The LAF Games Workshop Discussion Thread

[Rhoderic]

After painting my 3 Retributors I came to the decision that there was absolutely no way someone the age of 12 to 15 could paint these minis.

I'm Rhoderic's cynicism, but I don't believe the business strategists at GW have the slightest care for whether 12-15 year olds can paint the miniatures. What matters is that they will purchase the miniatures, believing they can paint them.

Oh, to think of all the ludicrous hardsell bullshit I was roped into investing myself in, aged 12-15.

When you look at the new stuff coming out of GW, which is made in very high detail and hard impact plastic, they have only one business model which is viable: high price, low volume.

Not buying it. Just... not buying it. Sorry.

I don't get why people say that GW is aiming for the 12 - 15 years old.
While I don't regularly visit gaming stores, I never saw any kids hanging there.
Most of the customers or gamers were people ranging from their mid 20's to their 40's.

The only kid I saw was a little boy who was playing army men with some Dust Tactics models on a display table while his dad was browsing around.

That's completely the opposite of my experience with official GW stores (Stockholm, Edinburgh and Dublin). Third-party gaming stores that don't exclusively sell GW products have an older clientele, for sure.

[Ray Rivers]

Not buying it. Just... not buying it. Sorry.

Do you have an education in business?

Are you currently running your own business?

Just wondering...

[Mr Brown]

To distil a business model down to 'high price, low volume' doesn't work. Furthermore, calling out someone who says they don't buy that statement and question their ability to judge based on business education is the wrong way to go about it.

Businesses all over, not just commercial retail (let alone wargaming), are having to rethink traditional 'business models' as the markets are moving and diversifying faster than it takes to sit an MBA these days. There are a multitude of options open to GW. They are pursuing these through IP farming to the likes of FFG and through computer games.

Will we all agree on things? No. Never. But then that's the point of having a forum for discussion. It get's pretty boring if you are reading through a topic of hundreds of pages with everyone singing from teh same hymn sheet.

[Rhoderic]

Do you have an education in business?

Are you currently running your own business?

Just wondering...

I have university education in business, yes.

More to the point, though, I have experience in being a GW fanboi in my youth, and socialising with others of my kind. Boy, did they have me good. I was the sort of blind follower that genuinely tried to convince other people to only buy GW products and eschew all those "shabby" substitute miniatures from all those "dishonourable" third-party manufacturers, just like GW had brainwashed me to. I didn't get into the hobby until shortly before turning 16 (that coincided with GW making a big push into the Nordic countries, before which they didn't have as much presence or visibility here) but I have no doubt that as a 12-15 year old I would have made sure to acquire the AoS box at any cost whatsoever to my parents, had it existed and been on my radar back then. It's that kind of product. 12-15 year old boys desire it.

[Ray Rivers]

I have university education in business, yes.

More to the point, though, I have experience in being a GW fanboi in my youth, and socialising with others of my kind. Boy, did they have me good. I was the sort of blind follower that genuinely tried to convince other people to only buy GW products and eschew all those "shabby" substitute miniatures from all those "dishonourable" third-party manufacturers, just like GW had brainwashed me to. I didn't get into the hobby until shortly before turning 16 (that coincided with GW making a big push into the Nordic countries, before which they didn't have as much presence or visibility here) but I have no doubt that as a 12-15 year old I would have made sure to acquire the AoS box at any cost whatsoever to my parents, had it existed and been on my radar back then. It's that kind of product. 12-15 year old boys desire it.

Cool, then you should realize those days are gone.

The closest GW store to me is in Valencia.

https://www.facebook.com/GWValencia/timeline?ref=page_internal

Check out their photo page. These folks know how to seriously paint miniatures.

And given your business education then you should know about business strategies and exactly what GW is doing... not basing your opinion on childhood experience.

[Rhoderic]

Yeah... but no. I don't really see why it is I should realise those days are gone. AoS strikes me as being like a worst-case-scenario extrapolation of the direction GW was headed 15 years ago. More over-the-top splendiferousness, more turgid doomsday romanticism, more pay-to-win shenanigans, more "proprietary" product tie-ins (as with the terrain pieces that come with their own special rules). Less depth, less composure, less grace. Children and young teenagers gobble that stuff up.

But I dunno... maybe the hobby culture is different in continental Europe, especially southern Europe. All those boutique games coming out of Spain, France and to a lesser extent Germany seem to be coming out of a miniature gaming culture that isn't like the one I'm accustomed to (but to be clear, I'm generally very positive to the boutique games and the culture they come from). A culture where, possibly, it's more common for adults to play and collect contemporary (non-"Oldhammer") GW games and give them the same "ultra-polished" treatment they give Infinity and all the rest of those games. That's not my experience of the Swedish scene, and I suspect the scene in the Anglosphere is more like the Swedish scene than the southern European one, though I can't claim that for sure. I don't know whether you're native to Southern Europe or not, so I can't speak to what "hobby culture" you come from, but the GW Valencia Facebook page does give me the impression of a culture where GW is held in higher regard among adults than it is here or in the Anglosphere. If so, that's neither better nor worse. Just different.

[Vermis]

All this talk about GW's business practices since, well, GW first started , makes me wish we could experience a parallel dimension where GW actually had no share holders and just did what it's fans liked and suggested... I wonder if it would still be around today, as the colossus that it still is. Every week, someone proclaims the nearby end of GW because of their supposedly bad business practices.
It seems to me that sometimes, people forget that a company's primary goal and reason of existing is to be profitable and make money, which doesn't necessarily mean pleasing people who think they are the customer's base. I heard before that GW relies more on young gamers who got suckered into the "GW hobby" than the old-time gamers who already have a lot of GW stuff and only buy the occasional blister or rulebook.
What if most people don't like how GW runs it's business, but they are still doing the right thing from a business perspective (that includes the long-term)?

And people have been saying that GW is, like, a business you guys, and they're doing the right thing, for almost as long.

But things are starting to happen. GW's sales have been slipping for years - that's a concrete fact. Not ex-GW-fanboys or old grognards having a moan - verifiable fact from the financial reports. No, they're not going to curl up and die just yet, but unless they can arrest the trend it's not going to go well for them.

What's less concrete is why it's happening. I don't know if GW has to inform it's investors about that*, but in any case the info is not forthcoming because Tom Kirby has publically and blatantly bragged that they do no market research. (And single-handedly brought the word 'otiose' roaring into the consciousness of the gaming market)
The most of what's left to us armchair CEOs is anecdotal data from the interwebz and even the 'meta' of their games. From watching fanboy-central forums like Warseer and Dakka for years, my own take is that people still generally like the background and models, but quit because of the prices and the unbalancing rules churn. They (arguably we) are the customer base, but they didn't cut themselves off, not without a push.
And yet GW kept upping the prices, and churning the rules, and increasing the purchase requirements for their games, as the sales kept dropping. And then shops started closing, or turning into one-man stores, to save costs. And then the spiels from the higher levels about selling models to 'collectors' rather than 'gamers'; and how GW's customers will buy anything that GW sells (that's the point of the hobby, after all); and blaming poor performance on everything from an LotR bubble that popped years before, to the £4 million for a new webshop paid to Kirby's wife, to the value of the pound, to the American legal system (the swine...) started appearing. And then they not only messed up the balance but ripped out the structure of their games. Especially when WFB apparently started selling so poorly - during random-rules giant-armies £3.50-witch-elves 8th ed - that they burnt it down and set up AoS in it's place.

And yet this game is by all accounts failing on it's arse. The apparent 12-15 demographic, which should be attracted to a game full of enormous shiny/spiky he-men and based around grabbing whatever earth-shakingly powerful set of special rules you like, isn't buying it. The alternative demographic of older 'collectors' isn't buying it. GW took the last popular elements - the background, the minis that represented that background, and the block manoeuvre game - and nuked them. Suddenly an awful lot of 'collectors' aren't that interested in the shiny new models to collect. Weird that, huh?

Jings Cherno. I shouldn't even have to type all this out. Most of it isn't new news - it's old stuff that's been chewed over many times before. And there's more I could post too. With all of that, with all the disregard, misunderstanding, alienation and contempt of customers and what so many of them actually want, and the resulting slide down the sales slope... do you really think it's some subtle, ingenious and long-term master plan that us plebs can't comprehend?

As opposed to a set of basic business blunders that would make even a bunch of The Apprentice candidates cringe?

*I only have a B or a C in AS Business Studies, Ray, and can't remember most of it. Does it still count?

[FramFramson]

Does anyone actually have sale figures for Age of Sigmar stuff?

I've heard some folks say it was selling well, others say it's doing terribly, but haven't seen anything convincing cited.

[FionaWhite]

Does anyone actually have sale figures for Age of Sigmar stuff?

I've heard some folks say it was selling well, others say it's doing terribly, but haven't seen anything convincing cited.

I've been led to believe it flopped badly and is the reason GW's been coughing out plastic Horus Heresy and the recent promises of Specialist Games coming back in order to fix their financial report for the year's end.

[grant]

I've heard too it was an immense disaster. What the hell were they thinking? Warhammer was at least a game, of armies, and has immense history. Age of Sigmar looks like Tonka toys for kids who are too uncoordinated to hold 28mm models. Just. Awful.

Even old Warhammer armies have lost a lot of appeal I think as one now needs to find like minded souls to play 8th or earlier games.

Who knows though? For me, Age of Sigmar even killed every last bit of nostalgia I had. That's really saying something. Used to be I would at least buy the rules, or wander in to check out the latest Warhammer edition. Not any more ...

[FramFramson]

Found this post on belloflostsouls which seems to hint that it is a flop, though they too are finding real data hard to come by. http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2015/09/rage-of-sigmar-what-the-heck-is-going-on.html

Most instructive is the linked Warseer thread where pretty much every respondent says no one is playing it. Granted, there could be a reporting bias in that, but it's the best we've got in the absence of genuine hard data.

I also saw a few points mentioned elsewhere:

- Fantasy armies are going for dirt cheap on ebay (easy enough to verify)
- Google searches for "Age of Sigmar" are way down (also easy to verify)
- The Google play store reports only 10k downloads for the app

But who knows.

[beefcake]

Fantasy armies dirt cheap you say... Time for some browsing.

[Gibby]

There are computer games set in the Old World that are proving very popular, and now GW cannot cash in on the overspill of people who think "Oh, I want to play the tabletop version again." Idiocy. I loved the Old World so much growing up, and still did very much (until the giant cartoony World of Warcraft-ish aesthetic got too much) before they killed it off.

[3 fingers]

I bought the AOS set for my boy for  Christmas as he was showing an interest,tbh I think they would make better space marines ,lol
I think warhammer miniatures have gone way over the top,maybe it's nostalgia but I prefer the older rogue trader 40k orks and the earlier warhammer stuff
The island of blood skaven don't look bad in online pics ive never held any in my hand to verify that.

[Cubs]

But Oldhammer is going from strength to strength!

So that's good news.

It's also good if you want to buy up old miniatures because the various trading sites (not necessarily eBay) are shifting a lot of old miniatures for very affordable prices. I spend a lot of time idly browsing on the Oldhammer Trading page on FB (and occasionally picking up the odd pretty thing) and the average price is around £3-ish per model. No-one's on there to make a killing and there's a lot of helpful people (some of them the GW 'originals') who can help you source stuff that you're having trouble finding.