GW Annual Report 2015/16

The annual report is out and makes for some pretty depressing reading. In the year that they killed Warhammer and launched Age of Sigmar their profits fell 27% (pre-royalties). And the report indicates that AoS is selling more than Warhammer was for several years, which implies that sales on their other systems are falling by huge amounts, despite some (by GW standards) amazing deals in such things as Betrayal at Calth, Deathwatch, the Getting Started sets and Imperial Knights: Renegades!

The (ridiculously) massive investment in their new webstore last year has paid off in spades though with a 2% drop in sales!

I don't know much about how businesses function, but common sense tells me that's not good. I hope they manage to get their act together.

To be fair, they still made ~10m quid profit last year before royalties but the underlying trend is, and has been for several years now, falling sales and falling profits. The fall in profits was disguised for a few years by cutting costs but they've pretty much cut every cost that can be cut now and they're still facing falling sales.

Other than through IP licensing, they are losing money hand over fist. Sales falling year after year despite, in most people's opinions, producing some of the best models they've ever produced tends to lead me to believe that maybe, just maybe, it's not just models that people are buying; it's games! And sadly, those games just don't cut it anymore with the extra competition from the likes of X-wing, Infinity etc. Hopefully the new FAQs are a sign of a new direction for the games side of the business. Fingers crossed!

Depressing to see that Kirby is still raking in so much money, still is authoring the report's preamble, still uses the phrase "My corporate structure", and that they have a 72-year old non-executive director for a gaming company in this day and age.

My own sentiment (admittedly gut feelings) on this are that last year still reflected heavily the influence of the Tom Kirby era, and that although Kevin Roundtree has been doing a fantastic job since taking the reigns at the beginning of 2015, the lag effect of Kirby will be such that it will possibly be 2017 at least before there is any noticeable uptick in the results.

At the beginning of 2015, everyone was soundly pissed off with GW for a number of reasons. Yes, they killed off WHFB and brought in AoS and some astounding models to accompany it, but 40K is their bread and butter and years of stupid decisions and corporate arrogance, eye-gouging price hikes and of late, mind-numbing, incohesive and continuous rule changes and new book publishing not only dampened many players' enthusiasm for 40K, but actually drove them away to other game systems.

I saw this locally, where the first wave of rage-quitters were followed last year by a number of dedicated veterans. Roundtree is doing an amazing job, price increases aside, and the seeming new direction with the codexes and campaign books and the release of 8th next year will re-boot the whole system, plus bring in new people. The stand alone games and special models seem to be very popular and that will hopefully continue, too.

Just over a month ago, something unprecedented happened here on the west coast of Canada. The head of operations for North America visited the main store in the Vancouver area for a day with Jes Goodwin. They had been scouting a new store location nearby and would head for Tacoma the following day. No one from GW admin, in the UK or North America, had ever set foot here before, and everyone was extremely excited and grateful that they finally had. Both were super amiable and made themselves available for most of the afternoon and into the evening - Jes had an endless line-up of fans the entire time, signing countless DE, CWE and Harlie books, plus the odd model, sword and other items. I had never seen so many DE players in this neck of the woods.

The one thing I heard from gamers whilst I was there was how much they appreciated the change in attitude with GW and the new directions they were embarking upon. So, while they may be down and could stay that way for a while, and many people have moved on finally from 40K, I think they will ultimately be OK.

One fly in the ointment, however, now that I think of it, is that last year's results should also reflect the popularity of the FW Heresy system and range. That seems like it should have been a huge financial success, so if they are down so far with that in the mix, ouch.

Gobsmakked wrote:

Just over a month ago, something unprecedented happened here on the west coast of Canada.  The head of operations for North America visited the main store in the Vancouver area for a day with Jes Goodwin.  They had been scouting a new store location nearby and would head for Tacoma the following day.  No one from GW admin, in the UK or North America, had ever set foot here before, and everyone was extremely excited and grateful that they finally had.  Both were super amiable and made themselves available for most of the afternoon and into the evening - Jes had an endless line-up of fans the entire time, signing countless DE, CWE and Harlie books, plus the odd model, sword and other items.  I had never seen so many DE players in this neck of the woods.

The one thing I heard from gamers whilst I was there was how much they appreciated the change in attitude with GW and the new directions they were embarking upon.

I can only hope that enough of them begged, bargained, pleaded, bribed or tortured him to fix our bloody codex!

There was a bit of that going on, yes.

I still have to wonder, when it comes to AoS, what the actual numbers on the different boxes that sold were. How many of the old Boxes contributed to the "success" of the first year of AoS? How many of those old boxes were purchased as, "get them while they are still available" for use in non AoS games? While the rules are being revised, from my understanding and that will also have an impact on the future of AoS, I'm still skeptical that the overall success was because people liked AoS as initially released and had more to do with people grabbing things before they have to proxy to finish armies for Fantasy Battle.

I know many of these things can't actually be answered. I have heard from some that the Sigmarines made great Space Marine Conversions for instance, and without being able to poll every singe person who purchased it as to what they purchased those boxes for (be it the old or the new miniatures) we will never know if it was for use in FB, AoS, or conversions for other systems.