GW Price Increase Predicted for June

[Omegabob]

What annoys me is the amount stuff is going up by, Dark Angels Veterans were £15.50 and now going up to £20+. What could possibly have happened for them to go up by a third?

I'm guessing you mean what could have happened besides GW greed?
LOL

Overall, I get that business expenses go up and if a company wants to keep its profit levels it has to make changes to adjust for the increased expenses. However, eroding away your current sources of income (current players/collectors) while reducing new sources of income (new players/collectors) is not an effective long term strategy for keeping your company going. Maybe GW has some grant master plan that I can't see but right now it looks like they are running their company into the ground. Maybe I'm just hitting the gaming stores in my area at the wrong time but more and more I'm seeing tables being used for other games beside Warhammer and 40K. And when folks I know that have been playing and collecting for 20+ years are selling off their collections and going to other games it is not a good sign. Maybe 6th edition will be so awesome it draws folks back in despite the cost increase, we'll just have to wait and see.

[Marius the Possessed]

Not a good long-term plan? Games Workshop has been a successful international business for 25 years, they know what they are doing. Black Library is becoming increasingly more popular, they still sell large numbers of product, and are opening more stores than they are closing. In the grand scheme of things, these price increases are very small, and most players adapt by buying their stuff over a longer period.

I really hate that everyone always points to any move by a business to increase prices as being greed. First off, it's a business, they need to cover expenses, and being international, Games Workshop has HUGE expenses in employee, production and shipping costs alone. Not to mention they are constantly developing new product, which means a lot of R&D costs both in people and supplies, plus with so many companies like Chapterhouse trying to rip them off, lots of legal costs. Add into this the fact that the world economy, particularly the European and American economies (GW's home base and largest market respectively) is still suffering, so GW increases prices so that they don't have to start scaling back massively. Not to mention that this is a hobby luxury item; those are friggin' expensive! Look at other hobbies and tell me those aren't equally or more expensive.

For all those people who complain about an annual and MINOR price increase (seriously, the only ones that go up a lot are Battleforces, how many of those do you buy on a regular basis?), stop. This is a luxury expense, luxuries are expensive, and with some simple patience or proper budgeting, won't affect your income any more than it already does.

[thenewKhan]

Not a good long-term plan? Games Workshop has been a successful international business for 25 years, they know what they are doing. Black Library is becoming increasingly more popular, they still sell large numbers of product, and are opening more stores than they are closing. In the grand scheme of things, these price increases are very small, and most players adapt by buying their stuff over a longer period.

I really hate that everyone always points to any move by a business to increase prices as being greed. First off, it's a business, they need to cover expenses, and being international, Games Workshop has HUGE expenses in employee, production and shipping costs alone. Not to mention they are constantly developing new product, which means a lot of R&D costs both in people and supplies, plus with so many companies like Chapterhouse trying to rip them off, lots of legal costs. Add into this the fact that the world economy, particularly the European and American economies (GW's home base and largest market respectively) is still suffering, so GW increases prices so that they don't have to start scaling back massively. Not to mention that this is a hobby luxury item; those are friggin' expensive! Look at other hobbies and tell me those aren't equally or more expensive.

For all those people who complain about an annual and MINOR price increase (seriously, the only ones that go up a lot are Battleforces, how many of those do you buy on a regular basis?), stop. This is a luxury expense, luxuries are expensive, and with some simple patience or proper budgeting, won't affect your income any more than it already does.

I understand what your saying, but I remember when a Land Raider was what $40? A Rhino was somewhere near $25. Yeah, that quite a few years back (yay dating yourself!!) but I don't think GW was "struggling" to keep in buisness at that point. People were complaining about prices then, yeah, they will definitely complain about prices now. What GW doesn't seem to understand is you don't need to up the prices anually. You can stay in buiseness alot of the time without constantly raising prices. Yeah, they have growing expenses, but what is their profit margin like? Can you REALLY tell me it takes GW more than a couple of dollars to make that Land Raider they are selling for $66? I doublt it. If they didn't up prices every singe year, say they did it every other year even, they wouldn't lose that much, they couldn't possibly lose so much on that sale that it tanked them into the ground. If they did go under because of that, they would have tons of internal issues needing to be sorted out.

Like I said, I understand GW price increases WILL happen, I understand the forces that cause them to happen. But I don't believe GW would be ruined if they didn't scrape some more money out of us every year.

[Fallen Autarch]

For the last couple of years they have managed allot of scraping. They are covering their costs happily and with a generous margin at the moment. You can always look for yourselves on their investor relations page.
I believe they are still scaling themselves under their new management. We have to remember they are a business now and ceased being a hobby a long time ago, even all the really good vanguard members of the company left and now work on other systems. If they can scale it so that their prices hit an equilibrium with their customers and still draw a healthy profit they will do it. They are reaching for it now to see where they can hit I reckon. Because they spend less on moulds, material and shipping that way they save money further helping their bottom line.

Cost curve - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The cost curve scenario for those interested.

However as the gamers we don't have to like it, they don't really care who/ how it affects us so long as they still climb towards their ceiling. We can budget it and spend the same amount but we will get less bang for our buck and resent it. To be honest I'm considering scraping my next army Idea for another year or two extra until I start getting a stronger income (Currently student).

Another interesting side effect as previously mentioned is other game systems now are going up. As product X (GW) costs more, consumers will switch to product Y (Other companies). The best threat we have to control their price is Independent stockists who charge less than the stores themselves. Which you see more often on-line. They can't cut them off like they wish because then their company scale would drop off sharply as larger numbers of gamers left.

In rambling conclusion, I can see where the price increases come from..... I just really really resent them..... allot.

[Klajorne]

These are the same comments made every year. The one thing I would like to touch on is the "It's not a sustainable strategy" comment.

How many years has there been price hikes now? And each year (and the year thereafter) GW is still showing growing profits on their financial statements (which is nothing but an accumulation of blatant lies, no matter which company you are, sort of like an online dating profile). So, apparently, it is working for them on some level. And during a period of economic downturn, no less.

Now, I agree that it isn't a strategy that can go on forever; some year it will hit its limit. Right now, though, it seems to have been an effective way to take the company.

I may not like it as a customer (who doesn't want to get more for less?), but as a business strategy, I'm not sure how you can argue with the numbers.

Now add in the usual blather about not seeing the whole picture: fewer sales/transactions might be beneficial for the company. I'd have to have more details to know for certain what's best for the long term health of the company. Just knowing that prices are going up and some people are leaving, is not enough to make a well educated decision. There's much more to running a business than that.

[HappyJim]

These are the same comments made every year. The one thing I would like to touch on is the "It's not a sustainable strategy" comment.

How many years has there been price hikes now? And each year (and the year thereafter) GW is still showing growing profits on their financial statements (which is nothing but an accumulation of blatant lies, no matter which company you are, sort of like an online dating profile). So, apparently, it is working for them on some level. And during a period of economic downturn, no less.

Now, I agree that it isn't a strategy that can go on forever; some year it will hit its limit. Right now, though, it seems to have been an effective way to take the company.

Thing is which can generally see from the numbers is the profits are not going up, people are just buying less, so really all each price rise is cover the loss in sales, if the units you sale is going down year after year you are doing something wrong, the units sold stayed roughly the same year after then you could say is a successful strategy, its really just patch work to keep those investors happy, still for wargaming as a whole it isn't really a bad thing, it just gives smaller companies easier access to the market because as customer, we are always going to be looking for the best deal.

I do spend money at GW but my spending is a lot less than it use to be, because of the investment is takes to actually buy a new army I am far less impulsive with my spends, its taken me a year to get round to actually buy plastic core units for my Vampire counts from GW, I'm currently waiting to see what warthrone comes up with, if I like the rules I may well move onto a new game and just buy the rules as I need from GW, if they hadn't got so crazy with the prices I can honestly say I wouldn't have even looked at other suppliers for models and rules. I can enjoy a wargame with nice models regardless of the name printed on the box!

I don't really recent them like I did the last few times they raised the prices, I just think they should be raising prices because they need to, not because it's that time of year again.

[saltrock36]

For me its not so much the price rises on thier own, but that combined with the trend of the average game being played at a higher points limit, and (although its balanced itself out more since Empire), models comming down in cost in points, meaning that to reach that gam limit you need more models overall. I could play a 2000pts fantasy game with no more than 70 models in my dwarf army. I now have that many models in jut 2 units of warriors.

Its nice that it brings a new element to the game that number can come into play rather than just death star units (as it was in 6th and 7th ed), but combined with the other effects its a bit of a killer.

Finding the motivation to paint so many models for an army is harder aswell, not to mention the ever increasing ways to posistion and equip models. Too be honest, if they could turn out the same quality as they did in the Warhammer starter box with high elves and skaven it wouldnt put me off buying semi-static models one bit if it saved money in the long run.

[DAMO.R]

Every business has to have a yearly price review. considder this if you will. it costs GW around £45,000 to make a plastic kit mould. and over the last 2 years GW have been churning out ON AVERAGE around 4 new plastic kits every month, not to mention the R&D team who have been developing the new tools, glues and paints and thats not cheap, so you do the math.

now i hate the price hikes as much as everyone else but give them some credit. to have to spend that much on each new plastic kit and still return a prophit is not easy. If GW were to cut the costs on the mould making process then the level of detail would greatly decrease so thats not an option.

im not going to quit 40k im just going to buy less and to be honest most of my armies just need the finishing touches anyway.

[Kaleb Daark]

Well said. I don't think that developing adhesives is going to fool anyone really, they will just rebrand a mass supplied product as do humbrol, revell etc. however you're spot on with the cost of a plastic model tooling cost.

It's a huge capital investment, and they need this if they ever want to lose those centrifugal moulds once and for all. Would we all not like to see the finecast range in decent polystyrene instead of resin, in order to do that GW needs the investment.

Yes, none of us like the price rises, but I'd rather buy less models as frequently than they not be there at all.

[HappyJim]

Thing is if you make changes to your company that will save you money in the long run its called a investment, you don't ask your customers to pay for that investment which is really what they are doing, I also think many times in the past GW hasn't raised the price because they have producing crap loads of new models, in short they burnt their bridges with many people, I also think the quailty has seriously started to slip, got my FW openday skin wolf today, I have to say I'm not pleased, regardless of being from ebay (still in the packet) it should have never been sold in the condition its in.

I do worry about the affordability of my hobby in 5 years time because I just can't see my wages being able to keep up with the price increases.