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Hopefully this hostile takeover involves marines from the Hasbro chapter drop podding into GW headquarters and purging everything inside.
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Jun 16, 2014 16:28
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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? The big thing is that GW is hiding a lot of their losses behind things like staff cuts, price spikes, and a lot of other short-term growth strategies. None of it is sustainable, and the fact that it's not even that profitable is notable. Many, many companies across a bunch of industries often fall into a trap like this.
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Jun 16, 2014 18:14
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Pyrolocutus posted:Hopefully this hostile takeover involves marines from the Hasbro chapter drop podding into GW headquarters and purging everything inside. "Do not ask, 'Why kill the shareholder?' Rather ask, 'Why not?'" @Serious Gaylord, your infoposts are really interesting, thanks for contributing them to this and other threads 
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Jun 16, 2014 20:59
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JerryLee posted:"Do not ask, 'Why kill the shareholder?' Rather ask, 'Why not?'" Its interesting to note that GW went through their biggest growth in a decade due to the influence of Mark Wells. He switched them from the money focus that so nearly ruined the company after the LoTR bubble died. The managers of that time talk about how the positivity he would bring to their presentations and the focus on getting more customers = more money was a change that really worked. He brought in the often derided, but very effective 10 commandments of customer service which turned average people into result getting sales staff. He is blamed for the rapid price increases and the cuts, but from talking to people the only things he promoted was a cut to the waste. When he came in GW was a bloated company, full of staff that had been there for a decade+ and didnt really have a specific job role. They were just, you know, there. Thats Jim, he kind of does a bit of accounts, a bit of graphic design etc. They had to go. He's the reason the part timer budget was slashed as it was not effective to have 4 people managers see once a week, and instead they got 2 they saw 5 days a week. Better training, better accountability. The price increases were driven by Kirby. He wanted to put GW products firmly into that premium market. 'Premium Product for a Premium Price' was a statement often coming from his mouth. Other wargames were not competition for Games Workshop, as Games Workshop were not in that market any more. No-one else makes Games Workshop miniatures after all. (This is something he really said.) Mark Wells left, and GW went into a spiral of pushing limited edition, premium (wonder where this came from?) price products. Rapid price increases and cuts to services and necessary staff have been used to mask the drop in customer base. (Which to be fair, is not 100% down to GW's doings. Hobbies have cycles with parents, a few more years and it will be fashionable again.) You now have a situation where upper management dont mention the 10 commandments of customer service. They dont talk about recruitment. They dont care that you ran 400 intro games in one week and sold 100 dark vengeance starter boxes. They only care that those were your only customers and you're still 2 grand shy of your target for the week. They're deeply entrenched in the short term and its going to take a big wake up call to slap them out of it. They're also losing staff hand over fist. They're at an almost 40% turnover rate for store managers in the UK, and the people they're bringing in are often from outside of the company. For nearly a decade they've operated a trainee manager program, and these guys have almost all been let go. People that have been working in Games Workshop stores, entrenched in their culture. All gone unless they were lucky enough to be placed in one of the central 'cover' stores. Their replacements are picked for their sales driven ability. Thrown into these one man stores and given 3 months to get the store back on target. Which is impossible if you just chase money. They're deep deep deep into the poo poo, and its not looking good.
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Jun 17, 2014 10:21
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I don't really want GW to fail (I mean, I would like them to start being a good company, yes) but if they do fail I really hope someone writes like a huge tome covering the whole 40-year history of the company and how it went to poo poo (a nerdy The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, if you will).
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Jun 17, 2014 15:10
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serious gaylord posted:Mark Wells So if I'm parsing this correctly, Kirby's been around forever but it's only been since Wells left and Kirby replaced him as CEO that Kirby was free to steer the company towards the ground without opposition? I mean, I'm pretty sure that GW hiking their prices faster than inflation has been a thing since before Jan 2013 when Wells, but there's definitely been some acceleration going on in the past year and a half, so I could see that as being the result of the removal of the last major moderating influence?
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Jun 18, 2014 05:26
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Kirby
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Wells always moderated the price increases. Before he left you got one a year, in June. It averaged out to 4% across the board. This was also the stores financial targets at the time, as the price rise essentially gave them 4% for free if everyone that bought something last year, came in and bought the same thing, so they were targeted with 'Make more than 4%'. Now while you got weird outliers like the Orc boyz and Empire State troops box halving in content but not halving in price, they were, for GW, pretty reasonable. At the end of his tenure was when you started to get the ludicrous £50 for a monster that used to be £36, and after he left everything took a leap up. Everyone blames Mark Wells for the price increase culture at GW, but I wonder if it was the opposite and he was the calming influence on Kirby?
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Jun 18, 2014 08:32
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I remember the soldiers of the Empire regiment was the first multi-part plastic kit they released and it had either 16 or 20 soldiers in it. When it came out in 1998(?) it was $20. At the time, that was an amazing deal. The current equivalent unit is $35 and before it replaced the old one, I believe that one was going for $35 as well.
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Jun 18, 2014 10:00
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20th October 2014 rolling with room mates birthday for inevitable collapse
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Jun 22, 2014 06:18
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Don't they have to release their financial situation later in July? I'm highly doubtful that there will be a increase in stock prices. Anyone got any info on that. I reallllly want Hasbro to buy Gamesworkshop. I mean yeah it'd suck kind of but I see how they handled MTG and such which has been still going pretty strong from what I understand. Not saying their a savior of the company but christ they'd at least try and aim the plane for a empty field or something.
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Jun 22, 2014 07:31
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COmpare and contrast what happened with MtG with what happened with D&D and say that  . D&D's a much more analogous property, I think.
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Jun 22, 2014 07:36
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What with investors being given more say in the company's affairs and the raising of the dividend I'd believe if the company was currently being taken over, laden with debt to pay for them and then to be abandoned while its properties are divided up among shareholders. Except the company is just so bad that they'd manage that on their own anyway. e: I mean they seriously claim dividends are only paid surplus to their needs as a company, if you believe that right now you're a bigger idiot than GW management. Rulebook Heavily fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Jun 22, 2014 |
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Jun 22, 2014 07:44
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thespaceinvader posted:COmpare and contrast what happened with MtG with what happened with D&D and say that Yeah, Hasbro would not make WH worse because that would be pretty hard for anyone to do without deliberately trying, but they're not absolute saints. Magic is obviously their golden child, but even there a lot of the stuff they've had to do to get it to its current on-paper success has been a mixed blessing, depending on who you ask. The D&D case is another instructive one, where in their attempt to fix some issues with their product they threw a lot of babies out with the bathwater and ended up creating an edition war. But this isn't the thread for goonsaying about Hasbro properties, really. There are a number of outfits that I'd trust to take up the reins of making trademarked miniatures (Reaper, PP, Mantic) and/or rules for miniatures (PP, Mantic) but I doubt any of them has the spare cash to buy GW at its current "value," nor is it really clear that they'd want to rather than just keeping doing their own thing. Is there any plausible scenario where most of the shareholders and executives bail out and GW gets left to keep making games in a financially humbled but still functional state? Or would it pretty much get pulled to shreds in any scenario that doesn't involve it getting sold off in one piece?
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Jun 22, 2014 07:58
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I think that in a hypothetical situation where Hasbro buys up GW (regardless of whether they're shoved under the WotC umbrella or kept as a separate, distinct entity under Hasbro), they would most likely lower the costs of the various kits, and also would push to get them in as many FLGS as possible. Beyond that, anything else (rules, fluff, approach to things like tournaments, whether or not they would keep both WHFB and 40k around, etc.) is completely up in the air under this hypothetical scenario. As others have said, for all the things Hasbro/WotC have done right with M:TG, there are several things they got wrong with D&D that could easily go just as wrong with WHFB/40k whatever. That said, I definitely agree that it would be pretty difficult at this point to do any worse than GW is already doing. 
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Jun 22, 2014 08:41
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I'd be interested to see if Games Workshops took on D&D and MtG.
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Jun 22, 2014 11:12
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WAR FOOT posted:I'd be interested to see if Games Workshops took on D&D and MtG. Release it, and then claim it never existed, remove it from their website, and sue anyone discussing or developing additional material for it.
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Jun 22, 2014 12:44
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JerryLee posted:Yeah, Hasbro would not make WH worse because that would be pretty hard for anyone to do without deliberately trying, but they're not absolute saints. Magic is obviously their golden child, but even there a lot of the stuff they've had to do to get it to its current on-paper success has been a mixed blessing, depending on who you ask. The D&D case is another instructive one, where in their attempt to fix some issues with their product they threw a lot of babies out with the bathwater and ended up creating an edition war. I'm not sure how much of that is Hasbro and how much of it is Wizards of the Coast though. Wizards has its own execs that will make decisions about the D&D brands, and they owned it before being acquired by Hasbro. They're certainly capable of making bad decisions about a brand or hiring brand managers without Hasbro, like every other company. Hasbro being chiefly responsible when it's really unlikely they actually have anything to do with say, game design at best puts Wizards on a pedastal they don't deserve (and makes the odd assumption that they aren't also a company and also interested in the exact same outcomes as Hasbro) and at works shows a kind of remarkable ignorance in the way businesses work. They way people talk about businesses in the game industry always makes me wonder how many of them have white collar jobs. That said, I do think that any GW acquisition by Wizards would be more likely to follow the DnD path than the MtG path, but Wizards could "save" the game by deciding it wanted to promote a tournament environment, which isn't really possible with DnD. Taking that seriously leads to a whole host of benefits for the community and the rule design.
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Jun 22, 2014 12:49
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But don't you realise that catering to tournaments by balancing the game and writing clear, concise rules is somehow bad for casual play?
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Jun 22, 2014 13:33
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Wow, I'm really surprised that many of you believe that not only did WOTC do badly with D&D, but also planned the edition war and subsequent fallout more than the brilliant marketing team at Paizo and Lisa Stevens did.
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Jun 22, 2014 13:45
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Chill la Chill posted:Wow, I'm really surprised that many of you believe that not only did WOTC do badly with D&D, but also planned the edition war and subsequent fallout more than the brilliant marketing team at Paizo and Lisa Stevens did. Pathfinder's current success is the result of Wizards deciding to discontinue the Dragon and Dungeon magazines and replace them with DnD Insider, which last I checked, isn't a product people are gushing about. Those editors and writers had to find some way to put all that 3.5e experience to work. TheChirurgeon fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Jun 22, 2014 |
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Jun 22, 2014 14:24
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I didn't realize that edition-specific experience was a thing. I would've thought it was only a grognard thing and at best a general game design/theory and general editing thing. I don't read the DND and PF threads but I do read the grogs.txt thread and most of it seems to be people reading too much into ICv2 and cherry picking sales data. E: anyway I won't continue this derail. I was just surprised cuz it seems to be a regular grog mantra by now.
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Jun 22, 2014 15:05
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The actual reason has less to do with Dungeon/Dragon, although that was a motivator, and more to do with Paizo having a warehouse full of printed adventure material for 3.5 ready to hit the shelves when 4e hit. They were at that point just dipping their toes into the whole "adventure path" thing. So they had to get rid of the warehouse of stuff AND keep themselves afloat after losing the exclusive magazine contract, and that's how they engineered a brand based entirely off not being another brand.
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Jun 22, 2014 15:09
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Daedleh posted:But don't you realise that catering to tournaments by balancing the game and writing clear, concise rules is somehow bad for casual play? In my experience (more with Historicals though) is that the guys loudest about "casual" play are the biggest WAAC-type players out there. But rather than being WAAC with a highly optimized and points efficient army they know everything about by virtue of lots of play-testing, these guys want to be able to exploit poorly written, vague and unbalanced rules to bully and selectively-rule's lawyer their opponents. Also a lot deliberately making illegal moves in the hopes that you don't notice then pleading ignorance with a side of "its just a game man why you got to be so serious about it?"
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Jun 22, 2014 15:43
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Rulebook Heavily posted:The actual reason has less to do with Dungeon/Dragon, although that was a motivator, and more to do with Paizo having a warehouse full of printed adventure material for 3.5 ready to hit the shelves when 4e hit. They were at that point just dipping their toes into the whole "adventure path" thing. So what we're in agreement is that somebody competent should make a shell game of continuing the 40k legacy when 8th edition hits next year but actually make good rules instead of piggybacking on terrible rules like Paizo did. Or just resell the same rules to nerds because Paizo showed it could clearly be done with enough grognard activity. End result being the status quo but with increasing share prices (unless Paizo had cheaper stuff but it doesn't look like it). So GW 2008-2013.
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Jun 22, 2014 15:57
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WAR FOOT posted:I'd be interested to see if Games Workshops took on D&D and MtG. I'm sure FFG could handle D&D better than WotC, but Magic couldn't survive becoming an LCG for a lot of reasons.
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Jun 22, 2014 16:03
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Chill la Chill posted:So what we're in agreement is that somebody competent should make a shell game of continuing the 40k legacy when 8th edition hits next year but actually make good rules instead of piggybacking on terrible rules like Paizo did. Or just resell the same rules to nerds because Paizo showed it could clearly be done with enough grognard activity. End result being the status quo but with increasing share prices (unless Paizo had cheaper stuff but it doesn't look like it). So GW 2008-2013. Paizo did have cheaper stuff and was much much better about embracing the pdf boom than WotC was. Around the release of 4th edition was also the time frame when WotC got super paranoid about piracy and removed almost all of its pdfs from retailers for a few years.
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Jun 22, 2014 16:07
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Rulebook Heavily posted:The actual reason has less to do with Dungeon/Dragon, although that was a motivator, and more to do with Paizo having a warehouse full of printed adventure material for 3.5 ready to hit the shelves when 4e hit. They were at that point just dipping their toes into the whole "adventure path" thing. They also milked the gently caress out of the edition war, and were very successful at it.
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Jun 22, 2014 16:49
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Does 7th edition even affect this upcoming financial? I mean worst case scenario GWs stock drops another 20% is that end game? I don't understand stocks, assuming if it drops people get the gently caress rid of it.
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Jun 22, 2014 20:23
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Hollismason posted:Does 7th edition even affect this upcoming financial? IIRC, their previous releases of new editions have fallen after the financial year has ended. This year, 7th edition 40k came out before the financial year ended, and also two years after the previous edition (when the trend had always been to release a new edition roughly every four years or so, give or take a couple years here and there). There's really no doubt that 7th edition was rushed out the door in the hopes that a new version of 40k would spike sales (and, presumably, save what is projected to be a very dire financial report). quote:I mean worst case scenario GWs stock drops another 20% is that end game? It honestly depends on what you define "end game" as. If by that you mean "GW goes bust/is sold/is chopped up and sold off piecemeal", then probably not, no. It'd take a while before they reached that point. On the other hand, if by that you mean "GW's stock falls so much that everyone sells it off in a panic, and then someone buys it all up for cheap and engineers the ouster of current GW management"...well, I'm not a stock market expert, either, but I think that is a possible (though rather far-fetched) scenario.
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Jun 22, 2014 21:14
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Ah okay, what I find baffling is there are actually investment firms that own GW stock, like what the hell how do you sell that to the people that use your company to invest. I'm sure these guys would get out fast if GWs report is garbage. It really does look like 7th was a stop gap to prevent a severely damaging Financial Report.
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Jun 22, 2014 21:18
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GW has reported solid, steady and regular growth for the past 5 years. It's a good investment if you just look at the headline figures. It's only if you're aware of the wider market and how badly GW treats its customers that you start to realise that not everything is as rosy as the headline figures suggest. Even with another 20% drop, the stock will be in far better shape than what it fell to after the LOTR bubble burst.  It would have to drop by more than 40% to reach the initial drop in 2005, and drop by 75% to reach the absolute depths that it reached in 2008. There's a long way to go before GW is dead. How fast that comes about is up for debate since the reasons it's happening this time are very different to the LOTR bubble. Arguably the reasons for the current problems are a lot more systemic, hard to turn around and might result in a much faster drop. If the downward trend is as slow as the LOTR bubble was then it might not be too late to save the ship. There would need to be a lot of severe changes extending far beyond their last response of trimming the fat.
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Jun 22, 2014 21:38
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What is the value being depicted there? Stock price? On that graph, it looks to me as though the 1998 peak mus be the 3rd edition of 40k, and the 2005 peak the 4th edition. I can't tell what the 2013 peak would be, though, or what the much-touted ~25% drop earlier this year was.
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Jun 22, 2014 22:03
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Hollismason posted:Ah okay, what I find baffling is there are actually investment firms that own GW stock, like what the hell how do you sell that to the people that use your company to invest. 7th was only out for 10 days. It was literally a cash grab for preorders and week 1 sales.
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Jun 22, 2014 22:10
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Have the 7th edition special editions sold out yet?
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Jun 22, 2014 22:11
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S.J. posted:Have the 7th edition special editions sold out yet? Not yet, no, still a lot of them left apparently
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Jun 22, 2014 22:19
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What happened in 2000/2001 to cause that massive plunge?
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Jun 22, 2014 22:22
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I bought a lot of old (2006-2009) White Dwarf issues and they made me nostalgic for the better days of the hobby, even though I wasn't into WH back then. It kind of makes me sad that GW has become a cartoony dumb and evil corporation. Anyway, I give them one more year, July 2015 is their end. I don't care, I have my WH armies and my group has already decided to keep playing 8th edition if 9th comes this year/GW goes under.
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Jun 22, 2014 22:26
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Power Player posted:I don't really want GW to fail (I mean, I would like them to start being a good company, yes) but if they do fail I really hope someone writes like a huge tome covering the whole 40-year history of the company and how it went to poo poo (a nerdy The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, if you will).
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Jun 22, 2014 22:57
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radlum posted:I bought a lot of old (2006-2009) White Dwarf issues and they made me nostalgic for the better days of the hobby, even though I wasn't into WH back then. It kind of makes me sad that GW has become a cartoony dumb and evil corporation. When I seriously got into 40k (around the time of 3rd edition, in the early 2000s), both of the stores I used to frequent would sell off old WD issues for like a buck a throw, and many of them were from the mid-late 1990s. I think there were even a couple from around 1993-ish or so. Needless to say, I bought a bunch of 'em. It was really cool as there was plenty of ink given to Specialist Games, fan-submitted stuff, and general goofiness. I remember one issue had a multi-page article by this guy who worked for (I think) WD France, and he basically had a character inspired by the whole "Eternal Champion" thing where he had a version of the same guy throughout all the GW games: 40k, WHFB, Necromunda, etc. There was an article by two WD dudes (one from the US, one from the UK) where they knocked out an entire Catachan army (from assembly to paint) in the two weeks the American guy was in England. And so forth. It was little things like that, that made you feel like GW was a company run by fellow gamers, for fellow gamers. Those days feel like they were a million years ago, now... 
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Jun 22, 2014 23:01
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Sydney Bottocks posted:I think that in a hypothetical situation where Hasbro buys up GW (regardless of whether they're shoved under the WotC umbrella or kept as a separate, distinct entity under Hasbro), they would most likely lower the costs of the various kits, and also would push to get them in as many FLGS as possible. Beyond that, anything else (rules, fluff, approach to things like tournaments, whether or not they would keep both WHFB and 40k around, etc.) is completely up in the air under this hypothetical scenario.
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Jun 22, 2014 23:37
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