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 Cleatus wrote:
Just watch, they'll release the old specialist games as "Battlefleet Gothic Classic", "Necromunda Classic", "Gorkamorka Classic". Same models, same rules, but prices updated for the 21st century.

If the ending prices (before SG were pulled completely) are any indication, that will likely be the case.
WarMaster blister packs went from $8 each when they came out around 2000 to double that and more in about a 12 year period.
They did similar price increases for Epic but at least those were newish model designs.ame price it's not as much

It really sounds like it was Tom Kirby's heavy borrowing to buy the company that nearly did it in. It set the pace (and indebtedness) GW had to compete against that really has only been exacerbated with time.

Kirby also took the company public, which diluted his ownership but brought in lots of money and a load of shareholders he had to keep happy.

Thus it was a double-edged sword. The new money paid off the debts and gave them cash for expansion, but the new ownership created a different kind of demand on the company.

 solkan wrote:
This is one of the parts that I thought was really interesting:

“But it ended up being one of the great dividing points of Games Workshop. We’d grown internationally at a very fast pace, and we had to deal with French, Spanish, Italian versions of the games. The print runs of the foreign language editions were always bigger than we could sell, and after several near-disasters where we’d printed way too many of something, GorkaMorka being a classic example, we’d nearly bankrupted the company.”

The death of specialist games by publication costs for the rest of Europe. That's not the reason I would have expected.

GW take the view that everything they do needs to make money in itself. That's why, for example, they run events and charge for entry, rather than paying to attend popular wargame shows like Salute.

This is good in one way because obviously you want to make a profit, but it's bad in another way, which is that you lose the opportunity to market your products to a different audience.

Obviously actual products need to make a profit, that is why you make them. But the problem with French Gorkamorka wasn't the game in itself, it was the serious cost overrun of producing too many copies for the market.

That is a problem with GW's Marketing Department, which actually is a bit otiose to mention since they don't have one. And that is the root of their problems.

However, translation work now costs at least 60% less than it did in the late 90s, and GW have got their production and supply chain working much more efficiently, so there should not be strong objections to making foreign versions of games, especially the kind of boxed game that needs much less rulebook than 40K.

Have to agree with Rick on the overly complex model problem.

Even Forgeworld suffers from it, although they seem to understand that games sell models not the other way around. I recently bought a pair of Kheres Assault Cannons from them and holy feth they're ridiculous. They shows a lack of knowledge (or maybe interest, or maybe both) about the limitations of the product they produce. Six very thin circular tubes that make up the gun that are very easily bent and very hard to bend back into perfect shape. And then, even if you do manage that, assembling the thing without six pairs of hands is impossible. I ended up having to build a core of brass rods and greenstuff the cannon into place around it. It looks like a mess.

Why they couldn't just do a simple circular cannon with six protrusions from it that you could just slot in is anyone's guess. They probably built the model using brass rods and didn't even think about the result post-resin.

Keep in mind that this adds nothing to the final product and you start to see the problem here.

Hmmm, over-ordering product that sits on the shelves unsold? Sounds like TSR before they went under/bought by WOTC.

There's a point to be made about well crafted kickstarters with well defined reward points.

A well crafted Kickstarter campaign will conduct market research as it advances. It keys in to precisely how much of an item will sell in the given market to pretty exacting terms. It further gives the company a means of production already in place for additional ales after the Kickstarter has been fulfilled, thus increasing profits. A great example of well crafted Kickstarter campaigns resulting in tremendous market research allowing for future profits after fulfillment are the Reaper Mini Bones kickstarters.

Competing against that in the current niche market of tabletop wargames requires that a company do actual market research or get n the Kickstarter bandwagon itself to allow the Kickstarter campaign to do the market research for you. The problem for a publicly traded company like GW is, your investors would probably balk at Kickstarters, thus they need to begin actual market research or the changing landscape will obsolete them as a company.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 solkan wrote:
This is one of the parts that I thought was really interesting:

“But it ended up being one of the great dividing points of Games Workshop. We’d grown internationally at a very fast pace, and we had to deal with French, Spanish, Italian versions of the games. The print runs of the foreign language editions were always bigger than we could sell, and after several near-disasters where we’d printed way too many of something, GorkaMorka being a classic example, we’d nearly bankrupted the company.”

The death of specialist games by publication costs for the rest of Europe. That's not the reason I would have expected.

Yeah, most of the rest of the article was basically what I was expecting, but that one kind of surprised me. Over printing for foreign language markets killing specialist games was really not what I was expecting to have been the cause for their demise.

Gorkamorka had come and gone before the 'Specialist Games' label had even appeared. Specialist Games as an entity with its own tab on the website didn't appear until the 2000s after Inquisitor was released, and all the smaller games went under it. Ithink just became a graveyard for them as the stock ran out over the next decade.

The obvious solution is just not to release non-English products for smaller ranges. Large as they are, Hasbro/Wizards doesn't do foreign language releases for non-core products, Modern Masters, From the Vault, and others are English only.

Having worked in market research in my younger days, as crucial as it can certainly be at times, it's often flawed and you get the sense by the questions being asked of what they want the answers to be. It's like polling, the framing of the questions are everything. Even if they did heavy market research I only see two scenarios, the first being it's dead on arrival because they'd be looking to get the answers they want simply to support current efforts, the second being they do it properly and what they learn is seen as a threat to kirby's way of doing things, which is a mix of David Miscavige and Donald Trump. His whole style is plain spoken brute that gets results.

From what we've gleaned over the last while in terms of the design process, it's quite evident that the rules are made for the models, and not the other way around. Try and imagine making starcraft and having it work with that kind of organization, zero communication between model design and the overall game design team. You'd end up with 3 wildly unbalanced factions. Putting the cart before the horse is insane for game design. No wonder we get the terrible balance and faction favouritism, there's no leadership, no plan, everyone is more concerned with keeping their jobs, Jervis Included.


GW's other problem is quantity vs quality vs consistency, or maybe we really did need the admech to be two crappy factions instead of an actual new codex faction. And then there's kauyon, which as a marine player I'm left scratching my head over. I mean sure, great, couple pages of rules with some broken stuff (thanks jervis) but other than that, why would I ever drop $90 if the supplements were already a terrible value. The bloat is devaluing everything in my opinion, rules and models. If your favourite band came out with a new album every week, the quality would drop, you'd also just stop caring.


Does anyone actually put a dollar value to GW missions at this point? It's the same problem, they went from supplements with a fairly defined concept like urban combat or planetary invasion to just pooping out missions on every other page in almost every book and publication. The fluff has been losing perceived value because the quality and consistency is non-existent, they still have plenty of talent writing for black library, but they'll also seemingly let anyone write for them and you have to be ready at any time for marketing to throw a wrench in there and have you pretend knights were involved in every battle ever, retconning to tighten IP whenever convenient, which is something even the casuals and the gw fanboys kinda start rolling their eyes at. Astra militarum is basically everyone's inside joke.


I made a post a few years back when someone brought me a recruitment flyer from europe http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/534173.page which genuinely shocked me, I thought it was satire for a moment . Glassdoor can confirm the "with us or against us" "if I ask you what colour snow is you better say black" vibe the company has. What I'm still in awe of is they screw their employees who end up passing that down the vibe to customers. I had ordered some bases into the local GW, when I went to pick'm up the store manager asked that, instead of just ordering at my leisure from the website I should order it in store, not for any benefit to me the consumer but so they could get the sale stat. I've worked in sales, I know it sucks to get other salesmen snaking your sales, I also know it sucks when you're competing against the company you work for., but this is a 1 person store. That's insane, That illustrates right there the insanity of GW, the manager handles all these interactions with customers and they won't see any of it represented in the metrics used to judge performance. This also leads to them asking ridiculous things of consumers, like doubling our driving time to and from gw so that staff will benefit from a sale stat. That's the culture it breeds, assuming the consumers work for them. Ludicrously short sighted.


It's like kirby watched Glengarry Glen Ross and thought if the hard sell worked for high end real estate it must work for toys and games. It's not hard to imagine the difficulty in selling people on this hobby. I don't think I could sell a single one of my non gaming friends on 40k, and they have all the disposable income in the world. Even if they came to me with a general interest and enthusiasm for getting into the game, I still don't think it would stick, you really have to get'm young to keep them from what I've seen. I'm not someone who values collecting or display, if I stop playing, I see no value in my little dudes. Even mentioning that they're a gaming company is now somehow verboten. Baffling. To think you'd do all that over optics for a lawsuit.

It's a piece of piss to write a 'mission' and sell it for $5. It takes a bit of effort to write a supplement like Forts or Cities or Big Tanks, that has been thought through properly.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
Gorkamorka had come and gone before the 'Specialist Games' label had even appeared. Specialist Games as an entity with its own tab on the website didn't appear until the 2000s after Inquisitor was released, and all the smaller games went under it. Ithink just became a graveyard for them as the stock ran out over the next decade.

Yes, I was using the term "specialist games" as the more generic moniker for "anything produced by GW and not 40k, WHFB or LOTR". It was just quicker to say "specialist games" than "everything not 40k/WHFB" and I figured people would understand

When GW created the label of specialist games, they were already dead.

privateer4hire wrote:

 solkan wrote:
This is one of the parts that I thought was really interesting:

“But it ended up being one of the great dividing points of Games Workshop. We’d grown internationally at a very fast pace, and we had to deal with French, Spanish, Italian versions of the games. The print runs of the foreign language editions were always bigger than we could sell, and after several near-disasters where we’d printed way too many of something, GorkaMorka being a classic example, we’d nearly bankrupted the company.”

The death of specialist games by publication costs for the rest of Europe. That's not the reason I would have expected.

Curious how shifting to free PDF downloads affected things.

I'm just thinking about the edition of Space Marine/Titan Legions that had cardboard cards for everything, including a random deck used for the combination of chaos abilities and greater daemon hit points. That's just not going to work out for an electronic version.

I know, for a while GW was producing free Japanese PDF versions for 40k and WHFB, then they started producing printed Japanese versions, and now the Games Workshop Japanese page is in English and the Japanese editions are the exceptions. Even looking at the Spain/Spanish version of the web page, there's stuff where they're just selling everyone the English version of the book and there's no translated electronic version.

So, I don't know. The thing is that those foreign language versions still cost money to translate. And when you have to translate every word in the game, that changes how you publish your games.

 solkan wrote:
And when you have to translate every word in the game, that changes how you publish your games.

With the weight of 7th that does seem like a daunting amount of translation. We've lost count of codex's and supplements.

Who is this Priestley guy? Just another GW hater!

Jokes aside, Antares maybe a better game but design wise it doesn't try to appeal to the GW crowd IMHO.

 Crazyterran wrote:
Of course he's going to gak talk 40k. Has to make his game I literally heard about just now look good!

Given the abject failure of his Kickstarter attempt to garner monies simply because "Rick Priestly", yeah, that's not surprising.

I wonder if GOA sells better than AOS.

The original abject failure at least got Antares talked about a lot on DakkaDakka. There is a long-running thread on the current version of the game, which has many posts for and against all aspects of the project.

One can only assume that DakkaDakka members who have never heard of Gates of Antares must be recent joiners and don't read the news forum.

As regards translation costs, they are a lot more reasonable now that in the 1990s.

One point is to keep the amount of text to the minimum. I would imagine new Specialist Games should not need reams of background fluff included. If the rules are kept to the size of AoS or Space Hulk, the translations will be a fairly minor part of the project costings.

In some ways it is a weakness of GW that they feel they have to try to ram every game into the 40K/AoS background with loads of fluff.

It's interesting to me that going to monopose small scale was a Rick Priestly idea. It's one of my favourite things about the LOTR range.

I hate assembly and I like true-scale to my minis, so it was godsend to me. I got so much more done when I didn't have the awful assembly stage waiting for me, promising to turn my dudes into oddly posed puppets because I suck at posing.

I was disappointed to see the component count in LOTR stuff climbing with the Hobbit releases, even if it did result in more dynamic poses. GW advertise the number of components as though it's a feature these days.

If Priestley's saying that SG nearly bankrupted GW last time around, then how are things going to be different this time around?

Logic suggests that GW will probably do limited runs, and that a lot of people who were jumping for joy at SG's revival, may be left bitterly disappointed...

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
If Priestley's saying that SG nearly bankrupted GW last time around, then how are things going to be different this time around?

Logic suggests that GW will probably do limited runs, and that a lot of people who were jumping for joy at SG's revival, may be left bitterly disappointed...

Well according to Rick it was overproducing for foreign markets that did it, maybe GW think they have a better idea now.

He's not saying that. He's saying that bad marketing made foreign language editions of SGs unprofitable, and that when Kirby took over the company and went public, the management started to slash costs by canning the SGs.

I agree with you that future SG releases are likely to be fixed print runs. It's much better for GW to accurately estimate they can sell say 10,000 English Blood Bowls, and another 10,000 split between French, German, Italian, etc.

The key is for GW to make accurate forecasts. This is where they failed in the late 1990s, and with Dread Fleet. Arguably they failed with Space Hulk too, and badly underestimated.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
He's not saying that. He's saying that bad marketing made foreign language editions of SGs unprofitable, and that when Kirby took over the company and went public, the management started to slash costs by canning the SGs.

I agree with you that future SG releases are likely to be fixed print runs. It's much better for GW to accurately estimate they can sell say 10,000 English Blood Bowls, and another 10,000 split between French, German, Italian, etc.

The key is for GW to make accurate forecasts. This is where they failed in the late 1990s, and with Dread Fleet. Arguably they failed with Space Hulk too, and badly underestimated.

So essentially, all those people who pinned their hope's on SG (if that recent thread is anything to go by) are going to be very disappointed?

And to think that the naysayers shot me down in flames for saying that

Why can't they just do limited production runs annually?

i.e. "In 2015 we sold 10,000 copies of Space Hulk. In 2016 we'll print 12,000 copies."

etc.

I don't understand why they decide to stop selling popular products. They did this with a lot of those limited edition terrain kits. They've already made the molds, so why not keep on producing them every year, but just be a little cautious to make sure they don't over produce?

In fact they do this with the massive Smaug model for the Hobbit SBG. It frequently sells out, then comes back a few months later. Or is that not the same thing?

 Kilkrazy wrote:
He's not saying that. He's saying that bad marketing made foreign language editions of SGs unprofitable, and that when Kirby took over the company and went public, the management started to slash costs by canning the SGs.

I agree with you that future SG releases are likely to be fixed print runs. It's much better for GW to accurately estimate they can sell say 10,000 English Blood Bowls, and another 10,000 split between French, German, Italian, etc.

The key is for GW to make accurate forecasts. This is where they failed in the late 1990s, and with Dread Fleet. Arguably they failed with Space Hulk too, and badly underestimated.

Making forecasts or predictions. This is where market research comes should come in.
Not sure if they make limited market research now?

 Kilkrazy wrote:
He's not saying that. He's saying that bad marketing made foreign language editions of SGs unprofitable, and that when Kirby took over the company and went public, the management started to slash costs by canning the SGs.

He (Rick) didn't say that, simply that the over produced for foreign markets and that made the company lose its appetite for making new games, never stated a reason such as bad marketing. There's a lot of reasons you might overproduce on something.

We should probably be careful about the language we use as well, specialist games as GW invented the term weren't canned until recently, Rick was talking about not creating new games, which is separate to the canning of SG's more recently.

-

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Why can't they just do limited production runs annually?

i.e. "In 2015 we sold 10,000 copies of Space Hulk. In 2016 we'll print 12,000 copies."

etc.

I don't understand why they decide to stop selling popular products. They did this with a lot of those limited edition terrain kits. They've already made the molds, so why not keep on producing them every year, but just be a little cautious to make sure they don't over produce?

In fact they do this with the massive Smaug model for the Hobbit SBG. It frequently sells out, then comes back a few months later. Or is that not the same thing?

Runs are limited to a sweet spot between unit cost, anticipated sales and storage/time lag between manufacture and anticipated sale of all the products.

You idea of 12k units a year for however many years would see the initial run sell out mega quick with not enough units to meet demand. This might kill interest in the next years run on top of the naturally lowered interest after release any way.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
He's not saying that. He's saying that bad marketing made foreign language editions of SGs unprofitable, and that when Kirby took over the company and went public, the management started to slash costs by canning the SGs.

He (Rick) didn't say that, simply that the over produced for foreign markets and that made the company lose its appetite for making new games, never stated a reason such as bad marketing. There's a lot of reasons you might overproduce on something.

We should probably be careful about the language we use as well, specialist games as GW invented the term weren't canned until recently, Rick was talking about not creating new games, which is separate to the canning of SG's more recently.

He doesn't say it in words because he doesn't need to. It's implicit in the nature of business. The key reason a company would overproduce is because the marketing department makes an inaccurate optimistic forecast of how many they will be able to sell.

Ah ok, I misunderstood you, I thought you meant bad marketing as in poorly communicating with the customer rather than poorly forecasting, I guess that's part of marketing too.

However it could also have been deemed not financially viable to produce a wider range of products for foreign markets at the level they were expected to sell. Otherwise surely they would just reduce expectations and not produce as much instead of cutting it entirely.

 solkan wrote:


I'm just thinking about the edition of Space Marine/Titan Legions that had cardboard cards for everything, including a random deck used for the combination of chaos abilities and greater daemon hit points.

I have that Chaos Boon deck sitting on my desk as I type. Loved that edition.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Ah ok, I misunderstood you, I thought you meant bad marketing as in poorly communicating with the customer rather than poorly forecasting, I guess that's part of marketing too.

However it could also have been deemed not financially viable to produce a wider range of products for foreign markets at the level they were expected to sell. Otherwise surely they would just reduce expectations and not produce as much instead of cutting it entirely.

That's right. Communication with the customer is a two way flow, well, a circle in a way.

Marketing seeks to understand what customers want to buy, and channel this info to design and production. When products are developed, Marketing informs and hopefully excites customers to generate orders.

GW Marketing ought to have been able to work out that there weren't enough potential customers for the foreign editions of GorkaMorka and so on. Then they could have told Design and Production to produce no foreign versions or to cut the cost on them somehow. Or perhaps thay could have run some major promotion in France, to generate more orders.

Since GW really have nothing resembling marketing, maybe the smartest move would have been to sell English versions in those countries and had the translation available as a download. Even when GorkaMorka was released, there was an internet.

Maybe that's how they'll handle the new SG stuff.