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usual caveats about source etc etc

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/29326.html

ICv2 has released the results of a study on the size of the hobby game market, including the finding that that the market in the U.S. and Canada totaled around $700 million at retail in 2013, as reported in the recently released Internal Correspondence #85. ICv2 also broke down the market by category, and found that the collectible games category was by far the largest, at $450 million; miniatures were second, at $125 million; board games were third at $75 million; card and dice games fourth at $35 million; and RPGs last at $15 million.

We define "hobby games" as those games produced for a "gamer" market, generally (although not always) sold primarily in the hobby channel of game and card specialty stores. We define the "hobby games market" as the market for those games regardless of whether they’re sold in the hobby channel or other channels.

In order to arrive at the estimate for the total industry, we compiled estimates on five individual categories: collectible games, miniatures, board games, card and dice games, and roleplaying games.

We interviewed many industry insiders to compile these estimates, and without their willingness to speak frankly with us about their own estimates of market size and the reasoning behind them, we would have been unable to complete this project.

We also report on the Spring season in the hobby game market, and found that it remained strong. In collectible games, Magic: The Gathering was not as strong (although definitely not weak), but Pokemon, My Little Pony, and Marvel Dice Masters were taking up the slack. WizKids' Dice Masters, in particular, was red hot (although in very short supply), with some calling it the “hottest game in years.”

Board games continued to grow in 2014, with growth coming from both the hard core games and civilians coming over in large numbers from other markets.

In miniatures, the two big licensed games, Star Wars X-Wing and Star Trek Attack Wing, were the games with the most heat this Spring, as the market anticipated the new edition of Warhammer 40K.

Boss Monster and Adventure Time were the big news in the Card and Dice Games category, with both getting a big reaction and selling out quickly.

And in RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons failed to appear in the Spring Top 5 in the last chart before the release of the new edition, the first time that’s happened since we began charting hobby game sales a dozen years ago.

ICv2 published its hobby game bestseller charts in the new issue, covering all five categories.

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/29331.html

Top 5 Non-Collectible Miniature Lines – Spring 2014

Title
Publisher
1
Warhammer 40k
Games Workshop
2
Star Wars X-Wing
Fantasy Flight Games
3
Star Trek Attack Wing
WizKids/NECA
4
Warmachine
Privateer Press
5
Hordes
Privateer Press

Interesting to note that Fantasy has dropped out of the top 5. Was it in the top 5 in last year's figures? I seem to recall it was still hanging in there.

This is , roughly, quarterly AFAIK

http://icv2.com/articles/news/28125.html

This chart of the Top 5 Non-Collectible Miniature Lines (hobby channel) reflects sales in Fall 2013. The charts are based on interviews with retailers, distributors, and manufacturers.

is :

Top 5 Non-Collectible Miniature Lines – Fall 2013

Title
Publisher
1
Warhammer 40k
Games Workshop
2
Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures
Fantasy Flight Games
3
Warmachine
Privateer Press
4
Star Trek Attack Wing
WizKids/NECA
5
Hordes
Privateer Press



But obviously doesn't factor in direct/GW stores sales.

Nice data! X-wing has certainly taken off, that data is in-line with how many people say they've switched to it.

 reds8n wrote:

Top 5 Non-Collectible Miniature Lines – Fall 2013
1 Warhammer 40k

2 Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures

3 Warmachine

4 Star Trek Attack Wing

5 Hordes

Interesting. I wonder how X-Wing would do if FF could sort out it's supply problems. Also makes me wonder what the gap is between 40k and the rest.

 reds8n wrote:

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/29331.html

Top 5 Non-Collectible Miniature Lines – Spring 2014

Title
Publisher
1
Warhammer 40k
Games Workshop
2
Star Wars X-Wing
Fantasy Flight Games
3
Star Trek Attack Wing
WizKids/NECA
4
Warmachine
Privateer Press
5
Hordes
Privateer Press

I still don't understand why they list WM and Hordes as separate games. I'd be really curios to see what the list would look like with the two combined.

 Steve steveson wrote:

 reds8n wrote:

Top 5 Non-Collectible Miniature Lines – Fall 2013
1 Warhammer 40k

2 Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures

3 Warmachine

4 Star Trek Attack Wing

5 Hordes

Interesting. I wonder how X-Wing would do if FF could sort out it's supply problems. Also makes me wonder what the gap is between 40k and the rest.

I think we can figure out an estimate. The financial report from GW says that 56% of their NA sales where from trade. The total NA sales where 32 million pounds(about 55 million US). So their trade sales would be 31 million US through trade. With the IVC2 estimate of 125 million US for miniatures, that means that roughly 25% of the US miniature marked is made up of Games Workshop products.

I would say it could still be 5 or 6 times what X-wing sells. But you also have to consider it takes about 5 or 6 new X-Wing players to spend what a new 40K player has to spend to get into the game.

Conversely there are many more veteran 40K players than X-Wing, which is such a new game, who may be buying modest amounts of stuff per year amounting to a large total.

 filbert wrote:
Interesting to note that Fantasy has dropped out of the top 5. Was it in the top 5 in last year's figures? I seem to recall it was still hanging in there.

IIRC in the last 5 years it was usually at #3-#5, some years it was completely out. Though this is probably first time it has been out of the list for more than 1 quarter in a row?

Those top 5 fall almost exactly in line with the biggest flgs in my local community. Except I'd have to replace the Star Trek game (which no one plays), with Flames of War, which takes over just about every table in the place on Sundays.

I wasn't going to bother with this, but it looks so pretty I changed my mind. This is another graph I've kept going for a while. These are international sales revenue figures over the past 14 years. There is no discounting for inflation here, so this is cash terms translated to UK pounds in the prevalent average exchange rate for each relevant year.

It is so clear that GW is tanking outside the UK, where it is barely (before discounting for inflation remember!) holding steady. Continental Europe is really taking a beating where sales are worse (in cash terms remember, so the reality is even worse as inflation has eroded value over time) than at any time since the beginnings of the LotR bubble! North America has just about lost all the ground it gained over the previous two years, and the rest of the world (including Australia) continues to be insignificant.

 Osbad wrote:
I wasn't going to bother with this, but it looks so pretty I changed my mind. This is another graph I've kept going for a while. These are international sales revenue figures over the past 14 years. There is no discounting for inflation here, so this is cash terms translated to UK pounds in the prevalent average exchange rate for each relevant year.

It is so clear that GW is tanking outside the UK, where it is barely (before discounting for inflation remember!) holding steady. Continental Europe is really taking a beating where sales are worse (in cash terms remember, so the reality is even worse as inflation has eroded value over time) than at any time since the beginnings of the LotR bubble! North America has just about lost all the ground it gained over the previous two years, and the rest of the world (including Australia) continues to be insignificant.

Our crops will wither, our children will die piteous deaths and the sun will be swept from the sky. But is it true?"

GW has been tanking outside the UK for ages. If they can get their act together in the UK, they will survive...I hope

 darefsky wrote:

I still don't understand why they list WM and Hordes as separate games. I'd be really curios to see what the list would look like with the two combined.

Agreed. I wonder if PP would take over the #2 spot.

I've followed the ICv2 reports for a long time. The trend I believe I've seen is that the gaming market has been expanding, but GW's own market has been shrinking. They can turn it around- they've got a ways to go before they're really unprofitable.

For the top 5

40k is always #1

For years, the 2nd and 3rd spots were Warmachine or Hordes- and they'd switch out periodically. I agree, it would be nice to see them lumped together.

The other spots have changed quite a bit more. Once in a while, we'd see WFB, but not as often as you'd think. Sometimes, we'd see Reaper's Dark Heaven Legends show up (they abandoned making a game for the range a long time ago) and we've actually seen Malifaux get into the top 5 as well (and outsell WFB).

In the time I've been following it, LotR has never made it into the top 5.

This chart really shows where the bulk of the LOTR sales boom came from: Continental Europe. Only a moderate bump in the UK, almost flat in North America. Would have expected a bigger bump in the UK.

 Osbad wrote:
I wasn't going to bother with this, but it looks so pretty I changed my mind. This is another graph I've kept going for a while. These are international sales revenue figures over the past 14 years. There is no discounting for inflation here, so this is cash terms translated to UK pounds in the prevalent average exchange rate for each relevant year.

timd wrote:
This chart really shows where the bulk of the LOTR sales boom came from: Continental Europe. Only a moderate bump in the UK, almost flat in North America. Would have expected a bigger bump in the UK.

And do you know why that bump happened? It had nothing to do with the popularity of the movies themselves (The Hobbit movie trilogy is having roughly the same numbers), it was all because of Planeta DeAgostini.

Start advertising your products and make them available through major retail chains at a reasonable cost and your sales will sky-rocket! Who would have thought it... It takes a special type of incompetence to take what was a tried and tested formula and just throw it in the trash.

Sorry if this has been clarified before but the ICv2 report seems to be purely based on actual sales. If you're not doing like for like how does it prove anything?

We all know it costs more to get up and running with GW, so monetary value can't really mean anything. £200 of GW sales could only mean 3 new players. Apply that to X Wing and (depending on where you buy) this could mean 8 new players (basic starter set).

So GW might have a whopping great sale figure, but I can't see how that shows that they are still number 1 in the gaming world

 Osbad wrote:
I wasn't going to bother with this, but it looks so pretty I changed my mind. This is another graph I've kept going for a while. These are international sales revenue figures over the past 14 years. There is no discounting for inflation here, so this is cash terms translated to UK pounds in the prevalent average exchange rate for each relevant year.

It is so clear that GW is tanking outside the UK, where it is barely (before discounting for inflation remember!) holding steady. Continental Europe is really taking a beating where sales are worse (in cash terms remember, so the reality is even worse as inflation has eroded value over time) than at any time since the beginnings of the LotR bubble! North America has just about lost all the ground it gained over the previous two years, and the rest of the world (including Australia) continues to be insignificant.

I'd *really* love to see that chart in constant dollars (pounds, whatever...)

Valete,

JohnS

From the GW reports, we it seems like they are consistently selling fewer objects (even in most years when they make increased profits, it is less than the increase in prices). This is likely indicative of a shrinking player base.

There's really no way to count actual players for each game.



Back on the report- one thing I think is crazy is that he didn't mention the fact that 7th edition came out this year.

He must have been intentionally avoiding telling his investors that his company sales are down the year that they launch a new edition their flagship property.

 Wayshuba wrote:

Backfire wrote:
Duh, in 5th and 6th edition releases, they released the edition quite early in the financial year, complete with starter set (which is probably their biggest selling single product). Now, they had just a week or two worth of sales of the basic rulebook, and no starter set.

Actually, the typical releases for 40k were in July (3rd-July 1998, 4th-July 2004, 5th-July 2004) except for 6th edition which was in June and 7th edition which was in May. In other words, 40k editions were always released at the near beginning of their corporate reporting year where 7th was rushed out to catch the end of the year. It is pretty obvious from looking at the 7th edition books as well, that it was rushed out the door to make the end of year period.

3rd actually came out 10th October 1998. I remember as my brother got it for his 12th birthday on the same day. But I digress.

The chart is not necessarily accurate. Apart from the inflation effect, GW changed their geographical reporting practice at least once during the period. (Swapping Nordic sales from Europe to UK or something -- I don't remember the details.)

It would be useful to put in a line for total worldwide sales.

Also note that GW are changing again from next year and will report by "channel" rather than by geographical area. It is difficult to know why this should be done except to conceal potentially interesting information from investors.

PhantomViper wrote:

timd wrote:
This chart really shows where the bulk of the LOTR sales boom came from: Continental Europe. Only a moderate bump in the UK, almost flat in North America. Would have expected a bigger bump in the UK.

And do you know why that bump happened? It had nothing to do with the popularity of the movies themselves (The Hobbit movie trilogy is having roughly the same numbers), it was all because of Planeta DeAgostini.

Start advertising your products and make them available through major retail chains at a reasonable cost and your sales will sky-rocket! Who would have thought it... It takes a special type of incompetence to take what was a tried and tested formula and just throw it in the trash.

You must have missed Kirby when he said they don't have to advertise or survey their customers. It is a niche market and they know what we want better than we do.

Kirby has pretty much said that the company is "fine" because the main proof is that if can still pump out dividends.

He is only around to ensure every year he can pay himself through that method.

Really, precious little else has priority than that.

You would see a whole new company if it was focused on market growth.

As long as there is always a way to ensure there is cash on-hand to pay dividends, the numbers can look as bad as they want until the company does not have enough resources to meet commitments.

Management practices will not change a jot until something other than dividends is noticed.

and RPGs last at $15 million.

At first I was like "this report is obviously bogus when it says the whole size of the market for RPGs is smaller than the sales of one company in that market." But then I needed to remember that this is at retail and icv2 is concerned with retailers. The reason the RPG market has "shrunk" so much is that publishers largely now sell direct.

The D&D people at Wizards have also confirmed that their approach to revenue for the 5th edition of D&D is not to focus on a buy a book every month model where they fill shelves with books. They're going to have a much slower release rate and concentrate on accessory and branded products, many of which are licensed out to third party manufacturers.

I'd propose that the industry is actually larger as this literally is about retail. There's no way they can track me ordering directly from a manufacturer and cutting out retail entirely. And being outside of retail, it'd be outside the scope of this study. Their primary customer and area of concern is retail of comics, games and hobby products.

As a point of confirmation, the collectible card game numbers sound right given what Hasbro presented at the New York Toy Fair. They talked about massive growth outside of North America and the icv2 estimates for NA sound about right for Magic's revenue from Hasbro's investor relations stuff.

I think the icv2 study may be quite accurate and their estimates of market growth in past surveys might be as well.

GW really is shrinking in a market that's growing. We know they are failing in North America to a substantial degree while everything else appears to be booming here.

I've been buying GW stuff since I got into Fantasy (thanks to getting the original Warlock on Firetop Mountain fighting fantasy release). My first Citadel miniatures were the solid dark grey lead ones (in fact I remember it being a "Great Goblin" and it cost me 35p). I remember the shock of seeing "plastic bases" on the lead figures when I got my http://solegends.com/citboxes/bc4deathcommando.htm - Still on a shelf behind me unpainted - lol
As a kid, I played WFB (I bought the 2nd edition box - which is still on my shelf). I didn't get "into" 40K till the late 90's with the release of 3rd edition.

Nowadays, I'm a school teacher and run the rather small 40K club at school.
We have an hour at dinner once a week to game. I've run this club for 11 years at the school I'm at now. It's always been a small club, usually with 6-12 players showing up with 400 point armies to play on the board/scenery I provide. As year 11's left school, an equal number of players started in year 7 as they started school. Now there are no new players starting. The club is down to 1 kid who now plays vs. me once a week.
New year 7's come now, ask how much the models are, and we never see them come again. I even provide a full painted set of Dark Vengeance now for anyone to use. The 1 kid that plays now can only afford to get models from ebay.

I've been reading Dakka a while now and these "Doom of GW" threads have been around all the while. I'm not White Knighting, but I would hate to see GW go under. What I *would* like to see is them take a step backwards to the practices that were good during successful years. I know you all seem to think the skirmish games were good, but imagine GW putting out one now. You'd never be able to buy figures as singles to add to your skirmish band, they'd sell them in boxes of 10 for a ridiculous price, even though you only wanted one.

For me, the times I enjoyed was when I could log onto the web store, find a single part number or sprue code and order just that. No forcing full boxes down my throat. I could get what I wanted at a decent price and I was encouraged to play/paint by getting that. Now if I want a small part, I have to feel like my wallet's been raped and I have a ton of stuff I don't want. The other thing that killed playing for me was (last edition) the flyers, and now the Psychic phase.

I can see GW going under in a few years, and I can see the current management taking every last penny out of the company before vanishing. :-(
It feels like one of those CCG companies of the early 2000s that knows it's coming to the end of its lifecycle. So it releases more and more must haves at a faster frequency at higher prices to milk everybody for every penny they can before they collapse.

Can GW fix it?

1. Produce cheaper starter sets that can clip together and have basic rules. Sell then in mainstream toy stores. Get kids back into playing the games. Even have a few paints and a brush in the boxes. Airfix do this with models they sell.
2. Leave at least 5 years between rule changes and play test them. GW has a fantastic place to play test - their own stores. Spend a year or so play testing (like D&D Next) before release.
3. Stop with the gak huge kits. Take the game back to a time when small troop squads meant something.
4. Bring back the single sprue/parts ordering on the web store - this won't save them, but I want it :-)

and I nearly forgot...

5. Get rid of the "Apple" marketing philosophy they seem to have adapted. They have too small a fan base to make it work.

They couldn't have a more polar opposite marketing strategy than apple?!

Apple advertise pretty much everything they make, on prime time tv, in cinemas, printed media. They spend a fortune on advertising.

How is gw in any way like that?

 Eggs wrote:
They couldn't have a more polar opposite marketing strategy than apple?!

Apple advertise pretty much everything they make, on prime time tv, in cinemas, printed media. They spend a fortune on advertising.

How is gw in any way like that?

"Prestige" attitude, high prices compared to the rest of the market, a certain fondness for throwing litigation around. All of the bad traits with none of the good ones.

 Guildsman wrote:

 Eggs wrote:
They couldn't have a more polar opposite marketing strategy than apple?!

Apple advertise pretty much everything they make, on prime time tv, in cinemas, printed media. They spend a fortune on advertising.

How is gw in any way like that?

"Prestige" attitude, high prices compared to the rest of the market, a certain fondness for throwing litigation around. All of the bad traits with none of the good ones.

Agreed.

It's like the company mantra is "be like Apple" but nobody has grasped the central concepts of what would make that a worthwhile exercise.

I'm not going to get into an apple argument, because some folks love em, and some folks love to hate em, but I think any comparison of apple and gw is downright bonkers.

One makes fairly high end technology, the other makes plastic models. One advertises, the other doesn't. One is in the top twenty biggest companies in the world. The other is a tiny, niche company worth less than the other makes in a couple of days. One has more than double the cash the us government has. The other probably has less cash than North Korea. Not seeing the connection myself.

 frozenwastes wrote:

and RPGs last at $15 million.

At first I was like "this report is obviously bogus when it says the whole size of the market for RPGs is smaller than the sales of one company in that market." But then I needed to remember that this is at retail and icv2 is concerned with retailers. The reason the RPG market has "shrunk" so much is that publishers largely now sell direct.

I think the biggest reason that the RPG market is so much smaller is because every player doesn't need to purchase that much in order to play.

Currently, I'm part of a six-person Pathfinder group. In the group, I am the only person who has any of the hard back books. Two other people have purchased the smart phone app. The other three have made zero purchases from Paizo to play the game. I purchased the hardback "Rise of the Runelords" campaign path, and we've been playing that pretty much all year with no further need to purchase anything else that what we already had to keep playing. Between the six of us, we've all spent less than $100 per person (though I've spent the bulk of it).

Though, it gets worse than that. We played a different campaign starting in summer of 2012 through the end of 2013 that was home brewed. All the books and resource material we use were purchased over that 18 month period. For this year-to-date, the entire group has spent about $150.00 over seven+ months: Rise of the Runelords, Inner Sea campaign setting, and a pawn set. That's all we've needed to purchase in order to play every Sunday for the last seven or so months.

The sheer nature of RPG's is that the players really just don't have to purchase that much material to play.

(Sorry for off topic, but I think it was an interesting issue that differentiates the RPG game market from the table top miniature game market.)