But that's the thing isn't it. Warhammer is GW.

For Warhammer to exist it requires Games Workshop.

Now if you ignore the product that the create all you are left with is a Small Corporation.. Just read the first line of their Business model "We make things. We are a manufacturer. Not a retailer"..

And that's the point, When you think that the games themselves are somehow Free without the intervention of GW, you will grow to hate GW. But its not We support GW in producing this stuff with what we buy, and how we spend our money has an impact on how the game changes.

So sit back enjoy the ride and be happy in what we have because we have a hobbie that's played the world over.. all because of a small building in the east-midlands of Great Britain.

I think the return of Throne of Skulls and Battle Brothers is a good step in the right direction; whether it had always been planned to make a comeback or whether it's a spontaneous thing now that WHW is improved, I don't know, but recognizing a desire for competitive 40k is great. 7th edition has supported that, I think; while some books (hai GK) have lost a lot from their 5th edition incarnations, it's not that significant and I feel that the 7th edition books are much closer in relative 'power levels' to each other than books in 5th or more especially, 6th.

This is shyte.
There is no "small building in the east-midlands of Great Britain" that "makes things",
any more than there is paper money who buys a house.

Warhammer is a cooperative endeavor through which human beings voluntarily shape their lives,
develop skills, grow and learn and care for one another.
GW is - currently - a group of money-junkies who hawk prefab-CAD plastic through a marketing framework called a rules-system.

The difference between the money-junkies who run GW now,
and the partying metal head-set who put the who thing together,
is the difference between destruction and creation.

The business environment within the latter-day corporate financial neo-fascism
that pervades our days as contemporary Western culture
encourages monetary success while creating nothing,
and GWs managers seem to act under this spell.
They take "Warhammer" as a commodity,
to be pumped up and maxed out but eventually burnt down if it means more money for investors.
Max-minning the gains over an investor's period of interest means
- in the previous decade -
spectacular performance for capital
and immediate capital kickbacks for management
at the expense of the market, community or commodity in question.
Fracking is a good example here - common corruption.
Everyone (who doesn't live near a fracking well) gains.
GMO crops are another (better) example.

Today's GW saw Warhammer as this grassy hillock,
and went all factory farm monocultural Monsanto with the purging and the imbalance
trying to maximize their own returns
but limited by their tiny brains.

Imagine the morning-after a GW COO's wet dream
- and we all see it coming - Titans in the clearance bin at Walmart.
That means peak saturation and volume and a crash into ...
other media, other stuff - space marine lunchboxes and yada.

The game, Warhammer, the community - all of this has nothing to do with GW.
Not these people, not in my opinion, and not anymore.
It is our hill.

At least, that is how things seem to me at the moment.
I hope that someone will tell me that I am wrong...

I think that's a fair point, @jin . I didn't really think about it that way before, in terms of the community and experience between players being what makes the game so awesome. Of course it is obvious, but I don't really step back away from the hobby to analyze it so much as just dive in and experience it.

I do believe that the hobby and the corp that facilitates it are very separate, but without GW, warhammer goes unsupported, and we know how that ends up.

Kickstarter gamers-union worker-owned cooperative with on-site 3d printing and narrative driven content sensitive to current events interpreted through the future mythology of unending conflict. Guest judges, better ideas and engineering... ends up like that.

Chopped 40k?

More likely the IP would end up twisted and snagged in legal limbo for eternity as lawyers bicker and drag their feet and so on and so on. Legally, no one could touch warhammer as it would never EVER end up in Public Domain.

While I'm not necessarily endorsing @jin 's rise of the gamer proletariat, I wanted to point out that at least in the USA this isn't true.

All IP, copyright, and patent eventually pass into the public domain (in the USA and most countries it takes about 70 years, but it can take up to 150 or so in others). The earliest incarnation of Mickey mouse for example is in the public domain now. It might take 100 years but eventually the Warhammer universe would be public property.

Ok, so when we're 200 years old... Nevermind. Ugh.

No what would happen is we would have 100 small copy-cat games without the 'global support' it would break down and slowly the hobby would die.


Anyway, not going to argue about it. I have said my peace.


Why they are doing it is another debate. And one I dont care to have.

Nah, man, you are missing the point.
We are the global support.
A million spin-off miniatures manufacturers are no threat to Warhammer,
but they may be to GW.
I collect GW miniatures and model them and paint them mostly out of nostalgia.
The rules system and the mythology are what hold the concepts and the agents (us) together in a coordinated fashion.
Current GW 'leadership' do not see this because they are blinded by material greed,
and so appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Now, we see this with the rise of the points shaving competitive gamer...
even the community is blinded and led along by a miniatures manufacturer to need new minis in order to keep up with a rules set which only serves to sell new minis and this cannot continue as the system will eventually become something else...
this is when GW will seem confused, sell off their miniatures manufacturing facilities or close them entirely, and say 'f-off' to the whole tabletop strategy genre.

Yeah, it'll get stuck in IP limbo for a century maybe, but the community may remain at large under a different not-for-profit non-corporate umbrella.
As far as I am concerned, it largely already does.

Which brings me back to my original post on this subject.
I am wondering if GW biz-heads have been able to pull their noses out of their money addiction
to see the long-term health and vibrancy of what had been and could remain a beautiful living thing
before they kill it dead and life takes root somewhere else.

GW has seen some new leadership changes recently, and there has been an explosion of interesting products since.

Alas, i am not interested in keeping this up any further. I love Warhammer and am not a cynic when it comes to GW, i am quite happy, and well engaged.

http://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/47322121.jpg

well, i am not so engaged and not so up to date on GW leadership changes,
though I seem to remember something about that last year sometime...
anyways, i began in this thread hopeful for a smart gw,
and got reminded that the wolf of wallstreet guides that hand.

it seems that for all the ip battles and court related expenses,
the goodwill and loyalty is there - i mean, if you have that, not need for copyrightable name changes and so on.. just introduce the new name.
this stuff only becomes an issue when loyalty is already cracking-
people are critical of gw leadership for a reason.

i would like to be more engaged - but am geographically challenged.
now, i mostly read da webz,
and maybe am colored by that hyperreality...

They are not defending just the IP, they are makeing sure the game as we know it isnt stolen by someone who wants to make a quick but of money..

I dont get how you think GW is just after money and the 3rd party, and other manufactures somehow give away the stuff for free! GW for the most part is one of the best in the price to quality ration (I know some are better, but not many)..

jin, Iam not sure what you do for a living.. but believe me when I say that in my book (and from company's that really do work for 'wallstreet'.. ) GW is a very bad investment and does only what it needs todo to keep a little additional investment flowing in. They do cater to the fans way before the Investors.

Ok, as an old fan of the 40K 'verse, here he's what I have to say :

I dropped the game when I saw the price of the figs increased by 50% in less than two years. Then become 100% after 5 years with no real worthy excuses. Worse, I didn't seen any sign that things were getting better.

I still love the 40K universe, tought, and lately, I began to read some HH stuff, but what I saw in BL had me having some crazy tough.

I mean, here's an example, one of my favourite author, ADB writed an awesome novel, which is published in an anthology for 15.95 euro, with four other novels of various quality. (ranging to the meh to good.). Then, I went on the Black Library site, to see the same ADB novel sold for almost the same price but in an numerical format.

What. The. Heck ?

Considering that this format skip the price of the paper, the inking, and many other cost, it's just maddening to guessing what maddening economical tought presided over the publication politics of Black Library.

That the kind of stuff that leave just wandering about G.W. policies. They sold their figs as if they were made of gold or platinum, as if ecomonics didn't had crashed those ten last years. When they GW crashed and almost burn those last years, it didn't need any foresight or economical genius to saw that happening.

Just look at the Oil price.

Plastics are controlled by that.

ummm, no.
oil has almost never been cheaper than it is right now.

Exactly this.
I read stuff online as my source of 40k info.
I read comments like this OFTEN!

Nobody near me plays warhammer - computer games are the rage in South korea.
Plus, the expense - some of the kids at the university have said exactly this...
I have asked some kids:
Have you ever heard of Warhammer?
They have said:
Oh, yeah. A friend of mine had like ten marines, and they were so expensive.

Why play 40k when you could have a killer gaming rig and do all sorts of stuff with it
FOR MUCH LESS MONEY?
(programming, even, porn is an option at that point,
thousands of games and video titles...)

Why play Warhammer?
Why care about it?

Has nothing to do with a plastics manufacturer.

Uh...... really? ........


........

Qualified with "almost," so I guess that gives about ten miles worth of wiggle room.

Even at their current rates, the price is still insanely high. Are we really at that point where we consider the current oil rates "cheap" or anything remotely so?

Seriously, this thread is fucked, I'm absolutely done here.

:laugh::laugh::laugh:

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-l...go-2015-1?op=1

not new information - part of the war on bric economies...

oils is down to levels not seen since 2009 and anticipated to go to 20$ a barrel
as the western economies slow to a grinding neo-dark ages halt...

anyone who thinks that big oil is doing its damnedest to deliver cheap gasoline to Joe Public's Tahoe (with no passengers) probably believes that men walked on the moon in 1969...

this

this was an excellent assay as well of the situation confronting us all imo...

fukkin stuff up simply to make it difficult for people to scan usable rules easily is perverse.
that is big oil ethics... ick.

skirmish level games and epic scale i.e. gothic integration of product lines would be ideal... and doable, with consistent and balanced rules within a narrative context permitting fine-tuning.
absolutely...

when i started on this thread, this comment perhaps had been most influential.

with my original post, i suppose i was trying to counter with a(n) (im)possibility,
that there is some benign plan being set in motion by the wizards of industry that lead GW...
still, i hope that this hope is confirmed and the cynicism proven senseless...

No its 5 year Average price which is the price that controls materials.. That is at an all time high

And with the Price of oil set to be back above 100 in the next year or so... its Avge price is not going to drop.

Trust me. This is my Day-Job.

You talk like the 2009 price was low for a long period of time? For it to affect the price of plastics you need a few years of reaction time for the market to adjust, and that's not going to happen.

Not when the Price is going back up... Again trust me I spend more time thinking about this stuff than 40K. (I or I should be)

Have they got better?

Hmm, an Interesting question really. I wouldn't say they have gotten "better" at what they do since they are and remain (largely) industry leaders so theirs never been a sense of rush or urgency to "make it better", but I do however think with 7th Edition they have given themselves a bit of direction and really helped settle (to a degree) the age old argument of "Balance vs Bullshit." Basically declaring unbound and a "do what makes you happy" approach really helped show the door to the harsher critics / balance purists; who tended to be more of the "squeaky wheels" as it was - and, realistically, there are so many games on the market that these hardcore folk have become someone elses problem where as say 5-10 years ago there wasn't really anywhere else to go.

I've always leant on the "Balance is better" side of things and I've taken a Hiatus from the game this past year and a bit - basically since 6th Ed Eldar came out and then 7th Edition was rumoured I did not really put alot of interest into the activities of GW. From an outsider coming back into the hobby I can flat out tell you that GW are doing the modelling / campaign aspect damn right from a design point of view - End times was probably the only real thing I took half an interest in, that and Orcs (40k). That Bloodangels side-box was also a great thing to look at.

However, GW still suffers alot of faults its just unable to, or doesn't want, deal with. Rules are officially half-way out the window when they are made up, it's quite clear on a few new units that "unit cost: function intended" are still not taken into account (eg: Taurox) and so you get hideously mismatched unit costs to the functions they perform - okay I get it's "what we feel" approach, but once a product is rolled out, you get Zero support for it afterward until your codex comes rolling around four years later and you pray to god that they went back and did something. So product support wise GW pumps out good stuff, but once it's out there, good luck having them revisit it to tweak / keep relevant that squad if something else comes along that just flips the bird to them in the next released Armies Codex.This then feeds into netlisting which only makes the problem worse, then GW caveat out of dealing with the issue because "hey, it's beer and pretzels yo".

Financially, prices are now eye-wrenchingly high - game sustainability is always thrown around forums alot, but I think we've reached a turning point with GW prices. Alot of new players are, put simply, offered far too many more "as good as" and cheaper luxury hobbies: especially with things like Kickstater or digital alternatives (Dawn of War, Spacemarine + MODS) and I can't see how the blue-shirts in stores are getting the numbers put out with the way this is going - convincing a mum that she should buy a box of super-human fascists is a hard sell. Saying that to play with these dudes requires a good £150 investment for literature and dice is probably near impossible outside Christmas. One thing GW are doing well however is putting content out there for better or worse. Before there were justified grumblings that GW would release a product, go quiet and you were left feeling they were just milking it for what it was worth - especially when you'd get things appearing in 2 issues of White Dwarf Monthly. Now, not so much because there's always something new around the corner and WD has become a "If this is interesting to you buy it" kind of mag-rag.

Overall I'd say GW have gone from a C-grade company who were basically bending it's customers over for a quick-win cash wise to a B- grade company who have a bit of direction but still have a long way to go before they "do it right". Hopefully though this is some kind of genius business plan I can't see.

Currently they are losing net 5,000 customers per four week period globally that's 65,000 customers per annum and since 2012 they have lost globally 169,000. Also adding to their misery they are losing 1.12 Million Pounds per four week period adding the two previous reports they are expecting to lose 39+ Million Pounds from 2012/13 to 2014/15 does not bode well for a company the just junked its fived plan and now looks "To the foreseeable future", less than 3 years.

GW had a report that states that the two figures quoted are unrecoverable. In short GW is going bankrupt and within 3 years. Nagash was the pointer to this, that's why they are killing off Fantasy in 2017 not 2019 as previously predicted.

Better far from it, the silly buggers have doomed the company to bankruptcy.:laugh:

source ?



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Who needs sources - This is the internet!

qft.

You have said this is quite a few places.

Can we have a source..

(and you saying it in another place doesn't count, this isn't fox-news)

source or it didn't happen.

How do you quantify a unique customer per week? Are we talking purchases and extrapolating that into customers? Are we using registered accounts used to order products on the website? Not being a smartass for once. I don't know much about economics, so I wonder how one could possibly figure that out.

Would need a source on all this. But certainly interesting to see how it plays out for the coming 2 years - If Fantasy is truly on the chopping block I'm sort of sad to see it go but then again the rumour mill has everything from "The End times are the end of WHFB" to "This is the final wave goodbye to the 'Legions and Formations' style of WHFB to a more Skirmish-level like setting." With Hobbit officially a "Dead" franchise now that the films have been and gone, thats just going to fade off shelves leaving a nice slot for the predicted "WHFB Skirmish" level of things.

As far as total bankruptcy - Frankly if GAME can get a bailout in the UK then GW can as well. Let alone the digital rights it can give out - the manufacturing Infrastructure is frankly too much to let go to rot and you'll have big interest from firms like Hasbro/Wizards/Wizkids, and there's always been the rumour that Blizzard/GW have patched things up and Warcraft the Miniatures Game will come in effectively milking the last drops of the fetid undead zombie franchise that Warcraft has become.