Same for the Ork collection. I would assume they commit to a set allocation of units based on projected sales. Those units will be based around the plastic, instructions, decals but also box manufacture that needs to be slotted into a production schedule.
The issue here seems more related to getting those projections wrong, again. I would assume that once they sort out another production cycle they’ll be available once more. Some of these issues have been discussed on The Painting Phase.

The point is to make as much money as possible, as fast as possible. The technique of artificially creating buying panic started with car dealerships – BUY NOW ! SUCH A SALE WILL NEVER COME AGAIN !!! – and has, over the past 30 years or so expanded to pretty much all merchants.

The thing about it is that these originally false claims have, against the odds, become sort of true in some cases.

I have noticed that if I don’t buy article X NOW – now that I see it in a store or on a website –  it may very well be gone and no longer available in a few months, weeks, days. Then, I will have to hunt for it and pay astronomical ‘collector’s’ prices on sites like Fleabay. Even paperback books, which used to be dirt cheap just a couple of years ago now cost 10 times their original retail price, in some cases -and that’s used……

I’m not sure how a company would benefit from creating artificial scarcity of a product they had just released, but I’m sure the bean counters at Nomad Investments – the major shareholder of what used to be GW – know……

I personally feel a LOT of GW’s problems come from the fact they keep releasing “limited” edition box sets etc. If GW went back to just having a line item available in ONE box/blister (like they used to back in the 90s) then it would be easier for them to schedule production AND (perhaps more importantly) allow stockists to keep items in stock for their customers.

The fact GW do these fancy “pre-order” box sets where some new miniatures are ONLY available in that box set (although they may be released down the road a year later) causes no end of frustration with the customers/ Customers have to spend to buy a BIG box of minis to access probably about 1/3rd of the contents that they really want (annoying), AND then have to jump through hoops on release day fighting against the scalpers running “bot software” to snap up the limited availability within micro-seconds of it going live.

Customers need a Stalinist purge (well perhaps not literally) on GW marketing dept, as perhaps they have too many “bright” ideas for GW’s own good 🙁

If only there were pre-order platforms where you could take orders for a window of 30 days, then ship product to customer 1.5 years later. 😛

This sort of thing comes up regularly. It is a simple (although complicated) balance of production at a cost point to demand. If they get it wrong, they’re sat with old product that won’t shift. Get it wrong the other way and they sell out and lose sales. None of this is ideal, planned or desirable by Workshop.

Look at 9th edition – the Indomitus box. Websites crashed due to demand. They had to print more at a later date. The cost of doing that, with physical product is immense. Heck, in a bindery changing the plates of a book to a fresh ones is nearly an 8 hour downtime. With 24 books being churned out over 8 lanes every 12 seconds that’s a massive loss of cash as there’s no product to sell.

Therefore, please – please – stop complaining. No one is being spiteful or cruel. No  one is intentionally trying to scam you. It is an error of capacity planning.

Heck, imagine you’re on the other side: You make 1000 of a box that cost you £50 to make. You sell it for 100. Your orders go nuts and at the end of the day, 100 customer can’t buy your product. You’ve just lost £5000. Scale that up a thousand fold and the losses are almost painful.

That’s what you get when everything is run by computers…..