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The new codexes are £30 I think the 8th Ed ones were 22. You think this is fair considering they also want you to supplement that cost with 2.99 a month for the app?

It's an obvious rip-off, but if obvious rip-offs are enough to put you off the game, you'd have stopped playing a long time ago.

On the plus side, if you're happy with just the digital or just the physical copy, you can sell the other half for probably half the price, so it actually comes out cheaper than it used to be.

yukishiro1 wrote:
It's an obvious rip-off, but if obvious rip-offs are enough to put you off the game, you'd have stopped playing a long time ago.

Haha try dat. But if you want to complain about it whilst handing over piles of cash then welcome to 40k

They went from £25 to £30, apart from marines who were already £30 iirc and my understanding was you don't need to subscribe to use the datasheets in the app?

mrFickle wrote:
The new codexes are £30 I think the 8th Ed ones were 22. You think this is fair considering they also want you to supplement that cost with 2.99 a month for the app?

You don't have to pay for access to your digital codex.

One thing I noticed when I went back a few weeks ago and dug out the cold codex was how the book has evolved over the years.

My early Tyranid codex had colour covers and a few colour model display pages, but the whole book was only 45 pages long.
As a comparison the most recent is 69 page just for the lore alone and the whole book is 128 pages long.

Not only that but they've gone from a handfull of colour pages to the entire publication being in full colour, with the last two editions also being hardcover as default.


So the price has increased from £12 or thereabouts (going on memory) to £30. That's just over double the price for an increase of nearly 3 times length, full colour and hardback.

YES I like the old £25 price; I also like the old £20 even more etc.... I do feel that pushing to £30 - the price of a full Big Rule Book - is starting to really push it somewhat considering that the BRB are often three times as long (though admittedly do have the biggest market of customers by far).


I can see where the price has risen and where the publication has clearly grown over the years and improved in terms of the depth and quality of product content*.



*we can assume balance and error checking are the same as they've always been from GW

Good shout Overread, I've noticed that myself too. I've recently been buying up the old 2nd ed Codexes for nostalgic value, and as great as those books were at the time there's a world of difference in content.
I think the problem is partially one of perception - if you get the Codexes for the same armies every edition, you're gonna notice some repetition especially in the lore - and the armies are getting to the size now that adding anything more than a smattering of new units leads to stuff like 98 datasheets in one book(!!) - so it feels like you get a bit less "shiny new stuff", compared to earlier on when the factions were still being decently fleshed out.

I think in a time of extreme financial uncertainty for millions of people and a looming decade+ long recession, making their weekend hobby even more expensive is a dick move but on brand for GW

Especially when they were most likely already making thousands of percent of profit on books sold.

What's not acceptable is the necron codex being far smaller than the marine one but doing the same deep strike damage to your wallet.

Now to wait for a GW defender to justify that...

Codex Craftworlds and Drukhari are currently 128 pages at £25, while Codex Harlequins is 80 pages for £20. Thats £5 cheaper with 48 pages less. The new Codex Necrons is 120 pages against the Marine codex 206 pages - 86 pages difference - but both are £30.

The D&D players manual, is about £45 for over 300 pages. Two copies of the Necron codex( 120 pages ), providing 240 pages...£60. Take off £10 as if it were a single book...£50.

Yet...the Core 40K manual is £40 with 368 pages...

...hmmmm...

...seems we'll need to put aside £30 for the Harlequin codex when its released.

 Matt Swain wrote:
What's not acceptable is the necron codex being far smaller than the marine one but doing the same deep strike damage to your wallet.

Now to wait for a GW defender to justify that...

Given the amount of people actually defending the Necron codex in general, I'd say you should don the flame suit

 Daedalus81 wrote:

mrFickle wrote:
The new codexes are £30 I think the 8th Ed ones were 22. You think this is fair considering they also want you to supplement that cost with 2.99 a month for the app?

You don't have to pay for access to your digital codex.

Nope but GW want you to do that. They have worked out that 30 per codex and 2.99 a month is achievable for a portion of their customers. I’d hand thought that to encourage the extra expense in the app they wouldn’t raise prices elsewhere.

Don't buy GW printed material.

It is ephemeral, and with the prices going up it only makes the purchase worse in the long term.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
You don't have to pay for access to your digital codex.

No you do. That's the price increase. Thing is, you aren't given a choice now. You automatically pay extra for a digital Codex you may or may not want, and that Codex is only viewable via their app, right?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
No you do. That's the price increase. Thing is, you aren't given a choice now. You automatically pay extra for a digital Codex you may or may not want, and that Codex is only viewable via their app, right?

I guess the real question here (and one whose answer can only be a matter of opinion, unless anyone here's figured out multiverse-travel), is: do we think that the Codexes would still be £25 if not for the app?
Personally, I strongly doubt it.

Though I also wouldn't be surprised if some of the Codex profits are attributed to the app in accounting, if GW want to hide its nature as a loss-leader, which might make it more difficult to convince the more tech-wary shareholders (not that GW could ever have those!) into investing in the system further.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Don't buy GW printed material.

It is ephemeral, and with the prices going up it only makes the purchase worse in the long term.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
You don't have to pay for access to your digital codex.

No you do. That's the price increase. Thing is, you aren't given a choice now. You automatically pay extra for a digital Codex you may or may not want, and that Codex is only viewable via their app, right?

And conversely, there's no way to just buy the digital version, so you automatically pay extra for a physical codex that you may or may not want because they can't update themselves and are useless as definitive guides to the rules within anywhere between a year and a week. I'm with you, don't buy these.

 Super Ready wrote:
Do we think that the Codexes would still be £25 if not for the app?

Of course not. It's a new release. The price will go up regardless.

But this is the excuse for it. You now have a digital code rather than just being able to buy a digital Codex.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Don't buy GW printed material.

It is ephemeral, and with the prices going up it only makes the purchase worse in the long term.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
You don't have to pay for access to your digital codex.

No you do. That's the price increase. Thing is, you aren't given a choice now. You automatically pay extra for a digital Codex you may or may not want, and that Codex is only viewable via their app, right?

We all know that price increase was hitting regardless of an app...

I have always thought that as part of the 'introductory' content new players generally buy GW rulebooks should be cheaper. But I also understand that they must make a ton of money off existing players buying new ones every year. Compared to the cost of miniatures they can overprice the books without much complaint.

 Overread wrote:
One thing I noticed when I went back a few weeks ago and dug out the cold codex was how the book has evolved over the years.

My early Tyranid codex had colour covers and a few colour model display pages, but the whole book was only 45 pages long.
As a comparison the most recent is 69 page just for the lore alone and the whole book is 128 pages long.

Not only that but they've gone from a handfull of colour pages to the entire publication being in full colour, with the last two editions also being hardcover as default.


So the price has increased from £12 or thereabouts (going on memory) to £30. That's just over double the price for an increase of nearly 3 times length, full colour and hardback.

YES I like the old £25 price; I also like the old £20 even more etc.... I do feel that pushing to £30 - the price of a full Big Rule Book - is starting to really push it somewhat considering that the BRB are often three times as long (though admittedly do have the biggest market of customers by far).


I can see where the price has risen and where the publication has clearly grown over the years and improved in terms of the depth and quality of product content*.



*we can assume balance and error checking are the same as they've always been from GW

While it's easy to see where the cost increase comes from, and acquiesce that it's probably for the better that introductions to an army are given my beautiful full-color hardback books with pretty art and pretty photos and lots of lore to explain everything about the army so that it really sells the army to a new player of the army...

but as a long time player of the game, I already know about my armies' lore and about the pretty models. I'd much rather buy a black and white softback book of mostly just rules. Even better, I think the indexes were literally the best rulebook format they'd done, and I was kind of sad to see them return to the codex model, and am outright dismayed by the codex+supplement model that's been adopted for Space Marines and the codex+campaign books model that's been adopted for everybody else.

Campaign based splatbooks are the worst. I'd rather one faction get a new codex than three get a campaign splat.

Yeah. . . I really only need about 20 pages of my codexes now.

And I still think most of the 4th ed books were a better value even though they were mostly *gasp!* black and white.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Don't buy GW printed material.

It is ephemeral, and with the prices going up it only makes the purchase worse in the long term.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
You don't have to pay for access to your digital codex.

No you do. That's the price increase. Thing is, you aren't given a choice now. You automatically pay extra for a digital Codex you may or may not want, and that Codex is only viewable via their app, right?

Think he meant you don't have　to pay the monthly fee. You buy codex, you get to use　app for codex regardless of whether you subscribe. Op sounded more like the 2 are linked.

Wait, you have to have the app to view your digital codex which you pay for when you buy the physical one, and there's a fee to do that?

GW needs to be hit with an unfair business practice charge on this, you pay form soenmthing you may not want ot use, then to use it have to pay more?

There's got t be something illegal in that.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Don't buy GW printed material.

It is ephemeral, and with the prices going up it only makes the purchase worse in the long term.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
You don't have to pay for access to your digital codex.

No you do. That's the price increase. Thing is, you aren't given a choice now. You automatically pay extra for a digital Codex you may or may not want, and that Codex is only viewable via their app, right?

Sorry - to be clear - I thought he was mentioning the monthly fee.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Matt Swain wrote:
Wait, you have to have the app to view your digital codex which you pay for when you buy the physical one, and there's a fee to do that?

GW needs to be hit with an unfair business practice charge on this, you pay form soenmthing you may not want ot use, then to use it have to pay more?

There's got t be something illegal in that.

No. The cost of the physical codex went up (to include a digital copy no doubt). The digital codex is accessed through the app. You don't have to pay any monthly fees for access to the digital codex.

Being locked to an ecosystem is not great though.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Don't buy GW printed material.

It is ephemeral, and with the prices going up it only makes the purchase worse in the long term.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
You don't have to pay for access to your digital codex.

No you do. That's the price increase. Thing is, you aren't given a choice now. You automatically pay extra for a digital Codex you may or may not want, and that Codex is only viewable via their app, right?

We all know that price increase was hitting regardless of an app...

I have always thought that as part of the 'introductory' content new players generally buy GW rulebooks should be cheaper. But I also understand that they must make a ton of money off existing players buying new ones every year. Compared to the cost of miniatures they can overprice the books without much complaint.

I agree the things you need to get your army going should be break even or a loss leader to encourage new players or existing players to have more armies. Codex prices put me off expanding. Especially when you your army needs codex and the supplements like PA to be up to speed

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:

but as a long time player of the game, I already know about my armies' lore and about the pretty models.

And yet in another thread about the downfall of Privateer Press one of the things that is being highlighted is when they split lore/fluff and rules into two publications. People went for the rules automatically because it was cheaper and ignored the fluff; it steadily got more and more ignored until PP stopped printing it. It was used as an argument to show how the players got a disconnect from the lore side of things. Now chances are the competitive end was always a bit like that, but it likely stifled recruitment and retention of fluff/lore fans within the game.

Just consider how many people really read BL books at all. Even long term fans might never have picked up one. Heck I'd been a warhammer fan for years and yet never picked up a BL book until a few years ago.


If you separate them there's a higher chance that you break the connection. Break the connection and its much harder to restore and its a proven element in retaining and drawing in gamers to your world and lore setting above drifting into others.

How much pages do the new codices have compared with the old ones?
The Necron codex is 46€, the old was 32€; the SM codex is also 46€, while the old was 50€.

The 2nd edition Edlar codex will forever be my grounding memory of what a codex can do.
About 100 pages.
Quick search finds one in mint condition on da bay, 35 USD.

New Craftworlds dex (here in the Netherlands), 32,50 Euros.
About 130 pages.

My wife and I go out to lunch and it costs 20 Euros.
Nothing special - just lunch in a building with chairs and heat and nice people.

32,50 seems OK.

Codex Marines is 37,50.
That is getting into dinner territory.
Still, a substantial text, if useable for 2 or 4 years, then I think OK.

 wuestenfux wrote:
How much pages do the new codices have compared with the old ones?
The Necron codex is 46€, the old was 32€; the SM codex is also 46€, while the old was 50€.

Both new codexes are 32.5, not 46.

 wuestenfux wrote:
How much pages do the new codices have compared with the old ones?
The Necron codex is 46€, the old was 32€; the SM codex is also 46€, while the old was 50€.

I am seeing 37,50...
https://www.games-workshop.com/en-NL/Codex-Necrons-EN-2020

As someone who played 2ed as a teenager and then stopped and came back last year I find the lore in the 8ed codexes to be pretty week and not hugely different to 2ed. Yes the cannon has moved on but codexes always have to cater for the new play and set the scene so it’s pretty basic and repetitive. Which is fine for new players but I don’t think it caters for those people that have been customers of GW for years. Those people really want the new rules.

And what’s worse, for me because I sort of kept up with the lore when not playing, I find that what’s in the codex is not really in line with what the black library puts out.

And with the CSM codex this is exacerbated so badly because they have squeezed info for 9 legions in there whilst trying to focus on the black legion, so you get a bit of everything but not a lot of anything.

I’m looking forward to picking up the necron codex because I don’t know much about them but not looking forward to buying the new SM+ DA codexes and the CSM codex. Infact I might not play DA anymore and repurpose my minis as a custom chapter as I then won’t have to buy multiple supplants like PA to keep up to date

Got a friend who plays the same army?

Split the cost. One keeps the physical copy, the other the digital copy.

Job’s a good’un.