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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.
So if you sell GW stuff on the internet but don't have pictures, just descriptions you should be ok. People can always go to the GW site to see what the stuff looks like, or read White Dwarf.
graspee
GW will find out the hard way that people will not buy what they can not access. There are no GW shops where I live and probably never will be. The only options I have is to either buy on-line or have a friend shop for me, provided I have a friend near a GW shop.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I hate this "you have to buy from a local retailer" BS. It's like this with a lot of AV equipment. I can't mailorder the speakers I want...they want me to get ripped off at a local dealer. So, I end up ordering from a grey market dealer for 1/2 MSRP.
The problem isn't with the Internet. If you want to charge more locally do it, but I better get some good service for the extra money. Plus, you better stock the exact model I want and not take 3 weeks to get it.
How do these places stay in business? The one near me (about 1 mile if it's any comfort) is in a mall with rather onerous rent. There is a comic book store a few miles away that seems to have the lock on geeks wanting to play games. But how do you pay mall rent by selling a a couple of miniatures? Is there really that much money in these things?
This sort of move (and I haven't read the article, so bite me if I base this solely on the blurb here:) is the 'head stuck in the sand' method that we lambast the RIAA and MPAA, among others, for. I see two possible rationalizations. First, Games Workshop needs to keep paying those mall/strip center rents. Second, they plan on selling online and don't want the competition.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
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
1. Sell millions through internet "e-tailers"
2. Realize that too much profit is bad (for whatever reason)
3. Quit selling to "e-tailers"
4. ???
5. Bankruptcy!
Trolling is a art,
Hey it's not like their entire customer base is hot-headed, demanding nerds with Napoleon fantasies...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
That's why my friends and I would buy the set, sell the minatures on, and then make cardstock chits for our battles. We just played a 3,000 point Warmaster battle for the total investment of the rules and the 2002 annual (about $50).
Suppose that's a DMCA violation because I made an apparatus to bypass their propriatary miniatures?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
When I was in highschool and playing WH and the like there was a big split in Games Workshop that resulted in the creation of Warzone which is basically a WH clone but the cost of the figures was MUCH cheaper and the quality much higher. Games Workshop drove their modelers from their company by making the game too expensive to be played by your average High School student and making the working environment intollerable. Games Workshop seems to think they can do whatever they want and the customers will still buy their overpriced product and up till now they have been correct, maybe this will be the straw that broke the camels back. Question: How does this look on a legal front? How can a distributer say that the location of a store is grounds for not distributing to that store? I don't know anything about the relevent laws and thought someone might.
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.
They also have decided that electritic lights and paper money don't give the GW customer the right 'experience'. So from now on they will be using torches and only excepting gold coins (or in the case of japanese made wargames, only gil.)
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
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.
Finding God in a Dog
GW used to be a much different organization. As they became bigger and bigger, it seems like they really lost touch with the gamers, and they kept targetting a younger and younger crowd. I mean, if you can, get your hands on a copy of "Rogue Trader" -- and then compare the feel of the rules to the ones from the latest edition of WH40k. They've added more models, and yeah, they're better models, but it feels like they've surrounded them in a web of dense, arbitrary rules.
I suppose that's necessary, for the climate of gaming nowadays. It's much more important to win than to play, which it didn't feel like when I first got into WH/WH40k oh-so-long ago.
Well, anyway, this doesn't surprise me. TSR went through a phase like this, before WotC bought them out. Remember when all the online D&D supplements were curiously void of any actual references to D&D? I think GW is making that same transition -- from a company made of gamers to a company selling to gamers.
boy am i glad that i invested in one of those 3d resin printers... I've been downloading all of Games Workshop's models off of usenet, where some dude with one of those 3d scanners has been posting them! I have all of GW's catalog and the only money i've spent is on the "printing" resin! Eat that RIAA!
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
Intellectual property protection by not allowing someone to sell a paper book or metal miniatures online? Bwah?
Complete and total lunacy. Howling at the moon. I know Game Workshop has been setting their lawyers loose on people posting PDFs of their books online, and I can certainly understand that, but this is just plain crazy. Saying no one but you can sell on the Internet is a sure way to drive the people who sell your products into the grave. If Games Workshop gets hurt by this (stores just stopping selling GW products) maybe it won't get too far, but I doubt it. If I ran a hobby shop selling Games Workshop material, I'd probably just start closing down, selling off all my stock cheap, and get into a stable, sane industry. Once Games Workshop gets away with it, Wizards, Wizkids, and White Wolf will too, and then no hobby store worth patronizing will be able to have any kind of Internet presence other than "we are located here" with a poorly drawn dragon on their logo. I hope that doesn't happen. I hope GW gets slapped hard, but I doubt it. Their stuff is too popular.
Way to try and turn back the clock on an entire industry.
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.'"
What GW is probably trying to do is protect their resellers' profit margins.
For instance, what a lot of people do is talk to the local guy, use up all his time and ideas, and then buy online from someone who is cheaper because they don't spend all day helping customers and providing a value-add. Therefore, you see the people who were providing all the quality customer service go out of business because they can't spend all that time helping people and compete with the low price guys. The same thing is in retail computer space, that's why the level of customer service is so abysmal IMHO. People would go pick the brains of the people who would spend time with them, and then go and order online or from some cheap guy that doesn't help them.
So, this makes it so that the stores which ostensibly put in the effort to educate customers and generate sales get crushed and the stores that add no value do well... BUT once the stores that provided the value go away, then you tend to get the whole manufacturer's sales go down because no one is helping the customers. You'll get some guys that will keep buying, but you'll not get many new customers.
THere are exceptions to this, and it sounds like they do need more resellers if their nearest one is over an hour away for someone, but they probably do have channel management reasons for wanting to make all their people compete evenly.
So now GW is doing the right thing by making it more difficult for gamers to buy their products. This will grow the market by... uh... wait... by... uh... .
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
This is one of the most colossally stupid business decisions I have ever heard of. Miniature gaming is an *extremely* niche market with alot of competition. Cutting off any market share at all just makes no sense whatsoever. Yes I understand that you can still get it online through their website, but it's still remarkably limiting.
.02
I can't imagine where other game companies, like Mayfair, WOC, etc... would be if they forced you to buy from brick and mortar stores. I live in Chicago, and finding the exact game product you might be looking for at the time isn't always easy. To restrict access to your product (a product that only a few 1000 people may be purchasing at any one time) is just plain dumb.
just me
jeff
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.
I have to wonder if this isn't also part of a larger issue?
Namely, the creators of these fantasy/role-playing games and miniatures attained their initial glory and status in the "pre-Internet" era. (By that, I mean, John Q, Gamer wasn't actively using an Internet browser at home or playing many games online.)
Companies like TSR made oodles of cash selling D&D books at $30 a pop through the local hobby shops, and items like the minitatures were soon to follow.
Nowdays, the prevalence of computers,the net, and online gaming seems like it is eating into their market. I guess some companies adapted better than others. (Look at how TSR went into the computer simulation game business in a *big* way.) In general though, I suspect the changes are somewhat lost on them.
I can easily see how they'd view the web and computer gaming as "the enemy" - since it would seem to be drawing folks away from a world of using one's own imagination to game, while establishing a "concreteness" to the whole thing by the purchase of small figurines. (In the virtual world, you simply look at photos of your favorite characters - perhaps as wallpaper or screen savers? The games provide a multimedia experience so you don't need to imagine what some "dungeon master" is trying to describe to you with just words.)
I started participating in auctions online and collecting an army for roughly half the price of what I was paying at the store. My army grew to more than 120 pieces before GW decided "welp, it's time to change the Chaos rule book and all the minis so we can make more money selling people new versions of what they already have." Fortunately, I only played with friends and not in tournaments since they banned all older minis from the tournaments. I couldn't see any reason to go out and by another Blood Thirster of Khorne when the one I already had was adequate enough.
Even back in those days, GW was trying to strong arm online retailers and auctioners into not giving discount prices. If anything, those prices made it easier for GW to clear out their old stock to bring in the new line. I certainly never would have as many minis as I do now if I had to pay full retail on all of them. Seems like they only want to shoot themselves in the foot. I wonder what they would think about how I created molds and copied some of the minis I had bought for my own use ($6 a pop for infantry level guys gets rather rough).
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
Seriously.
Little plastic or metal figurines. Once the original has been designed, you just churn them out by the millions. Most are just derivations of older designs anyway.
So why do these things cost C$30-C$50 each??!!
Unpainted.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Seriously, pardon my ignorance, but why exactly do you need to consult with a salesperson about buying miniatures? What value do they add? Consulting a salesperson on a computer if you don't know much about them? I can buy that. But purchasing miniatures for a game? I don't get it.
I have actually been in a GameWorks, I went to lunch with a couple of friends who were into it and they went in to buy some stuff. To tell you the truth, the place kind of creeped me out. And I didn't see anyone working too hard in there either.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Isn't it similar type of thinking (different actions and time) that caused TSR so much trouble. Produce dervitive products, rarely innovate, deal with not very good business partners, no major marketing effort( as in TV, or Newspapers, target sci-fi shows and college newspapers), failing to reach new customers. If GW wants to see what not to do, TSR from a few years ago would be ripe with examples.
Capitalism: unequal distribution of wealth
Socialism: equal distribution of poverty
In the United States if you demand that a retailer sell something at a certain price, or you try to force the issue, you can go to jail.
That's why it called the manufactureres Suggested Retail Price or MSRP. GW is the manufacturer, they sell to distributers who sell to retailers, who sell to the public.
The problem is that GW doesn't like the fact that the mini's they make for $.25 and are sold to the distributer for $2.00 are being sold by internet retailers for $2.25 +S/H. Becuase at a GW owned store and at most Brick and Mortor stores, they go for $6.00.
Ted Tschopp
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
I have a close friend who owns a Hobby Store which is the local Games Workshop re-seller. It is hard for them to make a living with the availability of cheep online stuff. Most sell at a 10-20 percent discont, which is the REAL problem.
You can always buy online from GamesWorkshop web site it self. There is no dicount however.
I hope the Hobby Store can stay in business, they offer tables to play and gather. I lecture the kids at the store all the time when they brag about buying this and that online for 50-75% off. You should support the hobby store or not play there.
Eventually the trend will be one source for these things, and no local places selling. This is bad for the economy.
Think globally, shop locally.
-Richard
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
okay, so i used to work for GW (I actually did the casting of the miniatures at their baltimore site - mind that i said casting and not sculpting). a friend of mine headed up the north american mail order dept. he showed me some numbers one day and explained the how-and-why of gw.
basically, they give crap-all about retail stores (their own or the indy's the push into being chapter approved). it's all just exposure. as he explained it to me, 80% of their revenue came in through mail-order (this was '95). 80% in north american, 80% asia/australia, and 80% in europe. at the time (and most likely now) they were the largest mail-order gaming company in the world. period.
so what's changed? nothing. you can buy online and i'm quite sure that gw isn't interested in anyone else profitting off their very lucractive mail/online-order business without shelling out some serious cash to become "chapter approved". it's just their business strategy - plain and simple.
that said, i used to be able to buy the miniatures by weight. that means an eight dollar item normally cost me about six cents. models were 50% off. but i left the company after being told that i needed to paint the "games workshop" way or not field an army. which pissed me off because i paint very well, just not their way. gw is the most ridiculously overpriced gaming company ever. this part of my rant is going nowhere fast...
to summarize: gw + mail/online-order = profit.
that's really all there is to it. honest.
The problem is that brick & moarter stores cost a lot more to run than your average Internet shop. A low traffic location will cost you upwards of $200/month. Then you have to worry about keeping the store manned. (Remember, minimum wage means minimum quality) Also, all that equipment being demonstrated sucks up electricity. Even when it's "off." (It's really in standby) Then add shoplifting to your list of costs. There's probably a few things I'm missing here.
You can get managed hosting at Rackspace and a self-storage unit(for use as a warehouse) in your local area for much less than that, and you can do all of the work on your own time, at your own hours, at your own wage.
What's this Submit thingy do?
GW wants to ban ALL 3rd party internet vendors and do it themselves--they want the WHOLE pie to themselves. Perhaps they are trying to become "vertically integrated" (ie. greedy bastards). Theoretically, making, distributing, marketing and selling a product through one big company is supposed to reduce risk of IP theft, possibility of other entities that you depend on going under and so on.
However in todays economy (fast moving, information based, global) "vertical integration" is ineffective and obsolete except in the case of VERY big corporations like GM--and even they outsource (if there is a problem with the outsource, they have enough pull to affect their management or pull out, or even take them over). The "razor blade" theory is also becoming so much bunk too (giving away whe razor and ripping us off on the blades).
In the computer industry I can think of examples where the tactics GW used completely backfired. MITS created the PC industry with the Altair--they were the only player in the game, but success very quickly brough competitors (Proc Tech, IMSAI, Cromemco, Apple, Commodore, Tandy...). MITS tried to aggessivley protect their IP (namely the bus which became known as the S100 bus--competitors started making peripheral cards for it and soon make S100 PCs of their own). Not only was MITS uncooperative with 3rd party vendors--they went as far as to threaten lawsuit. On the sales and marketing side, MITS attempted to make all their dealers exclusive MITS dealers--but soon most broke off that deal as IMSAI (and later Apple) gave them sweeter deals and didn't demand exclusivity.
GW is doing this now. They are vigourously defending their "IP" to the point of crippling their marketing (they don't even want people to put up pictures on their websites---turning their nose up at free advertising!). Furthermore, hey are trying to control everything--they want to have the only website and a bunch of stores with nothing but their own product. Like MITS, GW isn't exactly a high profile company. Also like MITS, their product could be duplicated relatively easily (not cloned mind you, but if GW alientates customers work-alike products will fill the void). GW could be like MITS in a third way in 2 or 3 years--completely gone.
This vertical strategy only stands a good chance of working if you have BIG resources and can take BIG risks. Even Texas Instruments failed with the TI99/4a. From the start they employed a vertical strategy (along with the "razorblade" strategy when sales were slow). Before TI discontinued the machine, they controled manufacturing (the thing was loaded wil all TI chips---CPU, VDP, memory, logic), distribution and sales (making it a bit more difficult to find than say a Commodore, Atari or Apple) and software/peripheral/accessories (they figured they could sell the computer for much less than it cost to make and hose customers on software and hardware accessories--the 3rd party TI market was basically non-existent). TI couldn't pull it off and lost millions. Ironically, in the couple of years AFTER TI pulled out of the market, a small 3rd party industry blossomed around the TI.
If a giant like TI couldn't pull it off, how can a specialty shop like GW handle the whole pie?
If there's a copyright violation, my guess is that it's either due to all the stores all using the same images that the manufacturer actually made, or they're using the manufacturer's trademark logos, as opposed to simply using the name as part of an item's description. The stuff about copyright violation is probably either bullshit, or it's something easy to avoid infringing. A seller can just get a $200 digital camera and take pictures of the merchandise themselves, and that's that. Use the manufacturer's name to describe who made the product, rather than using their logo or possibly confusing customers about whether you represent that manufacturer or not.
Setting heinous terms of sale, though, is probably do-able. If you want to buy a bunch of stuff from the manufacturer at below list price (so that you can resell it at a profit), then they can get you to agree to whatever terms they want to try to get from you, in exchange for that lower price. If you don't like the terms (which might say that selling over the net is prohibited) then you don't have to buy the items. I suspect they'll get away with that. But as everyone else is pointing out, the thing that they'll "get away with" will probably not really be to their advantage. (Just as if I were to put an ad in the paper saying I'm selling a Honda Civic, Honda can't do a damned thing about it.)
I don't see why this is a big deal or how "EVERY INTERNET BUSINESS" is threatened. And I can't imagine there are any serious barriers to someone else opening a manufacturing business that does the same thing and competes and blows these guys to hell It's not like there are patents on pouring molten pewter (or whatever these things use) into a mold, are there? (If there were, they would have expired centuries ago, no?) I bet this is a craft where the playing field is very level. (Now someone will shoot me down for my ignorance. Fine, show me.)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
channel conflict is the term your looking for, although I don't see it as a problem
Thought I'd take the opportunity to put my (british) 2p in. I used to play Warhammer 40k, dabbled with Adeptus Titanicus (think Mechwarrior but bigger and darker), and a number of the other GW games. Collected White Dwarf until about issue 130, with back issues down to about #20.
I gave up wargaming altogether at about age 13 when a blister of overscale lead minatures went from GBP 3 to GBP 4 overnight. I still think Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has one of the richest and most interesting backgrounds of any RPG (renaissance fantasy with Lovecraftian undertones would be the best description I can think of).
I do know a fair bit of the history of GW, both gleaned from the trade press and from conversations I've had with people who've met Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone (not the Steve Jackson of Illuminati:NWO, Car Wars, GURPS, etc fame). I've also met people who've applied for jobs with GW, both retail and creative. (I live in Birmingham, about an hour or so from GW's headquarters and design studios in Nottingham, UK.)
It would probably be fair to say that GW started the Apple of the gaming world, before morphing into the Microsoft-equivalent. It was started by a pair of hippies in a flat in London, making wooden chess and backgammon boards. I'm not too sure about the early years, but by the mid 1980's White Dwarf magazine was probably the best general roleplaying magazine available in the world, it covered AD&D, Call of Cthulhu, Runequest and many others large and small. The GW chain of shops stocked roleplaying games from a range of publishers, and minatures from Citadel (GW's subsidiary), and others. At some point Warhammer Battle appeared, as did a few other gems like UK editions of Call of Cthulhu, and Runequest; the Judge Dredd roleplaying game; and wonderful boardgames like Fury of Dracula, Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, and Blockmania. At this point in time they were seriously good roleplaying/wargaming shops, with a bloody good design studio turning out a range of quality product.
The aforementioned pair of hippies, Steve Jackson and Iain Livingstone got themselves a new hobby: writing Fighting Fantasy choose your own adventure books. This proved to be a fair bit more lucrative than running Games Workshop, so at some point in the mid to late 80's they sold up and over three or four years GW became the company you see today.
The basic marketing idea GW use these days is to catch'em young, preferably before the age of 10, and try to convince these kids that GW comprise the the known gaming universe. Hence the attempt to restrict distribution to sites that they control, to prevent impressionable young minds from realising that companies and people other than Games Workshop make cool and interesting games and minatures.
Even after switching all of their production over to lead-free metal a few years ago, which was a major re-tooling effort, the mark-up on minatures is pretty huge, especially when you have that much market share (kids pocket money is big business these days) and control over what minatures are fielded in competition/leagues, which are admittedly a good way to chill and meet people when you're a young geek. The move to more plastic minatures was mainly a cost-saving issue, as well as a way to break into a slightly younger market.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was licensed to Hogshead publishing, which was the best thing that ever happened to it (I was one of the people who waited 15 years for a supplement described in the first edition of the rulebook as 'in progress').
Anyway, I hope that gives you a little more insight into GW, personally I got back into minatures when I saw Flintloque, dammn good fun and easy to get started (between 6-12 minatures a side is a good skirmish, the rules work well with more players, each person controls their own squad of minatures. Plus, the minatures are way cool, Orc redcoats and Elven Voltigeurs, wargaming was meant to be this way.