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 insaniak wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
The other one Johnny posted was an empty box, nothing but the box, and asking 5 quid buy it now price for it.

The listing is at least very clear that it is just the empty box. That and the low Buy It Now price suggest that it's legitimately there on the off-chance that someone would like the box enough to part with a few quid for one. Which does happen.

If it was intended as a scam, it wouldn't have had the Buy It Now, and the fact that it's just an empty box would have been buried in the description in the hope that people would miss it and bid up to something stupid for it thinking it was the full product.

Yeah I never said it was a scam, I was just pointing out the difference between asking 5 quid for an empty box and asking 99p for the box, rules and templates and it getting bidded up to 40 quid.

Even though lots of people here seem horny over the terrain more than anything, I'm sure there's plenty of people who just want the rules in print form even if it means paying a bit more for them.

 insaniak wrote:

They could have released trial rules through White Dwarf or the website to judge potential interest through the downloads.

This is something that could have been done in the planning stages of the project. It would however, need even more lead time as White Dwarf has lead times as well. That said, would there be any actual usable data in terms of production runs? How do they interpret the number of downloads? What are they comparing them to? Despite there actually being a quantity (the number of downloads), I don't think you can make interpretations of that number until you have a baseline to use for comparison and a proven correlation between downloads and sales.

They could have run leagues through their stores.

So they need to do the game development work in advance (enough to run a league, not just demos of a simplified version) and run the league to its completion and then analyze participation rate? Sales of unit box sets to league participants? What kind of participation do you need to increase the supply for the launch? Again, there's no base line. How many units of the box set do you increase the production run if the average participation in each store is 3.7 players? What does it mean if the opening week had an average of 3.2 players, the middle week 5.1 and the final week 4.7? How long does it need to go for with regular attendance before you increase production?

They could have visited trade shows and gaming conventions with preview copies, run gaming sessions and taken pre-sales from retailers.

So they need to do the design and tooling enough to make the plastic terrain and run off their preview sprues, so there may be a timing issue here as now they are increasing the time between the completion of design and full production to allow for an increased amount of time spent on promotions and sales (and whether or not a suitable trade show and time to close sales based on interest and leads gathered there). At least in this case they'd end up with an actual firm number of placed orders from real trade clients. This one is actually useful in deciding to print at least that many plus what's needed based on normal sales levels for similar products in their webstore.

Timing is a big issue though as they'd need to take these extra perorders into consideration before they schedule time with whoever produced the rules and tokens. So the typical retailer might ask when this comes out and when the answer is next quarter, they might not really want to place a special preorder so far in advance. I think most would be like "is this going to be in your normal ordering system for new products? Cool. I'll order it then."

They could have held retailer information sessions where they talked about their upcoming releases and confirmed potential customer interest with the people who actually deal with said customers day in, day out.

At that convention? Or conference calls? Or have additional trade sales team members added to call each account for a chat? And what kind of answers would you need to add copies to the production run over and above the sales levels of other terrain kits or stand alone games? "Oh yeah, I think that'd be a cool product." Well that's nice. Should we produce twice as many as Bloodbowl because a handful of retailers who happen to respond or attend the seminar say it sounds good?

They could have opened up pre-orders early enough to actually queue up extra production if necessary.

I'm not sure how many stores want to make preorders for things before things go off to printers and a container of books starts being packed up in China. These things have huge lead times. So you're going to not get a firm answer from a good portion of your trade accounts. And you'd be asking your trade sales team to get preorders for things that aren't yet available rather than making real cash generating sales for the current new release.

And most obviously, they could have spent some time interacting with their customers, at which point it would have been made apparent very quickly that said customers have been asking for small-scale skirmish rules for 40K for a very long time, and that the Necromunda rules are widely regarded as perfect for that purpose.

I think that might be the opinion of a few die hards on some forums, but I'm guessing the majority of their customers have never played Necromunda and wouldn't have been able to tell them anything about it.

But still, how do you use that to make decisions about production numbers? The guys on the internet like Necromunda? Print quadruple the supply! Who cares if our own internal numbers for Necromunda's last sales run wasn't that impressive. The people on the internet like it! There's just no grounds for a meaningful decision here without hindsight.

Hindsight tells us they made too few, but there really isn't an credible way they could have justified the risk of a larger print run. When you take the portion that goes through trade sales and their own cost of retailing into consideration, the damage an extra 25% that just sits there does to the overall margins and return on capital of the investment is huge. You need real facts to justify a larger production run.

That said, they need to start doing at least some of the things you suggest so they can start having useful baselines to compare. They put out all sorts of PDF rules for the other 40k factions, so now the next time they do something like that, they can actually compare download rates with something. So that's a start. Many of your ideas would certainly work for future products, but only when you have enough information to actually make meaningful decisions. Hopefully as the transition away from Kirby's approach to customer and retailer communication continues, they'll start setting up some of these base lines and can start making meaningful decisions based on them. Wouldn't have helped for this project though.

 Sidstyler wrote:
For a higher price, yeah. The terrain kits are insanely expensive by themselves and cost a lot more than the boxed game does. And you don't get the rules, tokens, or any other actual gaming stuff with it.

I'm also one of the ones who likes having a physical rulebook. Don't really feel like bringing my tablet to game with. So if the rules are strictly digital only then I can't be bothered, honestly.

£90 vs £80?

I know you get a lot of other stuff thrown in, but if you're just interested in the scenery then buying separately probably works out roughly the same

We also don't know how many people really missed out on this because of the lack of supply. If they made 10,000 copies and 2500 people missed out, that could account for all the complaining about stock levels but still mean that had they gone with 20,000 copies, the whole project could have gone from a success to a failure with 7,500 copies sitting there. And if your instinct is to reply with "well then 13,000 copies would obviously have been the right amount" that would be a perfect example of an illusion of expertise through hindsight.

The smart thing is probably to make the copies you know you can sell within your expected time frame and then respond to additional demand as required. GW now has a new data point in terms of the rate of sales of a 40k based smaller model count game. Hopefully they learn from that going forward.

 frozenwastes wrote:

But still, how do you use that to make decisions about production numbers?

You use your 30+ years of accrued sales and marketing data to extrapolate from the quantity of people expressing an interest in a given product to the expected quantity of sales said expressed interest is statistically likely to translate into and work from there, I would imagine.

Much as I think the majority of complaints about GW are for the sake of complaining ... they pretty clearly ballsed up on this one, however it's looked at.

Demand was clearly way over what they thought and they should have gauged it better

Hopefully they are beginning to see that stuff like this is actually deserving of major future investment

 frozenwastes wrote:
We also don't know how many people really missed out on this because of the lack of supply. If they made 10,000 copies and 2500 people missed out, that could account for all the complaining about stock levels but still mean that had they gone with 20,000 copies, the whole project could have gone from a success to a failure with 7,500 copies sitting there. .

Would it?

How much do those 7500 units cost them in manufacturing and storage, compared to the profit margin on the 2500 extra copies that would have sold in your hypothetical?

Remember to factor in that most of the contents of those 7500 units can actually be recycled into other product codes if they turn out to be surplus to needs.

@ HMV

Printing in the UK is not economical compared china to the point where allot of type of print types aren't don't here anymore.

That's not to say there aren't printers here but given the demand and opportunity for this they might be a fair trade off cost against programme and revenue, assuming they can find one with available resources.

 notprop wrote:
@ HMV
Printing in the UK is not economical compared china to the point where allot of type of print types aren't don't here anymore.

GW does not print in China any more, they do it in Poland

They seem to do a lot of their printing in the UK from what I understand. Just picking up a few books on my desk to see:

GHB - printed in the UK,
GA: Order - printed in the UK,
White Dwarf - UK
Deathwatch Overkill - China

Those are all 2016 publications. The Deathwatch Overkill book has a different finish to the AoS books (gloss vs matte finish). The SW:A book seemed more akin to the AoS books in terms of finish.

insaniak wrote:

 frozenwastes wrote:

But still, how do you use that to make decisions about production numbers?

You use your 30+ years of accrued sales and marketing data to extrapolate from the quantity of people expressing an interest in a given product to the expected quantity of sales said expressed interest is statistically likely to translate into and work from there, I would imagine.

Make some sort of appeal to sales data from products sold 10, 20 or even 30 years ago despite it not necessarily having any relevance now? Just extrapolate based on "expressed interest" when they have nothing to compare it to? And no way to know the degree to which expressed interest translates into sales given the changes over those 30 years in terms of technology, how product is distributed, their new marketing plan, social media and so forth? I see. So no actual methodology then? I'm sorry if this sounds sarcastic, but I think you're giving GW way too much credit it terms of the information they have and what they can do with it.

How do you statistically analyze "expressed interest" and come up with actual production numbers when methods of communication are being used that weren't even in place 6 months ago? And how do you use the sales and "expressed interest" analysis from the time when Kirby was intentionally opposed to customer and retailer communication?

insaniak wrote:
Would it?

How much do those 7500 units cost them in manufacturing and storage, compared to the profit margin on the 2500 extra copies that would have sold in your hypothetical?

We can look at cost of goods sold, their production cost, the standard retailer discount, GW's own retail costs and a bunch of other data from their latest financials and do some quick math. GW has outlined what percentage goes through which sales channel and the expenses for that channel. We also know their standard retailer discount. We can use this to arrive at an portion per £ sold as a baseline. Then it's just a matter of multiplying our arbitrary numbers in different situations to see what effect unsold copies would have. We would figure out the revenue GW would get per sales channel based on the average costs of those channels. And the costs they would incur by having expenses related to sales but without the revenue by sales channel.

I promise you GW did this. The guy running the company is a chartered managerial accountant and that whole discipline is about how to use financial information to make meaningful decisions. They did so but with their far more specific and accurate internal data. And their actual sales data for similar products.

They just had no way of backing up any assertion that demand would be higher. They're missing a bunch of the metrics that would make some of your suggestions useful because they rely on comparisons and interpretations. They should start doing those sorts of things so they can hone in on their production numbers even better, but that wouldn't have helped them here.

Remember to factor in that most of the contents of those 7500 units can actually be recycled into other product codes if they turn out to be surplus to needs.

Not if they've been distributed to retail locations across the world and are just sitting there. Then you've got an administrative nightmare to bring them back in and tear them open and repack them. I'm also not sure they necessarily want to stock 7500 scout squads or 7500 ork squads.

Let me know what you actually disagree with:

GW made an analysis of their internal sales data and arrived at a production number for this product.

They underestimated demand and made too few (though how many more would suffice is impossible to say as we don't know either their production run or their actual shortfall)

People are expecting them to have fixed the issue immediately. They didn't leave a plan or person in place to respond immediately so it took a bit for them to start talking about making more sets or putting the rules up as a digital product.

I suspect it's this one:

GW used the information they had available to make the best decision possible in terms of a production run. And they were wrong only because of demand they could not have seen coming. They still did the right thing in terms of the data they had to work with at the time. And keeping with a disciplined approach to allocating capital to new projects. Now that they know, they can respond. They could not have before.

And possibly this:

GW's current management probably shouldn't be blamed for their lack of market research information and data that can be used for comparisons to actually make a model of interest to help with production estimates as the company just exited a period where the guy running it was expressly against having this information and actually liked surprising both retailers and customers with each release rather than using the releases to gain useful information.

 Bottle wrote:
They seem to do a lot of their printing in the UK from what I understand. Just picking up a few books on my desk to see:

GHB - printed in the UK,
GA: Order - printed in the UK,
White Dwarf - UK
Deathwatch Overkill - China

Those are all 2016 publications. The Deathwatch Overkill book has a different finish to the AoS books (gloss vs matte finish). The SW:A book seemed more akin to the AoS books in terms of finish.

It's printed by panda game manufacturing in China, so it says on my gold leaf rulebook

 frozenwastes wrote:
We also don't know how many people really missed out on this because of the lack of supply.

Given how quickly it sold out in spite of being 1 per customer, I'm going to say quite a few (especially if you consider a lot of people wanted to buy multiples).

Either that or the GW customer base are extremely well trained puppies sitting at their computers hitting the refresh button just at the right moment every saturday morning I'm sure there's some element of that, but I'd have my money on a good twice as many sales could have been made if they'd made twice as many and upped the limit to, say, 3 per customer instead of 1.

From Panda's website:

How long does it take to complete a project?

...
6 to 16 weeks for Mass production (Full-scale production commences, components are shipped to our main assembly base, printed components are climatized, quality assurance is conducted)
4 to 7 weeks for Shipping to North America or Europe

http://pandagm.com/question/how-long-does-it-take-to-complete-a-project/

GW could not have turned on a dime and promised immediately to have new copies if getting new books might take 10 weeks.

Presuming there is no queue

 frozenwastes wrote:
GW could not have turned on a dime and promised immediately to have new copies if getting new books might take 10 weeks.

Of course not, the best they could have done was turn around and say "we're looking at manufacturing more but it'll be several months away, we'll have more updates later this week".

Vorian wrote:

 Bottle wrote:
They seem to do a lot of their printing in the UK from what I understand. Just picking up a few books on my desk to see:

GHB - printed in the UK,
GA: Order - printed in the UK,
White Dwarf - UK
Deathwatch Overkill - China

Those are all 2016 publications. The Deathwatch Overkill book has a different finish to the AoS books (gloss vs matte finish). The SW:A book seemed more akin to the AoS books in terms of finish.

It's printed by panda game manufacturing in China, so it says on my gold leaf rulebook

Thanks for the heads up. I wonder what that means for the chances of a second print run.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 frozenwastes wrote:
We also don't know how many people really missed out on this because of the lack of supply.

Given how quickly it sold out in spite of being 1 per customer, I'm going to say quite a few (especially if you consider a lot of people wanted to buy multiples).

Either that or the GW customer base are extremely well trained puppies sitting at their computers hitting the refresh button just at the right moment every saturday morning I'm sure there's some element of that, but I'd have my money on a good twice as many sales could have been made if they'd made twice as many and upped the limit to, say, 3 per customer instead of 1.

That's entirely possible, but we don't know. Sadly GW doesn't even really know as they may have lots of hits on the website but they might not be able to extrapolate their conversion ratio and they also stupidly didn't do something like have a thing where you click to be notified when it's back in stock. They also can't really know how many people showed up at various retailers around the world and left without a product as most of that likely won't get reported. Maybe they'll ask their own store managers and some larger trade partners and make some estimates. Something tells me though that GW employees won't be that keen to spend that much time collecting data to prove how badly they screwed up. Bad for the career.

Yep, they missed out on money they could have made had these been more available. The question is how much of that money can they still capture with either the digital version, the terrain kits sold individually (or possibly in bundles at a discount) and new releases that will satisfy people as an alternative thing to spend their money on.

If they're smart they will make new40k scratch the Shadow War Armageddon itch right out of the box. Capture all this demand plus new40k demand.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 frozenwastes wrote:
GW could not have turned on a dime and promised immediately to have new copies if getting new books might take 10 weeks.

Of course not, the best they could have done was turn around and say "we're looking at manufacturing more but it'll be several months away, we'll have more updates later this week".

And if several months away is either a big "Coming Storm" release for 40k or perhaps even the launch of a new edition of 40k, are they going to want to split their marketing focus to sell more SWA at the same time?

If GW DIDN'T predict this quick sell out...Sheesh. What they are paying so much for market department? Those get more salary than game designers and would have to be pretty grossly incompetent if they didn't realize this would sell like hot cake.

Maybe GW should consider putting some of their game designers as marketers. Might do better job at it than the "pro" marketing staff.

It went out of stock on the UK store, then came back into stock (presumably because they ordered another production run). Warhammer Community says the rules "will be made more widely available". But you all seem to think its Limited Edition? Has it gone out of stock in the US?

 frozenwastes wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 frozenwastes wrote:
GW could not have turned on a dime and promised immediately to have new copies if getting new books might take 10 weeks.

Of course not, the best they could have done was turn around and say "we're looking at manufacturing more but it'll be several months away, we'll have more updates later this week".

And if several months away is either a big "Coming Storm" release for 40k or perhaps even the launch of a new edition of 40k, are they going to want to split their marketing focus to sell more SWA at the same time?

I'm sure they could arrange it so it's not in the window of a conflicting release. Like, release it in the same window as an AoS release or a Blood Bowl release. They could also do it as a midweek release.

It might be awkward if they are genuinely releasing a full new edition of 40k a week before the orders come in from China (assuming they are done in China and can't be fast tracked in the UK based on volume of people who asked to be notified or even put in a preorder system, as far as I'm aware it's only the printing that was done in China, not the whole set).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
It went out of stock on the UK store, then came back into stock (presumably because they ordered another production run).

I doubt it was another production run, it was probably more likely a website glitch from the webstore being overloaded as the website was also being sketchy and dropping out at the time.

Sometimes stock is reserved when someone starts placing an order, so stock level goes down, and when those people don't or can't actually place the order a short time later the stock becomes available again.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
It went out of stock on the UK store, then came back into stock (presumably because they ordered another production run). Warhammer Community says the rules "will be made more widely available". But you all seem to think its Limited Edition? Has it gone out of stock in the US?

The problem seems to be with some Dakkanauts that they can't distinguish between a "Limited Edition" (an intended one time offer) and a limited print run (a fact of most game related manufacturing processes) only ever seeing the word limited and then flying into a tizz.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I'm sure they could arrange it so it's not in the window of a conflicting release. Like, release it in the same window as an AoS release or a Blood Bowl release. They could also do it as a midweek release.

Absolutely.

It might be awkward if they are genuinely releasing a full new edition of 40k a week before the orders come in from China (assuming they are done in China and can't be fast tracked in the UK based on volume of people who asked to be notified or even put in a preorder system, as far as I'm aware it's only the printing that was done in China, not the whole set).

If I was them, I'd go with digital only for the full rulebook in their epub3 format and ibooks as soon as possible and then offer a bundle of the terrain and orks and scouts at the same price as before and have it be direct only and include the digital version as well. Then go with a limited run of UK printed books for their web store, their stores and trade sales. A conservative run at a very high price relative to the digital version.

 frozenwastes wrote:

Make some sort of appeal to sales data from products sold 10, 20 or even 30 years ago despite it not necessarily having any relevance now?
.

If spending 30 years selling a product doesn't give you some insight into ongoing trends and what is and isn't likely to sell, you would have to be either deliberately not paying attention, or just in the wrong line of work...

 insaniak wrote:

 frozenwastes wrote:

Make some sort of appeal to sales data from products sold 10, 20 or even 30 years ago despite it not necessarily having any relevance now?
.

If spending 30 years selling a product doesn't give you some insight into ongoing trends and what is and isn't likely to sell, you would have to be either deliberately not paying attention, or just in the wrong line of work...

Again, no methodology.

I'm guessing from GW's improving sales figures and their maintenance of their really impressive margins that they do indeed know how to figure out how many products to produce.

Don't know why it's so hard to accept they got blindsided here but that their general approach to figuring out how much to make is based on their own internal data and has been working for them. That they made the right call with what they could have known and that hindsight is 20/20.

Then why was no one told it was limited?



On another note, is there an electronic version of the kill team roster?

Why was no one told it was in infinite production?

 notprop wrote:
Why was no one told it was in infinite production?

If you're going to debate in bad faith, don't debate at all.

If they'd mentioned it was a splash release when they first showed it off, then the whole debate would be very different.

That's what's peeved me. My copy is on its way, but now the campaign I planned to run at the club may not happen, because I think I'm the only one who bagged a copy.

 frozenwastes wrote:
I'm guessing from GW's improving sales figures and their maintenance of their really impressive margins that they do indeed know how to figure out how many products to produce.

Those two things aren't necessarily directly related.