Why all the secrecy?

[Grimwaldo]

As I see other table top gaming companies open up beta rules testing to there respective comminutes I think why does not GW do this? (Privateer Press and Spartan Games have both done this)
In my opinion it would help with the perspective that GW does not care about its community. When people feel involved they tend to be a lot more fanatic about it and will buy more product.
I do not for the life of me understand "leaks" Why should I care that there are new models if I don't know what the rules are for them or how they fit into a new army?
I have had people argue with me that if we were to open up rules for public discussion that people would only want to see benefits that would be good for their own army.
I disagree people that really love the hobby would discuss argue and some to an agreement that would work best for everyone.
I have seen this work. So here I go off into some other territory. I play WM and one of the units ,Zelots, were totally off the rails powerful in the first edition. When PP rebooted the game Zelots were turned down from 11 however were still a good pick for an army.
GW has real problems with this kind of balance or downscaling really over the top units.
Take Khorn beserkers. Really good they were must have for any chaos army to take in earlier codexies, to now I may take them because I want a theme army, however they just stopped being competative. (I am sure that all of you have examples of this.)
This really honks people off. People invest in their army time and money only to have the next edition of main rules or codex make many of their core units/expensive models, not fun to play anymore in the main game. ( I am not going to open up a playable vs unplayable debate)
Giving people input in to the game makes them feel invested and can also midigate power creep and/or nerfing units to being not being fielded at all.
So I ask again why keep things so close to the chest and keeping the community at arms length?
Is there some side to of the business practice that I cannot see?
Why in this day and age of open communication do we still see tidbits thown to us.
Is this to generate buzz?
I really don't care about what the leaks say. really only pay attention once the rules are out so I can see the entire game/army in its entirety and see how it all works together.
I can see generating buzz, however would not giving the rules early in front of the actual book do better for model sales?
How about preorders?
Is this something that cannot be done because models have to be made and shipped and would cost to much for the company?
Can anyone give good insight?

[DarkLink]

Several reasons.

First, GW doesn't care about its rules. The codices are, to them, nothing more than an excuse to sell expensive books, and they operate under the assumption that people will play any army if it has rules, regardless of the quality of the rules. To them, the only thing that matters is that rules exist, not that they're balanced or even fun. They're pretty blatant about this, with numerous quotes from their design staff stating things like "it's not intended to be balanced", or "just make up your own houserules".

Secondly, they supposedly have a big special agreement with New Line Cinema regarding the LotR and Hobbit stuff. Stemming from this is the requirement that they provide operational secrecy. Ostensibly, if they leak too much 40k info, NLC will yank the LotR/Hobbit stuff because they will lose faith in GW's ability to keep stuff secret. (BTW, anyone know if their LotR/Hobbit lines are even profitable? Because I've literally never seen anyone play it, or even talk about playing it, except for in a highly sarcastic manner. I've heard it's a decent system, but no one actually plays it and all the store owners I know say it doesn't ever sell, ever.)

GW also completely neglects any form of marketing or community building. They pay massive amounts of overhead to run a bunch of GW-only stores, and they release White Dwarf (or Visions, or whatever they call it now), and they think that's adequate. Five or ten years ago, they were probably correct. Now, though, there are a bunch of up and coming competitors that are more than willing to steal GW's community away from them.



So, when it comes down to it, GW simply is too focused on the model side of things, with the inherent assumption that if they build it, people will come. That is becoming less and less true as more and more competitors start gaining market-share. Combine that with several questionable business practices, like shooting themselves in the foot with IP infringement cases, or paying massive amounts of overhead to maintain GW-only stores while shutting out independent retailers, and it's no wonder their revenues have dropped lately. They're still plenty profitable, but they're not thinking about this like a business, and they're certainly not earning their profits in an efficient manner. They're still behaving like a little garage-based company with a No Americans Allowed sign hanging outside their front door.

There's a lot of little nuances to all of these things, and some other issues, but this is GW's overall mindset.

[Wolfshade]

Perhaps because GW and the others have a different philosophy.

Historically, GW would use external testers, however, this lead to leakage. Which they do not like. Because of the very large numbers involved at GW HQ (I mean significantly larger than their competition, they do not need to rely on external people as they have educated dedicated gamers by the bucket load. These members then have a vested interest to maintain GW's secrecy. Your own example shows a crowd sourced rule set is not free from issues. Indeed, the affect of local meta can be quite significant. The downside to internal testing is that the more you see someone's rules you see the design philosophy behind them and start to play the armies as they were "intended" rather than all of the possibilities. Jervis has even admitted as much, hence when he plays blood bowl, he tries to play a long ball game as that was intended, rather than the short ball that is much more effective.

In terms of leakage, GW style themselves as a model company first and foremost, because of this game philosophy they sell miniatures which are then facilitated by rules. Polls and threads in this forum have shown that there are a number of gamers who buy models just because they look cool, regardless of how they might play or fit in the rules.

Part of the reason why GW do not leak their stuff officially (like they used to *allegedly*) is a consequence of the change of polices to keep things tight. This seems to be for two reasons, firstly, GW's licence with New Line cinema seemed to suggest a no-preview, secondly, because GW is so large, if a small operation sees a leaked version of something, they can rush to market their own version (as small companies are more agile) which requires less design effort, using the GW design as inspiration (and getting all their hours of R&D for free in effect)) and then prevent GW from releasing their won. Now I will say with this regard GW do not help themselves releasing rules but no model, creates a vacuum that is exploited by others and this would prevent GW releasing a product with the name as there is already one on the market.
It would seem that this second point GW are wiseing up to and are looking at a weekly release window through their stores and weekly magazine.

GW never did proper marketing, they used their in house magazine and exploited the communities desire to see what was new and so there used to be big leaks in advance which would create a ground swell of buzz around the release.

I think GW are trying to do something new with the weekly/monthly magazines to see how the community response. They also have the understanding of how people respond to FW's freely available rules, though FW sales are dissimilar to GW's core range as they are mostly models sales regardless. Their market is also slightly different.

I would say GW seems a little slow, but it does care for its community, though rather than shifting to a digitial method they instead have their communities focused in store and through events, like the national schools league, though I understand that this "outreach" is not extended in all territories.

[DarkLink]

Perhaps because GW and the others have a different philosophy.

I can tell you which philosophy makes more business sense. I've spent the last few weeks discussing some of this stuff with a couple of guys, one of whom has ran business ventures that made GW's total expenditures, let alone revenue stream, look like a drop in the bucket. It's not so much that the stuff they do doesn't make sense, but more that there are some massive, vast, huge things they could do to cut costs and improve product quality relatively easily in ways that would make their customers jump for joy.

I would say GW seems a little slow, but it does care for its community, though rather than shifting to a digitial method they instead have their communities focused in store and through events, like the national schools league, though I understand that this "outreach" is not extended in all territories.

Words are wind. They can say they care about their customers all they want. Until they actually do something to reach out and grow the community, though, they don't actually care.

[Wolfshade]

Words are wind. They can say they care about their customers all they want. Until they actually do something to reach out and grow the community, though, they don't actually care.

I would say that they do do this. Or at least in my region. There is the support for the national school league, then there is the bricks and mortar stores. Those stores acts as hubs for commmunity. It is these stores which are supporting local players with their free painting stations, gaming boards, advice etc and introducing new players to the hobby. There is no other wargames company that I know of that does that. Certainly, there is a FLGS, but there are at least 5 GW stores closer than that and that is the work of the store owner and it is his best interest to get more gamers as it is his sales and his revenue that is positively affected. So that is the store owner not those companies.

[DarkLink]

Haven't seen them do anything other than those rumored GW stores (that I've never actually been to or seen), personally. And those bring up their own issues, insomuch as they make terrible business sense. WTF would they spend massive, massive amounts of money on the overhead required to have a bunch of little stores open, when there are countless independent retailers that could do all of that work for them. It would free up so much money they could spend on other things it's not even funny. Every single store owner I know is downright astounded that GW thinks its worth running their own stores. But that's a bigger issue.

[Wolfshade]

I think this is a problem with GW and maybe why it needs to think more regionally. In my location, second largest city in the UK we have no FLGS. There are no independents, or if they are they don't exist in city centres/out of town shopping centres (malls). So for GW they then had to run their own stores to recruit players themselves. Recruiting to a hobby is fraught with issues is fouy consider the 6 month drop out rate that has been reported in some hobbies can be as high as 90%.

The nearest non-GW GW stockist to me belongs to a chain of hobby supplies and has no table, no footfall, is outside of the shopping areas so you go their because you are looking for what they sell specifically. There is also the only Slavic butcher I have come across two doors down, but that is another story.

Whereas from what I understand in the states there is a thriving indie scene, so certainly if they are already going what GW does, why not give them the risk and maybe slightly better Ts & Cs in terms of compensation for that. I think given the much lower (generally speaking) population densities means that you cannot hope to have the same sort of GW coverage in states as in the UK. I think in some places it would work, but generally not so. Plus it seems that the UK customer and the US customer are different beasts so it makes sense that you should have a specific different targeted approach for these regions.

[phreakachu]

Personally, i think that the 'secrecy' bit is just a bid for pr.

i mean, really... how many times a day do you plug into BOLS to see if something new has popped up, some infinitesimally small scrap of pic about the new toy coming to shelves so you can salivate at the mouth in regards? personally i hit the web about 5 time a day, AVERAGE.
Who needs all the big to-do with pr and advertising when We The Fans do it for them? When a scrap falls from the G-Dub table, we're on it like a pack of starving dogs... case in point all the noise, just today, about the Knight release: it went from rumors to confirmed rumors to pics in the span of *10 HOURS*...
I'm not a marketing expert, but im gonna guess that you cant buy that kind of buzz.

Slightly related because it was mentioned earlier: i know one dude who pretty much cleaned out my FLGS' LOTR stock... based on the question 'would you play the game' answered 'i dunno, maybe' in that tone we reserve for the folks who get on our nerves. i imagine the models sit mostly unopened in a pile of emptied cheetoes bags and discarded whack-rags in some parent's basement somewhere in Des Moines and its surrounding communities.

[Wildeybeast]

Exactly this. Virtually every leak that comes out of GW does so with full approval of GW. When they were announcing releases six months in advance, where was they hype, the excitement? Far better to whip the internet into a frenzy of anticipation with rumours and half-truths.

It's also to do with people's spending habits. If I play Ogres and it's announced in January that they will be coming in May, chances are I'm going to save up so I can splurge then, as well as not adding to my Ogre army because I don't know how effective all the units will be in the new book. All of which means GW gets nothing from me in the intervening six months. Whereas if I have no idea when or even if Ogres will get updated, I'm far more likely to continue buying stuff for them, or even succumb to a shiny new army, as I'm addicted to plastic crack. It's why they have shifted to weekly releases, rather than everything in a monthly dump.

[DarkLink]

The problem with those spending habit assumptions is that people do that anyways. I can't tell you how many people I know who were 'waiting for X codex to get a release', or waiting until after the new release to see if GW dropped the ball with the new codex.