The Great GW Pricing Poll

[miteyheroes]

I don't mind the fliers, Riptides, Warhammer Monsters etc being in the £40-£50 range.

But basic infantry shouldn't be so pricey. I can get 40 Gripping Beast Vikings or 40 Warlord Games Celts or 40 Perry Minitatures War of the Roses for £20; that's a brilliant price. 20 Empire Freecompany for £20 is a good price - it's more than the historicals, but I like GW and they do come with lots of options. 10 Dark Elves for £20 is not a good price. 10 Witch Elves for £35 is just madness.

So yeah. They need to cut prices for infantry by around 50%.

(And stop the hardback codices - they're too pricey, they stopped me buying despite the fact that I have every codex since halfway through 2nd ed.)

[The_Gonk]

The bizarre thing, I think, is the massive variance in price. As has been touched on: Why is there such a price disparity in some items which, from a humble punters view, you would think would be the same.

I voted 10% too high. Some of the stuff appears massively over priced and some feels like good value - the Freecompany box is awesome and so are some of the battalion boxes.

I really am torn on the hardback books - I like the fluff and the quality in my experience has been very good. I do think it'd be nice if they sold a cheapy version with just the rules though as I don't like transporting hardback books around.

[rickyard]

Thoughout this thread is full of complaints about how much the models cost, which as a consumers is a fair enough complaint. But, I think the majority of us have a fixed budget that we can afford to spend on wargames, so if the price drops, it doesn't actually help the profits of the company, infact, it costs them more, or eats into their margins further.

For instance, lets assume that GW make 50% profit, i.e for every £1 you spend they get 50p pure profit, now if I spend each month £50 with GW they make £25 profit from me.
If they slash 25% from their prices, the fixed costs remain stationary (or on the rise owing to externalities) but now they only make 25p. So for my same £50 I spend their profit is then drops further to £12.50.

The only way by cutting prices they can get back to the pre-cut prices is for me to double my spend with them, spending £100 per month. Now, unless I am a GW employee they have no way to enact that.

The other option is to increase their customer base, so instead of one of me spending £50, there are two of me, so they would then need to double their customer base, which is really hard. PWC previously did an independent research and observed that 95p in every £1 spent in the sector was spent with GW, so they can't really expand that much, not unless they convert people from outside the traditional sector.

Now, this increasing number of gamers, must be a good thing in my opinion, but it is a very risky business model, and we all know that GW is quite quite risk adverse.

This doesn't work this way: I may not but one mini for 20$ but perhaps I may buy three of them if it costed 15$... that would be 30$ more, so better tan NOTHING.

It is not only a matter of "I got my fixed Budget", it is also the "how much do I OBTAIN for this Budget??" If my Budget allows me to have ONLY one mini every two months... I quit.

AND consider that the budget for the hobby in a lot of cases really means "a budget for games and entertainment products" So if my budget allows me to have a new tabletop game or a New X-wing core game, I'm not buying a single Land Raider.

[rickyard]

So... GW should just start giving away minis for free? You do understand that it physically costs roughly the same to produce a single plastic mini of a given size regardless of how many points it costs in-game, right?

Exactly, that's why nobody understands that a hero costs 30$ and a trooper cost 30$ ten of them.

[DarkLink]

You mean $20 for a finecast low-volume single model vs. $35-45 for 5-10 plastic high volume kits?

[Porty1119]

That sounds very cool! It also put the mental image of a bunch of falcons attacking the GW execs and authors

Matt Ward v. Red-Tailed Hawk...

I've been priced out for quite a while. GW, for me, cannot compete with 1/72 plastics, my own sculpts, and cheap metal models. I can literally assemble a complete combined-arms platoon, a lance or two of Battlemechs, or quite literally three pounds of polymer clay (If I sculpted 28mm, I could probably achieve <$1/figure). I simply cannot justify the expense, not with other options.

[Chris*ta]

So... GW should just start giving away minis for free? You do understand that it physically costs roughly the same to produce a single plastic mini of a given size regardless of how many points it costs in-game, right?

You do understand that production costs have almost nothing to do with the price they charge, right?

Yes. That's frankly irrelevant. GW's not going to produce one army with a profit margin that gives them, say, a return of $1 for every dollar they spend, then produce another army that only give them a return of ten cents.

A disturbing amount of each box is profit. The cost of production for miniatures is really low. They don't want to have radically different costs between similar boxes (although they do) because it would make people less likely to buy the more expensive boxes.

And GW has plenty of armies that have lesser returns than others. Far more of a Space Marine box is profit because of the volume of those they sell means that they have already made back the sculpting and mould-making costs on them many times over.

Frankly, what GW needs to do is minimise their retailing costs. These really are loss-making (or would be if they charged sensible prices for their models. They consider the retail arm to be a form of advertising really.

[Darren Richardson]

I voted 20%, mainly because for the big tank kits etc, though they are expensive, they are standout items that showcase an army, now infantry prices are one of the big problems, when it costs more for the witch elves then it does a tactical squad, the latter using much more plastic, then you know something is seriously wrong.

Part of that I blame on the board and shareholders, who get greedy in the quest for profits, many will become so obsessed in the quest for higher profits they will unwittingly drive companies into the ground, because by the time anyone realises what dire straits the company is in, it is usually far too late to do anything about it....

The second part is the lack of online community support and open playtesting.

Lets take a look at a rival in this hobby business Wizards of the Coast (I know they make RPG's but bear with me on this).

Wizards of the Coast have a strong online community, they have now for over a decade, their staff use the boards and they have independent volunteers who throught the day montior and edit rule breaking posts.

They have sections devoted to FAQ and they respond to posters in a timely manner.

Lastly they value the players feedback, last year they implemented possibly one of the biggest playtests of any game in the world, players could register and download the rules that were being proposed for the 5th ed of Dungeons and Dragons, they listened to players feedback and ammended the rules and then allowed players to download the rules with the changes implemented, this continued throught the whole year, now when 5th come out it will be one of the most stable and rigirously playtested RPG anywhere on the market.

Games Workshop needs to take this approach with the gaming community if they want to see the company survive the next few years, along with restructuring their pricing for their plastic kits, all kits should be priced according to the amount of plastic used in the kits, and then inflated for sustainable profit accordingly.

Edit:

On a side note Paizo publishing also did this for their RPG Pathfinder, which also has become a sucess as well, so this method of playtesting DOES work!

[The_Real_Chris]

Cost is only part of the issue. The player base has shrank too much and the rules are increasingly poor.

To get back in I would want - total army cost of £200 (rules, models to a commonly agreed points value for tournament and pick up games), just better rules - listhammer is fine but some on table choices like Epic A are needed, a stable long term contract for independant shops to get player numbers up. Really for £200 I got a fantastic amount of stuff in thedeadzone kickstater so will be happy for the rest of the year, how can GW currently compete with that? They had a chance with Epic as I loved the ruleset, but 40k just has so many negatives.