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TheChirurgeon posted:Adding rules highlighting and linking is trivial. Add-ons like custom army builders are what require craploads of work above and beyond standard PDFs. Even then, PP's War Room, while not a flawless offering, is an army builder that's like $7 per army you want to use with it (or free if you just want a reference for special rules and such). It's not a substitute for a rulebook since it doesn't tell you how to play the game from beginning to end, but it's essentially $7 codexes that do have all this custom lookup and army building functionality you just described. Essentially, if GW claims (explicitly or otherwise) that they need to charge $50 for a digital codex in order to not lose their shirt, they're so full of poo poo it ought to be spraying out their nostrils and ears.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:37
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JerryLee posted: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. Even ignoring the potential to reduce the used model market, keeping players engaged with their existing armies and the latest rules keeps people playing your game, which means that new players will consider your game a viable option. When I lived in Seattle (aka, last month) it was getting difficult to find new 40k players because the warmachine community was so much more active. Someone could walk into card kingdom on Warhammer day, ask around for a game and the warmachine players would say "Sorry, I have like 5000 points of Space Wolves painted up but _______________ and so I just play warmachine now. Would you like to play a game of that?" and the guy walks out the store with the Cryx starter box. GW needs to do whatever they can to keep people playing their game, because the hobby of collecting citadel miniatures isn't going to keep the lights on for them.
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Jul 23, 2014 22:03
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TheChirurgeon posted: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. Yeah, I mean...assuming GW uses Adobe Acrobat I could highlight and link a codex in a day. I have zero previous experience actually doing this, but since I am 1) computer literate and 2) not a complete moron, I feel confident this is possible. Also, I've done similar in Word. It's literally just a couple buttons on the pane. This would cost GW perhaps $100-$150 dollars in someone's hourly pay. Assuming it took 8 hours, which it might not. Adding popups and whatever, who the gently caress cares, it's literally just flash with no practical use besides actually hiding the rules you want to see until you click them. It's actually annoying. If they could hide and expand rules magically in a physical copy, so it was lower page count, that would be one thing, but I don't give a gently caress if they save some pages in a purely digital document. It makes no sense!
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Jul 23, 2014 23:48
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drgnvale posted:Even ignoring the potential to reduce the used model market, keeping players engaged with their existing armies and the latest rules keeps people playing your game, which means that new players will consider your game a viable option. Man I wished I lived within easy distance of Card Kingdom. A hobby shop. . . With a professional layout, organized play, huge floor space, attached cafe, and that doesn't look like a re-purposed bomb shelter? Sign me up.
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Jul 23, 2014 23:59
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Yeah you walk into the FLGS I frequent looking for a game to play and odds are you are going to walk out with a Warmachine/hordes starter box. Games like Infinity, Bolt action and Flames of War are also usually well represented.S.J. posted: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. Most stores that I know of just gave you one if you asked. I got like 4 and I never even owned the 2nd edition hardback. Also the mini-rule book is the complete rulebook, not a stripped down one.
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Jul 24, 2014 00:36
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The Gate posted:Yeah, I mean...assuming GW uses Adobe Acrobat I could highlight and link a codex in a day. I have zero previous experience actually doing this, but since I am 1) computer literate and 2) not a complete moron, I feel confident this is possible. Also, I've done similar in Word. It's literally just a couple buttons on the pane. This would cost GW perhaps $100-$150 dollars in someone's hourly pay. Assuming it took 8 hours, which it might not. Adding popups and whatever, who the gently caress cares, it's literally just flash with no practical use besides actually hiding the rules you want to see until you click them. It's actually annoying. If they could hide and expand rules magically in a physical copy, so it was lower page count, that would be one thing, but I don't give a gently caress if they save some pages in a purely digital document. It makes no sense! The industry standard is InDesign, which essentially is for making print layouts and pdfs. I use it a fair amount to do publishable reports and I used to do more print layout stuff back in my graphic design days. There's also Quark, but I don't know how much use that gets these days. It's actually even easier to embed links and expandable text in InDesign than it is to do in Acrobat, and you can do it more elegantly. And yeah, agreed on hiding content until you click on it. They also do scrolling sidebars and call-out boxes, which are equally obnoxious.
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Jul 24, 2014 00:39
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Man I wished I lived within easy distance of Card Kingdom. A hobby shop. . . With a professional layout, organized play, huge floor space, attached cafe, and that doesn't look like a re-purposed bomb shelter? Sign me up. Yeah, it's a swell place. I wish I had taken advantage of it more often; I lived about a mile away for four years and didn't even know about it for the first two. I don't care that it's now a 20-30 minute drive, I'm still going to try to play and buy there as often as I can.
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Jul 24, 2014 00:43
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Numlock posted:Yeah you walk into the FLGS I frequent looking for a game to play and odds are you are going to walk out with a Warmachine/hordes starter box. Games like Infinity, Bolt action and Flames of War are also usually well represented. Oh well, it's been years since I looked at it so whatever. Either way, the stores were specifically instructed to have customers bring their old book in and get a sticker or w/e put on it.
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Jul 24, 2014 00:49
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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. Having worked with various independent RPG developers who operate through digital and print on demand this isn't true. The cost of adding functionality to a book isn't entirely negligible but it is always less than the overhead of starting up a print run. The only way it isn't is if you own a printing house. Usually this means that you price pdfs at half the price of their hard copies for supplements and one third to one quarter for books that everyone playing your game needs to own.
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Jul 24, 2014 02:11
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Numlock posted:Yeah you walk into the FLGS I frequent looking for a game to play and odds are you are going to walk out with a Warmachine/hordes starter box. Games like Infinity, Bolt action and Flames of War are also usually well represented. Anecdotal Evidence Tale: I'm about an hour or so from Tampa so I don't get over there very often, but I do try to pop into one of the game stores there from time to time. The first time I went into one of them (around 2011), the 40k/WHFB stuff took up a whole wall by themselves. I went back to the same store about a month ago, and all the GW stuff was piled up into a little tiny section (save for the GW paints/tools, which were over in a section with all the rest of the paints/tools by other companies). The rest of the store was literally dominated by Warmahordes (which took up all the space that had previously been filled with GW stuff in 2011) and board games, with Infinity and X-Wing occupying some space on the shelves as well. I don't know what that means in terms of how healthy GW's sales are in Central FL, but I suspect it's not very well.
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Jul 24, 2014 02:56
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PresidentBeard posted:Having worked with various independent RPG developers who operate through digital and print on demand this isn't true. The cost of adding functionality to a book isn't entirely negligible but it is always less than the overhead of starting up a print run. The only way it isn't is if you own a printing house. Usually this means that you price pdfs at half the price of their hard copies for supplements and one third to one quarter for books that everyone playing your game needs to own. There's a big difference between GW's eBook and Ipad editions; the eBooks seem like quick and dirty exports from whatever design program they use, but the Ipad editions are sufficiently different that I could see there being a cost. If you have access to an ipad or apple PC, grab one of the demos from the iBook store. That said, even if the iBooks cost an arm and a leg to develop, they aren't worth the asking price to me. I like that they include rule summaries so I don't need to grab the BRB to look up what some keyword does, but navigating them is kind of a pain (not as bad as the ebooks) and I don't feel comfortable bringing my ipad to the game store and leaving it out while moving army men around. If someone steals my kindle, that's a much cheaper thing to replace, but the ebooks are such a pain in the dick to navigate around that I'll just buy the hard cover and lament how bad GW is at making stuff people want to buy at a price they want to pay.
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Jul 24, 2014 03:24
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From BOLS:quote:+ They have a playtest team of about a dozen (a mix of tournament/casual players). This doesn’t include the core GW team playing too. Not all the playtest team may be testing the same thing at the same time. ... and now you know why the game is poorly balanced (outside the design)
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Jul 24, 2014 05:08
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It's been a while since I played 40K but things do interact with other things in your army right? I can't fathom who thought that was a good way to playtest a game.... oh wait yes I can, a fuckwit with a business degree and no understanding of tabletop wargaming but who is scared of the playtesters stealing their I.P and leaking the product prematurely.
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Jul 24, 2014 05:44
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Isn't it also just insanely hard to have major differences between units and still balance them with the ridiculous lack of granularity in stats in 40k? Like, AP 4 vs. AP3 is a huge different, as is BS3 vs. BS4, etc. That seems like it would cause a great deal of the balance trouble, too.
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Jul 24, 2014 05:57
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Night10194 posted:Isn't it also just insanely hard to have major differences between units and still balance them with the ridiculous lack of granularity in stats in 40k? Like, AP 4 vs. AP3 is a huge different, as is BS3 vs. BS4, etc. That seems like it would cause a great deal of the balance trouble, too. Yes, but a better designed game doesn't need enormous differences between units, GW themselves have done it (see for example Battlefleet Gothic).
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Jul 24, 2014 06:20
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I will never ever believe that GW "playtests" the rules, they're so badly written that most of the time you have to just make up your own poo poo. Also, it's not like "playtesting" means "fixing", they may just playtest them smoke some crack then go " Yep , that works!, Ship it !" Meaning maybe their bad playtesters. Supposedly there's a actual guy who tries to build "unbalanced" armies, but yeah anyone with have a brain could have been like " Wait, you mean you can have conceal and fortune on a squad?"
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Jul 24, 2014 06:31
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An unrelated note, but in Australia lots of Games Workshops only got a handful of copies (around 4) of Stormclaw. Meanwhile, the Indie stockist I work at got 20. Chatting with the guy that does ordering, if this is the normal thing worldwide and not just Australia, it could be a case of trying to artificially inflate the numbers as the products that Indies sell are already bought and paid for, and that same stock on a GW shelf doesn't count as revenue until it goes through the til. If that makes sense.
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Jul 24, 2014 06:39
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Hollismason posted:I will never ever believe that GW "playtests" the rules, they're so badly written that most of the time you have to just make up your own poo poo. I doubt there's much correlation between playtest feedback and the final draft.
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Jul 24, 2014 06:40
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WAR FOOT posted:An unrelated note, but in Australia lots of Games Workshops only got a handful of copies (around 4) of Stormclaw. Huh. That does go against what's been previously reported as (possibly unofficial) policy, namely giving indie LGSes less product. Interesting if GW's starting to try and give indies better stock; sad that they had to do it for cynical reasons.
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Jul 24, 2014 06:53
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JerryLee posted:Huh. That does go against what's been previously reported as (possibly unofficial) policy, namely giving indie LGSes less product. Interesting if GW's starting to try and give indies better stock; sad that they had to do it for cynical reasons. Whoever said that is wrong. We get tons of stock for whatever we want. Stock is given out to areas and sales managers then divide that stock as they deem appropriate for the stores under their jurisdictions. If a given store doesn't get what appears to be enough stock it's either because their sales manager hosed up (or was out of town or w/e and someone did his job poorly in the mean time) or because that store doesn't purchase enough product to justify taking stock away from independent stores that have consistently high stock/restock numbers in the case of tightly allocated items (this really only applies to release week stuff or truly limited items like Stormclaw or w/e). Unfortunately this does also mean that some times a sales manager will have some his personal allocation of stock shanghaied by another sales manager in the area due to a combination of gently caress ups and being an rear end in a top hat, both of which have happened to us in the past, but that's nowhere approaching official or unofficial policy. S.J. fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Jul 24, 2014 |
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Jul 24, 2014 07:02
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Huh. Well then. I think I repeated that misconception a few times myself, here and in the other thread, so mea culpa.  I definitely heard it from someone else first, though--people saying how their LGS would get under-allocated new product releases. THe implication was specifically that it would be far below demand at the store, so I assumed it wasn't just a case of it being a small store that didn't have enough GW customers.It's a shame that people have to make up/distort things to make GW look bad when there's no shortage of legit reasons to be upset with them.
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Jul 24, 2014 07:14
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JerryLee posted:Huh. Well then. I think I repeated that misconception a few times myself, here and in the other thread, so mea culpa. So, yeah. GW USA (or whatever continent you're on, I assume they all work basically the same except the UK gets the Lion's share of everything) gets so much product based on projections and then that product gets divided up for different regions sales managers. Granted, some times there isn't enough and there are hard caps on how much of [a thing] you can order on release week (which hardly happens anymore because no one has the stats for anything before the new models come out, our preorder numbers have gone to poo poo since spoilers have gone to poo poo). When problems happen with that, that's typically an issue with the guy who (and gently caress, I would not want this guys job - they go through this position pretty frequently lately) has to do projections and handle allocations inside the USA. e: honestly it's late and I'm probably getting a detail wrong somewhere or another but this should be generally accurate S.J. fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Jul 24, 2014 |
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Jul 24, 2014 07:22
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JerryLee posted:Huh. That does go against what's been previously reported as (possibly unofficial) policy, namely giving indie LGSes less product. Interesting if GW's starting to try and give indies better stock; sad that they had to do it for cynical reasons. Thats because whats been reported makes GW out to be a demon entity that loves to poo poo on their own customers. What SJ said is 100% right. But your version is much more appetising to those that froth at the mouth of the thought of GW doing anything positive. I posted as much in the 40k thread when it was brought up about stores not having Stormclaw boxes.
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Jul 24, 2014 08:27
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serious gaylord posted:But your version is much more appetising to those that froth at the mouth of the thought of GW doing anything positive. I don't know if you mean me personally with this comment or not, but you severely misunderstand me if you think I hate the idea of GW doing positive things. I want them to do positive things, all of the positive things, so that 40K becomes a game I fully enjoy made by a company I can support without reservations (or at least as close to it as any mainstream game ever can). I don't post in these threads because I'm a masochist who enjoys feeling angry and/or disappointed.
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Jul 24, 2014 08:39
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JerryLee posted:I don't know if you mean me personally with this comment or not, but you severely misunderstand me if you think I hate the idea of GW doing positive things. I want them to do positive things, all of the positive things, so that 40K becomes a game I fully enjoy made by a company I can support without reservations (or at least as close to it as any mainstream game ever can). I don't post in these threads because I'm a masochist who enjoys feeling angry and/or disappointed. Oh no, it wasn't against you, I was more talking about how that version is more likely to fly around the internet forums until it becomes 'fact'.
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Jul 24, 2014 09:13
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serious gaylord posted:Oh no, it wasn't against you, I was more talking about how that version is more likely to fly around the internet forums until it becomes 'fact'. Fair enough. Like I said, it's disappointing that people feel the need to make things up or distort the truth, if only because it makes folks less likely to take real grievances against GW seriously. I do feel pretty chagrined for having repeated it as fact, but it sincerely sounded to me like the sort of thing GW would do.
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Jul 24, 2014 09:34
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Sydney Bottocks posted:Anecdotal Evidence Tale Same story at mine as well. Not a lot of turnover ether in their inventory, I sure that most of those boxes have been there for years, probably even from before I first started visiting that store more than 4 years ago. Not that there isn't a lot of GW players around, I see them in the store all the time, but they apparently don't buy anything in the store to the owner's extreme annoyance.
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Jul 24, 2014 13:39
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The "GW won't give us product" line comes from their skirmishes with online retailers, doesn't it? That one online retailer made a big video about how they were going to drop GW, and one of the big reasons given was that GW just wouldn't give them enough models to sell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isXNJMhBteY
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Jul 24, 2014 14:16
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counterspin posted:The "GW won't give us product" line comes from their skirmishes with online retailers, doesn't it? That one online retailer made a big video about how they were going to drop GW, and one of the big reasons given was that GW just wouldn't give them enough models to sell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isXNJMhBteY The sad part is, this isn't anything new. I remember back in the early 2000s or so, the two game stores in Kalamazoo that I used to frequent both had massive "Getting Rid of GW" sales, and in both cases the story was the same: GW was treating independent retailers like poo poo. And this was well before GW had any competition from PP or anyone else. The retailers just said "the hell with it" (both stores were primarily comic book stores anyways, and both also sold a lot of stuff like RPGs and models and Magic cards and so forth) and decided that GW's policies were just too much of a hassle to put up with any longer. And that was like 2003 or so. I can't imagine what it must be like for independent retailers trying to sell GW stuff today.
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Jul 24, 2014 14:21
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counterspin posted:The "GW won't give us product" line comes from their skirmishes with online retailers, doesn't it? That one online retailer made a big video about how they were going to drop GW, and one of the big reasons given was that GW just wouldn't give them enough models to sell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isXNJMhBteY That's a little different, but related. They were complaining because GW placed an extremely low limit on "direct order" items per store. Direct items are basically things like the finecast line and characters, stuff that most people are only going to need 1 of, so it's not sensible to carry stock of it on your shelf. This made sense, until they limited stores to only $500 per month in direct order items, which isn't much if you're a big online retailer. The complaints about GW holding stuff back are largely based on how bad their order system seems to be. You can order x items for a new model release, but an independant store really doesn't know if they're going to get what they ordered or not until they get charged and them items show up (or not). This happened constantly to the store I played at in college, and it was in the top "tier" of stores in terms of carrying GW stock. That said, I don't know if the shorts were from product being withheld, or (more likely) the GW rep taking orders being poo poo at his job and not telling the manager what the limits were correctly. I DO know that with limited release items like Space Hulk that how much we could get was how much the guy taking your order liked you and first come first serve. There wasn't a fixed # per store, it seemed like a # per region/distribution area, the the GW order guy took it from there. This is US, btw.
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Jul 24, 2014 14:29
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There was also The Combat Company here, which is one of the largest such stores in the country if I'm not mistaken, they ordered $10k worth of Eldar on their release last year - which I believe amounts to 5 boxes of Wraithguard and 1 Wraithknight at wholesale prices - and received next to none of it.
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Jul 24, 2014 14:43
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NTRabbit posted:There was also The Combat Company here, which is one of the largest such stores in the country if I'm not mistaken, they ordered $10k worth of Eldar on their release last year - which I believe amounts to 5 boxes of Wraithguard and 1 Wraithknight at wholesale prices - and received next to none of it. As explained, there are many many reasons why a store wouldnt get all that they've asked for. Attributing it to moustache twirling evil is a bit silly.
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Jul 24, 2014 14:53
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serious gaylord posted:As explained, there are many many reasons why a store wouldnt get all that they've asked for. Attributing it to moustache twirling evil is a bit silly. Yes, never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by stupidity. 
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Jul 24, 2014 15:00
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I think people are attributing it to incompetence not evil
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Jul 24, 2014 15:00
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I thought the entire point of this thread was to point out that GW management are so grossly incompetent the entire company is going to crash in burn in the next 2 years, guess the date and win a prize! Step right up!
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Jul 24, 2014 15:06
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Present-day GW is basically what would happen if Mom from "Futurama" passed away, and left her company to Walt, Larry, and Igner.
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Jul 24, 2014 15:14
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In the UK, GW shops probably outnumber FLGSs, it's very rare to see GW things for sale elsewhere (anecdotal ), and I wonder how much of that has informed their decision-making? In my local town centre, there's a small boardgames/wargame starter sets (no GW) store, a comic store that has a couple of games (ie, magic), and a small GW store. There's an image of GW being somehow separated from the rest of the tradgames industry when you hit the physical shops, it's something GW has always seemed to encourage (understandably, pre-internet) and I can see a lot of that filtering up to management level. I wonder if it might explain some of the relations with independent stores worldwide?
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Jul 24, 2014 15:41
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Wait.. 'Stormclaw' was a limited release and not a new starter set for 40k? I didn't do much reading on it, but I'm sure I saw it mentioned that it included existing multi-part kits rather than 'starter set only' models, is that right? Also, 'warhammer fest'  I don't really think it's GW that bothers me any more, I'm no longer surprised by anything they do, what does bother me is the type of customer who still thinks paying out the arse for something as inane as a limited edition codex is a completely logical thing to do.
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Jul 24, 2014 15:55
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enri posted:Wait.. 'Stormclaw' was a limited release and not a new starter set for 40k? I didn't do much reading on it, but I'm sure I saw it mentioned that it included existing multi-part kits rather than 'starter set only' models, is that right? Given some of the discussion in the main 40k thread, I wonder how much of that is just people buying the boxed sets so they can flip the mini rulebooks and sprues on eBay.
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Jul 24, 2014 18:21
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enri posted:Wait.. 'Stormclaw' was a limited release and not a new starter set for 40k? I didn't do much reading on it, but I'm sure I saw it mentioned that it included existing multi-part kits rather than 'starter set only' models, is that right? Correct. It's a great discount but they're only doing a single run of it, no backstock exists or will be made. It is simply a product to help support the Sanctus Reach campaign. They will undoubtedly be creating similar boxes in the future with different armies.
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Jul 24, 2014 18:25
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