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The current stock issues are because GW has factories in the UK which has mandated covid-save work practice. That means they can't have as many staff in the warehouse nor in the factory as normal; it means warehouse staff have to move in certain directions around the warehouse; it means that their production, picking, packing and such is all hampered.

At the same time their market demand has skyrocketed.


GW is experiencing lower production output coupled with higher market demand. Not to mention 2 solid months last year where there was no stock produced and customer stripped every 3rd party retail store of pretty much everything there was.


These problems are not something GW could have planned for nor prepared for; it was covid. In fact GW was in line to bring online a new warehouse system and factory this year; both of which are hampered and have issues because of the covid elements.


And GW aren't alone, I know several other firms have had similar issues with supply and have had to close doors at various times to account for the fact that they can't keep up with demand or to change how their limited factory space operates to try and have as many staff whilst keeping them safe and socially distant. I know others had to stop because of supply problems and running out of materials to cast with.

 Overread wrote:

At the same time their market demand has skyrocketed.
.

Has it? Genuinely asking since I haven't read reports or anything.
It would make sense with people locked at home.

Thing is would this Video channel idea expand that? What was the max they had on twitch for free? Rookie numbers?

GW doubled profits this year and gave 5000 GBP in shares to every employee, they're doing okay.

As Blackfang notes - GW profits are insanely up for this past year. Lots of people locked down and stuck at home in their core market meant a lot of people who had money because they weren't commuting or eating out and such; so they focused on indoorhobbies like GW. IT also meant a lot of people came back to them, older gamers who had drifted away who suddenly had a lot of time to do hobby stuff.

It's a massive market boom which might not be sustainable, but certainly means that GW has weathered the pandemic very well. They also paid all their furlough money from the first lockdown, back to the government and I don't think they've taken any more out since. So they are emerging not only with higher profits, but no debts over their heads.

Got it, thanks for info guys.

Thats a Very positive outcome for GW if you ask me, specially when you see small biz in this industry struggling.
Making this industry more mainstream is a good thing since it needs more people influx to stay relevant.

Makes me think if this channel decision is based on these good results pos lockdown and that Twitch, YouTube etc was just testing the waters and will be terminated.

Like you say not sure if these numbers are something sustainable or reliable under the current covid situation.

Either way good news are good.

 ImAGeek wrote:

 CragHack wrote:
Instead of focusing their efforts timely releases, website stability, product support and availability, they give us this...
Two hands are not not enough to facepalm.

I mean, you know it will be completely different teams of people doing this than anything to do with product availability and the like, right?

Yes, obviously. But why hire people for something new, when you still have issues with your core products. Instead of putting money into some obscure app, put that money into hiring more specialists/gear/whatever else that would get all your problems solved in the first place. But as people stated, GW will never ever admit they have problems.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Londinium wrote:
This honestly feels like the first major mistake that GW have made since Rountree took over.

...pardon?

Note the word 'major', not 'minor'. They've made plenty of minor mistakes but nothing that important from a business perspective. Cursed City for example has sent nerds on online forums wild but ultimately isn't that much of a deal looking at the company as a whole.

This has the potential to be a costly flop, especially when we've seen equally niche things such as Castlevania (I'd argue more niche), do fairly well for themselves by going down the more traditional route. Hell obscure stuff like Altered Carbon got a TV series. If GW are just doing this for marketing purposes, it's far too costly for the return if they host it on their own platform, so I suspect they're not. If they're genuinely trying to create a television/movies arm to supplement tabletop, Black Library and video games then they're not going to succeed to any great degree with this model, it's too costly to produce actual quality content and they're a tiny player, they'll need to gain viewers outside of the Warhammer bubble. Best way of achieving that is through production companies who understand the IP and Amazon/Netflix etc. Their now very quiet plans for Eisenhorn are the way to go.

All depends on the content and the price.

I pay for individual films and shows on Prime etc - I would pay to see a whole new series of for instance Astartes. However I really did not like Castlevania so the animated show that looked like that would be of imited interest.

Would I subscribe to a Warhammer channel - not sure...

This honestly feels like a terrible business decision. None of these shows will be long enough or good enough to justify subscribing to the service. People are just going to subscribe and watch what they want, then cancel. There isn't enough content backlog, nor is the production cycle quick enough to guarentee a constant stream of new content. It's just a bad decision.

What if its £10 per 3 months or 6 months?


We've assumed its a monthly thing, but it could easily be a different payment system for a subscriber system.

We also have to consider that value for money depends on us knowing what they'll charge. Right now we've no idea.

Why would I pay, lets say, $15 if I could play, for example, WoW on a 6 month plan, that saves me ~$12?

I have never seen GW giving you discount vouchers in WD, and only seen bonuses like the rare mini or codes for games in Steam that most likely you already have.

If anything, just release the products as a video anthology on Blu-ray/Digital.

 Overread wrote:
What if its £10 per 3 months or 6 months?


We've assumed its a monthly thing, but it could easily be a different payment system for a subscriber system.

We also have to consider that value for money depends on us knowing what they'll charge. Right now we've no idea.

Yeah or like the yearly Prime sub.

Voss wrote:

Cronch wrote:

Animation is a great medium for Warhammer as opposed to live action because it's cheaper to produce and they can do a lot more with it.

Not if you want quality animation. Which...did show imo

Yeah, based on some numbers I've seen recently, a 22 minute animated episode is about $880,000*. And takes about a year or so from start to finish (a series will overlap in various stages of production as it moves from one team to another).

*going off what the animated Critical Role episodes are costing, by the same studio (Titmouse) that did Venture Brothers, ST: Lower Decks, and a bunch of other stuff.

The Clone Wars had an average budget of about $1 million per episode (IIRC a few episodes hit $1.5 million), supposedly Rebels and Bad Batch are in the same range. Not sure how Critical Role is being done, but it could be that 3d animated cost a bit more than 2d (ala Venture Bros and Lower Decks).

GW has an absurd number of shows in production at once for some reason, so they're going all in on this. (Probably about 60 million for these eleven shows assuming about 110 minutes each (either as 5 22 minute episodes or a single long feature). Now some of these probably won't cost as much because the animation style and quality varies pretty wildly. But their own 'bespoke' service is going to cost a pretty penny, too.

I can't imagine that being the case, given GWs revenues, profits, cash-on-hand, and complete lack of debt theres no way they put that much money into it (then again its taken 2 or 3 years now for us to get to release since some of this stuff was announced? Entirely possible that they spread the cost over that time.

Then again, I think part of GWs strategy with gobbling up the youtube animators is to drive down costs while bulking out its initial launch roster. Astartes was getting by on a $240k/yr budget as a side project, dunno if that was a one man show or if there was a small team, but entirely possible they worked out a deal to make astartes a full time job that will generate however many hours of content for a fraction of the price of what more established studios are doing.

Finally got around to watching the Angels of Death preview- uh, huh. Not sure the color thing isn't a cost-cutting measure rather than 'artistic vision.' The lip sync is definitely terrible. A reasonable and friendly chaplain is just _weird_. As is a captain and deathwatch veteran as a twitchy little ferret.

I dont see how it would be a cost cutting measure. You only have to add the colors/textures/effects to a model once and then it renders through into every scene the model is used in - adding the color is relatively quick and easy - it wouldn't have really taken them any more time than it already has to color in the models in the monochrome pallet they used. It could be that the additional colors were more taxing on the render though, I haven't played around with color in my rendering work to know if that makes a difference or not, in which case it was probably more of a "time" thing than a "cost" thing.

But still, burying it behind their own little wall makes no sense to me. They don't have enough, and nothing jumps out as worth making an effort for. Sticking to their existing audience rather than reaching out just seems backwards.

I mean, the dozen or so programs they've announced so far is quite a bit, and we know they have more programs which they haven't announced yet (because they told us so). They haven't really even given us a clue as to what format this content is going to take, be it animated 2-5 minute shorts, full length 20-30 minute episodes, or film length features, etc. We dont know runtimes, episode counts, or really much of anything. We'll have to see what the full scope of the content slate is on June 23rd. That being said, I don't entirely disagree - a tv show or film is marketing for the IP, but marketing which is potentially profit-generating in and of itself (vs something like a web ad which only costs you money and is reliant on sales generation to return value to the advertiser, etc.). It seems wasteful to gate this content behind a paywall that only existing fans will be interested in purchasing access to, theres no broader market or outside interest to capture that way, unless the warhammer + platform is being piggybacked as a "channel" type affair within someone elses streaming service.

To be honest, piggybacking seems almost guaranteed, the network and content delivery infrastructure to operate a streaming service isn't cheap and requires a lot of technical knowledge to set up, operate, and maintain. I doubt GW just signed a contract with Fastly or Cloudflare or AWS or whatever and added a handful of staff to its in-house IT department and did it all on their own. A partnership with Amazon Prime or Disney+ (especially Disney+) seems more likely and this could simply be a "phase 1" type approach to get big bucks investment from one of the bigger platforms (i.e. GW self funds the initial slate of programming as a proof of concept to get data on subscriber/viewership counts and what sort of value GWs IP brings to the table - if it crosses whatever threshold then Amazon/Disney/HBO/Netflix, etc. ponies up a billion dollar investment into producing a live action Eisenhorn series or whatever under terms more favorable to GW than if they had simply sold the licensing rights).

They can afford a risky failure.

Yep, the companies profit margins are obscene (something like 42.5%), they have little to no debt and has something like 100 million GBP in cash in the bank. This entire endeavor could be a massive bust and it wouldn't hurt GWs financial health in any appreciable way. They have everything to gain from this and nothing to lose.

Just noticed the part about "Exclusive miniatures" coming with this. I really don't like the idea of special miniatures you have to pay for being locked behind another paywall, ones for events and such are more like a special commemerative thing so aren't too bad, but having them only available via a paid subscription doesn't sound good if that's what happens with it.

Voss wrote:

Cronch wrote:

Animation is a great medium for Warhammer as opposed to live action because it's cheaper to produce and they can do a lot more with it.

Not if you want quality animation. Which...did show imo

GW has an absurd number of shows in production at once for some reason, so they're going all in on this. (Probably about 60 million for these eleven shows assuming about 110 minutes each (either as 5 22 minute episodes or a single long feature). Now some of these probably won't cost as much because the animation style and quality varies pretty wildly. But their own 'bespoke' service is going to cost a pretty penny, too.

Aren't a significant portion of these pretty much fan projects that have just been made official, though?

 Mentlegen324 wrote:
Just noticed the part about "Exclusive miniatures" coming with this. I really don't like the idea of special miniatures you have to pay for being locked behind another paywall, ones for events and such are more like a special commemerative thing so aren't too bad, but having them only available via a paid subscription doesn't sound good if that's what happens with it.

Huh? I haven't seen anything said about exclusive miniatures coming, other than fan speculation.

I hope I don't need to explain to you that just because a fan speculated about it doesn't mean that its true, and you don't have to concern yourself with this until GW officially announces something.

chaos0xomega wrote:

 Mentlegen324 wrote:
Just noticed the part about "Exclusive miniatures" coming with this. I really don't like the idea of special miniatures you have to pay for being locked behind another paywall, ones for events and such are more like a special commemerative thing so aren't too bad, but having them only available via a paid subscription doesn't sound good if that's what happens with it.

Huh? I haven't seen anything said about exclusive miniatures coming, other than fan speculation.

I hope I don't need to explain to you that just because a fan speculated about it doesn't mean that its true, and you don't have to concern yourself with this until GW officially announces something.

But they have officially announced it? I'm looking at an article on their page with it.

Warhammer+ will be an exciting new way to interact with the worlds of Warhammer.

Animations are just the start. There’s a whole heap of stuff coming, from more exclusive content to special-access areas, and dedicated offers and rewards. There might even be some exclusive miniatures in the offing…

Keep checking back for more information and join us on the 23rd of June for the full reveal.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/warhammer-animation/

The date for the article when it shows up in the search says it was posted back in march and there is no preview picture (it's just a black box), which seems a bit strange?

"There might even be miniatures" is most certainly not announcing anything, and especially not as a part of the service.

 Albertorius wrote:
"There might even be miniatures" is most certainly not announcing anything, and especially not as a part of the service.

In a paragraph discussing Warhammer+ and hinting at what it will involve, how is saying there might be exclusive miniatures as part of it not an announcement that Warhammer+ is getting exclusive miniatures?

It's not an announcement in the sense of "Here's a big preview article!", but it' still GW telling us exclusive miniatures are part of what's coming with it.

 Albertorius wrote:
"There might even be miniatures" is most certainly not announcing anything, and especially not as a part of the service.

Its not imposible - they are already doing exclusive minis for other reasons at hugely inflated prices even over the OP prices of the standard character models.

Again happy to see what they offer and at what price.

Jes Goodwin did a full conceptual sketch for Livia Sorken, so I hope she becomes a mini one day :

https://www.miniwars.eu/2019/08/mas-detalles-de-angels-of-death-la.html

That being said, I would hate to have it locked behind a Warhammer+ subscription...

weird, haven't seen that page before. Theres no mention of it on the actual page for the preview: https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/05/22/warhammer-animation-preview-online-watch-the-first-five-minutes-of-angels-of-death/

In any case, guess I was wrong - we'll have to see what happens I suppose

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

 Albertorius wrote:
"There might even be miniatures" is most certainly not announcing anything, and especially not as a part of the service.

In a paragraph discussing Warhammer+ and hinting at what it will involve, how is saying there might be exclusive miniatures as part of it not an announcement that Warhammer+ is getting exclusive miniatures?

It's not an announcement in the sense of "Here's a big preview article!", but it' still GW telling us exclusive miniatures are part of what's coming with it.

Indeed. There is a 100% chance of miniature (maybe plural).
As he says there’s no way they’d put it in the article otherwise.

In fact look back at GW articles in general.
They often put those “maybe this” “could even that” etc. Teases in there.
That sort of maybe you’ll see this, with a grin and a wink.

It’ll be a primaris lieutenant based on Astartes, obviously

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

But they have officially announced it? I'm looking at an article on their page with it.

Warhammer+ will be an exciting new way to interact with the worlds of Warhammer.

Animations are just the start. There’s a whole heap of stuff coming, from more exclusive content to special-access areas, and dedicated offers and rewards. There might even be some exclusive miniatures in the offing…

Keep checking back for more information and join us on the 23rd of June for the full reveal.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/warhammer-animation/

The date for the article when it shows up in the search says it was posted back in march and there is no preview picture (it's just a black box), which seems a bit strange?

Is offing British slang for offering? As in available to purchase? So if you pay for the subscription service you may get the opportunity to pay them more for a mini?

 Albertorius wrote:
"There might even be miniatures" is most certainly not announcing anything, and especially not as a part of the service.

There's no chance they'd put out that hint if miniatures weren't being lined up. People online would go mental if there was a heavy hint at miniatures and then nothing was provided. Look at the ongoing Cursed City saga and people squabbling about whether it was a limited release or not, why GW marketed it in the way they did etc.

As far as I know, "in the offing" means "possible to happen", so kinda redundant, but not particularly related to "as part of the subscription".

I mean, Fw is already offering miniatures of some of their characters, so more of that is certainly a possibility.

I just don't think it's particularly likely that it's as a part of a subscription of a new on-demand video channel. Mainly because they might want to sell them separately for money.

 warboss wrote:

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

But they have officially announced it? I'm looking at an article on their page with it.

Warhammer+ will be an exciting new way to interact with the worlds of Warhammer.

Animations are just the start. There’s a whole heap of stuff coming, from more exclusive content to special-access areas, and dedicated offers and rewards. There might even be some exclusive miniatures in the offing…

Keep checking back for more information and join us on the 23rd of June for the full reveal.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/warhammer-animation/

The date for the article when it shows up in the search says it was posted back in march and there is no preview picture (it's just a black box), which seems a bit strange?

Is offing British slang for offering? As in available to purchase? So if you pay for the subscription service you may get the opportunity to pay them more for a mini?

Isn't this the same way they handle their store promotion merch? You spend X amount and you can buy their backpacks and such?

 Londinium wrote:

 Albertorius wrote:
"There might even be miniatures" is most certainly not announcing anything, and especially not as a part of the service.

There's no chance they'd put out that hint if miniatures weren't being lined up. People online would go mental if there was a heavy hint at miniatures and then nothing was provided. Look at the ongoing Cursed City saga and people squabbling about whether it was a limited release or not, why GW marketed it in the way they did etc.

"Miniatures of the series"? Sure
"Miniatures of the series as a part of the subscription"? I don't really expect that to be the case. But I guess we'll see.

In any case, announcement? Most certainly not.

 Albertorius wrote:
As far as I know, "in the offing" means "possible to happen", so kinda redundant, but not particularly related to "as part of the subscription".

I mean, Fw is already offering miniatures of some of their characters, so more of that is certainly a possibility.

I just don't think it's particularly likely that it's as a part of a subscription of a new on-demand video channel. Mainly because they might want to sell them separately for money.

 Albertorius wrote:

 Londinium wrote:

 Albertorius wrote:
"There might even be miniatures" is most certainly not announcing anything, and especially not as a part of the service.

There's no chance they'd put out that hint if miniatures weren't being lined up. People online would go mental if there was a heavy hint at miniatures and then nothing was provided. Look at the ongoing Cursed City saga and people squabbling about whether it was a limited release or not, why GW marketed it in the way they did etc.

"Miniatures of the series"? Sure
"Miniatures of the series as a part of the subscription"? I don't really expect that to be the case. But I guess we'll see.

In any case, announcement? Most certainly not.

It's an article discussing Warhammer+ and what is going to be part of that, and wthin that article they mention there might be exclusive miniatures. They would not tease that if there weren't going to be exclusive miniatures as part of it as it would be absurd for them to go "There aren't really any, we only said might!" and have that line be there for absolutely no purpose other than annoying customers with false hope.

The article, and especially that sentance that mentions the miniatures, is not about the animations themselves, it's not the right context at all for them to be referring to miniatures from the animations. It's specifically about Warhammer+ and what that will involve. The miniatures mention is preceded by mentions of "exclusive content to special-access areas, and dedicated offers and rewards" irregardless of the animations.

It's baffling if you think that something mentioned by GW as part of an article on their site telling us about an upcoming product doesn't count as them announcing that information to us.

Sure buddy, sure. Maybe take it down a notch, time will tell. I'm sure we all can wait for them to announce the minis that will be part of the subscription, if any.