GW Once Again Taking a Giant Dump on Retailers

[bubbles15Participant 2308xp 2]

limburger, you’re showing a complete lack of understanding of supply and demand. I appreciate it isn’t commonly understood, but economics – supply and demand – controls prices. It’s as simple as that. Higher price, lower demand. Price completely off the planet? No sales, no demand.

I get that people think companies are all evil – because it’s easy – and out to fleece the customer – again, it’s easy – but it simply isn’t true. They want to make money, yes but that can only be done by selling products. Who else ducked out of buying codices when they went from £10 to £25 for the exact same reprinted book?

Workshop are not evil, not greedy. They produce product – expensive product but then.. so do Hot Toys and Three Zero. It’s a question of value returned. Don’t want to pay the price? Don’t buy it. If only we had the same choice about government we’d be on to a winner.

[soulman 2945xp 2]

GW got you by the balls now… pre-orders all the way baby…

Christ… if your not online for 30  minutes your out of luck…..

My thought…keeping it clean….. is

 

What about parents and families wanting to get there kids into GW.. priced out of the gaming range if you have to pay bills and eat food… and image telling somebody the following…

 

Yes you can buy products online… you have to get in line and even then you have under a hour to beat the rest of the world to the game you want…!!!. No you cannot buy it ever again….

Great business model for the rich fat cats….

[solarParticipant 2781xp 0]

The highest priced one that has sold on ebay went for £299 + £10 postage.

 

GW really are a bunch of dicks aren’t they. On the positive side this does make it a lot easier to not care about giving them any money in future.

[soulman 2945xp 0]

I will not even talk about the Kill team “space nazi” box set… wait until the woke left find out about that one…!

[elessar2590 18207xp 3]

Supply and demand is all well and good normally but GW is a monopoly that acts like one. They have arbitrary and discriminatory prices all over the world and if you’re a retailer outside that zone you cannot sell to people inside that zone. There is no supply and demand here, GW will always sell out of the box set it just looks fantastic on their financial returns if they do it really quickly.

I’m not trash companies, but when you’re a mega, global monopoly that raises prices during a pandemic and designates parts of the world as no go zones for retailers so you can massively overcharge them you do get the reputation of being a giant dick of a company.

For the record I don’t give them my money, I have enough hobby from other companies, this whole thing was about my largest national retailer getting screwed so GW could use them as free advertising and throw them under the bus to get all the money for themselves.

[horus500 11505xp 4]

Just on supply/demand it’s a theory that John Maynard Keynes came up with about 100 years ago. It’s not an absolute and for the last 50 years people have been creating extreme exceptions. Look up ‘Voodoo economics’. It’s why economics isn’t regarded as a hard science, because humans don’t act rationally all the time. We now have an entire school of economics called Behavioural Economics dedicated to working out “Why the fu(k did they do that?”

@bubbles15 GW does not subscribe to your logical thinking. As a FLGS I regularly would have bought more product from them of various items, not just new releases, and GW would say ‘No’. Why? ‘because….. we don’t want to’. They do not act they way you think they do.

[darkvoivod 7112xp 1]

@soulman, yeah I know what you mean about pricing families out of the hobby. Both my boys show an interest in mini’s and are approaching the age at which they might consider starting their own collection.
I want them to make their own decisions in this as in most things, but I dread them levitating towards GW.
The ammount of money they’d need to spend on an army just isn’t viable for those kids, but GW is still the most available games out there. I’m just hoping they, knowing through me what else is available, will pick up someting like Marvel CP or even Star Wars legion. Both expensive, sure, but you don’t need so much for a standard game.

If you look into GW practices they’ve been hostile to FLGS and even longtime fans for years. There’s plenty of sources out there confirming that. I still love the fluff and models, but I’ve really grown to hate the company.

[dazlambParticipant 1219xp 1]

Yes it’s been going on a long time 20 years ago when I used spend some of my time hanging around hobby shops, places didn’t want to deal with GW having had bad experiences.    I play Kings of War mostly now and the main reason I avoid GW is not the price or even the dodgily created scarcity but the rules.   Having recently played some ‘new’ blood bowl it has reminded be to be wary of GW and that I don’t miss having to deal with GW being in charge of the rules.   With GW price’s being high and past experience of rules even if I think something looks cool I will wait but I can see the apeal.   If there is  a general feeling about with non gaming parents that GW is expensive, overpriced and not  a good thing for there kids to get into it might have an effect or maybe they are after the whales 😀    But GW are getting more young first time gamers for AoS than Mantic is for KoW who’s player base seems to be older gamers who have played multiple systems before, so I guess they are doing something right.

[panzerkaput 33938xp 5]

Surely the answer is simply dont buy GW stuff until they start treating you with respect and give a fair allocation.

 

[darkvoivod 7112xp 4]

I’ve been trying that for years. Any minute now…..

Unfortunatly I feel like FLGS will also shoot themselves in the foot if they do not sell GW at all. Their market share is huge and they know it. And there’s a constant influx of new people, no matter how many they disenfranchise.
It was a revelation to me when I starter discovering other games, better rules (Oh man they rules are bad), better models (well, more diverse. the models are often still very good) , better treatmant of costumers and more affordable.

[sundancer 42908xp 1]

Unfortunatly I feel like FLGS will also shoot themselves in the foot if they do not sell GW at all.

Yes, but no. When a FLGS decides not to sell G’Wullu it opens itself up to everything else. And in a small town like mine that has a G’Wullu shrine being an alternative can be profitable.

[limburger 21676xp 3]

@bubbles15 supply and demand assumes there is an actual viable choice.
I can’t buy a product that isn’t produced.

No matter how much I wave money around.

GW doesn’t intend to produce to satisfy demand, unless they are absolutely certain that they are in control of how much product gets sold.

And I can not buy an alternative to GW products and still play their games.

they are for all intents and purposes a de facto monopoly and they behave like one.
Products like this box are not meant to satisfy demand.
They are meant to generate hype … and boy does it work, because we’re talking about it despite not having access to the product.

 

 

[thehumungus 2903xp 2]

Thats why I love companies like WARLORD GAMES. Better rules and they have product for their players. I do love the new orks but come on GW.

[tankkommanderParticipant 6411xp 1]

GW don’t care about scalpers. Whilst they might miss out on some money now, by creating (the perception of?) artificial scarcity GW can keep their prices high. The fact that people will pay stupid scapler prices just reinforces this. As I said before, GW has no incentive to change. There is no point in complaining, you either have to suck it up or move on and buy other stuff.

Fortunately there is plenty of good quality alternatives if people want to seek them out and take the time to build a community around those games instead.

[bubbles15Participant 2308xp 1]

@horus500 – unless an item is expected to be persistent then it will, by default be finite.

It costs money to make these things, so unless the expectation is that more will be sold than they make, then why make more? Saying that a shop would buy 1000 of an item doesn’t make sense. Shops don’t work like that. They have to meet demand, not hope.

@tankkommander – why should Workshop care about scalpers? You hit the nail on the head with ‘the fact people will pay.’ and we’re back to markets and supply and demand fixing price. Take petrol and energy. In the UK, both are heavily taxed, but we need them, so the tax continues to rise. However, as the price rises, less is sold – which is the intent. The market finds an equilibrium.

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