Miniature Wargaming Sales in 2012 and 2013 – Rise of the Pre-Painted

How is the wargaming industry doing? Which games are hot, which games are not? Who is expanding, who is not? Is the wargaming market expanding or contracting?

Lots of interesting questions. Unfortunately, I cannot answer them here!

What I can do however, is some fun speculation based on some recent numbers from ICv2, a consulting/analyst outfit for the card game, video game and miniature game market.

ICv2 is where trend-watching has become a science.

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#1 – Games Workshop’s Stock-Dive & ICv2 Data

The “fix point” most people have is the nose dive by GW, revealed in their latest financials, which showed a drop in sales by around 12% in the six months leading up to December 1st.

Obviously, that is “not good” for Games Workshop. At the same time, it is only a single data point in the picture, mostly because only Games Workshop is a publicly listed company. It doesn’t answer the question of how Games Workshop’s absolute loss of sales compare relative to other companies, competitors and competing games, mostly because none of the others (e.g. Privateer, Mantic, Fantasy Flight, etc..) publish their financials.

The next best thing is ICv2, which has released a bunch of new numbers in March. But those “numbers”, of course, come from the survey of external analysis. They aren’t sales numbers straight from the books of the companies. ICv2 numbers are…

… based on interviews with retailers, distributors, and manufacturers.

Presumably, they also don’t include Kickstarter. So keep that in mind.

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#2 – Gaming Is Growing

So here is the good news. According to ICv2, gaming as a whole has been growing in 2013. The gaming/hobby market as a whole is up by 20% in 2013.

The “bad news” (more a caveat really), is that this is the “entire” hobby market, Magic the Gathering, Monopoly and all. How much this helps predict the growth/decline in the niche of miniatures being meticulously assembled and painted by hand, I have no idea.

Probably not much.

The hobby game market grew 20% in 2013, according to a new report inICv2’s Internal Correspondence #84, an increase over the 15% growth rate in 2012.  Games have now been growing for a half decade; 2013 was the fifth consecutive growth year, with the average growth rate over that period nearly 15% per year.

The hobby game market has nearly doubled since 2008, according to the report.

The increase in sales has provided profits that are being plowed back into the industry at the retail level, with growth in retail square footage, expansion of play space, and investment in better play experiences.

Collectible games and board games were driving the growth through the holiday season, with sales on market leader Magic: The Gathering continuing to rise… 

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 #3 – Non-Collectible Miniature Games Sales

The likes of Warhammer 40K and Warmachine are classed by ICv2 as “non-collectible miniature games”, in contrast to collectible such as M:TG. Not sure how much sense that makes (especially for X-Wing), but that’s how it goes.

Here’s the main reason I wrote this article, the run-down of 2012 and 2013.

Spring 2012 looks pretty much like “we knew” the miniature wargaming market to look like. Warhammer 40K is king, and this is a long time before the Games Workshop sales dive.

Privateer is the main big other competitor, with their two main games at number 2 and number 4, and Malifaux at number 5. The chart from ICv2 looked exactly like this – unchanging – in 2011 and 2010 as well. This is the baseline, or as close as we’d get.

The first big shake-up. Fantasy Flight Games releases the X-Wing Miniatures Game at GenCon 2012 (August 16–19), taking 2nd place ahead of Warmachine right from the start.

This is also the time we see Warhammer 40K 6th Edition, so the king is safe and doing well.

Spring 2013 is, or I thought it was, a bit of a normalization. X-Wing still hot, obviously, though whether it is because of supply-shortages or the end of the first frenzy surrounding the game’s release, it drops slightly and Warmachine claws its way back to No. 2.

X-Wing aside, the rankings are still in the same order as they were in Spring 2012.

Now, welcome to WTF?

This is (roughly) the time we knew that Games Workshop lost 12% of sales revenue vis-a-vis the same period the year before. Obviously, Warhammer Fantasy is just gone!

Warhammer 40K is still king. I can’t say how much of GW’s lower sales are caused by the “disappearance” of Warhammer Fantasy, or how much Warhammer 40K can actually drop and still retain the top spot. The game might well lead over No. 2 many times over.

X-Wing is back, presumably it wasn’t a flash-in-the-pan, and Privateer hasn’t benefited from the Warhammer Fantasy cave-in or the likely drop in 40k sales.

What’s more, even the X-Wing knock-off (well, licensed alternative), Star Trek Attack Wing, often criticized for more disappointing ships than X-Wing (both as far as pre-paints go and in their lack of care for scaling issues), beat games like Hordes, Malifaux and WFB!

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 #4 – The Future is Pre-Painted?

GW is somewhat in a funk (relatively, it’s still a company making profits… just a bit less of them), but the big contenders and new entries to the market are the pre-painted games. None of the “classic” GW competitors, especially Privateer, really look like they were able to take advantage of GW’s misstep, despite a (tentatively deduced) overall growing market?

I don’t think this really will go unnoticed. Though I doubt the X-Wing success is easily reproducible, WizKids seems to have done just that by the most straightforward means possible. Other pre-paint games might follow. Some of them might fail, sure, but these new pre-painted competition seems to loom far larger than is generally recognized.

Will the market divide further into pre-paint/casual/CCG-style games like X-Wing for the mass market and, possibly, the painting scene heading towards a painting-focused, premium niche of the hobby (e.g. Kingdom Death, Forge World, etc..)?

Is painting miniatures at last loosing its appeal to the “big crowds”?

What do you think? Leave a comment!

Z.