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The GW site could look like the Wizards MtG one, daily columns/articles and submissions from players. A true resource alongside their card database (Gatherer). There's something new every day.

The GW site is a shop, nothing more. The extent of their community interaction is that they put stuff on sale, you buy it and go away.

Make Tony Cottrell CEO, and hand over all design and rules decisions to Forge World.

OK, that wasn't that serious but I think maybe taking a look at FW and why they are regarded in higher esteem than the rest of GW would be a start.

FW just don't seem to get anywhere near as much of a backlash (IMO) as GW, which is crazy, coz they are GW.

It's just they're accessibility at things like FW Open Days, the fact they tell us what's coming, that their books are so glorious so I don't mind paying twice the cost of a codex.

Their rules seem better, their models are higher quality, or if they're not because their QA drops they replace things instantly with no problems.

Although one thing GW does excel at is their customer service, but FW at least seem to listen to their fans - they used to ask what models we wanted to see and for the most part delivered.

FW ARE GW, they are the same company and they aren't as autonomous as they used to be but despite that they just seem to do everything better and I think that really is down to Tony.

I think getting him to look at the rest of GW might not be such a bad idea.

And maybe a Bugman's at the back of every branch of GW.... that would help...

GW would have to do a complete 180 from their current direction.

Simple; give us a reason to buy minis other then your stance of "they are really good minis"

support the community. GAMERS supply your revenue, not collectors. Collectors spend but not what gamers do.

 namiel wrote:
GAMERS supply your revenue, not collectors. Collectors spend but not what gamers do.

We assume this, but I think GW isn't totally off in its assumption that collectors drive its business more than gamers.

The quiet tragedy is that GW has good models, and good fluff. A good ruleset could bring in more people.

Balancing armies better, update models evenly, reduce prices even slightly.

Step one would be to tell the upper management of GW to take a long walk off a short pier.

Step two would be to either lower prices or greatly increase value added for all miniatures.

Step three would be to have decent rules.

Step four would be to actively engage their players as a community.

Under the current management, none of those last three would happen, which is why removing the current upper management would be the first step.

Since I do not think that is likely I will instead go with step zero - slowly go out of business.

The Auld Grump, which is the step that they are currently working on....

 namiel wrote:
Simple; give us a reason to buy minis other then your stance of "they are really good minis"

support the community. GAMERS supply your revenue, not collectors. Collectors spend but not what gamers do.

GW may be overestimating the power of the impulse buy, but they make a killing off the people who dabble in their products briefly before giving up in disgust when they find out nobody wants to play a 400 point game and their minis are already invalidated by the new codex that came out last tuesday.

I mean a dedicated gamer might spend $10k USD on their stuff but wouldn't GW rather sell $50 worth of minis to a thousand people?

I personally don't think there is anything the GW can ever do to get back in good standing with its gamers. There is way more hate from GW's "fans" than any community I've ever heard of.

They canned Warhammer because it wasn't selling. It's like when Rover and MG went down the pan, there was a massive outcry across Britain to save them but nobody went out and bought one.

Rover's chief exec said "If everyone who said they wanted to save Rover bought a Rover, it wouldn't need saving" - but these people went to BMW and Audi instead.

Same with GW. People bitch and whine about it and go to Mantic and Warmahordes etc, leaving Warhammer to disappear, then complain about Warhammer's demise which THEY brought about by not buying or playing it.

Stalemate, the real losers are Warhammer's genuine fans.

 insaniak wrote:
I'll be the voice of dissent here and say that I don't think lowering prices is actually necessary.

I agree. I can afford the minis, I just don't want to spend the time building and painting them up to play a huge tedious affair of vague rules, looking up charts and FAQ's, and other such nonsense.

It doesn't help that IMO a lot of the minis are not as good as they were a few years ago. I feel like they realized Space Marines were too generic with the fallout of the Chapterhouse affair, and decided the best medicine for that was to bling up every flat surface of everything with all kinds of crud, mostly skulls. I think the models are much too busy now.

 insaniak wrote:

That's part of where that communication thing comes in. The backlash to AoS wouldn't have been as severe if people had been more prepared for it. If GW had told us months ago that it was coming, and what that actually meant for WHFB, they could have eased everyone into it, and built up excitement before the release. They also could have entered into some sort of dialogue about what those people who still wanted to play WHFB could do about it, and divined from there whether or not it was worth their while to offer legacy support for it...

Instead, we got 'BAM!, and your game is gone! Here, play this vaguely similar but completely different game instead! It has Space Marines in it!'

I don't even play WHFB and I knew AoS was coming a month or 2 ahead of time. So to say people did not see it coming is not totally true I will admit details were scarce, but you knew it was happening.

I actually take the opposite tack on GW entering into a dialloge with existing Fantasy players. That seems like a losing proposition. If they did that in earnest then they would probably have ended up with some frankenstiened thing that was not what they (GW) wanted or what the players wanted and basically would have still ended up with a bunch of pissed off old fantasy players who might actually have some real beef with GW since they actively sought their advice and still "didn't listen". With the non community input method (and I don't know that they did not solicit customer feedback from anyone for a fact) they still end up with pissed off old fantasy players, but gain an un-compromised product they think will do better in the long run.

It is a tough position to be in. I work for a software company and we develop features based on customer feedback and we develop features based on our own sense of where the market is going, where it needs to be, or where we want to push it to. Because we don't focus completely on what the customers ask for we hear the "you don't listen to customer feedback" chant all the time, even though we do listen to customers. However it is hard to take the advice of a customer base of over 450,000 worldwide users. No matter how we collect customer feedback we only get a slice of the user base.

I can tell you from experience you can't give the customer all of the power during a development cycle. Like the old saying from Henry Ford, "If I asked the people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." Sometimes a customer does not really "know" what they want or have the vison to know what they "need".

So sometimes communication with the customer is not necessiarily the best thing.

Loborocket wrote:
I don't even play WHFB and I knew AoS was coming a month or 2 ahead of time. So to say people did not see it coming is not totally true I will admit details were scarce, but you knew it was happening.

Outside of internet forums I don't know how many people knew about it.

And even though we knew about it, most people just went on a buying freeze because we had no fething idea what was coming. There were a lot of contradicting rumours. People were suspecting a new edition or a new something going back to when the End Times came out. But that's not a good thing when all it does is piss people off because they think something is coming but have no idea what it is.

I actually take the opposite tack on GW entering into a dialloge with existing Fantasy players. That seems like a losing proposition. If they did that in earnest then they would probably have ended up with some frankenstiened thing that was not what they (GW) wanted or what the players wanted and basically would have still ended up with a bunch of pissed off old fantasy players who might actually have some real beef with GW since they actively sought their advice and still "didn't listen". With the non community input method (and I don't know that they did not solicit customer feedback from anyone for a fact) they still end up with pissed off old fantasy players, but gain an un-compromised product they think will do better in the long run.

Getting customer feedback doesn't mean you have to take all their advice and make a Frankenstein monster NOR does it mean you just ignore it all. Being able to communicate effectively with your customers means being able to present yourself in a way that shows you did listen to customer feedback even if you did something different.

I can tell you from experience you can't give the customer all of the power during a development cycle.

And no one is saying you should.

So sometimes communication with the customer is not necessiarily the best thing.

Agree to disagree on that one. Only thing worse than a pissed off customer is a pissed off customer you are ignoring.

If GW spent more time listening to customers in the first place they might not be in the position where they had to kill WHFB in the first place.

Loborocket wrote:

I don't even play WHFB and I knew AoS was coming a month or 2 ahead of time. So to say people did not see it coming is not totally true I will admit details were scarce, but you knew it was happening.


So sometimes communication with the customer is not necessiarily the best thing.

The problem with this line of reasoning, IMO, is that "a month or 2" advance notice, with ZERO details, no "hey, this is really really exciting!!!" type drumming up the new system, with evidence or anything to give players that time to see and get an idea of whether they might like it. Especially when you consider that rule books from GW are getting up towards the $100 mark, which is getting into college textbook territory (which, IMO is territory you do NOT want to be in), and more casual fans like myself may just decide to bail altogether.


I agree with you in the middle bit, where you say that even the best companies don't always do everything or anything that comes out of customer feedback.... But, GW doesn't have ANY communication with the customer, unless you call up support to say, "hey, I bought this kit, and part X was royally fethed and now I can't build it at all" I think there is a happy medium that can be struck here, but the point is, GW doesn't seem to do anything with the customer aside from taking money.

 insaniak wrote:
I'll be the voice of dissent here and say that I don't think lowering prices is actually necessary.

Lowering the cost of entry, though - that would certainly help. Stop the endless codex cycling, focus on using new editions to fix the rules rather than changing them up for the sake of change, and release skirmish rules to get people in universe without having to buy an entire army.

This. It's hard to get people excited to pay for a new codex and rule book every 2 years, much less the pretty models.

Stop producing rules and just come out and sell the models as collectors pieces. Be honest.

I wouldn't head back to them but I would possibly respect them more than I do now.

Replace the entirety of the companies gaming lineup with a Gorkamorka re-release!

Develop a solid core ruleset that they don't make constant dramatic changes to all the time. Tweak it over time to make it better and more balanced instead of completely redoing the whole thing and in the process just replacing one messed up mechanic with another.

Make the rules available online free and update them regularly to fix imbalance and ambiguity. Still sell codexes and a main rulebook with a couple bonus treats that aren't in the online rules, and focus on lore, art, and modeling. Update them every year or two to keep them from being too outdated as the online rules change.

Use regular campaigns to add small modifications to the base game keeping things constantly fresh and to drive sales in a less heavy handed manner than alternating between assault rules/ shooting rules, vehicles rule/vehicles suck, etc.

Develop a starter game with generally the same mechanics and the same models that is interesting and allows people to get into the game without a huge army and expenses and allows them to transition naturally into the larger game.

Set up a plan. Make it consistent. Communicate the vision. Tease the upcoming theme giving hints about which model types will be boosted and vague hints about what the story will focus on.

Just some stuff I'd like to see.

Can you guys offer any concrete plans of cutting costs for customers other then oh it needs to be cheaper because I'm entitled to cheaper minis for my loyalty over the years??

GW is barely profitable and is a public company. If they cut prices even 15% they'll be in the red.

It's NOT like GW is racking in the money themselves. Their production costs are massive. All their public shareholders which are British public institutions will dump the stock if they can't meet dividends.

The last thing GW should do is listening to some 35 year old fat guy on an Internet forum rage-hating on GW for how expensive they are and wants cheaper minis. There needs to be a financial basis.

GW can release free rules PDFs but put less work into them because all that writing and artwork takes a ton of money. Of course then the haters will rage about how gakky quality the new codexs are when they took a hit on their income JUST for the community.

DorianGray wrote:
Can you guys offer any concrete plans of cutting costs for customers other then oh it needs to be cheaper because I'm entitled to cheaper minis for my loyalty over the years??

GW is barely profitable and is a public company. If they cut prices even 15% they'll be in the red.

It's NOT like GW is racking in the money themselves. Their production costs are massive. All their public shareholders which are British public institutions will dump the stock if they can't meet dividends.

The last thing GW should do is listening to some 35 year old fat guy on an Internet forum rage-hating on GW for how expensive they are and wants cheaper minis. There needs to be a financial basis.

GW can release free rules PDFs but put less work into them because all that writing and artwork takes a ton of money. Of course then the haters will rage about how gakky quality the new codexs are when they took a hit on their income JUST for the community.

Sure.

Stop being a miniatures company and be a good games company that supports competitive and tournament play, and I'll be happy to support them. Or I mean, a "miniatures company first" or however the hell people they put it. Like, still make miniatures, but stop making them the be-all-and-end-all.

The reason their products cost so much is because they're always making more product (I understand the molds are expensive). But the product is stupid because it wrecks their game, so it's a lose-lose. Everything costs more AND the game keeps escalating. The models keep getting bigger and more expensive and more complicated, all things that are anti-game.

If they would write a good game, make the models for it and then -- finito for that version -- then the products would be cheaper and the game would be better. I do not care if they still sold space marines made in 1985. I just want space marines. Then every 10 years or so, write a new version of the game, maybe add models, but leave the existing models alone. Stop making new improved MORE EXPENSIVE models.

My brother has 10,000 or more points of Eldar, and he STILL has to buy Eldar stuff, because they keep coming out with new gak. He keeps buying newer, better models of stuff he bought 10 years ago. GW's whole business model is "Get people buying stuff for this game, and then keep adding to the game so that they buy stuff forever." That's just stupid, because the game just keeps getting bigger and more bloated. Or I think so.

Just be done with it and give people a new, fresh game to play instead of forever growing the old one until $2000 Warlord Titans are the average unit and you need to be on the beach to play the game.

DorianGray wrote:
Can you guys offer any concrete plans of cutting costs for customers other then oh it needs to be cheaper because I'm entitled to cheaper minis for my loyalty over the years??

GW is barely profitable and is a public company. If they cut prices even 15% they'll be in the red.

It's NOT like GW is racking in the money themselves. Their production costs are massive. All their public shareholders which are British public institutions will dump the stock if they can't meet dividends.

The last thing GW should do is listening to some 35 year old fat guy on an Internet forum rage-hating on GW for how expensive they are and wants cheaper minis. There needs to be a financial basis.

Well, the topic is community rapport, and one big problem GW has with the community is the perception that the minis are hugely expensive. This has always been true, but the cost has risen far ahead of inflation, and GW has made a lot of moves that read as attempts to simply pump the community for money. I think some concrete efforts to encourage army building would help. Package deals, better battle forces, etc. And make them useful! My advice would be to fill them with bulk troops that come from long paid off molds. Tactical Marines, Cadians, Firewarriors/kroot (13 year oldmodels, btw)

A price drop is unlikely, probably unnecessary, and it would certainly alienate the independent stockists. But GW has great IP and a ridiculous profit margin. If they aren't making money, they're doing it wrong.

GW can release free rules PDFs but put less work into them because all that writing and artwork takes a ton of money. Of course then the haters will rage about how gakky quality the new codexs are when they took a hit on their income JUST for the community

Well, you might be arguing something different here than the high minded finances you claimed.

 Polonius wrote:
Well, the topic is community rapport, and one big problem GW has with the community is the perception that the minis are hugely expensive. This has always been true, but the cost has risen far ahead of inflation, and GW has made a lot of moves that read as attempts to simply pump the community for money. I think some concrete efforts to encourage army building would help. Package deals, better battle forces, etc. And make them useful! My advice would be to fill them with bulk troops that come from long paid off molds. Tactical Marines, Cadians, Firewarriors/kroot (13 year oldmodels, btw)

I actually don't mind paying a lot of money for models (WMH models are expensive too), as long as they last essentially forever and I don't need to replace them because game rules change, or there's a "refreshed" model of the same thing or because of power creep.

Incidentally, this is starting to happen in WMH too, and it is also starting to get on my nerves (power creep and feeling like I need to buy more stuff).

I am 26, I work an intensive high powered job in Manhattan and probably make in the top 10-20% of all 20 somethings worldwide and I STILL don't purchase the codexes (except for Harlequins that you know won't be updated for anothe 10 years lmao) and instead download them free off the net because I know they'll be obsolete and unusable in 2 years.

Even the collector edition codexes have zero value after the next update just look at ebay.

GW should not lower prices (though they should not raise them). They cannot afford to. Just look at their financial projections. Nerds and people who are clamouring that GW needs to lower prices are people you don't want to super focus on anyway because barring any drastic change they will always be cash-strapped and just want to play minis - once they get successful and a good job they won't complain about the prices.

Look at Warmachine. They are JUST as expensive as GW. I don't see haters hate on PP all day long.

DorianGray wrote:
I am 26, I work an intensive high powered job in Manhattan and probably make in the top 10-20% of all 20 somethings worldwide and I STILL don't purchase the codexes (except for Harlequins that you know won't be updated for anothe 10 years lmao) and instead download them free off the net because I know they'll be obsolete and unusable in 2 years.

Even the collector edition codexes have zero value after the next update just look at ebay.

GW should not lower prices (though they should not raise them). They cannot afford to. Just look at their financial projections. Nerds and people who are clamouring that GW needs to lower prices are people you don't want to super focus on anyway because barring any drastic change they will always be cash-strapped and just want to play minis - once they get successful and a good job they won't complain about the prices.

Look at Warmachine. They are JUST as expensive as GW. I don't see haters hate on PP all day long.

Good will goes a long way. I saw on the PP forum where people were upset about a new release. Nerd Rage +10 going on. Then one of the creators got on line and explained it all and the nerd rage went away. GW players often say "Communicate with your opponent." The same goes for GW. They have a fractured and shrinking fan base and all of that could be reversed if they just communicated properly.

Hmmm with me it wasn't so much the price creep (prices go up it's a fact of life) as it's the fact they halved the number of models in the box. I'd say maybe increase the content of some boxes as £6 for a plastic figure is more than I'm prepared to go.

My personal problem with Age of Sigmar is it's lost what I liked about Warhammer. Dark gritty heroism. The grubby desperate Empire Spearmen somehow desperately managing to hold of the Chaos Knights for long enough for the villagers to flee. It's just to bright and shiny and not dark and brooding enough.

Warhammer was also a game of regiments a game of large fantasy battles and about their manoeuvers. That isn't an element in the new version.

I reckon the key thing they need to do is acknowledge that they are part of a competitive market. They've lost their monopoly which was far better enforced by the availability of Specialist Games than it was by IP lawyers. The Specialist Games meant you didn't look beyond GW you had the fleet game, the grand battle game, the skirmish game and the main battle game.

DorianGray wrote:
Look at Warmachine. They are JUST as expensive as GW. I don't see haters hate on PP all day long.

Indeed. Because price per model isn't the sole basis of the unhappiness that people currently have with GW.

PPs models are around a similar price point, but this is mitigated somewhat by the fact that you don't need as many of them to get a functional force.

They also get a certain amount of leeway due to the much better perception that people have of them as a company. Customers who feel more positive about a company will be far more accepting of a company's faults. PP are still doing a lot of those things that had people so positive about GW for back in the '90s.



And while I'm not one of those suggesting that GW need to cut prices, I feel a need to point out that this:

GW is barely profitable and is a public company. If they cut prices even 15% they'll be in the red.

...is not actually quite how it works.

GW aren't 'barely profitable', although their profits have certainly taken a hit over recent years. But lowering prices only results in less profit if it fails to generate increased sales. Selling 10 products that each earn you a dollar profit makes you more money overall than selling 3 products that each earn you 3 dollars profit... The key for any business is finding that sweet spot where your profit margin is balanced against the amount of work you need to do to get a sale. Raising prices to generate more profit only works until you hit that ceiling where people just stop buying. And given the decreasing unit sales that have been showing up in their last few financial reports, GW are approaching that ceiling. If they lowered their prices, and if that resulted in more people buying more stuff, then they very well might wind up more profitable as a result.

But at this stage, with the sheer amount of goodwill they have squandered, and with the current state of their games, I very much doubt that lowering prices would solve anything by itself. There's a lot more work needed to turn things around.

Dude I have access to Bloomberg terminal and equity research by the one gakky firm that covers GW since it's such a tiny company (in comparison to the real world)

Their total Earning margins are around 3-5%. No one has a "buy" on the stock. EBITDA is not much higher than earnings.

DorianGray wrote:
I am 26, I work an intensive high powered job in Manhattan and probably make in the top 10-20% of all 20 somethings worldwide and I STILL don't purchase the codexes (except for Harlequins that you know won't be updated for anothe 10 years lmao) and instead download them free off the net because I know they'll be obsolete and unusable in 2 years.

The funny thing is, I never used to buy all the codexes. It wasn't until they went full color and hardback that I started buying them all -- and then largely for the fluff and artwork.

DorianGray wrote:
GW should not lower prices (though they should not raise them). They cannot afford to. Just look at their financial projections. Nerds and people who are clamouring that GW needs to lower prices are people you don't want to super focus on anyway because barring any drastic change they will always be cash-strapped and just want to play minis - once they get successful and a good job they won't complain about the prices.

Look at Warmachine. They are JUST as expensive as GW. I don't see haters hate on PP all day long.

GW wants people who really enjoy their miniatures and fluff, and spend a lot of time on them painting and modelling (and maybe they also play the game) -- the people who primarily just want plastic game pieces to just play a game they'll take as customers, but they're not the target demo that the products are made or priced for. For these people, the models aren't expensive, because they spend an awful lot of time on each model.

I alluded to this in the other thread on DD. Look at what GW does for its painters/modellers/collectors: hundreds of hours of tutorials on Warhammer TV, dozens of books on painting, Paint Splatter, Sprues 'n Glue, and tons of photos in each White Dwarf, a whole (expensive) magazine dedicated to photography of models, an annual painting competition that's highly recognized, parade grounds, local showcase events, and on and on and on.

What do they do for the competitive gaming crowd? There isn't a video on Warhammer TV that shows ONE game table set up in a way that anyone plays the game. There are zero books on strategy. There are no videos or game guides on how to play the game (except the Dark Vengeance quickstart). They never photograph an actual game in White Dwarf. Battle Reports now boul down to "Super Monster A Charges Super Monster B and slays it in 2 rounds!". They don't show up at other people's tournaments. And you could go on forever.

The only conclusion that I can draw is that GW doesn't care about the competitive gaming crowd. They're happy to sell them product, but after that, they're on their own. As opposed to the painting & modelling crowd, which they're happy to support with boatloads of free & pay stuff.

The thing is, ANYONE who is interested in painting & modelling will spend a lot of time on the miniatures. Even at a minimum, 5 hours on a mini gives you a pretty rough result. If a model costs $10, and takes 5 hours just to paint, it's $2 / hour of entertainment right there. And then you have a game piece, and something that you can put on a shelf after to look pretty. If you spend 20 hours on the model, it's just $0.50 per hour of entertainment.

The majority of people in first-world countries who falls into GW's target demo of "painter/modeler/collector that also plays some games", who has any sort of job that leaves them with money in their wallet, will not be able to buy models faster than they can paint them.

GW should def. improve their rules though and give the competitive crowd a bone though. I play 90% causally but once or twice a year I go to adepticon bring a total face wrecking cheese max list and rape face as others do to me. It's fun to be hyper competitive once in a while.

DorianGray wrote:
GW should def. improve their rules though and give the competitive crowd a bone though.

I'm of the opinion that they could achieve this by merely "tightening" their rules, as many folks I know who play Warmahordes constantly tell me how tight their rules are.

I think it would satisfy pretty much every crowd out there, because ambiguity breeds rules arguments, which kill the "fun" of any game regardless of the intent you're playing that particular game.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

DorianGray wrote:
GW should def. improve their rules though and give the competitive crowd a bone though.

I'm of the opinion that they could achieve this by merely "tightening" their rules, as many folks I know who play Warmahordes constantly tell me how tight their rules are.

I think it would satisfy pretty much every crowd out there, because ambiguity breeds rules arguments, which kill the "fun" of any game regardless of the intent you're playing that particular game.

A set of tournament rules and a tournament FAQ would take care of it.

I don't think in 7e there are really that many cases of ambiguity anymore. A lot of rules arguments online are by people arguing between rules as written versus as intended; it's mostly clear what's written -- some people just don't like it.