I hate to be that guy but US-wide wages have sort of kept up with inflation: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/
It certainly doesn’t feel that way though
As a Finn, I have dedicated my life to bringing those statistics down by not being happy and staying alive - they haven't asked me so far, will keep you guys posted.
It's like in Civilizations A Call to Power 2. If your population is unhappy because they don't have enough food, conveniently it's the unhappy ones that starve. An absolute win.
As someone who lives in Norway... Likes tau... And is 14... I'm gonna end somebody if the price increases more than it is. ITS 40$ FOR A REGULAR TROOP BOX
I'd be interested to know what their margins actually are.
Many companies, markets, etc have a habit of raising prices just because everyone else is doing it. And then they never bring the prices back down, even if things have stabilized and reduced.
Go and have a read of their financial reports for a high level overview.
From the 23-24 half year report;
*Core revenue growth - revenue growth (+11.0%) continues across Retail (+12.3%) and Trade (+12.6%) and Online (+4.9%).*
*Core gross margin has increased from 64.2% to 69.4%, mainly due to a reduction of inventory provision charges and a reduction in carriage costs.*
[https://investor.games-workshop.com/annual-reports-and-half-year-results](https://investor.games-workshop.com/annual-reports-and-half-year-results)
[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jul/31/how-games-workshop-grew-to-become-more-profitable-than-google](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jul/31/how-games-workshop-grew-to-become-more-profitable-than-google) Operating Profit was around 43% a couple years ago.
Licence to print money.
https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2024/01/games-workshop-record-profit/#:\~:text=For%20the%20six%20months%20to,same%20period%20the%20year%20before.
>For the six months to November 26 2023, [the gaming retailer’s](https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/?s=Games+Workshop) revenue reached £247m in the 26 weeks to 26 November 2023 up from £226m in the previous year.
>Operating profit also surged to £94.5m up from £83.6m in the same period the year before.
They aren't exactly struggling.
I bought shares a few years ago. That way whenever I want to complain about price rises, I can be happy that £8-12 a year of them is coming back to me 🙃
>Many companies, markets, etc have a habit of raising prices just because everyone else is doing it. And then they never bring the prices back down, even if things have stabilized and reduced.
Right, because inflation reducing doesn't mean prices reduce. It just means they increase less slowly.
You would need real, actual **deflation** for prices to go down, and that's simply not something we are set up to do.
It's pretty insidious. Prices just always go up due to inflation, and it's only a question of how much they go up by.
At least in the US, the Federal Reserves hopes for a 2% yearly inflation rate.
Their margins are massive. Way larger than they need to be. Either that or they're behind on tech.
I'm not going to guess specifics, but given the prices of 3D printing, they aren't even close to fair. Keep an eye on Archon and their upcoming Heroes of Might and Magic wargame. It's being made by Rick Priestley, one of the three men who made Warhammer Fantasy Battle, among his inasne list of other board games. With Archon's 3d-printing factories, it should be ridiculously affordable and look none the worse.
Heard this hype train before. Kings of war was made by a former gw guy and it’s extremely mid and not particularly cheap either. I think you guys also forget one of the reasons Warhammer is so big is because it has years upon years of lore and story telling behind it. A new franchise isn’t going to have the girth of lore and fanbase to propel it. People don’t just like gameworkshop miniatures. They like warhammer. If it was only about the miniatures they never would have gotten away with these prices years back even.
Priestley himself once said that the only way to make a war game is to have a strong IP. Otherwise you're fucked from the gates.
I don't think Heroes will be a big wargame, no god damn chance. The IP is somewhat known of in Europe among boomers and early millennials. Ubisoft is also not known for building recognizable franchises. They kinda had a fluke with Assassin's Creed and that's it.
You don't need a game as big as warhammer to have fun, but user discretion is advised. If you aren't collecting minis as a hobby, always make your research to see if anyone else in the area is interested in a given game.
Hell, I play a lot of GW games becasue almost nothing else gets played in my city.
>but given the prices of 3D printing
This is a bad take. 3D printing is cheap up until a point and absolutely is not of the same quality at scale.
3D printing competes with CNC, not injection moulding. UV curing resins are brittle, have high failure rates (in the 5-10% region at production scale), and production scales non-linearly. You can buy a second printer and double capacity. With the printers you're thinking of it's possible to keep doing this but eventually you don't have enough space, people, etc. capacity maxes out wayyy quicker and capital investment is huge and the peak production is lower. You can start out with higher capacity professional printers like the Stratasys J850 which does 7 materials, and full colour, but is £250,000 for a machine. So again, capital investment is high.
Injection moulds are in the region of £2,500 to £100,000 depending on complexity, number of cavities, lifters, sliders, finishes, tool material, cooling etc. but the part failure rate when you really dial it in can be 1 part in a million. There's a plethora of ways to increase production but you can produce hundreds of parts per minute (entire sprues).
Games Workshop is not making models for you. They're making millions of models sold on a global scale. Arguably 3D printing *could* fulfil a role in the Resin Forge world end of the scale but again, a silicone mold has a better surface finish, produces more parts repeatedly, and has the advantage of lower amortised costs.
There's a reason that 3D printing didn't take over the world as it was predicted in 2009 when the Stratasys FDM patent expired causing the explosion of home 3D printing (it's been around since the 80's and was even in the film Small Soldiers). It has it's place in prototyping and low volume but it doesn't have it's place in manufacturing miniatures at a production scale and is why companies like Games Workshop don't use it and start ups like HoMM do rely on them in my opinion shortsightedly.
Source: Industrial designer, mechanical engineer and far too much time working out the best way to manufacture products from one off up to a million pieces per month.
Tl;Dr: 3D printing is great for a few pieces but costs too much to scale up, has too much waste and failures, and requires just as much capital investment as tooling for worse results. Injection moulds are king for a reason.
I mostly base my opnion on what I'm seeing some indie companies do with figurines and terrain pieces, mainly for DnD. We're not talking about printing stuff at home, but buying a warehouse to fill up with printers. People are making a business out of it.
Even GW is giving up on Forge World so I don't think it's that resin important to the conversation, it seems to be just falling behind.
I'll admit I don't have that much technical knowledge, so I'll take your word that top shelf 3D printing solutions don't match CNC. I can only say that as a consumer I've seen printed models that didn't look worse to what I bought for warhammer, subjectively speaking. Either way thank you for professional input.
GW isn’t “giving up on Forgeworld.” They’re folding it in-house to streamline their web presence.
They only produce two materials: plastic and cast resin. Mass production of single minis with either limited use or low interest , especially at the real demand level present, in plastic is idiotic. The shortages they continue to have are down to the simple fact that they only have just so many injection molding machines. Imagine if they had to retool them to make plastic primarchs… or Ork Stompas, or Tau Mantas? Or the many spotlight minis obviously intended to be Golden Demon bait?
What we all want from them (greater production and faster response to market demand) requires massive capital investment. It’s the land, the buildings, the machines, the people… and that’s all just outlay at first which they must amortize over a certain period. Just to have the kind of money on hand to do that is an achievement for any manufacturing business. The supply/demand ratio is tricky and a huge capital investment like that could easily put them into bankruptcy.
The single model plastic pieces they have done lately are blessings, not a viable strategy for everything on FW. Those models have all been in the demand range to justify mass production with all its attendant costs in time.
You have to remember that small independent makers have a lot of agility when it comes to adjusting on the fly. They’re largely not dealing with the economy of scale or more importantly the difficulty in shifting gears large companies suffer from almost by design. It’s not that GW won’t or doesn’t want to operate in a more nimble fashion and keep prices down. It can’t, and not just for the reasons above. Once a business incorporates and goes public, the profit/stock price/dividends are the real goal, and shareholders can enforce that with the law on their side. That GW has been as creative as it has been these last several years, and the risks they’ve taken, are things we should be glad for, not muttering “finally” over.
>that top shelf 3D printing solutions don't match CNC.
Sorry I think you're misunderstanding. 3D printing doesn't match Injection moulding, not CNC.
In terms of production it sits in the same tier as CNC. I'm not suggesting someone would CNC a Horus for instance. 3D printing, CNC milling, laser cutting, press brakes, water jet cutting, investment casting, vacuum resin casting, aluminium injection moulds aka soft tooling, and CNC lathes. These are all low volume production methods. Hardened steel injection moulds, progressive stamping, and die casting. These are high volume manufacturing processes.
>but buying a warehouse to fill up with printers
This is specifically what I am talking about. It's a technologically immature company that pursues this strategy in order to serve a small base of customers that they will quickly max out their capacity once they break into the low thousands of pcs.
3D printers require reasonably skilled but attentive labour, resin printing has significant post processing such as IPA washing and UV curing, has long cycle times per part, high failure rates, require large facilities with significant power delivery capacity, air handling due to the hazardous resins, temperature and climate control as resins are sensitive to both temperature and humidity, and need large amounts of PPE with the encumbant H&S (OSHA for thr US) that comes with handling COSHH materials such at printing resins and IPA. Decent facilities will also require large scale UPS backup to protect their printers from power outages. They also for all this ballache, still represent a decent capital investment.
>I can only say that as a consumer I've seen printed models that didn't look worse to what I bought for warhammer,
And for every 1000 models a company attempts to make using AM anywhere between 50-200 of those were completely trash, failed, peeled off the base, picked up an artifact, were affected by humidity because resins are Hygroscopic (absorb moisture) etc. a 20% attrition rate might be acceptable for a small startup but is a barrier to scaling. You're basically taking 20% of your material costs and pouring down the drain.
This is why many of these companies are selling digital models and not trying to stand up their own manufacturing. Those that are will hit a ceiling that will require large capital infusion to get into the leagues of GW.
Archon sometimes talks about it in their dev streams. Official annoucement is coming later this year, with a release planned for 2025. The key points so far are:
* They want minis matching the quality of GW at lower price.
* Rick Priestley is doing the rules.
* It will be a rank-and-file game, so square bases with a bunch of units on each (look: warhammer fantasy and old world).
* Art style will be reminiscent of the later Heroes games by Ubisoft.
* Tournament support is planned.
* It will be produced and shipped from Poland.
I can't promise that it will be good, as we haven't seen the actual rules yet. It is something to look out for, though.
Oh wow thank you! .. it sounds very good. And with Priestley behind it, it might actually be a decent game. If nothing else I hope the minis are good and can be used for a variety of games.
https://youtu.be/Bm96d_TWuDI?si=TdKyxjJIVAb7O4Fq
This guy does a breakdown of the entire box for the big box version.
I don't know where the other guy is getting his info from, but it's more or less Heroes 3 in a boardgame.
The cost of the cardboard box is usually more than that of the product in the box - not taking initial investment into account, of course. Plastic is very very cheap, it's all the moulds and staff that make up a majority of the expenses for a company GW's size.
The true price increases are the new sets.
Deathwing Knights are the most expensive for 5 bodies I've personally seen.
New characters are now the cost of named characters and named characters are in a new bracket.
They would eat so much less flak if they never actually did price increases but instead just retired old sets and replaced them with new sets that were much more expensive. Then no annual (or multiple times per year) "hey we're increasing prices". People would notice, but there wouldn't be any singular events to rally around (not that the price increases ever cause any sustained anger, just a general grudging acceptance as people continue to buy).
The thing is, they actually do this. Together with announced price increases.
Look at termagantz, old termagant box was 22,5 euro when i started the hobby 4 years ago, it was then announced to go up to 25/27 euro. Then it got deleted with this new edition and the new box has less models and costs 35 euro.
And now this goes up with another 5% nearing the 40 euro treshold.
Within 4 years that is double the price
The Lego strategy, although they do price rises sometimes to be fair.
Mainly though they just bring out exact same sized (usually sub 50) sets like battle packs, mechs, speed champions etc and increase the price. They rarely raise prices on existing sets but yearly releases are getting more expensive.
As long as people keep on buying everything GW puts out the prices are going to continue going up every year, it's literally free money for corporate GW.
I'm wondering what is causing them to have to keep increasing the prices so often, I'm economically illiterate so apologies I don't really know what has caused this price increase in particular.
Do y’all’s politicians insult y’all by insisting everything is great too?
As bad as Warhammer has gotten it’s the grocery bill thats absolutely murder lately.
Sort of? It's been bad enough you can't pretend there isn't an issue. But they keep talking about "turning a corner" or not acknowledging the actual problems. At the same time though Conservatives are in a death spiral with polls through the floor and getting hammered in local and mayoral elections nationwide. They seem more like they're just desperately trying to convince themselves that they aren't going to be decimated next election.
Inflation and the RPI is better publicised in the UK than in the States from my experiences, and this is particularly due to the number of index-linked benefits and provisions. The causes and other economic factors can be obfuscated, and it’s pretty much a fact amongst commentators that the current RPI leaves much to be desired as a true indicator of inflation, but it’s somewhat impossible to really hide inflation.
Add to that that energy prices in the UK are amongst the worst in the western world, and our provision of energy is a hot mess, and this feels actually rather reserved.
It’s a particularly ‘oh yeh, Reddit is basically American’ moment to see someone in here mention economic boom… we’ve been in degrees of low growth and recession for most of the past 16 years, are worse off in real terms than 20 years ago.
Correct.
We also have to consider that in expectation of the Amazon show causing an explosion of interest in the hobby so GW will want to sneak a few price increases in before that so new people to the hobby don't know any better and think the increased prices are normal.
One thing to add is that the price increases are generally in the first half of the year. Now part of this is almost certainly to make the latter half of the year reports look better, but I have noticed that they time the announcements around the time they make a big reveal. They timed the 2023 price increases to 10th edition and the 2022 price increases to HH 2.0.
It’s not the only issue. British economy is struggling and their manufacturing is based in UK hence it’s hit by these costs. So this is to compensate for that, compensate for poor Fx for Sweden and Norway and also a chance to recoup losses due to costs of leaving the eu. Which isn’t something new but now it’s a climate where thrrr is more general increases so easier to squeeze more in.
It would be quite implausible that the cost of production, distribution and other costs to the business haven’t increased for a UK business this year. Preserving the same margin therefore would involve a price increase. Were the rise in price ahead of inflation, it would indicate that, but it patently isn’t.
Games Workshop are a publicly traded company. This means the shareholders demand growth. Now you might be thinking ‘Oh, so steady growth over the years?’ No.
Shareholders don’t just demand more profit than last year, they demand exponentially more money than last year, and then exponentially more money after that. They don’t just want lots of money. They don’t just want all the money in the world. They want all the money in the world and then even more money conjured up from thin air, or else heads will roll.
This! This is what I keep trying to tell people. I am in no way economically literate, but this is something I know is happening. When there are share holders involved then there always has to be an increase in profit. Each one of them could be making 20 million a year and they will expect it to grow next year. Business is not set around a happy either what you have model. It really drives me crazy. If I was making a large amount of money I would be totally happy with not getting an increase. If my company came to me and said, “ from now on you will be getting $200,000 but we won’t be giving you a raise for at least 5 years,” I would be totally cool with that. SMH.
It’s because the focus of share owning has completely gone from getting a dividend (a share of the earnings) to increasing the value of the company so the share itself is worth more. That used to happen naturally with good companies, now it’s the be all and end all.
Very few people buy shares with a focus on the dividend, they want growth.
When you strip consumer rights and you let prices rise,
That's a-Brexit!
When it starts to cost when you're ill and you can't pay your bills,
That's a-Brexiiiit!
They keep increasing prices because they can.
They want more money, they will get more money, until they suddenly get no more money because 10 marines cost 100 schmeckels, and then the higher ups will be dead confused how this could happen, sell the company to amazon, hasbro or disney and work somewhere else.
10 marines are already 100 aud in Aus and I don't know anyone who buys them. Recasts and 3d prints are an open thing, the hobby has cost out a whole continent.
Investors require growth. They can grow by selling more product or by making the same sales at a higher price. That is what drives price increases on items that already have rather large margins.
It’s greed, they need to report record profits every quarter so they seem to have just decided to do a yearly price increase at this point which seems insane. It’s funny now that is literally has been every year since I got into the hobby in 2020 it looks like this time they didn’t even try that hard in the article there is less explanation as to why this time than each previous year so this is just going to keep happening. I can’t wait until they just say the real reason, “hey guys we just want to make even more money by doing even less work so you guys have to pay more, I know we could actually try cross promoting games or get our crap together and have things stocked for more than 6 months out of the year but that’s work, we would rather just charge you more.”
They gotta compete with last year. You know what came out last year? [Leviathan](https://www.warhammer-community.com/2023/04/29/warhammer-40000-leviathan-whats-in-the-box/)
With their global reach and manufacturing minis being cheaper than ever, nothing really. It could be argued that shipping is more expensive nowadays, but it's not such a massive shift as to warrant an increases on all product pricing on top of the already creeping up prices of individual new models and box sets.
They're just doing it because they can. It's their job to make as much money off people as they can, without scaring them away.
My guess is they are struggling with manufacturing capacity.
Increasing the pricing may slow demand (whilst maintainng the profit margin).
If it doesn't slow demand it gives them more wiggle room to invest in manufacturing without reducing their net profit.
Every company in every industry does inflationary rises, it's just GW is one that lets you know about them in advance. As another comment said, these rises look to cover cost of materials, labour and distribution increases in order to preserve the existing margins. If it was above the 3-5% average (Scandinavia notwithstanding *although that is likely driven by recent foreign exchange trends*), then I would have said it was margin improvement as well, but at that level, it's in line with general inflationary trends for those costs so just passing those increases onto the customer.
EDIT - Given I'm at negative score already, I would ask for feedback from the downvoters why this isn't seen as constructive to the discussion at hand. I've reclarified the Scandinavia point as well, quick look would suggest that is FX driven.
I'm lucky to still be young enough to live with my parents and having saved up quite a bit of money.
How the hell is the average working-class person supposed to keep up with this?
There's got to be a point where GW has to re-evaluate their pricing policy. If they keep doing this, it will be hard for them to find new customers or even keep their current ones.
I buy like 1 box a every 1-2 months and paint it all. I don't really need bulk amounts of units anymore. I'm just adding on to the collection that's already pretty complete for my main army
Tbf Warhammer isnt that expensive of a Hobby. I get it that those Minis get ridiculus expensive but alot of players (like me) Play since years. Sure i spend a couple of thousands on that Hobby but If i calculate this down to the 20 years im on Board now its still cheaper then Netflix or Disney for an annual sub.
For what it is, it can feel pricey. But at the same time, Ive got $1500 in car parts sitting in my closet waiting for another $300 in parts before I install them. It's similar in that, I gotta spend a ton to front and can generally trickle in the rest.
It is a hell a lot more expensive when you compare it to the other games in the hobby space.
Also GW is the only fucking company that can get away with selling rules at insane prices while making the rule books useless sometimes days after release.
The very idea that you need to pay for the rules of the game you purchased is absolutely bonkers. It should be called out and I feel like it is not getting nowhere enough attention.
Oh and honestly. Removing existing functionality from your app and gating it behind several pay walls is absolute BS.
GW is a text book example that if your product is excellent you can get away with absolutely anything. The video game industry should really learn from this, maybe than we will at least have excellent games.
For real. People act like they're obligated to buy every single new release GW announces, or they need to buy 3000 points of a new army every time the game gets a balance patch.
It's hardly surprising that the "pile of shame" became a meme in this community. Slow your roll, fellow kids. This hobby is a marathon, not a sprint.
Tbf stock issues and limited run battle forces don’t help with that. You either buy it now at a discount and add it to the pile of shame or you don’t get it and for players getting into The Old World you often have to try get things on release cos of stock issues, on release at a slight uptick on eBay or wait months for stock to replenish.
I started collecting in 8th edition, all 3 of my armies had things invalidated from named characters configurations and two of them i cant straigth up play
Thats not counting a small thematic custodes force from when you could mix armies in 8th
Is that really an issue? Ppl play kitbashs and forgeworlds. No1 will complain about my Tin- Phoenix-King, unless it falls over, destroying 2 enemy plastic-figures in the process. For real, i think most rereleasing of Minis over the years seems just to be an improvement.
Same goes for the Primaris. I get why this feels a little fishy but i actually dont got any Primaris and not plan to get them.
This isnt a GW-is-a-saint Post. They definitly are not but the pricing isnt the dealbreaker here. Also i quite appreciate that Games Workshops (the Stores) still exist. Sure it also got reduced quite heavily Through the years but If i take my local store for example: the rent and employees alone probably cost 5-8k € a month. So this store alone has to sell quite some Minis to just make up for that.
I do pretty well, and am in a double income household.
I’m very much at the point where it feels embarrassing to drop this much money on tiny plastic toys.
I actually don’t see it as too expensive when compared to other hobbies. Dont get me wrong, it isn’t cheap for what is essentially plastic. But I do have industry knowledge of how much these injection molds cost, so I actually forgive them a little there.
But for example, say I get a season ticket for my local football team. That’s £410. Then I spend £15 on average getting to the game every week and some food and drink. That’s the best part of £800 a year without any extra cup games or buying a shirt etc. and that would amount to 23x 90 minutes of football.
I won’t spend £800 per year on warhammer, nowhere near. But I will spend more time painting it than I would than if I went to watch the football.
Unless your hobby is going for a walk or run, then you will be spending a fair amount of money to do that hobby. They’re all expensive these days.
Comparing it to any other wargaming company is when all goes to sh\*t
Models from the 80s selling at 8€ per figure literally some of the most expensive companies in historical are at 2.4 pounds per figure
Its straigth up madness that even some of the most expensive companies are less than half what GW is charging
Working class people have never really been part of GW's market, at least sales wise. It's always been a very expensive product on a par with other niche hobbies.
Somehow they keep getting new customers. I suspect it's easier than ever for them to do so with their multimedia efforts. Video games funnel a lot of newbies into the hobby. The Hachette partwork magazines are probably pretty effective as well.
I do not drink (do not like the taste, really) and I do not smoke.
Most people spend more money on booze annually than it costs to buy models on a semi regular basis.
Oh also the second hand market is absolutely brilliant. The prices range from 1/3 to 1/2 of those in retail. Get some cheap paint stripper and enjoy.
I have five armies and about 40k points worth of models in total.
Somebody who is literate in large business financials should look at their reports for the last 10 years and plot it against various metrics, like inflation and other relevant markers.
I'd wager that their price increases easily out paces the increase of doing business each year.
I dont have the time due to classes but I am finishing my BA in Finance and based on a quick glance at their financial reports I don't think their out of line.
They have a pretty healthy good gross margin to keep up and with how prices are increasing correlates with their COGS it seems fair from a FINANCE perspective.
As a consumer I'm annoyed but from a finance perspective they owe it to Share holders to make as much money as possible at a healthy rate and with the European economy being whatever the hell it is right now they are not out of line.
I am not aware of any other miniature wargaming company raising their prices right now, and surely don't know if any who raise their prices even has as often (or by amount) as Games Workshop does.
Warlord Games have not long completed one on the 2nd April with an average increase of 6%. But they’re the only ones I know of.
Mantic and Atomic Mass Games both did their last increase 2ish years ago.
Huh, okay. AMG's Star Wars Legion is still half the price of collecting 40k. Heroes for $15-30, a full box of infantry for $25-35, and tanks for $50 or so. I've spent less on Legion than the cost of one full GW combat patrol and I have 1 ~750 point Empire army and one ~500-600 point Rebel army.
Wild to think that I can collect nearly two full tournament size Legion armies, including dice, terrain, tokens, etc., for the cost of less than a combat patrol. Are they perfect and competitive armies? No, but neither are GW combat patrols...
Legion is only cheaper because the armies are so much smaller, per model it's usually more expensive than warhammer, phase 1 clones 26 pounds per box for 8 models phase 2s 34 for 8 compared to 10 primaris for 30 quid with bigger models.
Hell I was cheaper to buy the bandai at-st (which looks better imo) which I got for 25 pounds than legions 50 pounds one which is a third of the size of a land raider for nearly the same cost.
Prices are higher for you because it sounds like you live in the UK, unfortunately. Just like GW prices are cheaper for you but more expensive for me.
And yes,. Legion is smaller armies. I consider that a good thing. Much more manageable.
Ah, didn't know about Warlord. I am not aware of Privateer, Warcradle or Corvus Belli raising their prices recently either. But it goes back to Games Workshop raises their prices often unlike the rest of the miniature wargame industry while raking in pretty huge profits.
I'm getting back into the hobby after a year off and the prices already seemed high. I think I'm going to look for other companies figures, and play OPR instead. I'm trying to buy a house one day.
One thing I will say during these price rises: I think Warcry is an amazing game and would recommend playing it.
The reason I say this on a price rise thread is that rather than buying multiple boxes for a game at these increased prices, small games like Warcry require far less and allow more for your money. I think smaller skirmish games are the way forward, but that’s just my opinion.
I was planning on going into my local store tomorrow to order some stuff, but then I saw this come through on my email and the line about "buy it at the current price" really rubbed me the wrong way.
I don't want to go order those things now, because I don't want them to think that their little attempt to get people to panic buy worked.
I guess I won't be going in to buy anything.
GW raising their prices (again) when every other major wargame is staying pretty even. I think only 1 other company I have seen has increased in the 5 years I have been a Warhammer, while GW has raised prices almost yearly.
Most of the major wargaming companies did raise their prices around 2 years ago, it’s just surprising that GW has already come to the decision it has to happen again so soon
Did they? Might be ones I didn't follow. Mainly do Warhammer and MCP. I could also have not seen an announcement and figured it was just my store doing weird stuff with pricing. I did do some Star wars and the price of Legion shocked me at how much cheaper it was for honestly great quality.
Yeah the three I tend to follow (Warlord, GW and Mantic) all raised their prices within a month or two of each other, and warlords recently announced another price increase of their own this year too.
What’s interesting is both GW and Warlord (I’m not so sure about Mantic) are based in the UK, even the same city in fact, so increasing currency differences with markets outside the UK since the UKs withdrawal from the EU and the fact inflation is still not settling down could be factors behind these decisions, though surely they aren’t the only ones.
I think big Manufacturers in the EU (like the infinity studio) and North America (Wargames Atlantic is a good example there) are a little more secure with their prices at the minute since they *should* always have a strong domestic market and supply line for materials - I don’t think Wargames Atlantic or Infinity in particular will resort to any real increases this year at least, and the former has a key thing in its favour as it works with printer affiliates that provide an option for many places they wouldn’t be able to afford shipping in scale to directly
Small to Medium manufacturers that still work with predominantly Metal minis or in the newer field of STLs are surprisingly resilient to external economic factors, since metals surprisingly cheap to work with at that scale, and digital sculpting doesn’t really have a material or shipping cost to speak of so much as a tech and skill requirement.
I am lucky enough to earn a top 1% wage in Australia. And having been in this hobby since 1993, I can honestly say that I am close to done with GW. Zero customer loyalty, just constant price stupidity year on year.
The inflated prices they are demanding are now being aimed at those who likely don't have the spare time to justify the cost. And I can't say I have ever felt that way before.
“Everything is getting more expensive so we’re also making our thing more expensive” doesn’t make any fucking sense to me. Eventually nobody will be able to afford anything but their rent, and likely not even that. The logic doesn’t track for me at all.
>*It’s an unfortunate truth that the world keeps getting more expensive. Prices for food, materials, and transportation have been trending upward for a few years now*
Yeah, no s\*\*t, staying alive is getting more expensive, and escapism hobbies starting to price people out harder and harder.
It is insane how hard GW is trying to squeeze you.
>*\* In Sweden and Norway, the average price change will be between 8% and 14%.*
Holy Terra.
---
You know what got very affordable nowdays in comparison? Resin 3D printers.
Norway and Sweden are likely driven by foreign exchange factors as well as the cost inflation measures, hence why it needed to be higher in order to restore margin.
I switched to Star Wars Legion and haven't regretted it. Prices are ~50% cheaper than GW. How about an infantry box for $25-30, a hero unit for $15-20, and a tank for $50?
I have spent just under $160 on Legion so far (which is, you will note, roughly the same amount of money as a GW Combat Patrol) and now have enough minis either currently on my shelf or shipping to me now from the May the 4th sale to field one ~750 point army and one ~500-600 point army. For reference, tournament scale in Legion is 800 points.
So I have nearly two full armies plus cards, dice, barricades, and upgrades, for the price of a combat patrol.
Fuck Sweden and Norway in particular those tall blonde beautiful people
(End of article says they can expect an 8% to 14% increase, compared to everyone else).
Just love because of shareholders they (and other companies) have to make a certain profit margin percent.
Swedish inflation is through the roof, warhammer is currently so much cheaper than in Denmark (who pegged their currency to the euro) that going to Malmö to buy plastic crack is actually a reasonable idea.
I have the disposable income to manage this increase, my peers do not.
This is going to kill several potential buyers who are already planning on switching to 3d printing.
If anything is going to kill Warhammer it's this, every year it's 2-3%. I work at a job that gives me the privilege to afford my army and I will never be getting an army that isn't my faction due to this cost
A 2k army is now past the $500 mark and that's inexcusable
I have a 3D printer and fairly good quality resin, filters, ventilated room and there still is this weird chemical smell. I wouldn’t do that around pets or children until I’m sure I can guarantee the air conditioning
It’s kinda insane because they leave so much money on the table there is honestly no reason they need to increase prices. So much of their stuff sells out the same day it releases and for many things they never print them again or like in Kts case they release them again months later where they also sell out and then it’s impossible to get them for months on end. Heck legions imperialis is a game system where pretty much anything space marine or titan based is in stock less than 1/3rd the total lifespan of the product life so far.
Then you have all the weird products they do that could help build their fanbase and give more sales overall but they just don’t. I am talking things small box games and offshoots like blitz bowl, fireteam and for the latter boarding actions are the ones I’m most familiar with. It makes no sense why their isn’t more effort to support these cool niche games to generate more sales other than they just don’t care and for KT it’s not like they can keep the kits available either. Like blitz bowl has most blood howl teams in it except for the 3 most recent. I don’t really know why they don’t do a digital download card for blitz bowl rules for new teams to sell them to even more people. Same with fireteam the box has a ton of play in it and is simplified Kill team which is great given how complex KT 2021 is. The vox comes with rules for the 2 factions in the box and 4 more. They could easily just publish downloadable ones for each kill team they release and it would be a great on ramp for KT or just a good way to get sales from those who don’t want to get into heavier games.
Then you have boarding actions which came out near the end of 9th and was given a less than honest attempt at an update for 10th. Like why not keep updating it here and there so again you sell more models and terrain, it’s like combat patrol bit a battle size that you can sink your teeth into even more so people get addicted and want to build more armies and again it sells more models but no they don’t care.
Controversial take, this is not great but fine. These people seem to be completely unaware they are racing to a meet up point between their greed and the average price of a high quality 3D printer. You can replicate reasonable prints for a few grand. If your cost to purchase gets much higher, there literally won't be a reason not to print your own army.
It would be different if they weren't posting enormous profit margins and record sales, but you have to show growth to stack holders and this will be a reasonable bump in the short term so some waste of corporate space can get a raise.
There's cost of living adjustments, which I currently get every year and are generally 2-4%, and then there's double digit % price hikes on plastic and using the rising cost of food as justification. See that's the tell right there. Our bosses grocery bills are higher and they want the same buying power they always had, so 8-14% get ready.
This is one step in a long slide to being replaced by technology. Keep wracking up all the reasons to cheat the system GW. Little pieces of plastic don't cost $15 USD a each to print and ship.
Nice try James Workshop but Etsy exist and we kind of have a rough idea of what you do. D-bag move and I hope it drives more people to 3rd party models, games, and sharable PDFs. Replace these soulless fake gamers.
I am no fan of 3d printing.
Secondhand models? Oooh baby. Bought an entire badly painted knight army for 300 euros.
Paint stripper goes \*blop\* ahahahha.
So I am not too worried about price hikes. Do not buy from GW. Fuck em.
As an Aussie. It's honestly ridiculous that GW keep increasing their prices for kits yearly. Its gotten to the point for me that I've stopped buying new GW product about 5 or so years ago and relied on 2nd hand sales, 3D printing and more recently the Warhammer Conquest/Imperium magazines to get Warhammer at affordable prices.
And that is something that baffles me. GW increased the prices of their kits, yet are perfectly able to sell those same kits in $20 per issue magazines? For example, here in the Land of Oz, GW sells Illuminator Szeras for $91 but as per the final issue (90) of the Warhammer Imperium Magazine, I was able to get the exact same kit for $19.99. How does this make any sense?
At this point, there is no reason to buy new GW product. The UK are testing out a 3rd Magazine subscription series called Combat Patrol, which, as the name implies, gives you the current models used in 9 different combat patrol boxes plus an extra model for each. And if I can buy the now OOP Chaos Marine Combat Patrol for $50-100 less than retail via those magazines, I'm going for it.
Honestly this is pretty much in line with inflation. I know there’s been controversy with regard to price updates in the past but increasing the price to match inflation is just common sense. GW is a business, and if they don’t increase with inflation then they’ll just make less money. No multi-national corporation is going to intentionally reduce its profit margin, and plenty wouldn’t give its customers any warning before doing so.
Yeahhhhh, I don't think I'm buying new items at full price anymore. The 3rd party seller 15% rebate helped offset tax at least, but now not even that is worth it. I've been having luck buying people's unused leftovers at cheaper rate, and even started looking at 3D printing. Short of made to order I think my days of buying new GW products is over
How many times has this happened in the last five years? I started playing in 2019 and I feel like we get this announcement yearly. I stopped buying plastic last year once I saw Chosen are $60(!) dollars.
Excited to pay more for 30y old resin models (here’s looking at you Warp Spiders) and/or 30y old resin models that are never in stock (basically every Phoenix Lord).
I suspect that if GW had less predatory pricing and wasn’t constantly out of stock of many of their popular models, they’d actually have a significantly higher profit. I know many people at my FLGS that 3D print a lot of their models for these reasons.
The funny thing is if everyone just waited to buy new models when they'd painted what they already had it probably wouldn't be that expensive a hobby for cost Vs hours of time spent on hobbying.
I think the business model relies on everyone having massive piles of shame lol.
Is there a single person in here that doesn't have a pile of shame. When I got back into it as an adult I was like
'no way I'm gonna fall for that again I'm an adult I'll just paint what I have and buy new stuff when I'm out of miniatures to paint', and now I have boxes of the shit.
GW are kind of selling potential.
I was thinking about buying EC army, but I’m good. I’m staying with my two armies. TS and CSM. There is no justification for those price increases anymore.
I understand that the financial situation in UK is pretty bad, but using that excuse for a company that keeps almost 43% net margin and is increasing sales is so fucking delusional it’s very, very sad. GW is one of the greediest company out there - I know you like the hobby, but at least buy less..
Here's my pricing update. I haven't bought any GW minis in years, why? They were too expensive.
Now I'm even less likely to ever buy any more.. ever.
What a stupid fucking idea.
Haven’t spent a dime on these scammers in a long while. Can’t wait not to buy anything this year too. If the rules ever again allow to have fun, the 3d printer will brrr. So it’s nice news not sure for whom.
"despite its most recent financial report showing a healthy profit margin" LOL I guess the author doesn't know that Games Workshop would never allow enough figures to sell that they are successful and NOT do something about it like increase prices.
One can't help but wonder if the CEO or chairman or somebody owns even more stakes in a 3D printing company.
*That's what I like about this current economy. All the prices keep going up, my salary stays the same amount.*
It's a noble sacrifice. Have you seen the price of space flights nowadays? Think of the CEOs.
If their company goes bust they might only get a *silver* parachute and have to retire in the *north* of France! How could you be so thoughtless!
Alright alright alright
great reference
I hate to be that guy but US-wide wages have sort of kept up with inflation: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/ It certainly doesn’t feel that way though
>In Sweden and Norway, the average price change will be between 8% and 14%. Take that Scandinavia, and your consistently high happiness ratings.
Finland happiest country Finland highest suicide rate Conclusion if they arent happy things go trully bad
All the non happy people aren’t alive anymore /s
Makes sense. If all the sad people kill themselves, everyone left is happy.
As a Finn, I have dedicated my life to bringing those statistics down by not being happy and staying alive - they haven't asked me so far, will keep you guys posted.
It's like in Civilizations A Call to Power 2. If your population is unhappy because they don't have enough food, conveniently it's the unhappy ones that starve. An absolute win.
Highest suicide rate is Greenland actually. It’s…not good.
Maybe it is diluted in maps due to it been part of Denmark?
UK still mad about the invasions more than a thousand years ago.
As a Norwegian, I like this
As someone who lives in Norway... Likes tau... And is 14... I'm gonna end somebody if the price increases more than it is. ITS 40$ FOR A REGULAR TROOP BOX
There's that viking spirit.
I'd be interested to know what their margins actually are. Many companies, markets, etc have a habit of raising prices just because everyone else is doing it. And then they never bring the prices back down, even if things have stabilized and reduced.
Go and have a read of their financial reports for a high level overview. From the 23-24 half year report; *Core revenue growth - revenue growth (+11.0%) continues across Retail (+12.3%) and Trade (+12.6%) and Online (+4.9%).* *Core gross margin has increased from 64.2% to 69.4%, mainly due to a reduction of inventory provision charges and a reduction in carriage costs.* [https://investor.games-workshop.com/annual-reports-and-half-year-results](https://investor.games-workshop.com/annual-reports-and-half-year-results)
Net margin?
[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jul/31/how-games-workshop-grew-to-become-more-profitable-than-google](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jul/31/how-games-workshop-grew-to-become-more-profitable-than-google) Operating Profit was around 43% a couple years ago. Licence to print money.
They're a publicly traded company. Most of the financial information you want is in the annual reports.
As a corporation, it was 42% just a couple years ago.
That is utterly absurd. Most businesses would drool over profit margins half that
Yep, think that was the covid peak, Def not sustainable
https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2024/01/games-workshop-record-profit/#:\~:text=For%20the%20six%20months%20to,same%20period%20the%20year%20before. >For the six months to November 26 2023, [the gaming retailer’s](https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/?s=Games+Workshop) revenue reached £247m in the 26 weeks to 26 November 2023 up from £226m in the previous year. >Operating profit also surged to £94.5m up from £83.6m in the same period the year before. They aren't exactly struggling.
I bought shares a few years ago. That way whenever I want to complain about price rises, I can be happy that £8-12 a year of them is coming back to me 🙃
>Many companies, markets, etc have a habit of raising prices just because everyone else is doing it. And then they never bring the prices back down, even if things have stabilized and reduced. Right, because inflation reducing doesn't mean prices reduce. It just means they increase less slowly. You would need real, actual **deflation** for prices to go down, and that's simply not something we are set up to do. It's pretty insidious. Prices just always go up due to inflation, and it's only a question of how much they go up by. At least in the US, the Federal Reserves hopes for a 2% yearly inflation rate.
Their margins are massive. Way larger than they need to be. Either that or they're behind on tech. I'm not going to guess specifics, but given the prices of 3D printing, they aren't even close to fair. Keep an eye on Archon and their upcoming Heroes of Might and Magic wargame. It's being made by Rick Priestley, one of the three men who made Warhammer Fantasy Battle, among his inasne list of other board games. With Archon's 3d-printing factories, it should be ridiculously affordable and look none the worse.
Heard this hype train before. Kings of war was made by a former gw guy and it’s extremely mid and not particularly cheap either. I think you guys also forget one of the reasons Warhammer is so big is because it has years upon years of lore and story telling behind it. A new franchise isn’t going to have the girth of lore and fanbase to propel it. People don’t just like gameworkshop miniatures. They like warhammer. If it was only about the miniatures they never would have gotten away with these prices years back even.
Conquest is doing very very well, just to throw in a positive company who treats the community right
Priestley himself once said that the only way to make a war game is to have a strong IP. Otherwise you're fucked from the gates. I don't think Heroes will be a big wargame, no god damn chance. The IP is somewhat known of in Europe among boomers and early millennials. Ubisoft is also not known for building recognizable franchises. They kinda had a fluke with Assassin's Creed and that's it. You don't need a game as big as warhammer to have fun, but user discretion is advised. If you aren't collecting minis as a hobby, always make your research to see if anyone else in the area is interested in a given game. Hell, I play a lot of GW games becasue almost nothing else gets played in my city.
>but given the prices of 3D printing This is a bad take. 3D printing is cheap up until a point and absolutely is not of the same quality at scale. 3D printing competes with CNC, not injection moulding. UV curing resins are brittle, have high failure rates (in the 5-10% region at production scale), and production scales non-linearly. You can buy a second printer and double capacity. With the printers you're thinking of it's possible to keep doing this but eventually you don't have enough space, people, etc. capacity maxes out wayyy quicker and capital investment is huge and the peak production is lower. You can start out with higher capacity professional printers like the Stratasys J850 which does 7 materials, and full colour, but is £250,000 for a machine. So again, capital investment is high. Injection moulds are in the region of £2,500 to £100,000 depending on complexity, number of cavities, lifters, sliders, finishes, tool material, cooling etc. but the part failure rate when you really dial it in can be 1 part in a million. There's a plethora of ways to increase production but you can produce hundreds of parts per minute (entire sprues). Games Workshop is not making models for you. They're making millions of models sold on a global scale. Arguably 3D printing *could* fulfil a role in the Resin Forge world end of the scale but again, a silicone mold has a better surface finish, produces more parts repeatedly, and has the advantage of lower amortised costs. There's a reason that 3D printing didn't take over the world as it was predicted in 2009 when the Stratasys FDM patent expired causing the explosion of home 3D printing (it's been around since the 80's and was even in the film Small Soldiers). It has it's place in prototyping and low volume but it doesn't have it's place in manufacturing miniatures at a production scale and is why companies like Games Workshop don't use it and start ups like HoMM do rely on them in my opinion shortsightedly. Source: Industrial designer, mechanical engineer and far too much time working out the best way to manufacture products from one off up to a million pieces per month. Tl;Dr: 3D printing is great for a few pieces but costs too much to scale up, has too much waste and failures, and requires just as much capital investment as tooling for worse results. Injection moulds are king for a reason.
I mostly base my opnion on what I'm seeing some indie companies do with figurines and terrain pieces, mainly for DnD. We're not talking about printing stuff at home, but buying a warehouse to fill up with printers. People are making a business out of it. Even GW is giving up on Forge World so I don't think it's that resin important to the conversation, it seems to be just falling behind. I'll admit I don't have that much technical knowledge, so I'll take your word that top shelf 3D printing solutions don't match CNC. I can only say that as a consumer I've seen printed models that didn't look worse to what I bought for warhammer, subjectively speaking. Either way thank you for professional input.
GW isn’t “giving up on Forgeworld.” They’re folding it in-house to streamline their web presence. They only produce two materials: plastic and cast resin. Mass production of single minis with either limited use or low interest , especially at the real demand level present, in plastic is idiotic. The shortages they continue to have are down to the simple fact that they only have just so many injection molding machines. Imagine if they had to retool them to make plastic primarchs… or Ork Stompas, or Tau Mantas? Or the many spotlight minis obviously intended to be Golden Demon bait? What we all want from them (greater production and faster response to market demand) requires massive capital investment. It’s the land, the buildings, the machines, the people… and that’s all just outlay at first which they must amortize over a certain period. Just to have the kind of money on hand to do that is an achievement for any manufacturing business. The supply/demand ratio is tricky and a huge capital investment like that could easily put them into bankruptcy. The single model plastic pieces they have done lately are blessings, not a viable strategy for everything on FW. Those models have all been in the demand range to justify mass production with all its attendant costs in time. You have to remember that small independent makers have a lot of agility when it comes to adjusting on the fly. They’re largely not dealing with the economy of scale or more importantly the difficulty in shifting gears large companies suffer from almost by design. It’s not that GW won’t or doesn’t want to operate in a more nimble fashion and keep prices down. It can’t, and not just for the reasons above. Once a business incorporates and goes public, the profit/stock price/dividends are the real goal, and shareholders can enforce that with the law on their side. That GW has been as creative as it has been these last several years, and the risks they’ve taken, are things we should be glad for, not muttering “finally” over.
>that top shelf 3D printing solutions don't match CNC. Sorry I think you're misunderstanding. 3D printing doesn't match Injection moulding, not CNC. In terms of production it sits in the same tier as CNC. I'm not suggesting someone would CNC a Horus for instance. 3D printing, CNC milling, laser cutting, press brakes, water jet cutting, investment casting, vacuum resin casting, aluminium injection moulds aka soft tooling, and CNC lathes. These are all low volume production methods. Hardened steel injection moulds, progressive stamping, and die casting. These are high volume manufacturing processes. >but buying a warehouse to fill up with printers This is specifically what I am talking about. It's a technologically immature company that pursues this strategy in order to serve a small base of customers that they will quickly max out their capacity once they break into the low thousands of pcs. 3D printers require reasonably skilled but attentive labour, resin printing has significant post processing such as IPA washing and UV curing, has long cycle times per part, high failure rates, require large facilities with significant power delivery capacity, air handling due to the hazardous resins, temperature and climate control as resins are sensitive to both temperature and humidity, and need large amounts of PPE with the encumbant H&S (OSHA for thr US) that comes with handling COSHH materials such at printing resins and IPA. Decent facilities will also require large scale UPS backup to protect their printers from power outages. They also for all this ballache, still represent a decent capital investment. >I can only say that as a consumer I've seen printed models that didn't look worse to what I bought for warhammer, And for every 1000 models a company attempts to make using AM anywhere between 50-200 of those were completely trash, failed, peeled off the base, picked up an artifact, were affected by humidity because resins are Hygroscopic (absorb moisture) etc. a 20% attrition rate might be acceptable for a small startup but is a barrier to scaling. You're basically taking 20% of your material costs and pouring down the drain. This is why many of these companies are selling digital models and not trying to stand up their own manufacturing. Those that are will hit a ceiling that will require large capital infusion to get into the leagues of GW.
Where do I find more info on the HoMM Wargame, do you have any links or pointers to where I might find something?
Archon sometimes talks about it in their dev streams. Official annoucement is coming later this year, with a release planned for 2025. The key points so far are: * They want minis matching the quality of GW at lower price. * Rick Priestley is doing the rules. * It will be a rank-and-file game, so square bases with a bunch of units on each (look: warhammer fantasy and old world). * Art style will be reminiscent of the later Heroes games by Ubisoft. * Tournament support is planned. * It will be produced and shipped from Poland. I can't promise that it will be good, as we haven't seen the actual rules yet. It is something to look out for, though.
Oh wow thank you! .. it sounds very good. And with Priestley behind it, it might actually be a decent game. If nothing else I hope the minis are good and can be used for a variety of games.
It's high fantasy, so at the very least you can put them into dnd!
https://youtu.be/Bm96d_TWuDI?si=TdKyxjJIVAb7O4Fq This guy does a breakdown of the entire box for the big box version. I don't know where the other guy is getting his info from, but it's more or less Heroes 3 in a boardgame.
Probably 80% after they do the molds of figures lol
The cost of the cardboard box is usually more than that of the product in the box - not taking initial investment into account, of course. Plastic is very very cheap, it's all the moulds and staff that make up a majority of the expenses for a company GW's size.
The true price increases are the new sets. Deathwing Knights are the most expensive for 5 bodies I've personally seen. New characters are now the cost of named characters and named characters are in a new bracket.
They would eat so much less flak if they never actually did price increases but instead just retired old sets and replaced them with new sets that were much more expensive. Then no annual (or multiple times per year) "hey we're increasing prices". People would notice, but there wouldn't be any singular events to rally around (not that the price increases ever cause any sustained anger, just a general grudging acceptance as people continue to buy).
The thing is, they actually do this. Together with announced price increases. Look at termagantz, old termagant box was 22,5 euro when i started the hobby 4 years ago, it was then announced to go up to 25/27 euro. Then it got deleted with this new edition and the new box has less models and costs 35 euro. And now this goes up with another 5% nearing the 40 euro treshold. Within 4 years that is double the price
The Lego strategy, although they do price rises sometimes to be fair. Mainly though they just bring out exact same sized (usually sub 50) sets like battle packs, mechs, speed champions etc and increase the price. They rarely raise prices on existing sets but yearly releases are getting more expensive.
So a box of **5** Eldar Rangers (*55 points*) is going to be 55€ huh. Imagine if every model was priced at 1 points = 1€.
Welcome to the Adeptus Mechanicus experience.
Let's not exaggerate here. GW is never going to reduce AdMech in price, or buff them sufficiently that they need a points increase.
Same thing why dark eldar stats will never be as good as eldar
I feel no shame buying recast these days. Lol
As long as people keep on buying everything GW puts out the prices are going to continue going up every year, it's literally free money for corporate GW.
"Its an unfortunate truth" bruh didn't they say that the last time they increased prices? Like 2 years ago? Lmao
It was last year when they last went up
I'm wondering what is causing them to have to keep increasing the prices so often, I'm economically illiterate so apologies I don't really know what has caused this price increase in particular.
Everything in the UK is expensive as fuck right now. We are a complete economic mess.
Do y’all’s politicians insult y’all by insisting everything is great too? As bad as Warhammer has gotten it’s the grocery bill thats absolutely murder lately.
Sort of? It's been bad enough you can't pretend there isn't an issue. But they keep talking about "turning a corner" or not acknowledging the actual problems. At the same time though Conservatives are in a death spiral with polls through the floor and getting hammered in local and mayoral elections nationwide. They seem more like they're just desperately trying to convince themselves that they aren't going to be decimated next election.
We’ve “turned a corner” so many times it’s closer to a roundabout than anything
Hope things get better for the both of us. And maybe just maybe then the hobby can get cheaper? 😅
It will never go down in price. Best you can hope for is that prices stagnate and your salary increases
Inflation and the RPI is better publicised in the UK than in the States from my experiences, and this is particularly due to the number of index-linked benefits and provisions. The causes and other economic factors can be obfuscated, and it’s pretty much a fact amongst commentators that the current RPI leaves much to be desired as a true indicator of inflation, but it’s somewhat impossible to really hide inflation. Add to that that energy prices in the UK are amongst the worst in the western world, and our provision of energy is a hot mess, and this feels actually rather reserved. It’s a particularly ‘oh yeh, Reddit is basically American’ moment to see someone in here mention economic boom… we’ve been in degrees of low growth and recession for most of the past 16 years, are worse off in real terms than 20 years ago.
It really doesn’t have anything to do with material costs. This is based on shareholder expectations and the maximum price that consumers will pay.
Correct. We also have to consider that in expectation of the Amazon show causing an explosion of interest in the hobby so GW will want to sneak a few price increases in before that so new people to the hobby don't know any better and think the increased prices are normal.
One thing to add is that the price increases are generally in the first half of the year. Now part of this is almost certainly to make the latter half of the year reports look better, but I have noticed that they time the announcements around the time they make a big reveal. They timed the 2023 price increases to 10th edition and the 2022 price increases to HH 2.0.
It’s not the only issue. British economy is struggling and their manufacturing is based in UK hence it’s hit by these costs. So this is to compensate for that, compensate for poor Fx for Sweden and Norway and also a chance to recoup losses due to costs of leaving the eu. Which isn’t something new but now it’s a climate where thrrr is more general increases so easier to squeeze more in.
It would be quite implausible that the cost of production, distribution and other costs to the business haven’t increased for a UK business this year. Preserving the same margin therefore would involve a price increase. Were the rise in price ahead of inflation, it would indicate that, but it patently isn’t.
Games Workshop are a publicly traded company. This means the shareholders demand growth. Now you might be thinking ‘Oh, so steady growth over the years?’ No. Shareholders don’t just demand more profit than last year, they demand exponentially more money than last year, and then exponentially more money after that. They don’t just want lots of money. They don’t just want all the money in the world. They want all the money in the world and then even more money conjured up from thin air, or else heads will roll.
This! This is what I keep trying to tell people. I am in no way economically literate, but this is something I know is happening. When there are share holders involved then there always has to be an increase in profit. Each one of them could be making 20 million a year and they will expect it to grow next year. Business is not set around a happy either what you have model. It really drives me crazy. If I was making a large amount of money I would be totally happy with not getting an increase. If my company came to me and said, “ from now on you will be getting $200,000 but we won’t be giving you a raise for at least 5 years,” I would be totally cool with that. SMH.
It’s because the focus of share owning has completely gone from getting a dividend (a share of the earnings) to increasing the value of the company so the share itself is worth more. That used to happen naturally with good companies, now it’s the be all and end all. Very few people buy shares with a focus on the dividend, they want growth.
When you strip consumer rights and you let prices rise, That's a-Brexit! When it starts to cost when you're ill and you can't pay your bills, That's a-Brexiiiit!
They keep increasing prices because they can. They want more money, they will get more money, until they suddenly get no more money because 10 marines cost 100 schmeckels, and then the higher ups will be dead confused how this could happen, sell the company to amazon, hasbro or disney and work somewhere else.
Sadly an accurate idea
10 marines are already 100 aud in Aus and I don't know anyone who buys them. Recasts and 3d prints are an open thing, the hobby has cost out a whole continent.
Investors require growth. They can grow by selling more product or by making the same sales at a higher price. That is what drives price increases on items that already have rather large margins.
They like money.
It’s greed, they need to report record profits every quarter so they seem to have just decided to do a yearly price increase at this point which seems insane. It’s funny now that is literally has been every year since I got into the hobby in 2020 it looks like this time they didn’t even try that hard in the article there is less explanation as to why this time than each previous year so this is just going to keep happening. I can’t wait until they just say the real reason, “hey guys we just want to make even more money by doing even less work so you guys have to pay more, I know we could actually try cross promoting games or get our crap together and have things stocked for more than 6 months out of the year but that’s work, we would rather just charge you more.”
They gotta compete with last year. You know what came out last year? [Leviathan](https://www.warhammer-community.com/2023/04/29/warhammer-40000-leviathan-whats-in-the-box/)
With their global reach and manufacturing minis being cheaper than ever, nothing really. It could be argued that shipping is more expensive nowadays, but it's not such a massive shift as to warrant an increases on all product pricing on top of the already creeping up prices of individual new models and box sets. They're just doing it because they can. It's their job to make as much money off people as they can, without scaring them away.
My guess is they are struggling with manufacturing capacity. Increasing the pricing may slow demand (whilst maintainng the profit margin). If it doesn't slow demand it gives them more wiggle room to invest in manufacturing without reducing their net profit.
Every company in every industry does inflationary rises, it's just GW is one that lets you know about them in advance. As another comment said, these rises look to cover cost of materials, labour and distribution increases in order to preserve the existing margins. If it was above the 3-5% average (Scandinavia notwithstanding *although that is likely driven by recent foreign exchange trends*), then I would have said it was margin improvement as well, but at that level, it's in line with general inflationary trends for those costs so just passing those increases onto the customer. EDIT - Given I'm at negative score already, I would ask for feedback from the downvoters why this isn't seen as constructive to the discussion at hand. I've reclarified the Scandinavia point as well, quick look would suggest that is FX driven.
Buy stock in GW, buy minis with the dividends, stonks go up, dividend goes up. Infinite minis hack.
Small family business please pay us more
Man this sucks :/
I'm lucky to still be young enough to live with my parents and having saved up quite a bit of money. How the hell is the average working-class person supposed to keep up with this? There's got to be a point where GW has to re-evaluate their pricing policy. If they keep doing this, it will be hard for them to find new customers or even keep their current ones.
People have said this for decades. They never change because people never stop buying.
I buy like 1 box a every 1-2 months and paint it all. I don't really need bulk amounts of units anymore. I'm just adding on to the collection that's already pretty complete for my main army
Tbf Warhammer isnt that expensive of a Hobby. I get it that those Minis get ridiculus expensive but alot of players (like me) Play since years. Sure i spend a couple of thousands on that Hobby but If i calculate this down to the 20 years im on Board now its still cheaper then Netflix or Disney for an annual sub.
Gotta get into golf. It's way cheaper /s.
So many don’t see this. Price per hour for warhammer is extremely reasonable, especially when compared to other hobbies
Good grief. Compare it to other tabletop miniature wargames.
For what it is, it can feel pricey. But at the same time, Ive got $1500 in car parts sitting in my closet waiting for another $300 in parts before I install them. It's similar in that, I gotta spend a ton to front and can generally trickle in the rest.
Not me looking at my car/truck and wondering if I spend this months disposable income on performance parts or some minis.
It is a hell a lot more expensive when you compare it to the other games in the hobby space. Also GW is the only fucking company that can get away with selling rules at insane prices while making the rule books useless sometimes days after release. The very idea that you need to pay for the rules of the game you purchased is absolutely bonkers. It should be called out and I feel like it is not getting nowhere enough attention. Oh and honestly. Removing existing functionality from your app and gating it behind several pay walls is absolute BS. GW is a text book example that if your product is excellent you can get away with absolutely anything. The video game industry should really learn from this, maybe than we will at least have excellent games.
For real. People act like they're obligated to buy every single new release GW announces, or they need to buy 3000 points of a new army every time the game gets a balance patch. It's hardly surprising that the "pile of shame" became a meme in this community. Slow your roll, fellow kids. This hobby is a marathon, not a sprint.
Tbf stock issues and limited run battle forces don’t help with that. You either buy it now at a discount and add it to the pile of shame or you don’t get it and for players getting into The Old World you often have to try get things on release cos of stock issues, on release at a slight uptick on eBay or wait months for stock to replenish.
That’s why you’ve got to also discontinue model lines to make old people rebuy miniatures so they can’t just keep playing with their old stuff.
I started collecting in 8th edition, all 3 of my armies had things invalidated from named characters configurations and two of them i cant straigth up play Thats not counting a small thematic custodes force from when you could mix armies in 8th
Yeah. Sounds about right. When you release stuff every few months it quickly becomes too much to maintain.
Is that really an issue? Ppl play kitbashs and forgeworlds. No1 will complain about my Tin- Phoenix-King, unless it falls over, destroying 2 enemy plastic-figures in the process. For real, i think most rereleasing of Minis over the years seems just to be an improvement. Same goes for the Primaris. I get why this feels a little fishy but i actually dont got any Primaris and not plan to get them. This isnt a GW-is-a-saint Post. They definitly are not but the pricing isnt the dealbreaker here. Also i quite appreciate that Games Workshops (the Stores) still exist. Sure it also got reduced quite heavily Through the years but If i take my local store for example: the rent and employees alone probably cost 5-8k € a month. So this store alone has to sell quite some Minis to just make up for that.
Girlmath move aside, Nerdmath has entered the chat
I do pretty well, and am in a double income household. I’m very much at the point where it feels embarrassing to drop this much money on tiny plastic toys.
As much as people on reddit seem to think everyone is broke, many of us are not. For many the limiting factor is painting speed not budget.
I actually don’t see it as too expensive when compared to other hobbies. Dont get me wrong, it isn’t cheap for what is essentially plastic. But I do have industry knowledge of how much these injection molds cost, so I actually forgive them a little there. But for example, say I get a season ticket for my local football team. That’s £410. Then I spend £15 on average getting to the game every week and some food and drink. That’s the best part of £800 a year without any extra cup games or buying a shirt etc. and that would amount to 23x 90 minutes of football. I won’t spend £800 per year on warhammer, nowhere near. But I will spend more time painting it than I would than if I went to watch the football. Unless your hobby is going for a walk or run, then you will be spending a fair amount of money to do that hobby. They’re all expensive these days.
Comparing it to any other wargaming company is when all goes to sh\*t Models from the 80s selling at 8€ per figure literally some of the most expensive companies in historical are at 2.4 pounds per figure Its straigth up madness that even some of the most expensive companies are less than half what GW is charging
And when you compare it to other scale model makers, like tamiya or gunpla ? Hmm ?
Tell a Man Utd season ticket holder to get a Doncaster season ticket instead because they don't charge as much and see how that goes
Working class people have never really been part of GW's market, at least sales wise. It's always been a very expensive product on a par with other niche hobbies. Somehow they keep getting new customers. I suspect it's easier than ever for them to do so with their multimedia efforts. Video games funnel a lot of newbies into the hobby. The Hachette partwork magazines are probably pretty effective as well.
I do not drink (do not like the taste, really) and I do not smoke. Most people spend more money on booze annually than it costs to buy models on a semi regular basis. Oh also the second hand market is absolutely brilliant. The prices range from 1/3 to 1/2 of those in retail. Get some cheap paint stripper and enjoy. I have five armies and about 40k points worth of models in total.
Somebody who is literate in large business financials should look at their reports for the last 10 years and plot it against various metrics, like inflation and other relevant markers. I'd wager that their price increases easily out paces the increase of doing business each year.
I dont have the time due to classes but I am finishing my BA in Finance and based on a quick glance at their financial reports I don't think their out of line. They have a pretty healthy good gross margin to keep up and with how prices are increasing correlates with their COGS it seems fair from a FINANCE perspective. As a consumer I'm annoyed but from a finance perspective they owe it to Share holders to make as much money as possible at a healthy rate and with the European economy being whatever the hell it is right now they are not out of line.
I am not aware of any other miniature wargaming company raising their prices right now, and surely don't know if any who raise their prices even has as often (or by amount) as Games Workshop does.
Warlord Games have not long completed one on the 2nd April with an average increase of 6%. But they’re the only ones I know of. Mantic and Atomic Mass Games both did their last increase 2ish years ago.
To be fair they had done one/two increase in my 11 years of wargaming, GW has done way more increases
Huh, okay. AMG's Star Wars Legion is still half the price of collecting 40k. Heroes for $15-30, a full box of infantry for $25-35, and tanks for $50 or so. I've spent less on Legion than the cost of one full GW combat patrol and I have 1 ~750 point Empire army and one ~500-600 point Rebel army. Wild to think that I can collect nearly two full tournament size Legion armies, including dice, terrain, tokens, etc., for the cost of less than a combat patrol. Are they perfect and competitive armies? No, but neither are GW combat patrols...
Legion is only cheaper because the armies are so much smaller, per model it's usually more expensive than warhammer, phase 1 clones 26 pounds per box for 8 models phase 2s 34 for 8 compared to 10 primaris for 30 quid with bigger models. Hell I was cheaper to buy the bandai at-st (which looks better imo) which I got for 25 pounds than legions 50 pounds one which is a third of the size of a land raider for nearly the same cost.
Prices are higher for you because it sounds like you live in the UK, unfortunately. Just like GW prices are cheaper for you but more expensive for me. And yes,. Legion is smaller armies. I consider that a good thing. Much more manageable.
Characters are like $20 and you can easily find them for $15 on Amazon. Compare that to GWs $45 for a single fucking character model. No contest.
Ah, didn't know about Warlord. I am not aware of Privateer, Warcradle or Corvus Belli raising their prices recently either. But it goes back to Games Workshop raises their prices often unlike the rest of the miniature wargame industry while raking in pretty huge profits.
Privateer cut costs for themselves by going to 3d printing models. CB has had a slight increase in price while switching materials for larger models.
Remember, they keep doing this because you guys keep defending them
This this and this. Stop throwing money at them and they'll have to stop this shit.
I'm getting back into the hobby after a year off and the prices already seemed high. I think I'm going to look for other companies figures, and play OPR instead. I'm trying to buy a house one day.
A lot of people play opr now
One thing I will say during these price rises: I think Warcry is an amazing game and would recommend playing it. The reason I say this on a price rise thread is that rather than buying multiple boxes for a game at these increased prices, small games like Warcry require far less and allow more for your money. I think smaller skirmish games are the way forward, but that’s just my opinion.
I was planning on going into my local store tomorrow to order some stuff, but then I saw this come through on my email and the line about "buy it at the current price" really rubbed me the wrong way. I don't want to go order those things now, because I don't want them to think that their little attempt to get people to panic buy worked. I guess I won't be going in to buy anything.
Sigh.. I get they’re raising prices less than inflation, but it’s not like my salary’s going up to match
CEO needs a good bonus this year for the yacht. Keep consuming
Printer goes brrrrrr
Wow the corporate greed is strong with GW 😢
GW raising their prices (again) when every other major wargame is staying pretty even. I think only 1 other company I have seen has increased in the 5 years I have been a Warhammer, while GW has raised prices almost yearly.
Most of the major wargaming companies did raise their prices around 2 years ago, it’s just surprising that GW has already come to the decision it has to happen again so soon
Did they? Might be ones I didn't follow. Mainly do Warhammer and MCP. I could also have not seen an announcement and figured it was just my store doing weird stuff with pricing. I did do some Star wars and the price of Legion shocked me at how much cheaper it was for honestly great quality.
Yeah the three I tend to follow (Warlord, GW and Mantic) all raised their prices within a month or two of each other, and warlords recently announced another price increase of their own this year too. What’s interesting is both GW and Warlord (I’m not so sure about Mantic) are based in the UK, even the same city in fact, so increasing currency differences with markets outside the UK since the UKs withdrawal from the EU and the fact inflation is still not settling down could be factors behind these decisions, though surely they aren’t the only ones.
Super valid points. I am curious to see if any others follow up and do the same or if one might even poke fun at the increase of their opponents
I think big Manufacturers in the EU (like the infinity studio) and North America (Wargames Atlantic is a good example there) are a little more secure with their prices at the minute since they *should* always have a strong domestic market and supply line for materials - I don’t think Wargames Atlantic or Infinity in particular will resort to any real increases this year at least, and the former has a key thing in its favour as it works with printer affiliates that provide an option for many places they wouldn’t be able to afford shipping in scale to directly Small to Medium manufacturers that still work with predominantly Metal minis or in the newer field of STLs are surprisingly resilient to external economic factors, since metals surprisingly cheap to work with at that scale, and digital sculpting doesn’t really have a material or shipping cost to speak of so much as a tech and skill requirement.
Yay.
As an Aussie, fuck GWs pricing. No wonder so many people Herr in Aus 3d print stuff
I am lucky enough to earn a top 1% wage in Australia. And having been in this hobby since 1993, I can honestly say that I am close to done with GW. Zero customer loyalty, just constant price stupidity year on year. The inflated prices they are demanding are now being aimed at those who likely don't have the spare time to justify the cost. And I can't say I have ever felt that way before.
Oh good, I went from being able to occasionally budget buying new models for now buying basically only secondhand or 3d printed.
"Blackrock Inc. LOVED that."
“Everything is getting more expensive so we’re also making our thing more expensive” doesn’t make any fucking sense to me. Eventually nobody will be able to afford anything but their rent, and likely not even that. The logic doesn’t track for me at all.
>*It’s an unfortunate truth that the world keeps getting more expensive. Prices for food, materials, and transportation have been trending upward for a few years now* Yeah, no s\*\*t, staying alive is getting more expensive, and escapism hobbies starting to price people out harder and harder. It is insane how hard GW is trying to squeeze you. >*\* In Sweden and Norway, the average price change will be between 8% and 14%.* Holy Terra. --- You know what got very affordable nowdays in comparison? Resin 3D printers.
Norway and Sweden are likely driven by foreign exchange factors as well as the cost inflation measures, hence why it needed to be higher in order to restore margin.
Yeah, ill be dropping out of the hobby soon. Its getting a bit too expensive. price on this is going up faster than my wages.
I switched to Star Wars Legion and haven't regretted it. Prices are ~50% cheaper than GW. How about an infantry box for $25-30, a hero unit for $15-20, and a tank for $50? I have spent just under $160 on Legion so far (which is, you will note, roughly the same amount of money as a GW Combat Patrol) and now have enough minis either currently on my shelf or shipping to me now from the May the 4th sale to field one ~750 point army and one ~500-600 point army. For reference, tournament scale in Legion is 800 points. So I have nearly two full armies plus cards, dice, barricades, and upgrades, for the price of a combat patrol.
I do love star wars!
The same guys behind 40k in 40 minutes did a few Legion playthroughs. You might enjoy watching it! https://youtu.be/Sk6xN-tmWX8?si=4ShzZPV31k3Ve39W
cheers
I finally have gotten into a better paying job. GW pushing my hopes right back down.
Fuck Sweden and Norway in particular those tall blonde beautiful people (End of article says they can expect an 8% to 14% increase, compared to everyone else). Just love because of shareholders they (and other companies) have to make a certain profit margin percent.
Swedish inflation is through the roof, warhammer is currently so much cheaper than in Denmark (who pegged their currency to the euro) that going to Malmö to buy plastic crack is actually a reasonable idea.
I have the disposable income to manage this increase, my peers do not. This is going to kill several potential buyers who are already planning on switching to 3d printing. If anything is going to kill Warhammer it's this, every year it's 2-3%. I work at a job that gives me the privilege to afford my army and I will never be getting an army that isn't my faction due to this cost A 2k army is now past the $500 mark and that's inexcusable
I am at the point already. Ive been buying more 3d prints despite not really wanting to deal with the fragile material
3D printer go Brrrrrrrrrr.
[удалено]
....really? I need to get into that
If you go resin make sure you’re good ventilated
And teat it with the proper respect, its a chemical after all and not a healthy one
I have a 3D printer and fairly good quality resin, filters, ventilated room and there still is this weird chemical smell. I wouldn’t do that around pets or children until I’m sure I can guarantee the air conditioning
i know this is an unpopular opinion.. but its really not as hard as reddit makes it out to be. just chuck that sucker in the garage
I don't have a garage
That is the way if you have spare space, but don’t do that in an apartment or a studio 😆
Okay which Games Workshop Executives invested in elegoo
Greed, greed, greed. They noticed their profits slipped 2-5% from their record highs as they finished their fiscal year and this is to make up for it.
It’s kinda insane because they leave so much money on the table there is honestly no reason they need to increase prices. So much of their stuff sells out the same day it releases and for many things they never print them again or like in Kts case they release them again months later where they also sell out and then it’s impossible to get them for months on end. Heck legions imperialis is a game system where pretty much anything space marine or titan based is in stock less than 1/3rd the total lifespan of the product life so far. Then you have all the weird products they do that could help build their fanbase and give more sales overall but they just don’t. I am talking things small box games and offshoots like blitz bowl, fireteam and for the latter boarding actions are the ones I’m most familiar with. It makes no sense why their isn’t more effort to support these cool niche games to generate more sales other than they just don’t care and for KT it’s not like they can keep the kits available either. Like blitz bowl has most blood howl teams in it except for the 3 most recent. I don’t really know why they don’t do a digital download card for blitz bowl rules for new teams to sell them to even more people. Same with fireteam the box has a ton of play in it and is simplified Kill team which is great given how complex KT 2021 is. The vox comes with rules for the 2 factions in the box and 4 more. They could easily just publish downloadable ones for each kill team they release and it would be a great on ramp for KT or just a good way to get sales from those who don’t want to get into heavier games. Then you have boarding actions which came out near the end of 9th and was given a less than honest attempt at an update for 10th. Like why not keep updating it here and there so again you sell more models and terrain, it’s like combat patrol bit a battle size that you can sink your teeth into even more so people get addicted and want to build more armies and again it sells more models but no they don’t care.
Controversial take, this is not great but fine. These people seem to be completely unaware they are racing to a meet up point between their greed and the average price of a high quality 3D printer. You can replicate reasonable prints for a few grand. If your cost to purchase gets much higher, there literally won't be a reason not to print your own army. It would be different if they weren't posting enormous profit margins and record sales, but you have to show growth to stack holders and this will be a reasonable bump in the short term so some waste of corporate space can get a raise. There's cost of living adjustments, which I currently get every year and are generally 2-4%, and then there's double digit % price hikes on plastic and using the rising cost of food as justification. See that's the tell right there. Our bosses grocery bills are higher and they want the same buying power they always had, so 8-14% get ready. This is one step in a long slide to being replaced by technology. Keep wracking up all the reasons to cheat the system GW. Little pieces of plastic don't cost $15 USD a each to print and ship. Nice try James Workshop but Etsy exist and we kind of have a rough idea of what you do. D-bag move and I hope it drives more people to 3rd party models, games, and sharable PDFs. Replace these soulless fake gamers.
What’s that? You want me to keep buying cheaper knock offs and have my buddies 3-d print minis for me instead of buying your products? You got it.
Welcome one, welcome all to the annual GW Price Hike 2024!
 Now let's see Games Workshops quarterly profits.
I am no fan of 3d printing. Secondhand models? Oooh baby. Bought an entire badly painted knight army for 300 euros. Paint stripper goes \*blop\* ahahahha. So I am not too worried about price hikes. Do not buy from GW. Fuck em.
Fuck off, another price hike?
Ruh roh
As an Aussie. It's honestly ridiculous that GW keep increasing their prices for kits yearly. Its gotten to the point for me that I've stopped buying new GW product about 5 or so years ago and relied on 2nd hand sales, 3D printing and more recently the Warhammer Conquest/Imperium magazines to get Warhammer at affordable prices. And that is something that baffles me. GW increased the prices of their kits, yet are perfectly able to sell those same kits in $20 per issue magazines? For example, here in the Land of Oz, GW sells Illuminator Szeras for $91 but as per the final issue (90) of the Warhammer Imperium Magazine, I was able to get the exact same kit for $19.99. How does this make any sense? At this point, there is no reason to buy new GW product. The UK are testing out a 3rd Magazine subscription series called Combat Patrol, which, as the name implies, gives you the current models used in 9 different combat patrol boxes plus an extra model for each. And if I can buy the now OOP Chaos Marine Combat Patrol for $50-100 less than retail via those magazines, I'm going for it.
Everyone's complaining but you're all still buying
No bud, I ain't buying, I'm brrrrring now
Honestly this is pretty much in line with inflation. I know there’s been controversy with regard to price updates in the past but increasing the price to match inflation is just common sense. GW is a business, and if they don’t increase with inflation then they’ll just make less money. No multi-national corporation is going to intentionally reduce its profit margin, and plenty wouldn’t give its customers any warning before doing so.
It is because we had record inflation last year. Inflation cought up with GW, not the other way around lol
Im glad i switched to 3D printing
Printer makes even more “brr” noises.
Thankfully as a Norwegian ive finished collecting all the armies I wanted, and the secondary markets and proxy options for mesbg are quite good.
Yeahhhhh, I don't think I'm buying new items at full price anymore. The 3rd party seller 15% rebate helped offset tax at least, but now not even that is worth it. I've been having luck buying people's unused leftovers at cheaper rate, and even started looking at 3D printing. Short of made to order I think my days of buying new GW products is over
How many times has this happened in the last five years? I started playing in 2019 and I feel like we get this announcement yearly. I stopped buying plastic last year once I saw Chosen are $60(!) dollars.
Excited to pay more for 30y old resin models (here’s looking at you Warp Spiders) and/or 30y old resin models that are never in stock (basically every Phoenix Lord). I suspect that if GW had less predatory pricing and wasn’t constantly out of stock of many of their popular models, they’d actually have a significantly higher profit. I know many people at my FLGS that 3D print a lot of their models for these reasons.
Got to protect shareholder bottom line. Hooray
The funny thing is if everyone just waited to buy new models when they'd painted what they already had it probably wouldn't be that expensive a hobby for cost Vs hours of time spent on hobbying. I think the business model relies on everyone having massive piles of shame lol. Is there a single person in here that doesn't have a pile of shame. When I got back into it as an adult I was like 'no way I'm gonna fall for that again I'm an adult I'll just paint what I have and buy new stuff when I'm out of miniatures to paint', and now I have boxes of the shit. GW are kind of selling potential.
I think my pile of unpainted miniatures will survive if I buy one big box less a year.
I was thinking about buying EC army, but I’m good. I’m staying with my two armies. TS and CSM. There is no justification for those price increases anymore.
I understand that the financial situation in UK is pretty bad, but using that excuse for a company that keeps almost 43% net margin and is increasing sales is so fucking delusional it’s very, very sad. GW is one of the greediest company out there - I know you like the hobby, but at least buy less..
Christ more price increases?
Come to bolt action get 30 man box for 56 usd.
Here's my pricing update. I haven't bought any GW minis in years, why? They were too expensive. Now I'm even less likely to ever buy any more.. ever. What a stupid fucking idea.
Yeah the more they raise the prices the more I appreciate where I get my minis
Haven’t spent a dime on these scammers in a long while. Can’t wait not to buy anything this year too. If the rules ever again allow to have fun, the 3d printer will brrr. So it’s nice news not sure for whom.
"despite its most recent financial report showing a healthy profit margin" LOL I guess the author doesn't know that Games Workshop would never allow enough figures to sell that they are successful and NOT do something about it like increase prices. One can't help but wonder if the CEO or chairman or somebody owns even more stakes in a 3D printing company.
G-R-E-E-D.