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Seeing the price for the new Space Wolf codex (are all that price now?) as being £30 kinda sums it all up. You can get a nice full colour rulebook for that price. With a lot of systems, tabletop or RPG, that's all you need book wise. Added to this the Bolt Action kindle version and it makes GW look totally out of touch.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I agree with frozenwastes about the long term value of the GW game fluff.

The revenue figures show that the vast bulk of sales are game books and model kits. Black Library and so on account for only a small amount despite being on sale in regular bookshops. (Like Halo and Assassin's Creed books.) That means the background has little traction outside the player community.

I could imagine another company taking over the games, which have significant physical assets. I can't see a company purchasing the IP purely to make films and books.

Well, there was a time when BL was releasing a NY Times Bestseller every other month. But then they decided they didn't need any of that.

Perhaps as the popularity of the game has declined so has the popularity of the books.

I think the HH books were consistently bestsellers from A Thousand Sons up until they started the hardcover releases.

As Rick Priestly has said in a podcast (can't remember whose was it) Kirby's GW is run by the accountant department and not from the game design, when you have such gems as "why did warmaster stoped having generals blisters? Well the accountants found out that generals didn't sell as much as units, which is logical since you needed only one and decided t cut them and focus only on regiment blisters" and "Our focus was to make 3rd edition a better version of 2nd edition, we made the rules and playtested it and then the decision came from above that we need to make a game that needs more miniatures, out of time I adapted my home-brew 15mm WW2 rules I use to play in my house and here you have WH40k 3rd edition".

I guess his NDA ended.

The reports indicate everything we have hypothesized and see evolve over the years, GW's market-share is shrinking and they depend more and more on a smaller core that will buy no mater the price or quality, are they in a bad position? They have the bulk, the infrastructure and customer loyalty to turn the ship around to a safe harbor, even if the ship has already hit the rocks, the fear is purely that they are not capable of doing it, delusional on their IP strength, fearful of competition, closing to themselves more and more and run by the accountants not the game designers with a corporate attitude of "fitting in" (essentially yes men) having a priority over everything else, I am not sure they are capable of turning the ship, even if the ship is perfectly capable of turning and has ample of time.

This financial year had all their heavy hitters, most direct sales ever and the fastest release pace we have ever seen and this is their result, most worrying of all is they felt they needed to secure a 4m loan, (which eventually they did not use) presumably for the website upgrade, how unconfident were they for their results that they felt this was necessary.

For me GW's strategy and corporate culture are their biggest enemies, been a manufacturer and retailer at the same time actively antagonizing the retailers that far outnumber their own retail potential is a bad thing, limiting themselves to a small selection of core systems also hurts them, I feel they have set a sales low and if a game system does not pass it, even if it is self sustaining, they do not bother anymore.

it's apparently not hard to make the bestsellers list; assuming you're selling to fans waiting on the book your initial spike on release might do it.

You might have a point about the hardbacks though; the books are pretty decent, but the paperback price is quite high for them, let alone the hardback price.

Edit: typo

I've seen it implied that they changed the distribution which is why it dropped off the bestseller list, I think Reinholt knows what, if anything, happened.

The best seller list is only a ranking. It's possible that other books started selling more, e.g. 50 Shades of Grey, and climbed up the list above the 40K books.

I would guess pricing had a lot to do with it though.

Given the huge amount of excitement that was in the Black Library thread back before the move to hardbacks and the general mood of 'here is the new list of books' 'meh, I might pick X or Y up when it comes out in softcover in a years time' that has been there since I think the switch is what shot them in the foot there.

Once upon a time I would have the next 6 months of releases already bought in my mind and devour each one when it came out, now I have passed the latest HH book in softcover at my FLGS a couple of times and haven't bothered getting it though. That's anecdotal, but it also seems to be the same lack of enthusiasm that I see when I talk to others who I know used to love those books, and they are the same kind of conversations we where having 3 years ago about the direction GW was heading (and look where we are with that now.)

So no evidence, but it just feels like the lead up to these terrible financials did.

I recognise the same psychological symptoms in myself regarding various kinds of purchases. I eagerly anticipate them, and when the item comes for some reason of other I do not or cannot buy it straight away. The eagerness to purchase fades and soon I put it on a sort of mental "would like" list and forget about it. It turns out that life goes on without the previously "essential" new thing.

This is fairly standard consumer psychology, and it is why companies do marketing, advertising, price promotions and so on, to build up that sense of anticipation and take advantage of it at launch.

 Wayshuba wrote:

Backfire wrote:


Financial pressure? They don't seem to think themselves they have much financial pressure, given that they just handed out dividend.

Closing regional HQs. Moving to one man stores. Taking on £4.5m in "exceptional costs". Pulling a lot of products from the channel to sell direct to make more margin. No, they are feeling the financial pressure and it is obvious.

I guess that your definition of 'financial pressure' is somewhat different. For me, "financial pressure" means acute shortage of funds or cash flow, or near-term prospect in failing to meet obligations. Given that GW is debt free, has cash in hand and is profitable, saying that they have "financial pressures" is quite a stretch, even if company's outlook otherwise is not wholly positive.

A popular strategy for companies is to assume that the company is in "crisis" all the time, and improvements in efficiency must be thought up even during the "good times": Japanese car manufacturers particularly were famous of this. In one post-LOTR collapse financial report Kirby acknowledges how the company had got "lazy and fat", and describes how he got a dressing-down from an important but frustrated investor for failing to take up proper measures. I am sure he doesn't want to relive that again.

 Wayshuba wrote:

As the CHS lawsuit showed, most of GWs sales of a product come from it's initial release. So they have constantly escalated pricing on new releases, with each batch higher than the previous one. As I have indicated on many other threads here prior to these financials in discussions about companies in panic mode/death spiral, heavy price increases are actually the common reaction at this point. This is one early sign I have long looked for when analyzing troubled companies. When I see constant hikes of 50%+ (and GW has done 70%-100% in quite a few cases this last year), that is generally a warning sign. No sane company, in good shape, pushes 50% price increases in one go on customers.

Of course,there are also cases where new products have lower prices - for example new Ogryns, Meganobz, Mek w/ Shokk attack gun (though only a little) etc. But sure thing, it is more common that the new products have higher prices: in this they follow same pricing strategy as many other miniatures manufacturers, most notably Privateer Press. Did you see their latest release? Blightblades are $35 for six plastic infantry miniatures, and Flameguard Cleansers are $75 for ten metal minis! I guess they are in panic mode too?

Also, I would like some examples about this supposed tendency of companies increasing the prices when they are doing poorly. Because most of the time I have observed the opposite, company responds to lower sales by aggressive pricing. Examples of that are not hard to find: for example number of car manufacturers have responded that way whenever the going gets tough: Saab, General Motors, Ford, even Toyota. Or lets take Nokia, when their smartphone sales began to plummet, they responded by lowering their prices. That's why Lumia is cheaper than iPhone or Galaxy.

 Wayshuba wrote:

Backfire wrote:
Rushing products - IIRC, they aren't actually releasing any more miniatures annually than they did before. They are just spread along the year more evenly. They are producing more codices and supplements, though.
Decline in quality - in what way? Technically, no. Artistically, that is always debatable.

Quality of printed books has gone down the tubes in the last year. Riddled with stupid mistakes and very little "crunch" and lots of fluff. Even the 7th edition books have a lot of errors and holes.

Printing quality of the books has in fact gone signifantly up (although of course the price has too). Even starter set nowadays features all-colour mini-rulebook etc. DV has clearly higher quality contents than AOBR did.
In my experience, new codecies do not have any more errors than the old ones. It is true that erratas have got longer - but this is because GW hired a new guy to make erratas few years ago who actually addressed more mistakes and rules issues, than the previous FAQs which were very sparse and almost useless.

 Wayshuba wrote:

As for the quality of the miniatures - they have gone down to (and I am not talking aesthetically, which is subjective). Special plastic characters used to have options with them (see "Space Marine Commander"), now they are all mono-pose with no options. The Imperial Knight? Poor engineering versus kits such as those from DreamForge, yet GW is supposed to produce "the best miniatures in the world". Aesthetically one may prefer the Imperial Knight, but at least with DreamForge you have pose-able legs, detachable and pose-able weapon arms.

Okay now we're getting into silly territory. To what old GW miniature exactly Imperial Knight is inferior? Stompa, or Dreadknight, both even more 'stiff' than the Knight? Now if you had just said that they are price gouging horribly with the Knight, no disagreement. I think they were surprised how well Riptide sold, and thought "hey, are we selling these too cheap?"
As for the Space Marine commander, wasn't he always one of the very few (if not the only one?) in his kind? Sure, the new monopose plastics do not have options (or have only an extra head), but that's because they have been designed to replace old metal/Finecast monopose characters. Reason they are monopose is that you can get a better sculpt that way than multipose. Lets face it, although the SM Commander has nice set of options, sculpt-wise the mini is very blah, and basically can be replicated with regular SM parts.

 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.

Yes, that's what I was saying about the editions, hence the numbers are not any way comparable. Anyway, it's doubtful that 7th edition will result to big sales bump, given how quickly it came after 6th, and lack of new starter set. I have read 7th edition book only once, does it have huge errors? For what I looked, it seemed better written than the 6th edition rulebook - now THAT was a rush job. I don't even understand how they messed it up so bad, given more than ample time. I suspect there were some issues behind the scenes.

 Wayshuba wrote:

Two large distributors/stores have reported that Infinity Operation: Icestorm pre-orders (only available for two weeks now and still three weeks to go) has already outsold 40k 7th edition by 2 to 1 (with more time to go) and another one reported Dystopian Wars outselling 40k 7th edition by a factor of 7 to 1.

So in other words the evidence is anecdotal and may have very mundane explanation (very active Spartan Games community in one town etc). My local FLGS does not carry either Infinity or Spartan Games, not even Warmachine.(In fact I would be surprised if there are more than ten Spartan Games players in the entire country). They do have X-wing, which seems to be selling nicely, and Flames of War, which seems like it doesn't. FWIW, neither Spartan Games or Corvus Belli made it to icv2's Top 5 miniature games list this spring.

Sales figures from a retailer aren't anecdotal since they presumably have records of what they sell and don't.

CB and Spartan are still small companies; I wouldn't expect them to hit top 5 lists with the big hitters yet.

But it is a taste of things to come.

One of them is the largest online independent gaming store in Europe. I would expect their sales to be a pretty good reflection of what's happening on the whole. Particularly because they sell virtually every major and minor gaming system. At what point does evidence go from being anecdotal to empirical?

Genuinely curious at which point evidence becomes accepted. I'd have thought that a statement from the biggest indie out there would count for something.

The guy from the Future of Games Worshop series has been talking in one of his Beeble Babbles (shameless plug here, they are awesome). If you're not interested in the whole thing the relevant stuff starts at about 1:08 ish.

He makes a couple of comments in particular, like that he is getting a proper analyst friend to look over the report in depth when he can and his prediction is that GW will start closing stores if things don't suddenly get better.

Evidence becomes accepted when it supports the position you already hold.

The ICV2 seems a fairly good survey of the retail market even though they don't publish specific detailed figures. We already know that GW's sales have declined because their own financial report says that definitively. If the ICV2 survey seems to confirm the point, this is supportive of ICV2.

 jonolikespie wrote:



The guy from the Future of Games Worshop series has been talking in one of his Beeble Babbles (shameless plug here, they are awesome). If you're not interested in the whole thing the relevant stuff starts at about 1:08 ish.

He makes a couple of comments in particular, like that he is getting a proper analyst friend to look over the report in depth when he can and his prediction is that GW will start closing stores if things don't suddenly get better.

I signed up to the Kickstarter project as I thought the models looked great

 jonolikespie wrote:
The guy from the Future of Games Worshop series has been talking in one of his Beeble Babbles (shameless plug here, they are awesome). If you're not interested in the whole thing the relevant stuff starts at about 1:08 ish.

He makes a couple of comments in particular, like that he is getting a proper analyst friend to look over the report in depth when he can and his prediction is that GW will start closing stores if things don't suddenly get better.

Thanks for the link and the time, which to be specific is 1:09:20 (direct link to the time).

Interesting watch so far! I'll sub to this guy I think.

 Yonan wrote:

Thanks for the link and the time, which to be specific is 1:09:20 (direct link to the time).

Interesting watch so far! I'll sub to this guy I think.

Somewhere around 1:31 (wow it's long) they mention Allen Merit being... very not good for the company, and they both apparently have personal experience there. I found that quite interesting since there was quite a bit of discussion in the Chapterhouse thread about how.. not good he seemed.

Very interesting stuff.

Yeah the CHS certainly brought to light a lot of "not good" things in the GW mindset and upper management. Merritt is still there? Not the guy given the golden handshake in Jan?

I think you're thinking of Mark Wells. The guy who was the CEO who seemed to be nothing more than a puppet for Kirby to get around those pesky laws about not being chairman and CEO.

Also found it funny to hear his first thought on seeing Kirby's ramble was 'he's drunk'.

Mark Wells was at GW for 13 years as CEO and left in 2013. I don't think he was merely a "sock puppet".

Alan Merrett has been with GW for much longer, since the Bryan Ansell days in fact. He came to be Head of Intellectual Property and played a significant role in the still unresolved Chapter House case.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I think the HH books were consistently bestsellers from A Thousand Sons up until they started the hardcover releases.

I just felt the need to address this, as it gives a misleading impression of the books' popularity.

Out of all of these books, only three stayed on the NYT Bestseller list for two weeks, and none stayed on the list for any longer. This indicates that they had a strong fanbase that snapped up the books when they first came out, but never had any sort of broad market appeal.

 jonolikespie wrote:
Also found it funny to hear his first thought on seeing Kirby's ramble was 'he's drunk'.

To be fair, quite a few people had that reaction. :p

If that kind of book had a broad market appeal then Black Library would contribute more revenue. Last year Black Library, Forge World, digital sales and Warhammer World all put together contributed £14.48 M, which was 11.7% of the total.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
If that kind of book had a broad market appeal then Black Library would contribute more revenue. Last year Black Library, Forge World, digital sales and Warhammer World all put together contributed £14.48 M, which was 11.7% of the total.

I'd love to see a breakdown of these in % or British Pound Moneys.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
If that kind of book had a broad market appeal then Black Library would contribute more revenue. Last year Black Library, Forge World, digital sales and Warhammer World all put together contributed £14.48 M, which was 11.7% of the total.

Agreed.

The reason I addressed the comment was because of the context of broad market appeal and awareness of the GW WH40K IP. A comment had been made that it was unlikely that a company would buy the 40K IP to make movies or books, and someone responded with the fact that several of the HH books made the NYT Bestseller list. My point (which is largely supported by the revenue from the Black Library) was that these appearances on said list were blips and not indicative of sufficient broad market appeal to justify someone seeking ownership of said IP specifically for selling novels.

I don't think GW is smart enough to capitalize on the IP. They want people to buy the figures (and the terrain, and the RoB board) and that's it.

A smart thing would have been to keep around the clothing novelties, go into video games - imagine an Assassin's Creed (or even Metroid!) type of game with a Callidus Assassin (with gigantic breasts in a tight bodysuit, of course), a Halo-like Space Hulk game, a CoD-like game, etc. Do a virtualized 40k type of game, that lets you play 40k on the computer against others. A 40k MOBA. You get the idea.

They should have been milking this stuff for years to be more than just a tabletop game.

WayneTheGame wrote:
I don't think GW is smart enough to capitalize on the IP. They want people to buy the figures (and the terrain, and the RoB board) and that's it.

A smart thing would have been to keep around the clothing novelties, go into video games - imagine an Assassin's Creed (or even Metroid!) type of game with a Callidus Assassin (with gigantic breasts in a tight bodysuit, of course), a Halo-like Space Hulk game, a CoD-like game, etc. Do a virtualized 40k type of game, that lets you play 40k on the computer against others. A 40k MOBA. You get the idea.

They should have been milking this stuff for years to be more than just a tabletop game.

Indeed, their way of selling 40k is a bit dumb.
Have a look at the new SW codex. SW players will just buy the new models (flyers and the murder Dread) but generally nothing else. This is not much.

WayneTheGame wrote:
I don't think GW is smart enough to capitalize on the IP. They want people to buy the figures (and the terrain, and the RoB board) and that's it.

A smart thing would have been to keep around the clothing novelties, go into video games - imagine an Assassin's Creed (or even Metroid!) type of game with a Callidus Assassin (with gigantic breasts in a tight bodysuit, of course), a Halo-like Space Hulk game, a CoD-like game, etc. Do a virtualized 40k type of game, that lets you play 40k on the computer against others. A 40k MOBA. You get the idea.

They should have been milking this stuff for years to be more than just a tabletop game.

I do not believe the IP is all that strong, to be frank. Not wanting to rehash the arguments about provenance, but at heart WHFB and 40K both are rather derivative and do not have much in them to attract the general reader/viewer.

That said, I think is some hope that the new character Murderwolf, who murders people with his Murderclaws while in a frenzy of Murderlust, could ignite a much wider interest.

The degradation of the IP has actually lost some fans, I'm sure.