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GW makes £123.5m per year (or did, this summer it will be less).

According to industry research, American table-top gamers spend on average $450 (£300-ish) per year. GW gamers, I'd imagine, are pulling the averages up, but not by too much as it's the biggest in the market.

~37% of GW's revenue comes from trade accounts (i.e., sales to independent retailers). These stores pay GW 55% of RRP.

FW, BL, WHW, and Digital Editions, combined, accounts for about £14-15m. Fantasy, apparently, is only 8% (about £11m).

Royalties, around one-two million.

LoTR/Hobbit. Who knows? Call it half of Fantasy, and 40k is left to account for about £90m.

European (including the UK) VAT is averaging around 20%, and the European (again, including the UK) accounts for approximately 60% of GW's revenue.


Inflate the player numbers a bit due to buying armies off friends, ebay, China, etc.

Probably less than a million 40k players, worldwide.

 Overlord Thraka wrote:
On the whole money-judging thing. I buy ALL my Warhammer 40k 2nd-hand on Ebay. I imagine there are more than few like me out there

My guess is no more than 3 Million

I second that, I haven't bought a new model in ages.

I did spend 600+ last year on miniatures though.

But I probably spent a hundred on codex, apocalyptic mega-blast and paints alone that year.

So I would say people who buy new models certainly break the 500.

I'd bet there is 37 ... Maybe 39.

Well we know GW have 120-130 million pounds revenue, 40k supposedly makes up about half that revenue, so 60-65 million. Then as mentioned about 37% comes from trade accounts which have a wholesale price about 55% of retail, though we don't know exactly how that 37% fits in to our 60-65, if we assume it balances out with the total 120-130 million then it would inflate sales to around 70-77 million.

So... the question is how much does the average 40k gamer spend in a year (just on 40k, not including anything else). £500 would buy you a sizeable army, so I would only expect new players and enthusiasts to be spending that sort of money, even a new player I doubt would buy that large of an army in a year. On the other hand, you have a lot of players who are just coasting along, only buying the minimum they need to play and quite possibly not even buying anything if they aren't playing the current edition. I've spent less than £75 this year, that's just codices for the armies I own.

I'm going to guess the average 40k player spends around £100-200 per year on 40k.

That places the total number of players between 350,000 and 770,000.

A pretty wide spread, I know, but that's the closest I would attempt to ballpark and I'm more than happy for someone to suggest other numbers to use for average money spent per year by a player,