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 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
Plenty of other companies do fantasy ans sci-fi for cheaper and better than GW IMO.

I don't know of any comparable ranges that are equally well fleshed out. You often have nice or cheap models from other companies, occasionally models that are both cheap and nice, but the range within a given faction is often quite weak.

That's what I'm saying with 40k/AoS/WHFB, they not only has a large number of factions, but they're well fleshed out factions. Lizardmen for example are one of GW's weaker ranges IMO because they rely on ancient Saurus models that are mediocre, but try and find good substitute non-GW Lizardmen models is a pain in the arse. One company might make some nice looking models, but only 3 of them so you can't exactly make and army, another company might have a bigger range but they look like hairy arse.

And GW have put out some quality decent value models recently too, £20 for a Blood Bowl team ain't half bad, it's very competitive with other fantasy football options on the market.

I don't think GW are the be all and end all, but there's definitely good reasons people keep buying them. I think it's a bigger mystery why people buy Macs rather than why people buy GW stuff

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

I don't think GW are the be all and end all, but there's definitely good reasons people keep buying them. I think it's a bigger mystery why people buy Macs rather than why people buy GW stuff

Because when you compare equal specs to equal specs, the Mac does not have a significant price premium. The machines hold more of their value over a longer period of time and, unless you get a lemon off the line, are shown to be more reliable and receive better service in study after study.

And on that peer to peer basis, the only thing that GW has that is significantly better than anybody else is market share.

Biggest market share also means the widest range of opponents.

Not necessarily, GW themselves seem utterly convinced (or at least have been historically) that the majority of their customers don't play the game.

I'd not argue that there are more gamers playing any other one system than 40K, indeed, GW still likely being the main introduction into wargaming for many probably means most gamers are potential GW gamers almost by default, but I'd go out on a limb and suggest we're now in an era where players of other systems collectively can now match GW, and even that is a significant change from a relatively short time ago.

 Azreal13 wrote:
Not necessarily, GW themselves seem utterly convinced (or at least have been historically) that the majority of their customers don't play the game.

To be honest I think they're probably right, and I'd suggest the same applies to most wargames. People are sold on the idea of a game but rarely get an army together to play said game, or might only play a couple of games in a year.

Of course where GW were going wrong was that people are still sold on the idea of the game, so even if they don't end up playing it, having a crappy game disincentivizes people from buying the models for it.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
Not necessarily, GW themselves seem utterly convinced (or at least have been historically) that the majority of their customers don't play the game.

To be honest I think they're probably right, and I'd suggest the same applies to most wargames. People are sold on the idea of a game but rarely get an army together to play said game, or might only play a couple of games in a year.

Of course where GW were going wrong was that people are still sold on the idea of the game, so even if they don't end up playing it, having a crappy game disincentivizes people from buying the models for it.

I'd fit into that demographic. I've around eight 40K armies that I can easily field over 2,000 pts. apiece, including half a chapter of space marines (consisting of models collected since Rogue Trader days). I dare say I have only played (since near the end of 5e) about a half-dozen games or so. Primarily because GWs game is so cumbersome - it takes hours for me to finish simple games in the 1,000 pt range. For example, my son and I are in the middle of a 1K tau vs. necron fight, bottom of the second turn and its already taken 3 hours! (We left the game up, so we can finish it the next night) Our previous 1k CSM vs. nids fight ( our first 8E game), took about 5 hours. It just doesn"t engender a desire to play, though the models are beautiful.

As for the model range discussion, its true that GW does have the largest and probalby most fleshed out model lines. However, there are plenty of models companies who provide a single model army line that is equal or superior to GWs lines. If people were not so locked into the lore and army rules GW has bound the likes of 40K with, then there is a lot of value in non-GW miniatures. Gw has just done a very good job of binding its customers to its specific world and appearance, creating a market that looks down on models that don't fit the 40k " asthetic".

Have they learned their lesson?

I'd say no. They've gotten better on the social media - I'll give them that - but their prices are still way out there.

Been looking at 8th edition, but just can't get myself to pay that kind of money. There are better, and cheaper, games out there.

Geifer wrote:

 Galas wrote:
They have reboxed the Stormcast Eternals boxes for their infantry lowering the price like 37% per model. So they are willing to learn. You need to vote with your wallet.

A reboxed that actually lowered the price a significant amount per model. Whats the last time have you seen that before they did it with stormcast Liberators, etc...?

The term you are looking for is Reverse Dire Avengered. They Reverse Dire Avengered those Sigmarines right good!

The principle isn't all that spectacular. They've done this with old unit boxes like Juggernauts upping them from 3 to 6 per box at a lower price per models. Little tree thingies Wood Elves used to have, too. Chaos Marauders, Saurus, too, I think. The thing that sticks out is that they did it with a new Sigmarine kit. That should tell us Sigmarines didn't perform as they were supposed to as the flagship line on the fantasy side.

Ohhhhh, don't suggest AOS is ANYTHING but the bestest most awesomest highest sellingest thing GW has ever done. You will be barraged by the players on here who push the game. All ten of them.

Ragnar69 wrote:Honestly if you are in it just for the game, I think you have chosen poorly. Collecting/assembling/painting is part of the "value" as well.

You also have to see the long term. I don't have any other hobby where I still have a benefit from money spent over 20 years ago.

Plus, whenever I hear what my friends and colleagues spend on their hobbies, I always cringe


PS: I spent much more nowadays, so GW must have done something right. I'm by no means a rabid fanboy, I even completely stopped buying/playing from early 4th to start of 6th edition because I was so fed up with GW. So I would say they have definately improved a lot.

I also collect Transformers, MUCH better return on investment. It's also half the reason my GW purchases over the last 10 years or so have dropped off. That, and the fact that very few sets were worth the price vs. contents. And then it came to a choice: Superion in a new form that will complete that side of my collection, or one Isle of Blood box. Bear in mind that I'd need to eventually get THREE of those sets to get the Swordmasters, Lothern Sea Guard, and Rat Ogres to a decent playable level.

Not even a contest four years ago, and it hasn't gotten any better now.

auticus wrote:Per several polls in the past on various sites, the average amount a player is willing to spend on an army in any system is $250.

GW games will never be that.

$15-20 per HQ unit

$20-30 per infantry unit, depending on the elite status

$35-50 per vehicle or monstrous creature, depending on size, use, etc.

Doesn't exactly add up to $250, especially given how many of the pricier units you'd need, but still more realistic than current prices. Almost $60 for a Vindicator? Ridiculous. You can't even justify that.

Ragnar69 wrote:

PS: I spent much more nowadays, so GW must have done something right. I'm by no means a rabid fanboy, I even completely stopped buying/playing from early 4th to start of 6th edition because I was so fed up with GW. So I would say they have definately improved a lot.

Ohhhhh, don't suggest AoS is ANYTHING but the worstest most evilest lowest sellingest thing GW has ever done. You will be barraged by the players on here who push hatred of the game. All ten bazillion of them. Just take a look at the latest sales numbers and stock price, GW is doomed any day now amiright...

Seriously though, this isn't the Kirby era anymore. under $300 bucks can get you an army of anything with a start collecting box or one of the holiday battleforce boxes. It may not be uber optimized or anything but a start collecting box or two and another box or two of troops and you are pretty much there.

 Just Tony wrote:

Geifer wrote:

 Galas wrote:
They have reboxed the Stormcast Eternals boxes for their infantry lowering the price like 37% per model. So they are willing to learn. You need to vote with your wallet.

A reboxed that actually lowered the price a significant amount per model. Whats the last time have you seen that before they did it with stormcast Liberators, etc...?

The term you are looking for is Reverse Dire Avengered. They Reverse Dire Avengered those Sigmarines right good!

The principle isn't all that spectacular. They've done this with old unit boxes like Juggernauts upping them from 3 to 6 per box at a lower price per models. Little tree thingies Wood Elves used to have, too. Chaos Marauders, Saurus, too, I think. The thing that sticks out is that they did it with a new Sigmarine kit. That should tell us Sigmarines didn't perform as they were supposed to as the flagship line on the fantasy side.

Ohhhhh, don't suggest AOS is ANYTHING but the bestest most awesomest highest sellingest thing GW has ever done. You will be barraged by the players on here who push the game. All ten of them.

Worry not! I'm clad in the armor of contempt, and perfectly safe from rabid fanboys!

But really, I don't have a problem with people enjoying Age of Sigmar for what it is. I occasionally play it myself, but it's not something that can hold my interest for long.

mikosan wrote:
Seriously though, this isn't the Kirby era anymore. under $300 bucks can get you an army of anything with a start collecting box or one of the holiday battleforce boxes. It may not be uber optimized or anything but a start collecting box or two and another box or two of troops and you are pretty much there.

Help me out here because I don't any of the rule books.

How many points is the following?

1x Ethereal on Hover Drone
3x Crisis Battlesuits with drones
1x 10 man Fire Warrior squad with 2x drones and 1x support turret

The above is $85, out of stock and doesn't include any rules.

How about the Space Marine starter?

1x Terminator Captain (storm bolter and power sword)
1x Venerable Dreadnaught
1x 10 man tactical squad

All of the starter boxes are 1x HQ, 1x Troop and 1x Elite. Again, as I don't own the rules, I'm not even sure these are legal armies to start with. One used to have to have 2x troops minimum.

Doesn't exactly add up to $250, especially given how many of the pricier units you'd need, but still more realistic than current prices. Almost $60 for a Vindicator? Ridiculous. You can't even justify that.

IIRC from said past polls, the most the average gamer (of any game) wants to spend was broken down as:

HQ - $15 max
Troop - $1.50 a model. $15 for a box of 10 guys, regardless of elite status.
Vehicles - $25 max

This would be for a system that has around 50 models in it or more.

Games like X Wing where you only need 5-8 models or so the price could be higher per model but the spending was about the same.

So with those numbers, 2 HQ = $30, four units of 10 guys would be roughly $60, and four vehicles or so would be $100.

Models would come out to be about $190, and then price for army book $25 max brought it to $215 with $35 left over for expanding a couple more units or vehicle into the collection.

Thats what the polls average (of course running a horde army would be higher in cost, but that was the rough average of an ":army:" that people on average wanted to assemble and pay for.

40k was always much higher than that, even back in 1999, but people have complained about the price of GW games (WHFB and 40k) since 1999 and before as well. When a $45 land raider debut in 2000, people lost their mind.

Don't forget to include the cost of a rulebook as well.

(Also in X-Wing, a list can be as few as 2 ships, but is about as likely as someone running HQ + 2 troops as an army).

Not true, double large base ships as a total list has been a persistent thing in X Wing for as long as there's been large base ships more or less. Dengaroo (a double Jumpmaster list) became so dominant competitively that it prompted an FAQ intervention to reign it in just this last few months.

Barfolomew wrote:

mikosan wrote:
Seriously though, this isn't the Kirby era anymore. under $300 bucks can get you an army of anything with a start collecting box or one of the holiday battleforce boxes. It may not be uber optimized or anything but a start collecting box or two and another box or two of troops and you are pretty much there.

Help me out here because I don't any of the rule books.

How many points is the following?

1x Ethereal on Hover Drone
3x Crisis Battlesuits with drones
1x 10 man Fire Warrior squad with 2x drones and 1x support turret

The above is $85, out of stock and doesn't include any rules.

How about the Space Marine starter?

1x Terminator Captain (storm bolter and power sword)
1x Venerable Dreadnaught
1x 10 man tactical squad

All of the starter boxes are 1x HQ, 1x Troop and 1x Elite. Again, as I don't own the rules, I'm not even sure these are legal armies to start with. One used to have to have 2x troops minimum.

Lol I don't play 40K so don't own any of the rulebooks either, but I did say a start collecting box or TWO because the number being thrown around was $250 bucks so two start collecting boxes and another unit box or characters would certainly be right around that 1500-2000 pt benchmark, at least in AoS. Is it optimized for tourney play? absolutely not, but the point stands. Saying you can't get an army for around $250 bucks is pushing a false narrative. If the Tau box is out of stock that tells me that a not insignificant amount of people found the box to be a good enough value to buy.

Space Marine Start Collecting is 25 Power Level
Tau Start Collecting is 18 Power Level

50 is where most people would start saying a real game is happening. There are loads of 50 and 75 power level battle reports on youtube and watching them definitely gives the sense of a real game going on.

The above is more relevant in AoS but the Tau one is around 500pts if I remember correctly. 4 of them would give you a playable army (especially in the case of the Tau even taking out the additional etherals) for $289. The marine one is fairly terrible as it's about 350-400 before the termi captain depending on the weapons you equip.

In general you can get actual legal playable armies with 3 start collecting and a different unit of your choice for all non-horde armies. That'll run you pre-rules around $300. Which isn't terrible honestly. That said a competitive-ish army or a more one of everything style of play will cost a pretty penny. Or if you heaven forbid decide to play nids/orks/ig.

They don't change, only upgrade communication and raise price as always, 40 euros for sm codex, yeahhh BUT we just bought your index a month ago? hello?

OP is wrong.

Two mistakes:

A. You think you know what it cost and
B. Price should be proportionate to cost

Neither is true, of course.

Doesn't matter if it cost GW only 10 cents to make a model. The price it sells for is based on a perceived value.

Everything you buy in life is priced as perceived value, and 100% luxury items are absolutely no different.

I would have waited at least two months before getting an index, to at least find out what the codex release schecdule would be like. Unless I played every army, then maybe I'd consider getting them.

 judgedoug wrote:
OP is wrong.

Two mistakes:

A. You think you know what it cost and
B. Price should be proportionate to cost

Neither is true, of course.

Doesn't matter if it cost GW only 10 cents to make a model. The price it sells for is based on a perceived value.

Everything you buy in life is priced as perceived value, and 100% luxury items are absolutely no different.

Which is one of the reasons comparing GW miniatures to other brands is pointless, unless you are going to bring up intangibles like the brand itself. I can buy a nice pair of off brand jeans that are high quality in terms of manufacturing. Gucci is still going to cost more because the brand carries a high perceived value and people are still going to pay for Gucci no matter how much I think it may be silly.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
To be sure the only smoke and mirrors here is the original post which is a price complaint post in the guise of a discussion about whether or not GW has pivoted it's business practices for the better.

It was never the price of the minis that really ever bugged me, things can be bought second hand, it was the rules.
At the end of the day its a game I want to play not things I want to put on a shelf, and GW dropped the ball for me.

The original post really was just a post all about price, which for many is actually not the most important factor. I've maintained that if GW can get their rules to a state where they make the miniatures feel valuable rather than devalue them, they can charge GW Australia/Forge World prices for their normal plastic kits all over the world.

They've been doing that. AoS and 8th 40k have been made into something that supports lower model count games. They're even publishing stand alone books for AoS that are all about getting a full and engaging gaming experience with less models (Skirmish and now Path to Glory)

For the OP, the issue is price. For me, I like the background of both 40k and AoS (especially AoS: Skirmish) actually makes the table top experience line up with the novels. As does 8th edition 40k (especially smaller games).

For years and years GW's core games were all about only having the real game experience when you put tons and tons of models on the table. This was especially so for WHFB. Now you can have a great day of gaming using AoS:Skirmish with like 20 models tops. The games are deep with lots of hard choices and great scenarios.

Thread after thread of arguing about GW's prices always had people point to the total cost to play a "real" game of 40k or Fantasy. And they had a point, the cost was disgusting once you combined the premium price of individual miniatures with the need to have so many of them. Their new game design approach actually makes games fun with less models, so you get to the "real" game experience that much sooner.

So I think the higher price can be sustainable.

We've had $35 ogre-sized models for years now. It's only now that the OP has noticed and decided to expose themselves with a complaint about prices from 2013.

Not to mention how friggin' nice the kits are; comparable or exceeding other $35+ resin kits from other manufacturers. And not as brittle.

I'd say based on the fact Age of Sigmar was basically a textbook example of a Lean Startup that GW has learned to apply some top business techniques that you usually only see in the cutthroat world of the tech industry. Picking out just the pricing strategy seems to be a slight strawman in fact, because if ICV2 or GW's own recent financial reports are to be believed their pricing strategy isn't slowing them down to much.

 DrNo172000 wrote:
I'd say based on the fact Age of Sigmar was basically a textbook example of a Lean Startup that GW has learned to apply some top business techniques that you usually only see in the cutthroat world of the tech industry. Picking out just the pricing strategy seems to be a slight strawman in fact, because if ICV2 or GW's own recent financial reports are to be believed their pricing strategy isn't slowing them down to much.

I don't agree it is a strawman since the price is the single most consistent complaint leveled against the company in its entire history; and if you looked at their financial statements over the last decade they've been making more and more margin on fewer and fewer unit sales. That is not a trend that can continue indefinitely., because eventually it will mean selling one hand crafted space marine for 20 million pounds to one guy once a year.

Isn't it a trend that has likely already reversed? In a week we're going to see the next annual financial report. I think it's going to demonstrate a return to real growth in terms of sales volume.

I honestly never thought I'd type that sentence.

Also, have they really been jacking things up over the last couple of years? The Primaris characters are large and are on 40mm bases. The Blood Angels captain is $33 and came out in early 2015. The new ones are $35. I don't think that's much of an increase.

Especially during the same time we have start collecting boxes, boxes like the battle maniple or scion storm or talons of the emperor. And GW is now making sure the barriers to entry are lowered with multiple starter sets at different price points for both 40k and AoS.

One of GW's worst examples of price-jacking was the shift of the Eldar Dire Avengers from a box of 10 to 5, with anincrease in price to boot (I remember it fairly well as I bought the 10, was going to go back the next week to buy another box and it had changed to the 5-man box).

Overall, I wouldn't say the trend has reversed - at best it has leveled out and on the SC boxes dipped to sane levels. In many cases, its still rising at a dramatic rate - look at the costs of boxed set since 6E's starter to now; the cost of each box set was noticably more than the last until we have a "starter" set that is $165 USD (though First Strike and Know No Fear are far more sane as introductory sets).

They certainly have learned some lessons.

It doesn't seem many of their customers have learned any lesson though.

 DrNo172000 wrote:
Which is one of the reasons comparing GW miniatures to other brands is pointless, unless you are going to bring up intangibles like the brand itself. I can buy a nice pair of off brand jeans that are high quality in terms of manufacturing. Gucci is still going to cost more because the brand carries a high perceived value and people are still going to pay for Gucci no matter how much I think it may be silly.

The difference is that those brands actually carry perceived value. Yeah, you're over-paying for it, but it still has the "wow, {brand}" factor from random people who see it. And buying that luxury image is worth it for some people. But who thinks that about GW? Who looks at a person with a GW product and says "wow, that's a really classy person with those high-end miniatures"? Nobody. GW is the Walmart or McDonalds of miniatures, they make an adequate product that is widely available and profit from sales volume over per-item price. Other companies, even GW's own FW brand, have a much stronger brand identity as high-end luxury products. And anyone who cares enough about the hobby to have an opinion on miniatures instead of just dismissing it as "that weird nerd thing" knows this. Owning GW products gives you no social status among the only people who could possibly care.