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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.
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.
I guess I'm missing something here.
www.games-workshop.com has an online store at their site.
Maybe they fear competition?
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Hey it's not like their entire customer base is hot-headed, demanding nerds with Napoleon fantasies...
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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?
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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.
This is an incredibly short-sighted decision that will ultimately cut GW off from a large number of customers. Every manufacturer has the right to do something like this, but they don't, for obvious reasons. Instead of merely saying "that's Capitalism," I'd say it's more of a short-term vs. long-term mistake...
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not sure how much expierence you have with war gamming but there are a lot of factors to take into account. Basically with Warhammer (and a lot of other games), you have several various 'factions'. Humans, Eldar, Orkz, Necron ect. Each faction tends to have different strengths and weaknesses. In those 'factions' you then have tons of different sub factions, also with things that they excel in and things that the do poorly in. For example Humans have the Space Marines and their various chapters. Within these sub-factions you now have several hundred different minatures to choose from, each on has different bonuses and negatives that need to be taken into consideration when fielding an army. Figuring out which faction best suits your playing style, and then which minatures will offer you the best bang for their fielding costs can be an awful lot of work. Just take a look at the many forums run for Warhammer, and all the army advice people ask for. Having someone close by, such as a neighborhood hobby store guy, that you can go in and chat to face to face about the various positives and negatives of a particular army you're thinking of fielding, and what he'd recommend against say a Skink horde is an invaluable resource. The thing is the majority of the players who play at a venue (some place that sells WH), buy from that venue to support it. The more assistance a particular venue offers, generally the more players will purchase from them. The thing with WH though is that from what I've seen, the majority of sales that do not happen from an actual retail location (neighborhood hobby store), take place on e-bay as resale. I'm curious how GW is going to deal with this type of competition.