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Since some people started doing the self help group thing of sharing our Games Workshop stories, here's mine: Back in the nineties we used to enjoy our silly boardgames, given that computers were lovely and expensive and no-one had internet anyways, so you might as well play cards and boardgames when you want to play games with other people. A friend of mine had lived in this crazy big city called Singapore for a while and eventually introduced me to this strange game called Warhammer Fantasy that he had picked up on his extended adventures in other countries. The game had now left him with no-one to play with, having returned to bumfuck nowhere Germany where people still played Chess, Parcheesi and Rummy. I think that was 5th edition even. Before long I exchanged a tenner of a now defunct currency for a few funky lizardmen and we played a few games. I helped spreading the game in my immediate surroundings and we ended up with some pretty sweet coverage of all the races and played the game quite often. I gave away my silly lizards in exchange for some sweetass orcs and goblins, a decision I would ultimately live to regret. 5th edition Warhammer Fantasy was not a very good game either. I'm often quite confused when people talk about the glory days of Games Workshop, because I don't remember any of their games being very good to begin with. Even back then their stuff just caused a lot of frustration. The way you had to play the game was to spend 50% of your army points on one or two heroes that had broken combinations of monsters and/or generic magic items as well as insane statlines that made them able to obliterate pretty much everything else in a single turn. Aside from that you had to spend 25% of your points on troops, which sucked balls because troops were awful and got obliterated in a single turn by any given combat-hero. Some armies like Undead had some decent troops like multi-wound mummies with halfway acceptable statlines or Chaos Warriors with awesome armour, good weapons and multiple attacks. I also remember that Lizardmen had Skink skirmishers that worked out mathematically because you could throw a bucket of dice at the enemy in lieu of actually having worthwhile attacks, which resulted in just getting a lot of sixes that would even threaten the aforementioned combat heroes. The last 25% you could spend on allied heroes, monsters or warmachines, all of which were acceptable choices. Most choices in your army books didn't even have models or pictures that showed what they were supposed to look like, so good luck with that. Sometimes we got lucky and managed to get some similar product from other manufacturers that might have looked a bit off scale but usually was quite a bit cheaper and noone really cared anyways. Sometimes we just used empty bases and wrote a post-it note. All in all the game was kinda dumb. We still ended up playing it a bit, but the enjoyment each and everyone of us got out of it varied greatly due to the flaws in balance leading to a lot of frustrations for everyone. Eventually we forgot about it and went back to playing Chess, Parcheesi and Rummy around the time when 6th edition came around. It was far too difficult getting miniatures anyways, given that we lived in bumfuck nowhere Germany and there just wasn't any convenient stores around that kept such a specialized product. I picked the game back up for a bit a few years ago when 8th edition Warhammer Fantasy came around, because those Tomb Kings looked pretty sweet and the newfound focus on troops made the game look promising to me. The enjoyment didn't last very long because the release cycle still sucks, there's still fairly blatant power creep, balance is still awful and the old problem of overpowered heroes just got replaced with overpowered death star hordes of 40+ elite troops that crush the opponent under a bucket of dice. I dropped the game again and just stopped caring. I can't say I really understand why people are so gung-ho about wanting to see the company die and getting picked up by Bandai or something else. I like this thread for some of the helldumping that goons do about everything Games Workshop, because it's fun to watch. Goons having a meltdown is pretty hilarious as well. But more often than not I would actually agree that some of the stuff that Serious Gaylord says is fairly reasonable and that it sounds more true to the world than the wild conjecture that sometimes goes on in here. Although this: Forums Terrorist posted:This thread was created explicitly to poo poo on GW because it's funny, stop mucking it up with serious arguments you nerds In short: Chess and Rummy are decent games, but I can't really recommend Parcheesi. Be warned though, because the Chess community can get awfully obnoxious and there's a lot of lovely people that just like to crush newbies and be smug assholes about it. No idea why Parcheesi was that popular to begin with, but it could've been worse, I guess. I heard they loved Warhammer in other countries. Zwiebel fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Jan 16, 2015 |
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Jan 16, 2015 19:29
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What would get me back into a GW, buying their products at retail price? I think it's a combo of stuff several other people have said. For me, Warhammer fantasy is my current main game, and Epic is my second, and I also play Space Hulk and - if I ever finish putting together and painting the bits - Dreadfleet. GW needs to support these games! It doesn't even have to be continuously making expansions for things. Simply keeping the game in stock in stores means that it's a game other people have heard of and know the rules to. And that's the other part, the rules actually have to not suck. I happen to like the rules for Space Hulk, but even I can tell there are some pretty archaic things in there: from the egg timer for the space marine's turn, to the requirement to cut out and assemble all the pieces before you can play. Any other board game I buy in a store, is ready to play in at most 20 minutes of popping cardboard tokens out of a sheet, opening packs of cards, and then however long it takes to read the rules. I have boardgame days at my place roughly once a month or so, and the guys are all hardcore gamers who have a high tolerance for a long set-up time for a new game we're interested in checking out. Including blind, because I sometimes buy a game without knowing much about it (more about that in a bit). But even that level of tolerance would never extend to a game that, upon opening, presents me with multiple hours of assembly before I can get started. Monopose minis are not GW's forerunning mode of production for its two big games, and that's good. But for a boxed, stand-alone game, monopose minis are demonstrably OK - because they're what pretty much every other boardgame does, and customers are buying boardgames in droves. Look at this. That kickstarter pulled in half a million dollars on the first day. It has nothing but monopose minis inside, including piles of the same exact mini for the enemy mooks. Why is it going to make a million bucks, nine months to a year before release? Because A) it's a well-known and compelling license. Conan is beloved, and you get to actually play Conan in this game, which as a Conan fan I can tell you is probably unprecedented. B) the rules have obviously been carefully playtested. They took this game and previewed it at Gencon and other conventions, and have run it for at least 500 playtesters! C) It's obviously expandable, and probably not difficult to expand yourself if it doesn't get downstream expansion support from the company. All of those things could be true of a games workshop miniatures-based boxed set or boardgame. Remember, I bought Advanced HeroQuest and Advanced space Crusade. But the latter required assembly (with glue) of multipart tyranid models, and you had to choose at assembly time whether to arm them with swords or guns, and that meant making that choice before playing the game, and that's why in my entire life I've only ever gotten to play it once. Whereas HeroQuest's figures were all monopose, clip them out, stick them in the slotta base, and start playing. Buuut, the original HeroQuest was a joint venture with a major boardgame company, and that's obviously why it was so popular. It had reasonably balanced rules (for the time), and it was for sale in Toys R Us as well as Games Workshop. You can still buy Talisman today, in normal games stores, even though it's not actually that great of a game. It was out of print for a long time, but Talisman 4th Ed. is an improved game, that is still being supported with new expansions. It's playable within 30 minutes of opening the box. I have no idea if it makes GW much money, but at least it's in print, it has to be at least minimally profitable, and... well, it's a missed opportunity, because it does not introduce players to GW's compelling fantasy or SF universes, the way Space Hulk or (nominally) Dreadfleet did. What does GW need to do to get me in the door? Well, this entire thread is about their issues with customer service, and i"m not talking about being friendly when I open the door. Being friendly when I open the door ought to be assumed for any retail environment, and this gets me to my second point. Most of the poo poo GW crows about in their annual report is ridiculous not because GW is claiming that it does it or is focused on it - stuff like employees fitting the corporate culture, or being friendly with customers, or whatever. Allll of that poo poo is absolutely ordinary and not even worth mentioning, because it ought to be assumed. Of course a Games Workshop store should be clean, well-lit, friendly, and staffed with someone knowledgeable about the products and able to help me get what I want. So is the local used book store, so is Safeway, so is PetSmart and goddamn Radio Shack. What they actually need to do to get me to go in, and stay in, and spend money, is offer me good products at reasonable prices. They can position themselves as a luxury brand if they want - people walk into Mercedes dealerships and buy cars that are excellent, luxurious, and hideously expensive, and enjoy doing it. And then bring their cars exclusively back to Mercedes for maintenance and repair. Hell, they lease them for three years and then get a new one! There are luxury markets and customers seeking luxury goods. But I think that's a poor choice for a games company, because the game market is a much smaller market than the cars market, or the mobile phone/computer market, or the pet food & supplies market. A luxury position puts an absolute top limit on potential sales worldwide, and it also requires the company pour a very substantial amount of its profits into maintaining a lead. Mercedes innovates constantly. A brand new Mercedes is not just appointed with flawlessly tailored leather and polished walnut; it's also got the very latest in active suspension control, heads-up display, radar lane change warning, and is at the top for safety as well. Even the healthy 30%+ margins Games Workshop claims are probably not enough to afford to do that kind of R&D, on top of the spending on marketing and customer service and presentation that makes a brand consistently luxurious. Another key thing to understand about luxury products, is that they all depreciate rapidly. Luxury customers want new. An $80,000 mercedes, after five years, is worth $25k or so. A Prada handbag selling for $5000 sells on eBay for $500 two years later. Luxury customers buy luxury in part to show off their status. Games Workshop cannot afford to replace every one of their products with a newer, better model every two to five years! No game company can. Instead, GW ought to go for market share, and the way you claim market share is to sell a broad diversity of products, accepting that many of them will underperform. It's been claimed again and again that the reason x, y, and z thing were discontinued by GW is because they didn't sell well enough. This is always in comparison to the core product. Well? Video game manufacturers know that the console doesn't need to be profitable, because it serves as a platform to sell products that are profitable. Major carmakers found out in the 90s that just because SUVs were massively more profitable, doesn't mean it's a good plan to just stop making subcompact cars with razor thin margins, because market sentiment can change, and it takes multiple years to develop an entirely new car. Honda, Toyota, and to a lesser extent Nissan, Mitsubishi, and european brands all ate American carmaker's lunch in a very big way in the early 2000s, because they had maintained compact, fuel-efficient models even while every carmaker on earth made at least one SUV, to take advantage of the hugely more profitable SUV marketplace of the 90s. Even Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, and other makers who had previously never sold any sort of truck, had SUV models. But the while the Honda Civic had margins of like 5% to 10%, compared to margins approaching 50% for SUVs, it left Honda in a position to immediately ramp up and sell hundreds of thousands of them a year once gas prices rose and customer sentiment shifted. Tabletop wargames and miniature boardgames aren't cars, obviously. But it was a huge mistake for Games Workshop to de-diversify. And, as has also been discussed, they failed in every way to support their side-games: failed in terms of marketing, in terms of rules writing, in terms of supplements, and in terms of pricing. The margin on a $100 copy of Space Hulk can't be much less than the (slim) margin on a $90 copy of Agricola. But, Agricola has add-ons, and it's a brilliantly-designed game in the first place, and you can start playing within 30 minutes of opening the box, and it's sold in normal game stores. It's popular enough that used copies do not go for much less than new ones online! And that brings me to that last point. Why would I buy new in a Games Workshop store, if I can get used online for a quarter of the price? It's the wrong question. Hugely, massively the wrong question, hilariously so. The right question is, why are so many people willing to dump their Games Workshop products online for so cheap?!?! And the answer is in the text above. I can get cheap Citadel stuff on eBay because Games Workshop customers become massively frustrated with the products they've bought, so much so that they're willing to take a huge bath on them just to get rid of them and reclaim some small fraction of what they spent. It's a question of supply and demand. Demand is poor, and supply is high, and Games Workshop cannot compete with the supply of their own previously-sold products because their sales practices are not based on selling things to people that they will want to have and keep forever: they're based on tricking people into buying things that they will soon become dissatisfied with. The reasons are myriad; because the rules suck. Because the products require a huge amount of up-front time just to become useful. Because the rules changes, when they are made, invariably convert previously-useful products into useless ones. Because a customer who buys eight of your products, and finds that five of them were dissatisfying, does not just sell off those five: they sell off all eight, and go on to encourage their friends to sell what they have and never buy again. Games Workshop would sell me products in their store, if I couldn't buy the exact same products from dissatisfied former customers online for a quarter of the price. And that would be true, if Games Workshop sold products that customers wanted to keep forever. They would need to have a genuine value up-front, once that isn't based on a customer service representative outright lying about their utility (e.g., "oh yeah you should buy a tyranids starter army, they're awesome" when tyranids are actually a poo poo army with poo poo support who can't win games on the table). They would need to retain value over time, and that means Games Workshop needs to decide before they make a product whether they're going to support it for the next 10+ years or not. That means doing customer research, and I'm not talking about what their CEO thinks customer research is (focus groups and surveys, apparently): I'm talking about bringing prototypes of your products to conventions and letting people try them out, gathering feedback from playtesting, and iterating the products repeatedly until they're well polished, not just physically but in terms of rules. And then if the product doesn't immediately sell well, iterate it, market it, stick to it, because you already know - from your playtesting and research - that it's a good product, so the poor sales can only be due to a failure to find the right way to market it or present it or support it effectively. Why was I able to buy several hundred dollars of Tomb Kings for $75 at a swap meet? Even though the 8th edition had just come out, and there was a brand new 8th edition army book? Because he felt betrayed. He had built an army up around cavalry, and 8th edition had made cavalry go from supreme on the table, to not even worth taking. The 8th edition army book still contained cavalry, but they were a "trap" unit now. The Tomb Kings army box also still came with cavalry! So every customer who went into a Games Workshop in 2010, and told the friendly salesperson that they were super into these cool awesome egyptian-looking undead guys, and was subsequently sold a $75 rulebook, a $40 army book, and a $90 army box starter set, soon discovered that a third of the models in their army set were literally not worth putting on the table, ever. Probably they only found that out after spending several more hours carefully cutting them out and assembling them, a task made harder by the fact that these sculpts, for this brand newly-released army book and this new box of products they had just bought brand new, were already a decade old, way behind the curve quality-wise, poorly fiitting, poorly-scaled, and ugly as gently caress when assembled. Why did that guy sell me his army? Oh, not just because Games Workshop literally betrayed his investment. But also because he had two or three hundred unassembled models. He'd already spent tons of hours of his personal time meticulously assembling skeletons, each of which had a minimum of five pieces to clip, position, and glue. After doing twenty or thirty of them, he doubtless realized that they wouldn't rank up, because OH! These bases are kind of too small, the skeletons have weapons and shield sticking out in all directions, I guess you needed to know to position them to rank before you assembled them. Too bad there was nothing in the box or instructions to suggest that! He had two unassembled metal screaming skull catapults, a kit so unbelievably frustrating to put together that I can still hardly believe it (every join must be pinned, and several of them must be glued together simultaneously). He also had two unasembled bone giants, an extremely old and ugly metal sculpt that is also a bitch to assemble (every join must be pinned), a metal scorpion (every leg is a separate piece, for gently caress's sake). There were at least 20 chariots, all in various stages of disassembly, because the guys don't really fit in the back too well, and you kind of have to paint them before you base them, which means you don't dare glue them down until you're ready to paint them. There were at least 50 more unassembled skeleton troops. And the leadership models! Two each of standing and riding tomb herarlds, two each of standing and riding liche priests, two each of standing and riding tomb kings, all in metal. But with plastic horses! It's a huge bitch to get a metal figure to stay on a plastic horse and not fall over on the tabletop. The previous owner had only assembled and painted a couple of models, both on horseback. A terrible decision for an 8th edition caster or leader. The guy sold me his army for pennies on the dollar because he was so burnt out. It was palpable in his face. This was a dude in his mid-20s who probably bought most of that stuff brand new, and he was just sad. His carrying case, a metal case with a handle, had a stenciled sprayed-on Punisher logo. This was a guy who cared about his army, and wanted to play it, and Games Workshop with a flagship army book of one of its two flagship games, turned an excited, engaged customer into a former customer. What would it take to get me to pay retail for Games Workshop products? Games Workshop would have to stop manufacturing those dudes by the thousand every time they iterate their game. They'd have to literally stop selling outdated products that suck, sell new products for every army they support on a regular basis, write rules that don't suck, engage with the community when developing products (to build excitement and anticipation and to make sure, before investing in full print runs and steel injection molds, that they have a product people will want and buy), stop attempting to claim a luxury position in a tiny market filled with competitors, and be willing to make low-margin products even in favor of the current cash-cow, in order to maintain diversity, be well-positioned for the next shift in market preference, and avoid discontinuing products in a way that alienates their customers. Do that, and yeah, I'll pay $50 for a box of models in a Games Workshop store with tables where I can play them, instead of $45 online from an online-only retailer. Hell yes. You think I'm going to cry about five bucks? I just need a lower barrier to entry, a game I can be confident I'll enjoy, a product that is worth what I paid, and a community that looks forward to new releases with anticipation instead of dread. Do that, and I won't even have the option to buy that product from a disillusioned former customer on eBay for $15. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jan 16, 2015 |
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Jan 16, 2015 19:33
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Zwiebel posted:I can't say I really understand why people are so gung-ho about wanting to see the company die and getting picked up by Bandai or something else. The answer to this is pretty simple. Both 40k and Fantasy are really silly and cool IPs, but everything about the way GW conducts themselves is unsavory. Hence this thread. People like the Warhammer concept, but don't like egregiously overpriced models and narrow minded business ideas, poorly written and balanced rule sets, and zero community and tournament support. Regardless of which company it is, people kind of justifiably picture the IP being in better hands as long as those hands aren't GWs, because it's hard to picture those other various companies having such backwards ideals and practices. Things are at a point where any big shakeup would probably result in something better coming out at the end of it.
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Jan 16, 2015 19:50
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It's actually kind of a unique situation, because the vast majority of trad games companies are privately held. When a privately held company goes bust, a lot of times, the owner retains the IP, and takes it to his grave. A publicly-held company that goes tits-up has to sell off its assets to pay its creditors or owners whatever they can, and the owners are the shareholders, and the shareholders have direct control of the board of directors (e.g., can hire and fire them by process of voting at the annual shareholders' meeting), and so - in theory - can and will force the company to sell the IP in any situation where the company is being liquidated. So we can't wind up with a Kevin Siembieda situation unless Games Workshop is taken private, which would require someone to buy all the shares. Not impossible, but it's hard to think of anyone who has that kind of money and would want to buy up GW and go private, particularly now that it's a company in financial decline. I don't actually want to see GW go out of business. What I want is detailed two posts up. But that scenario seems vanishingly unlikely, whereas a scenario where the shareholders get sick of year-over-year shirking profits and sell off their shares, tanking the share price to a sufficient level that the company appears to be a bargain to some much larger game company willing to buy them out? Still not super-likely, in my opinion, but at least possible. The big problem with that scenario is that profitable companies are risk-averse, and GW appears to be a very risky buy. You generally have to ask, why would we spend X million dollars to buy this company? Do we honestly believe we'll get a better return by doing that, as opposed to every other possible thing we could do with that X million dollars? Isn't the fact that GW's profits are shrinking, evidence that it's not a growth opportunity? The answer of course is that its numbers are in decline due not to a fundamental lack of opportunity to profit in its market, but rather, mismanagement. That's easy for us idiots to make claims to, but any actual buyer would have to put a lot of money behind that assumption. In the case of a non-hostile takeover, they'd have to convince GW's board to allow them to look at the company in detail (due dilligence), and then make an offer that the board feels would be in the best interests of the shareholders, e.g., a significant premium over current share price, beyond what the board thinks they will return in value to the shareholders in the near or medium future. A hostile takeover is even harder to justify: in that case, you make your offer directly to the shareholders, with little or no opportunity for due dilligence; the board and CEO actively oppose your offer by making an argument to the shareholders that they're better off rejecting the offer, and they share nothing of their proprietary, non-public records and plans (poo poo like upcoming products, detailed sales figures on a product-by-product basis, detailed performance figures for every store, resumes for key personnel, etc.). I don't know if there has ever been a hostile takeover of a public trad games company, ever. There are so few public trad games companies that even a friendly takeover would be fairly unprecedented. We all know about buyouts of private companies, perhaps most famously TSR, but these were cases where the owners wanted to sell, were drowning and looking for any rope at all, likely actively shopping the company to potential buyers. GW's directors have shown no sign of being sufficiently clear-headed about their company to recognize that a corporate sale might be in their own best interests and the best interests of their shareholders. I don't think it's going to happen this year, and it won't happen next year or in 2017 until/unless we see very very big drops in sales, to the point where GW is forced to either borrow or start selling assets, or the remaining shareholders lose their tolerance for declining share price. The fact that GW still pays any dividend at all (which is itself an idiotic thing for a small cap company interested in growing to be doing, I'll talk about that in other post if anyone cares) is basically proof that it's nowhere near the point where the board is interested in selling. GW is in a holding pattern, and despite its toxic practices, it'd only take a single big-selling product or license to turn things around. The Space Marine game generated two or three million pounds for a couple of years after release; the new line of paints that GW released a couple years ago generated two or three million pounds of profit, too. It is still a company capable of selling things for money. e. Just as an FYI: Games Workshop PLC's current market cap (calculated by multiplying share price by outstanding shares) is 158.52M pounds. In order to buy the company, a buyer would have to offer a significant premium over that number. They would get to (effectively) subtract GW's cash on-hand, which is probably five or ten million pounds. So figure a minimum buyout number today is probably on the order of 170M pounds or so. Who do we think could pay that? They don't have to have that much cash on hand, there are ways to buy using your own company's share equity (e.g., you pay shareholders with shares of your own company instead of cash), but that's complicated. I could see a company like Mattel or Hasbro easily having that much money, and Hasbro has had positive results from buying Wizards. But... would they spend that much? I dunno, man. I dunno. I don't think it's that likely. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Jan 16, 2015 |
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Jan 16, 2015 20:06
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Leperflesh posted:GW's directors have shown no sign of being sufficiently clear-headed about their company to recognize that a corporate sale might be in their own best interests and the best interests of their shareholders. I don't think it's going to happen this year, and it won't happen next year or in 2017 until/unless we see very very big drops in sales, to the point where GW is forced to either borrow or start selling assets, or the remaining shareholders lose their tolerance for declining share price. The fact that GW still pays any dividend at all (which is itself an idiotic thing for a small cap company interested in growing to be doing, I'll talk about that in other post if anyone cares) is basically proof that it's nowhere near the point where the board is interested in selling. I, for one, would be very interested in hearing about the hows and whys of dividend payment, if you feel like explaining.
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Jan 16, 2015 20:09
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Zwiebel posted:In short: Chess and Rummy are decent games, but I can't really recommend Parcheesi. Be warned though, because the Chess community can get awfully obnoxious and there's a lot of lovely people that just like to crush newbies and be smug assholes about it. Balance in chess is horrible. I only play Chess 2 now.
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Jan 16, 2015 20:30
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The main thing I took from those walls of text is that you're planning on playing Dreadfleet. You seem like a good guy, so don't do this to yourself.
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Jan 16, 2015 20:40
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Night10194 posted:I, for one, would be very interested in hearing about the hows and whys of dividend payment, if you feel like explaining. Way back in the 19th century, publicly traded companies almost always paid dividends. A dividend is a disbursment of your operating profits to your owners. It's originally concieved as the reason they purchased shares in your company in the first place. Understand: a company initially sells shares in a Public Offering. They get whatever the shares initially sell for. In a modern IPO, that's whatever the huge company managing the IPO pays. The instant actual trading starts happening, shareholders are paying each other for shares, not the company. So if you buy a share of IBM today, IBM does not get any money. Companies can also do supplemental sales of shares, in order to raise capital. This is a double-edged sword, though, because selling more shares effectively "dilutes" your existing shares. That's because the company's ownership, previously divided up into X number of pieces (typically several tens or hundreds of millions of shares), is now divided into X + Y pieces, where Y is the number of new shares you just sold. So selling shares of a company is a way of literally selling part of the company's ownership, in exchange for cash up front. This means it is borrowing. You are borrowing against the equity in the company, in order to raise cash. There are other ways to borrow. You could obtain a line of credit, for example, and most companies do this constantly, because big companies can borrow for very cheap (super-low interest rates, especially for short-term borrowing). You can also sell bonds, which are a promise to pay back a loan (to the bond holder) of the face value of the bond, which is itself some premium over its sale price. Bond prices fluctuate based on how much the market wants your bonds, which is itself a function of how risky the market thinks your debt is: if they think you're very likely to pay it back, your bonds will sell for a small amount less than face value; if they're perceived as very risky, the market demands a higher "risk premium" and thus you raise less money and/or must pay more in (effectively) interest, to attract buyers. But shares in the company represent ownership. Buyers of shares want ownership, in the old 19th century theory, because they then get to claim a share of profits. How much? Well, obviously, some of a company's profit (not revenue, which is total incoming money, but profit, which is money after accounting for all of the costs of running the business) should be retained, right? Because the company needs a cash reserve, and of course, the company is assumed to be trying to grow. In order to grow, you invest capital, so the company needs to reserve some of its profit every year to invest in itself. OK. But the directors of the company have a fiduciary responsibility (that means, legally enforced) to do what is best for its owners. So what is best for the shareholders: paying them as much as possible in dividends, or investing as much as possible in the growth of the company? A tricky question! Increasingly over the last hundred years, companies that are of small and medium size have seen fit to invest 100% of their profits back into the company, in order to grow. And the market has rewarded this strategy handsomely. This is seen (in theory) as a good thing, because presumably, the company can gain more growth in the long term by investing $100, which in turn rewards the shareholders by a value of more than $100, than if they simply paid the shareholders $100. That's why the shareholders are holding your shares in the first place, right? They think they'll do better in the long run, rather than cashing out now. IF you want your shareholders to believe that, shouldn't you also believe that? Famously, Amazon.com has never made a profit. And yet, it's enormous. Why? Because it has grown, very rapidly, for 20 years: investing not only 100% of it's operating profit (the profits after accounting for the cost of doing business) but also borrowing additionally, to spend on growth. A company can sustain this for year after year, by growing at a rate that is faster than the rate at which it is borrowing. This is seen by the marketplace as a good thing, because in the long run Amazon will wind up being vastly, vastly bigger. Amazon's market capitalization today is in excess of $130B. In once scenario, Amazon pays a 10 cent per share dividend for 20 years. In the other, Amazon pays no dividend for 20 years, but its share price rises by a factor of ten thousand, reflecting its massively larger market capitalization. Remember, market capitalization is the market's perception of how much the company is "worth," in a very real sense: if someone wanted to buy the whole company, they would have to pay whatever the shareholders are demanding for their shares. Even though it's not actually possible to buy a company for its current market cap, because the instant you start buying massively, you "move the market", because share price is a function of supply and demand, and you are directly adding to demand while directly reducing supply simultaneously. Put another way: if Amazon is currently trading at $288 a share, that represents the consensus price for only a tiny minority of shareholders (the current trading volume). The vast majority are unwilling to sell at that price, while (conversely) the vast majority of people interested in spending money are unwilling to buy a share of Amazon for $288. So share price is an auction, where most sellers won't sell and most buyers won't buy, but volume tells you how many owners are reaching a decision today to sell, and how many people-with-money are reaching a decision today to buy, at this price. Presumably the buyers think they'll make (enough) money by buying, and the sellers think they won't make (enough) money by holding. I say "enough" because there's an opportunity cost to a purchase: it's not just "will I make anything with this purchase" but "will I make more with this purchase than with any other purchase I could make instead". (Actually, I am completely ignoring risk premium here, but we don't need to get into that). Soooo, what's wrong with Games Workshop's dividend? Or any dividend for that matter? The answer is, it's a clear statement to the market that the board of directors of the company do not believe they could better use that money to grow. It says "instead of putting this million pounds to work accumulating market share, the best thing we can think of to do with it is pay it out to our shareholders." That's not automatically a bad thing for all companies to do. Today, so-called "blue chip" companies typically pay a dividend. This is seen as normal and reasonable because these companies have long-since passed any real potential for massive growth. IBM generates billions in profit annually, but the market for their products is not growing by a large multiple every year. It is saturated by their own sales and the sales of their major competitors. Yes, that market is growing - and IBM must satisfy its shareholders that it is growing year-over-year, because a total lack of growth suggests a company has nowhere to go but down, and that's not a value proposition. If your company can do nothing but shrink, presumably the best thing you can do for your shareholders is liquidate now and pay them all out, so they can put their money into something that will grow. For micro-caps and small-cap companies - think, companies with market valuations between $50M and perhaps $500M - the typical expectation is that the company is attempting to grow. This isn't always the case, of course. But it's the large majority. $50M is peanuts. The total size of the global economy (the Gross World Product) is something on the order of $85 Trillion annually. Why can't your podunk $100M company claim more of that? More specifically, why does Games Workshop think it can't do better by investing 100% of its profits in growth, rather than paying out a dividend? There are several possible reasons. Perhaps Games Workshop's directors honestly believe that the growth opportunities available in the trad games marketplace are too restricted for them to get a good return on that money. But... other trad game companies are growing. Provably. The total trad game market is also growing, provably. GW makes miniatures; Reaper is growing, and Reaper is a pure-miniature company. So is Privateer Press, and Wyrd, and a dozen other companies big and small. And there are not just-as-many miniature companies going out of business, either. So why does GW think it can't grow using that money, when several other companies in the same space are growing? Well, it's a matter of degree, of course: the same can be said of IBM, but in IBM's case, they are in a place where spending $X on growth allows them to maintain market share, while $X + $Y might not increase their market share proportionately, because the market is heavily saturated. Maybe the same is true of the trad game/miniature market? I don't believe that, and I suspect the market (the stock market) doesn't believe that either. Another possibility is that GW's officers and directors are also shareholders. And let's look at that for a minute, because this is also very common in publicly-traded companies. Famously, most CEOs get "paid" more in stock than in cash. Why? Well, this is seen as a strong motivator for those people to do what is already their fiduciary responsibility: maximise return to shareholders! If you own stock, it's in your direct, personal financial interest to make sure that stock performs, and to maximize that performance. So, in theory, the balance between paying a dividend or investing in growth affects the people making decisions about that balance in exactly the same way it affects the marketplace. Surely, the board and officers would not choose to pay a dividend (to themselves) if they thought they'd be better served growing the company (and thus, the stock price)? Or vice-versa! BUUUT. What if the insiders think the company's long-term prospects aren't that great? Or at the very least, are pretty risky? Perhaps they'd rather cash out now, instead of trying to grow the stock. Of course, they could just sell stock, but the executives of a public company are forced, by law, to plan their share sales in advance, and report those plans to the market. So if the CEO wants to sell a thousand shares, he has to say so well in advance. This is because regulators (correctly) assume these people have insider information that the market doesn't have, e.g., they'd otherwise be in an unfair position. They could buy up stock just before announcing a big sales year, or sell off stock just before announcing a disastrous quarter (or a big lawsuit, or whatever). So the market tends to react badly to signs that the insiders are bailing out. It's completely normal for insiders to sell small amounts (as a fraction of their total ownership) regularly, and in fact, most of them bleed off shares routinely. They are, after all, usually being paid more shares every year, and often are not being paid much (by comparison) in real dollars. (Plus, long-term capital gains are much cheaper than income taxes!) A dividend is another way for insiders to pay themselves, without selling shares and risking panicking the market. If a company pays regular dividends for a decade, it doesn't seem abnormal, and it's not suspicious. If a company suddenly pays a dividend, especially in the face of declining profits, that's more shady. Why on earth is Games Workshop paying dividends - and changing the amount every six months? Isn't it facing serious issues w/r/t growth? Couldn't it be using that money to shore up its market share? Isn't it in a growth industry? Why is the amount of its dividend different every six months? Are the insiders paying themselves as much as they can justify, without risking a panic by dumping shares? It's not by any means a sure sign of distress. It's just... odd. A company of this size is more ordinarily not only pouring every dollar of income into growth, but also borrowing more, and I'll remind you again that corporations can borrow short-term at incredibly low interest rates. A company that is engaging in modest amounts of borrowing is seen as doing a good thing, because it suggests they're identifying market opportunities and seizing on them without feeling restricted by their cash-on-hand. Stockpiling cash is a bad idea, because your shareholders ought to get to invest that cash themselves. This is why huge companies with huge piles of cash, like Apple and Intel, do things like share buybacks (which reduces total outstanding shares without reducing company value, thereby concentrating value in shares, thereby rewarding shareholders) or pay out big dividends. Running at huge debt is a bad idea, because it puts the company at severe risk: one poor quarter could lead to a bankruptcy situation, where you can't afford to service debt. Growing too rapidly could put you in that situation. Not growing at all suggests your company is stagnant and likely doomed. The middle ground suggests you are building future value for your shareholders, while managing your short-term risk. GW is not growing, and GW is not borrowing, and GW is not investing all of its profits in growth, and GW is paying dividends. The most likely explanation is that the dividends are being used to shore up a share price that would otherwise decline, and that the owners are literally out of ideas for how to use the company's earnings to grow. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Jan 16, 2015 |
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Jan 16, 2015 20:57
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Thirsty Dog posted:The main thing I took from those walls of text is that you're planning on playing Dreadfleet. It was a present. And if the rules suck, I'll modify them. The ships are amazing, the cloth play area is amazing, the terrain is amazing, it's a gorgeous game.
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Jan 16, 2015 20:57
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That was extremely helpful and interesting! Thanks for taking the time to write it all out.
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Jan 16, 2015 21:01
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Leperflesh posted:What would get me back into a GW, buying their products at retail price?... Wow, that characterization of the TK player sounds like a lot of guys that I know that has quit. Speaking of second hand market, what is the price for used minis from other wargames compared to GW? I guess the most comparable would be flames of war and PP.
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Jan 16, 2015 21:04
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Leperflesh posted:It was a present. And if the rules suck, I'll modify them. The ships are amazing, the cloth play area is amazing, the terrain is amazing, it's a gorgeous game. I'm in the same boat, and even grabbed a second copy from eBay based purely on how cool the models are. The game itself isn't that great, so I've got a vague project I've been working on on-and-off for the last couple of years to turn it into a card based boardgame. I'd love to see other alternate rules for it however!
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Jan 16, 2015 21:07
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Not a viking posted:Wow, that characterization of the TK player sounds like a lot of guys that I know that has quit. For PP most of it is just people using their distributor discount to sell under market by about 20%.
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Jan 16, 2015 21:15
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Night10194 posted:That was extremely helpful and interesting! Thanks for taking the time to write it all out. You're welcome. I've just made a few edits for clarity. Most importantly, $85 trillion is the Gross World Product, e.g, the total size of economic activity each year. The total "value" represented by the world's total commercial assets will be some substantial multiple of that. Not a viking posted:Wow, that characterization of the TK player sounds like a lot of guys that I know that has quit. I haven't personally checked, but it's got to be better, because those companies are growing. You can't expect to grow your business if your (especially new-in-box) products are undercut by your own products from your previous customers. The Supreme Court posted:I'm in the same boat, and even grabbed a second copy from eBay based purely on how cool the models are. The game itself isn't that great, so I've got a vague project I've been working on on-and-off for the last couple of years to turn it into a card based boardgame. I'd love to see other alternate rules for it however! I haven't looked into it much, but I know there are tons of interesting ships-on-the-table sail games. I figure my first thing is to just play it a few times, to get a feel for it, and then read up some reviews from people who have played it to see if they had insights into its problems that I missed, and then either search for other people's mods of the rules or decide if they can be salvaged with mods of my own. And if neither of those are true, I can just wholesale adopt a different ships-fighting game. The failure of Dreadfleet is a testament to GW's inability to effectively create and market products, because, as I said, the components are incredible and clearly represent a value. But I immediately realized on cutting out the bits from the sprues that there were parts I couldn't paint once the things were glued together, and I wanted to paint all the ships, and that meant not assembling them. So I currently have two assembled-and-painted ships. The introductory scenario is between the two biggest, most complicated and gorgeous ships, but I wanted to paint one of the smaller ones first, because my painting skills are rusty, so I started with the dwarf ship. I've now also assembled and painted the Heldenhammer, and started working on the other biggest ship, the vampire evil one (its name escapes me at the moment). But I got sidetracked from painting minis for a year (by Bronzestabbed, if anyone here is also a Let's Play regular) and so the thing is gathering dust in the hobby room right now. I tend to procrastinate a lot when it comes to painting my tiny, jewel-like objects of wonder, which only goes to highlight even more one of the big problems I have with GW's flagship games; you literally can't play them until you've done a whole bunch of hobbying, and that is a huge barrier to entry and casual play. Monopose minis aren't as cool and exciting, and I am kind of OK with the big tabletop games requiring the modelling effort, but GW can and should make games that you can play out-of-the-box. I say that confidently because in the last year, a dozen very expensive ($100+) minis-based boardgames have been kickstarted very very successfully, with monopose minis that you can play with out of the box. GW practically created that genre in the late 1980s, and if they'd stuck with it - writing better rules, iterating their games, expanding them, and accepting that the boxed-boardgame-with-minis division of the company would only be a quarter as profitable as their main game lines - they could still be dominating that space today. Here's the hypothetical scenario to really spell it out. I'm selling $10M of my main game annually, with a 30% margin. I'm selling $3M of my side-games annually, with a 10% margin. I'm selling $2M of an obscure game annually, with a 0% margin. But the obscure game gives my existing customers a reason to stick around, it brings customers into the store, and it represents 50% market share of the obscure-game's sub-niche. The side-games give my existing customers a reason to stick around, bring customers into the store, and represent 80% market share of the side-games niche. My main game is the most profitable, but also has the highest barrier to entry, is the most expensive, and only represents 40% share of its tabletop wargaming niche. If I abandon the side-games and obscure game, my company's margins improve massively, I have a less-complex business model, and I can make my existing employees working on those lines re-focus on my most-profitable line, perhaps improving my market share to 50%! But if in 10 years, the side-game's niche market grows from a total global size of less than $4M a year (which I owned 80% of) to a global size of $50M a year, and I retain 70% of that market share, I now have revenues in that space of $35M, and with my 10% margin, total profits of $3.5M. Eclipsing the $3M profits I was making on my main game line! And if in 10 years the obscure niche doubles, so I'm now selling $4M of the game with a 0% margin, well: it's still essentially free. To grow my other lines, I hired new people, maintaining those margins: and by continuing to exist in this obscure marketplace, I'm still owning half that market share, which helps to keep out competitors in the overall trad games miniatures-based games market. So I've maintained my dominating position in the overall market, I've maintained the (intangible, hard-to measure, but nevertheless real) goodwill of my customers, and I've given people who get bored with my main game a reason to still come into my store every other month, where they'll see the display about the new add on to the game they got bored with, and maybe it will entice them to get back into that main game and buy some more product! These are all made-up hypothetical numbers, of course. The intent is not to say that this is definitely what's happened with GW. It only shows how a narrow focus on the current margins of several products, without considering the bigger picture, can lead a company that thinks its making the most financially-prudent decisions to do something that is actually financially disastrous. It's a situation that literally anyone with a business degree should have learned about and understand, and it's the sort of thing that (in particular) marketing directors understand. The concept of a "loss-leader" is not new. The idea of diversifying products, even in the face of lower margins for some of them, is not controversial. That GW seems to have missed the boat in this regard is a key argument in this thread for the apparent incompetence of its leadership over the last 10 or 15 years, and this argument is not rebutted by plain statements that discontinued games were discontinued because they "didn't sell enough" in comparison to the primary games. Dreadfleet was a good idea. With better rules, and especially by signalling loud and clear that expansions were possible, it would have sold better; GW did the opposite, announcing on-release that there would be no expansions, and moreover, it was a limited run, so you wouldn't even be able to walk into a gaming place in 5 years and find someone else who had recently bought the game and thus might know the rules and be interested in playing it. It's a game with scenarios; would it have been that hard even to write some new ones and publish them in White Dwarf? Dreadfleet probably broke even, or lost a little, but it could have had playtested rules, product support, and some longevity, and it does not matter that its profitability could never have competed with the margins on Warhammer 40k models. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Jan 16, 2015 |
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Jan 16, 2015 21:33
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Leperflesh posted:I haven't personally checked, but it's got to be better, because those companies are growing. You can't expect to grow your business if your (especially new-in-box) products are undercut by your own products from your previous customers. The standard 20-30% off from retail discounters, and the 40-60% discount on used minis that you'd buy secondhand. It's also interesting that Privateer Press doesn't sell their products on their online store - only things like exclusives get sold there. If you want to buy a box of something, you have to buy from a retailer either in person or online.
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Jan 16, 2015 22:07
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S.J. posted:The standard 20-30% off from retail discounters, and the 40-60% discount on used minis that you'd buy secondhand. That is a great way to keep your retailers happy to carry and support your game, especially if their customers might have to special-order something and wait for it to get delivered to the store. Why have your FLGS special-order something from a distributor, if you could just go online to the company's webpage and order it yourself, to be conveniently shipped to your home? It also means you don't have to pay for staff to package and ship individual orders, so you can run your warehouse entirely like a distributor.
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Jan 16, 2015 22:22
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Honestly I could see why you'd make the move to dump something like Fantasy and reinvent it. If something's making the estimated 8% that people claim and is costing you more in resources it's a good idea to dump it or try and come up with a plan to reinvigorate the line even if it does piss off all of your previous customers, who cares, they've already bought that product. They just have to hope that the loss of sales from returning customers is made up by sales to new customers who are interested in the new line. Depending on what Fantasy turns into you may get new customers or it may just die a slow death again because you hosed it royally. Regardless just dumping Fantasy sales all together probably would have a positive effect if you are in fact spending more money to produce it than to sell it. I don't think they're going to dump the Fantasy line , I don't even think there is going to be the dramatic change that people think there will be. I don't think that it's their copying Warmachine or any other companies model.
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Jan 16, 2015 22:26
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Lets just throw this out there: few games match the feel of having a legit army from the old days as WHFB. That's why I wish I could play more. Yes, sometimes the GW fluff borders on offensively racist but I love the lizardmen because I love the Mayan/Aztek feel and mythology. Even the terrible names feel warm and cheeky instead mocking and derisive. But it's harder to devote a block of 3-5 hours once a week (this includes packing, travel, unpacking, setup, playtime, teardown, packing, unpacking to the house) or even bi-weekly to play with my plastic army men. I know there are third party ways to build armies too, so at least now I can whip up an army while on the crapper. However, because the time committment is so much to play WHFB, I play Warmachine/Hordes much more often. A 2 hour block is much more managable. I don't want WHFB to turn to Warmachine, but I would love if GW made a special set of fantasy rules for 1000 point and under games. Hell, even if they sold a rulebook for about $40 I would buy it as long as I could still get away with using a fair amount of my already existing models. A 1000 point and under game that was a little more fine tuned would be great. Aim for about an hour to play the game, with a smaller amount of models less setup time, and I bet you would get a lot more players who are new or just dont have the time to play 2500 point games anymore due to families and being adults. I dont get how no one at GW has thought, well what if we made a game where two patrols came across each other led by the equivalent of 2nd LT (in US Military) and they fought it out. Not everyone game has to have Teclis personally making sure that he finds a way to take cannonballs to the face. Not every game should have Slaan who just decide "Screw the prophecies and my sacred duties, lets go bust some heads!" Give me a better set of rules that I can use so that I can build and use an army made up a Saurus Scar Vet on a cold one who is commanding 30 skinks, 16 saurus warriors, a kroxigor, and skink chief of wizard and have that be a very playable army. Thats 548 points without magic items or upgrades and its 50 models. Ideally something like that ends up a 8 units. Add MMO lite effects to the units to add variety, or even nee types of weapons for a smaller more personal battle field. Instead of incredibly sacred heirloom of the world being in the hands of Joe Dwarf, maybe Joe Dwarf is really close to the company commander and his unit can perform actions out of the normal sequence of events because the two think alike. Maybe this group of 10 elven archers is led by a hot head muscle bro who constantly makes his men ground fight MMA style, so they counter charge and fight much better in hand to hand than normal archers, but cant stand and shoot. Hell, maybe that group of orcs can judge distance better than most orcs and can charge an extra inch or two. If I am describing an older GW game that I never played (only played WHFB and 40k, then GW should go back to that. ) You want me to buy new models and keep the money train going? Sell me commanders doing cool poo poo in their sculpts that I can put in as champions when and if I get to play a 2500 pt game. I would be willing to pay $10-$20 for multiple reasonably scuplted commanders. I already do that with Warmachine, but I would get to then put these in my big army. Hell if I really wanted to imagine and dream, then when I squeaked out time for a 2500 point game, then it would make me giddy as hell seeing all say 5 or 6 of my companies all together in a "real" fight. To me, it would make those games that much more satisfying. "Alright these wretched Skaven have led an invasion into our lands and the Slaan mage priest of this city has assembled his six lieutenants (all of who I have played memorable skirmish games with) to deal with this menance." Maybe people would buy cheap mini fluff novels for those guys. Maybe it would just be nice to have a model who represents the commander of your patrol team that somehow stood toe to toe with the forces of chaos. Maybe it causes you to lose a tournament because you are too attached to a unit you normally wouldnt care about, but because you like playing small scale battle with Lt Legolas, you just cant bear to see him get beat down by a group of Witch Elves and their cauldron. I wrote way too much, but this kind of thing just seems like common sense to me. Find a way to get shorter games, with smaller buy in, that gets people in stores to play, so that they want to keep buying models to play in big scale battles.
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Jan 16, 2015 22:30
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Hollismason posted:Honestly I could see why you'd make the move to dump something like Fantasy and reinvent it. If something's making the estimated 8% that people claim and is costing you more in resources it's a good idea to dump it or try and come up with a plan to reinvigorate the line even if it does piss off all of your previous customers, who cares, they've already bought that product. They just have to hope that the loss of sales from returning customers is made up by sales to new customers who are interested in the new line. Depending on what Fantasy turns into you may get new customers or it may just die a slow death again because you hosed it royally. The exact opposite of what I just explained, but I suppose it's forgiveable if folks don't want to read my huge walls of text. Suffice it to say that no, burning the bridge out from under the feet of your diehard loyal customers in order to court new ones is not a winning proposition, even if it appears to be the more profitable move in the very short term. For example: those customers will dump their models on eBay, undercutting your attempts to sell models to the new customers. Another example: those customers will badmouth your company and point out how "games workshop tricks you into buying into a system and then kills the system," undercutting your ability to attract new customers. A third example: customers these days are smarter and go online to read reviews of your products. Those reviews will be negative even if the product is good, because of pissed off former customers actively trying to sabotage the new product that they perceive as having killed the product they loved. A fourth example: GW will not adequately develop or playtest their new rules. We know they cannot have done that, because they no longer do any sort of public playtesting or demos, and they lack the staff to do adequate in-house playtesting. The rules for their new game will have problems and flaws and this, combined with the lack of an established player base, will prevent new customers from wanting to buy in. No. If Fantasy's margins are poor, they can be much more easily improved by making the existing customers excited about playing their game and buying their products again.
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Jan 16, 2015 22:33
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Chill la Chill posted:So what we're saying is we need a Gundam RPG/skirmish rule set. Battle tech could've been this rule set if it wasn't so riddled with groggy rules abominations. gently caress you i shoot my left arm Clan Large Laser at you and miss, I shoot the Clan ER PPC on my right arm and hit your 'Mech's left leg, blowing off all the armour and going into internal structure. please roll 1 critical hit location on a 1d6
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Jan 16, 2015 22:36
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Leperflesh posted:The exact opposite of what I just explained, but I suppose it's forgiveable if folks don't want to read my huge walls of text. This is a good rebuttal. However you must keep in mind  Prepare for an insane or idiotic response.
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Jan 16, 2015 22:38
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What if inside each troop box for the ball touching warhammer you get free chicken bones?!
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Jan 16, 2015 22:42
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Leperflesh posted:Dividends An Actual Good Post in this thread. Thanks for writing this!
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Jan 16, 2015 22:51
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TheCosmicMuffet posted:Balance in chess is horrible. I only play Chess 2 now. Let's do something about that...  
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Jan 16, 2015 23:24
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I too am grateful for these insightful posts about the miniature gaming industry and whst GW has done wrong. Thank you Leperflesh! 
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Jan 16, 2015 23:27
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What would get me back into a GW, buying their products at retail price? Dropping the scale back down and rewriting the rules from scratch. Prices per model aren't necessarily an issue for me (thought a lot of them are still gobsmackingly high) but the sheer number of them needed is. Orks are my favourite wargaming race. Period. I have crates and crates of them - probably close to 10,000 points worth of assembled and painted stuff, with another 5,000 points sat on the sprue or half finished. I could gladly spend £100-£150/month on Orks. But gently caress playing 40k. gently caress arguments because of lovely rules. gently caress the 7th ed Mob Rule (seriously which moron thought that was a good idea?). gently caress the balance issues. gently caress rolling on 20 random tables before the game even begins. gently caress titans in regular games. gently caress flyers in regular games. gently caress 2000 points as the standard (which by my gut feeling is closer to 3000 because scale creep). Every time I get tempted to put an Ork together, or scratchbuild an Ork vehicle, or do anything 40k related I remember the absolute monstrosity of the 40k ruleset. A 30 year old Napoleonic ruleset which has had nothing but poorly thought out and poorly written additions. There's been nothing done to streamline or update it since 3rd ed, and even that wasn't as much of a radical rewrite as people make out. It's more complicated than Warmachine, plays with several times as many figures and has less depth than tiddlywinks because there are too many models on the board. Complicated rules does not equal depth - just over complicated rules. Over 100 28mm infantry on the board and there's no tactical choices other than "who do you shoot first". If I want a "Beer and Pretzels" game then I play a simple game like X-Wing. Which still has more depth than 40k. If I want a large scale "beer and pretzels" game then I play Kings of War. Which still has more depth than 40k. If I want a complex tactical game then I play Warmachine. There is nothing that 40k offers, other than the universe and specifically Orks that puts it above its competition. Drop the scale down for the standard game to what is currently around 1000 points and stop increasing the size of an army with every release. 50 infantry in a standard army with a few light support vehicles and maybe 1 heavy vehicle. A swarm army like nids would have at most 100 models, so the Battle of the Somme effect of having too many models on the board actually fits that fluff and is thematic. Have add-ons, introducing flyers and titans for those who want to play larger games, but encourage larger board sizes to go with that. There shouldn't be more than 100 models/side on a 6x4 board in a Sci-Fi setting. The default size however should be 1k points. Stick the rules in the box on a reference card. This is such a simple and obvious thing to do, that PP implemented years ago (nearly a decade?) and it's mind boggling that GW doesn't do it. The rules need to be rewritten from scratch with extensive public playtesting. Look at Lord of the Rings and Epic:Armageddon. GW are capable of writing good rules if they aren't held back by catering to their legacy rulesets. Kings of War feels like a rebooted WHFB. Maybe it could do with a bit more complexity to be a true spiritual successor to WHFB, but I'd certainly take it over WHFB any day. The truth is that there's next to nothing that GW could do to get me playing WHFB again since KoW is such a good game. When a decent 40k alternative comes along then there's nothing that GW can do to get me back.
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Jan 16, 2015 23:33
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Some good posts lately, great stuff
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Jan 16, 2015 23:40
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All the cool kids are doing it, so: What would get me to buy from GW again? Basically nothing. At this point, there's absolutely no trust. If GW came out with my perfect game, and sold beautiful models for dirt cheap for it, I'd just be waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe if they had some sort of PR or market research, they could have avoided getting to that point, but GW are about level with EA for me - no matter how fun the game looks, that brand tells me it'll be horrible, and I actively avoid buying them.
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Jan 16, 2015 23:51
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Daedleh posted:There is nothing that 40k offers, other than the universe and specifically Tau that puts it above its competition. Fixed that for you.  But if I had to answer the question, I'd pay full price for Games Workshop products if they made a product that was worth the price point! I got into Tau and played for a long time, but it was such a slow and fiddly money sink that I gave up after 5th edition was released. What I got were some awkwardly molded and posed battlesuits, hovering vehicles that snapped off their flight stands and tons of useless little bits left over. Broadside suits tended not to remain attatched to their ankles if dropped. For the price, I would very much like snap-fit mono-color battlesuits with posable torsos, elbows and knees, bodies that don't look like Fisher Price toys, ankles that don't snap, and swappable weapons. I'd like tanks that didn't have terrible flight stands. I'd like a game with well-written, well-playtested rules that enabled decisions beyond "who do I shoot at" and made the game exciting. I'd also like GW to get off their arses and do something with their IP! The 40k universe is batshit, a huge sprawling edifice so ludicrous that half the content the fans produce is as legitimate as the official fluff. I want GW to not be so Gollum-like with their IP. I want more books thst aren't about the jerks of the Imperium! I want more cool video games! I want apps to help me build an army! I want to see adverts for new products in a magazine or on a bus! I also would like it to be less po-faced, I guess. I want GW to get with the times, basically. Until that happens I won't even consider parting with my cash.
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Jan 17, 2015 00:09
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Last year, I bought big chunks of the armies that I wanted to play as a teenager but couldn't afford. I have enjoyed sculpting them, painting them, and imagining the bloody battles that they would have in elfland or spaceelfland, but I have absolutely no desire to play the actual games anymore. Kings of War looks sweet. Maybe my elfies will see a battlefield after all.
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Jan 17, 2015 00:19
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Leperflesh posted:It was a present. And if the rules suck, I'll modify them. The ships are amazing, the cloth play area is amazing, the terrain is amazing, it's a gorgeous game. Try this: http://quirkworthy.com/2012/01/21/dreadfleet-salvage-project-version-1-0/ (Same guy who wrote Dreadball / Deadzone / etc)
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Jan 17, 2015 00:20
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Necromunda 2 would draw me right back in. This is where GW's top-notch plastic sprue design comes in, I'm not sure there's anyone else who could quite do this. I'd want Necromunda 2 to be designed from the ground up for customisable campaign play, starting with the plastic sprues the gangers come in and utilising magnets. The main point would be pre-fit holes for magnets in most pieces, making changing a gang a pain-free experience. Supported by decent rules that supported character growth, reduced randomness without chance to mitigate it, and keeping the 10-15 minute game length. The ideal rules would encompass a point-buy system so that new gangs could fight experienced gangs on an even footing. With that, the dream for the plastics would be: 1. Gang unique sprues containing bits to mix and match juves/ heavies/ gangers/ leaders from, plus gang-unique iconography, equipment and weapons. 2. Master equipment sprues, filled with every weapon and piece of equipment detailed in the rules. e.g. even money stuff like ming vases, or weapon upgrades, or specific grenades. 3. Wound sprues. Eyepatches, bandages, bionic bits. All magnetised! The important thing would be the core box would be self-contained; two gangs with all the equipment required for any adventure. Supported by the old-style White Dwarf, this would monetise itself. Want the new equipment in this month's Chapter Approved? Buy the sprue! New gangs, gang members, bounty hunters, new poses, weapons etc. The Supreme Court fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 00:21
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A Necromunda that accomodated all the 40k figures would be a really cool game in a way the game limited to gangers would not be, imo.
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Jan 17, 2015 00:42
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I remember even at the time being stunned that GW blithely expected you to remodel/repaint/etc every ganger every time they changed weapons. I didn't come across the idea of magnets until recently, and in hindisght it's obvious. loving magnets, etc. e: There was one time at my local where the staff guy told me I couldn't have my ganger firing a plasma pistol because the model had a bolt pistol (and even that had a decent crust of glue/remove/glue). If I remember right, my opponent waited till the redshirt had walked off, then agreed it was a plasma pistol. petrol blue fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 00:56
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Things that would make me consider buying GW products again: -Bring back the specialization games. Especially Battlefleet Gothic, Necromunda and Epic. If I want to play a massive-scaled battle pitting thousands of troops and vehicles against one another, I want to do it at a scale where I can comfortably play on a decent sized table, not an area bigger than my kitchen. Re-write Necromunda so it's compatible with all the factions and has a rule set that fits for small-scale games. - Models at a decent price point, and on that note, enough models per package to field appropriate sized squads. I shouldn't have to buy multiple blisters to field a unit of 10 models, or two boxes to get a minimum unit size of models.
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Jan 17, 2015 01:16
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As stated before I'm a fellow Necromunda lover but... I do wonder in the mid 90s how many Necromunda sales were driven by the awesome box full of modular terrain also useful for 40k players who could not be arsed to make their own and also pre-internet eBay and third party creator boom. Had GW even started experimenting with terrain kits back then or did it follow soon after?
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Jan 17, 2015 01:28
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It would be pretty loving cool if I didn't have to buy multiple copies of every loving thing I wanted to put in an army list, GW
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Jan 17, 2015 01:31
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gently caress yes - box full of IG / chaos cultists, plus a shitload of really nice 40k terrain, sign me up. These days, that'd make perfect malifaux terrain  Hell, I still miss my old juve-squad that would have been part of a proper 40k army, honest - Children of the Khorne. Just a shame I never got further than 'pile of juves in red/black' and buying the codex.
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Jan 17, 2015 01:33
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Already been said, but really nice effortposts, Leperflesh. I appreciate the insights.
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Jan 17, 2015 04:41
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Just to point out though , the Necromunda living rulebook http://www.poisonousmonkeys.co.uk/Necromunda/Necromunda_Docs/Necromunda_Rulebook.pdf Is not files, GW actually offered the rules up, if you haven't seen this then you should go through it. Also, you can find some amazing campaigns on this website. http://gaming.yaktribe.org/community/vault/necromunda-community-edition-rulebook.1/ There's a lot of support for Necromunda if you still want to play and there absolutely rules for Space Marines and every single weapon in the 40k universe, by people who playtest them. Adepticon actually has a Necromunda tournament and play tables every year.
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Jan 17, 2015 05:45
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