perfect example. The models in Dreadfleet are actually quite good (ignoring the problem that they can't be used for much else). The fluff is a bit ridiculous the more you think about it, but far from the dumbest thing in the history of the IP. The rules, however, have been oft-described as a train-wreck, and by actual games designers as well as Internet pundits. Ergo, the game goes on to become one of their biggest albatrosses. Had the game been actual fun, I doubt the silly premise would have been an issue. The lack of fun and disappointment that it wasn't Blood Bowl pretty much sank that ship as it left the slip.

I don't think Kirby gets that wargaming IS a market of its own, and that the games drive sales far more than anything else. To gloss over writing good rules in the hope that random strangers will be able to fix their omissions and oversights is, IMO, the rotten core of the GW empire. If the rules are crap, people won't play them. If people don't play them, they don't need the models. If they don't need the models, they won't buy them in the main. It's a pretty obvious circle, but it seems he has a willful blind spot that letting model sales drive rules development is a losing equation.

 insaniak wrote:

Backfire wrote:

-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

I don't recall seeing anyone complain that Dreadfleet wasn't a Space Marine release.

I do. Remember, it came out during an era when many 40k ranges were still missing key models (most notably Tyranids and Space Wolves). People were bitching that GW had "wasted design resources for pointless naval game" instead of providing missing kits for Thunderwolves etc.

On the other hand, finding people (particularly WHFB players) who complain about too much attention given to Space marines, is not hard.

 insaniak wrote:

- It was a new WHFB naval game that flew in the face of established fluff instead of being a re-release of Man'o'War
and
- It wasn't Blood Bowl, as the rumour-mill had been asserting strongly that it would be for more than 6 months by that point.

After the huge success of Space Hulk, people were clamouring for a similar treatment to be given to any of the other Specialist titles, although Blood Bowl's continuing success despite being out of print for a decade seemed to focus more attention on it specifically... And instead, GW gave us a new game that nobody wanted.

See, here it comes again. GW was criticized because they dared to bring out something new instead of rehashing the old. God forbid.

Now, the game itself might have had gameplay issues (I dunno as I never played it) but the enthusiasm was markedly low even before (mixed) reviews came out. Personally, I was not interested because the game was visual mess. If it had featured two even semi-coherent fleets, I might have.

Abandoning Blood Bowl seems quite silly given that it was perhaps their third most popular game, and likely in top 10 most popular tabletop miniatures games in the world! However, the ex-GW employee said a year or two ago that last Blood Bowl edition did not sell well: all the players were estabilished veterans who already had the teams, and the game was not bringing in much new players.

 Krinsath wrote:
I think the core problem with Kirby is he's mired in the view that GW is a miniatures company. While this is no shocking revelation about GW's view of the market, I think it is the crux of the problem. I would wager that Kirby views the actual games as something that happens off to the side and of interest to only a few hardcore nerds, much like it would have seemed back in the late 80s when there weren't fully fleshed-out ranges for anything. The models are the only things that matter in this world view.

It's true to an extent that a cool model will move units regardless of rules, but a solid rule set with good models and a rich background is the actual Holy Trinity of doing well in this business. GW has the latter two, but seems to be on a sharp decline on the first. Dreadfleet, as much as it's been brought up, is a perfect example. The models in Dreadfleet are actually quite good (ignoring the problem that they can't be used for much else). The fluff is a bit ridiculous the more you think about it, but far from the dumbest thing in the history of the IP. The rules, however, have been oft-described as a train-wreck, and by actual games designers as well as Internet pundits. Ergo, the game goes on to become one of their biggest albatrosses. Had the game been actual fun, I doubt the silly premise would have been an issue. The lack of fun and disappointment that it wasn't Blood Bowl pretty much sank that ship as it left the slip.

I don't think Kirby gets that wargaming IS a market of its own, and that the games drive sales far more than anything else. To gloss over writing good rules in the hope that random strangers will be able to fix their omissions and oversights is, IMO, the rotten core of the GW empire. If the rules are crap, people won't play them. If people don't play them, they don't need the models. If they don't need the models, they won't buy them in the main. It's a pretty obvious circle, but it seems he has a willful blind spot that letting model sales drive rules development is a losing equation.

I apologise for going OT, and I'm not having a go at you, but there seems to be two realities: the dakka reality and the real world reality. For as long as anybody has discussed Dreadfleet on dakka, the consensus has always been the same: rubbish game that didn't sell well.

Now, I can only offer anecdotal evidence and I'm not bragging or boasting, but every copy of Dreadfleet I put up for sale on ebay sold within 2-3 days. The demand was there, the public wanted it. I was able to shift 11 copies over a two month period. I remember at the time how hard it was to buy more copies to sell on and I was conscious not to have too many copies up for sale, which would have saturated the market.

Everybody's entitled to their view on game design and rules mechanics, but the dakka view that it didn't sell well does not tally up with my own experience.

RE: Dreadfleet, didn't they also destroy unsold copies rather than put them on sale, as not to give the impression that one could just wait a few months and buy a kit at a discount? If that rumor is true, then it means GW would rather sell 0 at full price rather than sell anything at a reduced price, even if they were to still get profit from that transaction. That seems insanely stupid; why not get some profit rather than nothing?

To me the most disturbing thing is still that line about not doing research; we all knew it but to actually read it from the CEO/Chairman of the company? I can't imagine how any shareholder, company or individual, would want to keep any decent amount of money in a company that admits to not knowing who they are targeting or what their customers actually want, and worse makes it sound like that's a good thing.

This is Business 101 stuff, how can you sell anything without knowing who you are selling to?

Backfire wrote:
See, here it comes again. GW was criticized because they dared to bring out something new instead of rehashing the old. God forbid.

No, you completely missed the point.

GW wasn't criticised because they dared to bring out something new. They were criticised because they brought out something that wasn't very good, and because thanks to their insane policy of not talking about what they are working on they allowed expectations to build up over what people thought the release would be, to the extent that anything different that they released was going to annoy people.

A bit of interaction with their fanbase when the rumours started (it wouldn't have needed to be detailed - Hey, you've heard the rumours, well, yes, we're working on a boxed game. It's something new involving ships, and nothing to do with Blood Bowl, Man'o'War, Warhammer Quest, or any of our previous games - Stay tuned for some sneaky reveals over the coming months!) would have gone a long way towards controlling those expectations and building a more receptive atmosphere for the game's release.

However, the ex-GW employee said a year or two ago that last Blood Bowl edition did not sell well: all the players were estabilished veterans who already had the teams, and the game was not bringing in much new players.

When Blood Bowl was last released, the game had sunk into relative obscurity, and the re-release wasn't anything new, just a reprint. In the last 5 years or so, there has been a fairly massive resurgence, driven largely by the fact that a whole bunch of other companies have sprung up making compatible miniatures.

In that environment, a redone boxed set with new miniatures of a similar standard to 3rd Ed Space Hulk would have done well. Certainly better than Dreadfleet.

But that's something that GW could only be expected to know if they actually ever looked out the window of their sparkly tower. Instead, they're busy patting themselves on the back about not doing any market research, and as a result have absolutely no idea what is going on with their own games.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
The demand was there, the public wanted it..

And yet copies sat on shelves in GW stores for months until being boxed up and sent back to be destroyed.

I think the pubic wanted it (assuming it was a Man O War game) until the word got out about how bad a game it was; I'm sure plenty sold for the RRP or more, but once the internet reviews started appearing it dropped off quickly. I'm tempted to buy it just for the mat, when it gets to about £20-25, because I'm under no illusions about how much I'd enjoy the game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

Now, I can only offer anecdotal evidence and I'm not bragging or boasting, but every copy of Dreadfleet I put up for sale on ebay sold within 2-3 days. The demand was there, the public wanted it. I was able to shift 11 copies over a two month period. I remember at the time how hard it was to buy more copies to sell on and I was conscious not to have too many copies up for sale, which would have saturated the market.

Everybody's entitled to their view on game design and rules mechanics, but the dakka view that it didn't sell well does not tally up with my own experience.

Out of curiosity, where were you selling them to? I'm assuming the box cost a lot more in Australia.

Herzlos wrote:

-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 .

Anyone can still buy old LOTR miniatures from GW (they're still cheaper than Hobbit minis, or most WHFB minis) and play the game. They just don't want to. The game went derelict long before Hobbit and it's prices (which may not have been entirely GW's fault anyway) so it can't be pinned on that.

In fact, LOTR seems to perfectly conform to wishes people often make from GW mainline games:

-reasonably priced
-no silly cartoony models
-no constant power creep
-fresh ruleset with no legacy junk

Yet it no longer sells. I don't know anyone who has an army or plays the game. What gives?

Backfire wrote:


-no silly cartoony models

The first expansion after the LotR films (Shadow and Flame?) had some terrible models with far more 'heroic' proportions that had gone before (Swan Knights and Elrond's sons). Essentially the Perrys had been taken off the game and replaced with inferior scupltors (I think Gary Morley was one).

Everyone I knew who played it ditched it around that time (there were also some questions raised over whether some of the new profiles broke the lore, with the orc & goblin shamans).

rich1231 wrote:
Account information would have been a few hours work max.
Password migration on the other hand wont be and will likely be a massive pain.

Downtime was likely to have been a DNS contingency.

There was no password or account migration, everyone needed to make a completely new account. They did however keep peoples addresses for the newsletters. I got stuck in anloop when I tried to unsubscribe from their newsletter. I couldnt unsubscribe because I didn't have an account to unsubscribe with. So I had to make an account to unsubscribe, which wouldn't unsubscribe me because it had thought my new account wasn't subscribed to the newsletter.

I gave up eventually and just marked the newsletters as spam.

Backfire wrote:

Herzlos wrote:

-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 .

Anyone can still buy old LOTR miniatures from GW (they're still cheaper than Hobbit minis, or most WHFB minis) and play the game. They just don't want to. The game went derelict long before Hobbit and it's prices (which may not have been entirely GW's fault anyway) so it can't be pinned on that.

In fact, LOTR seems to perfectly conform to wishes people often make from GW mainline games:

-reasonably priced
-no silly cartoony models
-no constant power creep
-fresh ruleset with no legacy junk

Yet it no longer sells. I don't know anyone who has an army or plays the game. What gives?

I don't understand it either; it was hugely popular (as in GW struggled to keep up with customers) and is regarded as the best GW ruleset. Was it maybe the new source book every film, and the starters with incomplete stats so you needed both the starter and the £50 rule book in order to play?

It was when the Ronan Outriders were released that killed the game mostly for me.

It was an incredibly well balanced game up until that point, then everyone started having armies of outriders, as heroes don't count towards the 33% bow limit.

 Riquende wrote:

Everyone I knew who played it ditched it around that time (there were also some questions raised over whether some of the new profiles broke the lore, with the orc & goblin shamans).

OT but: IIRC Tolkien specified that only Ainur and Elves could do real magic. Younger races could produce magical items if they knew 'the craft'. Morgoth and Sauron could grant magical powers to their underlings (reducing their own powers in the process, so they were sparing with it). So Orc magicians seem like violation of the lore, so were human magicians in MERP etc.

Backfire wrote:

 Riquende wrote:

Everyone I knew who played it ditched it around that time (there were also some questions raised over whether some of the new profiles broke the lore, with the orc & goblin shamans).

OT but: IIRC Tolkien specified that only Ainur and Elves could do real magic. Younger races could produce magical items if they knew 'the craft'. Morgoth and Sauron could grant magical powers to their underlings (reducing their own powers in the process, so they were sparing with it). So Orc magicians seem like violation of the lore, so were human magicians in MERP etc.

Didn't have a dog in the fight then, certainly don't care now, and as I recall both side of the debate had their own views and quotes on "what Tolkien specified".

The point is that, rather than keeping the post-film momentum going, Shadow and Flame immediately fractured the playerbase and was cause for concern over the future of the game rather than general positivity.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
The demand was there, the public wanted it.

You should tell that to our FLGSs then, last time I checked, they all still had copies of that game for sale.

One of them even tried organizing a tournament where the first prize was a brand new copy of Dreadfleet... no one even showed up for that tournament!

 WarOne wrote:
Red headed step children get more love than Fantasy. Fantasy is the evil twin, mutated leper pod person of war games.

What about the third core game ?

 insaniak wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
The demand was there, the public wanted it..

And yet copies sat on shelves in GW stores for months until being boxed up and sent back to be destroyed.

Yes, but you have no idea how many were sold and how many were sent back.

Stock runs out "GW are stupid! They don't make enough"

Stock is left "GW are stupid! No one wants the game"

Apart from the limited number things that sell out fast we have no idea what happens. Thats not to say it didn't sell well or it did, but we just don't know.

 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.

Debt isn't the only thing that can sink a business. Fixed business costs are also as deadly as debt. They are a burden that needs to be covered and frequently can't be re-negotiated (like debt) or put off for a better time (like debt), and most likely will cost much more to shread (aka, exceptional costs), before the savings can be realized. Despite the decline in sales, the recent report has shown GW costs remain close to the same - meaning most of what is left is tied directly to revenue and producing from that revenue.

They are already cutting into the bone - something that became evident to me when we are seeing constant inventory shortages on new releases (wood elves, imperial guard, etc.), extremely limited runs of products (effort to control inventory on the books), and high double-digit prices increases. One has to remember that GW has been putting price increases through by as much as 70% (Scions) to 100% (White Dwarf) and STILL declined. All the price increases have done is mask the massive loss of customers on the gross revenues, but it is showing in the operating profits dropping by 42%.

At this point, any cost cutting is going to effect: 1.) the quality of the product (which is already showing), 2.) their ability to deliver product (which is also already showing), and 3.) their ability to sell the product (which is also beginning to show). Either way, GW has little room to invest in growth and pretty much, as Kirby stated, is focused on surviving.

My reasons for my predictions, cross posted earlier in this thread, are simple. I have seen this curve one too many times before and have noted the likely effects. GW showed a 14% decline in direct sales in H1 and only improved this to an 11% decline in H2 pulling out all the stops in the period.

When your entire company is pretty much betting on one product line and this type of stress is showing, we are most likely going to see an accelerated decline from here. For example, next year showing a 20%-30% decline in revenues (and tipping the company into a net profit loss) and the following year accelerating even faster to as much as a 60%-75% loss in sales. Taking this historical example forward, it put's GW at about the £92m-£104m gross revenue range next year and £23m-£41m range the following. That being said, here is where the big anchor comes from the financials - despite a 10% decline in direct channels (offset by 2% for the indirects), GW's cost of sales barely moved - meaning that their COS is probably tied to fixed costs. So GW needs almost £37m just to sell their product, regardless of the revenue outcome. See how a sudden drop to £40m in sales in 24-months means you are out of business - even without any debt? When you need 30-months to correct for cost reductions, you can see very quickly how this can put them out of business fast (and so can Kirby which is why now is a great time to step down and let some other poor soul CEO take the job and thus, take the blame).

What is absolutely clear from this report is that their strategy is failing miserably. What is clear in the time since the close of this period to now (with the Ork and Space Wolves new models pricing and the uptick in putting LEs out for almost everything) is GW is doubling down on that strategy moving forward - so that strategy will produce even greater results (which is driving customers away in droves) in the near future.

As I said before these financials, when I start seeing price increases of 44% (Stormwolf over Stormtalon), 70% (Scions over Kaskrins) and 100% (White Dwarf) becoming regular policy in any company, it is a sure sign of a company in a lot of trouble to put such desperate pricing measures through and frequently has the opposite effect intended because it drives more customers away to the point where the declining volume cannot be covered even with such massive price increases.