ICV2 recently posted the relative sales rankings of miniatures games during the 2014 holiday season:

Top 5 Non-Collectible Miniature Lines – Fall/Holiday 2014

Rank - Title - Publisher

1 - Warhammer 40k - Games Workshop

2 - Star Wars X-Wing - Fantasy Flight Games

3 - Warmachine - Privateer Press

4 - D&D Attack Wing - WizKids/NECA

5 - Star Trek Attack Wing - WizKids/NECA

X-wing is second only to Warhammer 40k, which is amazing to me. I wonder if X-Wing might even surpass Warhammer...?

That should send GW some food for thought!

My son got into Space Wolves just over a year ago and I am finding some things about the game enticing! However, due to the exorbitant cost of new figs, and the way they do updates, there is no way I will get into it!

40k has been declining for a good while now, so it wouldn't surprise me.

No dollars. Hard to say if that is meaningful.

I see this as a rally cry for all of us former 40K players.

we must bring down the giant money sucking machine that is GW, we must spend every available penny we have on X-wing.

We must stop GW!!!!!!!!!!

Doesn't tell us all that much without actual values next to it.

For example it's all very well to say that China is number 2 in the world for military spending - but when you consider that the number 1 on the list spends 7 times as much overall and over 20 times as much in terms of per-capita spending, it makes China look pretty insignificant in comparison.

But yeah - Suck It GW!

Hard to say if that is meaningful.

I find the fact that X-Wing is beating Warmachine telling. I do find it a little troubling that two wizkids games are 4 & 5, but not surprised that Attack Wing has fallen to #5, given the way Wizkids does things.

I am happy to help support this game, it is awesome!

IIRC FFG became the second largest miniature game company worldwide basically overnight. Because of X-Wing. That was a few years ago. The above ranking suggest that that did not change.

No dollars. Hard to say if that is meaningful.

Very true. But it's also true that this is what everyone said before Pathfinder began outselling D&D during the decline of 4th edition.

My intuition is that this ranking is meaningful. Especially since we can use Warmachine as a calibration point.

Icv2 collects their information from phone interviews with various store owners and distributors in the US. While the information is interesting, it does not take into account sales direct from manufacturers, GW's own stores, the international market and it relies on the accuracy (and honesty) of the people they are talking to.

Hard to say if that is meaningful.

I find the fact that X-Wing is beating Warmachine telling. I do find it a little troubling that two wizkids games are 4 & 5, but not surprised that Attack Wing has fallen to #5, given the way Wizkids does things.

I suspect that there's a really big drop-off after the top 3 (and a very large margin between 1 and 2)

I mean, D&D Attack Wing? you've got to be REALLY into dragons to get something that lame.

The only person I know who plays that is the 6 year old son of my FLGS owner - says it all really

Yeah, it's meaningful. It'd be interesting checking how meaningful, i.e, if the ranking reflects the total amount of money that is spent for a single game or the total number of units sold for the same game.

I.e., if warhammer minis cost more than X-Wing (on average), this could mean that there are already more individual copies of x-wing ships around than of WH40K minis.

Icv2 collects their information from phone interviews with various store owners and distributors in the US. While the information is interesting, it does not take into account sales direct from manufacturers, GW's own stores, the international market and it relies on the accuracy (and honesty) of the people they are talking to.

In other words, it's probably the best information people like us will ever have access to...

No dollars. Hard to say if that is meaningful.

Very true. But it's also true that this is what everyone said before Pathfinder began outselling D&D during the decline of 4th edition.

Fourth Edition was a perfectly good hybrid of roleplaying and tactical combat--in other words, a pretty good reproduction of the core conceit of D&D--that Wizards of the Coast wrecked through some frankly stupid management practices.

• They cut off support for the Open Game License, creating an incentive for players to stick with D20.
• They failed to support the release with consistent, high-quality in-game fiction.
• They repeatedly slipped and fell with their online support.
• They started hedging and backtracking on the system in less than two years, with the "Essentials" line.
• The Fourth Edition material they did release post-Essentials suffered from lax oversight and inconsistent design, which in turn led to material of widely varying quality and power levels.
• The game suffered overall from a focus on cost-cutting and the use of freelancers rather than in--house designers.

This is relevant to the thread topic, I promise! GW is hemorrhaging customers for most of the same reasons: their support for the game is erratic, they're more expensive than their competitors for a product that's not of clearly better quality, the design offers wildly varying power levels, and (from a complete outsider's perspective) they seem to be parceling out updates piecemeal rather than keeping an eye on the big picture.

They could clean house, clean up their act, start charging based on the product's cost + margin rather than what they think they can gouge, and get a lot of customers back. They won't do that, for the same reasons WotC didn't, but they could . So they don't have to be overtaken by FFG and probably by Privateer soon, but they will.

I mean, D&D Attack Wing? you've got to be REALLY into dragons to get something that lame.

The only person I know who plays that is the 6 year old son of my FLGS owner - says it all really

Actually, from what I have heard, it has started off as a really good game and is quite popular. Wiz kids will undoubtably muck it up in short order, but for now it is apparently pretty good.

well, the world may be a ****** up and dark place where human morality is a sham made to cover up the existence of evils and horrors we had thought vanquished in modern, enlightened society...but if FFG and PP dethrone GW, then we'll at least know there some potential for justice

Icv2 collects their information from phone interviews with various store owners and distributors in the US. While the information is interesting, it does not take into account sales direct from manufacturers, GW's own stores, the international market and it relies on the accuracy (and honesty) of the people they are talking to.

In other words, it's probably the best information people like us will ever have access to...

It should be pretty straightforward to do the math on this.

GWs revenues are a matter of public record - £123.5m (approx $188.5m) june 2013-june 2014 - but they basically only sell 1 product.

http://investor.games-workshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/2013-14-Press-statement-final-website.pdf

Best I can find for FFG is 2011 at $22m

http://www.inc.com/profile/fantasy-flight-games

If we can find out the latest sales figs for FFG and what proportion is made up by x-wing, then we've got our answer

I mean, D&D Attack Wing? you've got to be REALLY into dragons to get something that lame.

The only person I know who plays that is the 6 year old son of my FLGS owner - says it all really

Actually, from what I have heard, it has started off as a really good game and is quite popular. Wiz kids will undoubtably muck it up in short order, but for now it is apparently pretty good.

I found it totally lame myself

but the irony of a grown man who likes to play with little plastic space ships saying something like that is not lost on me

Wasn't the D and D from WK fairly new in the 4th quarter of 2014? I'm not sure when it came out but that may have played a role in the popularity of it. I'd be interested in how Heroclix did but the data is for non collectible minis and thus wouldn't be listed.

Having been to Warhammer World in Nottingham and seeing the corporate offices, etc. I have to say I don't openly root against GW because most of the people I talked to were awesome. Fanatical, would probably be the best word to descibe some employees lol. While I was there, I voiced a lot of the major concerns Warhammer players have for GW... the overwhelming response; "that's the cost of doing business in this kind of model"...

Hopefully PP or FFG does overtake GW... then, maybe then it will force some serious "re-branding."

I'm actually surprised it outsold Warmachine.

Not really that shocked hobby games are growing in popularity yet GW's profits are going backwards. I wonder how long it will be before the 40k ship sinks and someone just buy's them out.

There's a huge drop between 1 and 2 and a massive drop from 3 to 4. Gw profit drop wasn't much last year and ffg has been steadily improving but I don't know how long ffg can sustain that. I remeber people saying privateer press was going to surpass GW and that clearly hasn't happened either.