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I believe the pre-order pause is so that they can undertake the warehouse move they have had planned for a while (they had already issued a notice to independent stores that they will not receive any shipments from GW from next week until early May as a warning to stock up on anything that may go out of stock during this period).

Why would a warehouse move they knew was coming affect preorders they knew were coming? More likely this is either an unforseen interruption in the supply chain of something or some legal fallout with Chinese imports.

 IGtR= wrote:
I can tell you that if you have the opportunity to sell your good/service at full price, and the capacity, you do it. There is no advantage to GW for hobbyists with £££ and nothing GW to spend on it going to buy a product from GW's rivals.

How would the business genius class of Dakka explain FOMO for CC in a shareholder's meeting as leading to either long-term value or short-term cashflow? Would the announcement the next day that CC was coming back have harmed GW and if so, how?

Exactly.

As entertaining as this discussion is, but if FOMO was indeed the goal, what would that look like from within GW?

They are a fairly big company, big enough to have an internal structure similar to other large companies. That means there will be a dedicated project team for Cursed City, or for Quest as the project. That team will have to compete internally for resources (read: production slots, other budgets), but they will also be measured for success, and 'success' will be seen in relation to budget. In the FOMO scenario, what would the defined 'success' be, on which their manager's bonus depends? Assess demand for the product, then secretly make sure only half of that is available? You think they wrote that down for her/him? I'd love to see that leaked.

While it's certainly possible that Cursed City is lower priority than other products, and has to make way in a production shortage, this clearly is not a situation with which GW is happy. Not even speaking of causing it deliberately.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Why would a warehouse move they knew was coming affect preorders they knew were coming? More likely this is either an unforseen interruption in the supply chain of something or some legal fallout with Chinese imports.

As they are setting up a new warehouse and moving the entire between locations so they won’t be able to send out any orders for a couple of weeks. There is no point letting people make preorders if they are not able to send them out.

Aeneades wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Why would a warehouse move they knew was coming affect preorders they knew were coming? More likely this is either an unforseen interruption in the supply chain of something or some legal fallout with Chinese imports.

As they are setting up a new warehouse and moving the entire between locations so they won’t be able to send out any orders for a couple of weeks. There is no point letting people make preorders if they are not able to send them out.

So you're saying this new warehouse suddenly fell out of the sky cause otherwise they wouldn't have scheduled any preorders for moving week in the first place?

 lord_blackfang wrote:

Aeneades wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Why would a warehouse move they knew was coming affect preorders they knew were coming? More likely this is either an unforseen interruption in the supply chain of something or some legal fallout with Chinese imports.

As they are setting up a new warehouse and moving the entire between locations so they won’t be able to send out any orders for a couple of weeks. There is no point letting people make preorders if they are not able to send them out.

So you're saying this new warehouse suddenly fell out of the sky cause otherwise they wouldn't have scheduled any preorders for moving week in the first place?

No, I am saying this is a preplanned hold on preorders. Why do you think they scheduled any preorders for the next few weeks? The preorder schedule is changing as they are placing a hold on the weekly preorder system they usually have in place.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

Aeneades wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Why would a warehouse move they knew was coming affect preorders they knew were coming? More likely this is either an unforseen interruption in the supply chain of something or some legal fallout with Chinese imports.

As they are setting up a new warehouse and moving the entire between locations so they won’t be able to send out any orders for a couple of weeks. There is no point letting people make preorders if they are not able to send them out.

So you're saying this new warehouse suddenly fell out of the sky cause otherwise they wouldn't have scheduled any preorders for moving week in the first place?

Or perhaps this is a planned pause in shipping things out that they've known of for ages and just didn't tell us because there wasn't any point? GW doesn't need to tell customers that they won't be shipping new things 2 months in a advance or whatever. They just do it and its only a few weeks with a pause on things during a period of time where we expect that. Heck most companies have had to pause in the last year for various reasons more than once.

we have to make some changes to when the next batch of incredible Warhammer releases come out

This doesn't say they're changing some assumed pattern, it says they're changing specific dates of specific items.

Add the Cursed City vanishing and it's clear something unexpected happened. New warehouses aren't unexpected.

I don't know if i should believe that GW is greedy or extremly incompetent and uncommunicative at this point. Or perhaps both.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

we have to make some changes to when the next batch of incredible Warhammer releases come out

This doesn't say they're changing some assumed pattern, it says they're changing specific dates of specific items.

Add the Cursed City vanishing and it's clear something unexpected happened. New warehouses aren't unexpected.

I read it that GW is changing their regular release pattern (new stuff every week) to account for the warehouse change. Something that they were likely well aware of, but which customers were not. So its a change for us in terms of when things come, its not necessarily a change for GW staff and such in the same way.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

we have to make some changes to when the next batch of incredible Warhammer releases come out

This doesn't say they're changing some assumed pattern, it says they're changing specific dates of specific items.

Add the Cursed City vanishing and it's clear something unexpected happened. New warehouses aren't unexpected.

That’s them letting us know that they are placing a hold on the usual weekly preorder system, that doesn’t mean they are changing specific dates of specific models.

You can read it however you want but it doesn't change what it actually says.

What we're seeing is another mass delusion with everyone parroting some random hearsay about a new warehouse that doesn't even explain the other mysterious stock shortage that happened within the same week.

New warehouse and factory aren’t hearsay. They’re specifically mentioned in their annual and 6 month reports

 IGtR= wrote:
So the pertinent point is:

"over the next couple of weeks, there will be a short pause where we’ll have no new pre-orders. Have no fear, though – new releases will be coming your way before you know it."

Where this fits in with Cursed City getting a reprint (or not) is unclear.

But I will be interested to see the response from the 'FOMO Brigade' who think that underselling a product which clearly has tens of thousands of customers who would have paid full price (or perhaps a premium) as some sort of 4-D chess.

As someone in a top-end provider service provider (albeit as a lawyer I don't have experience of manufacturing), I can tell you that if you have the opportunity to sell your good/service at full price, and the capacity, you do it. There is no advantage to GW for hobbyists with £££ and nothing GW to spend on it going to buy a product from GW's rivals.

If GW wanted this to be limited, they could have charged double the price, and been upfront about it being highly limited. Or, the much easier proposition, they could have made it a smaller undertaking to design/produce/market. Why not make it an exclusive Underworlds Warband?

How would the business genius class of Dakka explain FOMO for CC in a shareholder's meeting as leading to either long-term value or short-term cashflow? Would the announcement the next day that CC was coming back have harmed GW and if so, how?

FOMO Brigade, charge!!!!!

There can of course be discussion as to whether GW is employing artificial scarcity in this or other cases, but to dismiss it as a concept out of hand is demented. Its a well established tactic to increase perceived value, which is all GW has really.

I’d imagine ‘we are artificially manipulating supply of our products to increase perceived value alongside gradually increasing prices with each release to increase profit per unit exponentially’ is a much easer sell to shareholders than ‘lol sorry guys we thought only 1,000 people would want this thing we’ve been hyping for months now, even though we’ve been shown umpteen times to be massively incorrect and incapable of gauging our market, still thanks for trusting us with your money’.

Luke82 wrote:

 IGtR= wrote:
So the pertinent point is:

"over the next couple of weeks, there will be a short pause where we’ll have no new pre-orders. Have no fear, though – new releases will be coming your way before you know it."

Where this fits in with Cursed City getting a reprint (or not) is unclear.

But I will be interested to see the response from the 'FOMO Brigade' who think that underselling a product which clearly has tens of thousands of customers who would have paid full price (or perhaps a premium) as some sort of 4-D chess.

As someone in a top-end provider service provider (albeit as a lawyer I don't have experience of manufacturing), I can tell you that if you have the opportunity to sell your good/service at full price, and the capacity, you do it. There is no advantage to GW for hobbyists with £££ and nothing GW to spend on it going to buy a product from GW's rivals.

If GW wanted this to be limited, they could have charged double the price, and been upfront about it being highly limited. Or, the much easier proposition, they could have made it a smaller undertaking to design/produce/market. Why not make it an exclusive Underworlds Warband?

How would the business genius class of Dakka explain FOMO for CC in a shareholder's meeting as leading to either long-term value or short-term cashflow? Would the announcement the next day that CC was coming back have harmed GW and if so, how?

FOMO Brigade, charge!!!!!

There can of course be discussion as to whether GW is employing artificial scarcity in this or other cases, but to dismiss it as a concept out of hand is demented. Its a well established tactic to increase perceived value, which is all GW has really.

I’d imagine ‘we are artificially manipulating supply of our products to increase perceived value alongside gradually increasing prices with each release to increase profit per unit exponentially’ is a much easer sell to shareholders than ‘lol sorry guys we thought only 1,000 people would want this thing we’ve been hyping for months now, even though we’ve been shown umpteen times to be massively incorrect and incapable of gauging our market, still thanks for trusting us with your money’.

Suffer not the Timed Exclusive to live!

Luke82 wrote:

 IGtR= wrote:
So the pertinent point is:

"over the next couple of weeks, there will be a short pause where we’ll have no new pre-orders. Have no fear, though – new releases will be coming your way before you know it."

Where this fits in with Cursed City getting a reprint (or not) is unclear.

But I will be interested to see the response from the 'FOMO Brigade' who think that underselling a product which clearly has tens of thousands of customers who would have paid full price (or perhaps a premium) as some sort of 4-D chess.

As someone in a top-end provider service provider (albeit as a lawyer I don't have experience of manufacturing), I can tell you that if you have the opportunity to sell your good/service at full price, and the capacity, you do it. There is no advantage to GW for hobbyists with £££ and nothing GW to spend on it going to buy a product from GW's rivals.

If GW wanted this to be limited, they could have charged double the price, and been upfront about it being highly limited. Or, the much easier proposition, they could have made it a smaller undertaking to design/produce/market. Why not make it an exclusive Underworlds Warband?

How would the business genius class of Dakka explain FOMO for CC in a shareholder's meeting as leading to either long-term value or short-term cashflow? Would the announcement the next day that CC was coming back have harmed GW and if so, how?

FOMO Brigade, charge!!!!!

There can of course be discussion as to whether GW is employing artificial scarcity in this or other cases, but to dismiss it as a concept out of hand is demented. Its a well established tactic to increase perceived value, which is all GW has really.

I’d imagine ‘we are artificially manipulating supply of our products to increase perceived value alongside gradually increasing prices with each release to increase profit per unit exponentially’ is a much easer sell to shareholders than ‘lol sorry guys we thought only 1,000 people would want this thing we’ve been hyping for months now, even though we’ve been shown umpteen times to be massively incorrect and incapable of gauging our market, still thanks for trusting us with your money’.

Of course artificial scarcity is a concept, and GW employs it every now and then. Just not this time.

If I was a shareholder I would ask, why not sell 2,000 copies, make (more than, because overhead) twice the money, and the perceived value would be dented only slightly?

Luke82 wrote:

 IGtR= wrote:
So the pertinent point is:

"over the next couple of weeks, there will be a short pause where we’ll have no new pre-orders. Have no fear, though – new releases will be coming your way before you know it."

Where this fits in with Cursed City getting a reprint (or not) is unclear.

But I will be interested to see the response from the 'FOMO Brigade' who think that underselling a product which clearly has tens of thousands of customers who would have paid full price (or perhaps a premium) as some sort of 4-D chess.

As someone in a top-end provider service provider (albeit as a lawyer I don't have experience of manufacturing), I can tell you that if you have the opportunity to sell your good/service at full price, and the capacity, you do it. There is no advantage to GW for hobbyists with £££ and nothing GW to spend on it going to buy a product from GW's rivals.

If GW wanted this to be limited, they could have charged double the price, and been upfront about it being highly limited. Or, the much easier proposition, they could have made it a smaller undertaking to design/produce/market. Why not make it an exclusive Underworlds Warband?

How would the business genius class of Dakka explain FOMO for CC in a shareholder's meeting as leading to either long-term value or short-term cashflow? Would the announcement the next day that CC was coming back have harmed GW and if so, how?

FOMO Brigade, charge!!!!!

There can of course be discussion as to whether GW is employing artificial scarcity in this or other cases, but to dismiss it as a concept out of hand is demented. Its a well established tactic to increase perceived value, which is all GW has really.

I’d imagine ‘we are artificially manipulating supply of our products to increase perceived value alongside gradually increasing prices with each release to increase profit per unit exponentially’ is a much easer sell to shareholders than ‘lol sorry guys we thought only 1,000 people would want this thing we’ve been hyping for months now, even though we’ve been shown umpteen times to be massively incorrect and incapable of gauging our market, still thanks for trusting us with your money’.

Thanks for the response, interesting to see your take here.

I agree that FOMO is a concept, but I think what you seem to be missing is that a core component is that it is pre-announced, or an integral part of the business model. Fashion houses, sneakers, other Ltd Eds specifically hype up the LIMITED part about it; that would be the focus of the pre-sale marketing. More of the "Last Chance to Buy" thing where GW bring it back for a short period. Kickstarters give you a limited window to get in to achieve a similar aim.

I don't think you would see the words "artificially manipulating supply" in an annual report! In any event, you think they "artificially manipulated supply" and yet the price was broadly comparable with BSF (give or take a bit of normal inflation on prices).

What do you mean by a "tactic to increase perceived value, which is all GW has really." Do you think GW has standard/substandard products? Do you think GW as a business is overvalued (a wholly separate question)?

On the broader point, I find it odd that you think that instead of totalling biffing this up (not unprecedented in the corporate world, and frankly Dakka's large-scale inability to understand that SMEs do not dominate the world supply chains/legal infrastructure/have omniscience/are not bond villains, appears at best to me based on not understanding how a business actually functions), GW have a long game, where they think that AoS fans will, instead of being burned and spending their money elsewhere (a considerable risk, and one GW must be aware of FOR A BOARDGAME), simply buy MORE releases (because speed of sale does not matter to GW nearly as much as maximising returns will), and they decided to do this to a big box and planned their post roll-out comms snafu and suddenly pulling the webpage? Again, please explain to me why they didn't just do this with the vampires warband and charge double or hell even triple for that product? Less effort, and therefore more return for them, on that box.

There is also the option that the warehouse move was brought forward due to the shipment of boxes from china had to go the long way round Africa, so it's a quieter month than the one they had planned.
Pause in production as complete sets weren't ready, so there's not a constant supply of new inventory coming in.

TheGoodGerman does a great job summing it up. When your understanding of how GW's business operations work comes from the internet and what you read on message boards, lots and lots of stuff sounds possible. If you actually were in GW's corporate offices and said all of it out loud they'd look at you like you had two heads and were completely out of your mind, because it's pants on your head level nonsense.

Did GW brass intentionally undersell this product so they could tell their shareholders a bunch of meaningless buzz words that have no relation to reality and which wouldn't cut it with 99% of adults in the business world? Of course not. Is a little knowledge dangerous? Absolutely.

Aeneades wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:

we have to make some changes to when the next batch of incredible Warhammer releases come out

This doesn't say they're changing some assumed pattern, it says they're changing specific dates of specific items.

Add the Cursed City vanishing and it's clear something unexpected happened. New warehouses aren't unexpected.

That’s them letting us know that they are placing a hold on the usual weekly preorder system, that doesn’t mean they are changing specific dates of specific models.

Well, obviously they are.

Next preorders are explicitly now in May.
Ad mech (codex and new character) were slated for April (its in the preview video, in binary). They hadn't announced a specific date in April, but obviously they had one internally. And that date has changed by at least a week, if not two or three.

Luke82 wrote:

 frankelee wrote:
FOMO is a real underpants gnome level theory for explaining GW's sales tactics. Though perhaps that explains some of the more interesting mental stretches I've seen around the forums concerning the 'absolutely insane costs of holding an item in a warehouse' and 'the genius business strategy of producing small amounts of a product to make sure you sell it all.' The problem with all this is the people are GW aren't guys on internet forums pretending to know what they're talking about, they'd never come up with any of this stuff themselves.

It takes but a few seconds to google how luxury brands (which GW sees itself as) use artificial scarcity to drive up their perceived value and prices, you could have done that instead of typing this dog turd post man, use your time better!

I get its hard to admit you’ve been duped many, many times, but c’mon dudes this product, and many like it, sold out within hours of its preorder... how incompetent do people think this highly successful company is? So much more comforting to think some tragedy has befallen GW’s supply chain then to accept participation in a con job i guess.

Of course GW use artificial scarcity to boost sales. Every tried to get one of the limited edition Siege of Terra hardbacks? They go in minutes. They could clearly print twice as many and still sell them. Or the limited edition Sisters of Battle box? Or going back further, Space Hulk 4th edition? All pushed as limited products, one print run only, get them while you can items. Quite openly. Whether you like the ethics of that or not, they clearly do it, know how to do it, and do it quite brazenly.

What's nonsense is this idea that instead of employing that tactic, which works for them on a regular basis, they'd instead take something that isn't meant to be a limited edition, say that it isn't and will be available in the future, and then quickly change that after it sells out to, I dunno, stop people from trusting them and make them panic that every product might be limited regardless of what they say, so they should order on release day just to be sure?

And the evidence for this?

Indomitus. The first part of this evil plan. They say it's a single run but there will be plenty for everyone and then, shock, there aren't! Mission complete right, loads of people missed out on Indomitus, as we told them they didn't need to rush and buy and the idiots fell for it! They'll know better next time. Except they then went and printed a load more copies and I was still able to get one a month ago. Not sure how that fits the cunning plan.

So then that just leaves Piety and Pain and Cursed City. The former is one of those boxes that are always limited, we were surprised by how limited it was but we'd all assumed it would go away eventually. And Cursed City. I'm not sure two products constitutes a pattern. Especially as they've released a 100 or so other products that don't follow the pattern during the same timescale...

Could be loads of reasons. It's pointless to speculate. Shouldn't this thread die now? The box is out and in hands. How many pages of speculation and arguing more do we really need

deano2099 wrote:


Of course GW use artificial scarcity to boost sales. Every tried to get one of the limited edition Siege of Terra hardbacks? They go in minutes. They could clearly print twice as many and still sell them.

Boosting sales by selling half as many as they clearly could. fething genius!

as shown by Alchemist Workshop twitter feed.

#WarhammerCommunity #Warmongers #Warmaidens #CursedCity pic.twitter.com/nrxLA7wuhJ

— Alchemists Workshops (@AlchemistsWorks) April 19, 2021

Some of these replies boggle the mind. What gw wants is a guaranteed return on their investment. The bean counters at gw are happy if gw projects sales of say 20,000 copies and sells all those copies.

Let’s say hypothetically a box costs half of the sales price to assemble ship and store. In this scenario if gw produces 50,000 but sells 34,000 they would make less profit than by selling out a run of 20,000. If gw produces 100,000 copies but sells 49,000 copies they would lose money.

The other thing worth pointing out is that gw made 25% more money in the second half of 2020 than the previous year. It is much more feasible that gw underestimated demand by 25% than it is to say that they tried to create a sense of FOMO.

 Rick_1138 wrote:
as shown by Alchemist Workshop twitter feed.

#WarhammerCommunity #Warmongers #Warmaidens #CursedCity pic.twitter.com/nrxLA7wuhJ

— Alchemists Workshops (@AlchemistsWorks) April 19, 2021

Don't wanna say i called it but i called it

@Chikout - The argument against that is for a franchise like Warhammer Quest, it should be able to sell and sell. It has an attraction beyond focussed warhammer fan groups to casual players that played the original games in the 90s or even the Heroquest games. I would also say there is a fair bit of crossover with the boardgame (non-wargaming) market.

So in that sense, having this as a one and done, makes very little sense in terms of the additional sales it could have made over the coming decade (I don't think too much of a stretch if you look at the lifespan some 'classic' boardgames achieve).

I noticed that at least one of the characters was referenced in Broken Realms: Teclis - Jeslen Darrock



Any others crop up anywhere?

Chikout wrote:

Let’s say hypothetically a box costs half of the sales price to assemble ship and store. In this scenario if gw produces 50,000 but sells 34,000 they would make less profit than by selling out a run of 20,000. If gw produces 100,000 copies but sells 49,000 copies they would lose money.

That's not a sensible way to consider things. Due to the many fixed costs involved (design time, cost of making a mould, marketing costs etc etc) GWs cost per box is hugely variable. The first one off the production line has cost an absolute fortune, but the price per box goes down thereafter.

Marginal costs (the extra cost of a box added on to a production run) can be really low, 20% or less of retail, and are dependent on the size of a production run among other factors. .

Yeah that's silly. Once the components are designed and production line set up, the cost to make them is single digit bucks per box.