H.B.M.C. wrote:

 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.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
On another note, is there an electronic version of the kill team roster?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
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.

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

 frozenwastes wrote:
He's not. He's making a good point by flipping your statement around.

 davou wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
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.

you need to have multiple copies of a bunch of cardboard tokens to play a game? The only thing REQUIRED in that box to play your campaign is the book, which will be available very soon independent of the boxed game; and even if it wasn't I see people all the time playing games without official books, either via borrowing or outright downloading them.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
No but seriously, is there an electronic version of the kill team roster yet? I have the kill team rules, I mean the blank roster sheet. I can't seem to locate that anywhere.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 davou wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
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.

you need to have multiple copies of a bunch of cardboard tokens to play a game? The only thing REQUIRED in that box to play your campaign is the book, which will be available very soon independent of the boxed game; and even if it wasn't I see people all the time playing games without official books, either via borrowing or outright downloading them.

I don't, no.

But other players in my club may not want to play a game they don't themselves own,

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
No but seriously, is there an electronic version of the kill team roster yet? I have the kill team rules, I mean the blank roster sheet. I can't seem to locate that anywhere.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
No but seriously, is there an electronic version of the kill team roster yet? I have the kill team rules, I mean the blank roster sheet. I can't seem to locate that anywhere.

 davou wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

But other players in my club may not want to play a game they don't themselves own,

so they will have to wait the few days it takes for the rules to be released is what you meant to say?

 Starfarer wrote:
Have we fully jumped the shark into conspiracy theories now?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
On another note, is there an electronic version of the kill team roster?

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
We play a game called This is Not a Test which is a skirmish warband game very similar to Necromunda, and inspired by Fallout 3 (I'm playing NCR Rangers).

We don't use cardboard tokens, we tear up little squares of paper into chits and write on them. "S7 Sniper hit, Grazed, Stunned" etc.

 frozenwastes wrote:

notprop wrote:
Selling out is good, it's how you manage that fortunate situation that governs whether or not is is a success. Now if as I am lead to believe there is distribution stock that is to be made available then they can leverage what will already been seen as a successful release into a great one. It's only day 1 of release, let's see what happens in the new week before declaring ruination and disaster.

There were so many nested quote tags there, I hope I'm attributing the above the right person.

I agree completely with what is above.

The declaration of it being failure is based on the money they missed out on had they known what the real demand for this product would have been, but no one can provide any quantifiable factor that GW could have reliably known in advance to know to produce more, nor have they said anything about how their pet reason (it's obvious people would want it! it's necromunda and people have nostalgia!" or "people want 40k universe with good rules" or whatever) would have been reason enough to make more than their known sales figures for their other stand alone products or their terrain kits.

Yes, they underestimated demand. Now they know. And their "punishment" for figuring out the demand for 40k with different rules was something people wanted is to have blown away their sales goals and set themselves up for meeting that demand with a new version of 40k, an electronic release of the SWA rules and possibly another box or bundle. Yes, they left money on the table. So now they need to figure out how to get as much of that money as possible going forward.

455_PWR wrote:So a few folks got upset. They can buy pdf rules later to use their existing models. Anyone can buy the scenery. Their main games are 40k and aos anyway. Sorry but selling out sw:a isn't going to ruin gw folks, even if a handfull walk away upset.

Exactly. And given what they know quantifiably know about the demand for 40k games using different rules than current 40k, support for a lower model count, cool terrain bundled together, how effective their marketing team was, etc., it could well be that they'll make a plan for new40k that makes it the best selling edition of 40k in the game's history. Their return on investment for their new approach to marketing might be that good.

All the people saying this is so awful for business and they alienated all these customers who wanted one may find themselves totally shocked by future financial reports.

Blackwing530 wrote:QFT. In any publicly owned business, maximizing shareholder wealth is paramount. Another poster above said the same. While perhaps not a failure, per se, this can absolutely be considered a squandered opportunity.

They suceeded in meeting their goals with the SWA product, but are in the process of possibly squandering the opportunity to make more. It's possible that they'll get a digital copy out fast enough and offer some cobbled together version or a bundle or something and still capture much of that money. Or a lot of that money will still be there to be captured by new40k.

streetsamurai wrote:Calling a succes selling out a product when there is a lot of angry customers who aren't able to purchase it, shows an alarming lack of business sense.

I think that's totally over estimating the effect of these angry customers. Odds are the number angry enough to hurt GW's bottom line is really, really low and many of them will be offered something they want in the near future.

But just for the amount of ill will and bad publicity that this has generarted, it is far from a success. At least, lest hope that this force GW to change some of its pratices, and that they start to do that weird arcane thing that is market research.

I'll ask this again, what form of market research would you suggest for figuring out that the demand for this would have been higher than sales levels of their other stand alone products? Furthermore this research needs to be such that you can actually make decisions based on it and it needs to show that they should ignore their internal sales data for stand alone games. And on top of that, it needs to be done in a time line that allows them to make meaningful production decisions in advance of the launch date. And as well, it needs to not be based on hindsight. The fact that we know now that there was greater demand, does not mean it was something that could actually be known in advance.

The funny thing is that you are talking about market research as if it is an arcane spell they can cast and suddenly know to ignore their previous sales numbers and make more of something just because of our current position of hindsight. You are asking for a magic trick.

Starfarer wrote:I think it may be a case of the 8th edition release in a few months killing the chance of a full reprint. They can get the digital rules up next week, but if it takes a few months to get a full reprint, then you're edging into the 8th edition release, and GW can't have a fully separate, stand alone game competing with their flagship product.

This. I believe Mikhaila's trade sales rep who said this was a tiding over project before the new edition.

It sucks, but if you ignore the terrain aspect of the box set, it's still a super low buy in for a game. You're looking at hopefully a $20-30 digital rulebook, free faction rules, and pretty much $30-50 for a faction, depending on what faction you pick. Obviously you need lots of terrain for this game, but presumably people will already have this, or can play at their local store otherwise.

This is the cheapest buy in to 40k available in decades and has tried and tested rules that still hold up, over 20 years after their initial release. For all the negatives about availability, let's keep in mind 2-3 years ago no one would have imagined you could get into a GW game for that price point.

It's actually really quite shocking how good of a value the whole thing is. If you make your own terrain (remember when that was part of the hobby?) or go in on it with others or use club or store terrain, then this is one of the cheapest ways to do 40k in the history of the game.

Galas wrote:I don't know why people its so surprised that GW failed to do proper market research for this.

They haven't done it in 20 years, they are still learning how to do it

See my questions above on what kind of market research would be needed to actually know to make more of these boxes in advance.

H.B.M.C. wrote:I think it is rather odd how we still have people saying that this debacle is some sort of ideal situation and a triumph of risk management.

It's not a "triumph of risk management." Risk management is an explanation of their decision making process. And it goes to show you that without hindsight and results oriented thinking, GW's process is sound in this area. They did the right thing given what they could have known and now have to deal with the reality of having gotten their assessment of the demand wrong, but without any real means of knowing what the real demand would be without trying. Without releases a product like this to test the waters and see.

When the biggest stores in the country have used up over half their allotment 5 minutes after opening, something is wrong.

Yes. They got their demand assessment wrong when it comes to a game where there was no real way of knowing what it should be without trying a product release out to see what the demand is really like.

Some of you are making this out to be some sort of calculated move, or something that any business would be proud of. Are you insane?

The only insanity I see is people expecting GW to be psychic. Or to cast some sort of "market research" incantation to somehow know what they should have done. From a position of hind sight. That's the only delusion here. Are you insane?

Misleading your stockists (let alone your own retail stores)

Being wrong is not misleading your stockists. They actually thought their production run would be sufficient or they would have made a larger one. No one lied to anyone.

and engendering anger in your customer base that missed out (because they never thought it'd be limited)

How would they have gotten it if they knew it was limited? It would have still sold out in preorder exactly the same. Or maybe even faster. This makes no sense.

But this was GW's "master plan", and it is something that they should do more of/should be proud of.. get outta town. That's nonsense.

It is never nonsense to consider your margins and return on capital when launching a product. It is never nonsense to consider the sales numbers of other products in your line when making a new product. GW has their sales data of both their stand along games and their terrain kits to take into consideration.

The product designers, the rules team, the marketing team and the 3d designers who worked on the terrain should all be proud of what they have accomplished.

I would even go so far as to say whoever made the decision to make the smaller print run should also be proud of themselves. They made the right decision with the information they had. Even if some angry people on the internet with 20/20 hindsight can point out they made too few. You need to be disciplined when it comes to product runs. Especially when the majority of your revenue comes from the splash period of a new release. Why?

I really don't think it's true that everyone who missed out on this product now has a bunch of money that GW will somehow never get. If they want GW's products so bad that they feel angry about missing out on something that was so popular, something tells me GW can come up with something that will meet their demand. It's been a fething weekend. The release date for this game was earlier today!

What they do going forward is going to be about how much gravy they can get. How much of that missed demand (over and above their goals for the product) they can still capture. And how to factor this release into their plan for new40k. They can still get the digital rules out, maybe make a print run of books, make some terrain bundles, whatever. And they can also make sure they do the same thing in terms of marketing, social media usage, and so forth when it comes to new40k. As well as taking into consideration how positively people responded to the rules that support a lower model count when making their game that also needs to scale up into a larger model count.



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Manchu wrote:They should really sell the tokens and rulebook at the very least!

If and only if the turn around time will have it not conflict with a new40k release later this year. If it would, they are better off making sure to include small model count play as a feature of new40k and accomplish what this game does within new40k itself.

If they can find a printer (preferably one with an existing relationship) to rush print and ship their additional books and counters, then by all means I think they should do so. And since they then have those, they may as well run off some boxes and sprues and make more of the game boxes to sell. But only if it doesn't disrupt production for a future product and certainly not if it drags this game into new40k hype season as a distraction.

 Starfarer wrote:
Have we fully jumped the shark into conspiracy theories now?

 frozenwastes wrote:

 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.

NewTruthNeomaxim wrote:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
We play a game called This is Not a Test which is a skirmish warband game very similar to Necromunda, and inspired by Fallout 3 (I'm playing NCR Rangers).

We don't use cardboard tokens, we tear up little squares of paper into chits and write on them. "S7 Sniper hit, Grazed, Stunned" etc.

Just want to give you a stealth, high-five. People in this thread rightly angry over not having access to this release would do well to spend a few bucks on TNT's rules. It really is a superior Necromunda, if you don't mind the different theme.

 Azreal13 wrote:

 Starfarer wrote:
Have we fully jumped the shark into conspiracy theories now?

It doesn't sound so much like a conspiracy theory if you term it as "SW:A had a limited release because there was only so much machine time available before they needed to start producing the new 8th Ed starter sprues."

 frozenwastes wrote:
Was there something about Rountree that makes you think he doesn't understand the bigger picture?

 streetsamurai wrote:


At the end of the day, it is ridiculous to defend GW on this, since they are the one who were bragging that they weren't doing any market research

 Starfarer wrote:

 streetsamurai wrote:


At the end of the day, it is ridiculous to defend GW on this, since they are the one who were bragging that they weren't doing any market research

So we're holding the company as it currently exists to a statement made years ago by a former CEO? And you're calling other people ridiculous?

 streetsamurai wrote:

 Starfarer wrote:

 streetsamurai wrote:


At the end of the day, it is ridiculous to defend GW on this, since they are the one who were bragging that they weren't doing any market research

So we're holding the company as it currently exists to a statement made years ago by a former CEO? And you're calling other people ridiculous?

Have they said or done anything that gives any indication that this have changed since then?? No (at least, not before adepticon, since this could mark a change in their strategy. And let's hope that this fiasco make them realise the folly of their ways)

Talk about being ridiculous

 Starfarer wrote:

 streetsamurai wrote:

 Starfarer wrote:

 streetsamurai wrote:


At the end of the day, it is ridiculous to defend GW on this, since they are the one who were bragging that they weren't doing any market research

So we're holding the company as it currently exists to a statement made years ago by a former CEO? And you're calling other people ridiculous?

Have they said or done anything that gives any indication that this have changed since then?? No (at least, not before adepticon, since this could mark a change in their strategy. And let's hope that this fiasco make them realise the folly of their ways)

Talk about being ridiculous

They've made a ton of changes since Roundtree took over, nearly all of them good, and widely praised even here, and even by the career GW bashers.

They've been promoting their products at trade shows for over a year now. You don't think they aren't talking to the retailers there about their market demographics? And you mention yourself they showed up at Adepticon, and provided previews of upcoming products. Do you think maybe market research told them people wanted to know about things ahead of time, and that generates excitement?

Seems the change in strategy happened long before you think.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Insaniak's point about them having YEARS to get their gak together in this arena, from basic market research to communicating with their target audience is totally sound and you have yet to come up with anything to counter it.

Your constant apologising for GW,

and worse, acting as if it was some accidental bit of genius on their part is mind numbing. The fact that you started by saying that they should have made the box even more expensive is also quite telling.

This was a colossal screw up from start to finish.

 axisofentropy wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
On another note, is there an electronic version of the kill team roster?

We just published Battlescribe catalogs yesterday. Double-check everything with the rules though; this is all brand new so there will be a few mistakes.