>be GW
>release nice new miniatures that even grogs like me like the look of, and interesting unique warbands and stuff I might buy as a "pocket money" purchase
>bin them off after 4 years, or make certain miniatures only available in certain intro/fomo boxes which then disappear and re-appear
WTF is this business plan?
Like you can't buy this guy, for example. I got one for £0.30 somehow fortunately, it's such a cool sculpt. And you can't get it.
GW just aren't a regular miniature wargames company for miniature wargamers. They're closer to EA in video games. Imagine the Perry Twins just dropping their Agincourt Knights one day.
I would give GW like £20-25 for this Zoat, and I can't.
>I would give GW like £20-25 for this Zoat, and I can't.
It is crazy when you put it like that
Well I won't, and also don't support overpriced nostalgia-bait characters like that
Grogs will buy new things. Take it away, and they scramble even harder for it. They make most of their sales for stuff in preorders and the first months, so drop it, pull it, and watch them squirm is the new method.
Remember when they had inventories of all the bits and individual minis you could order from them?
>Remember when they had inventories of all the bits and individual minis you could order from them?
I do lad. Like GW kept the old original Rhino available, with all the metal parts to make variants, until like 2008 or something daft.
Or you could buy as many bionic arms from that one particular Necromunda Bounty Hunter as you wanted, and use them on your Iron Hands. It was great.
>go into GW
>order the bell from the Screaming Bell and a goblin arm
>staffer guy asks me what conversion I'm working on
Simpler times.
>costs you $104 dollars
>GW just aren't a regular miniature wargames company
No shit. They're significantly bigger than the rest of the industry put together.
>GW just aren't a regular miniature wargames company for miniature wargamers.
It's a combination of a few factors:
GW lacks production capacity to stock everything they make at all times, and found they made more money in short term bumps anyway, which works better for stock market sorcery/pleasing shareholders and maintaining their absurdly large profit margins than sustained sales over time and maintaining inventory. With the massively reduced costs of producing plastic moulds these days and the increased scale of GW, it's not even remotely the significant investment that for the business that it used to be, so they can and do just churn constantly. But they can still only produce so much at once due to the amount of casting machines. Short productions runs frees up time to produce more other things. The only thing that'd change any of this would be a massive drop in demand.
There's also that given their status in the industry, they've not really been pulling in executives from the miniatures industry since, well, ever, but rather from other industries including adjacent stuff like mobile phone "games" and other software, where the understanding how you monetise the customer base is very different to the classic miniatures industry. So the mentality at the top is very, very different.
So yeah, they're not a regular miniatures company, they've not been for a very long time. They're an anomaly. Their entire business model has been an anomaly for over 30 years ever since they centred it on physical stores selling only their own products. And even before that it was an anomaly since most miniatures companies at most had a single on-site storefront on top of their mail-order business rather than being directly associated with a chain of game stores.
It has as a miniatures company never, ever, been anything but increasingly anomalous over time.
and it's arguably the most successful miniatures company.
most of the money on these minis is made at the time of launch. their whole modern business model is built around the concept of "always be launching". cycling out old products on continuous loop is part of that. the fact that the resulting FOMO helps boost launch sales even more is just a happy byproduct.
that's why there's always new models, there's always old models going oop, and you have an endless cycle of new editions and army books even though none of the games ever actually improve. just gotta keep launching shit. quality is secondary and maintenance of existing anything is a distant third.
it's about the most cancerous model a game company could adopt, but as it turns out it's extremely profitable.
Gotta free up factory space and funds for fat black troony ground marine models, and that la creatura chaos cultist. You understand, I hope.
moron that's a macaw.
Its the fricking same thing i was warning you all about in the last half of 8th 40k and 9th 40k but everyone fricking laughed at me but guess what, I WAS FRICKING RIGHT!
GW is trying to do the burn and churn marketing method, they make a meta, thats stupid strong, nerf it a bit a month or so later, then put out a new meta that counters the old meta to make people buy the new shit.
They are trying to do that same bullshit that MTG does, the problem is models are a lot fricking harder to make then new cards, and its a lot harder to nickle and dime your player base with models then it is cards.
All this debacle proves to me is how many GW bootlickers there are. Every shitty decision that they have been making for the past 5-10 years has droves of homosexuals defending it. It's why 40k and AoS are both going to shit.
Its why i have been shilling my group to go back to 7th depsite its flaws it was the last time 40k was decent.
Its also why we are jumping on TOW
To add, its not a matter of New is bad old is good, its just that the games were activly better for me before 8th and AoS.
I got into 40k because of the game it was before 8th ed, 8th ed + is an entirely different game/system that i dont like. what pisses me off is that i would be fine if GW wanted to go with another interation of the game that was as different as the jump from 7th to 8th was, if they would have offered support for people who still wanted to play the older version of the game. But they basically showed them the middle finder and said deal with it.
You should play Horus Heresy. It's fun.
I do i enjoy HH, i do not like some things about HH, like how gimped psyker powers are, i get them needing to be nerfed from HH1.0 but holy frick.
Legion traits need to be returned with some, IF, being insanely OP
I also think reactions need to be toned down, they are CRAZY strong in that game.
Dreads needs a bit of tuning.
But my biggest thing is, i get tired of marines on marines. Like if they launched Orks and Eldar which were present during that time, that would be cool.
Personally im waiting for GW to spring board HH into the great scouring and have that act as a soft reboot of old 40k, with older factions only like marines, guard, nids, orks, eldar, possibly necrons.
They have you money. That was the plan. They also hope you have the attention span of a fricking goldfish, have grown bored of your current models and will slurp up whatever figure range they shit out next, over and over. If you don;t get bored of the models you own they will force you to dump them by omitting them from the next edition of the game you are hooked to. Welcome to corporate managed wargaming.
>Imagine the Perry Twins just dropping their Agincourt Knights one day.
Is it slowly dawning on you that in historicals there is no meta to chase? Wait until you find out the lore is actually more wild than anything Dan Abnett can come up with.
booooooooooriiiiiiiiiing
>I need magic and demons and laser cannons to be interested in a story
Yes, you are very boring.
>I need my game to be historical because I love realism and lack imagination
no u
Those historical figures you love so much? They liked stories of men fighting monsters to win fair damsels hearts too. Alexander the great would shit his skirt if you told him what a lightsaber was.
ITT: anons struggle to understand limited exclusive items.
Except most of the items being discussed were a part of their normal catalogue, moron.
games workshop was a magazine publisher that moved onto board games which were under milton bradley(?) .
they outsourced miniatures and paints to other manufacturers (heavy metal and citadel miniatures)
once they got big enough they just bought out citadel minis and made all their minis in house.
this is where many grog mbas think was when gw went to shit.
>once they got big enough they just bought out citadel minis and made all their minis in house.
>this is where many grog mbas think was when gw went to shit.
Completely moronic take, there are probably 50 peolle worldwide pining for the pre-Citadel days of GW.
deliberate misinformation and revisionism
there will be other minis you like the look of in the future.
I have foreseen it
Seethe piggy, you're just gonna buy more slop anyways like the good hog you are.
So that when they bring them back temporarily for jacked prices lots of whales will spend. You need to understand that GW has an audience that gobbles whatever it spits at them. I appreciate them as someone who bought a lot of shares 7 years ago.