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weeble1000 wrote:

 Enigwolf wrote:
To answer the questions, the person I spoke to was a senior regional director, one of the guys in charge of the Asia-Pacific Region. He was at our FLGS for a meeting with distributors some time back. The central and east Asia market actually consumes a lot of LotR - outsells all of their other product lines, actually.

This is the internet, believe me or don't believe me, that's your choice - I'm just sharing what I heard and I have no reason to cook up something like that. Shrug, I couldn't care less. I was one of the early anonymous rumor reporters that told Natfka about the mass Finecast->Plastic-maybe-resin switch back in '12.

Thanks for letting it roll off Enigwolf. Have an exalt.

I appreciate the input, despite the fact that I called it BS. Note that I was not saying you were misrepresenting what you heard.

Anyway, I appreciate you being cool about getting jumped on.

I appreciate the candor. I'm normally a pretty skeptical guy of GW myself, but frankly, as none of us work in GW Corporate, all we can do is speculate and relay what other people have said. For all the hate that gets thrown at them, they're still running a profitable, and ultimately financially successful company, in a sector with very few other publicly-traded companies to compete again.

It's easy to point fingers at GW corporate leadership and make it sound like you can do a better job, but unless you're in that position no one knows what they have to go through or deal with. That said, the fact that the LotR line is still alive is an indicator. Someone before criticized my criticism of comments made here without business savvy. Fair enough, indulge me for a moment.

Microeconomic theory states that in a monopolistic competition and oligopolic market, through a combination of the Average Total Costs (ATC), Average Variable Costs (AVC) and Marginal Cost (MC) curves, with the assumption that the Average Revenue (AR) curve = Marginal Revenue (MR) curve, that there are five scenarios for a business or product line to be in operation: (1) Profitability, (2) break-even, (3) minimalizing losses by staying open, (4) covering variable costs (barely) AKA operating at shut-down point, or (5) shutting down. It's clearly not shut down yet, and I'm sure that the initial spike of revenues has covered their initial sunk-cost of licensing the IP, so it's not minimalizing losses by operation. Break-even and coverage of variable costs is highly unlikely given the nature of the industry and the additional overheads (plus opportunity costs to the rest of their business units).

Thus, by process of elimination and Occam's Razor, the conclusion to be made is that LotR is still a fairly profitable business line for them 'til now.

Games Workshop is still alive, and is alive enough to be making mass changes and massive releases on an increased pace. I surmise that they're still a very healthy company, financially.

Have an Exalt for a singing the songs of Econ 101 like a bard in a tavern

One of the reasons I am entertained by forums and the Internet is that people online love to Forge the Narrative. What must be the truth are the all of the unknown facts that would make their hypothesis true.

If only my physics prof would have gotten on board with that, I woulda done GREAT!

I'm gonna remember all this come July 28th.

 Azreal13 wrote:
I'm gonna remember all this come July 28th.

I don't think there's any super special surprises coming. They've already said what the numbers, roughly, are, right (in percentage terms, anyhow)?

 Talys wrote:
Have an Exalt for a singing the songs of Econ 101 like a bard in a tavern

One of the reasons I am entertained by forums and the Internet is that people online love to Forge the Narrative. What must be the truth are the all of the unknown facts that would make their hypothesis true.

If only my physics prof would have gotten on board with that, I woulda done GREAT!

Thanks. I like to think that I learned something in uni.

 Azreal13 wrote:
I'm gonna remember all this come July 28th.

Feel free to bring this discussion up again in a month's time. If I'm not already sick of doing financial analysis on publicly-traded companies for my day job, you might be able to convince me to write a report on their stock performance. For now, if you've anything else to say to counter economic theory, please feel free to be the next John Keynes.

I don't have to throw around a number of large words to read GW's financials since, as you so aptly pointed out, they are a publicly traded company and come to the rather obvious conclusion that the company is not in immediate danger of folding. That said, it is also obvious that they are losing profitability and more than likely losing market share to smaller competitors.

Certainly, GW is still the large fish in a small pool but the little fish have grown teeth and are nibbling away at a greater rate than previously evidenced. Combine this with the current trend to make their product more exclusive by limiting availability of the entire product line; not many companies in the toy or even collectibles industry would brag that a 1000 of their products are direct-only because they would rather sell more than less through broad exposure in the market place. Instead, the cost cutting sword is slicing both ways and limiting GW's ability to recruit new customers.

As myself and a few others have said. GW is in a good position financially, currently, but no company can lose 10% revenue ma double down on what caused the losses to begin with. It would certainly help if upper management didn't think that market research was "otiose" because then they might actually be able to figure out what's causing the slide. Here's a hint, it's not a lack of releases but more that the general market seems to expect a higher quality product than is being released or else they wouldn't be defecting to other games.

I don't have a degree in economics but I have been investing for a number of years and have learned some of the warning signs of a poorly managed company, a painful lesson to be sure (damn bio-tech stock), and I manage several multi-million dollar projects as part of my job. Mistakes can cost and not listening to stakeholders (customers in this case) is objectively costing GW. They are not too deep to pull out and right now it appears that an increased release cycle may have slowed the fall BUT how long they can maintain this without reducing support for existing products or incurring greater expense in expanding production facilities? They've already retracted to their core by closing production in China and the US and limited expansion by restructuring in such a way that they'll have less market exposure.

 Enigwolf wrote:

 Talys wrote:
Have an Exalt for a singing the songs of Econ 101 like a bard in a tavern

One of the reasons I am entertained by forums and the Internet is that people online love to Forge the Narrative. What must be the truth are the all of the unknown facts that would make their hypothesis true.

If only my physics prof would have gotten on board with that, I woulda done GREAT!

Thanks. I like to think that I learned something in uni.

 Azreal13 wrote:
I'm gonna remember all this come July 28th.

Feel free to bring this discussion up again in a month's time. If I'm not already sick of doing financial analysis on publicly-traded companies for my day job, you might be able to convince me to write a report on their stock performance. For now, if you've anything else to say to counter economic theory, please feel free to be the next John Keynes.

What?

Where have I said GW are bankrupt or any other such nonsense?

I'm not trying to counter your copy and pasted attempt to try and shut people down with words you don't think they'll understand, nor do I disagree with your conclusion based on current information.

I'm interested to see how you argue that any company, publicly traded or not, can continue to counter a trend of falling revenue and profits indefinitely though? Got something on econowiki for that?

Plus, just FYI, flopping out your qualifications on the desk to try and prove your rightness isn't a cool move and doesn't really do much to support your argument. There's always a bigger... fish.

 Enigwolf wrote:
That said, the fact that the LotR line is still alive is an indicator.

If that's your indicator, you might consider reconsidering your position. LotR isn't what I'd call "still alive". There's a whole heap of old stuff you can't buy any more because GW aren't supporting it any more and GW clearly haven't been taking it seriously with new stuff since after the first Hobbit movie (I don't think we had any plastic kits for the last movie and the whole thing screams "we are only putting in a token effort now").

As for your microeconomics lesson, I'm not sure what website you pulled that off, it's been a while since I did economics, but surely there's an option which fits with "If you're not developing new models it doesn't cost much to keep the product line and you may or may not have an contractual obligation to support the product for some period of time".

Games Workshop is still alive, and is alive enough to be making mass changes and massive releases on an increased pace. I surmise that they're still a very healthy company, financially.

Personally, I've never asserted that GW is anything less than alive. They are still making profits and still have over 400 stores world wide.

BUT, you'd be naive to not realise that they have falling revenues in spite of an increased release rate (and we know that products sell best when they're first released) which is not a great sign AND it's quite clear they are shrinking while the rest of the market is growing, also not a great sign.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
BUT, you'd be naive to not realise that they have falling revenues in spite of an increased release rate (and we know that products sell best when they're first released) which is not a great sign AND it's quite clear they are shrinking while the rest of the market is growing, also not a great sign.

You see this said a lot, but without actual data on other companies, it's hard to assess whether the industry is growing, but no particular manufacturer is making fistfuls of money, or whether a small number in the industry is eating up most of the profits while many other companies are struggling, or whether every company is raking in the dough.

For example, if the industry as a whole grew 15%, but because there were 20% more entrants, that's a bad thing for all the companies that are there, even though the industry grew. Good for the consumer, of course.

Since Games Workshop, I think is the ONLY publicly traded company in the field, it's hard to answer those questions, unless you happen to work at PP or one of the other significant manufacturers.

So long as other companies aren't popping out releases like land raiders and stormravens and wraithknights, GW will always have some kind of niche, because there are people (like me!) who just love those kinds of things, in a cohesive, unified way (ie not 10 models produced by 7 different companies). There are some pretty big barriers to making those, I guess. We'll see where it all ends up in a decade or two

xraytango wrote:
<strikes deceased equine>

Nice. This made me chuckle. A well written post, sir.

 Talys wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
BUT, you'd be naive to not realise that they have falling revenues in spite of an increased release rate (and we know that products sell best when they're first released) which is not a great sign AND it's quite clear they are shrinking while the rest of the market is growing, also not a great sign.

You see this said a lot, but without actual data on other companies, it's hard to assess whether the industry is growing, but no particular manufacturer is making fistfuls of money, or whether a small number in the industry is eating up most of the profits while many other companies are struggling, or whether every company is raking in the dough.

For example, if the industry as a whole grew 15%, but because there were 20% more entrants, that's a bad thing for all the companies that are there, even though the industry grew. Good for the consumer, of course.

Since Games Workshop, I think is the ONLY publicly traded company in the field, it's hard to answer those questions, unless you happen to work at PP or one of the other significant manufacturers.

While other companies don't release their numbers, individual stores get surveyed and there is data on that (I can't remember where off the top of my head, but I know it exists and shows other non-GW segments of the hobby are growing).

And to use Enigwolf's microeconomic logic, the very fact we have so many other games these days, the fact we have so many kick starters, the fact I can walk in to a hobby shop and GW only takes up 5% of the shelf space where as 10 years ago it took up 30% of the shelf space.... these are all indicators that the rest of the market is doing well.

 Enigwolf wrote:
Microeconomic theory states that in a monopolistic competition and oligopolic market, through a combination of the Average Total Costs (ATC), Average Variable Costs (AVC) and Marginal Cost (MC) curves, with the assumption that the Average Revenue (AR) curve = Marginal Revenue (MR) curve, that there are five scenarios for a business or product line to be in operation: (1) Profitability, (2) break-even, (3) minimalizing losses by staying open, (4) covering variable costs (barely) AKA operating at shut-down point, or (5) shutting down. It's clearly not shut down yet, and I'm sure that the initial spike of revenues has covered their initial sunk-cost of licensing the IP, so it's not minimalizing losses by operation. Break-even and coverage of variable costs is highly unlikely given the nature of the industry and the additional overheads (plus opportunity costs to the rest of their business units).
Thus, by process of elimination and Occam's Razor, the conclusion to be made is that LotR is still a fairly profitable business line for them 'til now.

But I would retort that some contractual obligations may be at play to provide a game system with all characters during the run of movies and possibly plus a year.
Plus you could have simply said that the dies are most likely paid for and the net revenue is still worthwhile (plastic is possibly cheaper than the packaging).

Wow that was a strong attempt to make something simple sound complicated, I had a professor say to me "If you cannot explain something simply, you obviously do not know the subject matter well enough... or are showing off.". He was a funny one but leaned very little on "Occam's Razor" to show what was most probable.

Games Workshop is still alive, and is alive enough to be making mass changes and massive releases on an increased pace. I surmise that they're still a very healthy company, financially.

They are healthy in the scheme of things.
It is just odd that they have thriving competition (very hard to confirm due to most being private companies) and GW methods are pretty much "stay the course".
There just appears to be no long term plan at all to increase market share.
Would I be wrong in claiming they are content to provide dividends and find profit by reduced operation costs and increasing product margins?

Running the risk of sounding silly: the golden goose is getting old and no one is willing to climb the bean stock again (innovate, engage customers).

Yeah, got some economics in as electives but my main thing is business operations, supply chain management and very successful building my retirement by self managing my stock investments.

Kirby is "comfy" there really is no motivation to change his methodology, the demise of the company will not precede his retirement.

 Talys wrote:
Have an Exalt for a singing the songs of Econ 101 like a bard in a tavern

One of the reasons I am entertained by forums and the Internet is that people online love to Forge the Narrative. What must be the truth are the all of the unknown facts that would make their hypothesis true.

If only my physics prof would have gotten on board with that, I woulda done GREAT!

As a counterpoint, Trial Advocacy 101 might say that GW didn't get its handed to it in the GW v CHS case, but that doesn't line up with the practical reality of the situation. Even Kirby publicly admitted to both GW's failure to achieve its litigation goals and the expenditure of an "indecent" amount of money in attempting to do so.

The company is making lots of revenue, ergo it must be healthy.

The company won a jury verdict in its favor, ergo it must have have achieved its litigation goals.

In both cases, one does not necessarily follow from the other.

I think it's really simple actually.

When GW is in trouble, you will see a lot of releases that are upgrade kits, rather than new models and new factions, and no new risky models (like the Bloodthirster or Nagash) where return on investment is dubious.

So long as GW is tossing out new factions like Harlequin and AdMech in rapidfire release, I think we can all be pretty certain that there are healthy cash flows. Them molds aren't free.

 Talys wrote:
I think it's really simple actually.

When GW is in trouble, you will see a lot of releases that are upgrade kits, rather than new models and new factions, and no new risky models (like the Bloodthirster or Nagash) where return on investment is dubious.

So long as GW is tossing out new factions like Harlequin and AdMech in rapidfire release, I think we can all be pretty certain that there are healthy cash flows. Them molds aren't free.

Or GW doesn't know what is risky as they do no market research and so throw whatever they can think of out there.

I recall jokes being made in the dark and distant past of early 2000s about how if GW were ever in real fincial trouble they would do a line of Heresy era products....

 Talys wrote:
I think it's really simple actually.

When GW is in trouble, you will see a lot of releases that are upgrade kits, rather than new models and new factions, and no new risky models (like the Bloodthirster or Nagash) where return on investment is dubious.

So long as GW is tossing out new factions like Harlequin and AdMech in rapidfire release, I think we can all be pretty certain that there are healthy cash flows. Them molds aren't free.

Could be the exact opposite too though- they'll save big splash releases that people have been clamoring for, and big revamps/large models for when in trouble to bring their bottom line back up. When times are good they'll start throwng out upgrade kits and such between bigger releases to bide time for when profits get slow again.

 Talys wrote:
I think it's really simple actually.

When GW is in trouble, you will see a lot of releases that are upgrade kits, rather than new models and new factions, and no new risky models (like the Bloodthirster or Nagash) where return on investment is dubious.

So long as GW is tossing out new factions like Harlequin and AdMech in rapidfire release, I think we can all be pretty certain that there are healthy cash flows. Them molds aren't free.

How does a Dark Angels re-release with a new codex and a single plastic model fit into that theory?

 insaniak wrote:

 Talys wrote:
I think it's really simple actually.

When GW is in trouble, you will see a lot of releases that are upgrade kits, rather than new models and new factions, and no new risky models (like the Bloodthirster or Nagash) where return on investment is dubious.

So long as GW is tossing out new factions like Harlequin and AdMech in rapidfire release, I think we can all be pretty certain that there are healthy cash flows. Them molds aren't free.

How does a Dark Angels re-release with a new codex and a single plastic model fit into that theory?

You have to look at a few months, though, not one week's release. I mean, Necron got one model, too. But There were an avalanche of AdMech, an amazing number of Harlequin releases, two new space marine kits and one solo, one Eldar kit and two solo models, a huge Bloodyhirster kit, 4 assassins, theKhorne stuff, the IK upgrade... in like 6 months?

Contrast that with any other company... I mean, even if they could move the product, no other company could even afford to make an AdMech sized plastic release in a year. Even for GW, I cannot think of another 180 day period where there were this many new models.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Sinful Hero wrote:
Could be the exact opposite too though- they'll save big splash releases that people have been clamoring for, and big revamps/large models for when in trouble to bring their bottom line back up. When times are good they'll start throwng out upgrade kits and such between bigger releases to bide time for when profits get slow again.

I kind of doubt it -- those molds are really expensive and a long term investment, with all the costs upfront. It's a lot of risk to entertain if you're trying to conserve cash. They would be way better off releasing Skyhammer type stuff.

And if you're fair about it, the ONLY formation bundle worth buying, really, has been Skyhammer, though certainly, Necron and Eldar rules encouraged kit sales.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

Or GW doesn't know what is risky as they do no market research and so throw whatever they can think of out there.

Could be, but where does the money for the initial outlay come from?

The alternative theory is that GW could be making more profit, but instead reinvest those monies into facilities and molds. Can't sell from an empty wagon, right?

 Talys wrote:

You have to look at a few months, though, not one week's release..

It's actually longer than that. IIRC, GW normally has their moulds made at least 18months in advance, in order to allow enough lead time to get product cast and distributed around the world. So the rash of shiny new releases we've just had is stufff that has been in the works for at least that long, plus development and sculpting time, in some cases much longer (Eldar Jetbike, and I would guess Harlequins - they said back in 4th edition that they were developing all of the flavours of Eldar as a unified whole, and then nothing much happened straight away other than the peek at the prototype jetbike. It wouldn't surprise me if they've been sitting on some of the Eldar stuff since then).

 insaniak wrote:

 Talys wrote:

You have to look at a few months, though, not one week's release..

It's actually longer than that. IIRC, GW normally has their moulds made at least 18months in advance, in order to allow enough lead time to get product cast and distributed around the world. So the rash of shiny new releases we've just had is stufff that has been in the works for at least that long, plus development and sculpting time, in some cases much longer (Eldar Jetbike, and I would guess Harlequins - they said back in 4th edition that they were developing all of the flavours of Eldar as a unified whole, and then nothing much happened straight away other than the peek at the prototype jetbike. It wouldn't surprise me if they've been sitting on some of the Eldar stuff since then).

Yes, I'm sure you're right. For instance, a lot of the new sprues released this year, IIRC say (C) 2014 or 2013.

If they didn't have cashflows to maintain a rapid release cadence, they would stretch out these releases, though. Think of it this way -- if GW released just Eldar, Space Marines, and Adeptus Mechanicus in 2015, everyone would have gone, "wow, that was a lot of new kits out of GW this year". Their current release rate is eye-popping. I mean, there's no way a two-armed biped could keep up if they wanted to buy and paint *everything*.

If GW were in some kind of financial trouble, the smart thing to do wouldn't be to lauch everyhthing in 6 months, then have nothing left to release in the next 12, right? And we know that, if nothing else, Sigmar is coming out, no doubt with shiny new models. It isn't even profit-optimizing, because there's little chance you'll get many people who buy *everything*, whereas if you dribbled it out over a longer period, your chances for that would be higher.

GW is actually operating like some kind of gerbil on crack, lol. Makes me want to be retired, so that I could spend all day painting stuff haha.

TSR were throwing out rapid release of poor quality right before they went down as a means to try and prop up falling sales.

I guess the only difference here comes down to if you think the recent releases are poor quality or not, but I don't think we'll ever agree on that

 jonolikespie wrote:
TSR were throwing out rapid release of poor quality right before they went down as a means to try and prop up falling sales.

I guess the only difference here comes down to if you think the recent releases are poor quality or not, but I don't think we'll ever agree on that

Hah! Yeah.

Well, one big difference, though, is that TSR's releases were cheap to produce (it's just paper). Yeah, GW has a lot of print releases, but the model release cadence is a little mind blowing. And the molds cost what the molds cost, whether the models are good or not, right?

Oh well, 'tis what it is. Back to watching Sense8 while I paint me new blood angels! (42 to more tacticals to go...)

Peace!

There is a new release of some kind every week, not including White Dwarf.

This can be seen as a sign of health or a sign of desperation. My own view is that GW know they have lost a lot of the veteran players, so their strategy now is to exploit more deeply the ones who remain (superfans who want to buy a lot of GW) and of course newcomers.

The thing is though, while they are profitable and have good cash flow, every year for the past few years their sales and cash flow and profits have been declining. The rapid release rate of new products must be increasing their costs. If it does not lead to growth, the danger is continuing decline.

 Talys wrote:
I think it's really simple actually.

When GW is in trouble, you will see a lot of releases that are upgrade kits, rather than new models and new factions, and no new risky models (like the Bloodthirster or Nagash) where return on investment is dubious.

So long as GW is tossing out new factions like Harlequin and AdMech in rapidfire release, I think we can all be pretty certain that there are healthy cash flows. Them molds aren't free.

I'd read it the other way, they are throwing out all of the big guns to try and rake in cash, like the Knights.

Then there's the re-releases at an increased pace; a new Knights codex after a year, new Marines codex, new Dark Angels codex, new 40K release after 2 years (where the only real change was unbound a.k.a. no reason not to buy anything), Space Hulk re-release.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Talys wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
BUT, you'd be naive to not realise that they have falling revenues in spite of an increased release rate (and we know that products sell best when they're first released) which is not a great sign AND it's quite clear they are shrinking while the rest of the market is growing, also not a great sign.

You see this said a lot, but without actual data on other companies, it's hard to assess whether the industry is growing, but no particular manufacturer is making fistfuls of money, or whether a small number in the industry is eating up most of the profits while many other companies are struggling, or whether every company is raking in the dough..

Agreed, there's no statistically significant source of information as to growth. There's been some surveys and reports from smaller companies, but if you take the number of companies entering the industry then you can assume it's worthwhile doing so.

All the evidence we've seen (apart from GW) is that the industry is growing, I haven't seen anything to imply that it's remaining static or even contracting. There's more manufacturers, stores and events, more media coverage, more releases.

 Azreal13 wrote:

 Enigwolf wrote:

 Talys wrote:
Have an Exalt for a singing the songs of Econ 101 like a bard in a tavern

One of the reasons I am entertained by forums and the Internet is that people online love to Forge the Narrative. What must be the truth are the all of the unknown facts that would make their hypothesis true.

If only my physics prof would have gotten on board with that, I woulda done GREAT!

Thanks. I like to think that I learned something in uni.

 Azreal13 wrote:
I'm gonna remember all this come July 28th.

Feel free to bring this discussion up again in a month's time. If I'm not already sick of doing financial analysis on publicly-traded companies for my day job, you might be able to convince me to write a report on their stock performance. For now, if you've anything else to say to counter economic theory, please feel free to be the next John Keynes.

What?

Where have I said GW are bankrupt or any other such nonsense?

I'm not trying to counter your copy and pasted attempt to try and shut people down with words you don't think they'll understand, nor do I disagree with your conclusion based on current information.

I'm interested to see how you argue that any company, publicly traded or not, can continue to counter a trend of falling revenue and profits indefinitely though? Got something on econowiki for that?

Plus, just FYI, flopping out your qualifications on the desk to try and prove your rightness isn't a cool move and doesn't really do much to support your argument. There's always a bigger... fish.

When someone uses their knowledge to answer a post, try not to break rule one when replying. It makes you look foolish

Azreal13 wrote:...
I'm not trying to counter your copy and pasted attempt to try and shut people down with words you don't think they'll understand, nor do I disagree with your conclusion based on current information.

I'm interested to see how you argue that any company, publicly traded or not, can continue to counter a trend of falling revenue and profits indefinitely though? Got something on econowiki for that?

Plus, just FYI, flopping out your qualifications on the desk to try and prove your rightness isn't a cool move and doesn't really do much to support your argument. There's always a bigger... fish.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
As for your microeconomics lesson, I'm not sure what website you pulled that off, it's been a while since I did economics, but surely there's an option which fits with "If you're not developing new models it doesn't cost much to keep the product line and you may or may not have an contractual obligation to support the product for some period of time".

I love the internet for its contradictions - I get called out a few pages back for criticizing some of the wild speculation here of GW business strategy for being unfounded and unbacked by theory or evidence, and then get told to back up my own claims. And then I get attacked again when I provide the meat behind my arguments. Another thing I love about internet forums is that no matter who you are in real life or what you've done, it's all spurious because keyboard warriors will simply accuse you of copy-pasta in order to lower the counter-argument's legitimacy when they have no such legitimacy of their own (side note: I will be more than happy to have an academic discussion about Games Workshop as a business with anyone who's interested, because I think it's a fascinating industry and company to analyze). So, mostly for my own amusement, here's a screenshot of my OneNote page from biz school days (notes typed on laptop, graphs drawn using a Wacom Intuos 4 or my tablet) about this same theory that I mentioned before, complete with the graphs I was mentioning. Date and course number blacked out for purposes of my real identity. I more than welcome you to provide proof that I copied and pasted my above explanation from somewhere else, otherwise, please cut out the personal attack bullcrap.



And yes, the contractual obligation is one that is entirely a possibility (that I will admit I had not considered before), and one that falls under the third scenario, staying open to minimize losses, because a contractual breach will likely be more damaging. With regards to keeping the product line, that's the scenario about covering variable costs. However, as I mentioned before, because of the opportunity cost to other business units (i.e. designers to keep making new models, production lines that aren't used to churn out more 40k/Fantasy) and additional overheads (logistics management like SKUs and vendors, the administrative costs, etc.) it's unlikely that they're keeping it open because it "doesn't cost much to keep the product line". There is always a cost-of-goods sold associated with any product sold, even in software, and if this cost is minimally low, then well, that's profitability.

Talizvar wrote:There just appears to be no long term plan at all to increase market share.
Would I be wrong in claiming they are content to provide dividends and find profit by reduced operation costs and increasing product margins?

Running the risk of sounding silly: the golden goose is getting old and no one is willing to climb the bean stock again (innovate, engage customers).

Yeah, got some economics in as electives but my main thing is business operations, supply chain management and very successful building my retirement by self managing my stock investments.

Kirby is "comfy" there really is no motivation to change his methodology, the demise of the company will not precede his retirement.

Not at all wrong. In fact history has shown that a lot of companies that are used to being the dominant player are satisfied sticking with the "stay the course" as someone had mentioned in order to continue providing stable dividends for their shareholders, often by, as you so optly pointed out, optimizing current operations to reduce costs and increase the value of current product offerings for higher profit margins (Limited Edition things and annual re-releases with incremental upgrades are a classic example of this in the retail and product development world). And yes, this typically does not end well for said company when another competitor is able to replicate their success but implement it better (Apple vs. the rest of the smartphone world, Polaroid's demise, etc.)

 Enigwolf wrote:
I more than welcome you to provide proof that I copied and pasted my above explanation from somewhere else, otherwise, please cut out the personal attack bullcrap.

Dude you seriously need to lighten the hell up. It wasn't a personal attack at all. I assumed you got it off a website because that's normally where stuff comes from, almost all the course notes from my undergraduate degree could be found on various websites If I wanted to prove a point about a specific simplification of the Navier-Stokes equations I wouldn't go looking up my old course notes from 4th year aerodynamics, I'd just google it

But whatever, the reason I posted what I did was because your options don't allow for the situation I think GW is actually in with LOTR. As one of my old professors said, economics struggles to tell you anything you don't already know

There's far more signs that LOTR is struggling rather than thriving. I also noticed you completely fething ignored the part of my post where I pointed out one of the basis for your arguments (that LOTR is "still alive" was spurious at best. GW aren't supporting LOTR, many products are going out of stock and The Hobbit has only had a token amount of support.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Enigwolf wrote:
I more than welcome you to provide proof that I copied and pasted my above explanation from somewhere else, otherwise, please cut out the personal attack bullcrap.

Dude you seriously need to lighten the hell up. It wasn't a personal attack at all. I assumed you got it off a website because that's normally where stuff comes from, almost all the course notes from my undergraduate degree could be found on various websites If I wanted to prove a point about a specific simplification of the Navier-Stokes equations I wouldn't go looking up my old course notes from 4th year aerodynamics, I'd just google it

But whatever, the reason I posted what I did was because your options don't allow for the situation I think GW is actually in with LOTR. As one of my old professors said, economics struggles to tell you anything you don't already know

There's far more signs that LOTR is struggling rather than thriving. I also noticed you completely fething ignored the part of my post where I pointed out one of the basis for your arguments (that LOTR is "still alive" was spurious at best. GW aren't supporting LOTR, many products are going out of stock and The Hobbit has only had a token amount of support.

First of all, my apologies. I wasn't sure if you wanted a response to that bit of your post, because I didn't disagree with it - I didn't want to make my own post more of an essay than it already was. I haven't checked what's in stock and what's not in stock with LotR; should I probably have checked it to get a better understanding? Probably, but I didn't, and that's my own fault.

I don't think it's thriving, as a matter of course, LotR was just brought up in relevance when I referenced my conversation with a GW regional director years ago about the state of GW's finances at the time, which I think was misconstrued to be taken as today.

Do I think that the LotR line is in its death throes and will likely be gone from GW within the next 5 years? Yes, but for now, its still generating them revenue (whatever token amounts), even if its just clearing tons old stock (although there will come a point in time where the cost of inventory'ing the few boxes that remain outweigh the gains to be had from selling them off, and then they'll liquidate it in some way shape or form). I mean, the same thing did kinda happen with Specialist Games. I still think GW should've announced those discontinuations much earlier - there were a lot of BFG ships for my AdMech fleet I still wanted that are now OOP and mad expensive on ebay. >=[

 Enigwolf wrote:
I love the internet for its contradictions - I get called out a few pages back for criticizing some of the wild speculation here of GW business strategy for being unfounded and unbacked by theory or evidence, and then get told to back up my own claims. And then I get attacked again when I provide the meat behind my arguments. Another thing I love about internet forums is that no matter who you are in real life or what you've done, it's all spurious because keyboard warriors will simply accuse you of copy-pasta in order to lower the counter-argument's legitimacy when they have no such legitimacy of their own

You know what I don't love? A supercilious attitude from someone when they're attempting to disprove an argument that wasn't made. The implication that simply because someone doesn't fit some very short list of what is deemed appropriately qualified that it somehow means they can't be right in their opinions or the assumption that someone doesn't have different, but equally valid qualifications or experience informing what they say.

But there you go.