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 Overread wrote:

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Not Online!!! wrote:
Add to that modern PR customer relationships, having far more in common with cults than an actual custommer company relationship and you get people that are highly attached to an uncaring corporate moloch.

I don't think its even modern. I recall brand cults way back in the 90s

The only loyalty I have is to the colors purple, white, and blue brother!

So that person is the reason GW has those pots? Congrats those faulty pots are the reason I dont bulk buy their paints no matter how good the formulas are they DOA when they dry prematurely inside the pots. He seems very happy to suggest that is done on purpose for people to spill etc and spend more money etc... I could suggest a place for him shove his trumpet.

 NAVARRO wrote:
So that person is the reason GW has those pots? Congrats those faulty pots are the reason I dont bulk buy their paints no matter how good the formulas are they DOA when they dry prematurely inside the pots. He seems very happy to suggest that is done on purpose for people to spill etc and spend more money etc... I could suggest a place for him shove his trumpet.

What struck me the most about that part of the interview was when he admitted that the black flip-top paints had effectively no seal.

If any other company had sold paints in a pot that didn't seal they would have gone out of business a long time ago

Absolutely crazy

 Undead_Love-Machine wrote:

 NAVARRO wrote:
So that person is the reason GW has those pots? Congrats those faulty pots are the reason I dont bulk buy their paints no matter how good the formulas are they DOA when they dry prematurely inside the pots. He seems very happy to suggest that is done on purpose for people to spill etc and spend more money etc... I could suggest a place for him shove his trumpet.

What struck me the most about that part of the interview was when he admitted that the black flip-top paints had effectively no seal.

If any other company had sold paints in a pot that didn't seal they would have gone out of business a long time ago

Absolutely crazy

Insane for sure and he actually feels proud of himself. How can you be proud of prototyping and spending years developing a pot that he admits is not aimed for the painters purpose but rather to make people just buy more because of its faults. Unbelievable.
Any goodwill I could possible have towards this just vanished. It's not a case of a team doing the best they can and just falling short... no, its done on purpose.

But that’s true of every aspect of GW’s business. It’s not the guy, it’s the business.

like one of the reasons they have never produced a wet palette: "why would we want to help hobbyists use less paint"

On the surface these are funny anecdotes, but dig even a little deeper and it's pretty low behaviour.

It does confirm what a lot of people suspected though, that many of the negative traits of the paint pots are there intentionally


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 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
But that’s true of every aspect of GW’s business. It’s not the guy, it’s the business.

To be fair you could say the same about most businesses I suppose: making money and good behaviour are not easy bedfellows

Yeah. This guy, his behavior isn’t very ethical. But people should really aim their ire at GW. Any respect you lose for that guy should be minor compared to the eye-opening you should feel about GW, the company so many are quick to defend.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Yeah. This guy, his behavior isn’t very ethical. But people should really aim their ire at GW. Any respect you lose for that guy should be minor compared to the eye-opening you should feel about GW, the company so many are quick to defend.

Please can we not turn this into a "GW is bad! vs GW is good!" debate?

They've done plenty of good and bad things over the years, it's not anywhere near as black and white as some would like to claim.

I watched the video the other day and really enjoyed it, theres a lot of insight into the product creation process.

Its entirely possible for a company's cashflow to become a problem. Where they look at the projected sales for the next month and worry about how they are going to pay the bills due in that period.
The fact GW took out a loan to pay dividends shows that they didn't have funds on hand at the time. A meeting taking place were senior staff are told we need a boost to sales in the short term shouldn't be hard to believe.
We know with hindsight that things did pick up, they payed off that loan and the financials all looked rosey come the end of year report.

 Tamereth wrote:
The fact GW took out a loan to pay dividends shows that they didn't have funds on hand at the time.

Yep. And the most important part of that is GW borrowed money to immediately give to shareholders. Not to finance growth that requires a major up-front investment but will pay off in the long run, they just flushed that money down the toilet to reassure the shareholders that everything is fine. If you're having to borrow money for that then it's a giant red flag that things are not fine for the long-term health of the company.


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 Overread wrote:
I don't think GW tries to insulate in any way other than GW just acts like every other firm in that their marketing only talks about their product and their views and their stuff.

I think they absolutely do, just in a more subtle way than "{rival product} sucks you're an idiot if you like them". GW trying to pretend they're a separate hobby apart from the general miniatures hobby is why they're so invested in their retail chain. They want total information control and a locked-down process where people build GW models with GW tools, paint them with GW paints, and play with GW terrain on GW mats in a GW store. The whole reason they have all those overpriced tools that sell for half as much at your local art supply store is that they never want a customer to have to go outside the GW bubble to find something. And they really don't want you going to an independent store where you might discover whole product ranges that compete with GW. They'd rather keep a ghost town of a store open than allow those remaining customers to go to the thriving independent store nearby.

Contrast this with the old days when GW actively encouraged leaving the GW bubble and acknowledged the wider hobby. GW used to sell books on how to make your own terrain from household objects, how to use non-GW paints and tools where appropriate, etc. Now that's all gone. If you want terrain you buy an official GW kit and build it exactly according to the instructions. To paint your models you use only GW paints, even though we've seen on-camera proof that GW's studio painters use other brands. The sand box is gone and replaced with a sanitized corporate-friendly theme park.

 Undead_Love-Machine wrote:

 NAVARRO wrote:
So that person is the reason GW has those pots? Congrats those faulty pots are the reason I dont bulk buy their paints no matter how good the formulas are they DOA when they dry prematurely inside the pots. He seems very happy to suggest that is done on purpose for people to spill etc and spend more money etc... I could suggest a place for him shove his trumpet.

What struck me the most about that part of the interview was when he admitted that the black flip-top paints had effectively no seal.

If any other company had sold paints in a pot that didn't seal they would have gone out of business a long time ago

Absolutely crazy

What is weird is that the oldest functional paint pot I have is a black flip-top! Chainmail. Still a little left in there, too. I'm afraid to use it at this point.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
What is weird is that the oldest functional paint pot I have is a black flip-top! Chainmail. Still a little left in there, too. I'm afraid to use it at this point.

I have a box full of the old paints that I wasn't using up so I had them when I revisited the old armies that I used them for... I haven't been game to open many of them, but I suspect most of them will be solid by now. I did manage to recover one of two pots of Snot Green.

I suppose I should also address the OP, and to that I have to say: appeals to authority carry zero weight with me. I've seen so many "sure thing" financial enterprises that were guaranteed sound by all the right people go south, that it's gotten boring.

Indeed, the more pure, perfect and exemplary they look, the more suspicious I become, particularly if government auditors are cited as proof. See also: savings and loan crisis, tech bubble, Enron, housing bubble, etc.

So yes, maybe GW's financials are the envy of all humanity, but it's also possible that they were also never truly put to the test, and the lovely investor information page was a few weeks from being yet another cautionary tale. Maybe Kirby will spill the beans on his death bed, otherwise we probably will never know for sure.

I watched the Painting Phase video, and fully expected the internet to seize on that point.

The approach that Peachy and co take in the Painting Phase is pretty balanced. They enjoy the hobby; they don't push an anti-GW agenda, and will frequently rubbish the more extreme stuff that gets said. But they are happy to discuss GW's many shortcomings - often (thanks to Peachy and his contacts) with a lot more authority than other Youtube sites. They also tend to give their guests plenty of space to speak for themselves. I think there is a tendency to use clickbait titles for their videos, but they admit to doing this. So attacking the Painting Phase as the source of this isn't fair.

People who haven't worked in large organisations don't seem to understand how they function. Different departments will always have their own agendas. And everyone who is running a department tends to think that everything revolves around them. Internal messaging is rarely transparent, and messaging from management even less so. While it is possible that senior management were indeed becoming seriously worried about sales and cashflow, what was said to Tom Hibberd may well have been exaggerated (and perhaps intended to provide additional motivation).

None of this means that GW wasn't at risk of crashing and burning (look at what happened to Airfix). It just doesn't really seem like a big revelation.

I wonder if the 4-6 weeks door closing is just a misunderstanding about the scope.

So the source is part of the design team, and we know that the design team are working on stuff with a pretty long lead time (easily 12+ months in most cases). So I wonder if the management talking about closing the doors was talking about closing the design team for a while, and not the entire company.

It'd hurt them later, but they could probably get away with some slower realeases in a year if they could save some money now by closing a few departments for a month or 2.

Herzlos wrote:
I wonder if the 4-6 weeks door closing is just a misunderstanding about the scope.

So the source is part of the design team, and we know that the design team are working on stuff with a pretty long lead time (easily 12+ months in most cases). So I wonder if the management talking about closing the doors was talking about closing the design team for a while, and not the entire company.

It'd hurt them later, but they could probably get away with some slower realeases in a year if they could save some money now by closing a few departments for a month or 2.

Could be true, but it's still just as bad. Shutting down the design team for a month or two would save a tiny amount of money relative to GW's total annual revenue. If they're so desperate to cut costs that they'll take a future disruption to the release schedule for such minor savings that itself is a major red flag.

I enjoyed watching that video and actually learned how I'm supposed to be holding my GW Painting Handle, so thanks for that!

I find it bizarrely hilarious that both Peachy and this other guy still talk about GW like they are working there even though both quit some time ago. Cult brainwashing, anyone? j/k

The most important bit for me was learning about the "Hobby Trumpet". It explains eloquently so many baffling things GW does, and also puts me "squarely in my box" as a customer (basically I mean nothing to them and they do not make products for the likes of me). I like honesty, and that's as honest an answer I can hope to get from the company. They sell toy soldiers to 12-15 year olds, everything else is a lie.. Guess that makes me a chump, they got me hooked when I was that age, and now I'm just old and stuck in my ways LOL

Kind of puzzling though, how Tamiya and Mr Hobby, both respectable Japanese hobby brands, manage to create screw caps for their paints that actually seal? (My Tamiya X1 Black is 15+ years old and still going strong) Must mean that perhaps these GW boffins aint as good at their job as they think

Some really dumb takes in here. "HuRR jUsT tAKe LoAn" while ignoring the fact that self-financing company like GW needing a loan at all is like a Titanic that already hit the iceberg head on and righting the ship will take more than just "tAKe LoAn" (and if anything, loans could sink them even faster as these things cost a lot and would decrease confidence of retailers taking their products substantially). If they already started taking loans for such dumb things as dividend, yeah, dude is 100% right and there probably was a huge hole in sheets that was only masked with big cash inflow later - and if that inflow didn't happen, the company might very well go under.

Especially seeing the "tAKe LoAn" types forgot how the situation looked back then - WFB was making losses, then was dead, AoS failed to take off, 40K sales were tanking due to excessive kit milking (Dire Avengers and Greatswords, hello?), what would this loan even do? Make the company stay alive 8 weeks instead of 4-6? What was needed was a huge change of direction, and new crew did a lot of good decisions on that. It's like claiming a driver who manages to swerve and avoids hitting the wall at last second is somehow 'proof' that the wall was never dangerous to begin with and a little of extra wax on bodywork would allow the car to ram straight through undamaged

Tyel wrote:
Pretty clear 2014-16 was not a healthy time for GW - but equally, from the accounts, they were stagnating, not drowning. A short term cash crisis is however entirely possible if there were some lean months without much going on. I think they turned the corner with the Deathwatch Overkill box (Feb 2016?)

No, they started with Start Collecting boxes (which at the time was a massive bargain) followed by series of Holiday troop+vehicle discount boxes (still have Dark Angel one which was tactical squad+rhino+DA sprue for about the same tactical squad costs on its own today...). Both were so sudden and unexpected (plus just not how GW did things back then) the hole in the sheets forcing them to do it would be pretty much perfect, logical explanation. Both ended up printing money for GW so hard company literally couldn't make them fast enough (which would easily hide said hole in end year balance sheet, too...). Then you had Vs boxes with two armies that were 50-66% off individual kit price, also a massive seller. Anyone still remembers two Horus Heresy boxes, too? Literal mountain of minis for pennies, it's just sad comparing it to barely discounted boxes today...

And come to think of it, if the massive cash influx due to SC and VS boxes doesn't show up on investor balance sheets either until much later, something had to negate it. Gee, what could it be? Maybe, just maybe, it was the hole the dude mentioned the 'experts' here deny, eh?

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

I don't think it's that difficult to understand that being "former GW employees" doesn't make this objectively correct just because of that. They may very well have been told this or something along those lines at the time, but without any actual evidence beyond that then taking it at face value as being outright the case irrefutably is a bit odd. This is what someone, who wasn't directly involved in that financial aspect themselves, would have been told by others at that time so someone or something could easily have been a misunderstanding, misinformed, misremembering, hypothetical etc.

Why on Holy Terra anyone would tell this nonsense to employees if it wasn't 100% true?

Not only it's perfect way to tank morale, it's the best way to ensure your workers will barely do any work and will be instead desperately updating resumes and looking for openings in other game companies, especially senior positions like interviewed dude who could change jobs the easiest when you desperately need them fully onboard and trying their hardest, not being distracted doing 20 other things that don't help the company when you need them at 100% performance. And misunderstanding? You seriously thing that senior positions called to rescue meeting wouldn't attempt to clarify or gauge if it really is that bad before formulating plans for their departments to follow? Really?

Start Collecting kits is a good shout - and yes, suspect they sold zillions. Its around the same time I think, late 2015/early 2016.

 Irbis wrote:
Some really dumb takes in here. "HuRR jUsT tAKe LoAn" while ignoring the fact that self-financing company like GW needing a loan at all is like a Titanic that already hit the iceberg head on and righting the ship will take more than just "tAKe LoAn" (and if anything, loans could sink them even faster as these things cost a lot and would decrease confidence of retailers taking their products substantially). If they already started taking loans for such dumb things as dividend, yeah, dude is 100% right and there probably was a huge hole in sheets that was only masked with big cash inflow later - and if that inflow didn't happen, the company might very well go under.

This matches my experience with businesses. Lines of credit don't just magically materialize, and companies who draw on them regularly (and pay them off regularly) are different than companies who famously avoid them suddenly developing a craving.

This would be doubly true of a toy company. Back in the day, I remember people linking UK financial stories about GW's excellent stock, how the company kept growing, increasing market capitalization. It was clear that no one in finance really understood how or why they were succeeding, but the dividends were excellent. As soon as that aura of invincibility is punctured, I'm pretty sure their market cap would collapse.

And your remark about the financial reports is also spot on: these are always lagging indicators, not real-time disclosures. By the following mid-year or year-end report, GW clearly righted the ship. No company is ever going to say: "yeah, the quarterly report looks good now, but man we almost tanked."