Back in the olden days of the mid 00’s, it was quite rare for there to be any bundle products at GW beyond the Army boxes (which were christmas products?), the two-player starter sets and the Battalion boxes.
Recently, it has seemed that Games Workshop is prioritising big single-purchase bundle products and hugely increasing the prices of all its individual products. This avalanche of bundles products was well represented in Eons of Battle’s Adepticon video.
Replacing the Battalion boxes from Fantasy, we got the Start Collecting! boxes, during this time around 2017 prices almost across the board were lowered. Recently, Start Collecting! boxes have been getting replaced by Vanguard and Combat Patrol boxes at a higher price. But now just a short while later, we are gettign Boarding Patrol boxes for 40k, at roughly the contents and prices of the Start Collecting! boxes which were just replaced.
It certainly feels to me that GW has been changing sales tactic. Perhaps aiming at whales more than previously? These discount boxes to me seem like they will cannibalise future sales more than anything, when the second-hand market is flooded with modern sculpts and models similar to the famous 50p Hobgrots following Dominion.
Yes. YouTubers like Discourse Minis have been pointing this out (at length) for a few years now.
It’s not a question, GW is using FOMO to frontload bulk sales where people might otherwise just buy a single box.
A lot of this is because their profit margins increased during the pandemic lockdowns and they’re under corporate pressure to keep things that way, despite the changing circumstances.
We know that, for a niche like ours, people who are interested in collecting fantasy miniatures will choose the best quality and be prepared to pay what they are worth.
We don’t spend money on things we don’t need, like […] advertising that speaks to the mass market and not our small band of loyal followers.
While the greatly increased prices make it easy for me to stop supporting them, I‘m a bit worried that this business practise may have negative long-term impacts on the hobby as a whole as in fewer new people getting into it (while 3D printing is an attractive competitor, the barrier to entry is still too high for most) and local game stores stop having tabletop products an their shelves.
I share this sentiment, as I mentioned on thee Discord, I have seen two Italian comics/book stores liquidate their GW stands. I have also seen a stand in a UK stationary shop struggling to sell anything.
It really feels like 2014 prices are returning, and thence the slowdown of the company and sales might return too
Yeah, apparently GW’s Australian market is basically nonexistent.
With Privateer Press dropping back to a C-tier competitor, GW is in a position where they can basically do what they want (which is, ironically, copy Warmachine).
We had years of the bundles having zero discount over the individual boxes (aside from the boxsets with the rules), it’s funny how now they are pushing the discounted costs by just pushing up the prices of the individual boxes more than the bundles.
Haha, int this really just a click bait video? “Its too expensive I might quit… not really” I mean, given the over all inflation, production, shipping, “the China situation” etc it isn’t really hard to see prices going up.
Its a hobby, not a right to model/wargame. If you dont want it then dont buy it and vote with your money, rather than you tubers producing videos with no content what so ever to be consumed.
I mean sure GW is in for making profit, same as every other company producing something. If you need strength fellow war-games join the BATG!
That or you can just get a kiddo, then you’ll never have the time to finish the pile anyway no matter what… Sorry if I got a bit OT but the whole “GW is fucking their fans” thing has been going on more or less since I joined the hobby in the mid 90s.
For me its easier to count how much hobby time do I get out of this, and then compare it to anything else you tend to spend money on. Compared that way Id say our hobby has a really good h/€ ratio.
I‘m a bit torn here. Sure, wargaming is technically not an expensive hobby if you are not mindlessly hoarding miniatures (#BATG). However, most people who are starting out just want to assemble their miniatures and get a game going. Are they going to blindly spend 300+ euros on something unknowing if they will enjoy it? Perhaps. A more reasonable budget for most people would be something around 50, perhaps 100 euros for a decent starter force. I had this conversation more than once with colleagues — technically they are interested in the setting but not that much that they are willing to spend so much money upfront. I cannot argue with that. I mean, yes, technically there are skirmish games… but they are not particularly great deals anymore either.
Yeah the clickbait title of the video did annoy me, but the actual content of it I found to be quite good and quite useful.
It’s frustrating to see GW increase the prices so much.someone on the discord calculated the price of an old metal model from the 80s with inflation and it costed £12 in today’s money. Most character models now cost more than double that.
No offense taken. I know that the complaints about price hikes are as old as the hobby. Interestingly, not only GW but other companies behind indoor hobbies (e.g. LEGO and I believe Hasbro has also be in the news concerning this) have greatly increased their prices with the onset of the pandemic, inflation was just the latest convenient reason. A lot of this is driven by the desire to meet expectations of investors (not always though, LEGO is not a publicly traded company). If this is sustainable, I don’t know.
In the end though it’s on us. If these products are worth their money to you, by all means, I don’t want to discourage anyone from buying from GW. We should just remember that we as consumers also have the power to dictate prices…
Fair observations. Zooming out a bit, I for one am grateful that Games Workshop is in more capable hands now than it was, say, 10 years ago. Rountree is certainly performing better than Kirby in running the company, but more importantly the creative employees in the studio has done a remarkable quality job of fleshing out and expanding the 40k setting true to its spirit (WHFB, of course, has lain in fallow as regard the GW studio, soon to return).
As a little off-topic aside on pricing, online I’ve regularly run into people most interested in the creative works of Warhammer 40’000 in particular, who on the topic of the miniature hobby has to shrug and conclude that they cannot get into it since money does not allow it, but they do enjoy reading Warhammer works and looking on Warhammer art and pictures, and discussing the fictive worlds.
It is particularly common to find enjoyers of Warhammer aesthetics and background in this camp. It is likewise possible to find people who were pulled into the miniature hobby proper and discovered the real background by first coming across fun parody streams in the hobby community, but that’s beside the point.
The point being that sure, the core of Warhammer is its miniature side just like computer games are the core of Blizzard’s creations, but ultimately this isn’t something that can be waved off as being just about miniature toys alone at the end of the day. At the end of the day, this is about the fruits of human creativity and human learning playfully applied.
The benchmark I use is the 40k Cadian Shock Troops - in 2002 when they were released it was AUD $30 for 20, so $1.50 a model ($2.48 in 2022 dollarydoos). Just before they were retired, these same sculpts were $77 per ten, so $7.70 per model (The new sculpts are now AUD $84 for 10).
Before considering inflation, Cadian shock troops - the exact same 20-year-old models - were 5.1 times as expensive when retired. After inflation, they were 3.1 times as expensive.
Compare house prices, which are famously inflated in Australia. The Median house price in my state was AUD $220,000 in 2002 ($364,500 after inflation), while the 2022 Australian Median house price peaked at $944,000 (for a lot of the year it was lower).
Before inflation, housing was “only” ~4.3 times as expensive in 2022 as it was in 2022, and ~2.6 times as expensive after inflation.
GW miniatures have increased in prices faster than property.
@EvilFuzzyDoom And I thought prices in Australia were always that astronomical. I can remember buying that box for around 30 euros in 2005. Without considering inflation, this product became roughly twice as expensive over here until its retirement last year.
What I find remarkable about all this is that Warhammer is not some consumable product. Used miniatures usually retain some value which reflects in ebay prices and you would expect them to counterbalance the price of new items if the market was saturated. For a large part, this is not the case. Either due to people not selling their plastic piles or an ever growing demand. I think it’s the former.
I know that the complaints about price hikes are as old as the hobby. Interestingly, not only GW but other companies behind indoor hobbies (e.g. LEGO and I believe Hasbro has also be in the news concerning this) have greatly increased their prices with the onset of the pandemic, inflation was just the latest convenient reason. A lot of this is driven by the desire to meet expectations of investors (not always though, LEGO is not a publicly traded company). If this is sustainable, I don’t know.
