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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...
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.
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.
channel conflict is the term your looking for, although I don't see it as a problem
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.