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Was that the tournament where the space marine player got to go first, decided to leave his stuff off the table, so the tau player just had his kroot infiltrate the far side of the table for an auto-win? I just love the two people in the back trying to figure out what happens in that situation (hint: this is why almost every other game with an infiltration-style rule is usually limited to outside of the opponent's deployment area)
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Jun 15, 2014 04:25
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S.J. posted:The best thing that could happen to that company is that they fail and get bought by Hasbro. Oh, and April 12, 2015.
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Jun 15, 2014 04:29
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Randalor posted:Was that the tournament where the space marine player got to go first, decided to leave his stuff off the table, so the tau player just had his kroot infiltrate the far side of the table for an auto-win? That's the one. I laugh at it everytime 
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Jun 15, 2014 05:12
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July 4th, 2014 (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 15, 2014 05:25
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Nov 5th, 2015. 
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Jun 15, 2014 11:15
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Not sure how much of a bellweather this is, but Warseer has apparently reversed their moratorium on GW price discussion and the GW death-spiral. (It's been a long time since I've visited their GW forums, but I remember them as huge GW apologists who banned all discussion on these topics.)
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Jun 15, 2014 12:41
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January 1st 2015
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Jun 15, 2014 13:55
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I, for one am, hoping that Fantasy Flight Games would be the eventual purchaser and steward of the GW legacy. They already license enough stuff, and they know a few things about producing miniatures. July 8th 2014 my 40th birthday, just cause.
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Jun 15, 2014 15:05
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Is FFG large enough to get hold of such a monster IP?
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Jun 15, 2014 16:19
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Goast posted:Is FFG large enough to get hold of such a monster IP? Seems very unlikely, they're a small and privately owned company, they wouldn't have the pockets to be involved in an auction - Mattel and Hasbro could outbid them and still be within the margin of error on their annual reports.
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Jun 15, 2014 16:46
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Hasbro's had its fingers burnt on D&D, and Mattel doesn't really care about anyone older than 12. FFG might pick up the properties, but I doubt anyone is going to want the associated manufacturing costs. I could see Games Workshop imploding after dissociating from Citadel Miniatures, leaving Citadel in a position of legal safety. The Warhammer and 40k wargaming licences parachute to FFG (taking some GW suits along) in a pre-arranged contingency (or in a GW firesale). Citadel maintains solvency, gives amnesty to lovely GW execs that FFG didn't want, and then continues to manufacture miniatures for sister-company FFG's exciting line of tabletop wargames. Prices drop something like 10% - 15% across the board because "they're not in the game design business" and suddenly it's totally cool and popular to like
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Jun 15, 2014 17:28
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Any burn Hasbro may or may not have felt from D&D is adequately soothed by MtG 
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Jun 15, 2014 18:36
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GW doesn't have a killer app like that though. MtG's like printing money.
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Jun 15, 2014 19:04
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I'm not any sort of expert or anything but going into the tabletop minis business seems like a thing that's a huge financial roll of the dice. I mean, obviously there are companies that do it successfully, but it seems like most of them got into it by starting out small and slow and then gradually building it up into something bigger and bigger over time as they successfully expanded their market. If someone like WotC were to, for some reason, decide to acquire Games Workshop, going from 0 to 40K seems like it could potentially be a financial sinkhole of massive proportions...infrastructure costs, production costs, game design costs, etc. In theory the audience is already out there but there's no telling how a GW buyout would shake things up. To be honest I'm not really sure what Hasbro would find attractive about buying out GW the way that WotC was attractive due to Magic: the Gathering and D&D just happened to come along for the ride.
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Jun 15, 2014 19:17
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I always assumed that "acquiring GW" would involve directly acquiring ownership of their tooling, facilities, etc., but maybe I'm just naive? 
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Jun 15, 2014 19:33
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Probably, but stuff like that still probably needs maintenance, overhauls, replacements, new molds for new sculpts, there may be all sorts of other costs associated with them as well. Going from "we don't really do much tabletop wargaming-wise" to "we're going to start producing 40K and Warhammer Fantasy" doesn't seem like it'd be a simple endeavor even if you were able to buy out GW to get the ball rolling.
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Jun 15, 2014 19:39
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Which is why it would be tough for someone like FFG, but pretty easy for a big player like Hasbro - they'd be able to absorb transitional costs, and surely they have enough smart people there to recognise a profitable IP and product being horrifically mismanaged.
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Jun 15, 2014 19:47
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One of the problems though is that GW doesn't allow computer games to "replicate the feel" of their table top game. I'm not joking. If GW lost it's IP and it went to someone else, you can bet your rear end there would be a "replicated" pay to play game in 2 years and probably a facebook game as well. There's so much that you can do with that IP computer wise, you could even encourage Miniature sales by having a "point" buy system that gives you points towards getting units in the games. You could set it up so that you get 4 free armies, then have to purchase the other armies, formations, and dataslates. Then with events like Gamesday's etc.. you could release special units into the game only available by going to that event. Hollismason fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Jun 15, 2014 |
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Jun 15, 2014 19:57
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What actually is the "feel" of a GW tabletop game? Being thrown out onto the street for using non-approved paints?
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Jun 15, 2014 21:17
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PP just finished a kickstarter for a video game version of Warmachine. I backed that and I'll be playing it when it comes out. If GW followed MtG:O's method and let players buy online models and then trade them out for real models if they want.
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Jun 15, 2014 21:29
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It could be a reference to "product identity" arguments that occur in legal battles. Since GW can't actually copyright and trademark every word of their ruleset, they have to rely on "this FEELS too much like our product" when they're feeling litigious and then prove it come hell or high water. Chapterhouse was sort of the landmark case for that strategy. The other possibility is that they're being idiots about cross-market stuff in general. They may consider computer games to be in competition with their games rather than an extension of their IP into a separate market; it's a common fallacy in brand marketing to assume that someone who follows your brand follows your brand everywhere, across every vector you make available to the consumer, and to that line of thinking a game that is too much like tabletop warhammer (and, implicitly to their mindset, "better") is directly cutting into model sales. We know they think like this on some level because they've actually referred to Pokemon as a "competitor" to Warhammer (and one that Games Workshop has defeated at that - let that sink in while Pokemon continues to be bigger than it has ever been before, year after year). It's also why they tend to concentrate their focus as a company on fewer and fewer product and game lines and even model lines at a time, because they're thinking that the people who bought the Dawn of War games are all the same market as the people who buy, paint or play with models and they're just "concentrating" it. What they're actually doing is shedding a ton of consumers, but good luck telling them that.
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Jun 15, 2014 21:38
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I'd say something like or very similar to Warhammer Quest they released https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0C3669FD84 I mean , I guess for "feel" they'd need to replicate the phases and it'd be a lot more turned base but if you had no reason to take time to measure etc.. It think the games would be a lot faster. Oh I need to watch the Warmachine thing I didn't know they made that. This is the trailer for the Warmarchine thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmVuJyt8VgU That's kind of awesome. Hollismason fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Jun 15, 2014 |
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Jun 15, 2014 21:39
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moths posted:Not sure how much of a bellweather this is, but Warseer has apparently reversed their moratorium on GW price discussion and the GW death-spiral. I think they've actually had the price discussion thread up for a good while. They also had a thread on the "GW vs. Chapterhouse" lawsuit that was a pretty good source of information on the case, and there's also a thread about GW's poor business practices and what (if anything) they could do to turn things around (with the general consensus being "fire every manager and executive and start over from scratch"). Also from what I can gather, it's the GW defenders/apologists who tend to shitpost the most in those threads. Generally by popping in, dropping a low-effort "LEAVE GW ALONE"-style post, and then bailing when people actually disagree with them. There's very little "LOL more like Game$ Work$hop, amirite"-type stuff that seems to go on there. So yeah, Warseer can most certainly still be terrible at times, but I think they've been off the "everything GW does is wonderful" bandwagon for a while now.
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Jun 15, 2014 21:40
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I really doubt we'll see GW fold, what's more likely is that they basically outsource all of their business to other companies and remain as an entity that mostly is a rights holder and website operator. We'd probably see a price drop once the stuff was in the hands of reasonable people and GW probably wouldn't care because they would be getting to make money basically for free. Sort of like how CCP handled White Wolf, but without the part where CCP actively hated all tabletop products and desperately didn't want to make them.
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Jun 15, 2014 23:15
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El Estrago Bonito posted:I really doubt we'll see GW fold, what's more likely is that they basically outsource all of their business to other companies and remain as an entity that mostly is a rights holder and website operator. We'd probably see a price drop once the stuff was in the hands of reasonable people and GW probably wouldn't care because they would be getting to make money basically for free. Hasn't GW been spending an absolute fortune to do the exact opposite of this, though? I could be wrong but I think at this point the only thing they don't directly make (or supervise the making of) are their paints, and everything else (plastics, sculpting/CAD design, artwork, writing, etc.) is made in the UK under their direct supervision. If that is the case I really don't see them deciding to reverse course on that at this point.
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Jun 15, 2014 23:38
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Two Feet From Bread posted:PP just finished a kickstarter for a video game version of Warmachine. I backed that and I'll be playing it when it comes out. Even warmachine: tactics is not actually a video game version of Warmahordes. There are significant differences between the computer game and the miniatures game. I honestly don't think Warhammer 40k the tabletop game would convert very well to PC and survive. It's not a very good ruleset anyway and if you opened up gameplay to people who weren't already "bought in" to the hobby they would probably savage the hell out of the game and rightly so.
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Jun 15, 2014 23:56
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Sydney Bottocks posted:Hasn't GW been spending an absolute fortune to do the exact opposite of this, though? I could be wrong but I think at this point the only thing they don't directly make (or supervise the making of) are their paints, and everything else (plastics, sculpting/CAD design, artwork, writing, etc.) is made in the UK under their direct supervision. If that is the case I really don't see them deciding to reverse course on that at this point. Nothing in this thread--selling out, firing a shitload of executives, whatever--is something GW will do because they want to. They will do it because--in the extrapolated future that we are all discussing--sooner or later the RMS Games Workshop is going to slip under the water and at that point it's just a choice of which lifeboat they're climbing in.
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Jun 16, 2014 00:05
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moths posted:Not sure how much of a bellweather this is, but Warseer has apparently reversed their moratorium on GW price discussion and the GW death-spiral. drat, that second guy's analysis is kind of nonsense, but it's especially jarring to see just how much he apparently hates Spelljammer and blames it for TSR failing. EverettLO fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Jun 16, 2014 |
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Jun 16, 2014 01:08
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Anybody who hates Spelljammer is probably some kind of rear end in a top hat.
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Jun 16, 2014 06:16
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Panzeh posted:I honestly don't think Warhammer 40k the tabletop game would convert very well to PC and survive. I would play the poo poo out of an augmented reality version of the game, where I set up my table, an overseas opponent does likewise, and then our armies are beamed to each other, complete with digital overlays for ranges, templates, dice. Someone just needs to make AR tech better.
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Jun 16, 2014 06:55
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Becuase i have like, no idea about how the economics of a company like GW are supposed to work, Im never too sure about how seriously we should believe chat about their imminent demise. I mean, according to their financial reports, they consistently make profits right? Wouldn't there have to be an extended period of losses before they went belly up? My main beef with GW at the moment is that they've become such a conservative, risk averse outfit. All they've been doing for the last 10 years is endlessly regurgitate what Andy Chambers and Rick Priestly came up with in the early 90s. The last new game they produced was Deadfleet, which I remember being jazzed about as they were finally doing something different. OK, so it was a bit of a flop, poo poo happens, but it seems to have scared them off trying out new ideas.
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Jun 16, 2014 07:21
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BeigeJacket posted:Becuase i have like, no idea about how the economics of a company like GW are supposed to work, Im never too sure about how seriously we should believe chat about their imminent demise. I mean, according to their financial reports, they consistently make profits right? Wouldn't there have to be an extended period of losses before they went belly up? According to their last financial report, GW's profits have apparently seriously begun to stagnate, instead of growing. GW's biggest danger was always reaching a price point that was just too much for their customer base to bear. In the past they have covered for this by routinely increasing their prices, which made it look like they were still moving tons of product and making tons of cash, but which actually just meant that they were selling less stuff but at a higher price (which in turn meant that their profits weren't actually growing as much as they ought to have been, because if they were truly growing and expanding then they would potentially have made even more money while staying at a lesser price point. I think. ). The problem with that strategy is that when even the diehards eventually decide that "enough is enough", nothing they can do short of dropping prices is going to bring people back, and GW's painted themselves into a corner to where they actually can't lower prices because their operating costs won't bear it. And they can't cut costs elsewhere because they've already done that, too. There's a lot of deckchair rearranging (see: the revised website) and general desperation and panic (see: rushing 7th edition out) going on, because they have to do something to keep the stockholders from panic dumping their stock, but from all indications they are rapidly running out of options, and if 7th edition isn't selling as well as they want it to, then that's probably when the real bloodletting is going to begin. So basically, GW's poised to well and truly hoist themselves on their own petard, and it's really just a matter of "when", not "if", at this point. BeigeJacket posted:My main beef with GW at the moment is that they've become such a conservative, risk averse outfit. All they've been doing for the last 10 years is endlessly regurgitate what Andy Chambers and Rick Priestly came up with in the early 90s. The last new game they produced was Deadfleet, which I remember being jazzed about as they were finally doing something different. OK, so it was a bit of a flop, poo poo happens, but it seems to have scared them off trying out new ideas. Well, it's the same thing you see with a lot of Hollywood studios, really. Once you get to a certain level, the people in charge become averse to risk, because they (sensibly) don't want to sink a lot of money into something that might be a colossal flop. However, in a lot of cases what ends up happening is instead of refining and expanding upon what does work, they just keep rehashing it and hoping that people will keep buying the same old formula, just packaged slightly differently. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. There was a video series on YouTube by this South African guy (Colour of the Gods, I think is his channel) where he reviewed the various editions of 40k from Rogue Trader up to 3rd edition, and he then skipped over 4th and 5th on the way to reviewing 6th. His basic point was that 40k became what we know it as today when 3rd edition hit, and that there was no real need to review 4th or 5th because they (and 6th) are all just 3rd edition repackaged with a bit more gloss and sheen. I tend to agree with him for the most part, though I still prefer 3rd edition as it was the edition I got into the game with (I prefer 3rd edition-era fluff, as well; even though it was where the game became truly Grim Darkness, there were still the odd twinkles of humor here and there, and at least the fluff wasn't the horrible nonsense that Mat Ward seems content to poo poo out on a regular basis. But I digress ).
Sydney Bottocks fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Jun 16, 2014 |
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Jun 16, 2014 08:09
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They've been consistently making profits, but only growing at inflation rate while the rest of the industry is booming (analysts reckon 10-15% annual growth for the last 5 years). Prices have been going up well above inflation rate but profits have remained steady, therefore less sales. The limited edition of their flagship game with a print run of 2000 has still not sold out a month after release, while the previous limited edition of the game with a print run of 6000 sold out within hours of release. The last half-year report showed a drop in profits (not a drop in revenue mind) of 10% YOY which is very significant and their share price dropped 23% after the release. While no-one knows for absolute definite, all signs point to an exodus of customers. Since GWs prices and business model are sustained by simply being the biggest company, this is a huge problem. At some point the tipping point will be hit where people struggle to get games in, so why pay GWs prices for awfully lovely rules when you can get other companies stuff for 1/4 of the price? This has happened in some regions (Australia reportedly has now collapsed for GW with a small time manufacturer outselling them 7:1) but the question is whether this is in the process of happening globally. Remember that TSR were healthy right up until the minute that they weren't and the collapse was very, very fast.
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Jun 16, 2014 08:25
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The thing to understand is that, to all outside appearances, GW is not (and has not been for a long time) about making miniatures and games. Oh, making miniatures gets involved at some point, don't get me wrong, but what GW is actually about is forging a worldwide retail empire and making the lines on the graph go up uP UP for all of the executives and shareholders. That's why you're going to see the circular firing squad starting up long before their ability to pop out plastic sprues and put them in boxes is actually endangered per se.
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Jun 16, 2014 08:34
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^^^^^^^^ When is their next financial report due? I've sometimes thought (based on nothing solid whatsoever) that eventually they'll get rid of most of the retail chain, bar a few flagship stores in the city. It really is kind of weird how such a niche hobby has dedicated shops devoted to just selling their product and nothing else. Not sure of what the situation is in the US, but in England most mid-size market towns have their own GW. The amount they're paying in overheads for this lot must be huge.
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Jun 16, 2014 08:37
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BeigeJacket posted:^^^^^^^^ Next report is due end of July. The retail chain is a business model that worked in the 80s and 90s and if there's one thing that has contributed to their current predicament as much as their prices, it's the inability of the executives to build a 21st century business. A lot of people (me included) think that the retail chain is what will kill them. At least if they didn't have a retail chain then they could just limp along and shrink down to a minor player in wargaming, but if their profit dips below a certain level then their leases will land them in debt the same as TSRs failed print runs.
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Jun 16, 2014 08:52
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In the UK, despite what people claim, the retail stores pay for themselves. The losses of one covered by the profits of another. Its why they went full on for the one man/out of shopping centre stores. Minimum cost, maximum profits as their overheads were so low, even the lower amount of business would result in more profit. A lot of GW's recent growth in the UK has been from the middle class parent market who want their teenagers off of consoles and are happy to bankroll it, combined with the returning twenty somethings who have decently paying jobs and their continuing customer base. Now Games Workshop isn't seen as a fashionable parenting trend any more they've lost a lot of their new customer base. GW upper management tend to go through two cycles. The 'recruitment' cycle, where managers are hired and fired based not on their ability to hit targets, but on their ability to grow their customer base. People were fired for continually missing their recruitment targets (x amount of intro games per week, x amount of starter box sets) even if they hit their financial targets as this was seen as a short sighted way of running their business. You can only bleed your existing customers for so long, and by the end of their time, most managers werent hitting their financial target if they weren't doing their recruitment. Upper management never talk about money during their national meetings and instead promote and focus on getting new customers. The 2nd cycle is 'Money money money'. Managers are hired and fired based on hitting that money cycle, its all that's spoken about as the company is in trouble. From talking to people the last time it was this evident was after the LoTR crash, and it didnt make it better. It was only the switch to the other style of management that the company began to recover. Then the gradual switch from that to the £££ style and the company has again gone off a cliff. I am very interested to see these new financials and how they're presented to the shareholders. You cannot hide that 7th edition has gone poorly and has in fact done more to harm the business than not releasing it.
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Jun 16, 2014 12:00
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BeigeJacket posted:Becuase i have like, no idea about how the economics of a company like GW are supposed to work, Im never too sure about how seriously we should believe chat about their imminent demise. I mean, according to their financial reports, they consistently make profits right? Wouldn't there have to be an extended period of losses before they went belly up? Dreadfleet could have been really cool but it had some huge flaws that crippled it from the beginning. First it was basically a two player board game (not a "war" game) that cost $100. For people that like board games, you want to have it be something that your group can play, especially if you are sinking twice the going rate of what other companies are changing. Games Workshop hasn't been in the board game market for years other than the Space Hulk release, so hoping in with a super overpriced product and expecting it to sell was really arrogant although I doubt that had anything to do with Dreadfleet's poor numbers. It didn't even have that much stuff in it to really justify the huge cost. Second they came out and said that they would NEVER expand on it. A lot of guys that I knew were interested in what might have been Man o' War 2.0 or some hint that specialist games weren't 100% dead but when a gaming company makes it really clear that you are supposed to buy a product and then not bother them about it ever again it loses a lot of its luster.
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Jun 16, 2014 12:44
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I remember when I first heard about Dreadfleet, my interest was initially piqued because I thought GW might finally be dipping their toes back into the Specialist Games waters. Then I discovered that it was basically a glorified boardgame and that you could only use the stuff in it to play through the game's specific scenarios, and that there would be no expansions or additional units or whatever for it, and I basically went "welp". 
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Jun 16, 2014 13:38
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Daedleh posted:The last half-year report showed a drop in profits (not a drop in revenue mind) of 10% YOY which is very significant and their share price dropped 23% after the release. GW's revenue dropped over 7 million British Monies compared to the same time last year. In fact, GW had almost a 25% straight drop in everything across the board except for IP. That went up from 0.4 to 1.0 million British Monies. Then they blamed the independent retailed for the drop. GW is pretty comically evil. GW's fiscal year ended on the 1st on June. It ends on the Sunday of the firt full week in June. So they had about 10 days of 7e revenue before it all started counting towards FY '15. They ruined any hope of 7e saving them for FY 14. They should have released it on the 30th to collect all the pre-order monies as actual revenue and then use the pre-order amount as a smoke screen for the next report. Now, they have to include a full week and talk about how sales are expected to decline off that low number because that's the historical trend. It is almost as if GW is trying to lower their stock price in preparation for a hostile takeover that is being orchestrated from the inside. 
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Jun 16, 2014 16:16
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