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GW's board games tend to be mediocre and more reliant on production values than game quality, in any event. the value proposition on almost all of them is nostalgia revival or giant premium box of high-quality miniatures or both. you're generally not missing out on some sort of classic you're gonna pull out of the closet again and again, or some entertaining long-term campaign game. if you're eyeballing any WHQ box, i highly recommend Descent LOTD or Gloomhaven/Frosthaven instead. maybe Blackstone is better but Cursed City was a boring slog with too much turn-skipping randomness. this is all setting aside blood bowl, which kinda is a nostalgia game at this point but is also its own thing, and WHU, which is a weird trihybrid but excellent.
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Apr 25, 2024 07:42
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Anyways, its too late now the box is on its way, ill report back to you guys what i think of it when i play it a few times, either ways i got a bunch of very cool 40k minis out of it so im fine either ways.
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Apr 25, 2024 07:56
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Annointed posted:Voidscarred Corsairs never won a major. The glass cannon all or nothing Playstyle tends to flounder when not many rerolls. Okay yeah that does it I'm fully sold on the team. I'm not very good at these games but part of it is that I like having exciting things happen in them more than I like winning, and thus cannot resist big, bold all-in plays that either fail or succeed spectacularly on a single die roll. If Corsairs are conducive to playing like that then I'm definitely getting them. Still, not adding to the pile of shame yet. Gotta do the starter set teams first. Keeping the Kommandos, and I promised a friend who doesn't like to paint that I'd sell him the vet guard when I paint them. This was actually a lie though he's getting them as a birthday gift
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Apr 25, 2024 08:18
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Wow am I glad I fell for FOMO for the WQ: Blackstone game, out of curiosity I went back to amazon to see what the prices are after I bought the last copy, and they're all a hundred dollars more expensive now.
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Apr 25, 2024 10:15
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Al-Saqr posted:Its because GW actually shoots alot of their geese when people call their bluff. People tend to frame this as some grand conspiracy to cause FOMO but it's just a matter of logistics. They have limited production capacity and if they're gonna make more of thing A they need to make less of thing B. Keeping poo poo like Blackstone Fortress in production forever would just mean they made less Space Marine Fornicators, who always sell. GW wants to make money and in their ideal world they would sell everyone as much of everything they want, forever. But that's not possible.
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Apr 25, 2024 11:47
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Geisladisk posted:People tend to frame this as some grand conspiracy to cause FOMO but it's just a matter of logistics. They have limited production capacity and if they're gonna make more of thing A they need to make less of thing B. Keeping poo poo like Blackstone Fortress in production forever would just mean they made less Space Marine Fornicators, who always sell. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, I'm just describing that with GW 'missing out' is an actual possibity when it comes to their side games and limited runs. there's nothing positive or negative about it it just is.
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Apr 25, 2024 11:51
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Geisladisk posted:People tend to frame this as some grand conspiracy to cause FOMO but it's just a matter of logistics. They have limited production capacity and if they're gonna make more of thing A they need to make less of thing B. Keeping poo poo like Blackstone Fortress in production forever would just mean they made less Space Marine Fornicators, who always sell. Games workshop adamantly refuses to increase its capacity to make things, and this is a constant source of pain for its customers. It is at a completely absurd level now, and its decisions to print products that it has to know it cannot support can reasonably be called a conspiracy to take a short-term FOMO profit at the expense of customers who are fooled by the marketing into thinking this will be a viable product line. Yes, it's great they don't outsource all their production to China. But if there's no more room in Nottingham to build a factory, build one somewhere else. Neither the UK nor the US has some crazy shortage of industrial space where you can affordably place a plastic injection molding facility.
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Apr 25, 2024 19:00
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Leperflesh posted:Games workshop adamantly refuses to increase its capacity to make things, and this is a constant source of pain for its customers. It is at a completely absurd level now, and its decisions to print products that it has to know it cannot support can reasonably be called a conspiracy to take a short-term FOMO profit at the expense of customers who are fooled by the marketing into thinking this will be a viable product line. https://www.wargamer.com/warhammer-factory-plans quote:
IIRC there's also rumors about a US based factory.
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Apr 25, 2024 19:08
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I'm not going to accuse GW of making sensible business decisions, but I'm confident they would prefer to simply make more product, sell the product, and make more money. I'd put the lack of capacity down to incompetence long before I'd think GW actually thought any of this out as 12 dimensional business chess.
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Apr 25, 2024 19:16
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I hope they never increase prodcution so i can feel really smug in my dark room looking at my 'soulshackle' kill team box.
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Apr 25, 2024 19:21
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That's great if they can build a new factory. Demand far outstrips capacity right now. Bug Squash posted:I'm not going to accuse GW of making sensible business decisions, but I'm confident they would prefer to simply make more product, sell the product, and make more money. I'd put the lack of capacity down to incompetence long before I'd think GW actually thought any of this out as 12 dimensional business chess. Oh I think that's definitely true, that they'd prefer to just make more stuff. But the company keeps creating new products and product lines despite knowing in advance about their capacity limitations, and then failing to support those new product lines. Predicting demand can be challenging of course, but like... at some point it stops being incompetence and starts being a cynical exploitation of those limitations you know you're going to hit, if nothing else you can use that knowledge to inflate prices, but for example they also limit capacity available to independent retailers in order to keep orders going to their own site and Warhammer stores. Or you can sell a boxed set with the promise of multiple future expansions that will complete the game; that promise helps to sell the starter box, and then you don't actually have to make enough (or any) of those future expansions because you already got the big money up front for the main box and it'll be more profitable to make a new game with a big box than it is to make and sell enough of the expansions that you promised. That kinda thing. We see it the most in the specialist games category, it's much less of a deal for GW's main warhammer 40k line.
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Apr 25, 2024 19:40
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Leperflesh posted:That's great if they can build a new factory. Demand far outstrips capacity right now. GW supports more active product lines now than they ever have. And what does “fail to support” mean?
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Apr 25, 2024 22:08
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I mean actually have things in stock. For example, when Leviathan came out, customers noticed tons of other stuff for other game lines went out of stock for months and months. I also mean keep releasing new material to e.g. complete faction lines for games, although that's less clear to me because I haven't like taken notes on the complaints in this thread over the last two or three years. I have seen them though, people who can't get ahold of the faction they want or it never seems to be out yet. Also just be able to buy a boardgame a year after it came out, not from scalpers. Seems like they're still doing limited release products of that nature? If you google "games workshop out of stock" you can see an endless litany of complaints from all corners of the internet about players who want to buy into a particular faction for a specific game, such as middle earth or necromunda. My own experience recently has been Warhammer Old World. They made a big fanfare, released instantly-sold-out boxed sets, and then have continued to announce new models and kits while the actual rulebook has literally never been in stock in the US, at all. Preorders haven't even been filled. That's not supporting your game line, it's doing poo poo to try and get people to order the new stuff before it, too, is sold out. I get that you can point at production issues as a cause of this but GW of one year ago knew what their production capacity was and still decided to move forward with an Old World product. Which is great! I want that product, specifically! But it's so badly supported today that, for me, it doesn't really even exist... and the meta at my local game store is "nobody will play this because you can't get ahold of it" so there's zero games happening. It's being smothered in the cradle by poor support even while GW sells out every model it bothers to make and continues to advertise new stuff for the game.
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Apr 25, 2024 23:19
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just picked up my first kill team. got some tau pathfinders. they'll slot into a 40k army which is nice but I can practice a bit with them, and figure out the tau scheme I want!
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Apr 25, 2024 23:38
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They do outsource some things, and most of them are in the boardgames. Boardgames have a few limiting reagents; they can only make as many copies as they get rulebooks, boxes, cards, specialty dice, or counters from their external printer. It also sucks that about 70% of GW boxed games are low-key model releases with a nominal game. This is junk like the two knights in a box with a pamphlet, not-Gorkamorka, the Kill Team cult and Inquisition release, betrayal at calth, etc etc. You end up with serious games being lumped in with the "it doesn't matter people are buying for the toys" attitude. They don't need to reprint the games because 1) people are buying the figures at full price anyway and 2) it means inviting a company other than GW to the trough. The only time you see game reprints is when GW notices eBay resellers making more money than they did.
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Apr 25, 2024 23:53
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Ominous Jazz posted:just picked up my first kill team. got some tau pathfinders. they'll slot into a 40k army which is nice but I can practice a bit with them, and figure out the tau scheme I want! Great! The pathfinder kit is solid, if it's still the onr that was out when I had Tau. And from everything I hear they're in a good place game wise. Working on my own legionaries, one at a time: SkyeAuroline posted:My hands and elbows hurt but I hammered out one of the kill team leaders in a bit over one session (couple coats of the blue last night, rest of the blue and everything else today).
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Apr 26, 2024 00:31
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Leperflesh posted:My own experience recently has been Warhammer Old World. They made a big fanfare, released instantly-sold-out boxed sets, and then have continued to announce new models and kits while the actual rulebook has literally never been in stock in the US, at all. Preorders haven't even been filled. That's not supporting your game line, it's doing poo poo to try and get people to order the new stuff before it, too, is sold out. For OW specifically, the big issue is that they had absolutely zero faith in the game before release. Everything about their release plans just screamed "we think this is DOA and are doing the bare minimum". Releasing only a couple of new models per faction, bundling all of the faction rules into one book, etc. The reality is that there is vastly more interest than they anticipated, so everything has sold out instantly. I wouldn't be surprised if we started seeing more availability in a few months as they allocate more production to it, but that takes a while. In the meantime, the good news is that all the rules are available at https://www.whfb.app/, and there are a million sources for fantasy skeletons, dwarves and elf models that are vastly superior to decrepit old GW sculpts, so there is absolutely no need to give GW any money if you want to play OW.
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Apr 26, 2024 08:45
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From what I've heard, the primary problem has absolutely nothing to do with GW's own production capacity, which has vastly increased in the last handful of years. It is down to unreliable supply chains on printed materials, which is outside of their immediate control. This would seem to be borne out by things like the Warhounds & Dire Wolves for AT/LI having missing terminals in the sealed rules packets, and the print delays for ToW. Contact GW if you have that former issue by the way, they have a list and are going to send replacements when they get their next print run. Lovely Joe Stalin fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Apr 26, 2024 |
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Apr 26, 2024 09:02
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Geisladisk posted:For OW specifically, the big issue is that they had absolutely zero faith in the game before release. Everything about their release plans just screamed "we think this is DOA and are doing the bare minimum". Releasing only a couple of new models per faction, bundling all of the faction rules into one book, etc. If you're describing commercial / Marketing / actual product etc, I think the comment's fair, but the rules and faction design, by all accounts have been crafted to a level just as good as, if not more so, than the mainstay games.
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Apr 26, 2024 10:57
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Lovely Joe Stalin posted:From what I've heard, the primary problem has absolutely nothing to do with GW's own production capacity, which has vastly increased in the last handful of years. It is down to unreliable supply chains on printed materials, which is outside of their immediate control. The printed materials thing is a big factor and tallies with what has been said by ex-GW staff, like that merch/non-mini materials guy who spoke to painting phase. It also tallies with GW seeming to retreat from what might have been an experiment manufacturing minis in China, where they made/make the AoS endless spells and some terrain pieces. That being said, there clearly is a bottleneck in GW’s own manufacturing. It’s pretty apparent from the lengthy gaps in availability for plastic minis which don’t have any associated printed materials, notably around the build up times for stuff like Leviathan. Granted that could be an issue with boxes and packaging but not sure if those are similarly affected by these issues? And regardless, they’ve been willing to share in blank boxes anyway.
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Apr 26, 2024 11:41
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The printed materials being more of a bottleneck than the plastic also makes sense if you consider the Hachette subscription magazines that seem to run almost constantly and box loads of them appear in newsagents every week at sometimes deep discounts.
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Apr 26, 2024 12:13
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hoiyes posted:I would absolutely dispute this at least as far as the rules and game design go. The fact that the "legacy armies" as just as well-rounded and play tested out of the box, suggests a level of care from the designers way beyond meh. Yes, what I'm saying is that the rules are great, but that the penny pushers thought it would flop so they devoted minimal resources to manufacturing and designing new miniatures.
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Apr 26, 2024 12:17
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SkyeAuroline posted:Great! The pathfinder kit is solid, if it's still the onr that was out when I had Tau. And from everything I hear they're in a good place game wise. I put them together last night and they were pretty easy and look neat. it came with a decal book so i guess i'll finally learn how to put decals on.
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Apr 26, 2024 13:13
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Geisladisk posted:For OW specifically, the big issue is that they had absolutely zero faith in the game before release. Everything about their release plans just screamed "we think this is DOA and are doing the bare minimum". Releasing only a couple of new models per faction, bundling all of the faction rules into one book, etc. The reality is that there is vastly more interest than they anticipated, so everything has sold out instantly. this one is more mundane incompetence. they had a ton of TOW product in north america get ruined in transit, and it has backed everything up.
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Apr 26, 2024 14:54
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Geisladisk posted:Yes, what I'm saying is that the rules are great, but that the penny pushers thought it would flop so they devoted minimal resources to manufacturing and designing new miniatures. I think you are grossly underestimating the amount of effort that went into restoration of the older moulds and masters, and hilariously underestimating the cost of trying to range refresh nine armies. Primarily using the old plastics is probably the only thing that made the project practical to attempt.
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Apr 26, 2024 15:07
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i think a lot of people are just reading their pre-existing feelings about GW into this TOW mess
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Apr 26, 2024 15:40
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Lovely Joe Stalin posted:I think you are grossly underestimating the amount of effort that went into restoration of the older moulds and masters, and hilariously underestimating the cost of trying to range refresh nine armies. Primarily using the old plastics is probably the only thing that made the project practical to attempt. Possibly? To be clear I never expected them to fully refresh everything, and I have no idea how much work if any it is to restore a mold. But I expected more than "a hero and maybe a unit" for each army. My main barometer for how low they expected sales to be is the rulebook. It's been impossible to find since release, and the rulebook is like the one thing they can just order as many as they'd like, since it's all third party printers. And you should expect to sell ~1 rulebook per person who gets into it. Cease to Hope posted:i think a lot of people are just reading their pre-existing feelings about GW into this TOW mess My feelings on GW are broadly positive, they make cool things I like but sometimes make dumb business decisions because they're a corporation made up of humans. I also expected OW to flop, so it's not like I'd have been any better.
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Apr 26, 2024 16:06
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i like that they brought back the mummies
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Apr 26, 2024 16:33
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Is the old world a success?
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Apr 26, 2024 16:49
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Al-Saqr posted:Is the old world a success? IMO it's the best version of the Fantasy ruleset there's ever been and the entire old world range (plus anything for AoS that can be used for the legacy armies) has been solidly sold out since it released. So it looks pretty successful, yes 
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Apr 26, 2024 16:53
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Its good that the old world is such a great success, to be honest i expected it to do well because everyone got into warhammer fantasy once Total Warhammer 3 came out, which is ironically the same time GW killed the world lol. They absolutely have to come up with a good AoS game to build on the current worlds audience. I think that is coming soon since the lore of AoS is slowly morphing into something cool and interesting.
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Apr 26, 2024 17:03
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i would not recommend getting into TOW right now unless you have a pre-existing army, or failing that are willing to build an army from third-party or printed models. it's a much greater logistical challenge than 40K or AOS, due to more models and the need to set them up in ranks, ideally on movement trays. plus, the proper TOW models are expensive, even by GW standards. contrary my early fears, the balance seems fine. it hasn't been as heavily tested as 40K or AOS, obviously, but nothing has immediately jumped out balance-wise so far.
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Apr 26, 2024 17:12
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Cease to Hope posted:it's a much greater logistical challenge than 40K or AOS, due to more models and the need to set them up in ranks, ideally on movement trays. plus, the proper TOW models are expensive, even by GW standards. Hello, it's me, the person who decided to play guard in 40K, I'm not seeing the challenge here.
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Apr 26, 2024 17:19
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It definetly needed more testing and polishing, although the core rules are solid. ToW armies actually tend to be smaller than I remember from past editions which is a blessing tbh.
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Apr 26, 2024 17:19
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Cease to Hope posted:i would not recommend getting into TOW right now unless you have a pre-existing army, or failing that are willing to build an army from third-party or printed models. it's a much greater logistical challenge than 40K or AOS, due to more models and the need to set them up in ranks, ideally on movement trays. plus, the proper TOW models are expensive, even by GW standards. dont worry I am not planning on ever getting into TOW, I am full with both normal 40k and possibly trying out AoS next edition. no more space for large commitment board games in my life unless I become a multi-millionare.
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Apr 26, 2024 17:20
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There being a bottleneck with paper/printing is very odd because unlike the super-bespoke plastic molding machine pipeline, games workshop can (and should) outsource printing to any of a wide variety of printers. Other companies making other games don't seem to be having problems getting books printed like this. I kind of circle around in my head on whether it's just incompetence vs. a sort of learned behavior that they lean into. Not explicitly maliciously, but like, "welp nothing to be done" practiced helplessness because, after all, it looks good to report to your boss that your products have sold out instantly, right? It's much easier to spin "sold out really fast" as a positive than it is to convincingly present and defend "we have some unsold inventory on eight out of twelve faction minis and quite a lot extra for two of those factions for this game, but we expected that because not every faction will have equal popularity and it's better to make sure all of our customers can buy what they want than to have shortages." Even though that last approach is what a lot of other companies do to make sure they please customers, and that buys a lot of goodwill. But OK maybe they just can't figure out how to quickly do a second print run of rulebooks (or black library novels, another thing I see lots of people complaining about), even though other book publishers manage that routinely.
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Apr 26, 2024 18:56
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Does GW have shareholders meetings? I wonder why no ones asked them about this.
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Apr 26, 2024 18:57
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They do, but they're one of the very few companies that pay dividends so the holders are generally pretty happy.
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Apr 26, 2024 19:11
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Al-Saqr posted:Does GW have shareholders meetings? I wonder why no ones asked them about this. Yeah they're a public company in the UK, they have annual shareholder calls etc. But major shareholders tend to be index funds and investment companies, they care about the macro picture profit and loss balance sheet stuff, maybe drill down a bit to see how north america sales are going or whatever, and don't tend to care at all about nerds being mad that they still can't buy the models they want for the game that came out last quarter.
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Apr 26, 2024 19:22
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Leperflesh posted:There being a bottleneck with paper/printing is very odd because unlike the super-bespoke plastic molding machine pipeline, games workshop can (and should) outsource printing to any of a wide variety of printers. Other companies making other games don't seem to be having problems getting books printed like this. The last few years have not been kind to UK businesses who import and export, and things are still not un-hosed. Getting printing done outside the UK to come in has become harder, and getting it done in the UK, already the expensive option, has become more so. If that really is the problem GW is running into then presumably it wouldn't just be them, so the printers here wouldn't have a great deal of spare capacity to fit in additional print runs at the size and quality GW asks for. Anyway, I can't say hand on heart this is the problem, just that it's what I've heard from people at the company. And no, it doesn't look good to report to your bosses that you sold out instantly every week, because it's pretty obvious that you are leaving money on the table.
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Apr 26, 2024 19:25
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