Warhammer End Times Khaine Sells Out Like Hot Elvish Cakes!
November 22, 2014 by brennon
Wow. We didn't see that one coming. It appears as if the webstore for Games Workshop has completely sold out of both the Limited Edition of Warhammer End Times: Khaine and the standard Hardback Edition! The only one left on the shelf is the Interactive Edition!
If you want to get your hands on these now then it looks like you're either going to have to plump for the digital version or wait for the soft covers that will inevitably be coming in the near future. It's quite a statement as to the popularity of the Warhammer End Times campaign that such a mass of people have dived bombed the webstore for it. Of course there may still be copies at Games Workshop stores so look out for them.
As well as the books there's also the additional Battle Magic End Times Spells that are available to buy which you'll no doubt be needing if you wish to run some of the campaigns that appear in the new book as Tyrion retrieves the sword and becomes quite the dangerous individual on the tabletop against the might of Malekith.
If you missed out first time Games Workshop have also put both Warhammer End Times: Nagash and Warhammer End Times: Glottkin back onto the webstore in softback form and I am seriously tempted by both mighty tomes. I have been really interested in the story but not willing to shell out a bucket load of cash for the books so I'm on the edge of buying these for the sake of my fluff love.
Will you be waiting on Khaine or picking up one of the older books?
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Sold out! (or are they). Couldn’t resist that one lol. Well done to GW. End Times has been a superb piece of marketing. Restrict access to supply with little to no warning of release, prices get artificially inflated on the secondary market, demand goes up for each new release from people scared they’ll miss out and/or wanting to turn a quick profit. Hoover up the rest a few weeks later with a softcover release (also released with little warning). None of this is a criticism, although I can say that as someone who doesn’t want the books. I might feel… Read more »
I do wonder about a strategy to grow a game where the majority are shut out… You need to already be pretty committed to get into this.
I’m not sure what the marketing effect of all this is yet (if any)
I don’t think the intention of End Times is to grow the WFB as much as it is to exploit the wallets of the existing base. If it isn’t then I take everything back and this is an incredibly counter-productive piece of marketing.
There is the chance this is just to reinvigorate the existing player base (prime your sales force so to speak) before a relaunch of some description.
There are many ways to skin a cat
This is almost certainly the pre-cursor to 9th ed. I’m this is when GW will take the opportunity to make changes and grow the game.
I hope so as well. If GW would start afresh with a modern rules set, I do believe they could start to turn around WFB.
Not on its own perhaps, but accompanied with new plastic kits to outdated minis (e.g HE spearmen, Marauders) and the kathartic fluff reboot that is the End Times, the game will hopefully expand once more.
The whole thing makes me want to get more into Mantic.
The background for WFB is based entirely upon huge special characters and giant epic story arcs. By contrast the armies are often skirmish sized.
Meanwhile the figures increasingly look like some kind of deeply artificial videogame.
There are already copies on ebay for £100 a go.
The standard one was gone in about 10 minutes on the UK store. Just to remind everyone, this is for rules to play the game.
My local store only received 4 copies of Glottkin so unless I want to rush to the store to buy one, I’ve got to order online to get the latest books. I was sat updating the website and when it did I immediately ordered Kaine. By the time I’d finished it was sold out. Between the website update and it selling out there was 5 minutes. I timed it.
Also, correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t the softback’s just as expensive as the hardbacks were?
Nagas is £40 and Glottkin is £35 in softcover.
Isn’t that the hardback prices as well? Or were they £45 and £40?
The Glottkin book was £40 in hardcover. I don’t recall the price of the Nagash book but presumably it was slightly higher as well.
Unfortunately at the time of posting this the softcovers are only available in the UK. Hope they make it to the US and every where else soon.
omg overrated stone age game mechanics batman .. is this limited edition freak show getting out of hand yet?
Um… thinking… thinking… YES!!!!1 Way out of hand.
I love this sort of drastic fluff change. It gives WFB a bit of GoT feel – who lives, who dies, who ends up a horribly mutilated slave to a sadistic master from your worst nightmares?
What’s the page count on these books?
I was just wondering about the cost:page ratio, being as I recently pre-ordered one set of rulebooks and Kickstarted another set of rulebooks; is there any correlation whatsoever?
Obviously the GW ones will cost more because of the special, rare paper and the expensive, high-quality inks.
There’s two separate books that you get with the Khaine End Times book. One is a 144 fluff book, and the other is a 48 page rulebook, for a total of 192 pages. If we’re taking page count as an indicator of value, then whilst 192 pages for for £40 isn’t great, it stands up well to the army books. The page count can be a red herring, especially when it comes to rules. IIRC Richard Clarke (of Too Fat Lardies) spent a year designing Chain of Command. So even though it’s a 104 page softcover book, the cost has… Read more »
Also, because the per unit printing cost of the books is so low, GW don’t save much money by selling them in digital format. So whilst the prices of them can seem unreasonably high, they are in line with the margins on the printed books.
I now know who to turn to when I start my printing mafia. My heads still spinning from what you said 😛
The downside of books is that you only need to buy them once. This is why the rpg industry generates much lower revenue than other kinds of tabletop games
One thing we don’t often hear about is what proportion of the fluff is recycled from previous editions.
If you have been playing as long as myself (and you have probably experienced this also) some army books are merely a copy of a copy of a copy, making them so dull you cannot read them.
I assume the end of times will have some new stuff, but you know, it will basically be a rehash of Storm of Chaos with slightly different special characters. The fluff nowadays is almost entirely a description of how epic the most expensive kits can be.
So basically GW has turned these regular releases into limited edition releases with low prints.
Sort of. They release softcover versions at a reduced price a month or two later to hoover the people who missed out/have a lower personal price point. It is a marked departure from their usual way of doing things. We might never see the trad army book release format again for WFB.
Except (up until now) it was not clear softback versions would be coming out. Therefore some people who would have only bought the softback version will have bought the hardback thinking it was their only option. Also buying the softback involves waiting a couple of months. This approach probably increases GW’s income but I’d class it as “screw the customer over” marketing.
The softcover books have been open secret for a little while now. Even then, we do now know they release a softcover version later so we can say the books in general aren’t limited, only the hardcovers. I’ve given some thoughts further up the page on the marketing approach GW are taking here, which is designed to generate maximum demand on day of release.
I am afraid that they might do same thing with army books and codexes.
The softback versions of “Nagash” and “Glottkin” don’t appear to be available on the US webstore. I wonder why. Hopefully they’ll be there soon.
Isn’t it at all possible they’re looking at their numbers and seeing that most people buy the interactive, digital version? Hence limited printed release (maybe they’ve got the numbers right as Warhammer isn’t very popular, and these are non-essential books which you don’t need to play the game).
It’d be interesting to know what percentage of sales on a given book are now digital, and what the trend is, but I don’t think that accounts for what’s happening here. I’m sure GW do monitor sales and project what they’re likely to sell of a given book (and edition of a given book) and they print accordingly. Given how quickly the End Times books sell out, and how much they go for on the secondary market immediately afterwards, it does seem that GW are deliberately making the supply less than the demand.
Yeah that may well be the truth, though I feel it’s more stupidity then anything else – I’d side more on the idea that they simply assumed it wouldn’t sell that many copies due to Warhammer’s slack of popularity, rather than attempting to create artificial exclusivity etc.
I mean what possible reason do they have for limiting bloody cards eh?
If that was the case why would they release softcover versions of the books a few weeks later instead of just doing a second printing of the hardcover? They’re definitely limiting the number of hardcovers and as they don’t release the softcover at the same time they’re also wanting the books to sell out quickly.
Got the first book, hard back, no problem. Got the second in hard back, but was lucky. Have spoken to the guys in my local shop and, as I’m not around on release date, no way of getting the third in HB.
May be I should sell my hard back copies at a high price and buy the soft backs.
I can see that, from a marketing perspective, GW would want to generate some hype around the End Times but as a company how much money must they be losing (certainly in the short term) by limiting the release to so few copies and leaving so many without access to the new product.
Also seems to have started effecting 40k as Shield of Baal: Leviathan seems to have gone the same way too.
Did they not do some limited run release of a (I think) Space Wolves and Orks set earlier in the year?
I was told that they had underestimated the take up, so are rushing to get the soft backs out.
The amount of hard backs printed was already predetermined, at least for the first 3 HB sets.
Not concerned enough to release the Khaine softcover at the same time as hardcover. Presumably they would both be on the same slow boat from China.
Pretty easy to say its sold out when you only send 1 copy to the two stores I spoke to.