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From what I saw of the Kickstarter, the Fimir warriors (that I don't think GW even uses anymore) were replaced with something, and instead of Chaos Warriors they had 'Primal Chaos Warriors' which would have a different model, I assume. So it looks like they were already going to do that.
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Dec 2, 2013 05:39
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From what I understand of the situation, is that they had removed everything related to GW, but they were still trying to cash in on Heroquest name (and considering the 400k raised in the first day, they were succeeding at that) and Moon Design wanted to cover their asses in the legal quagmire that is HeroQuest's trademark rights. Honestly, all it probably would have taken was Gamezone emailing Hasbro's legal department asking for permission and everything would have been fine.
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Dec 2, 2013 18:05
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unseenlibrarian posted:"Heroquest" as a name for Glorantha stuff goes back to well before the Milton-Bradley game, being advertised in the back of the original Runequest as a future supplement in '77-78 or so. Yeah this is something I didn't know, and it really clears things up in my mind. Glorantha already was using Heroquest (although they may not have registered it as a trademark) when Milton Bradley did HeroQuest in partnership with GW. So, most likely, the Glorantha people already had an understanding (possibly a paid license agreement, possibly just an agreement not to tread on each other's toes) regarding the HeroQuest name, when MB published HQ. So now Moon Design is basically saying, OK, you can piggyback on that old agreement, if you can prove that MB has given you permission to do so. Gamezone obviously hasn't got that, so Moon Design is obligated to protect their own trademark, which by extension also protects MB. Halloween Jack posted:I haven't played MB's Heroquest since I was a kid. Even if somebody published a Labyrinth Lord style clone of it, isn't there some Warhammer setting stuff they'd have to excise? Gamezone isn't even re-using the classic rules (although they could, since a rules system isn't copyrightable) and they've at least appeared to go to a lot of trouble to make new sculpts, write new lore, and otherwise avoid any copyright issues. The only real question appears to be the trademark, not any copyright stuff (although of course none of us have actually seen the rule book, so we can't be certain of that). FMguru posted:Gamezone tried to raise a half-million dollars to re-print a game they didn't have the rights to and release it under a name that someone else had the trademark to. Some things in IP law are tricky, murky, or stupidly unjust; this is none of those things. I think Gamezone thought they were safe, because they are in Spain and their kickstarter was denominated in Canadian dollars. Plainly they were not advised by a lawyer (or a US lawyer at least) that they were exposing Kickstarter, an American company, to liability by using them to raise money for their product. I think if Gamezone ran their funding campaign on a website run by a company based in Spain, they'd be OK.
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Dec 2, 2013 19:53
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Leperflesh posted:I think if Gamezone ran their funding campaign on a website run by a company based in Spain, they'd be OK. I imagine there would still be an issue if they were marketing and selling to Americans, even if the funding website was based outside of America. It might be harder to stop, but I don't imagine you can ignore American trademarks just by shipping products to American consumers from outside of America.
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Dec 3, 2013 00:58
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Sefer posted:I imagine there would still be an issue if they were marketing and selling to Americans, even if the funding website was based outside of America. It might be harder to stop, but I don't imagine you can ignore American trademarks just by shipping products to American consumers from outside of America. There has to be a limit. Merely being "on the internet" can't be enough; if it were, it'd be effectively impossible to use a legal trademark in any other country that conflicted with a US-only trademark. I am not a lawyer, though, that's just my opinion, based on looking at a few trademark cases, studying IP law, and some basic instruction when I was in school about IP law (as a technical writer, it's relevant to my career).
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Dec 3, 2013 01:06
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So Games Workshop lost 25% of its stock value in one day. This is a few days old at this point but I guess we'll have some perspective on this. I'll give this insight: it's been a few days and the stock is not recovering, but isn't exactly in freefall either. Thoughts? e: http://masterminis.blogspot.de/2014/01/the-future-of-games-days-games.html (this is more funny than it is impartial and informative)
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Jan 17, 2014 22:13
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I and a friend were just talking about the new Games Workshop store in the area, and how we had no interest in buying anything there. 
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Jan 17, 2014 22:55
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It's not really "new store", is it? You can't play there or do much and there's just one employee in every new store. They're more like GW kiosks.
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Jan 17, 2014 23:03
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Well, much the same is true of my favorite nerd shop (three employees, no game space), so I wouldn't rate a store on those facts alone. But the fact you can't special order minis at a Games Workshop store is a real problem. It's bizarre.
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Jan 17, 2014 23:08
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The market is reacting to a significant drop in sales. I think it makes sense. GW doesn't have a major software release to provide a big hunk of supplemental revenue, like they did in 2011 with Space Marine. They don't have a major new release of paints, which provided a big shot of revenue in 2012. They pushed hard with the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit franchise, which has not proven to be a big popular game. And they're late in the Warhammer Fantasy release, so there's not a lot of excitement there. The only big thing for 2013 has been the new core rules for Warhammer 40k, and that hasn't been enough to counteract all those other things. I doubt the execs at Games Workshop are all that worried (yet). They know what new product releases they're working on right now, and the company itself is accustomed to working on a multi-year timeframe for projects rather than a quarterly timeframe to please the stockholders. That said, the company definitely has made a number of unpopular decisions in the last couple of years, including shutting down their specialist games, putting the squeeze on independent retailers, and reducing staff at their stores. Prices are up, some of the more recent army releases have been lackluster, and they're getting more competition from other tabletop wargames than they've had in the past couple of decades. I think it's far too early to count out GW though. They've had revenue swings like this in the past, and they've had a remarkable ability to hang on to their market leadership (particularly in the UK).
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Jan 18, 2014 00:12
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Also, they're charging $50 for 100-page codices. They seem to give zero fucks about attracting new blood at this point.
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Jan 18, 2014 02:22
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Most of the foot traffic I've seen of people not entirely entrenched in the hobby is people seeing cool stuff, seeing the prices, and then immediately leaving. Seeing them push ~$85 big boy kits and groups of 10 models for $35 when you need 30-40 of them per unit has pretty much priced me out of updating my dwarf army when it comes out, especially with the incredibly lackluster rules as of late. "Getting your feet wet in the hobby" now involves buying a rulebook and a codex, which is ~$135, plus something like ~$200 worth of models. That's around $300 to just try out the game. edit: Pretty happy that they stopped supporting the Specialist Games, though. At least for Mordheim, the fans took over and have a pretty good community constantly churning out decently balanced lists 
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Jan 18, 2014 03:19
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Yeah, hobbies like this tend to take a bit of a hit in a global depression. Most gamers probably aren't starving, but Warhammer and its derivatives are pretty significant investments of time and income that parents probably aren't willing to pay for and 20-somethings can't really afford. I mean it'd definitely be the first thing I'd cut from my budget if I were still wargaming. It seems like GW is reacting to a shrinking hobby the same way the anime industry in Japan has responded to the slow decline of it fandom. Namely: sell incredibly marked up merchandise to an increasing niche and fanatical subset of fans, bleed them for all they're worth, and gently caress it if anyone else actually joins it. It's not really sustainable in the long run.
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Jan 18, 2014 05:41
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For the past few years, I've been hearing that GW is trying to get kids/teenagers to come in, drop $500 of their parent's money, and drop the hobby 6 months later.
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Jan 18, 2014 06:27
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GW's model is not built on having people play their games for a long time, instead they are constantly trying to get new customers with little mind towards retaining old ones. I don't think this is the end of GW but I do think that as more and more other miniatures games get popular, and the companies that run them provide better service and equally cool minis for a lower price, that GW is going to lose its status as top dog and be more one of the "big 3" instead. At our store Warmahordes is far more popular than both Warhammer and 40K combined, and we can't be the only ones.
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Jan 18, 2014 07:23
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Ego Trip posted:For the past few years, I've been hearing that GW is trying to get kids/teenagers to come in, drop $500 of their parent's money, and drop the hobby 6 months later. Sarx posted:GW's model is not built on having people play their games for a long time, instead they are constantly trying to get new customers with little mind towards retaining old ones. This is essentially correct. Games Workshop's primary focus, beyond leveraging its IP, is in attracting new, young players with plenty of their parents' money to burn, milking them for all they can get away with, and then when those young customers get older and discover beer, weed, and girls they move on to the next batch. Some of those customers remain customers but GW largely doesn't give a poo poo about them at that point, anything they spend as a "diehard fan" is gravy. Now there's a lot to be said for targeting newer, younger customers, especially in this hobby. If you look at comics, at anime, or at tabletop roleplaying games one of the things you'll find is that these industries A). are heavily invested in catering to an aging and often unpleasant fanbase (as Asimo notes) and B). are slowly but steadily shrinking. Reaching out to new blood is a good thing...it's a great thing, really. But the problem is that Games Workshop steadily increases their prices on a constant basis to the point where it acts as a barrier to casual interest and, more cynically, since their business model is largely predicated on squeezing as much money out of their customers as they can before discarding them and moving on to the next batch they don't seem to care all that much about the quality of the games that go along with all the expensive miniatures that they sell. Also Games Workshop has a reputation as a bunch of litigious, unpleasant assholes who do poo poo like re-release beloved games in tiny, limited quantities while completely cancelling others, and while I highly doubt that the ire of gamers could ever be directly responsible for a 25% dip in a company's stock price if you take all of that together plus the rise in cheaper, better-quality miniatures games offerings with friendlier customer support and fan outreach (Warmachine/Hordes, Infinity, etc.), this honestly strikes me as the inevitable consequence of constantly demanding that your fans pay more and more for less and less.
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Jan 18, 2014 08:33
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They're also in the great position of actively making their games worse for the sake of selling more miniatures, which means they only really have traction with experienced hobbyists because they've been around for a while and people will pretty much play anything uncritically for nostalgia's sake in the TT wargame/elfgame industry.Business Gorillas posted:"Getting your feet wet in the hobby" now involves buying a rulebook and a codex, which is ~$135, plus something like ~$200 worth of models. That's around $300 to just try out the game. "Getting your feet wet in the hobby" involves finding a skirmish-scale game and dropping maybe $100 tops on models for it. GW games are not "the hobby," even though they're the public face of it for a lot of people. Really, GW being bought out by Hasbro (not going to happen) or the entire management being fired and replaced with people who aren't the stupidest, most short-sighted business managers is the best thing that could possibly happen to the tabletop wargaming industry at this point.
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Jan 18, 2014 10:42
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Lemon Curdistan posted:"Getting your feet wet in the hobby" involves finding a skirmish-scale game and dropping maybe $100 tops on models for it. GW games are not "the hobby," even though they're the public face of it for a lot of people. Of course they aren't the hobby, but like you say they're the face of it to a lot of people and they have a large retail presence that other companies lack or can't afford. So when the face of the hobby is demanding that you drop $200-$300 to play Beef Marines With Chainsaws versus Space Lobsters it's not surprising that they might be experiencing some financial difficulties because if little Timmy really wants to carve up aliens with a chainsword then for that kind of money he can cajole his parents into buying him a new video game console and get all the simulated carnage he wants without having to dick around with paints, glue, and the smell of unwashed neckbeard.
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Jan 18, 2014 10:58
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I do think that a large part of GW's shrinking market share is the rules to their game though. They've always balanced through constant power creep meaning that if your faction doesn't have a current edition codex than its not good. They clearly don't care to have a balanced and competitive game. That's fine but Magic has shown us how having a "pro" scene can really help drive sales of your game and other games are following that model. When people go from Magic or Board Games to minis games and I give them a demo of booth 40K and Warmachine at their request, they almost always comment on how the rules feel way more strategic in Warmachine. Then when they see the much smaller entry price it is hard to sell savvy gamers on GW product, which is probably why their market strategy focuses on children rather than discerning consumers and doesn't care that they leave once the children mature to be discerning. Its a shame because a lot of their models are incredible looking, but short of a total rethinking of their rules and marketing, I can't picture myself ever playing a GW game at this point.
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Jan 18, 2014 12:06
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Magic's a go-to example for "how to successfully manage a hugely profitable tabletop game," comparing 40K to M:tG is like night and day. The Magic designers frequently post extremely transparent articles concerning the design and playtesting process that goes into each new block, they put significant amounts of thought into the creation of new sets and mechanics and how they might interact with established rules, they maintain and sponser several levels of sanctioned tournaments from constructed pro-level stuff all the way down to "show up and draft for a lark," starter sets for Magic are both easily affordable and give you everything you need to sit down and start playing, and while a Magic habit can be expensive buying a handful of booster packs is still leagues more affordable than feeding a minis habit. Also the M:tG division of WotC maintains good relations with their fanbase. Really though, we could probably fill the next couple of pages listing all the various reasons why GW stock just took a kick in the chin. Maybe it's the way they keep finding new and inventive ways to gently caress over retailers, maybe it's their obnoxious litigious streak, maybe it's Finecast being garbage, maybe it's their poor game design and attendant lack of care, maybe it's their constant price raising, etc.
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Jan 18, 2014 12:26
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Sarx posted:Its a shame because a lot of their models are incredible looking, but short of a total rethinking of their rules and marketing, I can't picture myself ever playing a GW game at this point. Specialist Games and Warhammer Historicals always struck me as GW's Bell Labs where the actual innovation happened. I can't point to specific examples anymore, but I distinctly remember seeing good Warhammer (or 40k) mechanics that I could recognize from their debut in the "minor leagues." As 40k grew, it's encouraged larger and larger armies while doing very little to facilitate playing those armies. My breaking point was when Apocalypse came out without any means to abbreviate turn length. You'd expect some stats to be consolidated, squads' fire to be consolidated into a firepower table, rules for movement trays, or anything that would make the game play more like Epic. And instead it was just "Dump all your toys on the table and play a game built for a fraction of them."
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Jan 18, 2014 14:47
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One of the big things now is that GW's community outreach is small and shrinking. I've seen several reports of how Games Day events are run for profit/have to make their cost back, no longer give out even T-shirts to attendees and don't even have space for people to play games. Golden Demon has been deemphasized, too. I never went to a Games Day event as a kid. I didn't live with the means or in the right country. But y'know what kept me going for a few years in the hobby? The cool poo poo that went down on Games Day. The tournament reports (ha ha remember Games Workshop organizing play for their game?) and Golden Demon looked really cool. There was a real sense that the company played games and encouraged people to play their games. Games Day as I hear of it now is a chance to pay fifty euros or its equivalent in order to get to the Forge World counters and receive the privilege of buying product... at retail price. No game tables. No live painting demonstrations (GD Germany did those but there might not be another German GD sponsored by GW at all). No early release deals or any deals of any kind. And the painting competition has gotten a lot of flak for basically being a downplayed thing, with display models being placed under yellow halogen bulbs that distort the paint jobs and the event being over in an hour or so. And in line with all of this, attendance is way, way down. GW doesn't really care about building or maintaining a community. They think that those will manage just fine on their own and that they can treadmill the youngsters forever. The communities that do stick around end up being poisoned against the company. (But hey that's okay so long as they're buying product right?!?!?!? No, it isn't). So yeah, it really is an economic miracle that something like this didn't happen sooner.
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Jan 18, 2014 15:04
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I originally played 40k in the mid-90s, when you resolved things model-by-model, terminators had armor saves of 3+ on 2d6, and vehicle armor penetration was resolved with the full range of dice used to play D&D (even the d20). When some friends got into 5th edition, I tried out the starter set and was overjoyed by the special rules you could fit on a single sheet of paper, the baseline-seeming competence of space marines compared to the up-close toughness of the orks, and especially the squad-based resolution. Then some of us bought armies other than space marines, while one of the guys got into Blood Angels when their codex came out.  What a cluster gently caress. I got into Imperial Guard. 
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Jan 18, 2014 15:44
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I'm worried that this is rapidly turning into a "let's describe in detail all the failings of GW" discussion, which isn't actually very interesting. People have been exhaustively describing the failings of GW for at least twenty years now, and for most of that time, I've kind of quietly been raising my hand and saying "yes, but: look at the numbers, they're still profitable, their revenues grow year by year, their stockholders must be happy." Now we have a very significant drop in stock price, but as someone who pays attention to the markets, I understand that it's extremely premature to start writing Games Workshop's epitaph. Moreover, I don't really see anything that folks have listed that are that different from poo poo GW's been pulling for decades. Treating customers badly, constantly raising prices, and terribly-balanced games with game-breaking rule changes and updates, are all things they've been doing routinely for a very, very long time, and yet they managed to grow as a company fairly steadily for all of that time. I think it's too easy to just accept the poor 6-month performance numbers as proof of what's been said all along (GW are money-grubbing assholes who don't care about their own gamers, or even their own games). I suspect that the real answer is a lot less of a satisfactory confirmation of what gamer nerds have been saying about GW forever, and actually that is has a lot more to do with the ugly, complicated, and dry details of operating a multinational consumer goods manufacturing company. Excess costs, structural issues, a lull in the release cycle, an unexpectedly unpopular product line, and you get a slump. Let's wait and see what the next report shows. Not as much fun, maybe, but GW has a long, long history of minor setbacks followed by resurgent performance. Sometimes they make products that mostly flop (Hobbit/Lord of the Rings tabletop), sometimes they make products that are both highly successful and highly profitable (the new line of Citadel paints, the Space Marine computer game).
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Jan 19, 2014 07:33
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Leperflesh posted:Moreover, I don't really see anything that folks have listed that are that different from poo poo GW's been pulling for decades. Treating customers badly, constantly raising prices, and terribly-balanced games with game-breaking rule changes and updates, are all things they've been doing routinely for a very, very long time, and yet they managed to grow as a company fairly steadily for all of that time. I don't think anyone's saying that GW has necessarily gotten much worse. The problem is that for the last decade they've had more and more competition and those companies aren't making the same mistakes GW has been.
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Jan 19, 2014 08:35
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Since GW makes more money in the UK than any other market, I'd be interested in hearing from Britgoons about how much market presence those competetors have over there. Most of the posters on SA are American and so we tend to have a skewed perception of GW's success (or failure) compared to their core market.
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Jan 19, 2014 08:38
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Sarx posted:I don't think anyone's saying that GW has necessarily gotten much worse. The problem is that for the last decade they've had more and more competition and those companies aren't making the same mistakes GW has been. Also, if I'm reading and understanding things correctly, this bad financial news comes at a point where GW has A)done a ton of cost-cutting measures already, and B)had a release of their most popular product line (Space Marines). I could be wrong, but if the Space Marines didn't boost their sales and they've already cut a ton of costs as it is, what can they do next to fix things? That's what seems to have a lot of people kind of thinking that this report isn't just the usual "GW's having a bit of a financial bump in the road, but they'll rebound like always" sort of thing that's happened in the past, but an indicator of something a bit more dire. Time will tell, I suppose. Leperflesh posted:Since GW makes more money in the UK than any other market, I'd be interested in hearing from Britgoons about how much market presence those competetors have over there. I forget where I read it, but someone made what I thought was a very good point about how GW apparently seems to think the rest of the gaming world is similar to that of the UK (i.e., fan-run gaming clubs/groups providing the social aspect, instead of people gaming at their FLGS where they might also be exposed to competing non-GW products), which the author felt might help lead to understanding why GW has taken the approach it's been taking in recent years (even down to Jervis' columns in WD; which from what I have read elsewhere, tend to be viewed as completely out of touch with modern-day views on tabletop games and how they are played, not just elsewhere in the world but even within the UK itself).
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Jan 19, 2014 08:55
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There's all kinds of elements as to why Space Marines are so popular and get people into the game. When I started playing 40k two editions ago, the choice to start with Marines was easy. I needed to buy the smallest amount of models to get a playable army and they were the easiest to paint so as to look good with a limited palette. That was literally it, that's the clincher. And it's remained true for years, and although this is all anecdotal it's still the top reason a lot of people I know pick them (and these days the Grey Knights) as their intro army. They have been an economical way to get into the game in comparison with other choices in time and money. I'm pretty sure GW doesn't really recognize this; I used to think they did, but I'm not so sure anymore because the price point, already high, has reached the point where the old Marines aren't occupying that sweet intro-level spot of juvenile masculine fantasy mixed with comparatively low entry bars. So if the new Marines didn't boost sales, I am not surprised. They have creeped towards being too expensive, GW hasn't done a whole lot to get people into the game lately, and there's now a new "minimum entry" army occupying their old position. That's before I even consider how we're still in a recession and all and how there's lots of competition these days. That price point is worth expanding on further. I did a little price comparison today: I compared the price of GW models and Mantic Games introductory level army deals for Kings of War. The two games are similar in many respects, share a development history, use the same base sizes and in some cases are pretty much just serial numbers away from being published by the other company. This army deal of 135 dwarf figures goes for 99 pounds: Translated roughly into GW unit pricing (with Cold One cavalry subbing in for the nonexistent dwarf GW cav), it came to around 300 pounds for the sane content, not including the fact that the Mantic army deal has the army book and rulebook for Kings of War included. This 179 model deal for undead models for 99 pounds eclipses 400 pounds in equivalent GW models. That's five hundred if you include the price of the rules needed to play. Does that seem sane to anyone? One game offers a full playable army for the price the other charges just to buy the rulebooks needed to play. The main difference between the two games is visibility in the marketplace, and that's rapidly changing in Mantic's favor in the wake of its successful kickstarter campaigns for Deadzone and Dreadball. Whether or not the GW stock drop heralds change, change is coming whether GW is ready for it or not.
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Jan 19, 2014 09:20
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Does GW even have an "entry-level" game outside of filling out a full army? Or have they discarded the very idea entirely?
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Jan 19, 2014 09:34
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Does GW even have an "entry-level" game outside of filling out a full army? Or have they discarded the very idea entirely? Buy a starter set. Leperflesh posted:Since GW makes more money in the UK than any other market, I'd be interested in hearing from Britgoons about how much market presence those competetors have over there. Piss-all. The only time you see any other wargame systems on offer is at FLGSs or online, and not even at some FLGSs. I've never seen a Warmahordes box in person, and GW has a store in most towns.
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Jan 19, 2014 09:42
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I often give thanks that GW was never able to isolate the market in the US the way they did in the UK.
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Jan 19, 2014 09:47
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thespaceinvader posted:Buy a starter set. Which is weird as a bunch of the UK-based YouTube types are always hyping up various other games systems (Flames of War, Bolt Action, Infinity, Mantic's stuff, even WM/H). Is it just that they are more "order from the Internet"-driven sales for the UK gamers that do play them? Or do most UK gamers really just not bother with anything outside of GW? Just curious here, the last time I was in the UK was in 2003, when GW was still pretty much the only game in town (literally and figuratively), and when the stores had more than one person working at 'em (the store manager at the GW I visited at the time told me I had an open invitation to come back and get a game in against him the next time I was over, if I wanted to bring my Blood Angels with me. Sadly I never got the chance to head back over there for that game ).
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Jan 19, 2014 09:50
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I've lived in the UK for years, a few years of which I got into playing 40k with Imperial Guard  . The last time I was there was in 2012, and for the most part there really was no other visible miniature product lines. It was beginning to change though, with the local board game cafe having their own sort of sub-store catering to a lot of different miniature systems. Outside of that, most FLGS I had been in would have a smattering of other British games (Firestorm Armada, etc.), maybe some random fantasy miniatures for RPGs in a forlorn corner that nobody ever went to. The shop I went to the most always seemed to have all manner of strange miniature boxed sets gathering dust with big sale stickers on them.GW, on the other hand, had a pretty sizeable presence between a dedicated University society for it, and a shop in what must be one of the highest rent shopping areas smack dab in the middle of the tourist area. It seemed to have pretty decent foot traffic, if only because of the sheer volume of people passing each day. I interviewed for a position on the corporate side of GW, probably in...oh, 2010? They brought me down to Nottingham, and I had some interviews with HR and such regarding market and business analysis and my degree/experience in Econometrics. It was kind of a depressing experience for a number of reasons, because there are a lot of people there who are on the ball- but just as many with an extremely myopic view and seemed allergic to change. I, fortunately, didn't end up getting the job and went on to do something more interesting. Its going to take a fairly large shakeup upstairs to get things back on track.
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Jan 19, 2014 10:28
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Sydney Bottocks posted:Which is weird as a bunch of the UK-based YouTube types are always hyping up various other games systems (Flames of War, Bolt Action, Infinity, Mantic's stuff, even WM/H). Is it just that they are more "order from the Internet"-driven sales for the UK gamers that do play them? Or do most UK gamers really just not bother with anything outside of GW? Just curious here, the last time I was in the UK was in 2003, when GW was still pretty much the only game in town (literally and figuratively), and when the stores had more than one person working at 'em (the store manager at the GW I visited at the time told me I had an open invitation to come back and get a game in against him the next time I was over, if I wanted to bring my Blood Angels with me. Sadly I never got the chance to head back over there for that game I know for Warmahordes this past year's World Team Championships were a pretty big deal and included mostly teams from Europe so there's obviously a player base there but I bet they do largely online shopping.
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Jan 19, 2014 10:32
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I've certainly seen enough similar threads to not give GW the ten-count yet. But! But this thing with the codices seems really different. It's just absolutely incredible to see any non-special edition game book priced at $0.50 per page.
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Jan 19, 2014 11:07
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Gravy Train Robber posted:I interviewed for a position on the corporate side of GW, probably in...oh, 2010? They brought me down to Nottingham, and I had some interviews with HR and such regarding market and business analysis and my degree/experience in Econometrics. It was kind of a depressing experience for a number of reasons, because there are a lot of people there who are on the ball- but just as many with an extremely myopic view and seemed allergic to change. I, fortunately, didn't end up getting the job and went on to do something more interesting. Its going to take a fairly large shakeup upstairs to get things back on track. That's really the impression I get when I read stuff about whatever latest  -type changes GW is making, too. I read something on one of the gaming forums (I think it might have been Dakka but not sure) where someone made what I thought was a pretty good point, after the inevitable "GW should never have gone public, all the shareholders care about is maximizing profit" lament went up. The poster's basic gist was that nobody says this about (say) Amazon. Why? Because the people that run Amazon apparently know how to properly manage a publicly traded company: by maintaining the balance between ensuring customer satisfaction and repeat business, expansion and growth of the business, and doing these things in such a way to ensure the company makes enough money to keep the shareholders happy. Whereas GW's management is either unwilling or unable to figure out how to properly balance these things, and as a result they have been seeing a shrinking customer base over time, and what appears to be a reduction of their company's footprint across the globe (rather than an expansion, as one might expect of a successful, growing company). They seem to have managed the "keeping shareholders happy" part, mostly by raising the prices of their products (which is probably a measure intended to counteract the decline in customer base. It is also a measure that seems to have finally reached its' breaking point, if GW's recent financial report is any kind of early indicator of things to come). The poster also commented that if GW had remained privately held (or somehow became privately held once again), it wouldn't necessarily mean a return to the good old days, because it would be even harder to shift bad management out than it currently is (although I'm frankly surprised GW's shareholders haven't moved to oust GW's upper management by now). Plague of Hats posted:I've certainly seen enough similar threads to not give GW the ten-count yet. But! But this thing with the codices seems really different. It's just absolutely incredible to see any non-special edition game book priced at $0.50 per page. I agree that time will tell. I just think a lot of people are in the mindset of "where does GW go from here" (as I mentioned in an earlier post), given that they have already slashed costs pretty much to the bone, and also given that the recent Space Marines release apparently did nothing to help boost sales. It's particularly troubling with the latter; I seem to recall reading once that the Space Marines by themselves generated more sales for GW than all the other 40k armies (and maybe WHFB, too) put together. If people are now starting to lose interest in keeping up with GW's flagship army for whatever reason, I would think it can't bode well for the rest of their business, at least not in the near future anyways. Also I agree with you on the codices. Something definitely has to give there, considering that the production costs for those massive hardback tomes have to be pretty drat high, to where a lot of them have to be sold in order to make back their costs (on a related note, I seem to remember reading that the recent Tyranids book is possibly not selling quite as well as GW might have hoped, but not 100% sure on that). I'm honestly surprised nobody at GW has managed to figure out that since they already pay for Internet and electricity for their existing webstore servers and whatnot, that all they'd need to do is expand their storage a bit, convert all their existing rules and army books into e-books, and sell them directly. Even at half the price of the current hardback books, I'd have to think that would be almost pure profit on their end (and maybe they could keep some softcover versions of the books in stock, for those that prefer a paper copy; those can't be as expensive to print and ship as the hardback books, I would think). Sydney Bottocks fucked around with this message at 11:38 on Jan 19, 2014 |
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Jan 19, 2014 11:33
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I'm pretty sure this doesn't spell THE DOOM OF GAMES WORKSHOP but a 25% dip in stock value isn't the sort of thing you brush off as just a minor hiccup either. Something, somewhere along the line, hosed up.
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Jan 19, 2014 11:37
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thespaceinvader posted:Buy a starter set. In the last 12 months I've been into half a dozen FLGSs across the UK; they all stock WM/H, and they have at least the same amount of shelf space devoted to it as they do to GW products. Some don't even bother to stock Warhammer/40K.
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Jan 19, 2014 11:41
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Fair enough. I'll be the first to admit my experience of them is probably more limited than most. I'm pretty sure GW is the only company to have their own brand stores in the UK, certainly the only company to have them particularly prevalent.
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Jan 19, 2014 12:18
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Leperflesh posted:Since GW makes more money in the UK than any other market, I'd be interested in hearing from Britgoons about how much market presence those competetors have over there. My FLGS has warmahordes in as well as 40k. It's main business is comics and board games (with the latter getting steadily bigger in the UK). No space to play in there though. Other stores in the UK carry far more range with a few dedicated wargame stores around. GW is pretty ubiquitous on high streets across the country so certainly has the most awareness and ease of pickup though.
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Jan 19, 2014 14:34
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