Fascinating outsider report on GW AGM

Richard Beddard is the companies editor of Interactive Investor, and a columnist at Money Observer magazine, and a professional investor.  He recently attended GW's Annual General Meeting for the first time and wrote a column about his impressions as an outsider of the company and its future direction.

This report is contained in the link below and is not exactly encouraging for us enthusiasts.  It is an extremely interesting read, as are the many comments at the bottom of the page - for once, a rational discussion of the hobby and company, not the usual gamer diatribes.

One thing that stands out is GW's complete disassociation from its customers.  Their own Investor Report states that they do no demographic research or focus groups, yet they are comfortable stating that only 20% of customers buying their models are also gamers!  How any modern corporation could base its future strategies on such groundless facts is amazing.

And if you do not like what they are selling, you are not a customer!  The arrogance is astounding, and I hate to say it in this day and age, but to me this whole approach smacks of a very traditional British approach to sales (and I am not trying to be generally offensive here at all) that I thought had finally gone the way of the Dodo.

Check it out:

http://www.iii.co.uk/news-opinion/richard-beddard/games-workshop-agm%3A-relentless-profit-machine

This is a company with a huge amount of potential, that is ripe for a takeover and complete management turnaround.  How long do we have to wait?

I would be astonished if that 80/20 split is even vaguely accurate. I've been a GW customer for ~30 years and I don't think I've met more than a handful of people in a GW store who aren't gamers to a greater or lesser degree.

Count Adhemar wrote:

I would be astonished if that 80/20 split is even vaguely accurate. I've been a GW customer for ~30 years and I don't think I've met more than a handful of people in a GW store who aren't gamers to a greater or lesser degree.

Yeah that's total horse dip.

I really liked this read. We, as gamers, tend to be particularly hurt by GW's stupid claims unsupportive business model, but I liked the more objective opinion here. It's interesting, but not surprising that GW management have a long term plan and closed eyes/ears to any who challenge their ideas.

Oh well. I guess I'll keep going until they make 40k into Age of The Emperor.
I feel sorry for younger generations of potential gamers, though.

One thing I do like about GW's direction is that they have no interest in producing pre painted and put together models like X-wing, a distinguish difference between a toy and model. I don't want any kids under 13 in the hobby.

Richard Beddard wrote:

I’m told that the word “Game” in Games Workshop encourages the misconception that games are its business, but that only about 20% of Games Workshop’s customers are gamers. The rest are modellers and collectors. Maybe half of them think about playing now and then. The other half have no intention. People actually walk into the stores because they’re curious about modelling fantastic armies.

I think GW is missing the mark on this statement. Or at least that more of their customers would be gamers if the game was ... not a total mess.
I can only speak for my self when I say that the reason I started buying games workshop products was because, and only because I wanted to play the games. I am now one of those "mainly a modeller and collector that only occationally think about playing the game", but then I remember the rules and go back to painting with a little shudder and a sigh. That is what GW has made me. If the game was playable ( as dark eldar ) I'd be playing a LOT more than I do. I can't think of any company where such a large part of the customer base actively hates the people that makes the product they love.

FIFA?

Thor665 wrote:

FIFA?

^ ++!

Thor665 wrote:

FIFA?

Interesting read, it is unfortunate that it pretty much confirms several views I already had.

Its a very interesting read.
It really stuns me though that they are making decisions based on absolutely no research. Granted, I know this i the way its almost always been (at least in memory) but how can a company like this continue without fact checking its demographic? I sincerely doubt that collectors are anywhere near their main market, because collectors don't buy multiples of models. A collector only needs one of a squad, whereas a player needs many.
I've often thought GW had the worst marketing department on the face of the Earth, but this just really nails that in.

I'm sure the 20% figures was just plucked out of thin air as the company openly, even proudly, admits that they carry out no market research. If anything, I'd say it was the other way round, with 80% gamers and 20% collectors.

I've often wondered if the 20% figure (now confirmed to be made up) was just them trying to place justification as to the extremely high price for their rule books. We need to charge this amount as only about 20% of our customers buy them so printing costs are higher do to limited runs or some such non-sense.

Ita probably a contributor to that. But the codices are reqlly quite good. Not sure they're worth the AUD$80 we have to pay for them, but they're nice

I don't deny that the newer codices aren't well put together visually (have some gripes about rules and wording but that is a different discussion). Full color with lots of images borders and such makes for a great looking book. I'm just not sold on the price tag, digital copies are even worse as they are charging the same price as if it was a hard copy, I highly doubt the manufacturing and digital distribution costs are equal to the manufacturing and distribution expenses of the hard copies.

I'm with you 100% on that one, @CurstAlchemist
There's no chance it would cost the same. They'd lose money if that charged less for the digital copies, because their stats would predict a certain number for literature sales and everyone would stop buying the books.

I'm interested to know what the actual percentage of regular gamers to hobbyists and collectors is. I'd think it would be very hard for us to make a very accurate guess, since I'd expect that the gamers are much more likely to meet each other at stores, conventions, tournaments, and online. It stands to reason that there could be a large customer base who keeps to themselves and their immediate circle of friends that we would have no knowledge of here online. I don't think it's 80% hobbyists like they claim, but I'd be very surprised if it was even close to 80% regular gamers. It might seem like that to you if you're a regular gamer, but then your realm of experience is more heavily in gamer circles, which would surely skew your perception to some degree.

I'm mostly a hobbyist, not entirely out of choice, though I hope to play a lot more in the future when I have more minis painted. I started collecting minis around 1999 with an intent to also play, but my primary interest was definitely in the hobby side. I played a few games in high school, but stopped because the rule system was so screwed up that our friend group spent much of the time during a game arguing over rules. I more or less quit GW for many years, though I dabbled with some other games, but was drawn back into 40k when the Dark Eldar got their revamp and started building a large army, I've been working on it on and off since, with much more renewed interest lately having made some friends in the gaming community on Youtube. It wouldn't surprise me if a slight majority of people who've bought GW minis had a similar story, being somewhat interested in playing (or at least intending to play at some point, if not really every achieving that goal) but spending most of the time fiddling around with the miniatures.