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While most of what I know about Palladium comes from the horror stories thread here in tradgames, my assessment is this: GW is worse in that many of the people in control aren't doing things for love of the game or IP anymore, but rather in terms of increasing short-term value for the shareholders or whatever. This is toxic for reasons that I don't need to explain to anyone who's on board with this thread, but there is a lens, however distorted, through which you can view it as a correct strategy. With Palladium it sounds as though the person ultimately in charge might have his heart in the products to a much greater extent than GW, but it's much harder if not outright impossible to defend it as good business on any level.
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Jul 23, 2014 08:34
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Well the CEO and the person who has a huge amount of stock are the same person so it's pretty easy to figure out what's important. I think it's something like 16% of stock he holds. So yeah. I can't find the article but there was a guy who psted a huge long article that was like 14 parts on the GW stock issue and he notice the biggest trend really is in Dividends paid out just 5 years ago it was 50 pence( or whatever that fictional British currency is) this year was like 20? I think was the number and then the Dividend had basically a direct correlation to stock prices figure the stock would be announced would probably indicate we're not going to see "I lost everything" levels of badness in the report, but will see" poo poo my pants over and over again then put them on my head, my pants that I just poo poo in" levels. I'll try and find it, it's pretty good. Hollismason fucked around with this message at 08:49 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 08:45
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Kevin Sembieda has a reputation for some pretty scummy practices, though. Like apparently (according to Bill Coffin who used to write stuff for Palladium back in the day) one of the things Sembieda would do is commission a sourcebook (RIFTS: Bermuda Triangle or whatever) and he'd tell whatever freelancer was working on it that it was so awesome, so great, you're doing good work buddy...then as deadline was approaching suddenly the draft was a terrible horrible mess in desperate need of revisions. Sembieda would then go "well I guess I'll just have to do the corrections myself, thus is the burden of a professional game designer. Oh by the way, because of this you aren't getting paid the full amount we agreed upon." Then he'd take he draft, add/copy-paste some crap in there, credit himself as lead developer, and pay the freelancer who worked on it like 70% of the original asking price. Also according to Bill Coffin Sembieda is just a massive prick in general, like the sort of guy who shouts and throws temper tantrums. But for all that Rifts isn't dead by any means, Palladium will continue to exist as long as Sembieda's alive. Hell, somehow he managed to convince people that pledging to that Robotech minis Kickstarter was a good idea.
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Jul 23, 2014 08:45
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It's weird if you look at who started GW and the people involved with it in the early days and what they went on to do today it's pretty amazing there were a lot of talented people involved with GW in the beginning. Ian Livingstone <- Literally a Knight, he was knighted, Eidos Interactive ( Tomb Raider) Steve (Not Gurps ) Jackson <- Founded Lionhead Studio w/ Peter Molyneaux There was a third guy but who knows what happened to him, he doesn't have a Wiki. These three started the Company though. It's kind of interesting as all the early people for Games Workshop all went into Game Design and such or at least a lot of them did. Like if you look at the after careers almost all of it is in Video Games. I don't even know anything really about Tom Kirby.
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Jul 23, 2014 08:59
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Palladium is also terrified of technology and the internet, but rather than shutting down all communication they encourage a cult-like following from a small handful of devoted true believers, who in turn are given the power and license to ban all dissenters and disbelievers outright on the forums, and actively harass dissenters, disbelievers, creditors and competitors on places outside of their control like facebook. All criticism is ignored, and what little praise exists is magnified and amplified to such a degree that one wonders if Siembieda genuinely has a mental illness.
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Jul 23, 2014 09:02
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NTRabbit posted:one wonders if Siembieda genuinely has a mental illness. Not to continue the derail but from experience, I'd say he suffers from an acute case of crotchety old man syndrome. As for GW, I'm curious about their history, when and why did the founders take off?
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Jul 23, 2014 10:10
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Someone who is more informed than me can probably tell you but I know the two people who found it sold off their part in the early 90s then it got taken public.
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Jul 23, 2014 15:29
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The thing about Palladium is that people will still defend Siembieda by saying "But he still has a company! Palladium is still around despite all the naysayers!" It's around, but its output in the past decade is less than half that of the previous decade, and they haven't released anything besides issues of The Rifter in 2013-2014. In fact, their output in the past decade is lower than it was in the 80s, and in the 80s they were releasing flagship products as well as reprints and supplements. The last time they released a new game was in 2008 (Dead Reign) and Siembedia hosed over the authors exactly as Kai Tave describes. GW is out of touch, but Palladium has been out of touch for about as long as Rifts has existed. Basically, if you're a GW fan, Palladium should be the company that makes you feel good about yourself in comparison--except that the one thing Palladium products have going for them is that they're unusually cheap.
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Jul 23, 2014 16:15
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Halloween Jack posted:the one thing Palladium products have going for them is that they're unusually cheap. I'm betting they have a warehouse full of leftover stock from the past 20-odd years. The Palladium/GW comparison exists I think primarily because they both had a lightning-in-the-bottle moment during the 80's. GW got it with 40k and its pastiche of various sci-fi fiction and references, while Palladium got it via Rifts, which is also a hodge-podge of various elements. Palladium got a leg up thanks to licensed games such as TMNT and Robotech, but what really got them going was Rifts. GW has just done a better job of not squandering their IP--or well, they were, up until recently.
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Jul 23, 2014 17:49
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Rifts actually came out in 1990, but you're right about it getting them going. At first their production schedule slowed as they laid the groundwork, then it took off as Rifts became their focal point (and its kitchen-sink nature meant that The Rifter could serve as a repository for material that could be plugged into their other games as well).
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Jul 23, 2014 18:08
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I think another point of comparison is how they have badly handled the transition to the digital world, each in their own way.
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Jul 23, 2014 18:18
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NTRabbit posted:I think another point of comparison is how they have badly handled the transition to the digital world, each in their own way. What do you mean? $50 for an ebook is a totally good deal right? Seriously though why are the codices $50 each?
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Jul 23, 2014 18:19
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Len posted:What do you mean? $50 for an ebook is a totally good deal right? Because if you want the drugs, you pay the dealer his price.
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Jul 23, 2014 18:26
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The financial report should be out in a week or so and that is going to set the tone, from what I understand 7th did not sell well at all.
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Jul 23, 2014 18:47
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Len posted:What do you mean? $50 for an ebook is a totally good deal right? That the physical books don't come with a download code or at least a goddamn coupon for the digital versions is one of the dumbest things Games Workshop does.
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Jul 23, 2014 18:59
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Now now, let's not be hasty here.
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Jul 23, 2014 19:07
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To be fair, fully interactive ebooks apparently cost more than regular books to produce because of the extra programming on top. Of course, once the fixed cost of developing the ebook has been paid off then the materials cost is £0 and everything after is pure profit, but there's still that initial outlay to pay off.
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Jul 23, 2014 19:15
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Daedleh posted:To be fair, fully interactive ebooks apparently cost more than regular books to produce because of the extra programming on top. Of course, once the fixed cost of developing the ebook has been paid off then the materials cost is £0 and everything after is pure profit, but there's still that initial outlay to pay off. As you say, the additional unit cost for materials, manufacture and shipping is 0, or at least as close to it as makes no difference (they do need bandwidth to let the customer download it, but that's probably single-digit cents per ebook at most). It depends on how many of the interactive ebooks they sell as to whether it really justifies $50 per unit. Well, actually, the answer is that since it's GW there's a markup of like 100%, so the more generally useful case would be whether an interactive ebook is justified in being the same price as paper.
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Jul 23, 2014 19:26
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I agree. The common view that I disagree with is that ebooks should automatically be cheaper than printed copies because "it just costs them bandwidth!" when that's not the only cost. Without knowing what sort of volume GW sell, we don't know whether it's actual price gouging or just a standard profit margin.
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Jul 23, 2014 19:30
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Daedleh posted:To be fair, fully interactive ebooks apparently cost more than regular books to produce because of the extra programming on top. Of course, once the fixed cost of developing the ebook has been paid off then the materials cost is £0 and everything after is pure profit, but there's still that initial outlay to pay off. This assumes the books have to be fully interactive. They don't, and digital versions can cost as little as 0 additional dollars to create as pdf versions of the paper books are a natural byproduct of producing the file to send to printers. All that extra bullshit is just to justify a $50 price tag for a digital book (that they still fail to justify). And I'm willing to bet that you'd sell more copies at say, $20 to people who got a $30 off coupon with their codex than at the straight $50 price. At that point it becomes a solid upsell to clients who would have otherwise not paid for two copies of the codex. TheChirurgeon fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 19:31
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Ultimately the only answer to "how much should X cost?" that matters is "how much will people pay us for it?" GW is well-versed in that particular equation having relied upon it for years. Now maybe they've hit the point where it turns out that people aren't willing to pay as much as GW wants them to. Is $50 too much for a digital rulebook? If people aren't buying it and GW isn't recouping costs then absolutely. But if people are, somehow, queuing up to pay $50 for a fancy pdf then that's what GW should be pricing it at.
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Jul 23, 2014 19:34
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Kai Tave posted:Ultimately the only answer to "how much should X cost?" that matters is "how much will people pay us for it?" GW is well-versed in that particular equation having relied upon it for years. Now maybe they've hit the point where it turns out that people aren't willing to pay as much as GW wants them to. Unfortunately this isn't necessarily the case -- GW is likely worried that if they price the digital codex less than the hardcover, no one will buy the hardcover, not that people are lining up to buy either the digital copy or two copies of the same book (print and digital). Their digital-first supplements, to my knowledge, did not sell well. VVV Yeah I think it's ultimately that they don't want the digital book to cannibalize print sales, and they don't think that people will still buy the print one for table use if the digital one is cheaper, possibly due to the proliferation of tablets. This isn't necessarily incorrect. TheChirurgeon fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 19:36
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The thing is that the hardcover is going to get produced no matter what. My understanding is that it's easy to convert the production files into a product (compared to creating a new product entirely). That is, the ebook is practically a byproduct of the digital design process. People are going to want the physical book to reference at the table, anyway. Selling the ebook cheaper as a loss-leader would be a solid strategy, so of course they don't do it. Efb! Hard!
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Jul 23, 2014 19:37
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TheChirurgeon posted:Unfortunately this isn't necessarily the case -- GW is likely worried that if they price the digital codex less than the hardcover, no one will buy the hardcover, not that people are lining up to buy either the digital copy or two copies of the same book (print and digital). Their digital-first supplements, to my knowledge, did not sell well. In their actual case this might be more correct than one'd think, but if you unpack it I'm pretty sure the actual cause of that would be that GW poo poo is already so price inflated that people are looking to save money however they can, similar to how people probably don't actually prefer lovely models from ebay that they need to bathe in super clean for a week. In the more sane realms of the consumer multiverse I've happily bought hardback when digital was a fraction of the price, simply because I like that format better.
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Jul 23, 2014 19:43
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I think the "digital sales will cannibalize hardcopy sales" worries are vastly overblown given, as moths says, people will want the book at the table anyway. For all that nerds are supposedly gadget lovers, tabletop nerds have a fixation on books that borders on the pathological. That and, to be honest, flipping through a book to find the rule you need or whatever can be quicker than looking it up on a tablet, especially if the digital copy isn't very well indexed for quick searching.
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Jul 23, 2014 19:43
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Kai Tave posted:I think the "digital sales will cannibalize hardcopy sales" worries are vastly overblown given, as moths says, people will want the book at the table anyway. For all that nerds are supposedly gadget lovers, tabletop nerds have a fixation on books that borders on the pathological. That and, to be honest, flipping through a book to find the rule you need or whatever can be quicker than looking it up on a tablet, especially if the digital copy isn't very well indexed for quick searching. It doesn't matter if their worries are vastly overblown -- it is still something they are worried about. It's no different from Broadcast and Cable networks worrying about making their shows available for streaming online will cannibalize viewership for their shows on TV or magazines worrying about websites stealing print readers. It's still a legitimate concern and something they have to figure out, but yeah, obviously they need to find some kind of middle ground that will encourage customers to buy both. JerryLee posted:In their actual case this might be more correct than one'd think, but if you unpack it I'm pretty sure the actual cause of that would be that GW poo poo is already so price inflated that people are looking to save money however they can, similar to how people probably don't actually prefer lovely models from ebay that they need to bathe in super clean for a week. Yeah I mean, I agree with you on the idea that the root cause is probably the price of the books being too high to begin with. Everyone I know who plays (and was interested in 7th) was clamoring for a mini rulebook for 7th immediately but the only release for months was a massive, 3-hardcover book set at a price point in excess of $100 where one of the books was essentially a hundred pages of advertising for Games Workshop products. My tolerance for buying new heavy-rear end hardcover books is already pretty loving small. TheChirurgeon fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 19:48
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The core rules and army books should never have been allowed to become flagship products. Media sellers like videogame consoles or ebook readers are almost always sold at a near loss (or loss!) because it broadens your customer base. Your core product sales are a hard cap on media sales. You simply can't sell more copies of Super Mario Bros than you've sold NES consoles. Raising the bar on the main books only makes it easier for people to a) stop being customers and b) compete for remaining customers by trading all their orks for Magic cards. But more importantly, it lowers the ceiling on just how much you even can sell under perfect circumstances. Your core product is not where you should be pricing people out of your base.
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Jul 23, 2014 20:02
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The idea that the digital book is expensive because the process of formatting to digital is expensive is laugh-out-loud ludicrous. Digital is overwhelmingly less expensive to produce than print, and the publishing industry moved overwhelmingly to digital formats years ago. As it turns out, the printing costs of a large full-color manual in hard-cover with artwork are considerable. Every publisher from large to very small recognizes this. The digital codices are extremely overpriced, and pricing them at the same point as the physical book is insulting to the intelligence. Given that PDFs and e-books are less useful for reference needs in table play, that only makes it more outrageous. Tabletop nerds would use digital more if viable digital alternatives were offered. We're well into the age of affordable tablets and digital publishing, as opposed to cumbersome laptops full of pirated PDFs. I've played several systems with a digital, often form-fillable character sheet before, and it's a less expensive and less cumbersome at the table alternative. It's not far from that to being able to track your squadron's fate digitally.
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Jul 23, 2014 20:08
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moths posted:Raising the bar on the main books only makes it easier for people to a) stop being customers and b) compete for remaining customers by trading all their orks for Magic cards. This is the friggin' truth. Think of all the times you've seen a post (in these forums or elsewhere) saying "I really don't want to get back into this game right now, someone want to buy my army for cheap?" Heck, someone posted this in the main 40k thread on just the last page or two. If the newest rules were always both fun and cheap to pick back up in some functional format, you'd have these folks much more likely to hang onto their armies (preventing said armies from reentering the market) and maybe along the way they'd buy a box of the new flash gits or whatever occasionally. Instead they have to pay $125 for rules and a codex that may have broken and/or completely sucked all the fun out of the army they made in third edition. It really takes a particular pathological sort of design to make a game where a predominant (or at least highly recognizable) attitude is "Goddamn it, no, I can't get sucked back into this again" rather than "Oh, yeah, I'd like to keep these around for when I have the chance to play them." Granted, GW isn't completely unique in this regard; M:TG and WoW could both probably stand to remove shades of that sort of thing from their milieu despite still being comparatively good games anyway; but 40K is definitely one of the games that's worst for that.
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Jul 23, 2014 20:15
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In many ways, Games Workshop's issues echo those of Dungeons and Dragons, where you can play continually with a single investment (in the case of D&D, the core books where you pay $50 every what, ten years? Unless you are dedicated to buying tons of supplements you're done after that). Once you have that army complete, the reason to buy new product is either to a. build an entire new army, or b. buy updated content for your current army, which tends to come in the form of new rules. Those posters talking about selling their armies might not get back into the game at any price point, and even if they did it doesn't necessarily mean more revenue for Games Workshop unless the rules hit a price point that's ~just right~ for doing so. Even then, what incentive does that player have to buy a new version of a unit they already bought and painted? As much as I hate Games Workshop's policies, I don't envy the market they're trying to work with. But then this is where investment in a competitive scene comes in handy, as it can help create turnover or demand for new product to stay current. Ultimately they need more products like Flyers, or Apocalypse that lead to new additions for existing armies in addition to generating support for new armies.
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Jul 23, 2014 20:24
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TheChirurgeon posted:In many ways, Games Workshop's issues echo those of Dungeons and Dragons, where you can play continually with a single investment (in the case of D&D, the core books where you pay $50 every what, ten years? Unless you are dedicated to buying tons of supplements you're done after that). Once you have that army complete, the reason to buy new product is either to a. build an entire new army, or b. buy updated content for your current army, which tends to come in the form of new rules. Those posters talking about selling their armies might not get back into the game at any price point, and even if they did it doesn't necessarily mean more revenue for Games Workshop unless the rules hit a price point that's ~just right~ for doing so. Even then, what incentive does that player have to buy a new version of a unit they already bought and painted? As much as I hate Games Workshop's policies, I don't envy the market they're trying to work with. I'd be willing to be proven wrong by a detailed breakdown from an economist or accountant, but I think it's a mistake to assume that keeping this sort of invested customer marginally happy with their investment is a bad strategy for GW. Take the example of a guy with 2000 points of orks and buying more only very slowly. If GW can make him happy, they get to sell that extra box of flash gits or a morkanaut or whatever every year or two, plus there's the secondary bonus to their sales of having fewer cases of $1000 MSRP of orks posted on ebay for $500. Plus whatever tertiary knock-on effects from having that guy, and dozens like him, generally being happy with GW and expressing online/in game stores that they are generally positive about GW rather than negative. Even if army-completed guy or gal isn't buying much more after they've completed their main army, it also doesn't cost you much (if anything) to keep them in the game instead of dumping their army on the secondary market and letting everyone know about how Warmachine is better. It could be as simple as slashing the cost to keep up with the latest edition in half, and making sure that edition and codex are actually decent rather than making the lifelong Dark Angels player start composing his craigslist ad. poo poo, if they slashed $50 off of the combined price of the hardcover rules and one codex, I think most people would agree that brings it back into eminently reasonable territory for a hardcover set of game rules. The customer only needs to buy one extra box of terminators over the lifespan of the edition in question (notionally 2-4 years) for GW to break even on revenue from that guy, and it seems like the difference in good will would be massive.
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Jul 23, 2014 20:40
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Thing is, if they dropped prices at this point, everyone's going to start screaming firesale, about how GW's doomed, and it'd probably lead to a short-term drop in revenue, and after what happened with the last half-year's figures, they sure don't want that. I totally agree that it would be a good strategy, but I think that ship might have sailed long ago.
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Jul 23, 2014 20:45
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Battlefront actually gave out new edition softcover rulebooks to Flames players who owned the previous edition hardcover. It's such a trivial thing, but spoonfuls of sugar like that are how you do the GW model without being hated. Especially in a climate where dozens of competitors are making your same units and you can't copyright any of the IP.
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Jul 23, 2014 20:50
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petrol blue posted:Thing is, if they dropped prices at this point, everyone's going to start screaming firesale, about how GW's doomed, and it'd probably lead to a short-term drop in revenue, and after what happened with the last half-year's figures, they sure don't want that. I agree that sudden price drops wouldn't necessarily be a good thing for them. In addition to what you've said, I can imagine people being pissed off if they'd finally brought themselves to buy an overpriced kit and a month later the price dropped by 30%. It'd still probably be a good thing for said customer in the long run, but they might not see it that way. I think they could get around the "the sky is falling!" reaction by freezing the notional prices and beginning to add value to the boxes. Like, rebox the Sternguard kit and add some sprues so that it's still $50 but you get to make eight or ten guys instead of five. The $30 space marine characters come with a $10 or $15 coupon towards the GW store. All of this is of course academic because lol if you think GW feels bad about it or wants to change.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:04
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moths posted:Battlefront actually gave out new edition softcover rulebooks to Flames players who owned the previous edition hardcover. As long as you handed in your old rulebook, yeah. It was pretty cool. Granted it was a paired down version of the rulebook from what I remember (like 40k's mini rulebook) but still, people really liked it.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:04
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No, you kept your old book. It even got a shiny sticker on the cover to show you're an edition veteran!
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Jul 23, 2014 21:07
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moths posted:No, you kept your old book. It even got a shiny sticker on the cover to show you're an edition veteran! Right, so you couldn't get a bunch of free mini rulebooks, forgot about that. Didn't mean we took it from them you just had to have it on you.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:12
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Daedleh posted:I agree. The common view that I disagree with is that ebooks should automatically be cheaper than printed copies because "it just costs them bandwidth!" when that's not the only cost. Without knowing what sort of volume GW sell, we don't know whether it's actual price gouging or just a standard profit margin. Have you worked with some of the publishing tools? My understanding is that, if you worked in parallel, its drat easy to port over your print designs into digital because you are already working in that format when laying out the designs to be published. $60 for an ebook is insanely stupid.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:14
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BULBASAUR posted:Have you worked with some of the publishing tools? My understanding is that, if you worked in parallel, its drat easy to port over your print designs into digital because you are already working in that format when laying out the designs to be published. $60 for an ebook is insanely stupid. If it's just a flat PDF, yes. If you're adding functionality, such as rules highlighting, linking etc then no. I don't know how complex GWs ebooks are since I've never used them. If it's anything like Mantics digital offerings, where there is additional functionality built in rather than being a plain PDF then yeah, there were additional development costs up front.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:23
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Daedleh posted:If it's just a flat PDF, yes. If you're adding functionality, such as rules highlighting, linking etc then no. I don't know how complex GWs ebooks are since I've never used them. Adding rules highlighting and linking is trivial. Add-ons like custom army builders are what require craploads of work above and beyond standard PDFs. Bottom line is that Games Workshop has complete control over the costs involved in the product and there's more demand for a cheaper frills-free digital codex than a full-price one with some extra stuff.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:30
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