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 Overread wrote:


Has anyone ever seen one of these Whales?

I know they exist in MMO games, but with those you can at least interact with every new release. With models it takes time to at least build let alone paint and many of us here are not whales and yet already have extensive backlogs of models. So are Whales a thing for Warhammer and are they really as impactful as people suggest. Or is it really just that whilst no one likes a price rise, many just grin and bare it (and a few just tolerate it but then sling mud like crazy online to vent)

I was one, of a sort, back in the day.

I'd just got my first "real" job with spending money and everything and I wanted an IG army, so I went to my local indy store (which had just opened) and plunked down the cash for a full Praetorian army with extensive armor support. Fully mechanized with artillery and Sentinels. Guy's face was glowing as I ticked off all the items and pre-paid for it.

I got great customer service after that, but never did it again. It was kind of fun.

Ironically, I subsequently sold them all off, getting an excellent deal in the process. GW's price hikes present unique opportunities to buy low and sell high. I think more than half of my collection was paid for that way.

Hopefully this means more alternative companies being able to find their way into indie stores as the margins on GW crumble. A lot of the time indies have to heavily compete with online to stay afloat and this will make the pressure even higher as the online stores can probably take the hit, huge warehouses full of all sorts of stuff and sometimes GW is just the draw to the rest of the store. There have been webstores running at 30% off, some at 25% currently, most at 20%. We'll probably see a drop-off to 20% as standard, free shipping thresholds rising.

I'd love somewhere local to stock Kings of War and other Mantic stuff, have even offered to do demos in my spare time, get a weekly group going, all stuff that takes time and could be a real asset.

No interest, though. GW or nothing, even if I then see them constantly fire-saling GW stock (usually large big box games that flopped, like warcry, dominion, dungeonbowl, ash wastes etc. horus heresy was the only one that really made bank for indies recently).

 Overread wrote:
Has anyone ever seen one of these Whales?

I know they exist in MMO games, but with those you can at least interact with every new release. With models it takes time to at least build let alone paint and many of us here are not whales and yet already have extensive backlogs of models. So are Whales a thing for Warhammer and are they really as impactful as people suggest. Or is it really just that whilst no one likes a price rise, many just grin and bare it (and a few just tolerate it but then sling mud like crazy online to vent)

Basically every release will have people saying 'this is far too expensive. I'm only going to buy two'.

 Lord Damocles wrote:

Basically every release will have people saying 'this is far too expensive. I'm only going to buy two'.

On the GW Price Thread: "This is highway robbery!1! I'm totally going to boycott GW."
On the Painting Thread: "So this is my new fleet of the latest releases. I'm doing each one in a unique color scheme..."

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I'd say anyone with a decent sized Horus Heresy army from FW is a whale

Agreed. You want to see a whale in it´s natural habitat? Check out the 30K Channel on youtube. Once there was a guy who fielded a Mastodon. Every 30K marine is expensive as hell but this Mastodon is in another league.

> Hopefully this means more alternative companies being able to find their way into indie stores as the margins on GW crumble.

fwiw, Read up on monopolistic competition. "Monopolistic competition is a type of market structure where many companies are present in an industry, and they produce similar but differentiated products." The key part of mc is that you have a product that is "differentiated" enough that your target audience won't go after the "similar" products. GW has done it for Warhammer 40K with its store structure, lore, and other strategies I'm sure someone else can explain better than myself, since I don't get the willingness to pay GW prices, either. I do have three copies of Space Hulk, two copies of Space Crusade, a copy of Advanced Space Crusade, a copy of Killzone, two Tyrrannid army boxes...

ok, so the basic problem:

GW is too expensive, hence people buy where they can get discounts as with 20% off it does not look that bad
still too expensive but not as bad going with GW

so maybe have realised that those are on the edge and reached the maximum people are willing to pay, no more profit increase so they reduce the margin for retailers

which means the 20% off becomes 15% and the 15% off reduced to 10%
or with higher cost to run a shop as well, more likely that we see the 20% becoming 10 and the 15 turn into 5, because the shops need to cover their cost but also need to be cheaper than GW to sell GW stuff

In addition stores already have problems selling certain GW stuff, even on discount because the "hype" is only real on the internet and for a short time
some of the local stores still have Cursed City on the shelf, because it does not sell to the board game community that comes across
and if they need to reduce the discount even further, the chance is high that instead of more profit for GW, those won't stock GW products at all

there is a good chance that this is not working out as well as GW might think

 ced1106 wrote:


fwiw, Read up on monopolistic competition.

Anyone else remember when the secondary market for GW stuff took off on ebay, and GW tried to stop people from using photos of the merchandise for sale because that somehow violated GW's IP rights?

I seem to recall that while the lawyers were exchanging nasty emails, ebay asked sellers to not show GW packaging or logos, but dug in hard against GW arguing that it owned all likenesses of all its products.

Yeah, they're not exactly free marketeers.

When people say "GW is to expencive", they usually mean "I cant justify buying all this months new releases the day they are released!" rather than "I cant justify building a(nother) playable force over the next six months.

Some stuff is clearly not worth the price tag (looking at you, necromunda ridgehauler), even if I put the same amount of money on other stuff.

 Fayric wrote:
When people say "GW is to expencive", they usually mean "I cant justify buying all this months new releases the day they are released!" rather than "I cant justify building a(nother) playable force over the next six months.

or both

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 ced1106 wrote:


fwiw, Read up on monopolistic competition.

Anyone else remember when the secondary market for GW stuff took off on ebay, and GW tried to stop people from using photos of the merchandise for sale because that somehow violated GW's IP rights?

I seem to recall that while the lawyers were exchanging nasty emails, ebay asked sellers to not show GW packaging or logos, but dug in hard against GW arguing that it owned all likenesses of all its products.

Yeah, they're not exactly free marketeers.

Yeah, I remember that for awhile. Didn't it end up getting watered down to basically "don't copy the picture off of the GW website for your listing"?

And even that doesn't seem to be enforced anymore.

 Arbitrator wrote:
The decades have shown that for every person priced out of GW's products, two people are willing to pick up their slack and buy more stuff for higher prices.

That leaves them with two thirds the customer base they could have. Probably half as with a saner pricing policy they not only retain the customer who leaves but gain three new ones instead of two. Even that is likely rounding down.

Yeah I think that was during the Kirby days of "our copyright lawyer isn't actually a lawyer". Which didn't really come to an end until Chaperhouse Court Case. I think GW today must have better legal advice.

GW is also not afraid of the internet either, back in those Kirby days GW almost seemed to wish that the internet would just go away

Its definitely a thing at least in the old days GW were never overly friendly towards independents. I used to work in a small store that sold GW, no problem at all getting new releases and well stocked. The moment a GW opened across town new releases were later arriving or not possible to stock. No idea if it was deliberate or just a result of limited stock coming to the area and the official store getting presidence but the effect was the same. (Should point out this was 25yrs ago though!)
I get the feeling they are now getting a much higher chunk of the wargaming marketshare (certainly more than 10yrs ago so when they really were looking on the ropes), so as with any almost monopoly, the company selling the stuff can act as it likes and the retailers have to put up with it. Although im not sure it will ultimately be helpful for the industry, especially as some of those stores will be feeling the pinch anyway, and this wont help.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
*needle scratch*

Get. Angry. At. The. Right. Thing.

This.

Isn’t the margin like 35-40% anyway.
I get what your saying but we will still be able to find online discounts at 15% which is about all I can find in the states anyway outside of store closing 40% off sales.

 Overread wrote:
GW is also not afraid of the internet either, back in those Kirby days GW almost seemed to wish that the internet would just go away

fun fact, it all started with a fan film made outside the UK
project was official supported and even advertised in WD but than GW learned by the people who made that movie that IP law in the UK is different to the rest of the world and that things they thought are fine were not
as those making the movie knew about differences to UK law but somehow GW thought as a UK based company UK law is always applied and not the law were the movie is made, and one of the differences (just to oversimplify it) was that unlike in the UK, an artist will always has the rights as a creator and those cannot be sold or acquired

and this caused the panic reaction to remove everything from the internet, and not allowing any fan-based content and GW even wanted people who post pictures of models online to add "painted by XX, copyright by GW" (which is stupid as GW selling you the model and you making the art, you own it and not GW and even a "model manufactured by GW" is not required) just to be sure no one else will have any rights to something GW thought they owned

 Overread wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:

 Arbitrator wrote:
The decades have shown that for every person priced out of GW's products, two people are willing to pick up their slack and buy more stuff for higher prices.

Big spenders are usually whales and people with no impulse control.

Has anyone ever seen one of these Whales?

I am one, likely you are also, likely nearly everyone here is a whale, some small some bigger.

Got more than one army? Spend over £200 on a faction?

"There he blows."

I have multiple armies, so I cannot avoid the label if it applies. So in whaledom terms I have my fair share of blubber, but am nowhere near the largest.

 Overread wrote:

I know they exist in MMO games, but with those you can at least interact with every new release. With models it takes time to at least build let alone paint and many of us here are not whales and yet already have extensive backlogs of models. So are Whales a thing for Warhammer and are they really as impactful as people suggest. Or is it really just that whilst no one likes a price rise, many just grin and bare it (and a few just tolerate it but then sling mud like crazy online to vent)

But does it apply. Really?
This is different though, most Dakkaites probably avoid the label of 'whale', including you and I and other big spender hobbyists.

The distinction, and the reason why outside this thread I would NOT term myself a whale, and would frankly be offended by the label is that whales are a very specific type of spender.

Whales buy virtual expendables for online products. If you buy 10000 diamonds to give yourself a boost in an online game you are a whale, if you buy a wargames army you may spend more, but when the crystals are gone and you have nothing to show for them you still have the toys. So those buying the models but not the 'diamonds' are not whales, they are just high end consumers. They can even sell the army.
However you cannot sell the 'diamonds' there may well be restrictions on the account you bought the diamonds for.

Now purchasing in game currency doesn't automatically make you a whale. Some games have a nominal free to play structure but lock permanent DLC behind a paywall. Pay some money to unlock new content, sure, not whaledom. You can also buy modest amount of 'diamonds' and not be a whale either. Play a free game, like it, pay $5 for the basic pack of 'diamonds' as a contribution.

Whaledom occurs when you must win a competitive online game, because you need the sense of achievement, and sink lots of real world money into short term in game boosts. Some online games companies make almost their entire revenue from the 2% of whales.
This is mildly exploitative, whales whale usually because they underachieve and want to be the good at something, which they can be if they pay enough. These can be big spenders, but normally have it together.
The main distinction between whales and big spender hobbyists is that whales don't get to keep their purchase, they pay real money for vapour. In many cases they don't even keep the game, the server resets after six months, or there is a new game based on the next years teams and a whole new run of virtual assets to collect.

Things get particularly shady when you add gambling mechanics. Pay $10 for 'diamonds' so you can rofflestomp a free-to-play opponent, tolerable. Pay $10 for a roulette wheel with the chance to win 'diamonds', fething reprehensible. But it doesn't stop at $10, or $100. It gets even worse, it is cheaper to buy a Forgeworld Warlord Titan than to gamble for top tier players in FiFa or one the best socket gems in Diablo Online. It is at that point you realise that these game companies are exploiting children and the mentally ill. Our hobby may be crazy, but there is a veneer of sanity behind what we collect, we get product, and it is ours, we can also sell our collections in hard times, or have our widows sell it when we are gone. It looks good on the shelf, it's (potentially) a work of art. You don't ever need to use it for it to have real lasting life value. Online whales have no excuse, or more accurately their exploiters don't.

gungo wrote:
Isn’t the margin like 35-40% anyway.

for GW, not retailers
GW is operating on 40-41% profit margin, a retailer has 20-25% margin on the products (at least some time ago, don't know the current ones but given that you now see 15% more often than 20% discount it might be already lower), which means someone who gives 20% discount has a 5% income, and from this 5% they need to cover all their costs and make a living

and now GW ask for 5,8% more from the retailers, which means someone doing a 20% discount makes a loss on selling GW models, while just doing a 10'% discount might not give them enough volume of sales to live from the income

 Orlanth wrote:
Our hobby may be crazy, but there is a veneer of sanity behind what we collect, we get product, and it is ours, we can also sell our collections in hard times, or have our widows sell it when we are gone. Online whales have no excuse, or more accurately their exploiters don't.

Also, and no less important, once you bought your stuff you can at least theoretically use it as often as you like and in perpetuity, and are not dependent on GW providing some sort of service or support. In practice, you still need someone to play with and a physical or digital space to set up a game, but that is pretty easy to find nowadays.

 Orlanth wrote:

 Overread wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:

 Arbitrator wrote:
The decades have shown that for every person priced out of GW's products, two people are willing to pick up their slack and buy more stuff for higher prices.

Big spenders are usually whales and people with no impulse control.

Has anyone ever seen one of these Whales?

I am one, likely you are also, likely nearly everyone here is a whale, some small some bigger.

Got more than one army? Spend over £200 on a faction?

"There he blows."

I have multiple armies, so I cannot avoid the label if it applies. So in whaledom terms I have my fair share of blubber, but am nowhere near the largest.

I don't think you can classify a whale as spending £200 on an army. That's just regular army collecting to build up a single army. Even then most armies would be hard pressed to fit into that budget (flesheater courts you can probably do for that little). Plus you can easily spend as much if not more on paint and building tools alone. That isn't what I'd consider "Whale" money.

Whale would be something closer to "I'm buying at least 1 of every new thing GW releases on release day" kind of territory. Or "I own a 100,000 point army" kind of situation. Though even then you'd want to attach a timeframe since you can spend fairly low over the years and build up a large number of points if you focus on just one army.





But that's getting down into the specifics of where we classify a whale and since its a term that tends to be being used in a negative connection its a term many will push at to increase the limits on so that it doesn't apply to them. People want to be keen fans; die hard players; competitive etc.... They don't want to be a "bloated whale"

 Pacific wrote:
Its definitely a thing at least in the old days GW were never overly friendly towards independents. I used to work in a small store that sold GW, no problem at all getting new releases and well stocked. The moment a GW opened across town new releases were later arriving or not possible to stock. No idea if it was deliberate or just a result of limited stock coming to the area and the official store getting presidence but the effect was the same. (Should point out this was 25yrs ago though!)

GW seems to have shifted this stance as every FLGS I know got a TON of the Voltaan boxes while several GW stores announced their allocation of the box would be delayed and they wouldn't have them on release day.

 Platuan4th wrote:

 Pacific wrote:
Its definitely a thing at least in the old days GW were never overly friendly towards independents. I used to work in a small store that sold GW, no problem at all getting new releases and well stocked. The moment a GW opened across town new releases were later arriving or not possible to stock. No idea if it was deliberate or just a result of limited stock coming to the area and the official store getting presidence but the effect was the same. (Should point out this was 25yrs ago though!)

GW seems to have shifted this stance as every FLGS I know got a TON of the Voltaan boxes while several GW stores announced their allocation of the box would be delayed and they wouldn't have them on release day.

One of the biggest in the UK did not get all the stock to fill Votann preorders, and only today GW updated the store info on those kits as in stock... Its been sold out for 1 month, preorders not filled I mean.

So, my wife and I can be considered "whales". 40k and AoS are our passions. We both worked super hard our whole lives, weren't able to have children, don't travel, etc... but that means we can do 4-6 large armies a year, support local talented commission painters, etc... I also have an incurable genetic disorder, so I wanna savor every bit of my last 10-15 years unapologetically...

That's for context... but let me say, we're an extreme fluke, and not the fanbase GW can count on. Even we're running out of armies after doing this for 10+years... so we were tapering off our buying anyway.

Meanwhile we support a lot of local stores that this will be an awful hit for. Several barely give tabletop games table space as it is, as one 6x4(ish) table, can support one game of 40k... but three games of Magic, Pokemon, etc...

All these mad pricing moves accomplish is, driving down shelf presence and table presence in stores, and drive up 3d printing, etc... It is very typical late-stage-capitalism to go hard on short term gains, with no eye towards the wide view.

Many of our stores were selling at MSRP... there's no where for them to go... they just lose money...

Hm, disappointing. Not going to watch the video because the title is clickbait, but the news is worth discussion. I feel like GW corporate does not understand how different the miniature gaming scene is in the US, where stores are the locations that provide space for people to gather & play. More or less it is that or hoping a friend has a game room, likely with only one table and very limited terrain.

Put simply, less independent retailer support = less community = less sales for GW. In the short term they will surely get profit from this, but I don't see how the long term impact will work in their favor. They weren't having problems making money before. Fortunately MTG exists as a subsidy.

It's all about maximizing profit for this financial year, or even just this quarter. When a company is owned by shareholders, everybody there, up to the CEO, really "just works there." And the strategies work until they don't.

Local stores just need to make sure they have a diverse audience, TCGs (I know Magic is on fire right now and sometimes losing places money), board games, RPG minis, 3d printing, all that. Because if you don't offer the maximum discount on GW products, somebody else will.

 Overread wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:

 Overread wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:

 Arbitrator wrote:
The decades have shown that for every person priced out of GW's products, two people are willing to pick up their slack and buy more stuff for higher prices.

Big spenders are usually whales and people with no impulse control.

Has anyone ever seen one of these Whales?

I am one, likely you are also, likely nearly everyone here is a whale, some small some bigger.

Got more than one army? Spend over £200 on a faction?

"There he blows."

I have multiple armies, so I cannot avoid the label if it applies. So in whaledom terms I have my fair share of blubber, but am nowhere near the largest.

I don't think you can classify a whale as spending £200 on an army. That's just regular army collecting to build up a single army. Even then most armies would be hard pressed to fit into that budget (flesheater courts you can probably do for that little). Plus you can easily spend as much if not more on paint and building tools alone. That isn't what I'd consider "Whale" money.

I might not, you might not. But whaledom is not decided by us, but by society at large.
Spend £200 on toy soldiers for men, that is an extravagence, and also still an oddity despite some change in attitudes. We also both know it doesn't stop there.

 Overread wrote:

Whale would be something closer to "I'm buying at least 1 of every new thing GW releases on release day" kind of territory.

arguably that is a collector, people like that dont tend to open their kits, or buy two and open one. These collections become significant over time, and not only in money spent.

 Overread wrote:

Or "I own a 100,000 point army" kind of situation. Though even then you'd want to attach a timeframe since you can spend fairly low over the years and build up a large number of points if you focus on just one army.

Ok a 100K army is too much, but if I totalled all my WHFB and 40K it would come to a little more than that, and that was collected over time since the 90's by a guy on mostly low income.

 Overread wrote:

But that's getting down into the specifics of where we classify a whale and since its a term that tends to be being used in a negative connection its a term many will push at to increase the limits on so that it doesn't apply to them. People want to be keen fans; die hard players; competitive etc.... They don't want to be a "bloated whale"

If we have piles of shame, then any further purchases are a form of whaledom.
Tell me I am wrong.

 Albertorius wrote:

Greenfield wrote:
People seem to be assuming that GW's own margins aren't already being squeezed. If GW's costs are increasing (very likely) and they aren't raising prices, then their own margin is already being hit. Whether that's more or less than the 5.8% rise in trade prices they've passed on to retailers none of us would know, but it doesn't follow that just because GW raised trade prices by 5.8% without raising RRP that they're simply netting 5.8% more profit at the expense of independent retailers. They may well have been sucking up those kinds of cost increases in their own supply chain already.

Before people pile on, this isn't a blanket defence. Games Workshop products are expensive; they make lots of pricing decisions that I think are strange, misguided or objectionable – but raising prices to retailers when your own costs are likely going up considerably really isn't much evidence of a strategy to hammer independent stores or hit internet discounters or whatever.

It's more that we know their margins on the stuff they make tends to be quite large, and that they've had record earnings for several years on a row. They could suck up a reduction in margins without having losses, just less earnings. They chose not to do that.

We also know that many, if not most FLGS, run at razor thin margins.

Sure, GW sets it prices with a very substantial margin. But that's not new and doesn't really seem to be the criticism a lot of people are levelling here. If GW's costs are going up (does anyone imagine they aren't?) their margins will be going down. Putting up wholesale prices just corrects for that – whether they're going beyond correction with the precise level of the rise in prices, I don't think we can say.

 Pacific wrote:
Its definitely a thing at least in the old days GW were never overly friendly towards independents. I used to work in a small store that sold GW, no problem at all getting new releases and well stocked. The moment a GW opened across town new releases were later arriving or not possible to stock. No idea if it was deliberate or just a result of limited stock coming to the area and the official store getting presidence but the effect was the same. (Should point out this was 25yrs ago though!)
I get the feeling they are now getting a much higher chunk of the wargaming marketshare (certainly more than 10yrs ago so when they really were looking on the ropes), so as with any almost monopoly, the company selling the stuff can act as it likes and the retailers have to put up with it. Although im not sure it will ultimately be helpful for the industry, especially as some of those stores will be feeling the pinch anyway, and this wont help.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
*needle scratch*

Get. Angry. At. The. Right. Thing.

This.

MY adopted home city is a freakshow.

The FLGS moved across the city centre to set up next door to the GW and is still going strong.

It is an FLGS/ model/ toy soldier/ model railway/ RC cars store so does have more strings to its bow to keep it going. They don't appear to have issues with getting the latest product but I know they don't advertise selling GW stuff for less than retail. There is a discount if you're a regular.

 Orlanth wrote:
I might not, you might not. But whaledom is not decided by us, but by society at large.
Spend £200 on toy soldiers for men, that is an extravagence, and also still an oddity despite some change in attitudes. We also both know it doesn't stop there.

The opinion of society at large is irrelevant because "whale" is defined relative to other customers. A whale is defined by two things: significantly greater spending than the average customer, and buying habits that are driven by addictive behavior rather than rational evaluation of the value of a purchase. Buying $5,000 in loot boxes for a F2P mobile game makes you a whale, buying a $50,000 airplane is just an entry-level purchase in an expensive hobby. The person who merely participates in an expensive hobby does not necessarily have the impulse control issues that make whales such a desirable target for a business.

(And why is it toy soldiers for men specifically? Do women not get to have toy soldiers?)

It feels like you're muddying the water mixing up hobbies and whales which whilst related are two separate discussions/groupings.
Hobbies by their nature are luxury purchases that are non-essential. Each hobby will have its cheap and expensive options and each hobby in itself will have a different range of thresholds to buy into the hobby. Some are really low, some are very high.

However when talking about whales you're not talking about that, you're talking about already being with the hobby and then identifying exceptional buying power within the hobby. Then we take it one stage further, because tha's where we started, to ask if those exceptions are generating enough sales on their own to account for a controlling margin of GW's marketing and product creation and sale.

Are there whales - sure - are they common enough and spending enough to actually be a major percentage of GW's total sales to the point where they are a very specific group GW markets and works with? And just where is the line between keen hobbyist and whale.