Gaems Wurkshup!

For games played by men (and women) with beards, such as tabletop RPGs.

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The Shutting Downs
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Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by The Shutting Downs »

http://www.starburstmagazine.com/gaming ... ple-armies

* Games Workshop Germany and potentially France will be closed, with multiple store closures seen across countries including the USA and UK.

Because I know I've only brought paint there in the last few years, 'cos I can't afford to play the games anymore

* There will be no more Finecast products seen from the company.

No Great Loss, they were crap.

* Forge World will be handling all Lords of the Rings and Hobbit based products, with the subsidiary company’s models being directly available over a redesigned Games Workshop website.

Forge world and Black Library being the only thing people are actively liking at the moment.

* Roughly 30% of the sortiment will become webshop exclusives.

So they are reducing the number then?

* Wood Elves, Bretonnia, Beastmen and Khemri will no longer receive support. No further updates, support or future models.

Cue more pissed off fans.

Yeah, not doing well GW.
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by buzzmong »

I think part of this could be due to pricing themselves out of their own market for their minatures.

It was expensive when I was actively playing over 10 years ago for 40k, but at least you could get a small tactical squad for ~£7, and a full specific army tactical squad was just about £15 (normal ones were about £12 iirc).

Looking at it now though, with the aforementioned boxes being £15 and £25, and single minatures being £9, it's obscene.

I don't think I could really afford to build an normal 1000 point army today and I'm earning over £20kpa, let alone on paper round money like I was earning at the time.
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by The Shutting Downs »

Was chatting to a mate at work about this, and if you look at the competition on the market, a LOT of it is small skirmish style games, squad based or small armies, whereas warhammer and 40k are always pushing for larger armies to make you BUY MORE!

They also really ignored the video gaming side I think, as the MMO didn't really take off as they hoped, but Blood Bowl is fun, and Games like Necromunda and Mordheim would be excellent based on the X-Com: Enemy Unknown format, but they are so precious about the IP now, getting a licence isn't easy.
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by Dog Pants »

They're worried that videogames will detract from their tabletop sales, which I think is completely wrong. Their stuff is too expensive, surely even they must realise that? I'm a wage earning adult and I can't afford to play Warhammer, how do they expect teenagers to do it? The RPG industry is a good analogue for what's happening - sales started to drop in the 90s because videogames were becoming more and more viable. Most companies put their prices up and up to make up for lost sales, but there came a point that even that couldn't make up for the huge decline and now only a few big titles like D&D and Vampire remain, with a few indies scraping by. Not nearly as versatile as it was 20 years ago. Except Eclipse Phase is doing really well. It's creative commons so anyone can play it for free, it has a wiki, and you can buy print versions if you want which I presume are regular small print runs. So the only overhead they have is the hosting and the time of the devs, and they have a massive audience. Moral of the story? Adapt or die. If GW don't start releasing electronic versions of their games and moving their miniatures to a supporting line they are going to go under eventually.

I made a blog post for this ages ago on Geek In Public (Anery's now somewhat neglected blog): http://www.geekinpublic.com/?p=308
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by Anery »

I WILL get that blog back up and running, I just don't have the time to write on anything more than a fortnightly basis.

Anyway, back to the GW thing.
The prices are prohibitive, and the finecast debacle cost them a lot of money. It wasn't unusual for folks to be opening up finecase products in the shops to see if they were up to snuff and exchanging them there and then if they weren't. I spoke to a chap on the train who opened up 7! dwarf something or others before they found one that was acceptable. As a company these kind of losses are just not acceptable, as a consumer it shakes your faith in the compnay and you are less inclined to buy their products.
As for pricing, pfft, well.
Can a kid on paperound money buy a tactical squad? the cornerstone of a Space Marine army, the basic fucking grunt - 25 quid?! fuck off.
They have been pretty sloppy with their IP recently too*, sure Talisman on tablet works well but Space Hulk made like a WWII Stuka, the games in the pipelines look misguided at best - what the fuck is that card/dota game all about? and that planetside alike is going to be good for a week until folks get pissed off with the Pay2Win and leave. This does nothing but generate ill will toward the company and waters down their credibilty. And yet they sit on Mordheim and Necromunda and do nothing, Epic gets left in a dusy cupboard and Man o War lies sunk at the bottom of the bathtub - all could be turned into incredibly good digital games in engines that already exist.
Their method of increasing payments with an a miniatures arms race is ridiculous too. Give me options, not ultra-fab insta-gib expensive models.


*DoW series not included.
The Shutting Downs
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by The Shutting Downs »

Anery wrote:Man o War lies sunk at the bottom of the bathtub - all could be turned into incredibly good digital games in engines that already exist.
They made a one off game - Dreadfleet - recently, clearly trying to pull on the nostalgia of Man o War, every time I went into the store it was 'Do you want to reserve a copy? If you don't now you won't get a copy, do it now'

Guess what, it undersold and was sat on the shelves for months.
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by Dog Pants »

Interesting that. I wonder how profitable the GW licenses are for FF compared to the likes of Dreadfleet.
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by Anery »

The Shutting Downs wrote:
Anery wrote:Man o War lies sunk at the bottom of the bathtub - all could be turned into incredibly good digital games in engines that already exist.
They made a one off game - Dreadfleet - recently, clearly trying to pull on the nostalgia of Man o War, every time I went into the store it was 'Do you want to reserve a copy? If you don't now you won't get a copy, do it now'

Guess what, it undersold and was sat on the shelves for months.
What I meant is that these all transfer to current digital game types and engines quite happily: turn based combat, RTS, sport management (for those of us who suck at BB but would like to play it as a mangement game)

From a business point of view GW are doing the right thing. They are pulling back and reevaluating their expenditure. The best thing they can do right now is pull back the number of stores they have, real estate and wages are going to be big outgoings for them. Franchises can be set up, independants can have large displays and materials on hand to engage the buyers - provided and trained by GW but wages paid by the retailer (kinda like the apple stores you see in PCWorld) GW keep their audience, independants benefit, other games get more exposure through the increased traffic through the shop and the public still get their Warhammer fix.

As for the Black Library? well the lore of the universe is good, both myself and PNut are Blood Angels fans - we fucking hate Fabius Bile because of what he did to 'us' - it shows how well curated it is that we get like that (you'll quite often find that if PNut and myself are on TS we will eventually end up debating some point of lore about the BAs) Keep em coming I say.
Dog Pants wrote:Interesting that. I wonder how profitable the GW licenses are for FF compared to the likes of Dreadfleet.
I'd say very profitable, otherwise their range wouldn't be so extensive. Deathwatch (missus should be getting me the core rulebook soon) Dark Heresy, Only War, Death Angel, Chaos in the Old World, Horus Heresy, Relic (oooooh, expansions....) and thats not all of them!

Incidentally, this popped up on BOLS. Independantly
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by The Shutting Downs »

http://masterminis.blogspot.de/2014/01/ ... games.html

This series is a good read on GW, and he agrees, financially, they are doing the right thing by their shareholders, but I do think they have done a hell of a lot to the detriment of their fan/customer base.

I think they could do a lot on the computer gaming market, and when I was working for GW it was actually something we were taught as a sales technique for people who came in asking if we sold computer games, if they said they had played Shadow of the Horned Rat or Space Hulk, or any RTS game, we could have them on the gaming front.
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by Joose »

The Shutting Downs wrote:http://masterminis.blogspot.de/2014/01/ ... games.html

This series is a good read on GW, and he agrees, financially, they are doing the right thing by their shareholders, but I do think they have done a hell of a lot to the detriment of their fan/customer base.

I think they could do a lot on the computer gaming market, and when I was working for GW it was actually something we were taught as a sales technique for people who came in asking if we sold computer games, if they said they had played Shadow of the Horned Rat or Space Hulk, or any RTS game, we could have them on the gaming front.
I've often said that they could be bathing in money by just giving more of their games the BB treatment: make it, on the computer, with the exact same rules as the tabletop game. Don't fuck about with it, there is no need to turn it into an RTS or an FPS, just put the games they already have onto a computer and let people play them over the internet. They could do some of the boxed games (Necromunda springs immediately to mind) with almost exactly the same model as BB (although I would make the additional races as DLC rather than whole new games). Things like 40K and the like could be done with microtransactions. Their fear may be that they would be loosing players to computer games that way, but that argument is demonstrably bollocks: its exactly what WoTC did by putting Magic The Gathering online: its the exact same game, you buy cards in the exact same way as you do in real life. The result is that a bunch of people who wouldn't buy the physical cards through lack of opponents are now buying digital cards, most of the people who were buying physical cards are *still* buying physical cards, and a significant portion of magic players buy both. However you slice it, that's more sales.
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by Anery »

Joose wrote:I've often said that they could be bathing in money by just giving more of their games the BB treatment: make it, on the computer, with the exact same rules as the tabletop game. Don't fuck about with it, there is no need to turn it into an RTS or an FPS, just put the games they already have onto a computer and let people play them over the internet. They could do some of the boxed games (Necromunda springs immediately to mind) with almost exactly the same model as BB (although I would make the additional races as DLC rather than whole new games). Things like 40K and the like could be done with microtransactions. Their fear may be that they would be loosing players to computer games that way, but that argument is demonstrably bollocks: its exactly what WoTC did by putting Magic The Gathering online: its the exact same game, you buy cards in the exact same way as you do in real life. The result is that a bunch of people who wouldn't buy the physical cards through lack of opponents are now buying digital cards, most of the people who were buying physical cards are *still* buying physical cards, and a significant portion of magic players buy both. However you slice it, that's more sales.
You could package the digital version of whatever model you had just bought with the physical version as added incentive - want a new dreadnought for your army? tempted by painting but never commited? buy the physical model get both.
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by Dog Pants »

Or conversely, have a favourite unit in your game? For less than a tenner you can get a miniature of it! I'd buy a Slark mini to put on my desk.
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by Anery »

Waaaait a fucking second.
Minor derailment of thread, kind of.
Apparently Blood Angels are scheduled for new releases this year. Fuck yeah! more models to buy and leave in boxes!
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by Anery »

Pnut
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by Pnut »

Looks good, only problems I can see are:
1. Nobody to play against.
2. Cost, doesn't say on there but I can't see it coming in under £70.
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by The Shutting Downs »

A lot of Orcs and Blood Angels will end up on eBay
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by Anery »

Pnut wrote:Looks good, only problems I can see are:
1. Nobody to play against.
2. Cost, doesn't say on there but I can't see it coming in under £70.
Buying from folks like totalwargamer should bring the price down, Dark Vengeance is currently 61 quid so yeah, I can see them adding a tenner. Sadly.

However!
The Shutting Downs wrote:A lot of Orcs and Blood Angels will end up on eBay
A very good point. Cheaper if you only want half the minis like I do. Then again, I've always had a soft spot for Orks...
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by Pnut »

Anery wrote:
Pnut wrote:Dark Vengeance is currently 61 quid so yeah, I can see them adding a tenner. Sadly.
Looked into this and may have got my estimation slightly wrong. Dark Vengeance is £61 for 48 minis. New 40k is going to have 70 minis so I'm guessing its going be a bit more than £70, £85-90 would be my guess.
Also the format for White Dwarf has changed a fair bit this week. They are now going to be doing weekly White Dwarfs at £2.50 and monthly Warhammer: Visions at £7.50. You can now get them digitally from the Black Libary and iTunes.
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by Dog Pants »

Games Workshop are the only company I know who charge for their catalogues. :P
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Re: Gaems Wurkshup!

Post by The Shutting Downs »

Got the new White Dwarf - Weekly and Monthly - today.

The Monthly has been reduced in page size, but upped to nearly 8 quid.

The Weekly is the same page size, but about a dozen pages and is 2.40.

The staff have clearly been told to hype the whole thing up, as the words ' a piece of history' were said several times. I've not had a thorough look, but I think this may be the nail in the coffin of me getting white dwarf.
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