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 tauist wrote:
To me, the signal GW of today (vs the GW I grew up with) is loud and clear. They just want me to buy the models, and forget about investing into the games themselves.

GW has always been a models company. warhammer only exists because GW wanted a way of selling models. in that sense, the company has remained true to itself for the last 40+ years

 Da Boss wrote:
My view on this is that your hobby shouldn't be too attached to the companies that make miniatures or rules.

My hobby is miniature wargaming. I use whatever rules and models I like.

If the local play community doesn't like that, I need to find someone who does. It's not that hard to recruit a likely friend to play with you, just more effort than existing in a pre-made ecosystem.

The advantage is you never have to care about what the big companies do particularly, and can just rock on with what you have. The disadvantage is you're not part of "the community" and have to make your own, which can be a bit daunting. But it's not that bad once you start.

And with distance, disentangling my emotions from it, it's completely reasonable for GW to be doing some clear outs after this long. They've got a massive range, with piles of minis in it. Stocking that range for the entire globe has to be a nightmare, and has basically sunk other games companies.

Added to that, the creatives working for GW no doubt want to do a bit of their own thing, rather than rehashing Rick Priestley's wonderful ideas from the 1980s for ever. Don't get me wrong, I love Rick Priestley's games to bits, but I can see why the guys in there now want to do their own thing, have their own crack at making a aesthetic and so on.

There are cynical motives on top of it, but I don't discount the creative urge completely just because of that.

I'm still interested in the 40K setting, but I actually find I'm less interested in the Old World as I get older. I always wanted something more Middle Earth than Fantasy 30 Years War, and I'm happy to move on to that, especially now with the wealth of historical and fantasy miniatures available.

It's all upside to opening up your hobby as far as I'm concerned.

Edit: And I've been saying for years that fixed list tournaments are the way to go if you actually want to test player skill at the table, rather than in the spreadsheet.

All of this, really. Although I do think there's something odd happening, which is that on the one hand everyone and their dog seems to believe that tournament/event players are only a TINY proportion of all players, AND that everyone and their dog wants to talk about and write for the event scene. So if you are, like all of us here, involved in the commentariat portion of the purchasing base, we're all exposed to a lot of that, and so have it reinforced that that's the most important thing.

Ash Barker of GMG (who for a brief time was manager of my local GW when I was a teen) had a chat with another FLGS owner who was once a GW manager and they note that, in a way, the current "problem" is just that the complaints of earlier warhammer players have come to roost. We all wanted more frequent balance updates and model updates and new releases and ostensibly better rules throughout the 90s and 00s, and now we have it, but the cost of that is that there's just more new stuff, and old stuff can't just sit on the shop shelf forever without moving.

I still think a huge part of the thing is that a lot of warhammer players just don't have close gamer friends that we hang out with for the sake of hanging out. In that friendly context it's not that hard to just houserule a thing or play an indie or a counts-as or use old rules. But if you primarily play pickup games at the local store(s) or attend tournaments once very few weeks/months because that's how you guarantee a number of games, the most straightforward path is to follow a common standard, and SOME set of those people are planning on trying to do well at the next Very Important Event, so it becomes seen as a waste of time NOT to be following the event standard.

For all that one might complain about how often the rules change... when I was a teen playing games with my friends, if we ever found ourselves in the position where someone wasn't playing Orks, Eldar, Space Marines, or Chaos (the armies my friends had) it WAS just like it is now with an points update. Perhaps worse (and better) because there WERE no PDFs or youtube breakdowns or blogs with analysis.

Yes that is what GW goals is selling model. But GW has two main buyer groups. One group is the group for whom buying is the hobby. Which are willing to buy, build and paint an army (or just buy) and never play a game. The other group is the gamer group, which consists of those people that need 3 of X tank, 3 of Y tank, 6x boxes of Z specific unit and A, B and D character right now, because over the years and for most armies, what consists a playable army is on a 6-9 month rotation. And the "fun to play" widows become shorter and shorter each edition. And the way GW treats its games and uses legends, they seem to want the gamers to rebuy an army at worse every 2 edition.

On Tournament players? It’s not as if they’re a cohesive group with a common approach.

Some like to craft their lists to place well, others take whatever they usually take and hope for the best attending for a greater variety of opponents, some take it all far too seriously, some don’t take it anything like seriously enough.

Some use Tournaments as their predominant gaming venue, some might just do one to see how it goes, others will attend a few a year, others yet might only attend a specific one year on year.

And lots of others in between.

I'd also note that of the Tournament players that I know who "metachase" very few of them were buying brand new kits from GW. They were often buying new armies often to hunt the meta and that meant they often chased down secondhand as much as they could.

So not only are they are minority of the whole playerbase, but they are also potentially not GW's best customers profit wise.

When I used to do tournaments, I was very much in the "take what you have" mode for a long time, simply because I did not have the money to spend on models. I enjoyed the experience anyway - I didn't expect to win or do particularly well at all, but I still got to get lots of games in on nice tables with terrain I hadn't experienced before and against people I would not normally get to play.

When I had a bit more income I was able to take it more "seriously" and buy stuff that would do better in tournaments, and then sometimes I did a bit better, but I didn't really enjoy the experience any more or less because of that. We did play more cut throat games in preparation for tournaments back then, but we were all okay with that in our group.

A lot of the angst I see is people who just want to play with their guys who are playing in an environment with lots of people doing that sort of tournament prep. I think it's best to move on from such an environment in that case, those people just have a totally different approach to yours at that time. But it's hard to do, and probably seems easier to try and change the culture of play. And you might even be successful to an extent, but it's always going to lead to awkward situations.

Now, all I want is to do campaigns and stuff, but I don't have any free time to do it! Ah well.

But the tournament mindset DEFINITELY leads to more churn as well - those guys I played with would buy new armies all the time, spray paint them and do a couple details and get playing. Then a few months later they'd do it again. I was a bit the odd one out sticking with "my guys".

 Lord Clinto wrote:

Baltika wrote:
...and had their armies squatted....

This.

My wife finally finished painting her passion project army, Tomb Kings, less than 6 months before AoS launched; whereas the entire army was squatted.
She was so disgusted that she threw it up on ebay and sold the whole thing less than a month later.

And to top it off TK is now one of the featured Old World armies...

Well, now she can do it again.

BTW, why didn't she just keep playing 8e WHFB? Or look at the Legends/eratta etc for AoS? (Tomb Kings did have Sigmar rules during 1st, 2nd, & 3rd editions)

ccs wrote:

 Lord Clinto wrote:

Baltika wrote:
...and had their armies squatted....

This.

My wife finally finished painting her passion project army, Tomb Kings, less than 6 months before AoS launched; whereas the entire army was squatted.
She was so disgusted that she threw it up on ebay and sold the whole thing less than a month later.

And to top it off TK is now one of the featured Old World armies...

Well, now she can do it again.

BTW, why didn't she just keep playing 8e WHFB? Or look at the Legends/eratta etc for AoS? (Tomb Kings did have Sigmar rules during 1st, 2nd, & 3rd editions)

A few reasons why people might drop an army that loses official support

1) With no official support games will eventually dry up. If your main game site is your local GW store then it might dry up almost instantly.

2) No existing model stock. Don't forget this was before the explosion of quality 3D printing so alternatives weren't always reliably on the market. So you were left hunting 2nd hand which got very expensive very quickly. Even just filling in a few corners can suddenly become an insane cost

3) No new models/updated rules/new lore/stories/characters. This taken to 11 because it wasn't just a faction but the whole game vanishing overnight. You can't jump to a new army in the game - the game itself was gone.

4) Suddenness. Whilst everyone could see Old World flagging; at the time of End Times it was actually on a high. GW had just done a huge campaign; pumped loads of money in the form of new kits into it
TK and a few other armies got it worse because when GW did bring it back they axed that army entirely.

This is more of an emotional one because sure you could keep going and keep the models but for some the sudden "death" when there was no clear plan or reason just soured them.


I'm sure there are loads of other reasons too - again remember this was before we had the explosion of 3rd party models from 3D printing and also before we have had a steady rise of systems like One Page Rules that use GW models for other games. And even now OPR is still small and has a long way to go.

 Overread wrote:


A few reasons why people might drop an army that loses official support

1) With no official support games will eventually dry up. If your main game site is your local GW store then it might dry up almost instantly.

Depends upon where you are/who you're playing with. But presumably she had already some # of people to play with... What, they all threw up their hands, sobbed & ditched their models? Nobody would've approached the not-in-a-GW-shop problem as "Well, we need a new place to play!"?

 Overread wrote:
2) No existing model stock. Don't forget this was before the explosion of quality 3D printing so alternatives weren't always reliably on the market. So you were left hunting 2nd hand which got very expensive very quickly. Even just filling in a few corners can suddenly become an insane cost

BS.
EBay, FB groups, etc were all well established sources. Then or now, you could get nearly anything you wanted any day of the week. If you didn't like some of the prices all you had to do was dig a bit further/check back every so often etc
There's also the good old fallback of scratch-building stuff if you find prices truly not to your liking or availability too slim.

 Overread wrote:
3) No new models/updated rules/new lore/stories/characters. This taken to 11 because it wasn't just a faction but the whole game vanishing overnight. You can't jump to a new army in the game - the game itself was gone.

More BS.
The only place the game vanished overnight from was GWs stores & site. I assure you plenty of shops were left holding WHFB stock - both books & models. and not all of them were jacking it up price wise on EBay. If you wanted something you had to put in the effort to go find it.
No "New" product coming out? That's only a problem if your hobby is buying. Play wise it greatly simplifies things. Very easy to jump into a game or switch armies.
Oh no, no more FAQS etc from the company.... Whatever shall we do? Reasonable people discuss things with those they play with, come up with a solution, write it down, & game on. And yes, sometimes that results in several groups having slightly different answers to something.

 Overread wrote:
4) Suddenness. Whilst everyone could see Old World flagging; at the time of End Times it was actually on a high. GW had just done a huge campaign; pumped loads of money in the form of new kits into it
TK and a few other armies got it worse because when GW did bring it back they axed that army entirely.

This is more of an emotional one because sure you could keep going and keep the models but for some the sudden "death" when there was no clear plan or reason just soured them.

Not entirely. As I said, TK HAD rules in AoS 1e. 2e. & 3e. Not especially good rules. And not tourney legal rules. But they were there.

 Overread wrote:
I'm sure there are loads of other reasons too - again remember this was before we had the explosion of 3rd party models from 3D printing and also before we have had a steady rise of systems like One Page Rules that use GW models for other games. And even now OPR is still small and has a long way to go.

Irrelevant. If you wanted to play any edition of WHFB you could've.

ccs wrote:

 Overread wrote:


A few reasons why people might drop an army that loses official support

1) With no official support games will eventually dry up. If your main game site is your local GW store then it might dry up almost instantly.

Depends upon where you are/who you're playing with. But presumably she had already some # of people to play with... What, they all threw up their hands, sobbed & ditched their models? Nobody would've approached the not-in-a-GW-shop problem as "Well, we need a new place to play!"?

 Overread wrote:
2) No existing model stock. Don't forget this was before the explosion of quality 3D printing so alternatives weren't always reliably on the market. So you were left hunting 2nd hand which got very expensive very quickly. Even just filling in a few corners can suddenly become an insane cost

BS.
EBay, FB groups, etc were all well established sources. Then or now, you could get nearly anything you wanted any day of the week. If you didn't like some of the prices all you had to do was dig a bit further/check back every so often etc
There's also the good old fallback of scratch-building stuff if you find prices truly not to your liking or availability too slim.

 Overread wrote:
3) No new models/updated rules/new lore/stories/characters. This taken to 11 because it wasn't just a faction but the whole game vanishing overnight. You can't jump to a new army in the game - the game itself was gone.

More BS.
The only place the game vanished overnight from was GWs stores & site. I assure you plenty of shops were left holding WHFB stock - both books & models. and not all of them were jacking it up price wise on EBay. If you wanted something you had to put in the effort to go find it.
No "New" product coming out? That's only a problem if your hobby is buying. Play wise it greatly simplifies things. Very easy to jump into a game or switch armies.
Oh no, no more FAQS etc from the company.... Whatever shall we do? Reasonable people discuss things with those they play with, come up with a solution, write it down, & game on. And yes, sometimes that results in several groups having slightly different answers to something.

 Overread wrote:
4) Suddenness. Whilst everyone could see Old World flagging; at the time of End Times it was actually on a high. GW had just done a huge campaign; pumped loads of money in the form of new kits into it
TK and a few other armies got it worse because when GW did bring it back they axed that army entirely.

This is more of an emotional one because sure you could keep going and keep the models but for some the sudden "death" when there was no clear plan or reason just soured them.

Not entirely. As I said, TK HAD rules in AoS 1e. 2e. & 3e. Not especially good rules. And not tourney legal rules. But they were there.

 Overread wrote:
I'm sure there are loads of other reasons too - again remember this was before we had the explosion of 3rd party models from 3D printing and also before we have had a steady rise of systems like One Page Rules that use GW models for other games. And even now OPR is still small and has a long way to go.

Irrelevant. If you wanted to play any edition of WHFB you could've.

Your comments suggest then that a great majority of GW players are not as invested as you are. What you describe is a series of gates you would need to pass through to achieve that outcome, which is comparably more difficult than the GW hype, culture and support machine providing it to you.

Without that system in place, the effort required is beyond the average player. there's nothing wrong with that.


I think you're looking at the concept of the game rather than the concept of the GW hobby and game experience (TM), which like it or not created it's own self-sustaining ecosystem and gamer populations evolved to only exist within it. If nothing else it showed GW that their efforts to create their own closed consumer base actually works and that they can have big impacts on large consumer bases by their actions.

Maybe I'm simplifying this in my head? GW is a business that sells miniatures. People don't usually buy the same miniatures over and over again. I bought a land raider 13 years ago and haven't bought one since. Do you know why I don't need another land raider? Because I already have one and the price has gone up like $20..

GW needs people to buy their miniatures to turn a profit and to keep their shareholders happy. Selling new miniatures is how they pay their artists, various other departments, and how they continue to exist as an entity. They look at the numbers for sales and continue manufacturing the products that sell and discontinue products that don't sell. Why do you think they make so many space marine kits? Because those sell.

Something that many people don't realize is that storage is very expensive. Those giant warehouses cost a ton of money and the longer a product sits in the warehouse the more its return begins to diminish. Large companies like Walmart would "roll-back" prices on products the longer and longer they took to sell due to the cost of the space that product took in their store. Why would I keep a 60in DLP TV in a space that this 55in LCD TV can fit and sell for $200 more?

TLDR: GW has to turn profits to design, produce, and sell the little grey miniatures we all love so much. They also don't have infinite cheap storage to keep every kit ever produced.

Karol wrote:
Yes that is what GW goals is selling model. But GW has two main buyer groups. One group is the group for whom buying is the hobby. Which are willing to buy, build and paint an army (or just buy) and never play a game. The other group is the gamer group, which consists of those people that need 3 of X tank, 3 of Y tank, 6x boxes of Z specific unit and A, B and D character right now, because over the years and for most armies, what consists a playable army is on a 6-9 month rotation. And the "fun to play" widows become shorter and shorter each edition. And the way GW treats its games and uses legends, they seem to want the gamers to rebuy an army at worse every 2 edition.

I don't think that GW necessarily sees or care about a distinction between those groups. Buyer/collector/painter types will buy whatever they think looks nice or fits their collection or tells their story or what have you. Gamer types will buy stuff to keep playing the current rules. Both parties are buying though.

You can do either of those things and not care a whit what GW is doing though, beyond them just being one company of many that makes some stuff. It's of course easier if you live in a place where other stuff is available.

Tyel wrote:
The core issue with this - and a lot of GW decisions - is that they don't think their core customer is an ancient grognard. They think the average player gets into 40k, is committed for 18-24 months (i.e. buys a lot), and then either moves on or has got into something quite niche.

GW's big concern therefore has to be all the ancient kit they've sold. Because on paper, nothing stops them selling a bunch of Space Marines to the parents of a 12-14 year old boy. Who is interested for a little while, but at 14-16 isn't interested, and then sells/hands it over to another 12-14 year old, and rinse repeat forever. Instead of getting 5-7 customers over a ten year period, they only get 1.

So the obvious approach is to stop providing rules for kits they've not sold for a decade. Then stop providing rules for ancient kits that they intend to stop selling (possibly because there's a replacement similar unit.) Finally, with Primaris, it seemed a cynical approach to draining the very extensive Space Marine pile on Ebay etc.

You also have this phenomenon of just... people who are active, versus people who think they are. You have people who bought the Leviathan Box, played 40k every week, expanded out their armies...and are now a year later are bored/done with the hobby. Then you have people who "tried to get back into the game" in 8th. Maybe bought a codex and played twice. Saw 9th disrupted by Covid. Maybe got in one game, oh its a bit bloated/confusing. Now 10th's here, and a year into the edition are umming and aaahing about playing their first game (never mind purchasing anything). You might think you are in the hobby - but from GW's perspective you are invisible.

Truth. A lot of the posters here fit into the second group.

Longstrider wrote:

Karol wrote:
Yes that is what GW goals is selling model. But GW has two main buyer groups. One group is the group for whom buying is the hobby. Which are willing to buy, build and paint an army (or just buy) and never play a game. The other group is the gamer group, which consists of those people that need 3 of X tank, 3 of Y tank, 6x boxes of Z specific unit and A, B and D character right now, because over the years and for most armies, what consists a playable army is on a 6-9 month rotation. And the "fun to play" widows become shorter and shorter each edition. And the way GW treats its games and uses legends, they seem to want the gamers to rebuy an army at worse every 2 edition.

I don't think that GW necessarily sees or care about a distinction between those groups. Buyer/collector/painter types will buy whatever they think looks nice or fits their collection or tells their story or what have you. Gamer types will buy stuff to keep playing the current rules. Both parties are buying though.

You can do either of those things and not care a whit what GW is doing though, beyond them just being one company of many that makes some stuff. It's of course easier if you live in a place where other stuff is available.

I think they did at least once - lets not forget at one time they openly took Old World away from gamers and gave it to boutique model buyers in AoS.

Now that, of course, backfired for the most part.

The thing is even within those groups there's subsets - such as the collector/painters who view themsleves as gamers but who don't actually game all that often. The potential to play the game is very important to them even if they don't get much of a chance.

Which is the other aspect; there's an insane amount of crossover. Someone might be a painter/collector only of fantasy models buying random ones to do as they want; but they might also be a very serious 40K gamer.


That and most of the time when you buy a model you never get asked "you painting/playing/building/whatever. There's no formal study and whilst you might infer from online content; the online market is also only a tiny fraction of the actual market. So whilst I think GW are aware of the different groups and have tried before to cater specifically too them; I think that its actually something GW doesn't have "hard" data on. I think they can get trends and impressions in the market; but not specifics.

The fundamental issue for GW is not production capacity (even if that also is a limitation), it's shelf space. Each kit takes up shelf space and they no longer have the efficiency of the old blister packs with metal minis. They have a ton of cardboard boxes that all take up space and you can't put too many behind each other. And their shops tend to be small because store space is expensive. Very expensive. So they want to have a fairly limited range available. At the same time, having a vast majority of product that customers want not available is a great way to lose business, so they have to find a way to have a large proportion of kits for the main games in stores. And that means cutting back on what they have.

I don't think SKU bloat is as big a problem for GW as most other firms. GW have their own distribution network; their own stores and their own website - plus considerable resources to market all 3 and they are the market leader in a big way.

They don't have to worry about older kits that 3rd party distributors don't want to ship as much as new ones; they don't have to worry about competing for shelf space in tiny 3rd party stores in quite the same way as other smaller firms do.


Honestly I think production possibly is GW's biggest barrier right now.

Especially when you consider the latest trends in removing toolbox model options and dishing those options out to new specialist models whilst also often keeping the toolbox model around in the army.

I think if GW were really worried about SKU bloat then we'd not have seen armies like Tyranids explode into the massive number of options they have today.




Another aspect is that some of this simplification we've seen has only really been in the last edition of AoS and 10th and could simply be management trying things based on customer studies/pet theories/new design approaches or other elements.

 Overread wrote:
I think they did at least once - lets not forget at one time they openly took Old World away from gamers and gave it to boutique model buyers in AoS.

And they did it just as a major computer game company was launching the game...

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 Overread wrote:
I think they did at least once - lets not forget at one time they openly took Old World away from gamers and gave it to boutique model buyers in AoS.

And they did it just as a major computer game company was launching the game...

In fairness no one expected TW Warhammer to be as big as it has become - nor that it would prove to be TW's most played game ever. Even ignoring that its "3 games in one" the game has continued to top the active players list for TW - even surpassing TW Three Kingdoms which I believe outsold it.

Granted if you want Fantasy RTS you've basically got nothing else big in the market to compete with it and haven't really had anything in the market for a very very long time.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 Overread wrote:
I think they did at least once - lets not forget at one time they openly took Old World away from gamers and gave it to boutique model buyers in AoS.

And they did it just as a major computer game company was launching the game...

Apparently tactical marines outsold the entire fantasy range.... Sure GW pissed off some people that enjoyed fantasy but from a business point of view, killing off fantasy made sense.

Bringing it back is what made no sense, especially with basically zero updated model. My store is stuck with a whole shelf of ToW that probably will never be bought.

WHFB/TOW is a case where GW just can't win. but a lot of it feels like a consequence of people who are too engaged in online arguments who talk about the game more than they play it

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:
WHFB/TOW is a case where GW just can't win. but a lot of it feels like a consequence of people who are too engaged in online arguments who talk about the game more than they play it

I don't think that's necessarily true. I think there's plenty of people playing it who aren't particularly online, and then there's also a lot of people who are just online, but that's true of everything else Warhammer. It does seem like some stores probably wound up with stock that's not going to move because some set of nostalgists are keen on old models but not as many as say they are - but again, that's true of everything else Warhammer too.

What TOW highlights to me is this particular weirdness GW the company and GW fans have with its rules printing sales model. One take is that GW sells models and the rules are just incidental, which is often used to justify their irregular (outside of 40k, KT, and AoS) rules fixes. Another is that rules DO drive model sales, which gets used to justify their seasonal update cycle and edition churn. A third option is that both are profitable, which if true could just mean that TOW is a designed to sell rulebooks and then the models are as incidental as the rulebooks are to model sales for other games.

Certainly, most of the people I know playing it are either using older minis or using non-GW minis, with relatively few purchases of re-released old stuff. That might well wind up doing the game in, but only for those people who both want Official GW Rules but also won't spend money in the amounts that GW wants, OR it might be that they're okay with the sales they're getting right now and the game will truck along as it currently is - it's not like those people I know who I play TOW with were spending leisure money on other GW games in the meantime anyway.

As much as I like TOW and playing it, I don't think that there's any particular commercial reason for GW to be doing more even if I'd like it. But that's just generally true of their operations; if they make cool stuff I want to buy I'll buy it, but neither the faceless corporate entity nor myself owe each other anything.

Which, come to think of it, might be most of what drives most of our internet arguments; people who think that they DO owe us something, and people who want to pretend we ought to be appreciative, rather than just spending or not spending money.

My issue with TOW is that the price per model is okay, but I'm forced into buying models in quantities that I don't want. I don't want to deal with the hassle of selling the stuff I don't want on the secondary market, so I just don't buy any at all.

The stuff I want to get is MTO as well, and I can't be arsed with that.

But I heartily agree about the last point - disentangle your emotions from the company and see it as a buy/do not buy choice and move on. Once I started to do that I became much happier and much more relaxed about all of it.

I think it is unrealistic to think GW can keep the whole range in circulation for ever. Trashing a range only a few years after it came out (the Sacrosanct Stormcast?) is weird but if somethings been available for like 20 years then we can't be too upset when they stop making it, and it should be findable on the secondary market without much effort.

 Da Boss wrote:

I think it is unrealistic to think GW can keep the whole range in circulation for ever. Trashing a range only a few years after it came out (the Sacrosanct Stormcast?) is weird but if somethings been available for like 20 years then we can't be too upset when they stop making it, and it should be findable on the secondary market without much effort.

The Stormcast thing is super weird. It seems like its less that these models are gone as getting resculpted with no timeline as to when they'll be available, but the communication behind it is extremely.... inconsiderate?

 LunarSol wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:

I think it is unrealistic to think GW can keep the whole range in circulation for ever. Trashing a range only a few years after it came out (the Sacrosanct Stormcast?) is weird but if somethings been available for like 20 years then we can't be too upset when they stop making it, and it should be findable on the secondary market without much effort.

The Stormcast thing is super weird. It seems like its less that these models are gone as getting resculpted with no timeline as to when they'll be available, but the communication behind it is extremely.... inconsiderate?

I think the problem is that "Age of Sigmar" marketing and management want Stormcast in every single new edition
However Stormcast are not Space marines and GW realises that they can't have 10 chapters of Stormcast and have them actually sell and sustain markets like they can Marines*. So they realise that Stormcast as an army has a finite number of units they can fit into it before it becomes insanely bloated and that translates to finite number of sprue that the sales can justify spending on and sustaining in production.

I'd also argue this is harder for AoS because its inherent structure has fewer tactical slot types and counters. AoS is quite basic in damage and unit types so that doesn't create as many niches you can work with to create varied specialist roles.

It's honestly messy and part of me would love them to be really bold in the next edition and not put stormcast in the box and have two other factions. It's needless to say that AoS has more than enough factions that could do with either a range update or range addition in a big way. If anything they are spoil for choice in factions which would do well with a launch edition update/addition.




*And even with Marines GW marketing has shifted around loads from them being just a few shoulder pads; to whole codex; to expansion codex bolt-ons to the core one etc.

 Jammer87 wrote:
Maybe I'm simplifying this in my head? GW is a business that sells miniatures. People don't usually buy the same miniatures over and over again. I bought a land raider 13 years ago and haven't bought one since. Do you know why I don't need another land raider? Because I already have one and the price has gone up like $20..

GW needs people to buy their miniatures to turn a profit and to keep their shareholders happy. Selling new miniatures is how they pay their artists, various other departments, and how they continue to exist as an entity. They look at the numbers for sales and continue manufacturing the products that sell and discontinue products that don't sell. Why do you think they make so many space marine kits? Because those sell.

Something that many people don't realize is that storage is very expensive. Those giant warehouses cost a ton of money and the longer a product sits in the warehouse the more its return begins to diminish. Large companies like Walmart would "roll-back" prices on products the longer and longer they took to sell due to the cost of the space that product took in their store. Why would I keep a 60in DLP TV in a space that this 55in LCD TV can fit and sell for $200 more?

TLDR: GW has to turn profits to design, produce, and sell the little grey miniatures we all love so much. They also don't have infinite cheap storage to keep every kit ever produced.

I think most consumers of GW products understand that a company that doesn't make a profit eventually goes bust. Most don't object to GW being profitable, in fact I'd like to think that most of us are happy that GW are profitable as it secures their long term future (and our long term enjoyment of the products they make). The issue is that the profit that GW makes is obscene.

GW's financial figures are no secret, they release them every 6 months (it's a requirement of being on the stock market). According to the most recent report GW made £494 million in turnover last year, with a profit of £203 million. That's a return of 41%, after all costs (including model design, distribution, warehousing, maintaining stores, etc...) but before tax (which is a percentage of the profit). Most companies can only dream of maklng such high returns.

To give you an example of how obscene GW's profit is let's assume that GW suddenly slashed their prices by 20%. Let's also assume that their costs would stay as is as a result and sales remained static (they would likely increase with a 20% price cut, assuming GW could keep up with demand, but let's not get into that now). This means their revenue would drop to £395 million. With their costs being £291 million this would leave them with a profit of £104 million, still 26%, which is far healthier than most companies.

Of course GW are under no obligation to make less than an obscene amount of profit. On the other hand GW consumers are allowed to complain about it, especially since that profit is coming at our expense.

El Torro wrote:


Of course GW are under no obligation to make less than an obscene amount of profit. On the other hand GW consumers are allowed to complain about it, especially since that profit is coming at our expense.

You already have the only tool you need if you feel GW profits are obscene, and at your expense - you’re not being forced to participate, nor is it an essential item to survive. You can support different gaming companies, or play no games at all.

No joke on the profits. I went to GWs website and the land raider is $92!!! I remember when they were $45 and that was more than I could afford.

 totalfailure wrote:

El Torro wrote:


Of course GW are under no obligation to make less than an obscene amount of profit. On the other hand GW consumers are allowed to complain about it, especially since that profit is coming at our expense.

You already have the only tool you need if you feel GW profits are obscene, and at your expense - you’re not being forced to participate, nor is it an essential item to survive. You can support different gaming companies, or play no games at all.

Exactly. If you, players, are willing to pay that much, the company would be dumb to ask for less. Supply and demand shape prices, nothing else.

Complaints about pricing make no sense if, at the end of the day, players still pay. (they make even less sense when you realise how much of the product bought is never used and was bought only as a result of marketing, fomo, blind consummerism, impulse etc.)

What we are discussing is ‘planned obsolescence’, it’s a predatory business practice that harms the environment and enables hoarding and compulsive purchasing, and it’s an utterly farcical idea for a collectible tabletop game

lindsay40k wrote:What we are discussing is ‘planned obsolescence’, it’s a predatory business practice that harms the environment and enables hoarding and compulsive purchasing, and it’s an utterly farcical idea for a collectible tabletop game

Planned obsolescence is the one of the worst creations of humanity...


Basically the reason I'll never buy a BMW(2 OR 4 Wheels, i used to work for a Motorrad dealer)