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 tyrannosaurus wrote:
Again this assumption that there is a consensus that 7th is broken and unplayable [often from people who, by their own admission, haven't played it]. I've got a game tomorrow, and it took 30 seconds to organise. "1850 points, Battle Forged, Maelstrom missions?" "Okay". Simple as that. Unbound isn't for everyone, which is why it's optional. PUGs aren't dead unless you insist on imposing your house rules [e.g. no Lords of War, no Malefic powers, only a certain amount of detatchments etc. etc.]. House rules are a bad idea for PUGs, and always have been.

Says imposing house rules is bad. Restricts game to Battle Forged house rule.

The big issue with 7th is the community dispersion it is creating. Everyone has their own way to play it, and major adjustments are something many seem to want to make (though all of them a bit different) to be willing to play.

When one of the strength's of your product was the ubiquity of it and the ability to easily find pick-up games, this is a real issue. You are taking your strength and putting it to the torch.

My view is that 7th will be shown to be a commercial failure, which will lead to further falling sales and an erosion of GW's market position and profitability. That's not a comment on 7th as a game, but rather 7th as a product: bad.

 Reinholt wrote:
The big issue with 7th is the community dispersion it is creating. Everyone has their own way to play it, and major adjustments are something many seem to want to make (though all of them a bit different) to be willing to play.

You had some of this before (Pro/Anti FW, pro/anti special characters even), but not to this degree. Not by a long shot.

The pro/anti battleforge/unbound and the pro/anti Lords of War are more decisive than the pro/anti FW ever was. IMHO.

@Reinholt

I don't know that I agree. At least with the conclusion. While I do see a bit of dispersion in the way people want to play 7th I haven't seen it affecting getting a game in or dividing the community much at all.

Now online that's a different story. Online you'd think that no one could agree on how to play 7th and no games are ever gonna happen. But on a local level I feel like it's the same as it's been since 3rd edition.

I feel like the next report will be the truly telling one. But I'm not an expert by any stretch.

 tyrannosaurus wrote:
Again this assumption that there is a consensus that 7th is broken and unplayable [often from people who, by their own admission, haven't played it]. I've got a game tomorrow, and it took 30 seconds to organise. "1850 points, Battle Forged, Maelstrom missions?" "Okay". Simple as that. Unbound isn't for everyone, which is why it's optional. PUGs aren't dead unless you insist on imposing your house rules [e.g. no Lords of War, no Malefic powers, only a certain amount of detatchments etc. etc.]. House rules are a bad idea for PUGs, and always have been.

The BAO, which just finished, used 7th, and allowed Lords of War [albeit a restricted choice] based upon a poll that suggested this is what the attendees wanted. LoW armies were few and did poorly, evidence that they haven't broken the game. Yeah they imposed restrictions so it's not a true reflection of 7th, but restrictions are always imposed by tournaments.

If 40k isn't going in the direction that you would like, fair enough, but to suggest these financials are down to an unplayable ruleset is misleading. An unpopular ruleset [for whatever reason], or a ruleset that came in too soon after the previous, maybe [although, personally, I think it's the best one yet].

Here's an extensive thread about why people are leaving. Draw your own conclusions.
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/603134.page

I'm actually of the opinion that 7th is superior to 6th. Sure, it has issues, but so has pretty much every edition, and many of those stem from Codex releases. RAW, 7th IS broken and unplayable, if only for the issues around Psykers and the use of the phrase "Psyker unit" but making the (admittedly rather broad) assumption that two players agree on the RAI in that, and one or two other areas, the heart of the game itself is probably closer to balanced than 6th was. Not perfect, but one good FAQ away from being a lot closer.

 Hulksmash wrote:
@Reinholt

I don't know that I agree. At least with the conclusion. While I do see a bit of dispersion in the way people want to play 7th I haven't seen it affecting getting a game in or dividing the community much at all.

Now online that's a different story. Online you'd think that no one could agree on how to play 7th and no games are ever gonna happen. But on a local level I feel like it's the same as it's been since 3rd edition.

I feel like the next report will be the truly telling one. But I'm not an expert by any stretch.

Now, where have I heard that before?

 Reinholt wrote:
The big issue with 7th is the community dispersion it is creating. Everyone has their own way to play it, and major adjustments are something many seem to want to make (though all of them a bit different) to be willing to play.

When one of the strength's of your product was the ubiquity of it and the ability to easily find pick-up games, this is a real issue. You are taking your strength and putting it to the torch.

My view is that 7th will be shown to be a commercial failure, which will lead to further falling sales and an erosion of GW's market position and profitability. That's not a comment on 7th as a game, but rather 7th as a product: bad.

In my community - large US city - 7th hasn't fractured the community at all. Everyone kind of just transitioned from 6th right into 7th. I have yet to see an unbound game outside of a few youngsters that just field the models they own. We have 2 very active FLGS, and a bustling GW with three tables that are in use 5 days a week, often with a wait.

While I do believe GW has made countless bad decisions, is being mismanaged, snd only has a few years leftsd it currently exists - I dont agree that 7th ed. has splintered the playerbase. At least not where I live and play.

 tyrannosaurus wrote:
Again this assumption that there is a consensus that 7th is broken and unplayable [often from people who, by their own admission, haven't played it]. I've got a game tomorrow, and it took 30 seconds to organise. "1850 points, Battle Forged, Maelstrom missions?" "Okay". Simple as that. Unbound isn't for everyone, which is why it's optional. PUGs aren't dead unless you insist on imposing your house rules [e.g. no Lords of War, no Malefic powers, only a certain amount of detatchments etc. etc.]. House rules are a bad idea for PUGs, and always have been.

The BAO, which just finished, used 7th, and allowed Lords of War [albeit a restricted choice] based upon a poll that suggested this is what the attendees wanted. LoW armies were few and did poorly, evidence that they haven't broken the game. Yeah they imposed restrictions so it's not a true reflection of 7th, but restrictions are always imposed by tournaments.

If 40k isn't going in the direction that you would like, fair enough, but to suggest these financials are down to an unplayable ruleset is misleading. An unpopular ruleset [for whatever reason], or a ruleset that came in too soon after the previous, maybe [although, personally, I think it's the best one yet].

The guys at Frontline Gaming did a ton of home work to make the BAO come off without a hitch. They also did not use rules right out of the box, written by GW. I mean look at the list of rules for the tournament (http://www.frontlinegaming.org/community/bay-area-open-2014/bao-tournament-format/). You can have this, you can't have that, many, many house rules to make the game "fair" for all players. On the flip side, look at the Warmahordes rules (http://www.frontlinegaming.org/community/bay-area-open-2014/bao-2014-warmahordes-schedule/), theye are following the rules provided by Privateer Press for tournaments with no alterations. Having to house rule everything points to how poor 7th is and why a portion of the player base hates it.

I actually think GW could get away with a new edition of 40K in the near-ish future, but only if they handled the process with a finesse and transparency that the existing management is likely completely incapable of.

It would need to be different enough to actually merit a new edition to begin with, a genuine attempt to modernise and refine the rules(for my part, I'd suggest moving to a D10 for increased granularity, but then focusing heavily on your basic "roll equal or under" characteristic tests to streamline play, I'd also unify the armour and wounds/HP mechanics across all levels of play from infantry to superheavies, by giving all units an armour value which could exceed 10 and then giving weapons an AP which would reduce the armour value of an enemy by that amount, the final number being the test they have to roll against, and for wounds/HP keep the existing system for infantry models, but for vehicles/MCs replace glancing/penetrating mechanics with a simple reduce to zero wounds/HP then any further hits are catastrophic, roll on a table).

Any such move would likely gain them as much venom from people who are change-averse(for whatever reason valid or pedantic) as it would praise from those who want change, so the process would need to be open and inclusive; dev diaries on the website explaining their thinking, genuine solicitations of feedback and a forum in which to express them, limited public playtesting of the rules well before release so they can actually make changes based on the results. If they genuinely couldn't afford to keep the company going through such a process, Kickstart it for feck's sake; shove a poster in every GW store offering a chance to shape the future of 40K or whatever marketing BS will work, pointing people to the KS, get a proper community rep who's only job is to do the rounds on forums, podcasts and social media promoting the KS and the game/company in general. Look at what CGI are doing with Star Citizen; they make mistakes, they experience delays, and not everyone is happy all of the time(or at all, there're always misanthropes), but they've banked nearly $50million to support one of the most ambitious games ever made and the money keeps coming in, because they're capable of making backers feel like they're engaged in a participative process.

sand.zzz wrote:

 Reinholt wrote:
The big issue with 7th is the community dispersion it is creating. Everyone has their own way to play it, and major adjustments are something many seem to want to make (though all of them a bit different) to be willing to play.

When one of the strength's of your product was the ubiquity of it and the ability to easily find pick-up games, this is a real issue. You are taking your strength and putting it to the torch.

My view is that 7th will be shown to be a commercial failure, which will lead to further falling sales and an erosion of GW's market position and profitability. That's not a comment on 7th as a game, but rather 7th as a product: bad.

In my community - large US city - 7th hasn't fractured the community at all. Everyone kind of just transitioned from 6th right into 7th. I have yet to see an unbound game outside of a few youngsters that just field the models they own. We have 2 very active FLGS, and a bustling GW with three tables that are in use 5 days a week, often with a wait.

While I do believe GW has made countless bad decisions, is being mismanaged, snd only has a few years leftsd it currently exists - I dont agree that 7th ed. has splintered the playerbase. At least not where I live and play.

You can't use your one store as a basis for the entire GW player base. There are just as many if not more stores that saw a dramatic decrease of GW games in the past two years.
I've been around since RT and I've NEVER seen it this dismal.

Noir wrote:

 Hulksmash wrote:
@Reinholt

I don't know that I agree. At least with the conclusion. While I do see a bit of dispersion in the way people want to play 7th I haven't seen it affecting getting a game in or dividing the community much at all.

Now online that's a different story. Online you'd think that no one could agree on how to play 7th and no games are ever gonna happen. But on a local level I feel like it's the same as it's been since 3rd edition.

I feel like the next report will be the truly telling one. But I'm not an expert by any stretch.

Now, where have I heard that before?

It will always continue to be true, that's why, right up until the point where GW ceases to trade or becomes privately owned again (and therefore is no longer obliged to make it's financials public.)

The fact is, GW can continue to play this game for some while longer, ie release new, shiny, big ticket stuff in order to limp from report to report. They've already done the easy thing this year with a new edition, but the one thing everyone unanimously praises, the depth of the IP, means they can continue to mine their history for the next Imperial Knights.

I've had, from a source I trust, an implication that there's some really exciting stuff in the pipeline, but he's an ex-staffer, so I filter anything he tells me through that fact, but if sound decisions were made and action was taken when the interim report showed the problem, it would surely be the coming year where the fruits of those decisions would be ready?

Nobody is more skeptical that GW have either the awareness, desire or talent to fix their predicament, but of they were to take action, it would take a reasonable lead in time for those actions to show.


EDIT

Interestingly, autocorrect inserted "Priestley owned" instead of "privately owned."

Now there's a thought....

 MWHistorian wrote:

sand.zzz wrote:

 Reinholt wrote:
The big issue with 7th is the community dispersion it is creating. Everyone has their own way to play it, and major adjustments are something many seem to want to make (though all of them a bit different) to be willing to play.

When one of the strength's of your product was the ubiquity of it and the ability to easily find pick-up games, this is a real issue. You are taking your strength and putting it to the torch.

My view is that 7th will be shown to be a commercial failure, which will lead to further falling sales and an erosion of GW's market position and profitability. That's not a comment on 7th as a game, but rather 7th as a product: bad.

In my community - large US city - 7th hasn't fractured the community at all. Everyone kind of just transitioned from 6th right into 7th. I have yet to see an unbound game outside of a few youngsters that just field the models they own. We have 2 very active FLGS, and a bustling GW with three tables that are in use 5 days a week, often with a wait.

While I do believe GW has made countless bad decisions, is being mismanaged, snd only has a few years leftsd it currently exists - I dont agree that 7th ed. has splintered the playerbase. At least not where I live and play.

Your FLGS encompasses the entire international player base?!?!

Really dude? My reply begins with "In my community" and ends with "At least not where I live and play".
I don't even..

 Hulksmash wrote:
I feel like the next report will be the truly telling one. But I'm not an expert by any stretch.

Thing is though... this last report was a new edition of their flagship game, plus a big kit with nostalgic value (Knight), plus during this year was the 6th edition Space Marine codex, which is the bestselling codex for the bestselling army. And they still had a drop.

What could they do for the next report that could match? 9th edition Fantasy? Necrons? Dark Eldar? Bretonnia?

And then add in that switching their remaining stores to single employee stores could cause another 10 million in lost sales because of reduction of opening hours to save salaries and to get smaller foot prints and save rent.

This has been a year of the biggest splash releases of their best selling stuff and still the revenue drops. And given that everything gets released at a slightly higher price means their actual volume is down even more than their revenue.

Shrinking customer base that's buying less. Shrinking retail presence. Shrinking sales in all channels but FW & BL. Shrinking market share.

4 million spent on a new website that generated... no change in sales.

We don't need to wait six months for the next report to be the telling one. This one was. I was positive about their ability to make the single employee store plan work through hard sales and I was wrong. This report showed it.

I usually have pretty good respect for the stuff over at Frontline Gaming, but this article is pretty meandering.

http://www.frontlinegaming.org/2014/07/31/tinbane-on-analyzing-gws-sales-figures-a-40k-players-guide/

Barfolomew wrote:
I usually have pretty good respect for the stuff over at Frontline Gaming, but this article is pretty meandering.

http://www.frontlinegaming.org/2014/07/31/tinbane-on-analyzing-gws-sales-figures-a-40k-players-guide/

Wow. Words fail me with that.

Barfolomew wrote:
I usually have pretty good respect for the stuff over at Frontline Gaming, but this article is pretty meandering.

http://www.frontlinegaming.org/2014/07/31/tinbane-on-analyzing-gws-sales-figures-a-40k-players-guide/

That sounded like an attempt to calm passengers on the Titanic.

It might sound crazy, but improving the profitability could pave the way for a reduction in prices.

This made me chuckle.

I would be interested in the market research around the following series of questions. I think they would go along way in giving GW some direction.

1) If GW were to stop publishing rules, would you continue to purchase GW models?

2) If GW were to cease operations, would you continue to play thier games with your playgroup?

3) If yes, then which of GW's games would you continue to play?

4) Which edition of the rules of the above games would your playgroup use?

That would give them an edition to use as a target for a reset button. While model production is good, I think they would find that it isn't the driving force behind sales, and somehow the cart has to be put back behind the horse.

If the product you offer is solid and desireable, then one man stores be damned, people will find time to track down your out of the way store and come in.

If the rules are solid, then you can stretch the price point before people start to complain.

I think it will be telling if the board tells Kirby "no". If that happens I have hope that the ship can be pumped dry and set back on course.

 Orock wrote:
It might sound crazy, but improving the profitability could pave the way for a reduction in prices.

This made me chuckle.

While I have no doubt that the writer has some business experience, it is evident that he/she is a bit jaded, just as I would be, and allowing excuses to be too easily accepted. It's a real shame the other players in the table top gaming space are not publicly traded so we could see a comparison.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Shotgun wrote:
I would be interested in the market research around the following series of questions. I think they would go along way in giving GW some direction.

1) If GW were to stop publishing rules, would you continue to purchase GW models?

2) If GW were to cease operations, would you continue to play thier games with your playgroup?

3) If yes, then which of GW's games would you continue to play?

4) Which edition of the rules of the above games would your playgroup use?

That would give them an edition to use as a target for a reset button. While model production is good, I think they would find that it isn't the driving force behind sales, and somehow the cart has to be put back behind the horse.

If the product you offer is solid and desireable, then one man stores be damned, people will find time to track down your out of the way store and come in.

If the rules are solid, then you can stretch the price point before people start to complain.

I think it will be telling if the board tells Kirby "no". If that happens I have hope that the ship can be pumped dry and set back on course.

To quote GW:

We do no demographic research, we have no focus groups, we do not ask the market what it wants. These things are otiose in a niche.” (page 3, bottom half of the page in financial report)

Barfolomew wrote:
To quote GW:

We do no demographic research, we have no focus groups, we do not ask the market what it wants. These things are otiose in a niche.” (page 3, bottom half of the page in financial report)

I still don't get how someone (as in a shareholder) reading that line wasn't like "Are you barmy? Those things are even MORE important in a niche"

Frontline is talking their book, but in fairness, that's what they should be doing to protect their own business. I can't fault them for trying to put a positive spin on that article.

In a way, it is also completely correct: if GW takes the correct actions on the back of the cost cutting (better rules, better community relations, lower cost of entry, using scale advantages to achieve pricing advantages to eliminate competition, market research, etc.) then it's one-hundred percent correct this will have been positive.

However, that's a giant IF, and part of why I think a place like frontline might hold the view expressed in that article (erroneously, in my view) is that they probably compare GW to themselves (being another company in the gaming space), and thus assume more competence than GW deserves.

It's true that GW could use this as a springboard to massive growth and profitability; the article is correct about that. Sadly, I think my prediction that they will instead do a bunch of things they shouldn't and continue with the stuff that doesn't work is more likely.

 MWHistorian wrote:
That raises a good question, is 40k now over saturated? Can they milk this cow any longer?
If not, do you think they'll find another cow?

A quick way would be look more at licences.

I have enough unpainted minis right now to last the rest of my life. And there's enough BL books that I can always find something I want to read when looking for a light SF/fantasy book.

But I'd still pay for some cool 40k t-shirts, action figures and other swag.

That's something I really don't understand why GW does not go into.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

 MWHistorian wrote:
That raises a good question, is 40k now over saturated? Can they milk this cow any longer?
If not, do you think they'll find another cow?

A quick way would be look more at licences.

I have enough unpainted minis right now to last the rest of my life. And there's enough BL books that I can always find something I want to read when looking for a light SF/fantasy book.

But I'd still pay for some cool 40k t-shirts, action figures and other swag.

That's something I really don't understand why GW does not go into.

Unofrotunately when they have branched out into things like that they've demonstrated the same bizarre approach (e.g the occasional Black Library T-shirts) - very expensive, not promoted outside the usual channels like WD and limited edition.

There's also a danger that someone wearing a 40K shirt might veer dangerously close to counting as marketing - surely not!

Barfolomew wrote:

 Orock wrote:
It might sound crazy, but improving the profitability could pave the way for a reduction in prices.

This made me chuckle.

While I have no doubt that the writer has some business experience, it is evident that he/she is a bit jaded, just as I would be, and allowing excuses to be too easily accepted. It's a real shame the other players in the table top gaming space are not publicly traded so we could see a comparison.

No it not, it really is not. If anything GW has proved going public is the worse thing to happen to a table top minituare game company player base.

Noir wrote:
No it not, it really is not. If anything GW has proved going public is the worse thing to happen to a table top minituare game company player base.

I meant purely for data access, not for the multitude of other reasons why shouldn't be public.

Wow, that Frontline post was bad. I don't think you could credibly write what was written if you'd kept up with the reports since the two loss making years, where GW has been predicting a return to growth because they got their house in order already in almost every report.

Barfolomew wrote:

 Orock wrote:
It might sound crazy, but improving the profitability could pave the way for a reduction in prices.

This made me chuckle.

While I have no doubt that the writer has some business experience, it is evident that he/she is a bit jaded, just as I would be, and allowing excuses to be too easily accepted. It's a real shame the other players in the table top gaming space are not publicly traded so we could see a comparison.

I guess that depends on what you hope to find out versus what you can infer given what we know about current economic conditions and the observed behaviour of those companies.

With regards to the website cost of £4 million I could have sworn that only £0.9 million of it was included in this years figures.

Edit: Yup, on page 8.

We invested an additional £0.9 million in the new web store (2013: £3.1million)

WayneTheGame wrote:

 Yonan wrote:

 Reinholt wrote:
There is no reason GW can't make things work; they just won't.[/color]

Pretty sure there's been a substantial brain drain hasn't there? All the skilled people have been replaced by those that can say "yes!" emphatically enough. They may very well be completely unable to release a good system now.

I have the sinking feeling that's the case; the people there can't write good rules (maybe Kelly since he was around in the old days, maybe he picked something up from Rick and Alessio) or just think that things need to be more convoluted because they're from the old school (Jervis).

I'd try to do everything in my power to get Alessio back writing rules, whether it was as a contractor/consultant or an FTE.

Well, when you pride yourself on hiring for "attitude" and not skill and your underlying belief is that knowing what the market demands is irrelevant, all you will hire is people that will either agree with you or acquiesce.

I still can't get over the "we do not ask the market what it wants" claim.