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Games Workshop Tries to Crack Down on Internet Sales
heirodule writes "In this messageboard posting internet retailer The warstore says he was contacted by Games Workshop, maker of miniature wargames such as Warhammer 40,000 and the Lord of the Rings Battle Game. GW will be refusing to distribute their product to retailers who sell over the internet after July 1. That's bad enough, but they cited the problem of IP violations (like people posting pictures of their products?) as part of the rationale. The claim is that for GW, this has nothing to do with internet sales offering discounts (yeah, right) but with the 'experience' that GW wants customers to have (of coming into their own stores and getting a hard sell)." The nearest Game Workshop store to me is a 1 hour, 10 minute drive, according to their store locator. The Usenet thread may be of interest.
The newsgroup post says this:
"Also effective July 15th, no stores besides their own will be permitted to sell GW products on the internet."
I guess I'm missing something here.
www.games-workshop.com has an online store at their site.
Maybe they fear competition?
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
Is because their retail dealers are screaming about internet (and before the net, mail order dealers,) undercutting them on price. That's the only reason for a manufacturer to take this kind of action, every other excuse is smoke and fluff.
If they survive the drastic drop in sales (which always happens when companies do this,) they'll be back on the net shortly. How quickly it happens depends on how much of their sales came from Internet sources. If internet sales accounted for much of their revenue they'll be back quickly; if not, they may just fade away. They don't have enough retail exposure (enough retailers carrying their stuff) to pretend the play the mass market game.
Try Their Site
I'm sure they have one-click shopping...
I wish I could filter out the annoying Pickens articles...
You will still be able to buy on-line - but only directly from GW.
According to the usenet article by Neal of Warstore, GW informed him that:
Also effective July 15th, no stores besides their own will be permitted to sell GW products on the internet.
Looks like they want to contol all internet sales of their products.
Mark
I wish I could remember the marketing term for this. The reasoning is that if a customer can get a product for much less off the internet than in a store, they will waste the stores time getting information on the product(demonstrations and comparisons) and then buy the product online. Because of this, the store will stop carrying that brand of equipment. Compare the price of a laptop on a companies website to the price for the exact same laptop in a store. It's the same principle, keeping your supply chain happy and free from the fear of being undercut. Before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, none of this is my opinion, it's from an MBA marketing textbook.
I worked at Circuit City years back and if people had the slightest idea what the mark-up was on some of the AV equipment/Accessories they buy, they would probably be physically ill. To go really off topic for a second, the items with the highest percent mark-up are batteries. That's the reason they are placed all over the store. Just some useless FYI ramblings.
I'm thinking that if they come after us for playing their games without using their miniatures, the best thing to do would be to invent different rules and keep them under an open content license. After that, companies can compete to sell minis for the new open ruleset.
*ahem*
http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/
An Open Gaming Content minatures system would be great. Unfortunatly, no one's done one yet.
For instance, the rules say that you can only use Games Workshop-licensed minatures in games. While you're just playing with your friends it's one thing, but if you want to field three land raiders or something, you have to shell out the $50 each for those model kits. (They're pretty high quality plastic models, but they don't have very many pieces at all, so you're paying strictly for licensing/the name. A similar model from testors or someone would be like eight bucks.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Are you sure they have the 'right' to do it? In many countries policies like this (limiting resale to certain outlets, setting a minimum price, etc) are considered anticompetitive and subject to investigation if the company concerned has a large market share.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Games Workshop is once again trying to funnel money to their own retail stores and their own web site, rather than independent retailers. They have a consistent history, from the late eighties, when I started to play their games, of screwing independents whenever possible- for a while they were forcing game stores to become "Chapter Approved" to sell their stuff, which means you sign an agreement giving them more money.
This policy of only them being allowed to sell their merchandise via the Internet is just more of the same.They are doing their best to become the Microsoft of the gaming world, and it's the reason I quit buying things from them ten YEARS ago. It's a damn shame, too, because their creative arm is the best in the business, by far. I made the switch to pen and paper games, like Gurps, and eventually computer games.
I think as Games Workshop continues to alienate their customers with sketchy sales practices, aggressive pricing, and constantly re-releasing newer versions of old models, forcing a collector to re-buy his army every few years to participate in tournaments, they will eventually piss off their players to the point that they will seek other things to do with their spare time. There's no shortage of other options, including intelligent, geek-friendly gaming companies like Steve Jackson Games. [I have no affiliation, I just think they're cool.]
Eagles may fly, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
There are plenty of mini rules sets available on the web. My favorite is Evil Stevie's Pirate Game.
I played Warhammer & Warhammer 40k for a long while but never really bought GW models. I would buy a few then looked at alternative model companies to bolster my armies with. The only GW game I have spent alot of money on was Necromunda. Which I feel was one of the best Table top games made. Of course GW canceled Necromunda after they realized that after a player bought one or 2 gangs he really didn't need to buy much else. Its a very similar issue to Warmaster. When they released it you could by boxed Armies that were fairly cheap. But now you can''t by preboxed armies. You have to buy individual blisters to create an army and that can be expensive.
I did try to get into Warzone for a while since its rules seemed to flow better than WAR40k 2nd & 3rd. Plus you could get an enitre army dirt cheap. Warzone was bought out byt sombody who was planning a massive release at retail stores but that was the last I heard of them.
Now for the more shady characters out there I recently looked into casting my own minis. While gathering info I found a booklet that describes how to copy any minature made out of metal. After you make a mold the cost per mini came to 3-15 cents.
This has always been GW policy. Several years ago I owned and operated a hobby shop that had both a B&M and internet prescence. GW would not sell to me if I told them that I would sell their products online. They also have difficult restrictions on minimum orders and such.
The simple solution was just to buy from a wholesaler. GW is one of the few manufacturers that will sell direct to a retailer anyway. Almost all other lines are purchased via wholesalers. The benefit to dealing direct was a slightly better discount. (MSRP -%40 vs MSRP - %30 if my memory serves me). In all likelihood online dealers will still be able to buy thorugh wholesalers, they will simply be forced to either charge a little more or accept a little bit thinner margin on these products
If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
1. Saturate the retail market with retail stores (currently australia is the only market that is saturated).
2. Increase their own internet sales for the times that the local retailer doesn't carry the mini that the customer wants.
Not only do they already have the monopoly on their games, they also have a very strict retailer ordering policy with high minimum orders and desplay and stocking requirements. This forces retailers to buy insane amounts of mini's that nobody buys leaving 1000's of their wholesale dollars tied up in these worthless figs. Summary: GW subsidizes their mall locations as advertising to give the players the 'experience' while making their money off their internet sales and by making the independant 'local stores' pay for them with large orders for stuff that nobody buys.
Note to GW: You can't "close the internet" to much of anything.
Sure, they'll be able to stop people from using their images. Sure, they can refuse to sell to retailers who sell online. But they can't stop you from selling used stuff, or reselling new stuff, with your own pictures. Ultimately, I think they'll end up realizing that it's a futile effort. After a few thousand angry letters from their customers, and sharply decreased sales, I'm sure they'll come around
The rules aren't the core issue. Other games have released the rules for free - VOID is a big example (very popular at our local store in the midwest US). The problem is in the miniatures themselves. Information may want to be free, but how do you "free" sculpts, casting, molds, molten metal, etc.? You could go the route that Reaper has done with CAV and make a mold from a CAD file, but that's an expensive route. Even if you freely share your designs, how would you "print" them out into white metal or even resin?
When was this, exactly?
Back cover of my 1st edition Player's Handbook says $15. And most of my 2nd edition boxed sets are $20.
While $30 today may be reasonsable, "back in the day" I don't think this was the case.
It's still dark. Humanity is constantly battling for its existence against Chaos, but the human Empire is a religious-fascist hegemony which self-destructively purges dissent and heresy, through a perpetual Inquisition. Science is a thing of the past and artisans (re)produce technology with no knowledge of how it works. It almost makes the Orcs' destructive nihilism look at least honest.
But yes, it's very much marketed to 12 year olds.
Freedom: "I won't!"
channel conflict is the term your looking for, although I don't see it as a problem
http://reapermini.com/
You're not kidding. All of GW's promotional literature refers to it as 'The games workshop hobby'- little or no mention of role-playing, table-top gaming, or the idea that anyone other than GW might have ever thought of it. In addition to the numerous 'official' rules that GW has for retailers, I have heard from employees, owners, and managers of several independent or semi-independent (part of a non-GW chain) hobby shops that GW has a habit of 'loosing' orders from shops that don't stick to the party line (MSRP, for instance).
This is all heresay, of course, but a number of hobby shops in my area have exited the GW market entirely because they could no longer make a profit on it; they were being forced into ordering too much stock from GW, and then felt intimidated into selling it at prices that kept it from moving. They also have probably the highest 'churn rate' (rate of introducing 'new and improved' versions of products, and then discontinuing/depricating old ones) of any gaming company I've ever seen. They ban any miniature more than a few years old from any 'official' competition (cons, tournaments)- not old rules mind you, but old lumps of metal that look almost exactly like the new lumps of metal. Now, only the most dedicated of fans care a whit about these nerd-fests, and these are the people who have invested years, hours, and cash by the fistful in the hobby. And those are the poor saps getting shut out in the cold by GW.
The basic truth that a lot of people feel is that they no longer care about anyone old enough to notice or care about these things; they want to get 10 year olds hooked on it for two or three years, have their parents burn through a couple hundred buck at every holiday/birthday, and then chuck the whole thing in the trash in time for the next product cycle to start. Which is a shame, because long ago GW produced some of the most interesting games on the market (there are episodes of the old Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game that are still classics), but much of their new material (except for that produced by licensees like the all-too shortly lived Hogshead, and that under extreme conditions of creative restriction) is schlock- a conscious choice to aim at the least common attention span. If we're lucky, they'll draconian policy themselves into a turnaround when they realize there's not much money in being overpriced and disliked. . . but I'm not putting any money on it- just like I stopped giving GW any money when it became clear they were getting worse instead of better with regard to both their product and their policies.
A deal in which a retailer agrees not to operate an e-commerce site in exchange for the ability to purchase the supplier's goods -- part of a class of contracts broadly known as "non-price vertical restraints" -- is subject to the "rule of reason:" the proscription is examined in conjunction with the competitive state of the market to determine if the activity is illegal.
Generally speaking, these contracts have been upheld; see, e.g., O.S.C. v. Apple, 792 F.2d 1464, 1469-70 (9th Cir. 1986) and H.L. Hayden Co. v. Siemens, 879 F.2d 1005, 1014 (10th Cir., 1989), both upholding the ability of suppliers to contractually foreclose dealers' ability to sell products via mail-order.
However, there is a caveat: since GW operates its own e-commerce site, it's in horizontal competition with its dealers. This doesn't automatically mean that the restraint becomes horizontal (and, indeed, the penumbra of antitrust law suggests it does not), but it does give some squeaking room for lawyers who want to challenge those restrictions.
Nonetheless, the preponderance of the law is on GW's side, especially since (unless things have changed in the decade or so since I last played a tabletop game) the market is very competitive. It's very unlikely to my mind that a successful challenge to this restraint could be mounted.
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
Poorhammer is a game made up by myself and some of my poor friends. What you do is buy plastic Army men, aliens, robots, dinosaurs, cowboys, lego-men, whatever, make up rules for them, and fight to the death. We based our rules off of the actual Warhammer rules.
Strange, a black car just pulled into the drivew
I have a friend who used to do phone sales to stores, over an area that spanned several states. He worked in Baltimore with all of the guys who do sales to stores for the whole country.
He always said that Games Workshop chooses to do things the high-end way. Good materials for their models, much better sculpting (I mean, seriously, just *compare* them, and you'll see what I mean), etc. They *know* that their stuff costs way more, and that's the way they *choose* to do business. Call them the Mercedes of the tabletop gaming world, if you will. And their growth rate, even with internet retailers, even with crappy knock-offs, has been phenomenal.
Having said that, I never played much, because it's more money than I'm willing to shell out for that kind of casual hobby.
According to my friend, the problem he had with his stores was they always want to half-a$$ it. They want to carry only a portion of the figures, so when the new blood elves come out (or whatever), Joe Kid can't find them at his local store. They don't get enough of the new stuff. They don't run tournaments. They have stuff from years back and will sell it to newbies without telling them what they're getting. Basically, retailers want to stock GW products as cheaply as possible, but they cut their own throats by giving the kids a crappy introduction to the game and putting a lot of hurdles in the way of getting new figures.
My friend said that for those stores who were willing to do it right (which seems like quite a risk to the storeowner, because stocking the whole line is expensive), he had *never* had a store that didn't grow quite rapidly. He worked the western US, and had a store in the middle of Utah (and not SLC), with practically no population, that did great while stocking the whole line, running tournaments, etc. My friend firmly believed that they could make *any* retail store successful, if the store would just do it right. And yet it was still a constant battle against cheapskates who were giving people a bad image of Warhammer.
So, GW takes that situation into their own hands, with their own retail stores. And on the internet, it's the same deal. This guarantees that the web site stocks the whole line, all the time, including the new stuff. The information is complete and up-to-date. The stuff is shipped in a way that conforms to certain standards, and so on.
At least, that's the line I got, from somone who used to be on the inside. He left a couple of years ago.