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@Torga_DW - I still don't think it's realistic to play MtG by buying $50 of cards and a booster a week, but your point is totally valid in that it is cheaper to get into. There are plenty of very casual players with horrible decks, too. In contrast, not so much in wargaming. The chances of fluking into an ultrarare are so minute if you only occasionally buy a pack here and there that you might as well buy scratch and win lotto tickets.

Incidentally, if someone looks at a DV box and thinks the assembly and painting is a hassle, i would suggest to then that they are probably better off with another game. 40k is vastly better for the person who goes, "sweet, I get 40+ models to put together and paint? What a deal!"

I guess, I'm saying if you view 40 models as 200 hours of entertainment (painting) suddenly, $100 seems super cheap -- that's $0.50 per hour. It's all what you get out of the box right? But in the life of a successful 40k army you need so many models (usually) that if you don't enjoy the process, the"work" to put together MPP will make you hate the system.

In contrast, if you enjoy it, every purchase gives you two ways to have fun.

Talys wrote:
@Seandrake - minotaurs and chimera (both the 40k one and the whfb one) are not marked as direct only on the Canadian site.

I know my store has the FB Chimera, as I almost bought it in boxing day

My store has told me, anything that isn't web-only exclusive they can order in. I don't know if it's regionally different.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Yodhrin wrote:
Beastmen: Minotaurs(plastic kit), Ungor(plastic kit).
Bretonnia: the whole range(inc plastic kits).
Dwarfs: Thunderers(plastic), Cannon(plastic.
Lizardmen: Terradon Riders(plastic).
Ogres: Leadbelchers, Ironguts, Gnoblar Fighters(all plastic).
Orcs & Gobbos: Goblin Regiment, Orc Boyz, Goblin Wolf Riders, Board Boyz, Savage Boar Boyz, Spider Riders(all plastic).
Skaven: Rat Ogres, Plague Monks, Night Runners(all plastic).
Empire: Archers, Knights, Militia, Handgunners, Cannon, Pistoliers, Steam Tank(all plastic).
Tomb Kings: Tomb Guard(plastic).
WoC: Tzeentch Sorcerer Lord(plastic clampack).
Wood Elves: Dryads, Glade Guard(both plastic).

Every last one of those kits - all plastic, all still in production - are direct-only. That's on top of the fact that all metal and finecast are also direct-only. And that's only Fantasy, it's barely any better for 40K - ffs, the basic box of Chaos Space Marines, as well as the new plastic Raptors box and the Bikers are direct-only.

You're totally off base on this one.

Ok, fair enough. I don't play and only loosely collect Fantasy. I just can't think of any 40k models that I've ever wanted in plastic that my store didn't have or couldn't get.

I'm not really sure if being web only is a measure of whether a kit is direct only? I thought it was, but that list includes a whole pile of kits that are NOT web only.

You can actually sort by web exclusive stuff, I note that in 40k there's Kroot Carnivores, Ravager, Falcon, Hellhound, Basilisk, Deff Rolla Battlewagon. There's also a few kits that come up when you sort by web exclusive but don't have the web exclusive sticker so might be an error, they are Warbikes and Lychguard.

By the way, my store has tons of Bretonia. Perhaps it's old stock as FB doesn't sell well.

Re: Chaos -- I certain won't argue that with you, but I'm sure I've seen basic Chaos SM on the shelf.

Edit - you are definitely wrong about basic CSM. I happen to be at a MtG tournament, and the store has a new box basic CSM, ordered after boxing day.

I don't think that's a good measure, I know my local store often has direct only stuff in stock. For whatever reason they occasionally order a few direct only things to put on the shelves.

Talys wrote:

 Psychopomp wrote:
By the way, my local store doesn't need help selling stuff. They stock things, have a lot of stock, and people come and buy things. Partly because they have a lot to look at and choose, partly because the price is good.

By any chance you talking J and J Superstore? It's the only store I can think of where it would have millions in stock or at least 1 million. Man that is a huge gaming store that only sells stuff.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
You can actually sort by web exclusive stuff, I note that in 40k there's Kroot Carnivores, Ravager, Falcon, Hellhound, Basilisk, Deff Rolla Battlewagon. There's also a few kits that come up when you sort by web exclusive but don't have the web exclusive sticker so might be an error, they are Warbikes and Lychguard.

You're probably right, and it's just my mistake. I guess I always just thought it of such, because mostly, the direct-only pieces I want are 40k unique characters, in metal or finecast, which happen to also be (largely) web-only. I suppose all web-only is also direct-only, but some direct-only can be bought at GW stores but not local stores -- and I just haven't run into any like that.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I don't think that's a good measure, I know my local store often has direct only stuff in stock. For whatever reason they occasionally order a few direct only things to put on the shelves.

Indeed. But this one had a sticker with list and discounted price at 17% off MSRP (the regular, walk-in discount for this store). On wierd stuff they get that's direct-only, the sticker price is the list price. Also, most of the direct only stuff (not everything, but almost everything) that I see in stores is in a plain box with no box art. It will often have a weird (cheap!), inkjet-like photocopy placeholder in the front, and it will be a plain box, with citadel logos and an address label with the SKU. Sometimes, the models that go in the larger boxes will come in a plain brown box, again, with a weird placeholder where there should be box art.

The funny thing is, the first time I saw one of these on a shelf, I thought it was a knockoff/recast

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

Maybe it's just because I do research for a living but I see too many giant gaping holes between equating GW's overall revenue and/or limited anecdotal data to any useful answer to the question of "how much has 40k really declined?".

I do research for a living as well. And the kind of research that I do tends to break a lot of rules, which would be concerning but for the consistency of results over 25 years of applied methodology.

You just have to appreciate the limitations of your data, which is what you are talking about. That said, what I will say in response is that hand-waiving what data you do have is just as bad as not appreciating the limitations of your data. There's always holes in the data. If there weren't, folks wouldn't get paid good money to draw meaningful interpretations from data.

For example, you don't know what percentage of GW's customers read internet forums. So dismissing data on that basis is inapposite. We do know, for example, that more than 10,000 people signed an online petition regarding GW's business practices. This was a petition primarily marketed on forums like this. You could start using that as a basis for inference, for example. You could draw on research related to the correlation between number of petition signatures and number of like-minded individuals. You could correlate that data with what data you do have regarding GW's unit sales.

I don't know what kind of research you do, but in the kind of research that I do, you have to use scattered fragments of information to work towards building a coherent picture. And context is important. For example, you mentioned that forum users are the 'enthusiast' subset of wargamers. Fine, but this would also suggest that these individuals spend far more than the average customer, meaning that the smaller sample size could have a disproportionate impact on GW's sales.

You also need to appreciate context. How many wargamers do I represent? Statistically speaking, I personally represent a heck of a lot more than one individual. How many lurkers are there for every active poster on DakkaDakka? How many individuals read the forum without ever becoming a registered user? How many individuals do my opinions impact? Am I talking to people in my local community? Am I talking to people who have never looked at an online forum?

Convention and tournament data are also, at the very least, objective data. As a researcher, how do you dismiss that without a proper context? For all you know, 80% of GW's player base in North America could attend tournaments. I just made that number up, but my point is that you can't say, "only 15% of individuals who play Warhammer 40K at least once per month attend a tournament." You can only speculate based on...supposition.

Countering inference with supposition is not terribly productive. I understand the point you were making, and that you weren't countering inference with supposition, per se. Nevertheless, I think my point is equally fair. Just because there are holes in the data doesn't mean you can't use it to make a reasonable inference. In my business, correlation is one factor that increases our confidence in results. When disparate analyses which in themselves are problematic from a research perspective produce similar results, there is something to that.

As I said, if you shook the magic 8-Ball, it would come up "Signs point to Yes" because the data are aligning in a similar direction. The 8-Ball wouldn't give you a standard deviation.

weeble1000 wrote:
As a researcher, how do you dismiss that without a proper context?

I don't dismiss it, I accept that I can't draw wild conclusions which would answer a question like "how much has 40k declined?"

If you asked, "do you think 40k has declined?", the answer would be "probably, GW has declined and 40k is a large part of GW, but we lack the data to know for sure".

If you asked, "how much has 40k has declined?", the answer would be "no fething idea, it might have even grown, we simply don't know".

A petition of 10,000 people would be less than 5% of GW's customer base by my rough estimate of GW's current revenue and what I think is a reasonable guess at what your average GW customer would spend. Include people who voted multiple times, include people who aren't currently GW's customers and take in to account most people voting are the enthusiast subset instead of the mainstream consumers and I find that data to be rather meaningless in the context of answering the question that was asked.

Yes, statistically if you grab a group of gamers you consider each one to represent a lot more than 1 individual... but you also have to take in to account the context of the gamers you are sampling and how they actually fit in to the wider gaming community. Limited scope opinion polls tell you less about the overall community and more about the specific people that you asked.

The entire North American market is less than 1 third of GW's revenue. A few less people turning up to a tournament or convention in a couple of cities is not meaningful in the context of answering the question that was asked.

Wargaming ebbs and flows, it varies massively from location to location and even within locations the demographics vary wildly, that makes anecdotal evidence of extremely limited use in answering a question like to what amount (if at all) 40k has declined. GW's revenue over the last few years has been dropping but still by a % low enough to not know which product lines have gone up or down or stayed the same.

We have data, sure, we have no data that actually useful for answering that question. You have failed to convince me otherwise

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

weeble1000 wrote:
As a researcher, how do you dismiss that without a proper context?

I don't dismiss it, I accept that I can't draw wild conclusions which would answer a question like "how much has 40k declined?"

If you asked, "do you think 40k has declined?", the answer would be "probably, GW has declined and 40k is a large part of GW, but we lack the data to know for sure".

If you asked, "how much has 40k has declined?", the answer would be "no fething idea, it might have even grown, we simply don't know".

A petition of 10,000 people would be less than 5% of GW's customer base by my rough estimate of GW's current revenue and what I think is a reasonable guess at what your average GW customer would spend. Include people who voted multiple times, include people who aren't currently GW's customers and take in to account most people voting are the enthusiast subset instead of the mainstream consumers and I find that data to be rather meaningless in the context of answering the question that was asked.

Yes, statistically if you grab a group of gamers you consider each one to represent a lot more than 1 individual... but you also have to take in to account the context of the gamers you are sampling and how they actually fit in to the wider gaming community. Limited scope opinion polls tell you less about the overall community and more about the specific people that you asked.

The entire North American market is less than 1 third of GW's revenue. A few less people turning up to a tournament or convention in a couple of cities is not meaningful in the context of answering the question that was asked.

Wargaming ebbs and flows, it varies massively from location to location and even within locations the demographics vary wildly, that makes anecdotal evidence of extremely limited use in answering a question like to what amount (if at all) 40k has declined. GW's revenue over the last few years has been dropping but still by a % low enough to not know which product lines have gone up or down or stayed the same.

We have data, sure, we have no data that actually useful for answering that question. You have failed to convince me otherwise

But you are not responding with any data more reliable than what I was talking about. Moreover you are applying a 'standard of proof' that is impossible to achieve, and using that unreasonably high standard to undermine reasonable inference.

You infer when you do not know. Entire academic disciplines are based on making reasonable inferences.

We have data that supports a reasonable inference that 40K sales are in decline, and by a not insignificant amount. For example, we know how many limited edition sets of the 6th ed rulebook were sold and how quickly those units sold. We likewise know the number of limited edition sets of the 7th ed rulebook. That data lines up with dropoffs in revenue, dropoffs in stock levels, increasing prices, decreasing event attendance, and the rise of anecdotal accounts of a declining player base in multiple regions and across the breadth of those regions.

I mean, come on, you have events from one end of North America to the other reporting remarkably consistent declines in 40K event attendance. Is there some kind of coast of coast shift away from the 40K tournament scene unrelated to customers generally buying less and playing less? That data can't be easily or even reasonably explained away by localized conditions. Did the grand pooh-bah of 40K in every major US city from New York to LA rage quit the tournament circuit to start a 40K home gaming renaissance?

All of that data points in the same direction. It is reasonable to infer that less people buying Warhammer 40K and less people playing Warhammer 40K results in declining sales of Warhammer 40K products.

To infer otherwise would be unreasonable because A) there is far less data that supports such an inference, and B) you'd have to accept a scenario that largely contradicts the extant available data. Sure, it could be that WHFB is in such extreme decline that it alone accounts for more than five years of consistently declining sales. It could be that GW is selling less paint, fewer Black Library novels, fewer Forge World products....but....

That's right, I remember now, GW appears to be selling more Black Library products, more Forge World products, and increasing licensing revenue. If Black Library is up, Forge World is up, and licensing is up, where is GW losing tens of millions of dollars of revenue other than Warhammer 40K? If we know that GW is losing a portion of valuable, repeat customers based upon objective data, where is the data that shows how GW is making up those losses?

That's how you make an inference. And if you can show me data that contradicts that inference, fine, but all you have done is demonstrate how this bit of data and that bit of data don't come packaged with a mathematical guarantee. That's quite beside the point.

You will never have the data to know "for sure," so why hold that up as a standard when it induces you to discount data that has been correlating nice and consistently for half a decade?

I've found the discourse between allseeingskink and weeble1000 really fascinating, thank you both for sharing your views.

Also polite, which is to be congratulated.

To get back to the main topic, the evidence is clear that there has been a further decline in sales though not large.

Does it matter which part of GW's product range is affected?

I would say yes, in the sense that it influences how GW will respond. If there were losses in all sections, I would imagine that could be disregarded by the higher echelons as an adverse financial environment, whereas deficits in particular area would indicate there is something 'wrong' with that recipe, and result in the kind of shake up WHFB seems to have on the cards.The speculation/rumours surrounding WHFB seemingly indicates that GW intends to alter what it sees as a losing pony, into a closer cousin of a more profitable 40k.

I have no experience in this field, so before you give what I've said any stock, take a trip to the local coastline, bottle some water, bring it home and put it in a saucepan, evaporate until dry. Apply resultant salt and fish urine residue to the part of your screen that my comment occupies. Repeat as necessary.

I guess it depends how you define large. The first half of this year was worse than the first half of last year. As for product ranges, the rumour said fantasy was selling at 8%. Going by statements from a previous annual report, lord of the rings isn't doing too well. As a guess, i'd say it would sell at or less (probably less) than fantasy. The only other product gw makes is 40k. Proportionately, i would expect 40k to have lost the most sales.

Or: People have access to a greater range of games than ever before and social media/ internet use/kickstarter has made it easier for exposure to these games to happen, coupled with many competitor companies offering free access to rules or rules included with models, that lowers the price barrier to entry and increases impulse purchase chances. Whilst Games a Workshop had made it harder to obtain their product and decreased social media and internet interaction.

Price barrier to entry is the killer as the starters only help if you want those factions.

But you are not responding with any data more reliable than what I was talking about.

I don't need to, I only need to point out that there are gaping massive holes in your data or that your data is vastly too incomplete to draw conclusions, as that was the thrust of my initial point: we can't answer the question "how much has 40k declined?"

I also note that in this exchange you have not attempted to answer that question. Just how much has 40k declined since pre-LOTR days? You can discuss the (limited) data all you want, but all you are proving is that data exists, not that it can be used to answer the question, which was my whole point.

weeble1000 wrote:
You infer when you do not know. Entire academic disciplines are based on making reasonable inferences.

Key word there being reasonable. If you can find enough realistic alternate solutions other than the one being hypothesized, I'd say it's not reasonable.

Almost all your data only applies to the enthusiast subset of 40k gamers. Event attendance is down? Only enthusiast gamers go to events. Limited edition sales are down? Mostly it's enthusiast gamers buy limited editions. Tournament attendance is down? The tournament scene is TINY compared to the casual scene. There's lots of complaints on internet forums? Only enthusiast gamers even bother with internet forums. An online petition got 10k signatures? Only enthusiast gamers would have been on the forums to see it.

When all your anecdotal data only falls in to only 1 or 2 demographics and those demographics only make up a tiny proportion of overall gamers any conclusions you draw cannot be considered reliable when considering overall and global trends

You will never have the data to know "for sure," so why hold that up as a standard when it induces you to discount data that has been correlating nice and consistently for half a decade?

Because you not only don't have enough data "to be sure" you don't have enough data to make any reasonable guess that would answer the question "how much has 40k declined". Even if you want to say "well it's probably declined" that still doesn't answer the question that was asked.

I can come up with plenty of possibilities as to why any of your data is too spurious to make any reasonable assumption. Revenue is down? Well we also have reason to believe WHFB is down, if WHFB was 25% of the revenue of 40k around 2007 and 40k is around half of total revenue. If WHFB has halved (or significantly reduced) in popularity in that time, that's enough to account for the less than 2% decline in revenue since 2009. Tournament and event attendance for 40k is down? So what? That could as equally mean a shift in demographics as much as it could mean a decline, it's a long jump between tournament and event attendance and making any assumptions about what the average gamer spends on 40k and how many gamers there still are out there.

It is totally reasonable to think the data we have cannot answer the question "how much has 40k declined since pre LOTR days?".

If you feel otherwise then I think we'll just have to call it a day and agree to disagree because I feel perfectly justified in saying the very limited evidence I've read and that you've presented is insufficient to answer the burning question of quantitatively evaluating 40k's performance over the past 15 years.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

Talys wrote:
@Seandrake - minotaurs and chimera (both the 40k one and the whfb one) are not marked as direct only on the Canadian site.

I know my store has the FB Chimera, as I almost bought it in boxing day

My store has told me, anything that isn't web-only exclusive they can order in. I don't know if it's regionally different.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Yodhrin wrote:
Beastmen: Minotaurs(plastic kit), Ungor(plastic kit).
Bretonnia: the whole range(inc plastic kits).
Dwarfs: Thunderers(plastic), Cannon(plastic.
Lizardmen: Terradon Riders(plastic).
Ogres: Leadbelchers, Ironguts, Gnoblar Fighters(all plastic).
Orcs & Gobbos: Goblin Regiment, Orc Boyz, Goblin Wolf Riders, Board Boyz, Savage Boar Boyz, Spider Riders(all plastic).
Skaven: Rat Ogres, Plague Monks, Night Runners(all plastic).
Empire: Archers, Knights, Militia, Handgunners, Cannon, Pistoliers, Steam Tank(all plastic).
Tomb Kings: Tomb Guard(plastic).
WoC: Tzeentch Sorcerer Lord(plastic clampack).
Wood Elves: Dryads, Glade Guard(both plastic).

Every last one of those kits - all plastic, all still in production - are direct-only. That's on top of the fact that all metal and finecast are also direct-only. And that's only Fantasy, it's barely any better for 40K - ffs, the basic box of Chaos Space Marines, as well as the new plastic Raptors box and the Bikers are direct-only.

You're totally off base on this one.

Ok, fair enough. I don't play and only loosely collect Fantasy. I just can't think of any 40k models that I've ever wanted in plastic that my store didn't have or couldn't get.

I'm not really sure if being web only is a measure of whether a kit is direct only? I thought it was, but that list includes a whole pile of kits that are NOT web only.

You can actually sort by web exclusive stuff, I note that in 40k there's Kroot Carnivores, Ravager, Falcon, Hellhound, Basilisk, Deff Rolla Battlewagon. There's also a few kits that come up when you sort by web exclusive but don't have the web exclusive sticker so might be an error, they are Warbikes and Lychguard.

By the way, my store has tons of Bretonia. Perhaps it's old stock as FB doesn't sell well.

Re: Chaos -- I certain won't argue that with you, but I'm sure I've seen basic Chaos SM on the shelf.

Edit - you are definitely wrong about basic CSM. I happen to be at a MtG tournament, and the store has a new box basic CSM, ordered after boxing day.

I don't think that's a good measure, I know my local store often has direct only stuff in stock. For whatever reason they occasionally order a few direct only things to put on the shelves.

I got that list by going to Element Games, going through each individual army, and noting down all the entries which had "this product is no longer being distributed by Games Workshop" as the reason why it was unavailable. I was mistaken about the CSM though, my fault, I didn't notice the range had been reboxed since the release of the Raptors, and the new boxes are available.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

Almost all your data only applies to the enthusiast subset of 40k gamers. Event attendance is down? Only enthusiast gamers go to events. Limited edition sales are down? Mostly it's enthusiast gamers buy limited editions. Tournament attendance is down? The tournament scene is TINY compared to the casual scene. There's lots of complaints on internet forums? Only enthusiast gamers even bother with internet forums. An online petition got 10k signatures? Only enthusiast gamers would have been on the forums to see it.

First, you don't actually know that. So if we are poking holes in inferences, all of these are inferences with massive holes in them. Second, you can absolutely draw reasonable inferences from small, statistically insignificant sample sizes, even though it contradicts a lot of rules regarding statistical analysis.

I regularly conduct research with groups of 20-40 participants and generalize out to populations of entire federal judicial districts with millions of registered jurors. I just ran a research project with less than 20 participants for a case in the Southern District of New York which has over five million residents. I ran a swath of statistical analyses on the resulting data that would have been largely meaningless without intensive qualitative analysis.

In short, listening to what people say is very useful. Did the three Black/African American participants in my research project reliably represent the million+ Black/African Americans residents of the district? From a statistical standpoint, no. Could there have been a slew of different factors that account for their responses from recruitment methodology to the way I greeted the participants? Absolutely.

Does that mean I ignore what those three people have to say? Hell no. Does that mean I don't draw the type of inferences from these data that I use to advise clients in billion dollar litigation? Absolutely not.

Do I think the type of wargamer that posts on internet forums is significantly different from the wargamer that does not? No. Are there differences, sure. Are there meaningful differences, sure. Are there such fundamental differences as to completely disassociate one from the other? I don't think that is reasonable. Most people aren't terribly different, and wargaming is a very small hobby in the grand scheme of things.

On a personal note, I have almost 2,000 posts on DakkaDakka and probably less than 100 posts on non-wargaming forums on the entirety of the internet. I spend an average of 30 minute per day on my mobile device, which is two hours less than the average American. People fit much better when you put them into larger buckets.

 agnosto wrote:

This:

I asked the staff and they were only allocated a few boxes. Did I run off to the nearest GW store or GW's webstore? Nah, I just bought some more Infinity because it was right there in front of me.

Was my point earlier. The whole, "We're super-exclusive" attitude that GW's developed while actually just failing to properly manage their inventories has resulted in a great deal of lost revenue.

Funny, because when the Wood Elves released my local GW had the same issue of being understocked.
They got allocated four boxes of Wildwood Rangers/Eternal Guard, no Araloths, two Treeman boxes, and three boxes of Sisters of the Thorn/Wild Riders.

Fantasy stuff tends to get understocked, period, here in the US. It's not exclusive to independents.

weeble1000 wrote:
*snip*

No offence intended but you still haven't even attempted to answer the question, how much has 40k declined since pre LOTR days? You can talk about how data is useful yet you haven't actually attempted to use it to answer the question.

I won't deny that limited data can be useful. I won't deny that you can draw some educated guesses from limited data. I do it all the time when clients ask me questions I RARELY have all the data necessary to give them a full answer, my answer is usually "well the data looks like this, unfortunately we don't know what's going on fully because of these factors, but based on my experience I think this region here is where you want to try and work in order to improve things". People don't pay me to BS them, giving them definite answers to questions I don't have the data to support in a meaningful way.

You said it yourself:

Did the three Black/African American participants in my research project reliably represent the million+ Black/African Americans residents of the district? From a statistical standpoint, no.

I never said you should ignore what people are saying on forums, I never said you shouldn't take in to account petitions, I never said tournament/event attendance is not significant, I never even said that it's not worth paying attention to enthusiasts...

...what I said... all I said... we can't answer the question "How much has 40k declined since X period in time?" and all those things you suggested are a far cry from answering that question.

Of course all those other things are worth looking at and discussing in their own right (well duh) they simply are too insufficient to answer the burning question of quantitatively evaluating 40k's performance over the past 15 years.

Not sure if it will influence the discussion - but based off the data leaked in the CHS case...

Total sales of the items listed increased (in dollars) 28% from 2004 to 2011. Total average cost for the items which were leaked increased 46% during the same time period.

While many might argue that that doesn't mean anything at all - it is a pretty straight line to draw that if you increase the cost of a product by X and the sales don't also increase by X - then it is highly likely that you are selling fewer of them.

Considering the general split of how GW sells things (online, GW stores, independents) has remained fairly steady, you could even infer the actual units sold...or at least the rate change of units sold per item listed.

It didn't cover everything - but it was a rather large sampling of the 40K catalog. For the things which were covered, it had the important things - to include things like the Codices (a big indicator) and troops choices (another big indicator) and many vehicles (somewhat less of a big indicator...especially since I think there might have been a bit of the Edition rules Tomfoolery going on with them...and they still dropped...).

Granted, the question at hand (pre-LotR to present) isn't quite covered by the data set. It catches the tail end of things there, and doesn't quite come all the way to here. We do know that things really haven't been looking too much better for GW since 2011 (considering 3 consecutive reports of dropping profits...). Also don't have the data before...though, everything else was more or less headed up at the time.

It isn't quite enough to say on its own that 40K has dropped 25-30% in terms of units sold in the last 15 years, not definitively at least. However, it does make the odds of that statement being true better than the odds of that statement being false.
____________________________________

Actually - I should scratch that...or at least amend it. They may not have dropped at all from 2000. They might be dead flat back to the same levels they were at around that time period. Though, if things were going up...and now they are not...that would generally be the point of the discussion as opposed to a specific point to point comparison.

Do you mean this list, Sean?

http://www.thefieldsofblood.com/2013/04/the-sales-life-of-warhammer-rules.html

It is interesting to look at however it's hard to say much from it because you have to go through each book and see when it was released. I think it's talking about financial years rather than calendar years. The Imperial Guard codex was new in 2004 FY, As far as I can see (I might have missed it) there are no publications on that list that were actually released in 2011FY. There's also a lot of products that aren't on the list that might skew results if you tried to add them up, but if you look at individual products you have to take in to account varying popularity of armies.

Probably more useful to get out of that data is that 4th ed sold $138k in the first 3 years, 5th sold $148k.

I'm not sure if those numbers are US only or global, but if you divide them by the relative prices of the rulebooks that might give some indication of the drop from 4th to 5th, but that's only a 4 year window from 2005 to 2009 and again it's only looking at the rulebook so you have to ask yourself if rulebook sales alone (and possibly US only?) is an indicator of global trends of 40k as a whole. You'd also need to know whether it's USA or global before you do any normalising and if it's US only you have to remember the US is less than a third of overall revenue.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 agnosto wrote:

This:

I asked the staff and they were only allocated a few boxes. Did I run off to the nearest GW store or GW's webstore? Nah, I just bought some more Infinity because it was right there in front of me.

Was my point earlier. The whole, "We're super-exclusive" attitude that GW's developed while actually just failing to properly manage their inventories has resulted in a great deal of lost revenue.

Funny, because when the Wood Elves released my local GW had the same issue of being understocked.
They got allocated four boxes of Wildwood Rangers/Eternal Guard, no Araloths, two Treeman boxes, and three boxes of Sisters of the Thorn/Wild Riders.

Fantasy stuff tends to get understocked, period, here in the US. It's not exclusive to independents.

I think perhaps you thought my point was that independent stockists received less product than GW's own stores which isn't the case. I was inferring that the company is striving to cut costs by managing the amount of unsold inventory in warehouses etc but all they effectively did was ensure that customers who want to buy their product are unable to. Product unavailable = lower sales volume = lower earnings.

Interestingly, to me anyway, my wife works in the international logistics department for a fair!y large international supplier of cell phone parts for about 12 years. I talked to her about the inventory side of things, since that is where her experience is, and she laughed and said it sounds like very poor planning and management of raw and finished goods. It can be a bit of a dance but if you have an idea of who your customers are and what they want, you can manage levels quite well. If you're missing data, you build large cushions in the amount of raw and finished product that you order and prepare for distribution.

My thought/fear is that the folks running GW are too concerned with cutting costs and the result is that they are losing sales volume due to being unable to meet demand. Demand appears to be higher than GW corporate thinks it is and they seem to be misgauging it repeatedly. The primary culprit is their lack of market research and apparent inability to adjust orders for finished product from their manufacturing division to accommodate. Proudly not performing the most rudimentary of market research is a concern here because if you know what your customers want, you're not surprised by demand levels....

I think the problem with the orders is that the boxes are made overseas with quite a long lead time, so even though they have in house plastic production, they can't actually ramp up to meet demand. That coupled with no research presumably leads them to being pessimistic when ordering things.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Do you mean this list, Sean?

Yes, but mostly no (BTW - I was the one who actually compiled that chart out of the data - compiled quickly before the list was redacted for those who missed it). That is the rulebook portion of the list. The full list is several pages long (for the GW 40K data). All told, there were around 100-150 different 40K items listed in addition to several dozen pages of other sales data. I would need to dig back through to find the original document (hundreds of files with thousands of pages and unfortunately, it doesn't interest me quite enough to do that right now).

And yes, I have already collated the list by release month and prices, fiscal year, price increase dates. It tends to show trends throughout (including the core rules sales that you have noted) where the change in sales do not follow the change in pricing (as I mentioned above...). When you normalize the pricing and compare it that way - the newer releases also drop off faster than the old (indicating that following the release spike, fewer copies are sold in subsequent years).

In terms of the other questions...it is US only. I would say that yes, rulebook sales are a good indicator of popularity. Based off from other information available, I would say that US trends can be extended globally (for 40K...). You also have to remember that the US accounts for about 1/3 of overall revenue but almost 1/2 of 40K revenue (due to WFB and LotR being much less popular in the US than 40K...would need to double check, but IIRC the last time I had calculated it it was around 40-50% of global 40K sales...).

That would be more useful data to have than anything else I've seen, though I imagine it would still be easily skewed by the creeping release cycle.

I would think rulebook sales are a reasonably good indicator as well, I bring it up as a point though because they've always been quite easy to pirate (you can get recasts and whatnot as well, but the rulebook is exceptionally easy to pirate even before the digital editions) and often people keep playing older editions. I don't necessarily think the performance of the 7th ed rulebook would be a good indicator of 40k's overall strength because I imagine a lot of 40k players would not buy it, but 4th to 5th I'd think it's a better measure. But even going back to 2nd edition, I played a lot of 2nd edition but never owned a rulebook, a couple of people in my gaming group owned copies and we just shared.

I wasn't aware the USA was a larger slice of the 40k market, where did you obtain that data? Though it does seem odd to me, if 40k in total is 50% of revenue and the USA is half of the global 40k market then 25% of total revenue would be from 40k in the USA alone, but the USA in total is only about 30%. It would also imply that the lack of popularity of WHFB and LOTR is not a global phenomenon at all and they would have to really rival 40k in a lot of locations... I find it odd then that GW would be so eager to snub WHFB and LOTR when they would have data showing entire regions where it is very popular.

In 2011, 40k was roughly 50% of US sales. The last numbers I have were more recent than that, and put it around 70%. Globally at the time of those numbers, 40k accounted for roughly 50% of total sales. US about 33% of total sales...

So, 70% of 33% is 25% (very roughly...). 25% of the whole, 50% of the 40k slice (at airport right now...so pulling up the exact figures is more difficult).

In terms of WFB and LOTR...they are down around 35% combined globally. LOTR carries royalties. They have been scrambling to figure out how to save WFB. Won't work here, wrong aesthetic. In much of Europe though, WFB is closer to 40k in terms of sales.

And there's an interesting question as to whether and to what degree the robust competitive 40K scene in the US contributed to the relative popularity of 40K in the North American market.

Talys wrote:
My store has told me, anything that isn't web-only exclusive they can order in. I don't know if it's regionally different.

Independents can order the "direct only" items, but don't get full trade discount. I don't recall what they do get, but its significantly worse.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
That would be more useful data to have than anything else I've seen, though I imagine it would still be easily skewed by the creeping release cycle.

I would think rulebook sales are a reasonably good indicator as well, I bring it up as a point though because they've always been quite easy to pirate (you can get recasts and whatnot as well, but the rulebook is exceptionally easy to pirate even before the digital editions) and often people keep playing older editions. I don't necessarily think the performance of the 7th ed rulebook would be a good indicator of 40k's overall strength because I imagine a lot of 40k players would not buy it, but 4th to 5th I'd think it's a better measure. But even going back to 2nd edition, I played a lot of 2nd edition but never owned a rulebook, a couple of people in my gaming group owned copies and we just shared.

I wasn't aware the USA was a larger slice of the 40k market, where did you obtain that data? Though it does seem odd to me, if 40k in total is 50% of revenue and the USA is half of the global 40k market then 25% of total revenue would be from 40k in the USA alone, but the USA in total is only about 30%. It would also imply that the lack of popularity of WHFB and LOTR is not a global phenomenon at all and they would have to really rival 40k in a lot of locations... I find it odd then that GW would be so eager to snub WHFB and LOTR when they would have data showing entire regions where it is very popular.

In addition to the above...

Easy to pirate now, largely equals easy to pirate then. If we were comparing numbers from say...1996 to 2006 - then the difference in rates of pirating would be more significant, however things like torrents have been fairly mature for the duration of the data set. Same applies for the number of people who don't own a book. Granted, the higher price point of the items may have a greater impact on the final decision to borrow a book from friends/family versus purchasing your own copy, but since other data is in the same direction - I am inclined to believe the general percentage of players who buy versus borrow is about the same over time. You would likely see a greater impact on optional rulebook sales though. In the past (4th and earlier) it was quite common for people to own every Codex released - even if they didn't play the army. Opposition research or whatever. As Codex costs increased though, it is likely that fewer people are still doing that - and subsequently reducing the overall sales on those items.

The UK is really the stronghold of WFB players. There it is pretty close to even footing with 40K. Mainland Europe (apparently Germany in particular) is also pretty close. Based on the information I have been able to obtain, Australia and Canada are much closer to the US in terms of WFB versus 40K.

 Sean_OBrien wrote:

Mainland Europe (apparently Germany in particular) is also pretty close. Based on the information I have been able to obtain, Australia and Canada are much closer to the US in terms of WFB versus 40K.

Prior to 8th edition, yes, you would be right, WHFB had a massive following.

Post 8th edition? Nope. WHFB practically disappeared from the face of the earth.

 keezus wrote:

Talys wrote:
My store has told me, anything that isn't web-only exclusive they can order in. I don't know if it's regionally different.

Independents can order the "direct only" items, but don't get full trade discount. I don't recall what they do get, but its significantly worse.

I think I was told a year or so ago that it was somewhere in the 10-20% range (possibly closer to 10%), which means the retailer pretty much can't discount the item if they want to make a profit.

PhantomViper wrote:

 Sean_OBrien wrote:

Mainland Europe (apparently Germany in particular) is also pretty close. Based on the information I have been able to obtain, Australia and Canada are much closer to the US in terms of WFB versus 40K.

Prior to 8th edition, yes, you would be right, WHFB had a massive following.

Post 8th edition? Nope. WHFB practically disappeared from the face of the earth.

It said Mainland Europe, not the bottom left corner!