Printable View
I just read this article about GW's recent financial performance and thought that it would be a good share with the community:
[url]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/07/26/questor-share-tip-buy-games-workshop-as-company-leverages-fantas/[/url]
They did highlight the core problem of pricing making the company's products less attractive to new customers, which is a serious issue, but if they just eventually turn around to pulling in more and more money from licensing, maybe they won't care that their core profit is shrinking and their revenues aren't improving. The big bump in royalties along with the recent hefty drop in stock price makes them a reasonable bet to hedge on if you want to get some return on investment. Worst case scenario, you lose a little bit of money, but it's cheap enough to grab some and see if the ride goes up. If it starts trending further down, you sell and don't lose much. If it goes up, even modestly, you've made profit. Likely trend is for it to stay about where it is, maybe with a small boost, but definitely worth keeping an eye prior to the release of next year's annual report, because if that disappoints, the stock price will not take it well.
So, pretty much usual stock stuff.
But yeah, the pricing is a big turn-off for a lot of people. Long-time loyal customers are usually well off enough to afford to absorb the price on a new unit here or there, and already have enough to play comfortably, so they often don't see the problem so well and think the pricing is fine or try to defend it using easily-deflected excuses. I look back at when I got into the hobby with my dad, and remember that we didn't have much money, but could afford to build GW armies, along with a bunch of other people, and that made the games an attractive hobby. With the current pricing scheme, we, and many other people, would had to skip out on GW games. The sad thing is, the company grew on that affordable pricing scheme into this big thing, and then the guys in charge decided it'd be a good idea to take a company built on being for everyone and try to make it super-niche because they thought that'd look good to investors or something. And, of course, it hasn't worked out well. No, the company isn't closing up its doors, but the revenue is at its lowest point since 2008, and has slid downward the last four years. That's not exactly a sign that your new brilliant direction is working, but they stubbornly insist on sticking with it. And that is an area of concern.
Still, they know how to "leverage" their IP by letting just about anyone do a PC, video, mobile, card, or board game for it, as long as that company is paying them money for little to no work or investment on their end, so that'll keep some profits rolling in, at least while the IP is attractive enough. It's still amusing that there's not a single Age of Sigmar game in that group, but plenty of games based on the world-that-was, yet we keep being told by trolls - er, I mean, "fans" that it was a boring setting that had nothing attractive about it and couldn't be used for interesting stories or anything like that. And yet, it's good enough to make money with other companies using it.
I love how you call 'fans' of the hobby trolls yet you're trolling yourself.
Then again I'm not surprised you're making these comments.
Way too early to expect any games based on AoS. The new setting just isn't established enough yet. If you're going to license something it's better to go with the more fleshed-out and well known setting. Unless AoS has truly bombed I expect we'll start seeing something eventually.Quote:
Originally Posted by Erik Setzer