GW Allocations on Beast Snagga Ork Box

[bubbles15Participant 2308xp 0]

I admit to being confused here:

1. That GW are doing this deliberately

2. That they don’t care

To address the first, the very idea is potty. They want to sell to as many people as possible. I have no idea on their allocation – 70/30 in favour of resellers? They look at the sale of Ork products over a period of time and must surely judge that figure as the number of potential sales.

However I suppose it’s a bit like Tesco running out of stuffing at Christmas: no matter how many they buy in, people will buy more. With a popular base box they didn’t anticipate that rather than 10,000 buyers they’d have 20,000 as folk re-start new armies and new players buy in the new stuff.

The second is just as silly. Workshop don’t want stock on the shelves unsold, but equally if they could sell more, they would. The moulds are made, the box designed, printing more is straightforward and cheap! They could happily print 50,000 boxes as the unit cost to them is very low. Reprints are expensive.

Nothing will be exclusive. That’s be even sillier. However as with anything, re-printing is more expensive.

Now, I was a ‘victim’ of this phenomena with the End Times books. I’ve got a softback of the Elven one. Bit annoyed at that but it isn’t malice, Workshop lost a sale.

[hobbyhubParticipant 4169xp 0]

Uggghh!

It’s 10:05 am on Sunday morning here in New Zealand, and we are still being subjected to the queueing system for the Warhammer Online store.

We didn’t have this with the Dominion box set launch I don’t think…But I am on the store more just now – our local club is running a 40K Crusade Campaign that I’m dream list building for in Excel, so I’m copy and pasting data from the store into the file.

When Dominion came out, the queue system was switched off after the first our or so, or there was no queue so I got to jump right to the store.

But these are first world problems and more an inconvenience more than anything else.

[horus500 11505xp 1]

@limburger from a business sense it’s no different to KS. Make enough product to ensure 100% sales. Make 90% of estimated demand to ensure you can charge 110% of expected cost and create a market expectation that whatever you produce, that it will fly off the shelves. Behavioural Economists have nerdgasms over this sort of stuff.

“GW’s new …. must be amazing, it totally sold-out world-wide. I better queue up on an internet site to buy the next thing or I’ll miss out!”

[hobbyhubParticipant 4169xp 0]

@horus500 – Don’t most KS only start full product until after the KS has finished and the quantities are know?   If they over produce since they want an inventory for later sales or to supply to FLGS, then that decision is totally down to them, but they can just make to order.

Hence the long delay from the KS to delivery, they have to produce the stuff.

GW doesn’t.

By the time GW formally puts the launch announcement in one of their Online Fests, the sprues have already been made, and presumably the other stuff as well.   They did an unboxing in the Dominion set when it was previewed.

GW doesn’t know how much they are going to sell of any of the launch or twin force sets (eg the up coming Thousand Suns and Grey Knights box).   They can use data and various calculation methods and their guts/intuition to come up with a number, but they would prefer to under produce the box rather than over produce it.

 

“Some guy on YouTube” – can’t remember who – suggested that GW use these launch boxes to rescope the cost of creating the new sprues in it.   I hadn’t thought of that before.  This would be another reason why they don’t want many copies going to FLGS as they would be selling at wholesale rather than retail.

[horus500 11505xp 2]

KS is GW on an unknown budget with a delay. KS’s plan is ‘never make more than you sell in advance of making it’. GW’s plan is ‘never make more than you are sure you could sell’. The difference is that GW has already planned and produced their product and you can wait 2+years for a KS.

When GW deals with FLGS they used to say you can buy a small amount at this amount at standard amounts (70%rrp) or a stupidly large amount at less than that. The problem is that that large amaount is often far more than we had in the bank. The risk was (and still is) the FLGS problem. When AoS 1st ed came out they were trying to force us to buy either less than 10 copies or more than 80. We couldn’t afford 80 an as it turned out almost didn’t sell the 10 (the intital rrp was to high and a year later GW nearly halved it). If we’d bought the 80 we would never have moved it, but that would have been our problem.

GW has very exact sales figures. The one thing they have perfected is their internal sales expectations. The only thing they sometimes get wrong is they underestimate how quickly things will sell out.

All the big box sets are ‘value for money’ when you compare them to squad boxes. Have a look at the ‘Start Collecting’ ranges and it’s really obvious.

[limburger 21691xp 0]

yep … ‘start collecting x’ is cheaper than buying the one big things in there. I did the math when doing Daughters of Khaine.
It was cheaper to buy the ‘start collecting’ set by a very wide margin. Their ‘shadow and pain’ box also was a good deal despite the fact that I didn’t need one half of the box. All of those probably still sell at a comfortable margin for GW.

GW really has perfected the art of shifting risk towards their 3rd party shops.
Again … this makes sense for them, but it really stinks for those shops who get stuck between a rock and a hard place.

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