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And it’s up.

https://assets.ctfassets.net/ost7hseic9hc/6nhjgj1BVPlaTocG6L4IbS/e42b72a50979ca58769b9e85e04ae79a/2023-24_accounts_-_final.pdf

Another record performance, which is nice.

Hey is this the 10th anniversary of the "Kirby on crack" one?

EDIT: Nope, 12 already! How time flies!

Main interest points for me?

All the settings seem to be selling.

There’s a chunk about the stock difficulties, acknowledging customer frustration and touching on what they’re doing to address it.

Amazon Deal includes a 1 year period to agree creative guidelines, ending December 2024. Nothing will follow if said creative guidelines aren’t agreed.

Has there been a significant rise in income tax in the UK? Charts show a hefty increase in pre-tax profits but they end up the same as land year's profits after tax.

Very good financial performance for the company.

Interesting things to note -

1) While sales are overall healthy and up, sales via the GW website are *down*, maybe the most notable admission of anything going wrong in the entire report, and surely a measure that the site is a disaster. I do wonder if shareholders will hold Rowntree's feet to the fire on this a bit more than he has admitted here.

2) The web relaunch was supposedly done a few months earlier than planned, which given what a hot mess it was is somewhat inexplicable.

3) There will be a "phase 2" this year to improve the customer experience of using the website. What a low ****ing bar that is.

4) Warhammer+ subs are up, non-trivially. I am quite surprised at this given investment in the service has clearly imploded.

5) New warehouse in Australia is nearly done. Some additional investment and acknowledgement of teething issues at the US warehouse.

6) There is an admission that stock levels have frustrated customers, and that there are some measures ongoing to improve this (but not dramatically, GW remains committed to not sitting on stock).

7) There's an explicit callout thanking John Blanche, which is nice.

8) The Amazon show deal requires the agreement of creative guidelines to be agreed between the companies before the end of 2024, and is not yet signed.

9) The Amazon deal also contains an option for them to acquire the Warhammer Fantasy (which I believe in context means AOS, not Old World/WFB, but they might be rolled in) rights too later if they wish.

10) There has been a slight increase in spending for animations for W+, but it's actually a drop in real terms.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Has there been a significant rise in income tax in the UK? Charts show a hefty increase in pre-tax profits but they end up the same as land year's profits after tax.

Page 59:

Pre-tax 203m vs 171m
Tax 52m vs 36m
Post-tax 151m vs 135m

Tax % was higher because Corp Tax was reduced to 19% in April 2017, and then raised to 25% in April 2023, which is broadly what you get from the above numbers.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Has there been a significant rise in income tax in the UK? Charts show a hefty increase in pre-tax profits but they end up the same as land year's profits after tax.

edit: forgot about Corp tax mentioned above

 The Phazer wrote:


9) The Amazon deal also contains an option for them to acquire the Warhammer Fantasy (which I believe in context means AOS, not Old World/WFB, but they might be rolled in) rights too later if they wish.

That was one picked up in the mid-year report as well. As it's capitalised I believe that it's Old World not AOS (every other usage of fantasy in the document is lower case), they're usually very careful about deliniating the difference between the two rather than lumping them together. Makes sense, WHFB still remains more culturally relevant than AOS in the licencing world - the one big budget AOS game utterly flopped. Amazon could probably do a lot of good stuff in the animation world for WHFB, I'm less convinced about live action but you never know.

Glad to see old world and heresy are viewed as strong franchises and there are large plans for continued investment into them.

 morganfreeman wrote:
Glad to see old world and heresy are viewed as strong franchises and there are large plans for continued investment into them.

Cashing in on nostalgia does seem to be making GW a fair few quid.

 Londinium wrote:
- the one big budget AOS game utterly flopped.

Hang on - there was a big budget AOS game?

 Dysartes wrote:

 Londinium wrote:
- the one big budget AOS game utterly flopped.

Hang on - there was a big budget AOS game?

https://www.pcgamer.com/david-braben-says-frontier-developments-has-had-a-turbulent-and-difficult-year-as-warhammer-age-of-sigmar-realms-of-ruin-flops/

It's probably in the AA space, not AAA, but still the biggest attempt at leveraging the AOS IP outside of tabletop.

Yeah and honestly that game flopped because they tried to make a console RTS Game and got exactly what you get when you try and make a console RTS game - a game that doesn't really work for console nor PC players.

It's a shame because a lot of the features in the game really felt like they put a lot of care into the game itself. It did run well and it had neat features and they clearly saw a future; but when playing the demo I could feel the issues.

The combat and gameflow was just dull - units moved slowly across the map; got locked into close combat and then you basically sat there watching healthbars move down until you hit retreat. Ranged units were slightly more engaging as they could change targets.
You could feel how it was all built around a controller control scheme with features built in so that it could account for a slower pace of gameplay for a console user rather than mouse and keyboard - and it sadly killed the game.










On other fronts I'm glad to see GW continuing to be a strong firm! And that HH And Old World are doing healthy in sales!

I was getting so many suggestions on YouTube about GW sales collapse I thought was suspicious over the last few months.
It’s humorous.


If they seeing less sales from there store, I wonder if it’s more just price difference to online. It’s basically buy 3 get one free at this point.

Warhammer+ is a mini and hope, and they haven’t fix my account yet! Should cancel, but minis 2 and 3 been good.

Honestly the new store is a nightmare to navigate. The previous one was super easy - the new one has so much "bling" going on that finding actual things takes effort.

I suspect they've lost sales to casual browsers who used to browse, see something cool and buy it.




Another aspect could be that as "cost of living" continues to be a problem; more and more people are getting wiser at hunting down deals so GW is losing direct sales to 3rd party sales. Though I don't think that's the whole truth, since I'd have expected that drop to happen more right after/during covid when people were forced to change habits.

I suspect we're also seeing a bit of post-covid consolidation/concentration of the audience; we're hitting the point now where you'd expect to see Covid Newbies making the call between moving on to their next novelty or biting down hard on their sunk cost like the rest of us have, so people who weren't spending a ton anymore are leaving and the rest are beginning their transition into hobby midlife whalery when they begin building their piles of shame.

GW have been in a far better position to take advantage of the big influx with marketing, licensing, community interaction etc being far beyond what they were willing/able to do on the previous two big "wave" expansions of the customer base(LotR and Dawn of War - obviously this latest one dwarfs, aha, even the former of those two), so the question now is whether they've learned from the last time when it comes to *maintaining* the audience rather than just letting it shrink while they bleed it dry. Given how much some modern fans seem willing to spend and their stock issues they could probably stand to keep pushing for a few more years, but eventually whales turn into grogs and boom-bust only works until it doesn't.

Report mentions they’re not fussy about how people buy, so much that they continue to buy. Hence why they’re keen to get their stock levels right. After all, selling out whilst you’ve a number of unfulfilled would be buyers isn’t ideal.

And it seems the 5ish percent drop in direct online sales is more than compensated by the overall 10% increase in sales.

They seem to be doing really well, generally giving customers what they want, albiet at high prices again. Good for GW.

That website change was a clear downgrade though!

The site is a nightmare. I can't imagine that's not a cause of some of that lost revenue from their store. I don't ever want to go on it and I used to browse fairly often even if I rarely bought. Now you couldn't pay me to use that site that can't even remember FROM MY ACCOUNT what country I live in.

 Da Boss wrote:
They seem to be doing really well, generally giving customers what they want, albiet at high prices again. Good for GW.

That website change was a clear downgrade though!

Definitely. Not sure why they couldn't just do a cosmetic facelift.

the old site wasn't compatible with their electronic warehouse system

(which also seems to be a bit of a dog... although to be fair most companies that invest in big outsourced IT projects end up with partial functionality and plenty of excuses),

so the old site had to go

 YodhrinsForge wrote:
I suspect we're also seeing a bit of post-covid consolidation/concentration of the audience; we're hitting the point now where you'd expect to see Covid Newbies making the call between moving on to their next novelty or biting down hard on their sunk cost like the rest of us have, so people who weren't spending a ton anymore are leaving and the rest are beginning their transition into hobby midlife whalery when they begin building their piles of shame.

GW have been in a far better position to take advantage of the big influx with marketing, licensing, community interaction etc being far beyond what they were willing/able to do on the previous two big "wave" expansions of the customer base(LotR and Dawn of War - obviously this latest one dwarfs, aha, even the former of those two), so the question now is whether they've learned from the last time when it comes to *maintaining* the audience rather than just letting it shrink while they bleed it dry. Given how much some modern fans seem willing to spend and their stock issues they could probably stand to keep pushing for a few more years, but eventually whales turn into grogs and boom-bust only works until it doesn't.

The other factor is the wider economy.

I think it is fair to say GW sells luxury products, and luxury products do better when there is widening wealth inequality concentrating wealth. That is the current trend in most of the developed world.

A big part of GW's pandemic success is that the pandemic was essentially a big government handout to the wealthy in the UK

In fairness to GW - GW paid their Covid money back to the government pretty quickly. I think generally because GW holds this "no loans" policy very strongly and that was basically a loan.

So I don't think GW really profited in that way from Covid. The government money more kept the lights on. I think they did profit because a LOT of people got stuck at home and had nothing to do thus restarted/started a hobby and one of those big choices was Warhammer.

In terms of retention? I think we need to consider that someone who picked it up during the pandemic having left years ago (as in 3rd-5th Ed era) will have returned to a very different hobby.

From the move to a near 100% plastic range, the dawn of Contrast and similar paints, the hobby aspect is more accessible.

Someone that found stuff like the metal Hive Tyrant a chore to build and maintain may very well be blown away at just how easy the plastic Hive Tyrant is to build and paint.

We’ve also a much wider range of offerings in terms of games and entry cost. AoS, 40K and HH all remain expensive to start out in. But Necromunda, Blood Bowl, War Cry, Underworlds, Kill Team etc are much cheaper, and pretty well supported. They’re also very community driven, as they’re aimed at scheduled and regular games, be it competitive or narrative campaign stuff.

So there’s more to see and do, and a lower skills barrier. All of which helps retention.

Sure for some of those games you can X-Wing your way to spending a small fortune, but it’s over time, and comes after you’ve enough to get the main flavour of the game.

Also GW have been pushing Killteam, Warcry, Underworlds and now Spearheads. A good number of low model count, typically quicker games to play. Ideal as growth games to get started quickly with playing.

No "2K points worth of models to get started properly" or "Oh we just use Killteam to learn for your demo game" situations.

That's ideal both for those with more limited time and those who perhaps are very new to it all and don't have the commitment to really build up a huge force in isolation before they get to playing "proper games"

 Londinium wrote:

 The Phazer wrote:


9) The Amazon deal also contains an option for them to acquire the Warhammer Fantasy (which I believe in context means AOS, not Old World/WFB, but they might be rolled in) rights too later if they wish.

That was one picked up in the mid-year report as well. As it's capitalised I believe that it's Old World not AOS (every other usage of fantasy in the document is lower case), they're usually very careful about deliniating the difference between the two rather than lumping them together. Makes sense, WHFB still remains more culturally relevant than AOS in the licencing world - the one big budget AOS game utterly flopped. Amazon could probably do a lot of good stuff in the animation world for WHFB, I'm less convinced about live action but you never know.

That encapsulates all fantasy games under their brand. It's called warhammer old world, warhammer fantasy doesn't exist anymore.

There’s also the age issue.

I like many got started with Hero Quest back in 1989. And I’ve been hooked ever since.

And now? Now I’m 44. Whilst I remain blissfully childless, many of my peers do have kids. And many of those kids are just as nerdy as we were. So you’ve parent and child spending going on. And that my friends is something that can generate big bucks.

Not only do you have a built in opponent and fellow hobbyist? But it’s an all-weather shared hobby. Something you can do in different time spans, from a quick painting session to a day long game.

And to quote many a parent from my Till Monkey Days? “At least it’s not another bloody screen from them to stare at”

And that’s true of the entire TTWG hobby, not just GW.

 Overread wrote:
In fairness to GW - GW paid their Covid money back to the government pretty quickly. I think generally because GW holds this "no loans" policy very strongly and that was basically a loan.

So I don't think GW really profited in that way from Covid. The government money more kept the lights on. I think they did profit because a LOT of people got stuck at home and had nothing to do thus restarted/started a hobby and one of those big choices was Warhammer.

I'm not referring to any monies paid directly to GW, but simply that they were beneficiaries of the general economic shifts accelerated by the pandemic by virtue of their market niche as a producer of luxury goods. At least in the UK, and I'd hazard for the US too.

It’s also a hobby well suited to a lockdown.

Yes it made actually gaming difficult, but the build and paint aspect is ideal for when you can’t really go anywhere or do anything. That painting is generally regarded as therapeutic is also a benefit, and one that’s easy to carry over once life returned to normal. It’s nice bit sit down with music on, and refocus your concentration.

As a parent whose kids all play Warhammer all I can say is it's brilliant. While some of their friends moaned about their parents I was seen as the cool dad! Something I never expected and I've got to admit I'm really not.
It's great seeing them reading books, making army lists, painting models etc rather than being glued to a screen.
Expensive hobby,yes it is when I'm the one paying for all their models but it's worth it. I don't have to worry about them as they, and frequently their friends are safely in the hobby room rather than hanging around on the streets.
We're lucky as being involved in this hobby also helps with school. For example in some subjects certain teachers count it as part of the coursework.