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 Kilkrazy wrote:
If you are right it is ironic that some of the changes of the past five years in Fantasy are being applied to 40K as well, and we have been seeing much wailing and gnashing of teeth by erstwhile 40K players, and GW's sales have been falling year on year for a couple of years now.

For my money it was the introduction of £30 hardback codexes that did it.

Precisely, same for us. We don't consider paying a good amount of money for a product that is so poorly done. If their codices were well-written and it they actually put some effort into it, then yes, we'd gladly pay for them. But such shoddy work does not deserve the insane prices they ask for. Yarrrrrrrrrrr.

They should publish a solid / exciting set rules & codexes, at a sensible price. The idea being to make gamers want to buy more models or try out another army. In fact you could class them as a 'lost leader'. Get gamers interested in wanting more stuff. They are currently charging a premium price for something that is in no way worth the price.

 Wolfstan wrote:
They should publish a solid / exciting set rules & codexes, at a sensible price. The idea being to make gamers want to buy more models or try out another army. In fact you could class them as a 'lost leader'. Get gamers interested in wanting more stuff. They are currently charging a premium price for something that is in no way worth the price.

Exactly this. The issue is that the rules are poor relatively speaking; some people might still find them fun but personally I want rules that are clear and don't require negotiations prior to playing. Couple that with a business strategy that seems to be offer as few as possible for as much as possible (I have no doubt they wouldn't sell a Tactical Squad at 5 for $40 if they didn't think there would be a cataclysmic backlash to it) and on top of that constantly push out things.

The idea of dataslates and supplements isn't a bad one if it was used to expand things that had to be cut from the books or just explore other things (e.g. different theme forces for example Chaos Legions or cults, different Craftworlds or Tau Septs), but not at the price they're asking (seriously, why is a supplement the same price as a full codex for half as much content?) and not when they do it seemingly with no rhyme or reason.

They've pretty much resorted to snake oil salesmen tactics, trying to milk the rubes out of as much cash as possible before the jig is up and they have to get out of town before the lynch mob forms up.

Another thing they've done in the past few years which is a real shame is get rid of all the great hobby content that used to be on their website. This content was produced and therefore any cost is already paid, and it just had to sit there, taking up a very small amount of space, but ADDING VALUE to the product for customers.

Paying premium prices for minis is less painful if other things are set up so that the miniatures you sell have more value than miniatures of other companies, for intangible reasons like better support in terms of guides, background information, and general hobbying support. Getting people enthused about gaming through terrain articles, painting articles and background is a cheap and effective way of getting them to buy miniatures. But GW scrapped all of that work for pretty much no reason. It makes no sense to me at all, and it's a tremendous shame.

I think the main reasons I personally buy less 40K than I once did are the prices getting to an unjustifiable point for casual expense, their retail stores being pushy, spending too much time on Dakka and taking in the negativity like a hate sponge and not having anyone to play with since moving to London.

 Da Boss wrote:
Another thing they've done in the past few years which is a real shame is get rid of all the great hobby content that used to be on their website. This content was produced and therefore any cost is already paid, and it just had to sit there, taking up a very small amount of space, but ADDING VALUE to the product for customers.

Paying premium prices for minis is less painful if other things are set up so that the miniatures you sell have more value than miniatures of other companies, for intangible reasons like better support in terms of guides, background information, and general hobbying support. Getting people enthused about gaming through terrain articles, painting articles and background is a cheap and effective way of getting them to buy miniatures. But GW scrapped all of that work for pretty much no reason. It makes no sense to me at all, and it's a tremendous shame.

Yeah.. I fondly remember modeling/painting/collecting articles on the website. And then they took them all down, presumably because they figured why are we giving this for free when we can charge $30 for a digital "How to Paint X" book instead...

There used to be How To Paint Citadel Miniatures and How To Build Wargames Terrain books by GW. They dumped those product lines years ago.

The painting articles and books were based on the paint sets two paint sets ago. With the colors changing, and then the colors and the types of paints changing, the old material wasn't as helpful anymore to people who didn't know how to paint or didn't have a bunch of old paints sitting around like people are leading on.

The terrain book sadly was a casualty of GW making the terrain kits.

 ClockworkZion wrote:
The painting articles and books were based on the paint sets two paint sets ago. With the colors changing, and then the colors and the types of paints changing, the old material wasn't as helpful anymore to people who didn't know how to paint or didn't have a bunch of old paints sitting around like people are leading on.

The terrain book sadly was a casualty of GW making the terrain kits.

They couldn't have kept them with a big note that said that the colors used were from a previous paint range and therefore wouldn't match exactly with the new one, but could provide inspiration? They had to not only remove but actually delete the pages entirely?

When you been in business for so long you can always smell something foul going on. After 2006 they went down the rabbit hole of Greed. I take much pleasure in seeing this company becoming a shadow of it's former self. I also take much satisfaction of shoving GW corporate ideology into the apologists faces. Where is your God now?

OH! Just love the there stock prices at this moment of time. Does not quite reflect (to me) the actual cost of the share.

But it is getting awfully close though.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
There used to be How To Paint Citadel Miniatures and How To Build Wargames Terrain books by GW. They dumped those product lines years ago.

...and those were damn good books. Still got a copy of the terrain book.

WayneTheGame wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
The painting articles and books were based on the paint sets two paint sets ago. With the colors changing, and then the colors and the types of paints changing, the old material wasn't as helpful anymore to people who didn't know how to paint or didn't have a bunch of old paints sitting around like people are leading on.

The terrain book sadly was a casualty of GW making the terrain kits.

They couldn't have kept them with a big note that said that the colors used were from a previous paint range and therefore wouldn't match exactly with the new one, but could provide inspiration? They had to not only remove but actually delete the pages entirely?

I'm not claiming that nothing could be done with them to make them work (hell, I'd love it if they'd archive the Paint Splatter articles from WD on there at least) but why they pulled what was out there. With the new paints the approach they used to teach people to paint is simpler and still gets a great tabletop look so I'm willing to bet that's the other reason it was dropped.

Even if it hadn't been dropped sooner it's likely that we'd end up losing them when the site was revamped.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
There used to be How To Paint Citadel Miniatures and How To Build Wargames Terrain books by GW. They dumped those product lines years ago.

I have both those old books, they are awesome, and I really wanted to do all the stuff in the terrain book, but I never found the time or resources.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Adam LongWalker wrote:
When you been in business for so long you can always smell something foul going on. After 2006 they went down the rabbit hole of Greed. I take much pleasure in seeing this company becoming a shadow of it's former self. I also take much satisfaction of shoving GW corporate ideology into the apologists faces. Where is your God now?

OH! Just love the there stock prices at this moment of time. Does not quite reflect (to me) the actual cost of the share.

But it is getting awfully close though.

Oh yeah, gak you m8, just saying spiteful stuff about GW is pointless on such a thread.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
There used to be How To Paint Citadel Miniatures and How To Build Wargames Terrain books by GW. They dumped those product lines years ago.

They have now tons of "how to paint this" or "how to paint that unit", check the digital editions. The tutorials are pretty basic and you can do much better with free stuff on this here forum, but yeah, they haven't stopped that stuff.
As for Terrain - you are not supposed to build your terrain anymore. You are supposed to buy GW terrain, battleboards and whatnot.

 Sigvatr wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
There used to be How To Paint Citadel Miniatures and How To Build Wargames Terrain books by GW. They dumped those product lines years ago.

...and those were damn good books. Still got a copy of the terrain book.

Me too. It is actually a really good book on how to build terrain out of easily found, cheap materials.

As someone said above, these days "Terrain building" means buying a GW terrain kit.

Terrain building really died (not that it was doing so hot before this happened) with GW's new rule of "no rules if no model kit" making it so that unless they had a kit of some kind they would/could not put something out for it.

It's dumb, but at the same time I can at least see the logic behind it (unlike some things they do).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kosake wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
There used to be How To Paint Citadel Miniatures and How To Build Wargames Terrain books by GW. They dumped those product lines years ago.

They have now tons of "how to paint this" or "how to paint that unit", check the digital editions. The tutorials are pretty basic and you can do much better with free stuff on this here forum, but yeah, they haven't stopped that stuff.
As for Terrain - you are not supposed to build your terrain anymore. You are supposed to buy GW terrain, battleboards and whatnot.

They're doing faction specific painting books now too. Space Wolves, Tyranids and Dark Eldar all got books.

The funny thing about removing the painting articles is that GW spent some obscene amount of money designing a website that nobody ever wants to visit. Look at the website for MTG, where you'll find daily articles about game design, new releases, recent tournaments, etc. Even if you aren't trying to make an immediate purchase you still have reasons to keep going back to the website, and that keeps the MTG brand fresh in your mind. But somehow GW fails to see the benefit of having people visit their website frequently, and even the limited blogs and articles they used to have are gone. So now, unless you're buying a specific product, you'll never visit their store and you'll never have an opportunity to think "hey, I could buy one of these" while you're there.

Last two visions have no paint splatter either, they removed them.

Well like I have said before the ultimate expression of Teh GW HHHobby is that users log on to the GW web site and spend money.

They don't get sent any products, they just spend the money.

-

 Kilkrazy wrote:
... How To Build Wargames Terrain books...

Well now they sell the terrain, so why teach you how to make innovative terrain out of various household items when they can just sell you another skull-encrusted tower?

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Well like I have said before the ultimate expression of Teh GW HHHobby is that users log on to the GW web site and spend money.

They don't get sent any products, they just spend the money.

Surely the ultimate expression of the GW hhhobby is they help themselves to your cash and tell you what you would have bought?

GW is a company that doesn't truly understand its own success beyond knowing their customers and fans have an almost addicted relationship with them. GW saw what FFG and FW were doing and it tried to imitate them without understanding their success. This is why we have superficially "high production value" hardback codices, with the same standards of writing as before.

Accessibility is what gets people into a hobby, quality of the experience is what keeps them their. GW doesn't understand that cost diminishes the experience. There is an emotional and experiential enrichment to every hobby and GW has eroded that by nickel and dime-ing the experience and by making the hobby less accessible for the sake of premium branding.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Azreal13 wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Well like I have said before the ultimate expression of Teh GW HHHobby is that users log on to the GW web site and spend money.

They don't get sent any products, they just spend the money.

Surely the ultimate expression of the GW hhhobby is they help themselves to your cash and tell you what you would have bought?

I agree with Kilkrazy. I think Black Library's sale of desktop wallpaper exemplifies this drive.

 aka_mythos wrote:
GW is a company that doesn't truly understand its own success beyond knowing their customers and fans have an almost addicted relationship with them. GW saw what FFG and FW were doing and it tried to imitate them without understanding their success. This is why we have superficially "high production value" hardback codices, with the same standards of writing as before.

Accessibility is what gets people into a hobby, quality of the experience is what keeps them their. GW doesn't understand that cost diminishes the experience. There is an emotional and experiential enrichment to every hobby and GW has eroded that by nickel and dime-ing the experience and by making the hobby less accessible for the sake of premium branding.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Azreal13 wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Well like I have said before the ultimate expression of Teh GW HHHobby is that users log on to the GW web site and spend money.

They don't get sent any products, they just spend the money.

Surely the ultimate expression of the GW hhhobby is they help themselves to your cash and tell you what you would have bought?

I agree with Kilkrazy. I think Black Library's sale of desktop wallpaper exemplifies this drive.

Wait a minute. I've been out of the GW loop for a while, but Black Library are selling desktop fething wallpapers?

Yes, unfortunately they are Loki

WayneTheGame wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
The painting articles and books were based on the paint sets two paint sets ago. With the colors changing, and then the colors and the types of paints changing, the old material wasn't as helpful anymore to people who didn't know how to paint or didn't have a bunch of old paints sitting around like people are leading on.

The terrain book sadly was a casualty of GW making the terrain kits.

They couldn't have kept them with a big note that said that the colors used were from a previous paint range and therefore wouldn't match exactly with the new one, but could provide inspiration? They had to not only remove but actually delete the pages entirely?

They could have put the colour conversion chart sheet inside the cover, rendering the book useful again. But they want you to buy the ebook painting guides for a single unit/faction for each unit you buy.

 -Loki- wrote:

 aka_mythos wrote:
GW is a company that doesn't truly understand its own success beyond knowing their customers and fans have an almost addicted relationship with them. GW saw what FFG and FW were doing and it tried to imitate them without understanding their success. This is why we have superficially "high production value" hardback codices, with the same standards of writing as before.

Accessibility is what gets people into a hobby, quality of the experience is what keeps them their. GW doesn't understand that cost diminishes the experience. There is an emotional and experiential enrichment to every hobby and GW has eroded that by nickel and dime-ing the experience and by making the hobby less accessible for the sake of premium branding.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Azreal13 wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Well like I have said before the ultimate expression of Teh GW HHHobby is that users log on to the GW web site and spend money.

They don't get sent any products, they just spend the money.

Surely the ultimate expression of the GW hhhobby is they help themselves to your cash and tell you what you would have bought?

I agree with Kilkrazy. I think Black Library's sale of desktop wallpaper exemplifies this drive.

Wait a minute. I've been out of the GW loop for a while, but Black Library are selling desktop fething wallpapers?

I just checked to confirm this... wow, have we gone back in time? Is it 1996 again when people will pay for anything tech related? Well, I guess GW might think it's still 1996 with how they try to market, but still. Holy gak...

WayneTheGame wrote:

 -Loki- wrote:

 aka_mythos wrote:
GW is a company that doesn't truly understand its own success beyond knowing their customers and fans have an almost addicted relationship with them. GW saw what FFG and FW were doing and it tried to imitate them without understanding their success. This is why we have superficially "high production value" hardback codices, with the same standards of writing as before.

Accessibility is what gets people into a hobby, quality of the experience is what keeps them their. GW doesn't understand that cost diminishes the experience. There is an emotional and experiential enrichment to every hobby and GW has eroded that by nickel and dime-ing the experience and by making the hobby less accessible for the sake of premium branding.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Azreal13 wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Well like I have said before the ultimate expression of Teh GW HHHobby is that users log on to the GW web site and spend money.

They don't get sent any products, they just spend the money.

Surely the ultimate expression of the GW hhhobby is they help themselves to your cash and tell you what you would have bought?

I agree with Kilkrazy. I think Black Library's sale of desktop wallpaper exemplifies this drive.

Wait a minute. I've been out of the GW loop for a while, but Black Library are selling desktop fething wallpapers?

I just checked to confirm this... wow, have we gone back in time? Is it 1996 again when people will pay for anything tech related? Well, I guess GW might think it's still 1996 with how they try to market, but still. Holy gak...

One can hope that although GW are trying to sell wall papers, no one is buying them...however, there are a lot of true believers who no doubt think that the pixels are worth paying for...because they are special GW pixels with special GW encoding...

They're selling what now?!?

 heartserenade wrote:
They're selling what now?!?

Wallpaper?

I think GW's is quite clear this year.
Establishing a new game or call it Fantasy 9th edition.
Start at smaller pt level such that players have a chance to get into the game and Fantasy players can adapt.

The revenue this year will mainly come from the new game and 40k supplements and data slates.
I hope it will work out.