Not sure if anyone has seen this but GW must be Hurting for market share of Table Top Games. I don't think there going out of business but things must be bad add with that FFG having a WH Fantasy killer, it spells trouble. This is very entrusting to an ex-player
I don't get it, i have been able to buy GW products in non GW brick and mortar stores and online cheaper than GW's price for a long time now (or perhaps even since I started?) and it never has been illegal. I think they are allowed a discount of 10 or even 20%.
Edited by Iceeagle85They alo alowed online sales in the US again.
https://spikeybits.com/2017/03/gw-repeals-online-shopping-cart-ban-for-american-retailers.html
guess they finaly decided to start acting like a proper gaming company.
29 minutes ago, Cubanboy said:Not sure if anyone has seen this but GW must be Hurting for market share of Table Top Games. I don't think there going out of business but things must be bad add with that FFG having a WH Fantasy killer, it spells trouble. This is very entrusting to an ex-player
GW also had a warhammer fantasy killer: Age of Sigmar, and it killed of fantasy real good. 
40k is the GW game to beat.
People who used to play fantasy at my lgs all switched to warmahordes...
I can't think of a single instance where I would buy anything from a GW store. The same models are like 50% the price at any of the other gaming stores around.
That company makes me scratch my head...It's easy because my hand is already in the area due to the equally frequent face palms.
1 hour ago, Cubanboy said:... add with that FFG having a WH Fantasy killer, it spells trouble.
I don't think anything could have killed WH Fantasy harder than GW with their Age of Spacemarines.
Butt from what I know GW always allowed for 3rd party stores to sell at a discount. They couldn't just sell it higher than MSRP or else they would get blacklisted. However as GW started to increase the cost of their models to include the wholesale cost, their sales numbers have hurt. They did increased the MSRP to follow so retailers didn't get straight up shafted but the over-inflation due to some hack with a marketing major and his (I am certain of gender) quest to find that premium price point the damage and it is possibly irreparable has already been done.
Ok, to explain a little bit for those that don't know.
GWs sales terms in the US have prevented stores from selling GW products via an online shopping cart system. For many years now, in order to purchase GW product from the big discount stores here in the states you had to either email them your order or call them. This wasn't true outside the US because the laws were different and GW wasn't allowed to restrict sakes like that. This policy is now being reversed by GWs new management and the online places like miniature market and warstore will once again be able to put GW stuff in a shopping cart. I don't think this is a sign of increasing desperation on the part of GW though, just another example of their new CEO trying to undo the colossal mistakes whatsisface kept making.
Thanks for the explanation, but why do something like that in the first place.
To encourage people to buy at brick and mortar stores, probably specifically GW brick and mortar stores, but they couldn't really say that. It was part of the same initiative where they forbade EU located stores from selling outside the EU.
40 minutes ago, Forgottenlore said:To encourage people to buy at brick and mortar stores
That seems to be trend with several companies these days. 5I think wizkids made it so you can't buy dice masters online)
Yeah, and the slow dying of B&M stores is certainly an issue, but I doubt the manufacturers can do anything about it and am not sure they should be trying. The solution, if one comes, will come from a different quarter.
6 hours ago, Forgottenlore said:Yeah, and the slow dying of B&M stores is certainly an issue, but I doubt the manufacturers can do anything about it and am not sure they should be trying. The solution, if one comes, will come from a different quarter.
I would say thanks to online shopping store dying is a general issue, in the nearest city from me we once had many bookstores, nowadays there is one store of one of the great bookstore chains in the center of the city and one none chain store somewhere on the outskirts of the city and I would say that is because of Amazon and other online stores. All those big bookstores have also an online shop these days to compete with Amazon and all the others.
Exactly. It's a pervasive issue in all sectors, made more pronounced for game stores because there are no "big chains", just little mom & pop stores. That's why I don't think the manufacturers can really accomplish anything via online-restrictive trade policies, it's a market wide, global trend.
On the the other hand, small, individually owned game stores are in a better position than most other kinds of retail to discover something that will work to compete with online stores. I don't know what, but a good business owner (annoyingly rare) has the potential to come up with something innovative where manufacturers really can't.
2 hours ago, Forgottenlore said:I don't know what, but a good business owner (annoyingly rare) has the potential to come up with something innovative where manufacturers really can't.
I think the issue is, that most LGS aren't doing it because they are gifted business owners or even really enjoy running a retail store. They do it because they are gamers first and want to own a game store, because that supports their hobby. I saw someone refer to it as a lifestyle business.
That means most store owners aren't going to be the type of person who comes up with a plan to deal with how things are going right now. The owner of my LGS for example has talked about dropping GW stuff completely, or at least enough that he's no longer considered a favored retailer or whatever it is. To maintain that status he has to have like 5k worth of stuff in inventory at any one time. But not much GW is being sold, and hasn't for a while. I buy a little from time to time and a few other people play... But not enough to warrant what he has to spend. But he likes the perks he gets from GW, so he keeps doing it.
The LGS does have the advantage in the US anyway as being the place where people go to play. Which is the only thing that's keeping the LGS open right now I think.
The last boss guy at GW literally said "We are a model company, and they will buy whatever we put out" so he deliberately hyked prices, restricted stores, and pushed for new models to be flatout broken and old models to be rendered nearly useless if not truly useless.
GW still has a lot of issues but fortunately the whole Age of Sigmar crap was the final straw and they sacked the jackass. Since then they have been doing a lot of things uncharacteristic for GW in the past few years: such as *gasp* discount packages! I remmeber when i first saw the Tau Starter Box and i was heavily contemplating grabbing one because that was literally a 50USD discount box for what was in there (Tau Crisis Suit trios are 75USD on their own, the special Ethereal would be 15-20 given character prices, and the firewarriors are 50USD on their own. The box they were all in was 85....). In fact the only one i'd say is a total waste of time is the Ork one purely because they still keep pushing Deffdredds onto ork players and refuse to actually buff them to be able to function. Oddly enough the vanilla Space Marine one is the worst one in terms of price vs whats in the box...and thats their poster child!
I havnt touched 40k in over a year, both my orks/tau have a thick layer of dust on them. I am really hoping 8th Edition fixes all the bs in the game, but im not expecting it. Even with the new management they still tend to favor loyalist armies over anyone else.
Another interesting development is them hopping on X-Wings competetive gaming tail with whatever this is:
Reminds me a lot of Imperial Assault with the board and card approach. They are really heavy on advertising this as a competetive game with organized play structure. Strange things going on over there. But to be honest, this looks pretty good and sounds like a game I could get into at a reasonable price point. Game length is advertised as 45 minutes (again with a remark on how great that is for competetive play). Though I do have to wonder wether GW have it in them to maintain a sound ruleset for a competetive game that will be pushed to the absolute max (something they certainly didn't care about before).
If they go for competitive play they really, really need to clean up their game.
40k is horribly imbalanced, its only fun in a casual setting because people will generally not use something because its just way, way too cheap and powerful (case in point, yes i have 3 riptides but in 2k or less games i never bring more than 1 and the Stormsurge literally never gets off the shelf unless its above a 2k game....Ta'unar above 3k lol but thats FW anyway). Also theres sooooo many rule loopholes in that game, you spend more time battling over rules in a competitive game than you do actually playing. And that bugs the hell out of me.
Not to mention its way way too random. Not talking about attacking, kinda hard to remove the luck from that and make sense for doing it, im referring to the immense amount of charts. I dont like having to randomly get Weirdboy powers, randomly resolve MobRule when i fail a morale/pin, randomly determing my warlord trait, etc etc. NONE of these charts are unanimous in their effect, some of them make my army a brutal killing machine while others literally just wasted my time (any idea how FRUSTRAITING it is to use a weirdboy in a blob of boyz and i get 'EadBanger and Zzap instead of Warpath and Da Jump? Zzap atleast is pretty strong, but it can affect my big blob of boyz so its hard to use without exposing my weirdboy's paper frame and 'Eadbanger can f' right off...such a spell should NOT be in an ork spellbook (its a precision shot....for an ork....and its pathetic even if it DOES go off since its a toughness test)
I love the models. I got into orks first because i LOVED their models and Tau second because polar opposite strats (wow they got strong a year after i picked them up... lol). The game is too messy right now though.
The shadowspire game he linked to with the video above us supposed to be a totally new game and rules that have been built from the ground up with competitive play in mind. I'm not convinced that GW designers are skilled enough to pull that off, but at least they acknowledge the problem and are trying.
21 minutes ago, Forgottenlore said:The shadowspire game he linked to with the video above us supposed to be a totally new game and rules that have been built from the ground up with competitive play in mind. I'm not convinced that GW designers are skilled enough to pull that off, but at least they acknowledge the problem and are trying.
I wouldn't say GW designers are unskilled, after leaving GW many made good games, of course those are gone now but i thnk it's more of a managment thing that they want to push certain units/aspects of the game for financial reasons. Didn't Rick Priestley say Beyond the Gates of Antares has many things he wanted to do in a new 40K edition but wasn't allowed too?
Nevertheless I'm looking forward to Shadowspire, sadly though the release is late 2017, that's another new thing i can't remember GW anouncing anything that early.
Haven't seen Antares yet, but I have been singularly unimpressed with most games done by former GW game designers. They always seem to be mired in 30 year old design theory and the GW paradigm. To be fair, I am more than a little bit a game mechanics snob, but still. Plus, as you mentioned, all those designers have for greener pastures and the current crop are the ones that were fully indoctrinated into Mark Wells's corporate yes man churn and burn philosophy.
But we'll see. I'm not playing GW games anymore, but I am still paying attention to what the company does and am very interested in seeing to what degree they can turn around the past few decades of mis-management.
7 minutes ago, Forgottenlore said:Haven't seen Antares yet, but I have been singularly unimpressed with most games done by former GW game designers. They always seem to be mired in 30 year old design theory and the GW paradigm. To be fair, I am more than a little bit a game mechanics snob, but still. Plus, as you mentioned, all those designers have for greener pastures and the current crop are the ones that were fully indoctrinated into Mark Wells's corporate yes man churn and burn philosophy.
But we'll see. I'm not playing GW games anymore, but I am still paying attention to what the company does and am very interested in seeing to what degree they can turn around the past few decades of mis-management.
Could be different tastes, i don't mind old design as long as it is executed in a good way new is not naturally better.
But then i know only of Beyond the Gates of Antares and the Starship Troopers game which was also said to be good.
23 hours ago, Forgottenlore said:Yeah, and the slow dying of B&M stores is certainly an issue, but I doubt the manufacturers can do anything about it and am not sure they should be trying. The solution, if one comes, will come from a different quarter.
Although, with Amazon now opening B&M bookstores, it becomes a much more dubious truism.
Quote: "e-commerce accounted for only about 8.1 percent of all U.S. retail sales last year"
Beyond the Gates of Antares is a sci-fi version of the Bolt Action, command-dice-in-a-bag, game system that is quite fun to play. Sometimes you want that die to be yours so can get a surprise attack or get yourself out of a pickle, other times you hope ir not yours so you can see what the opponent is planing. The fact the all races have come to rely heavily on drones also makes army design and tactics very different then other games.
On 3/22/2017 at 2:13 PM, Cubanboy said:Not sure if anyone has seen this but GW must be Hurting for market share of Table Top Games. I don't think there going out of business but things must be bad add with that FFG having a WH Fantasy killer, it spells trouble. This is very entrusting to an ex-player
lol @ RuneWars killing anything GW. For all of its faults, Games Workshop still makes the best models on the market, even if they don't come assembled and pre-painted. For every ounce of faith I've lost in FFG's ability to write a decent set of rules over the past few years, GW's made up for it with their recent shift to a community driven focus.
Edited by WonderWAAAGH17 hours ago, WonderWAAAGH said:lol @ RuneWars killing anything GW. For all of its faults, Games Workshop still makes the best models on the market, even if they don't come assembled and pre-painted. For every ounce of faith I've lost in FFG's ability to write a decent set of rules over the past few years, GW's made up for it with their recent shift to a community driven focus.
Great to see you old friend. I just hope the prices come down much more then what they are right now. GW is making some really consumer friendly choices and I could not be more happy, and if they can get the rulebooks a bit more streamlined then it will be a super big win.