Games Workshop Stock Plummets By 24 Percent

[BlameTheWizards]

Games Workshop Stock Plummets By 24 Percent

The Warhammer creator's profits are down by about 3.4 million British pounds compared to last year.

Games Workshop, producer of the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 line of war game miniatures, reported a 24 percent decrease in their stock value yesterday following a profit loss of several million British pounds. According to the half year financial report published on their website yesterday, Games Workshop's revenue for the six months leading up to Dec. 1, 2013, was 60.5 million in pounds, with a pre-tax profit of 7.7 million.

The same report for Dec. 1, 2012, reported a revenue of 67.5 million pounds with a pre-tax profit of 11.1 million. As of Thursday, shares in Games Workshop were going for 548 British pence, or roughly $9 American.

According to their report, Games Workshop's reduced margins were the result of "the rapid transition from multi-man stores to one-man stores and the reduction of trading hours across the Group." In layman speak, this most likely means that their market is shrinking and they've had to lay off employees at their specialty Games Workshop stores.

Games Workshop views this as a short-term issue and expects to see growth again with their one man model for their stores. During the six month period of the most recent report, 27 new stores opened and 20 closed.

While the company has enough resources to last it for the foreseeable future, Games Workshop still expects their profit to remain under pressure during this time of restructuring.

Source: Games Workshop, <a href=http://www.lse.co.uk/AllNews.asp?code=qjocmh66&headline=Games_Workshop_Shares_Down_24_As_FirstHalf_Profit_Tumbles>London South East

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[dragongit]

well, gamer's workshop, perhaps if you didn't gouge the prices for your figurines as much as you do, people would be more likely to buy them. I dont' play the game, but I have a few friends who do. They tell me the prices keep going up to the point where they would rather find a cheaper miniature game then continue to invest in Warhammer.

 

[Bradeck]

No matter. The emperor protects. Doubt is for the weak. We all know that the hidden chest in the armory of the Grey Knights holds the key to revitalizing the entire franchise...

 

[Raziel]

I bet it didn't help that they capped the amount of figures non-GW stores were allowed to order. That led to several popular stores closing.

But yeah, the figure price gouging is certainly the biggest problem.

 

[Baresark]

well, gamer's workshop, perhaps if you didn't gouge the prices for your figurines as much as you do, people would be more likely to buy them. I dont' play the game, but I have a few friends who do. They tell me the prices keep going up to the point where they would rather find a cheaper miniature game then continue to invest in Warhammer.

Holy shit, I was going to say this exact thing. I recently got into it with some friends and I'm still angry about the situation. I bought two kits (Space Wolves Battle Force and Battle Pack) and dropped $125 on them which didn't net me a 500 point army. I wasn't familiar with it at the time, but then you have to spend hours and hours gluing and assembling them, then you are supposed to paint it. It just makes me angry as I think about it. Not only are they charging entirely too much for little pieces of plastic that require lots of work, but they put up this huge time barrier for the game on top of that. Can they make it any harder to play their damn game? Also, then you need your armies codex... which is less than 100 pages and costs $33. Then another $75 for the general rule book.

I've barely played and I'm already about to quit because of how lousy of a company they are.

Edit: For everyone's reading pleasure - http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Games_Workshop

 

[Azahul]

My local area pretty much switched over to Warmachine wholesale a long time ago. This is in Australia mind you, where the cost for a single box of 10 troopers can net you an entire starter army for Warmachine. Nothing about this is all that surprising.

 

[Me55enger]

Y'know, saying British Pounds is a far clunkier way of saying, like, £. Plus it is, to be pedantic, British Pounds Sterling. Still, your word choices baffle me.

Truth be told it has astounded me how a money sink of this capacity seemingly survived the economic apocalypse so well, and only now appears to be suffering. I sunk a portion of my teen years into it and came out the other side smelling of glue and disappointment.

 

[Atmos Duality]

It appears that their army of lawyers can't sue their company back into dominance this time.
I keep seeing cheaper figurine games popping up at my local hobby shops. (and I mean much cheaper. Like, 30% warhammer equivalence cheaper, with close to the same quality models and materials)

If nothing else, 3D printers would be putting them out of business in the next decade anyway.

So bad business practices and screwing your customers and retailers lead to lower profit? Who would have thought?

Not Games Workshop, but it's not like they'd ever learn.

They're kind of the Nintendo of the figurine gaming world; they've enjoyed the benefits and automatic success from a virtual monopoly for far too long and their business model is too ingrained in the monopolistic mindset. (yes, Nintendo had a monopoly once upon a time, and their bizarre series of rises and falls can be largely attributed towards that initial mindset; Games Workshop seems very similar)

 

[fix-the-spade]

They upped prices, reduced model quality and began aggressively stone walling third party resellers, this has hurt sales. At the same time, competition is increasing and a whole bunch of miniature gamers I know are buying different brands and just playing them to old 40k rules, because that's fun to them.

In response GW are going to cut staff numbers to one guy per store?!?

Seriously, what the hell is he supposed to do? I've run a one man shop (a petrol station) and it's hard work when you don't have a regional manager armed with a sales target, model displays to build/rotate and customer games to run.

With one guy in store just how are they going to run games and models anyway? The work load on the guys (soon to be guy) in my local GW store is way beyond one man just from those, does this mean that they're about to get cut too? I can't see many customers through the door if GW stores start looking Lord of the Rings themed Model Zones (who incidentally, went bust last year).

This sounds suspiciously like someone trying to maximise short term profits before gutting the business.

 

[Vivi22]

In layman speak, this most likely means that their market is shrinking and they've had to lay off employees at their specialty Games Workshop stores.

Highly unlikely that the market is shrinking or the smaller companies would be hurting quite a bit, if not more, than GW. Far more likely that GW's market is shrinking as their prices continue to rise, and their treatment of customers descends into new levels of dispicability. When they decided to prevent online retailers in Canada from selling their products over the internet for reasons that were clearly bullshit, that was the final straw for me (and I mean final straw in the sense of giving up the game altogether. I'd already given up buying anything from them by that point).

Interestingly, a friend of mine visited a gaming store in Toronto I think it was a few months back and the store didn't sell any GW stuff anymore. After they pulled their shenanigans with online resalers they simply decided they were a company they couldn't support and wouldn't do business with anymore. And apparently they were doing just fine without them.

Let's be honest here, they already showed how much they care about the customers when they raise prices every year, upped the prices of the rule book and the codices, and even went so far as to release a supplemental army book for Eldar putting the full cost just for the Eldar books at over $100. I'm sorry, but for that money, I bought the main Warmachine rulebook, a starter set and some extra models giving me all of the rules I needed to learn the game and a legal army to play it with. For less than the cost of the main Warhammer rulebooks. And aside from the Warmachine rulebook being paperback instead of hardcover, the quality is fucking great.

But don't get me wrong: if they'd like to continue gouging their customers some more I'm all for it. I imagine it will result in me having some more people to play Warmachine with.

 

[Vivi22]

They upped prices, reduced model quality and began aggressively stone walling third party resellers, this has hurt sales. At the same time, competition is increasing and a whole bunch of miniature gamers I know are buying different brands and just playing them to old 40k rules, because that's fun to them.

In response GW are going to cut staff numbers to one guy per store?!?

Seriously, what the hell is he supposed to do? I've run a one man shop (a petrol station) and it's hard work when you don't have a regional manager armed with a sales target, model displays to build/rotate and customer games to run.

With one guy in store just how are they going to run games and models anyway? The work load on the guys (soon to be guy) in my local GW store is way beyond one man just from those, does this mean that they're about to get cut too? I can't see many customers through the door if GW stores start looking Lord of the Rings themed Model Zones (who incidentally, went bust last year).

This sounds suspiciously like someone trying to maximise short term profits before gutting the business.

The thing I find ironic about dropping stores down to one person is that when they put a stop to online stores selling their stuff in Canada part of the reason they claimed was because online stores don't help to build the community and get the game out there by demonstrating it to people and what not. Which is silly because miniwargaming did more for me with their low prices and preponderance of bat reps and video tutorials and the like than my local store ever did.

But if the goal is to have people going to local stores to get demos of the games, how the hell is that going to work with one person there? You can't help demo a game for someone if you've got to go behind the counter every few minutes to ring in an order for a customer, or check stock in the back room, or any number of other things that happen on a daily basis that will have to take priority over demonstrating the game because people are their ready to hand you money without taking up a lot of your time.

GW are utter morons and hypocrites.

 

[omega 616]

Along the same lines as others have said, if they just dropped the prices they would be fine but it's like they can't think further than 1 step ahead.

"we need more money, so we need less staff and a larger profit margin on everything."

Half the prices (or more) and your business will flourish, I think warhammer stuff is really cool but that cost is very prohibitive!

 

[Starke]

Then maybe you shouldn't have kept canceling lines like Invasion and Space Hulk. (Yes, I know FFG pulled the plug on Invasion, not GW, but let me express my irritation.)

 

[gigastar]

Maybe if this keeps up theyll end up doing the right thing out of desperation.

Probably the worst way to do the right thing, but one step forward after a dozen backwards somersaults has got to be an improvement.

 

[Albino Boo]

The results are consistent with a large number of bricks and mortar retailers over the last quarter. Large number of them are hurting and games workshop is just one of the crowd.

 

[Starke]

Along the same lines as others have said, if they just dropped the prices they would be fine but it's like they can't think further than 1 step ahead.

"we need more money, so we need less staff and a larger profit margin on everything."

Half the prices (or more) and your business will flourish, I think warhammer stuff is really cool but that cost is very prohibitive!

The irony is, if they cranked out individual customizable action figures to the mass toy market, they'd probably be making bank. So long as they remembered to keep the Slanesh Cultists and some of the Dark Eldar and Dark Elves as premium purchases from other sources.

 

[GonzoGamer]

The miniatures have always been expensive. The roblem I have is with each new edition of the rules, they require more and more miniatures for a game.
My friend and I still play sometimes but we use old rules.

 

[Weaver]

well, gamer's workshop, perhaps if you didn't gouge the prices for your figurines as much as you do, people would be more likely to buy them. I dont' play the game, but I have a few friends who do. They tell me the prices keep going up to the point where they would rather find a cheaper miniature game then continue to invest in Warhammer.

I literally stopped playing because of the constant price increases.

Well done, GW; this was nothing but inevitable and wholly predictable.

 

[Siege_TF]

One of the reasons it`s so expencive, and everyone`s getting shorted is that everything`s made in Britain. One of the reasons everything`s made there is that when they tried China it took less than three months before cheap knockoffs started appearing in the market, and the quality of some of their technical supplies dropped; Imperial Primer and Liquid Greenstuff in particular. Not that they could have expected that from a fine, upstanding country like FUCKING CHINA (no offense to the people living there, or people of Chinese decent).