Because its so awesome to see dozens of primer sprayed armies on the tables on GW night at the FLGS right?

Back in the day, I got around that by saying my Dogs of War army were all clay golem replicas of the real Regiments of Renown and painted them up as the Terracotta Army.

It's fluffy AND lazy!

GW absolutely needed that licence money it was the only thing that saved this financial year.

GW has been staying afloat due to licenses for several years now, but it has been primarily licenses for video games. I kinda doubt the fees from FFG amounted to all that much.

Sorry, but their most recent Annual Statement seems to contradict what you're saying - £5,939,000 was generated from IP licencing out of total revenues of £118,000,000.

That doesn't seem to be what's keeping GW afloat.

Royalty income increased in the period by £4.4 million to £5.9 million. This was due to the strong performances of Total War: Warhammer and Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide.

The full GW Annual Statement can be found here, whilst an abridged (sorry it's all I could find) Asmodee Annual Statement can be found here.

IF (and that's a big if) the Asmodee statement is correct then it is showing a gross Revenue figure of $121,553,000.

Using todays currency exchange rate of 1.33 USD to 1 GBP the Asmodee figure in pounds sterling is somewhere around £91,672,385.

Roughly £27,000,000 LESS than GW.

Sorry guys, but GW ain't dying anytime soon by the look of things.

Cheers

Baaa

The 118,000 number is total revenue, before various operating costs are paid for.

If you look a couple lines down, you see

"Operating profit - pre-royalties receivable = 10,921" and

"Royalties receivable = 5939" the licensing fees being discussed

For a total "Operating profit = 16860"

Licensing your IP to other companies has virtually no costs involved, meaning more than a third of their profits are coming from licensing.

Fantasy, much loved as it was, was not making money. End of. GW is a business; if something isn't making money, kill it.

The vast majority of bitching about GW comes from Codex hoppers; "Tau are great now, buy an army". "****, Eldar are better, sell Tau and buy Eldar" etc.

Fantasy, as it was (from a business sense) had to die.

Here is the problem with your logic. This applies not only to fantasy gw, it applies to Games Workshop as a whole. It seems like there are some distinct problematic issues in their business model overall, at least from the bits and bits you get from the GW player base.

As I did dislike their model nearly 30 years ago already, I might be wrong on their current business model … if there were changes at all from the 90's to now. ;-)

Sorry, I've got to disagree with you.

Fantasy was the game that built GW. At the time it was an exciting world of Elves and Dwarves etc. The movies of the late '80's were full of fantasy ****. That changed, but a loyal fanbase remained.

Right up until the AoS makeover, GW tried to bring new players into Fantasy.

They brought out some fantastic models but people had lost interest in the game. Period.

The business model was ****, no arguments there; but I saw something on the TV last night which I've never seen, an advert for GW (albeit books).

So maybe, we'll get our games back.

Cheers

Baaa

I don't think it was anything to do with people losing interest in the game, or the game not getting support.

It was just too **** expensive. New players didn't want to outlay the thousands of dollars required for a 2500 army, and existing players already had a 2500 army and didn't need a new one...

so NO ONE was buying. That's why the game became a skirmish game. Because buying a handful of models is much more palatable. Being able to re-brand all the models to in-house IP was just a bonus.

Things:

A- I really liked GW's The Lord of the Rings game. I liked the aesthetic of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings on virtually every level. I liked that the miniatures were not as cartoonish as the WHFB minis were (at least until GW started coming out with minis for characters and armies not shown in the movies). Frankly, I prefer skirmish games to massed battle games, but that's probably partly due to the fact that I like RPGs and don't like my characters to be so overpowered as to be Full Metal Marisoo Badasses.

B- It was inevitable that FFG would lose the license to GW's IP. FFG will probably eventually lose the license to the Star Wars IP.

I say probably because they might not. LEGO and Hasbro, for instance, will almost certainly never lose their licenses. But one is a household name and the other one is practically a household name (and is one of the biggest names in games and toys in the world). If GW were willing to cannibalize sales of their own IP to produce Star Wars miniatures and games, they would probably get a license from LFL for as long as they were willing to make them. Ditto-ditto Topps and Wizards of the Coast.

So long as FFG can maintain quality and market penetration while delivering the licensing fees for LFL, we need not fear an end to X-Wing, &c. Should they fail to deliver, should another company come along who can, then FFG might lose the Star Wars IP.

C- GW is not the Games Ferengi. The Ferengi have a well-established history as capitalist extraordinaires, but if they were unable to deliver on their promises, they would not be the best bankers and traders in the galaxy. They would be just another batch of pirates, like the Orion Syndicate.

It's probably also worth remembering that our chief perspectives of the Ferengi come from hippy-dippy socialists (Gene Roddenbury's mind during his, "The crew can't have any interpersonal conflicts, because humanity has evolved passed that!" phase) whose diplomat-in-chief lost his first command (the Stargazer) to the Ferengi, during the same battle that the Enterprise-D's CMO (and CO's some-time beau) lost her husband, the galaxy's self-proclaimed ultimate warriors (and warriors don't worry about money!) the Klingons, and - to a lesser extent - the galaxy's self-proclaimed ultimate patriots (Empire über alles), the Romulans.

After Gene passed, we got a more balanced view of the Ferengi in DS9, where we had Quark and Rom (who joined the Bajoran security forces before becoming a spy for both Bajor and Starfleet during the Dominion's occupation of DS9) and Nog (who joined Starfleet!) and the Ferengi Alliance, though officially neutral, was sympathetic to the Federation Alliance during the Dominion War.

Fantasy, much loved as it was, was not making money. End of. GW is a business; if something isn't making money, kill it.

The vast majority of bitching about GW comes from Codex hoppers; "Tau are great now, buy an army". "****, Eldar are better, sell Tau and buy Eldar" etc.

Fantasy, as it was (from a business sense) had to die.

Here is the problem with your logic. This applies not only to fantasy gw, it applies to Games Workshop as a whole. It seems like there are some distinct problematic issues in their business model overall, at least from the bits and bits you get from the GW player base.

As I did dislike their model nearly 30 years ago already, I might be wrong on their current business model … if there were changes at all from the 90's to now. ;-)

Sorry, I've got to disagree with you.

Fantasy was the game that built GW. At the time it was an exciting world of Elves and Dwarves etc. The movies of the late '80's were full of fantasy ****. That changed, but a loyal fanbase remained.

Right up until the AoS makeover, GW tried to bring new players into Fantasy.

They brought out some fantastic models but people had lost interest in the game. Period.

The business model was ****, no arguments there; but I saw something on the TV last night which I've never seen, an advert for GW (albeit books).

So maybe, we'll get our games back.

Cheers

Baaa

I don't think it was anything to do with people losing interest in the game, or the game not getting support.

It was just too **** expensive. New players didn't want to outlay the thousands of dollars required for a 2500 army, and existing players already had a 2500 army and didn't need a new one...

so NO ONE was buying. That's why the game became a skirmish game. Because buying a handful of models is much more palatable. Being able to re-brand all the models to in-house IP was just a bonus.

This.

I was a long-term 40K player who would have probably gotten into Fantasy as well if it weren't for the cost. I just couldn't justify the expense given what I was already spending to have two-three 40K armies on the go (so there was some variety to play with).

The minute I got into X-Wing; GW was dead to me. Really need to organise myself and sell it all. Will fund X-Wing for years!

The 118,000 number is total revenue, before various operating costs are paid for.

If you look a couple lines down, you see

"Operating profit - pre-royalties receivable = 10,921" and

"Royalties receivable = 5939" the licensing fees being discussed

For a total "Operating profit = 16860"

Licensing your IP to other companies has virtually no costs involved, meaning more than a third of their profits are coming from licensing.

Which in plain English means that Royalties only accounted for one third of the total operating profits, hardly the thing that kept them in business. They also stated, as you did, that the vast majority of those royalties came from video games, so will losing FFG hurt them?

Probably not that much.

Overall, if you compare what GW have posted to the (albeit limited) information from Asmodee (who appear to have posted a loss of around $5,000,000), GW seem to be in a much healthier position.

We could spend an eternity speculating on what caused that loss i.e was it purchase of FFG that put them in the red, but one thing that can be guaranteed is that Asmodee will be looking to bounce back from that and if X-Wing is as big a cash cow as people on these boards seem to think it is, then it'll be a prime target for generating profits.

Cheers

Baaa

You know I didn't say it saved them from going bankrupt, I said it saved their year as in they were only 00.9% down in profits instead of 4 million down they would of been without total war and the other games.

I wonder if they keep producing until that date or if they are cutting everything now as we speak.

Probably cut it soon otherwise they get left with stock they are not allowed to sell.

As long as they sell it on time to their distributors they should be most likely fine. But IANAL and know jack **** about their licence with GW either.

Overall it's not surprising anyway as FFG has become a big competitor of GW, basically the only other option long term would have been for Asmodee to buy GW. Asmodee is on a buying spree anyway, but they just took a 80 million dollar loan to basically buy pandemic together with its developer F2Z. So GW might be on their shopping list for a later point in time. ;-)

One thing is for sure, Asmodee is on a shopping spree and willing to continue that strategy to expand its market dominance.

My guess is that FFG will want to clear inventory, so they are probably limiting production. But there might be some sweet deals from distributors in the March '17 time frame

They also stated, as you did, that the vast majority of those royalties came from video games, so will losing FFG hurt them?

Probably not that much.

Which was the point I was making to Hobo when you commented. Thank you for agreeing with me.