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Chikout wrote:
You kind of missed my point. An earlier user pointed out that the recent 40k release list has been a selection of wish listed armies, but they were in danger of running out of ideas.. That list was just pointing out that there is a LOT more fan wished armies that they could still release. Also that list does not contain a single loyalist chapter in it.

There are still ideas, but they aren't good ideas. SoB are the only thing on the 40k list that is really a new concept and something with long-term demand built up, the rest of it is just milking the cash cow of their existing armies by giving a whole new codex to every minor sub-faction. There's nothing like plastic 30k marines left, the kind of game-changing product idea that gets mass sales and people rushing to buy new armies. With something like codices for CSM sub-factions the CSM players will buy it, but the end result is going to be much more like another Codex: CSM update in sales numbers.

The only things GW have left to boost sales numbers are:

1) 40k 8th edition, a high-stakes product that they get exactly one chance to get right. An AoS-level screwup in the rules would be a disaster for GW. The community would hate it, sales would drop, and they would have completely blown their big opportunity. To be successful 8th edition 40k needs to be a major improvement over 7th, and it seems doubtful that GW has anyone competent enough to write a good game.

2) Relaunching the specialist games range. This could be big, but we need to have a sense of reality about it. Necromunda/Mordheim may have some demand built up, but model-wise they're skirmish scale games that use GW's existing 40k/WHFB model lines. So they may draw a lot of interest, but it remains to be seen how that would translate into sales. Epic and BFG have a lot more potential for model sales, but let's not forget that these games already died from lack of interest. How much is nostalgia for the good old days going to translate into sales for a whole new game that isn't compatible with 40k/AoS? Success depends on convincing people who already declined to buy Epic/BFG to change their minds about the games, and that's an uphill battle before the games are even announced.

In regards to AOS, every new release will help increase the user base as they are all 'new' armies.

Sure, it might increase the customer base, but AoS is largely perceived as a failure and their models are competing with every other fantasy miniatures company in the market. Obviously GW wants to continue to get what money they can out of AoS, but I don't think there's any release for AoS that is an equivalent "our financial report is looking bad, release the plastic 30k marines and fix it!" emergency option.

 Peregrine wrote:


To give a little help here: GW reports their profits in GBP, but gets income in a variety of currencies, including a huge amount of revenue in USD from the US market. If the pound crashes relative to the dollar then the profits GW makes on all of their US-market sales will increase. To put some (completely made up) numbers on it: let's say GW sells a box for $50 in the US. Before the pound crashes that box provides $10 profit, which translates to £5 profit in the financial report. Now let's say the pound crashes to half its value. Now the $50 box in the US market is still making the same $10 profit, but that $10 now translates to £10 in the financial report. GW has "doubled" their profit without improving their business at all, they just happened to benefit from a favorable exchange rate. And it works both ways, if the pound doubles in value that US sale would only provide £2.50 in profit.

This is why looking at GW's numbers at constant currency and considering revenue in addition to profit is important. It removes the exchange rate factor and removes things like "we closed a store and made more profit by not paying rent this year" from the profit numbers. Constant-currency revenue is the best indicator of how many boxes GW's customers are buying, and therefore how healthy the company is.

There might be one exception this though - Forgeworld. IIRC this is not split by US/UK/EU/RoW sales so with tanking £ it would be interesting to see just whether a lot of the profit increase might be associated with this and hence not being extracted from the 'constant currency' argument?

 Whirlwind wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:


To give a little help here: GW reports their profits in GBP, but gets income in a variety of currencies, including a huge amount of revenue in USD from the US market. If the pound crashes relative to the dollar then the profits GW makes on all of their US-market sales will increase. To put some (completely made up) numbers on it: let's say GW sells a box for $50 in the US. Before the pound crashes that box provides $10 profit, which translates to £5 profit in the financial report. Now let's say the pound crashes to half its value. Now the $50 box in the US market is still making the same $10 profit, but that $10 now translates to £10 in the financial report. GW has "doubled" their profit without improving their business at all, they just happened to benefit from a favorable exchange rate. And it works both ways, if the pound doubles in value that US sale would only provide £2.50 in profit.

This is why looking at GW's numbers at constant currency and considering revenue in addition to profit is important. It removes the exchange rate factor and removes things like "we closed a store and made more profit by not paying rent this year" from the profit numbers. Constant-currency revenue is the best indicator of how many boxes GW's customers are buying, and therefore how healthy the company is.

There might be one exception this though - Forgeworld. IIRC this is not split by US/UK/EU/RoW sales so with tanking £ it would be interesting to see just whether a lot of the profit increase might be associated with this and hence not being extracted from the 'constant currency' argument?

FW probably benefited from brexit as much if not more than citadel sales because as soon as brexit came out there were threads clamouring to buy FW stuff at reduced prices. They were reduced prices for customers but still go through at the same value on GW's balance sheet.

So brexit had a two sided improvement...
1. Sales overseas at constant USD/EUR/AUD/NZD/etc made GW more GBP per product sold.

2. Sales from FW in GBP likely increased due to a reduced price for people paying with bank accounts in USD/EUR/AUD/NZD/etc, but they go through at the same GBP per product sold.

A weak GBP favours UK companies that relies on exports and hurts a UK company that imports regardless of whether the sales themselves are made in GBP or USD or whatever.

Forgeworld is reported as part of their "online" revenue stream, alongside GW.com and BL.

That, in total, contributed ~20% of total revenue across the last few reports.

A division offering a share of 20% of the total as its contribution, and with it uncertain how much of that share is already to the U.K., is unlikely to have grown so dramatically as to have made a significant impact on the bottom line. Certainly I'd think we'd have heard about that sort of growth, officially or otherwise.

 JamesY wrote:
I'm very interested to see what direction 8th will bring. I hear talk of a new kind of space marine (new armour pattern and rapid growth, similar to corax's supermarines in deliverance lost) coming out with it. If that is true, and they are messing with space marines (I haven't heard it from enough people I trust to fully believe it yet), then anything could be on the cards.

Don't know about "rapid growth" Marines. While I feel that all the forces in 40k and Marines in particular are hugely undermanned for what there supposed to be capable of, having tons of em running about would make it feel to much like great crusade/HH mk2. That said I would like to see MK8 make an appearance outside the Death watch.

 Peregrine wrote:

Chikout wrote:
You kind of missed my point. An earlier user pointed out that the recent 40k release list has been a selection of wish listed armies, but they were in danger of running out of ideas.. That list was just pointing out that there is a LOT more fan wished armies that they could still release. Also that list does not contain a single loyalist chapter in it.

There are still ideas, but they aren't good ideas. SoB are the only thing on the 40k list that is really a new concept and something with long-term demand built up, the rest of it is just milking the cash cow of their existing armies by giving a whole new codex to every minor sub-faction. There's nothing like plastic 30k marines left, the kind of game-changing product idea that gets mass sales and people rushing to buy new armies. With something like codices for CSM sub-factions the CSM players will buy it, but the end result is going to be much more like another Codex: CSM update in sales numbers.

The only things GW have left to boost sales numbers are:

1) 40k 8th edition, a high-stakes product that they get exactly one chance to get right. An AoS-level screwup in the rules would be a disaster for GW. The community would hate it, sales would drop, and they would have completely blown their big opportunity. To be successful 8th edition 40k needs to be a major improvement over 7th, and it seems doubtful that GW has anyone competent enough to write a good game.

2) Relaunching the specialist games range. This could be big, but we need to have a sense of reality about it. Necromunda/Mordheim may have some demand built up, but model-wise they're skirmish scale games that use GW's existing 40k/WHFB model lines. So they may draw a lot of interest, but it remains to be seen how that would translate into sales. Epic and BFG have a lot more potential for model sales, but let's not forget that these games already died from lack of interest. How much is nostalgia for the good old days going to translate into sales for a whole new game that isn't compatible with 40k/AoS? Success depends on convincing people who already declined to buy Epic/BFG to change their minds about the games, and that's an uphill battle before the games are even announced.

In regards to AOS, every new release will help increase the user base as they are all 'new' armies.

Sure, it might increase the customer base, but AoS is largely perceived as a failure and their models are competing with every other fantasy miniatures company in the market. Obviously GW wants to continue to get what money they can out of AoS, but I don't think there's any release for AoS that is an equivalent "our financial report is looking bad, release the plastic 30k marines and fix it!" emergency option.

Epic didn't die due to lack of interest, nor did bfg, they died due to lack of support, long wait times for people's armies, bad models or non existent ones, the dropping from stores for no legitimate reason.

All these reasons and more, but this is 2016, all of these issues are very easy for gw to overcome now, mainly due to the internet existing, look at the amount of 6mm "small scale" games around now, the space combat games, that's not lack of interest, these companies have filled the void that fw has left.

 Formosa wrote:
Epic didn't die due to lack of interest, nor did bfg, they died due to lack of support, long wait times for people's armies, bad models or non existent ones, the dropping from stores for no legitimate reason.

I think Peregrine was talking about the late 90's when Epic 3rd edition came out and sold poorly so was axed.

All these reasons and more, but this is 2016, all of these issues are very easy for gw to overcome now, mainly due to the internet existing, look at the amount of 6mm "small scale" games around now, the space combat games, that's not lack of interest, these companies have filled the void that fw has left.

It's always hard to say, GW doesn't really operate in the small quantities that might be sufficient for a smaller company to survive. Their dropping of metal/resin has made it impractical to make miniatures that only serve a small audience.

I have no idea how big the Epic audience might be, I quite liked the game and bought the 3rd ed boxed set and a bunch of other stuff, but it seems people generally like bigger models that they can spend more time on each model.

That seems to be the thinking behind both the move to 8mm and concentrating on knights and above

There are not only two options to keep them going, 100% disagree, Peregrine. The trend for small, nostalgic factions must be a huge cash cow, with plenty of milking left. Even if they just re-iterate every faction and RT model they could do it for decades. They may have largely shot their plastic HH marines bolt, but plenty of other stuff to do.

Poor poor doomsayers who cried GW is dead a year ago...

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
To me, the concern is how sustainable this is. GW has released a lot of stuff in the past year or so. While we know that more is to come (specialist games, maybe more 40K primarchs, 8th edition, etc.), how much longer before the train starts to lose steam?

The train already lost steam.

It's a mature product line. This will always happen.

Look at X-Wing. Its sales have been declining too, but that's because the line is maturing. Everyone already has all the TIE Fighters they'll ever need. Now FFG is trying to find new shinies to sell customers, but the interest is lower unless the model is OP (or FFG packages it with some must-have upgrade card)


That said, didn't GW invest a bunch in site infrastructure last year? It looks like sales are up, but not having that cost on the books for this year would definitely help profitability.

When was GW paid the royalties for Warhammer:Total war? It was released at the end of May and it has just under 1 million owners on Steam so its quite possible that a good chunk of this profit originates from Sega.

There was a hefty dose of royalties in the last report. Frankly, it was the only thing that kept the numbers steady. A breakdown of what they were for may be buried somewhere deep in the report notes, but I've not seen it nor seen it referenced.

 Runic wrote:
Poor poor doomsayers who cried GW is dead a year ago...

Haha, I don't know about the GW doomsayers but I do recall the AoS doomsayers..

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1084111664996993&id=865488760192619

It's great to hear GW's is getting it's reward for such a outstanding year of popular releases but I, like others, worry abit about them keeping this rate up.

AoS is solid because it's a new thing that can only go from strength to strength as the setting, lore and armies are expanded upon which have limitless possibilities.

40k however...that's going to turn into more and more of a treacherous pitfall as they stop looking back and begin moving forward. It really looks like a "damned If they do and damned if they don't" situation as there's little chance of GW living up to the fandom's expectations which seems to differ with every player.

Edit: removed insane as being too harsh. Really meant that for the more "devoted" player-base.

How is being able to put down a force of approximately equal power to the opposition's for the same points and not needing to remortgage one's Grandmother to do so an "insane expectation?"

Haha, okay, "insane" was a harsh term. Should've specified that for some of the players I've seen that are rather fanatical about it rather than a broad accusation.

Can't say on the rules and prices. Pretty sure those are going to be complained about no matter what GW do. Best hope is future changes lose them as few fans as possible since it's impossible to please them all, the arguments of "keep it complex" and "streamline it" attest to that.

Oh, is it the time of year where I roll out my traditional complex =\= complicated post?

I'm still a bit priced out. I'd like to get into the hobby again, but right now I'm more content with my commission work. It's still just so durned expensive.

 Azreal13 wrote:
Oh, is it the time of year where I roll out my traditional complex =\= complicated post?

Haha, maybe.

I'll admit I haven't gotten into 40k gaming and have remained staunchly on the fantasy/AoS side so I may be a little blind to the real issues. I do believe I have seen some players say they enjoy the "bloat" and definitely saw people prefering unbalanced rules so it's still a mixed bag either way.

Either way, best of luck to GW with the rules and especially with writing new lore.

Baron Klatz wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
Oh, is it the time of year where I roll out my traditional complex =\= complicated post?

Haha, maybe.

I'll admit I haven't gotten into 40k gaming and have remained staunchly on the fantasy/AoS side so I may be a little blind to the real issues. I do believe I have seen some players say they enjoy the "bloat" and definitely saw people prefering unbalanced rules so it's still a mixed bag either way.

Either way, best of luck to GW with the rules and especially with writing new lore.

In my area people stopped using fliers at this point because of the clunky rules. People just don't find them fun to use, and dog fight rules adds a bunch of new stuff to the game to keep track of.

"Bloat" describes current 40k pretty well. a lot of groups bassicly doing what ever they can to try and manage the complexity.

Since that last 6 months, I made my comeback in the 40k universe and I plan to start playing AoS soon.
With all the last update they did, I have never been soo happy about GW.

I think people are putting a little too much stock in 'plastic horus heresy'. Yes, those boxes helped expand the number of Horus Heresy players out there and yes, pretty much everyone who is really interested in playing HH got at least 2 of each box because of just how insanely good of a deal they are, but you have to remember that those boxes, especially Calth, were just as insane for dedicated 40k players as HH players. I mean, the Contemptor is easily the best dread outside of blood angels, the Cataphractii captain is brokenly good, the SoS are basically auto-include in any army that wants to shut down psychic and on top of all that you got dirt cheap bricks of marines that are incredibly cool looking, the prospero ones are fantastic. I would say probably only 60ish% of those boxes will ever see a game of HH with the majority splitting time between the two.

The plastic HH box sets were a fantastic idea and great sellers but I don't think they bring so much to the table that a non-HH box game that was good value and had cool stuff in it couldn't do pretty close to the same level of sales. The boxes helped, adn I doubt what comes next will match them exactly, but they're not totally impossible to keep up with.

As for the idea that GW could 'run out' of exciting, get people up and spending releases soon, I say; go check ANY comment section for ANY of the wrath of Magnus stuff. Wishlisting for JUST CSM is New plastic Khorne Berzerkers, Plastic Noise Marines, New plastic Plague Marines, Blastic Khorne Termies, Plastic Nurgle Termies, Plastic Slaanesh Termies, Plastic Oblits/Mutas, New Havocs, New basic CSM kits, New Abbadon, New Typhus, New Lucius, New Warpsmith, New Chosen, New Character kits, Etc. Sisters of Battle and Inquisition need their entire range rebuilt from the ground up, then you still have things like Exodites and Arbites that you can build an entire faction around. That's a Solid Year of releases right there! With 4 factions! out of what 22-24?

And that's only 40k! AoS has 10x the amount of ground to cover. All of Death, 20% of Chaos, 60% of Order and 40% of destruction need to be entirely rebuilt from the ground up, leaving a HUGE amount of room for amazing new models. And if the rumors from a while back that Sigmar is 35% of GWs total sales and climbing are even in the ballpark, what Sigmar does will influence a lot of things as time goes on.

GW has made some good solid strides in the past year that has allowed them to build a framework for them to build off of in the future. If they keep going in a positive direction in terms of customer relations, high quality releases, and improving their rule sets(whatever you think of AoS it's hard to argue that the GHB isn't awesome within the context of the game), we could be looking at some very good years for GW.

Not as much as you think, though.

Unless you count "rules getting worse" as change, which case yes perhaps a lot has changed.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Not as much as you think, though.

Unless you count "rules getting worse" as change, which case yes perhaps a lot has changed.

And "how much" do I think, exactly?

ERJAK wrote:
As for the idea that GW could 'run out' of exciting, get people up and spending releases soon, I say; go check ANY comment section for ANY of the wrath of Magnus stuff. Wishlisting for JUST CSM is New plastic Khorne Berzerkers, Plastic Noise Marines, New plastic Plague Marines, Blastic Khorne Termies, Plastic Nurgle Termies, Plastic Slaanesh Termies, Plastic Oblits/Mutas, New Havocs, New basic CSM kits, New Abbadon, New Typhus, New Lucius, New Warpsmith, New Chosen, New Character kits, Etc. Sisters of Battle and Inquisition need their entire range rebuilt from the ground up, then you still have things like Exodites and Arbites that you can build an entire faction around. That's a Solid Year of releases right there! With 4 factions! out of what 22-24?

And that's only 40k! AoS has 10x the amount of ground to cover. All of Death, 20% of Chaos, 60% of Order and 40% of destruction need to be entirely rebuilt from the ground up, leaving a HUGE amount of room for amazing new models. And if the rumors from a while back that Sigmar is 35% of GWs total sales and climbing are even in the ballpark, what Sigmar does will influence a lot of things as time goes on.

It's not GW running out of ideas that is the problem, it's customer burnout. Pacing is important. Back when I played (going on 3 years ago now) major releases were about every 6 months. Pacing was awful. You'd wait and wait and wait and if you were lucky enough to be the target of the release, it's quality was a crapshoot. Quality is still a crapshoot, but just about every month GW seem to release something they, or internal sources that spoke through 'rumour' people, said that GW would never, ever release. Plastic Horus heresy stuff. Knights. Plastic Mechanicus. Plastic Genestealer Cult. Etc.

The idea of GW blowing its load isn't about releasing all of their pent up ideas at once, it's about the customer base having the money to buy it and the enthusiasm to do anything with it. Month after month there's releases that customer base has been screaming for, but it's mostly getting thrown in the to-do pile while the next months set of shiny stuff is released. What used to take 3-4 months of spaced out releases is just thrown out there all at once. They might have lots left to release, but if they keep up this pace, they're in danger of just burning people out. That's bad for the hobby as a whole, because when someone is burned out like that, they might not go to another game and then come back to 40k, they might just sell everything and find something else to do.

 Runic wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Not as much as you think, though.

Unless you count "rules getting worse" as change, which case yes perhaps a lot has changed.

And "how much" do I think, exactly?

I'm not sure that's the question you want answered.

Not every fan buys every release though. Typically in a year I might see two major release perios I like that are far apart, but that's me. I have no data or way to know how spaced out the average purchaser spaces things out. This includes FW products. If I exclude that then only one release period a year has had me so interested I had to buy.

For the serious fans who have to buy it all then yeah I could see burn out happening.

Joyboozer wrote:

I'm not sure that's the question you want answered.

It seems he knows "how much" I think has changed, would be interesting to hear, seeing as I haven't really touched on the subject.

But anyway, anyone with an internet connection is capable of perceiving the many changes that have taken place within the last year for themselves.

An aspect not changing for the better doesn't reduce the amount of other changes, it's simply something that has stayed the same, as a sidenote. Seeing as there are these unlogical "rules are the same, ergo nothing has changed" arguments which ofcourse, simply aren't true when looked at objectively. One can claim anything with bias, the factual matter can still differ.

 Gamgee wrote:
Not every fan buys every release though. Typically in a year I might see two major release perios I like that are far apart, but that's me. I have no data or way to know how spaced out the average purchaser spaces things out. This includes FW products. If I exclude that then only one release period a year has had me so interested I had to buy.

For the serious fans who have to buy it all then yeah I could see burn out happening.

That's a fair point, but even for people who only buy the odd release for their one army, they still face this new stuff more regularly.Every month there's more units, formations and rules you'll face and likely want to know about before you face it, which is more stuff to keep track of, which may be broken to the point you don't enjoy playing it. It's just more and more and more and more.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Runic wrote:

Joyboozer wrote:

I'm not sure that's the question you want answered.

It seems he knows "how much" I think has changed, would be interesting to hear, seeing as I haven't really touched on the subject.

But anyway, anyone with an internet connection is capable of perceiving the many changes that have taken place within the last year for themselves.

An aspect not changing for the better doesn't reduce the amount of other changes, it's simply something that has stayed the same, as a sidenote. Seeing as there are these unlogical "rules are the same, ergo nothing has changed" arguments which ofcourse, simply aren't true when looked at objectively. One can claim anything with bias, the factual matter can still differ.

The problem is what changes can also affect the possibility of what you want to see change diminish. What I'm personally seeing is more and more and more stuff that means the chances of 8th edition being the complete overhaul 40k needs less and less and less likely. Every new army, every new formation, every new unit is something that will need to be rewritten in an overhaul edition. 3rd could do it because 2nd didn't have a huge wealth of stuff to mvoe over. it had so little they could get away with 'get you by' lists in the rulebook itself. There's just so much stuff in 40k now, made worse with the last year of releases, that fixing 40k, to me, just isn't possible anymore.

And yet the Deathwatch release was extremely balanced. The genestealers were strong but not overpowered. So far it seems they are making small strides to try keep the power levels in check.

Only with some of this new chaos stuff does it come to approaching OP, but they need at least a little to compete with the other stuff at this level. Other than that the only really truly OP thing released this year that boggled my mind was the space marine legions supplement which was stupidly powerful and then followed by death from the skies. DFTS was panned for being OP and generally unweidly and ditched by the community and it's no longer official core rules according to GW.

Also your average 40k casual fan usually doesn't keep up to date on every release and doesn't follow them. And unless they are in a huge game store where every players has 3+ armies and then one or two of all the new ones coming out then I doubt it's much of a barrage for new people. They are limited to what appears in their meta. Only the hyper competitive people who want to game everything and look and buy every last super op thing to make super cheesy not fluffy lists is being overwhelmed (which is a good thing since people don't have as much time to sit and make cheese lists).

Your vastly overselling how bad this is.