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I feel like it wasn’t that long ago when we really were getting a look under the hood at what went on with GW’s game development thanks to their weekly podcasts and all the interviews with designers on their Twitch channel. Ever since Warhammer TV came out they’ve shut down both podcasts and the Twitch channel is just “hang out and hobby” episodes all week.

Since they don’t do interviews with anyone outside of their own company I feel like their company has gone kind of “opaque” again – not dark ages level but close.

I still enjoy the designers articles in White Dwarf but that’s way less content and insight than before. I figured maybe W+ would be the place for this kind of content (I have a sub) but nothing yet…

So before I start let me just state something: The following post is not a defence of GW practices.

All of the podcasts the WarCom team did pre-Covid were easier to record and produce when people were actually in the Nottingham offices to do said recordings and producings. The weekly Twitch streams did take over from this a bit but as a reminder, that was 4/5 people doing streams 5 days a week trying to come up with the same kind of content the pre-Covid Twitch channel was doing without access to the Nottingham offices and Warhammer World. The team did an absolutely stellar job with this but as anyone who watched them could tell the burnout was huge.
GW higher-ups clearly still don't value the WarCom team the way they should and only now are we seeing proper expansion with time split between pre-recorded sessions on WH+ like Masterclass or Loremasters and the general YouTube and Twitch stuff. There's been a lot of change for the Presenting and WarCom teams over the last two years and from what I have seen, it comes down to the same kind of problems we normally hear about with regards to GW's managing of employees i.e. expecting the world and not appropriately compensating or supporting them.

Something else that is important to remember is that while a lot of companies have jumped at the chance to get as many people back into offices/workplaces as possible, GW has been very cautious with their staff returns and has kept a lot of Covid regs that English businesses are no longer legally obligated to continue with.

It's also pretty clear that the WarCom website team gets given very bad info on releases and what is "acceptable" to put in the articles posted. Edits are common, as are mistakes. Overall the situation reeks of different tiers of management wanting different things and fighting each other to win.
Not really problems exclusive to GW for sure but problems nontheless.

I think thats because Warhammer+ was not as successful as they were banking on it being.

There are a couple videos of some people breaking down the earnings reports that GW put out and it leads to believe that Warhammer+ is not actually doing well at all, cost them a lot of money for not a lot of pay off.

The reason that relates to why GW is more Opaque in their comm again, is because IMO, they are trying to recoup their losses, and doing so by pushing out the burn and churn power creep we are seeing in 9th as bad as it is. Tapping into the competitive market to get people to drop lots of money on the new hotness. You can recall in 8th they did a lot of beta testing rules and were very back and forth with the community to get things worked out that they saw being issues, they had good turn around on those sort of things. Now in 9th they all but dropped that, and just went back to pumping out codex with broken rules selling models, fixing it 3 montsh later and repeating it.

My personal opinion on it is that they are trying to just fly low and get their losses back. As that back and forth open communication of 8th took a lot more time and money to do, something they are trying to fix.

 Backspacehacker wrote:


The reason that relates to why GW is more Opaque in their comm again, is because IMO, they are trying to recoup their losses, and doing so by pushing out the burn and churn power creep we are seeing in 9th as bad as it is. Tapping into the competitive market to get people to drop lots of money on the new hotness. You can recall in 8th they did a lot of beta testing rules and were very back and forth with the community to get things worked out that they saw being issues, they had good turn around on those sort of things. Now in 9th they all but dropped that, and just went back to pumping out codex with broken rules selling models, fixing it 3 montsh later and repeating it.
.

Umm success/fail of wh+ has had zero impact on 40k rules. Even if had it would be quite a few months before first effect would be visible

tneva82 wrote:

 Backspacehacker wrote:


The reason that relates to why GW is more Opaque in their comm again, is because IMO, they are trying to recoup their losses, and doing so by pushing out the burn and churn power creep we are seeing in 9th as bad as it is. Tapping into the competitive market to get people to drop lots of money on the new hotness. You can recall in 8th they did a lot of beta testing rules and were very back and forth with the community to get things worked out that they saw being issues, they had good turn around on those sort of things. Now in 9th they all but dropped that, and just went back to pumping out codex with broken rules selling models, fixing it 3 montsh later and repeating it.
.

Umm success/fail of wh+ has had zero impact on 40k rules. Even if had it would be quite a few months before first effect would be visible

Thats objectively not true. If WH+ was a fail, that means fanatically the company did not make the profit it was expecting, meaning that they will find a way to make that profit up one way or another.

GW clearly set out to make money with WH+, IF, im not saying they did not but, if they did not, that means they would need to find a way to make up the cost for the money they could have been making. Ergo, they will look toward 40k, and find ways to make it more profitable. Altering rules to push power creeped armies to push more models absolutely would be on the table.

The name of GWs game is making money, and everything they own in corrected back toward that, and geared toward that purpose. If one part of their company does not make the money they were hoping for, then another part will find a way to make that up.

You are forgeting time line. Even if day 1 gw would realize it's failure and need to recoup first product it would affect would still be in production.

Gw doesn't work in week's leadtimes. Year as minimum. Wh+ isn"t even year old...

Thus even if it has effect on gw's products it's IN FUTURE.

Leadtimes. How people still haven't learned those. "oh yes gw puts out this product to test result for next product in 2 months".

This is going to quickly turn into another power-creep thread - not my intention. But I would like to point out that the "broken" books that people have accused of being overpowered to sell models to recoup losses came out before GW's profits had fallen - and some say they are the REASON their profits fell.

There should be an investigation into their practices to see if they intentionally push power to sell models and "churn and burn". I wonder what the reporter would find - and what the community would think of this reveail should it come to pass.

That being said, I appreciate the original responses and I think you're right, remote work sort of ended all the communications because the team wasn't in office. Are they back in office now though or still remote?

If GW are all about money (and, within reason they are - although survival and market share is also likely a motive) then they haven't left any money on the table regarding 40k. If WH+ is a failure, they can't turn round and say "get more", because they've already got everything they think they can get away with.

If (when?) we get Marines 4.0 later this year that's an obvious cash grab. But it was likely determined to happen long before whatever happened at WH+ was revealed.

 Backspacehacker wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

 Backspacehacker wrote:


The reason that relates to why GW is more Opaque in their comm again, is because IMO, they are trying to recoup their losses, and doing so by pushing out the burn and churn power creep we are seeing in 9th as bad as it is. Tapping into the competitive market to get people to drop lots of money on the new hotness. You can recall in 8th they did a lot of beta testing rules and were very back and forth with the community to get things worked out that they saw being issues, they had good turn around on those sort of things. Now in 9th they all but dropped that, and just went back to pumping out codex with broken rules selling models, fixing it 3 montsh later and repeating it.
.

Umm success/fail of wh+ has had zero impact on 40k rules. Even if had it would be quite a few months before first effect would be visible

Thats objectively not true. If WH+ was a fail, that means fanatically the company did not make the profit it was expecting, meaning that they will find a way to make that profit up one way or another.

GW clearly set out to make money with WH+, IF, im not saying they did not but, if they did not, that means they would need to find a way to make up the cost for the money they could have been making. Ergo, they will look toward 40k, and find ways to make it more profitable. Altering rules to push power creeped armies to push more models absolutely would be on the table.

The name of GWs game is making money, and everything they own in corrected back toward that, and geared toward that purpose. If one part of their company does not make the money they were hoping for, then another part will find a way to make that up.

It's a false premise to think it's more profitable to have an unbalanced game opposed to a game where people are pretty happy with the balance and GW's numbers in 7th/8th and now 9th make that pretty obvious if it's Indeed true that 9th reaches a bad balance on the Level of 7th at times. Marines 2.0 and the start of 9th were a fiasco and the release of very unbalanced Codizes with Admech, DE and now Tau alienated a lot of people that returned to GW with good will after 7th as it seems. Personally I think the focus on tournaments and no models no rules add to that but it's not stated negative as often as the balance problems.

Zarkro wrote:
I feel like it wasn’t that long ago when we really were getting a look under the hood at what went on with GW’s game development thanks to their weekly podcasts and all the interviews with designers on their Twitch channel. Ever since Warhammer TV came out they’ve shut down both podcasts and the Twitch channel is just “hang out and hobby” episodes all week.

Since they don’t do interviews with anyone outside of their own company I feel like their company has gone kind of “opaque” again – not dark ages level but close.

I still enjoy the designers articles in White Dwarf but that’s way less content and insight than before. I figured maybe W+ would be the place for this kind of content (I have a sub) but nothing yet…

The tone of WarCom has shifted. Articles like this are becoming standard fare:

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2022/03/02/ghazghkull-thraka-author-nate-crowley-picks-his-favourite-prophets-of-da-waaagh/

Makes me wonder about the audience, who is it that craves pictures of the same model painted 8 different ways?

Dunno, but seems like content thinned across all channels. Most GW communications seem to be product announcements and ads for events these days. Little about how to actually do hobby stuff.

 techsoldaten wrote:

Zarkro wrote:
I feel like it wasn’t that long ago when we really were getting a look under the hood at what went on with GW’s game development thanks to their weekly podcasts and all the interviews with designers on their Twitch channel. Ever since Warhammer TV came out they’ve shut down both podcasts and the Twitch channel is just “hang out and hobby” episodes all week.

Since they don’t do interviews with anyone outside of their own company I feel like their company has gone kind of “opaque” again – not dark ages level but close.

I still enjoy the designers articles in White Dwarf but that’s way less content and insight than before. I figured maybe W+ would be the place for this kind of content (I have a sub) but nothing yet…

The tone of WarCom has shifted. Articles like this are becoming standard fare:

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2022/03/02/ghazghkull-thraka-author-nate-crowley-picks-his-favourite-prophets-of-da-waaagh/

Makes me wonder about the audience, who is it that craves pictures of the same model painted 8 different ways?

Dunno, but seems like content thinned across all channels. Most GW communications seem to be product announcements and ads for events these days. Little about how to actually do hobby stuff.

Standard fare? Those have been a thing for quite some time.

I think what you're looking for is on warhammertv and not what is essentially their marketing twitter.

I noticed their lies about the reason for raising prices by attaching the decision to personnel and production. This was sympathy slight of hand by GW whose real reason was their stock plummeting by more than 33% since September.

 Tokhuah wrote:
I noticed their lies about the reason for raising prices by attaching the decision to personnel and production. This was sympathy slight of hand by GW whose real reason was their stock plummeting by more than 33% since September.

Whats funny is i think they are making the same mistake they made back in....what was it. 08? 07? when they over expanded and were hurting real bad financially.

I haven't.
But then again all I really want to hear from them is when products xyz are coming. And I expect to see pics of said products.
Though I did find it helpful that they told us when prices were going up. I had a FW shopping list I hadn't pulled the trigger on. Had I waited I'd have spent more for no good reason.

 Tokhuah wrote:
I noticed their lies about the reason for raising prices by attaching the decision to personnel and production. This was sympathy slight of hand by GW whose real reason was their stock plummeting by more than 33% since September.

The stock market price is the last price someone was willing to pay for it. GW has 32M shares. Someone was willing to sell 400 shares for $92. GW can go a week without a trade at all. Since this year's high they've traded MAYBE 15K shares, which is super tiny compared the outstanding shares. The top 10 shareholders possess over 13M shares and none of those sold.

The dividend payment is also Feb 25th, which also usually causes a drop as those funds reinvest.

Moreover their half-year was released on 1/11 and in it they stated in their financials that their cost of goods increased. They made more money and less profit, which literally means their costs increased.

The share price was always going to come down anyway. It inflated because GW were on an extreme high of sales which prompted the value to rise up and up which prompted the market to buy into GW which drove the prices up. They hit a limit and then the profits steadied and changed and the fast rise was gone. All those investors who were short term then sold off and jumped to the next fast rise - sparking the stock to fall.


It was fairly expected. GW have had some fantastic stock market performance for a company of their nature, but they are never going to be one of the stock-market wonder companies that's always increasing with big and fast gains.




Operational costs will have gone up - I don't know of a single firm that hasn't got things going up. Shipping is insane right now; moving anything around is way way way more expensive and likely to remain so for a good portion of time. Heck even just clearing the backlog of port inventories is going to take a long time.






AS for Warhammer communications on their social media suffering I have to say I fully agree its Covid and GW being cautious with covid safe measures. I suspect the fact that their teams are all in one main site in the UK means that they can't risk an outbreak. Someone in the social media team getting sick and then passing it to the rest of the production and office teams and suddenly GW has most of their company shut down at their HQ. They are right to be cautious because most of their eggs are in that basket. They are also not hurting for money nor sales, so right now they can afford to be a bit more cautious.


I suspect that original plans for Warhammer+ had more interviews and battle reports and such. Things that are being stretched out and weakened. Heck the preview events only just started getting a couple of people back in the studio as opposed to all being in homes.

I think until GW can do away with the social distancing and other covid measures we will see the social media side continue to suffer more than it should. However it is likely to recover.





I do also agree that GW's social media does suffer from missinformation likely due to managers and compartmentalised information blocks which mean that the staff on FB don't know everything going on with production or game design so they can often only go with what marketing info they are given. My impression is their hands are tied and its likely hard for them to push for more information.

I'm not trying to sound like a cynic but a social media pressence does not equate to transparency. In fact sometimes the opposite, its a brilliant way to pretend they are.

You can't really 'talk' to anyone in Games Workshop in charge of anything meaningful. You can only 'talk' to social media PR people on their facebook or twitch stream, and only questions directly relating to the post/content or else you get ignored/blocked. And even then the people who run their facebook have as much knowledge of what games workshop HQ is doing as you do. And its not like they're going to relay your messages to anyone. They just smile and nod and go "wouldn't that be cool!".

You could send an email. I know I have, and tons of others. However we never know who reads them or if they all get read.

And I think Warhammer Community is the same. They put out 'codex roadmap's of 4 codexes and we dont even get to know 2 of them (because they probably dont even tell them) and we have zero dates on anything.

Its all superfluous distraction and ads. They are the same now as they have always been. Not saying thats bad, but some people have definitely been tricked into thinking the people writing the rules talk to the average everyman and listen to his feedback, lol.

You(everyone) should consider the social media presence of any company that sells you a product as the velvet glove surrounding the Iron fist.

It is the chaos cultist that tells you that the dude on the Golden throne cares naught for them and the(4 armed/blood/whatever) God they speak of cares like care-a-lot bear about them.

Left side of the mouth saying FOMO, right side saying price increases. It's almost comical nowadays.

GW's awesome now. They have a Facebook page and everything!

It's crazy how GW tore out a large base of the community (fan made content)slapped it behind a pay wall and lost a lot of good faith with said community.

Companies with good faith like it or not have a lot of their problems swept under the rug

 fraser1191 wrote:
It's crazy how GW tore out a large base of the community (fan made content)slapped it behind a pay wall and lost a lot of good faith with said community.

Companies with good faith like it or not have a lot of their problems swept under the rug

Said community also sent death threats to someone to who GW offered a job so let's not pretend they're the good guys here. GW messed up with the community content guidelines in some people's opinions and then the 40k community was really gakky to people who took jobs working for GW.
In a better world, GW could have just said "Don't monetise works based on our IP" and the community wouldn't have done crimes because people need to get paid.

 Gert wrote:
Said community also sent death threats to someone to who GW offered a job so let's not pretend they're the good guys here.

How do we know those people are earnest or just trolls peripherally associated with the community? Or just kids who don't know they shouldn't do that?

Said community was also starting to earn big money - Astartes was generating £20K a month or there abouts through Patreon.

GW only went after those who were gaining financial income off their fan-works. Which honestly is fair, you'd expect that of most firms. Heck with US trademark laws if GW isn't seen to take steps to protect it from such activities, they can lose their trademarks and suddenly they've a whole heap of problems.

Hecaton wrote:

 Gert wrote:
Said community also sent death threats to someone to who GW offered a job so let's not pretend they're the good guys here.

How do we know those people are earnest or just trolls peripherally associated with the community? Or just kids who don't know they shouldn't do that?

Earnest, troll, poorly raised child.... doesn't matter. If your sending death threats I'm just going to assume the worst about you.

Did the 'community' send death threats?

That guilt by association isn't likely to end well.

Seemed like the accepted status quo was to keep the negativity going, herald the end times, and then call people who chose to work with GW sellouts, shills, and other much worse insults.
Again though, not defending GW, just saying that portraying the company was the only bad actor is not true.

I can't believe everyone in this thread sent death threats to GW, shame on you community.

EightFoldPath wrote:
I can't believe everyone in this thread sent death threats to GW, shame on you community.

It was a form letter sent out to all of us. I made a second account so I could send two of them.

 Insectum7 wrote:

EightFoldPath wrote:
I can't believe everyone in this thread sent death threats to GW, shame on you community.

It was a chain letter sent out to all of us. I made a second account so I could send two of them.

Fixed it

Racerguy180 wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

EightFoldPath wrote:
I can't believe everyone in this thread sent death threats to GW, shame on you community.

It was a chain letter sent out to all of us. I made a second account so I could send two of them.

Fixed it

Tbh I'm not sure the significance of the difference here?