A quick thought on GW

Nothing amazing in this post. Just a general observation about GW's practices lately.

Ok what first needs to be established is that this company is not stupid. Think about it. For the last 6 years they have reported lower sales figures and are compensating for this by increasing efficiency in both production and their stores. This overall process is probably not sustainable and will eventually implode but not before 2 key things occur, for 3 key reasons.

Key reason 1; There is only so much you can raise prices to offset lower sales. People have finite spending money for toys. This limit is commonly accepted as having been reached already.

2; They, as a company, have been introducing policies that aren't working. They've been doing this for years. These policies are far reaching in effect and wide in scope and have culminated in job losses, store closures and decreased performance from the stores that remain. A brilliant compendium on this can be found here (about 4/5ths down, no hotlink directly there)

3; Market saturation. By this I'm referring to the process of there not being a large enough incentive to buy from the manufacturer (ie GW) because online retailers and auctions (like ebay or amazon) sell them for much cheaper. MUCH cheaper. Plenty of posts I see refer to "veterans" picking up models en masse for cheap from what seems like mostly teenagers who may have bought models when they were 12/13 and then dropped the game later due to lack of interest. The fact is, at some point GW will see itself trying to push models in an environment where so much second hand stock already exists that nobody will feel any need to "buy new". The same problem exists in the car market in NZ, for the record. I don't know a single person who owns a 'new car'. Everything is second hand. Everything. Selling new cars to NZers is like trying to sell homemade chocolate to a supermarket, you just simply cannot hope to do it.

So with that being said, what are the 2 key things that will occur during the death throes of  this current incarnation of GW.

1; Vigorous defence of 'intellectual property'. The suing of people who attempt to copy or emulate a GW game system (which might fail, given what happened to d20 and WOTC) or a GW iconographic "thing". CHS recently got plugged with a court date because they used the terms "space wolves" and other stuff like that to describe his products. Since the term "space marine" cannot be copyrighted or trademarked to GW on the basis of the fact they didn't invent the term, it was the very specific matters of "Space wolves" and "Blood angels" and "eldar farseer" and other things like that used in direct reference to what are clearly plagiaristic uses of another company's iconography.

What's amusing for me is that this new trend of big companies suing EVERYONE who dares use some term that's tangentially related to a product of theirs was predicted in the 2005 citigroup "plutonomy" memo. Apparently fatcats have no imagination and all follow the same rules. As set by a corrupt mega-bank that bribes politicians. Ha ha ha.

2; A switch over to the production of books and computer games. Simply put this is the future of GW. They will continue to produce new models, using forgeworld as an initial launch platform to test for market interest, however the company GW itself will run much lower production sizes on models and instead switch over to lucrative royalty schemes involving computer games. Dawn of war in 2004 saw a peak in sales and income for the company that has not been met or exceeded at any point within the last 10 years. Then there's things to consider like WAR (which was EA's fault for flopping), DoW2, the already planned DoW3 and now an MMO based on the 40k universe. Books will also begin to surface more regularly as we've seen with the HH novel series which in 23years of 40k has only just started relatively recently to appear in official novels rather than passing mention in other fiction, not to forget that they have that trio of eldar books and for all we know soon enough there'll be one about Tau as well.

GW will switch over to products which carry no need for retail space beyond a middlemans shelves, it will continue to introduce policies that lower the throughput of retail stores for their models and forgeworld will see an increase in activity as the experimental skunkwerks of GW, launching untested products to the masses and then trawling the internet for feedback before officially introducing them to the main game either by making IA books 'canon' or by directly ripping the unit into a new codex.

In the death throes of the old GW, having failed to grasp the attention of longtime purchasers from auctions and making the barrier to entry too high for newcomers, it will be reborn from the ashes like a phoenix, bright and strong and ready to rape a new medium with the same cold, ineffective callousness that saw TCS get bought by Hasbro, only that this time GW has a pre-established computer market to maliciously exploit to the continued detriment of everyone involved. While GW will still produce pewter/resin/plastic miniatures, it will be in far smaller volumes than today and will act mostly as a supplement and as the "plastic crack" that the new generation of video gamers will buy without having fully understood the roots of the company, or why such cool little models aren't more popular. And probably without realising that there's thousands of online auctions everyday for the same shit at atleast 50% off.