Post by aaron on Jul 21, 2014 8:36:02 GMT -9
Rules of engagement
1. if you say you hate something tell us why. I don't want to read I hate GW their just a big bunch of duty heads! we are all adults here and can find ways of articulating ourselves.
2. no foul langue.
3. no spam if you have a link to prove a point then fine but don't just send us to your buddies poorly painted army telling us how cool it is... unless it proves a point.
4. If you disagree with anything someone says be an adult about it, but if you come on this forum and tell us that piracy is ok and that digital media has no value expect to be lambasted not only by me (because I will show you every way your wrong wrong wrong )but by just about everyone on the Cardboard warrior forums.... we all have a vested interest in digital media and we all know it's value... so do you or you wouldn't be here.....
OK . First let me say this post is obviously going to be really long and it's a long time coming and in many ways will be repeated information from many other posts.
The reason I am making this thread is that a lot of my other threads are getting semi, hijacked with disgruntled X 40k players/ fantasy players. Sadly I myself have been apart of this hijacking of my own threads LOL so now here it is an open forum to talk about everything GW and what they are doing wrong... and believe it or not what they are doing right!
So lest start this of with the obvious statment 40k is the most broken table top war game I have ever seen and just when they start to get it right they do something colossally stupid to mess it up again. with the latest edition of 40k they have broken the game so badly that they have almost just thrown out the rules entirely.
if you don't believe me go onto the Miniwargaming.com and listen to just about any battle report they have the first they say is we have changed or omitted some rules. they do this so that 40k is some what playable. otherwise it would be to complicated and not make any sense their are even rules that contradict one another and leave you going what?
why GW ?? why would you do this to a game that used to be cool and had the potential to be AWESOME!!! ... well the answer is more complex than I would have ever imagined.
so lets break down some information first to make the bigger picture come into focus.
I'm going to be jumping around a lot so it may get a little disjointed.
first lest talk about where GW came from.
on their website they say our history ... and this is what they put...
" Games Workshop is the largest and the most successful tabletop fantasy wargames company in the world. Our major brands are Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. In addition, we hold a licence for The Lord of the Rings tabletop battle game. At the heart of the Hobby are the millions of gamers, who spend their time collecting, creating, painting and building up the armies which they go on to command on a carefully prepared tabletop battlefield."
this says absolutely nothing about their history and for good reason their past reads more like game of thrones than any other company I have ever herd about! no one would want to invest in them is they knew about what went on in the past.
they started in 1975! 1975 people I was only 3 years old! now I know some of you out there were thinking hell I was graduating college! so yes you watched them go from making wooden boards for backgammon to become the monstrosity that they are now!
they started a publication to sell their work and get better exposure called the owl and the weasel.... two predatory animals both of them using stealth and deception to get their desired prey items... also Owls aren't that smart when it comes to bird world. Two years later they would replace this publication with the first ever White dwarf. So really (this is for the kids who haven't gotten this yet, mostly Americans ...) let me spell this out for you White Dwarf is just a giant well crafted advertisement that you pay for... now I know what your thinking .... actually I don't I'm not a mind reader and that would be just creepy! so you might be thinking White Dwarf has lots of cool stuff in it, painting guides ,alternate rules and army lists... so really it's not an advertisement it's a gaming supplement. No it's a very cleverly disguised advertisement and you PAY for it... this is just one of the underhanded yet deceptively cool tricks that GW has come up with over the years.
In the beginning it was basically owned and funded by John Peake, though his partners were Ian Livingstone, and Steve Jackson. Ian and Steve wanted to get all jiggy with the times and try out this new roll-play thingy that was getting super popular in the U.S. but John would have no part of this ... and so John became the first official casualty of the soon to be GW empire.
They got the exclusive rights to sell D&D in the U.K. (TSR was it's own ball of ugly that is going to make a great movie! check it out on kickstarter)and using gaming cons they started skyrocketing into popularity and in 1979, Games Workshop provided the funding to found Citadel Miniatures which they later absorbed and now it's all just GW
at one point there was a serious (and I don't want to say friendly bid for taking over TSR) I mean merging the companies ....
O.k. lets stop here and discuss something very important. TSR and GW kind of both stumbled into a market that is being savagely exploited by today's video game industry and all Micheal Bay movies , it's called the teenage boy market and they discover there was A LOT of money to be made from them.
this has lead to lots of things like the over sexulasation of women in the gaming industry and the super masculisation of males bla bla bla but the biggest thing to point out here is greed. both GW and TSR were destroyed by greed. it didn't happen over night and to GW it's still happening, eventually if they can over come their money addiction (because it really is an addiction just like any other drug) if they can't beat the habit it will consume them.
So about 1979 and 1980 their was blood in the water and lots of it! so the sharks came out and did what sharks will do and GW found that they had become one of the biggest sharks of all. At this point GW had major dealings with TSR, Milton Bradly, even Wizards of the coast towards the end and each time all parties involved came away bloody and broken from the experience.
One of the big lessons hear is that GW doesn't play well with others and I'm not kidding if you ever want to read some of the best literature of twists, turns, back stabbing and de-throneing you have ever seen read up on the history of GW and TSR it got crazy. Fiction writers can't make this stuff up any better than what actually happened!
this was the gaming industry at it's darkest time and the people who suffered the most were the fans of the games. Hero Quest will never again see the light of day as their is to much hate, blood and feuding over it. the companies that own it won't let it be publishes out of pure spite for the other groups that own it and won't just cut their losses and move on. that's just sad.
In 1984, Games Workshop ceased distributing its products in the USA through Hobby Games Distributors and opened its Games Workshop U.S. office. Games Workshop U.S. and Games Workshop in general, went through a large growth phase in the late '80s,
...flash forward from 1972 and I am now 8 years old ... I stumbled into a game of 40k at a UFLGS the guys that were playing were complete jerks and the store owner was the biggest pretentious butt head I think I have ever met and that's really saying something, but there you have it. Even though the people sucked I was hooked by the pageantry of the game and I wanted in! I was 8 years old people!! I have been playing 40k since I was 8!! LOL
ok so GW was experiencing their equivalent of the Roaring 20's and they were making money hand over fist ... they were using that money not really to make better products but to CRUSH anyone who looked like they might even be kind of a threat some day and they sent out cease and desist orders like most people send out greeting cards! they were securing themselves as the top gaming company in the world. "remember they had been bloodied by other companies and they didn't want it to happen again" you see they knew all the dirty back handed tricks they used to get where they were and they were cleaning house and boarding up doors to make sure that no one else could do the same.
Following a management buyout by Bryan Ansell in December 1991, (my guess is this wasn't friendly in fact it lead to some serious problems but will get to that) Games Workshop refocused on their most lucrative lines, so they cut off roll play stuff and focused on WHFB and 40K .they started "franchising" i use that term loosely as a tradition franchise doesn't do what they did .... mom and pop shops started pooping up all over the place and the company enjoyed growing profits. Now many of you here on the board actually owned or still own one of these shops and can tell people way better than I can the horror and abuse that you suffered from the hands of GW. They were not friendly to their franchises and treated them like thieves and backstabbers ... after all GW is and we all project what we are on other people ... i.e. you can't lie to a lair.
Remember how I said the take over SORRY I mean "management buyout" caused them problems well, in the first public display of the middle finger to the fans of the games GW did what they wanted with little regard for their customers ... this would be a singe of continuing business practices.
The complaints of their old customers led a breakaway group of two GW employees to publish Fantasy Warlord in competition with GW, but remember when I said GW was using their money to Crush people well this was one of those time and Fantasy Warlord met with little success. party because GW beat them down and partly because the game kind of sucked. It had some really good elements but lacked a solid game play plus it had no fan base.
Games Workshop expanded in Europe, the USA, Canada, and Australia, opening new branches and organizing events in each new commercial territory. doing everything it could legally or otherwise to crush competitors and drive everyone from the market. it worked in England why not everywhere else.... but by the end of the 90's the company was having problems and loosing money now they blamed it on the market shifting to collectible card games such as Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon but perhaps it was because they were spending their money on crushing people and not of updating their games or making the rules work!
Also by the late 90's the Internet was in full swing and most people world wide were getting on board but GW in a colossally bad decision it was voted to shun technology. this would come back to bite them in @$$ more than once. Also in this new age of information it was getting harder and harder to keep dirty dealing behind closed doors and people were starting to see GW for what it was.
Now here's something that really needs to be it's own thread as it's going to probably be a huge section of the responses in this thread but lets talk for a moment about the Golden age of internet piracy. In no other market did piracy have nearly the devastating effect that it has (and is continuing to have) than in the gaming industry. Huge companies such as Relic and THQ have come crashing down because of it. GW has felt the sting of piracy more keenly than just about anyone. There is no magazine , rule book, codex or army book that couldn't be found on pirate bay or any other torrent posting website .... NO I WILL NOT POST ANY LINKS and you better not either!! remember how I just said ignoring technology would come back to bite them in the @$$ well Piracy hit them like a broadside at point blank range. This is partly their fault for not better protecting themselves and really the fault of everyone who pirated their stuff (shame on you ) the reason this was so bad is that GW had only one means of making up the profit margin they had to hike the prices on the models.
many of us know how expensive it is to make a rule book both in terms of time effort and some of you even have to hire artist. so it's costly to make then it's pirated and all your effort is wasted. on top of that some creative kid who (didn't pirate their stuff) comes along and makes paper replicas of all their models .... now their game is completely free.... now their financially bleeding no not just bleeding they are gushing blood out of a wound they can't heal or fix.... the models are fan art and their are no laws governing it.... their printed material is popping up faster than they can shut them down and being hosted in countries that have no respect for copyright laws.... the now have a serious problem and so how do they handle it .... they do the only thing they can. they make models that are collectors items. Effectively due to piracy 40k is dead. now it's just collectible models. extremely high priced collectible models because they have to pay for the manuals and books that are being pirated even as you read this. Internet Piracy is a plague on the gaming industry and the world at large. if you are a pirate, think about the economic dagger that you are shoving in our backs and educate yourself to the damage it's causing. It hurts very real people both in the loss of good thing and the remuneration that has to be paid to fix it. just stop.
the owners of GW at this point were and are getting old they are getting more and more out of touch with thir target market and the world in general. it wasn't until Dawn of war that GW finally embraced and accepted the video game market after three previous attempts to bring 40k to the computer world. though Fire warrior met with marginal success it was little more than a doom clone. Their last round of price hikes and shutting down all internet sales proved that they have no clue about today's economy and how 87% of all commerce is now conducted over the internet. the board of directed are now 4 or 5 generations removed from their target market and not only do they not understand the world their money is growing up in it's like a completely alien thing to them.
They conduct business like it's 1970 when the world was ignorant of what was happening and people believed everything big companies send out on impressive letter head.
Now a days however people can look up information and everyone is an armchair lawyer, were not going to take idle threats from big companies and in fact if allegations are salacious enough we can counter sue for wrongful prosecution and then GW stands to loose it's intellectual property rights and trademarks but they blunder on like a rhinoceros charging through a mine field.
with other companies and innovative creators out there making new games, that are better and cheaper, you would think they would want to compete up their game as it were but sadly they sit upon their throne thinking they can't be touched. it's only a matter of time before they feel the cold sting of the economic dagger in their back from games like War Machine and their ilk.
Hell their are several people on this forum right now that if we had the money, we have the time and talent to completely destroy GW.
Now I have made some bold and disparaging statements against GW but let me say this, they grew up in a time when the gaming industry was a brutal and ugly place to be. They are doing what they know, it's worked for them in the past and they are trying to continue in teh best way they can and still make a profit. GW has become a status symbol among nerds placing it in a Brand image category like Gucci or Prada. will a Prada bag hold your stuff better than the J.C. Pennies bag that looks exactly the same and costs hundreds / thousands less? no. Is the Prada in fact any better at all.... no not really, in fact the same factory that makes Prada bags doesn't put a label on every other one so they can send it to Pennies that way they can tap both markets. So are brand people stupid for paying more for a label.... yes. yes they are. the nerd community is starting to figure this out and GW is doing everything they can to stop the nerd community from seeing through their marketing smoke and mirrors. GW hasn't figured out yet that we have access to the internet, we know how much it costs to make plastic and even how to do it, we know how much it costs to do injection molding and spin casting, and we know that FINE CAST is just a BS term used to say were going to charge more. We can calculate shipping and even talk to shipping companies to see what kind of deals they give out to big companies ... so really GW isn't fooling anyone but themselves and it's starting to show.
GW makes some great models and if they didn't exist I bet that a lot of us wouldn't be here right now and the gaming world would look very different for better or for worse. GW is one of the founding fathers of the modern gaming industry and if you look at my desk I am surrounded by GW products some almost as old as I am. Their mythos has shaped my imagination for years and if you were to remove every GW influence from me I don't know what kind of a person I would be. I bet a lot of us can say the same.
when I was a kid I dreamed that one day I would move to England and work for GW helping make my favorite thing in the whole world 4ok. I even applied (several times in fact) I even sent them my art. I never herd back. not surprising with all the ugly that was going on behind closed doors. In a lot of ways it's a small blessing that they never hired me, I'm not good at office politics and would have been destroyed by the experience. I mended my broken dream and was going to open my own comic book / war-hammer store but the money was never there and that never happened either ... after hearing the horror stories of many different shop owners I can't imagine how I would have taken it if my childhood hero GW had shafted me like that.
I still dream of owning a shop someday and maybe I will but unless GW does a MAJOR overhaul of their business practices then I will avoid them at all costs.
one final thought and then I will pass the mic , step aside and let you all take the floor GW is a company. they are trying to make the most profit they can with the least amount of expense they can. just like any other company out there. sometimes we forget that because for many of us GW isn't a company it's a lifestyle we grew up with them they aren't just a business they are our childhood. Changing the game is like changing Coke or star wars. Every time they do that they chip away at us and it makes us angry. but in the end they are just a business like anything else they are trying to survive in today's economy the best way they know how, perhaps it's time to step aside and let some one else take the reins of the company to help navigate it in these ever changing and turbulent times?
Ok .... I'm done I've said my peace now it's your turn!
1. if you say you hate something tell us why. I don't want to read I hate GW their just a big bunch of duty heads! we are all adults here and can find ways of articulating ourselves.
2. no foul langue.
3. no spam if you have a link to prove a point then fine but don't just send us to your buddies poorly painted army telling us how cool it is... unless it proves a point.
4. If you disagree with anything someone says be an adult about it, but if you come on this forum and tell us that piracy is ok and that digital media has no value expect to be lambasted not only by me (because I will show you every way your wrong wrong wrong )but by just about everyone on the Cardboard warrior forums.... we all have a vested interest in digital media and we all know it's value... so do you or you wouldn't be here.....
OK . First let me say this post is obviously going to be really long and it's a long time coming and in many ways will be repeated information from many other posts.
The reason I am making this thread is that a lot of my other threads are getting semi, hijacked with disgruntled X 40k players/ fantasy players. Sadly I myself have been apart of this hijacking of my own threads LOL so now here it is an open forum to talk about everything GW and what they are doing wrong... and believe it or not what they are doing right!
So lest start this of with the obvious statment 40k is the most broken table top war game I have ever seen and just when they start to get it right they do something colossally stupid to mess it up again. with the latest edition of 40k they have broken the game so badly that they have almost just thrown out the rules entirely.
if you don't believe me go onto the Miniwargaming.com and listen to just about any battle report they have the first they say is we have changed or omitted some rules. they do this so that 40k is some what playable. otherwise it would be to complicated and not make any sense their are even rules that contradict one another and leave you going what?
why GW ?? why would you do this to a game that used to be cool and had the potential to be AWESOME!!! ... well the answer is more complex than I would have ever imagined.
so lets break down some information first to make the bigger picture come into focus.
I'm going to be jumping around a lot so it may get a little disjointed.
first lest talk about where GW came from.
on their website they say our history ... and this is what they put...
" Games Workshop is the largest and the most successful tabletop fantasy wargames company in the world. Our major brands are Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. In addition, we hold a licence for The Lord of the Rings tabletop battle game. At the heart of the Hobby are the millions of gamers, who spend their time collecting, creating, painting and building up the armies which they go on to command on a carefully prepared tabletop battlefield."
this says absolutely nothing about their history and for good reason their past reads more like game of thrones than any other company I have ever herd about! no one would want to invest in them is they knew about what went on in the past.
they started in 1975! 1975 people I was only 3 years old! now I know some of you out there were thinking hell I was graduating college! so yes you watched them go from making wooden boards for backgammon to become the monstrosity that they are now!
they started a publication to sell their work and get better exposure called the owl and the weasel.... two predatory animals both of them using stealth and deception to get their desired prey items... also Owls aren't that smart when it comes to bird world. Two years later they would replace this publication with the first ever White dwarf. So really (this is for the kids who haven't gotten this yet, mostly Americans ...) let me spell this out for you White Dwarf is just a giant well crafted advertisement that you pay for... now I know what your thinking .... actually I don't I'm not a mind reader and that would be just creepy! so you might be thinking White Dwarf has lots of cool stuff in it, painting guides ,alternate rules and army lists... so really it's not an advertisement it's a gaming supplement. No it's a very cleverly disguised advertisement and you PAY for it... this is just one of the underhanded yet deceptively cool tricks that GW has come up with over the years.
In the beginning it was basically owned and funded by John Peake, though his partners were Ian Livingstone, and Steve Jackson. Ian and Steve wanted to get all jiggy with the times and try out this new roll-play thingy that was getting super popular in the U.S. but John would have no part of this ... and so John became the first official casualty of the soon to be GW empire.
They got the exclusive rights to sell D&D in the U.K. (TSR was it's own ball of ugly that is going to make a great movie! check it out on kickstarter)and using gaming cons they started skyrocketing into popularity and in 1979, Games Workshop provided the funding to found Citadel Miniatures which they later absorbed and now it's all just GW
at one point there was a serious (and I don't want to say friendly bid for taking over TSR) I mean merging the companies ....
O.k. lets stop here and discuss something very important. TSR and GW kind of both stumbled into a market that is being savagely exploited by today's video game industry and all Micheal Bay movies , it's called the teenage boy market and they discover there was A LOT of money to be made from them.
this has lead to lots of things like the over sexulasation of women in the gaming industry and the super masculisation of males bla bla bla but the biggest thing to point out here is greed. both GW and TSR were destroyed by greed. it didn't happen over night and to GW it's still happening, eventually if they can over come their money addiction (because it really is an addiction just like any other drug) if they can't beat the habit it will consume them.
So about 1979 and 1980 their was blood in the water and lots of it! so the sharks came out and did what sharks will do and GW found that they had become one of the biggest sharks of all. At this point GW had major dealings with TSR, Milton Bradly, even Wizards of the coast towards the end and each time all parties involved came away bloody and broken from the experience.
One of the big lessons hear is that GW doesn't play well with others and I'm not kidding if you ever want to read some of the best literature of twists, turns, back stabbing and de-throneing you have ever seen read up on the history of GW and TSR it got crazy. Fiction writers can't make this stuff up any better than what actually happened!
this was the gaming industry at it's darkest time and the people who suffered the most were the fans of the games. Hero Quest will never again see the light of day as their is to much hate, blood and feuding over it. the companies that own it won't let it be publishes out of pure spite for the other groups that own it and won't just cut their losses and move on. that's just sad.
In 1984, Games Workshop ceased distributing its products in the USA through Hobby Games Distributors and opened its Games Workshop U.S. office. Games Workshop U.S. and Games Workshop in general, went through a large growth phase in the late '80s,
...flash forward from 1972 and I am now 8 years old ... I stumbled into a game of 40k at a UFLGS the guys that were playing were complete jerks and the store owner was the biggest pretentious butt head I think I have ever met and that's really saying something, but there you have it. Even though the people sucked I was hooked by the pageantry of the game and I wanted in! I was 8 years old people!! I have been playing 40k since I was 8!! LOL
ok so GW was experiencing their equivalent of the Roaring 20's and they were making money hand over fist ... they were using that money not really to make better products but to CRUSH anyone who looked like they might even be kind of a threat some day and they sent out cease and desist orders like most people send out greeting cards! they were securing themselves as the top gaming company in the world. "remember they had been bloodied by other companies and they didn't want it to happen again" you see they knew all the dirty back handed tricks they used to get where they were and they were cleaning house and boarding up doors to make sure that no one else could do the same.
Following a management buyout by Bryan Ansell in December 1991, (my guess is this wasn't friendly in fact it lead to some serious problems but will get to that) Games Workshop refocused on their most lucrative lines, so they cut off roll play stuff and focused on WHFB and 40K .they started "franchising" i use that term loosely as a tradition franchise doesn't do what they did .... mom and pop shops started pooping up all over the place and the company enjoyed growing profits. Now many of you here on the board actually owned or still own one of these shops and can tell people way better than I can the horror and abuse that you suffered from the hands of GW. They were not friendly to their franchises and treated them like thieves and backstabbers ... after all GW is and we all project what we are on other people ... i.e. you can't lie to a lair.
Remember how I said the take over SORRY I mean "management buyout" caused them problems well, in the first public display of the middle finger to the fans of the games GW did what they wanted with little regard for their customers ... this would be a singe of continuing business practices.
The complaints of their old customers led a breakaway group of two GW employees to publish Fantasy Warlord in competition with GW, but remember when I said GW was using their money to Crush people well this was one of those time and Fantasy Warlord met with little success. party because GW beat them down and partly because the game kind of sucked. It had some really good elements but lacked a solid game play plus it had no fan base.
Games Workshop expanded in Europe, the USA, Canada, and Australia, opening new branches and organizing events in each new commercial territory. doing everything it could legally or otherwise to crush competitors and drive everyone from the market. it worked in England why not everywhere else.... but by the end of the 90's the company was having problems and loosing money now they blamed it on the market shifting to collectible card games such as Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon but perhaps it was because they were spending their money on crushing people and not of updating their games or making the rules work!
Also by the late 90's the Internet was in full swing and most people world wide were getting on board but GW in a colossally bad decision it was voted to shun technology. this would come back to bite them in @$$ more than once. Also in this new age of information it was getting harder and harder to keep dirty dealing behind closed doors and people were starting to see GW for what it was.
Now here's something that really needs to be it's own thread as it's going to probably be a huge section of the responses in this thread but lets talk for a moment about the Golden age of internet piracy. In no other market did piracy have nearly the devastating effect that it has (and is continuing to have) than in the gaming industry. Huge companies such as Relic and THQ have come crashing down because of it. GW has felt the sting of piracy more keenly than just about anyone. There is no magazine , rule book, codex or army book that couldn't be found on pirate bay or any other torrent posting website .... NO I WILL NOT POST ANY LINKS and you better not either!! remember how I just said ignoring technology would come back to bite them in the @$$ well Piracy hit them like a broadside at point blank range. This is partly their fault for not better protecting themselves and really the fault of everyone who pirated their stuff (shame on you ) the reason this was so bad is that GW had only one means of making up the profit margin they had to hike the prices on the models.
many of us know how expensive it is to make a rule book both in terms of time effort and some of you even have to hire artist. so it's costly to make then it's pirated and all your effort is wasted. on top of that some creative kid who (didn't pirate their stuff) comes along and makes paper replicas of all their models .... now their game is completely free.... now their financially bleeding no not just bleeding they are gushing blood out of a wound they can't heal or fix.... the models are fan art and their are no laws governing it.... their printed material is popping up faster than they can shut them down and being hosted in countries that have no respect for copyright laws.... the now have a serious problem and so how do they handle it .... they do the only thing they can. they make models that are collectors items. Effectively due to piracy 40k is dead. now it's just collectible models. extremely high priced collectible models because they have to pay for the manuals and books that are being pirated even as you read this. Internet Piracy is a plague on the gaming industry and the world at large. if you are a pirate, think about the economic dagger that you are shoving in our backs and educate yourself to the damage it's causing. It hurts very real people both in the loss of good thing and the remuneration that has to be paid to fix it. just stop.
the owners of GW at this point were and are getting old they are getting more and more out of touch with thir target market and the world in general. it wasn't until Dawn of war that GW finally embraced and accepted the video game market after three previous attempts to bring 40k to the computer world. though Fire warrior met with marginal success it was little more than a doom clone. Their last round of price hikes and shutting down all internet sales proved that they have no clue about today's economy and how 87% of all commerce is now conducted over the internet. the board of directed are now 4 or 5 generations removed from their target market and not only do they not understand the world their money is growing up in it's like a completely alien thing to them.
They conduct business like it's 1970 when the world was ignorant of what was happening and people believed everything big companies send out on impressive letter head.
Now a days however people can look up information and everyone is an armchair lawyer, were not going to take idle threats from big companies and in fact if allegations are salacious enough we can counter sue for wrongful prosecution and then GW stands to loose it's intellectual property rights and trademarks but they blunder on like a rhinoceros charging through a mine field.
with other companies and innovative creators out there making new games, that are better and cheaper, you would think they would want to compete up their game as it were but sadly they sit upon their throne thinking they can't be touched. it's only a matter of time before they feel the cold sting of the economic dagger in their back from games like War Machine and their ilk.
Hell their are several people on this forum right now that if we had the money, we have the time and talent to completely destroy GW.
Now I have made some bold and disparaging statements against GW but let me say this, they grew up in a time when the gaming industry was a brutal and ugly place to be. They are doing what they know, it's worked for them in the past and they are trying to continue in teh best way they can and still make a profit. GW has become a status symbol among nerds placing it in a Brand image category like Gucci or Prada. will a Prada bag hold your stuff better than the J.C. Pennies bag that looks exactly the same and costs hundreds / thousands less? no. Is the Prada in fact any better at all.... no not really, in fact the same factory that makes Prada bags doesn't put a label on every other one so they can send it to Pennies that way they can tap both markets. So are brand people stupid for paying more for a label.... yes. yes they are. the nerd community is starting to figure this out and GW is doing everything they can to stop the nerd community from seeing through their marketing smoke and mirrors. GW hasn't figured out yet that we have access to the internet, we know how much it costs to make plastic and even how to do it, we know how much it costs to do injection molding and spin casting, and we know that FINE CAST is just a BS term used to say were going to charge more. We can calculate shipping and even talk to shipping companies to see what kind of deals they give out to big companies ... so really GW isn't fooling anyone but themselves and it's starting to show.
GW makes some great models and if they didn't exist I bet that a lot of us wouldn't be here right now and the gaming world would look very different for better or for worse. GW is one of the founding fathers of the modern gaming industry and if you look at my desk I am surrounded by GW products some almost as old as I am. Their mythos has shaped my imagination for years and if you were to remove every GW influence from me I don't know what kind of a person I would be. I bet a lot of us can say the same.
when I was a kid I dreamed that one day I would move to England and work for GW helping make my favorite thing in the whole world 4ok. I even applied (several times in fact) I even sent them my art. I never herd back. not surprising with all the ugly that was going on behind closed doors. In a lot of ways it's a small blessing that they never hired me, I'm not good at office politics and would have been destroyed by the experience. I mended my broken dream and was going to open my own comic book / war-hammer store but the money was never there and that never happened either ... after hearing the horror stories of many different shop owners I can't imagine how I would have taken it if my childhood hero GW had shafted me like that.
I still dream of owning a shop someday and maybe I will but unless GW does a MAJOR overhaul of their business practices then I will avoid them at all costs.
one final thought and then I will pass the mic , step aside and let you all take the floor GW is a company. they are trying to make the most profit they can with the least amount of expense they can. just like any other company out there. sometimes we forget that because for many of us GW isn't a company it's a lifestyle we grew up with them they aren't just a business they are our childhood. Changing the game is like changing Coke or star wars. Every time they do that they chip away at us and it makes us angry. but in the end they are just a business like anything else they are trying to survive in today's economy the best way they know how, perhaps it's time to step aside and let some one else take the reins of the company to help navigate it in these ever changing and turbulent times?
Ok .... I'm done I've said my peace now it's your turn!