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As the above suggests...

So we have battlescribe which may as well be GW supported as it is certainly tolerated. But GW do seem to be missing out on the data insights most companies crave on their customers. A GW app, with the ability to link to your opponents to upload images, lists and narrative to battle reports that can be easily published on the web/facebook (which would increase visibility), would show GW how its non-tournament players behave and help them plan to exploit them more. Finding out the majority of players play at shops, clubs or home, whether they are using new or old models, whether their armies are painted, etc. etc. would all be helpful to the company for what looks to me like a very limited investment.

The short version is GW prefers books. They probably have a solid profit margin on the books. They also own a lot of retail stores and they want books they can put on the shelf. Also the rule books have lots of background and fluff in them that helps get new players into the hobby.

GW still has a significant retail presence, I would guess that plays into their decision making process. If GW is going to selling it they probably want to be available in physical form so they can put it on a shelf in one of their stores. Even the rules that available online are still available in physical form, like the rules for units in AOS.

I get the books point - yet battlescribe exists. And physical retail operations love to have loyalty cards or other programmes to better understand their customers, so if anything their model encourages such a product.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
I get the books point - yet battlescribe exists. And physical retail operations love to have loyalty cards or other programmes to better understand their customers, so if anything their model encourages such a product.

Yea the popularity of battlescribe shows their is a market for it. I would love an app from GW myself but they seem still to have the old retail mindset.

I’m surprised they don’t have something like this purely for the information gathering potential.

An app that you can input what GW stuff you currently own:
You could input all the models you own and use your own inventory to create army lists from, and to make a wish list of what you plan/need to add to it.
They could also add hobby stuff- paints, scenery, etc etc.

It would be useful as a user, with similar functionality as BattleScribe for list building, with the addition of a catalogue of what you currently own, combined with the citadel paint app, and allow you to input the paints you own.

GW could harvest the data and you’d get targeted ads based on what you currently own or have wishlisted. You own khorne berserkers- get an advert for red paint.

From a marketing POV I think they’re missing a trick tbh.

Arguments about profit margins on printed material are true, of course, but I think that is only part of the story.

Roleplaying games, and to a lesser extent, wargames, revolve around catering to the imaginations of the players. World building, artwork and fluff all contribute to player appreciation for the hobby. People who enjoy reading are generally the types of people that make up the majority of the player base; similarly, those who like the games often develop an appreciation of reading.

There are accessibility issues with technology as well; if you're young, you probably don't remember pre-internet life, but this game was born in 1987, and a significant chunk of the player base have been playing since then.

And finally, this game appeals to people who are collectors; that part of the hobby may not be important for every player, but it is important enough to many players.

Aash wrote:
I’m surprised they don’t have something like this purely for the information gathering potential.

An app that you can input what GW stuff you currently own:
You could input all the models you own and use your own inventory to create army lists from, and to make a wish list of what you plan/need to add to it.
They could also add hobby stuff- paints, scenery, etc etc.

It would be useful as a user, with similar functionality as BattleScribe for list building, with the addition of a catalogue of what you currently own, combined with the citadel paint app, and allow you to input the paints you own.

GW could harvest the data and you’d get targeted ads based on what you currently own or have wishlisted. You own khorne berserkers- get an advert for red paint.

From a marketing POV I think they’re missing a trick tbh.

If I'm using an official GW app, the last thing I need to see is more GW ads in that app.

GW are still very slowly moving away from the previous management's "we don't need market research" attitude (and poor choice of IT partner). Give it time.

 Platuan4th wrote:

Aash wrote:
I’m surprised they don’t have something like this purely for the information gathering potential.

An app that you can input what GW stuff you currently own:
You could input all the models you own and use your own inventory to create army lists from, and to make a wish list of what you plan/need to add to it.
They could also add hobby stuff- paints, scenery, etc etc.

It would be useful as a user, with similar functionality as BattleScribe for list building, with the addition of a catalogue of what you currently own, combined with the citadel paint app, and allow you to input the paints you own.

GW could harvest the data and you’d get targeted ads based on what you currently own or have wishlisted. You own khorne berserkers- get an advert for red paint.

From a marketing POV I think they’re missing a trick tbh.

If I'm using an official GW app, the last thing I need to see is more GW ads in that app.

I’m not saying I’d be particularly keen about getting advertisements, but from a business standpoint I’m surprised they haven’t done it!

Also, even without targeted ads, the potential for information about what the customers are building list-wise would be valuable for planning future releases and product development.

 Blood Hawk wrote:
The short version is GW prefers books. They probably have a solid profit margin on the books. They also own a lot of retail stores and they want books they can put on the shelf. Also the rule books have lots of background and fluff in them that helps get new players into the hobby.

GW still has a significant retail presence, I would guess that plays into their decision making process. If GW is going to selling it they probably want to be available in physical form so they can put it on a shelf in one of their stores. Even the rules that available online are still available in physical form, like the rules for units in AOS.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
I get the books point - yet battlescribe exists. And physical retail operations love to have loyalty cards or other programmes to better understand their customers, so if anything their model encourages such a product.

Take it as evidence that GW at least realizes they have a problem with whatever system they're currently using for document control? They've had several very public incidents of reverting an errata in CA and then having to re-issue the errata as an update to CA, I don't think anyone would be particularly confident that an app with GW's name on it could be trusted to have the correct rules. We might give that sort of recurring issue a pass and keep buying books (lord knows why) but we're all more critical of an app that can be hot-patched.

Also, it would render CA an entirely pointless product.

I remember 6th ed codex space marines enchanting edition have list creator.. too many unhappy customers I heard.
I don’t have it.

Because Greed, plain and simple.

GW isn't interested in data on the game. They care about miniature sales figures, and the market chooses to keep buying models no matter how much or how little GW cares about the rules.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
GW isn't interested in data on the game. They care about miniature sales figures, and the market chooses to keep buying models no matter how much or how little GW cares about the rules.

I am not sure the data you could collect is useful anyway, I made 6 kill teams today. 4 of them pure matching points for stuff I never intend to buy, and it does not show anything on potential releases that sales data would not be a better indicator for.
Cannot put in a list something that does not exist so that data ends up as a bit moot.

You're also forgetting the cost of the app itself to develop. The AoS one is remarkably simple for the units and list creation that it needs too do simply because the army building in AoS is very simple (and similar to a lot of other current wargames).

Before people point out the flaws with that this is what I'm talking about:
You select a unit. It may have 2 weapon profile options and a command group. These are all optional bonuses that don't cost extra points and so can be tick-boxes that don't require validation checks on data entry.
Your army needs a minimum of 'x' battle-line/troop units (needs validation)
You need a general with trait (needs validation).
Other things like sub-faction traits or the like may only require validation on 1 item (often the general) or be based on how many warscroll battalions you have (a simple number to count up). The amount of list checking you have to develop for is minimal from a computing standpoint.


Now consider a tactical squad and all the possible permutations it can have. And not just the 'tournament/ITC optimal' ones, but the narrative, the fun, the 'I've built it this way', etc. And that's not even looking at detachments. rules of 2/3/4, equipment restrictions, optional not-relics/traits (Tau/Tyranids as examples), custom traits, etc. Think about how much validation is required for basic army, then compound this by what people play in clubs around the world and not just on those coveted 'top' tables.

Battlescribe gets away with it now because it's a legacy system built over years that uses XML's to handle it's validation rules. It's essentially a local database running scripts against itself. It's been round near 10+ years and isn't just a 40k list-builder (look at how many games it ostensibly supports). It came out in competition against things like Army Builder.

But to develop something like that new and fresh, even in-house at GW, that can run on iOS and Android platforms and with a modicum of stability and usability in the same way as the Warscroll builder. That's an expensive project.

GW have a market worth of £2b and are recording record profits year after year thanks to the "streamlined" AOS and 40k products. They can afford to hire one or two java developers.

Yes, because 'just throw money at it' is the solution to what will be an expensive product that.. you want to write in Java? A notoriously 'good' language to write a client side database in.

In any case you're looking at a minimum of a 6-figure cost for the project assuming multiple developers (because 1 is a stupid idea and you know it), testers, etc. And the shortest time you could reasonably do it in is 6 months assuming good requirements gathering and no changes from the first month. That's me being naive on costings and assuming people 'get it right' first time. Even internally at GW you're not dropping the costs that much doing it in-house.

For a product that may not get much in the way of market-dominance because, again, people will just point to Battlescribe. It's a cost without a reward, a high cost in time, money and man-hours. I'm not saying it's not possible, just that it's not really cost-effective no matter how much money GW is valued at (also market worth and revenue are different things, but I'm sure you're aware of that too).

Talk to anyone who's had to adjust battlescribe roster files with all the GW FAQs, balance changes, points costs, and weird formation/no slot/whatever and I think you'll see why. GW has created an incredibly complex system to make an army list in, as shown by all the issues battlescribe has had in the past. They actually said they were going to make just such an app, but I'd expect the complete lack of info since is a sign they took one look at the work involved and gave up.

I wouldn't hold my breath on them changing it anytime soon. To have an app worth using, it would need to match battlescribe's ability to customize and change things. And that means a lot of programming. Especially when you get stuff like inquisitors who can be taken in tons of armies without eating a slot but aren't technically part of the formation they're in.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
GW have a market worth of £2b and are recording record profits year after year thanks to the "streamlined" AOS and 40k products. They can afford to hire one or two java developers.

Yea ... considering how little their core business is tied to software that's probably a recipe to have a bad time. But yeah they do have the resources to build out a team if they wanted to or just outsource the initial dev work to start.

Considering the fact that you could leverage such an app as a sales channel and how easy it would be to push new releases through it I'm surprised they haven't done it yet.

GW has the 40K Combat Roster on Warhammer Community, but is is a simple Power Level list builder. It doesn't even have detachments in it.

As others have said, each additional layer of rules adds another level of complexity to the program. So how much money do you expect GW to spend and how much do you expect them to charge to get a working 40K Matched Play list app up and running?

 BaconCatBug wrote:
GW have a market worth of £2b and are recording record profits year after year thanks to the "streamlined" AOS and 40k products. They can afford to hire one or two java developers.

They can also afford to have ice cream machines in their stores which I'd say is a better way to spend money. An app isn't really necessary.

GW can afford to buying BattleScribe. It’s cheaper and take away other game’s army builders.

Apple fox wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
GW isn't interested in data on the game. They care about miniature sales figures, and the market chooses to keep buying models no matter how much or how little GW cares about the rules.

I am not sure the data you could collect is useful anyway, I made 6 kill teams today. 4 of them pure matching points for stuff I never intend to buy, and it does not show anything on potential releases that sales data would not be a better indicator for.
Cannot put in a list something that does not exist so that data ends up as a bit moot.

So.... you aren't aware what data apps capture are you?

You have location data. Where are the customers relative to the outlets. You get that a bit from facebook but you have to pay. Liukewise you get some info from shop sales data and mail order data, but you can get more... It doesn't give you where do people play. Is it shops or clubs? Home or school? Where people play can have implications for your targeting.

Enable it to link to another account to do batreps. You start to build a social network database. Who are key players in terms of centres of influencing? The military use this for kill/capture/talk targeting, in effect you target your efforts to where they most matter. You get a bit of this from existing networks but again you have to pay.

And so on. Read any paper on this to get a better idea. The list creation function is the hook and something ironically you probably care very little about (it is more meaningful if linked to another player or tagged in some way as having played).

There was a post just like this from a few days ago.

GW announced one for 8th edition some time ago, but never released anything.

Vaporware [noun] - computer slang. a product, especially software, that is promoted or marketed while it is still in development and that may never be produced.

axxiomatic wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:
GW have a market worth of £2b and are recording record profits year after year thanks to the "streamlined" AOS and 40k products. They can afford to hire one or two java developers.

Yea ... considering how little their core business is tied to software that's probably a recipe to have a bad time. But yeah they do have the resources to build out a team if they wanted to or just outsource the initial dev work to start.

Considering the fact that you could leverage such an app as a sales channel and how easy it would be to push new releases through it I'm surprised they haven't done it yet.

I suppose a good number of people in this thread didn't have experience with the 3rd edition (did it carry over into 4th) GW army builder program. It wasn't bad, but updates quickly lagged (and this was at the early 2000s release pace of 3ish codices per year) and then stopped. They completely underestimated what it took to keep something like that running, with even as simple as list building was back then.

This is something that's pretty far out of GW's wheelhouse, and I'd say they know enough to know that doing it right would be a pretty serious undertaking. To properly create (and lord, would this be a project perfectly suited for deadly scope creep) and maintain a usable app would a very significant, ongoing investment, that also has a very nebulous return value.

Budget proposals on things that should have a great deal of effect on customer appreciation and engagement without an easily quantifiable profit number suck.

 Bookwrack wrote:
I suppose a good number of people in this thread didn't have experience with the 3rd edition (did it carry over into 4th) GW army builder program. It wasn't bad, but updates quickly lagged (and this was at the early 2000s release pace of 3ish codices per year) and then stopped. They completely underestimated what it took to keep something like that running, with even as simple as list building was back then.

This is something that's pretty far out of GW's wheelhouse, and I'd say they know enough to know that doing it right would be a pretty serious undertaking. To properly create (and lord, would this be a project perfectly suited for deadly scope creep) and maintain a usable app would a very significant, ongoing investment, that also has a very nebulous return value.

Budget proposals on things that should have a great deal of effect on customer appreciation and engagement without an easily quantifiable profit number suck.

Read The-Real_Chris's post just up thread. The app isn't about engagement or customer appreciation it's a data-gathering tool that has a tertiary function helping you build a list. If you can't see that you probably think Facebook's purpose is to help you keep in touch with Grandma rather than selling your data and serving you ads, the functionality is just the most efficient way to get you to give them something to sell.

I'm not sure how you missed it' but 'functionality' is the key word.

First, learn the phrase 'scope creep.' It will really help clear up what you're failing to understand. The-Real-Chris was talking about some very complicated and hard to implement concepts for something starting out as a roster builder. Anybody who has worked in software development will be very familiar with why even something that makes sense to add like a location tracker or 'find nearby users' is a lot harder to add on, especially across multiple platforms. And since none of that is anything remotely near GW's wheelhouse, it's stuff that would all have to be outsourced completely, or have a team built from the ground up, none of which is cheap.

Making a functional army builder app for 40K will have both a tremendous upfront and on-going cost, and the actual returns that investment will make is very hard to do up front. Everything The-Real-Chris suggested for making it a better tool is great, but neither cheap, nor easy to implement, and screwing it up a la the 3rd edition army builder program leaves you with an expensive data gathering tool that almost none of your customers use, because it stopped being useful the next time a Psychic Awakening book is released.

 Bookwrack wrote:
I'm not sure how you missed it' but 'functionality' is the key word.

First, learn the phrase 'scope creep.' It will really help clear up what you're failing to understand. The-Real-Chris was talking about some very complicated and hard to implement concepts for something starting out as a roster builder. Anybody who has worked in software development will be very familiar with why even something that makes sense to add like a location tracker or 'find nearby users' is a lot harder to add on, especially across multiple platforms. And since none of that is anything remotely near GW's wheelhouse, it's stuff that would all have to be outsourced completely, or have a team built from the ground up, none of which is cheap.

Making a functional army builder app for 40K will have both a tremendous upfront and on-going cost, and the actual returns that investment will make is very hard to do up front. Everything The-Real-Chris suggested for making it a better tool is great, but neither cheap, nor easy to implement, and screwing it up a la the 3rd edition army builder program leaves you with an expensive data gathering tool that almost none of your customers use, because it stopped being useful the next time a Psychic Awakening book is released.

It's so difficult that the list building part of it was done for free!

The_Real_Chris wrote:

Apple fox wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
GW isn't interested in data on the game. They care about miniature sales figures, and the market chooses to keep buying models no matter how much or how little GW cares about the rules.

I am not sure the data you could collect is useful anyway, I made 6 kill teams today. 4 of them pure matching points for stuff I never intend to buy, and it does not show anything on potential releases that sales data would not be a better indicator for.
Cannot put in a list something that does not exist so that data ends up as a bit moot.

So.... you aren't aware what data apps capture are you?

You have location data. Where are the customers relative to the outlets. You get that a bit from facebook but you have to pay. Liukewise you get some info from shop sales data and mail order data, but you can get more... It doesn't give you where do people play. Is it shops or clubs? Home or school? Where people play can have implications for your targeting.

Enable it to link to another account to do batreps. You start to build a social network database. Who are key players in terms of centres of influencing? The military use this for kill/capture/talk targeting, in effect you target your efforts to where they most matter. You get a bit of this from existing networks but again you have to pay.

And so on. Read any paper on this to get a better idea. The list creation function is the hook and something ironically you probably care very little about (it is more meaningful if linked to another player or tagged in some way as having played).

I am well aware of all this, as well as how many people turn off. But I still do not think that is useful data for GW without the huge investment of data collection. Which would probably cost more than the app to maintain and development costs.

It's not *that* difficult to create an army builder software. It's not easy, but it's not rocket science.

Battlescribe is testament to that. Yes its the work of a few years... but it's one guy in his spare time.
Employ a decent app developer or three and it could be done in a matter of months. Or buy out / license battlescribe.
Bugs and maintenance? Get the FAQ team to go through the bugs once a week and fixe them. Updating for new books? It just becomes one more task that is part of the publishing process.


My guess is that the reason GW doesn't do it is that they're afraid of cannibalising their own book sales. A large portion of the community only buys the books for the datasheets and points. Their current model of releasing expansion books and yearly errata for $55 a pop might fall in a heap if there was an endorsed way of getting the updates digitally.