Salute 2013 and the Decline of Games Workshop (really?)

April 23, 2013 4 Comments

Games Workshop on Salute 2013

Last weekend was the “big one” for a sizeable part of the wargaming industry: Salute 2013 in the UK and Adepticon in the US.

I was unable to attend either one, unfortunately. Oh well, maybe next year.

There is some great Salute (and Adepticon) coverage out there in the Blog-o-sphere (Beasts of War had massive amounts of great Salute pics and coverage).

Salute 2013 and (the lack of) Games Workshop

Another, very interesting observation comes from Warseer’s Jim30 musing on his impressions from Salute 2013 (and those of previous years).

Here is what he said:

Well I was at Salute today, the fifth time in as many years. Something which I and my friends noticed though was just how downsized the presence of any GW items for sale was compared to previous years. A few years ago GW had a stall on site (selling full price while others around it were doing 20% off, so hardly doing a roaring trade!). Most of the larger retailers present had a very substantial amount of GW stock on their stands, and it would usually seem to sell – the usual round of 10-20% off plus old blisters getting people scrabbling for a bargain.

this year there seemed to be hardly any traders carrying GW, and when it was seen it was in far smaller quantities than before. Wayland for instance had a small GW bit in the middle of its stand, but it was seemingly outnumbered by Warmahordes stock. Very few other retailers who come year after year seemed to have any, and the interest in buying second hand models just didnt seem to be there. I’ve been going to wargames shows for over 25 years and I have never seen such a low presence of GW stock at a show.

The one bright spot was Forge World who had a big queue at one point, but not much action by late in the day.

By contrast a vast range of new systems were being demoed and shown off with plenty of people like myself investing a lot of money in new toys and systems. This wasn’t a convention of old grognards, this was thousands of people (I heard one organiser say that they had 2500 advance sales plus overall numbers were up on last year – at least 5 – possibly 10,000 people were there during the day). The majority of the audience were teens – thirty somethings, with money to spend. The fact is that this is a market which GW should have eating out of its hand, but instead they were playing all manner of systems and I didnt see a single GW demo game or participation game.

It is quite telling that GW not only seems uninterested in trying to sell regular products at these events, but that traders think that on a show where according to some they do 20% of their annual turnover in a day, they felt no need to bring a large amount of GW stuff with them, but still got good levels of sales.

My takeaway (shared by friends with similar views) was that GW is not only divorcing itself from wargaming into being a toy company, but that the interest in their product from a large wargames gathering seems vastly lower than only a couple of years ago.

Questions and Thoughts?

Again I have to stress, I wasn’t there.

Watching things unfold from a distance, it did indeed appear as if the biggest news breaking were Mantic’s Deadzone from Salute 2013 and CMON’s Crytal Brush competition from Adepticon.

But news doesn’t have to correspond with presence or popularity. Nobody expected GW to bring big news to a non-Games-Day convention, even if many people there buy and play their products.

  • Were you at Salute 2013 (or Adepticon)?
  • If so, would you agree with Jim30′s observation?

Likewise, even if the observation is spot on, the conclusions drawn by Jim30 don’t necessarily have to be the right ones.

  • Is Games Workshop truly in relative decline to the rest of the industry (i.e., all those high-grossing Kickstarters are truly shifting the industry)? 
  • Is it (“only”) independents shifting to a more broad-based business-model (understandably, as GW’s been playing hard-ball recently, especially in North America)?

In short…

  • Is GW going down (by losing the support of the broader industry)?
  • Going up (and not even needing others to do its think anymore)?
  • As it always was, i.e. blessed with arm-chair critics vastly exaggerating GW’s decline (despite Games Workshop reporting rising profits over the past few years)?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this! Leave a comment!

Z.

Filed Under: Blogging, Games Workshop, Mantic Games, Miniature Wargaming, Rumours, Wargaming Industry, Warhammer, Warhammer 40K, Warhammer Fantasy Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
About Zweischneid

Hi. I am Zweischneid. Wargame Addict. Miniature Connoisseur. Aspiring Blogger. Did you like this post? Follow me on Twitter or Facebook for more. And don't forget to share your favourite miniature pictures and wargaming videos at www.pinsofwar.net.

  • Carl Tuttle

    I actually DID go to Salute this year, and while I haven’t been in previous years I would disagree with quite a bit of Warseer Jim posted there. Of course I can’t compare to what independent retailers brought the previous year, but if there was any GW model I wanted to buy – it didn’t appear to be a problem. What Wayland Games did or did not decide to bring is sort of up to them – but with retailers closing shop based on GW Policies I think they are still quite the big dog in the room.

    There were absolutely people running demo games of both Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40k at Salute. There were also demos for a lot of really nice other games as well.

    The interesting thing to me was the fact that there are so many tertiary companies springing up which are supporting GWs product lines (and some directly going head to head with some of their product lines… in the same game.) like shoulder pads, head swaps, etc.

    The show was great but the conclusions drawn from completely anecdotal evidence on the part of someone attended and saying “it felt like…” isn’t going to get us anywhere. So until we start comparing the financials of competing companies, I am not sure anyone can really draw any specific conclusions.

  • theresponsibleone

    I was at Salute.

    There was less GW product there – but why would you pay an entry fee to buy standard plastics you can get from a webstore whenever you want?

    Salute is not there for the Games Workshops of the world. I go to Salute for the cottage industries and the hobbyists. But at home, I play Warhammer 40K and Warhammer Fantasy Battle.

    Games Workshop’s financials seem to be pretty solid – there’s no profit warnings on their investor relations site. Their financial reports show anything but a decline, whatever internet popular opinion is at the moment. Most of the armchair theorists don’t have experience in running successful businesses, they just think in terms of what they’d like on a personal level and extrapolate from there.

    Games Workshop aims at new entrants into the hobby. They are one of the best ways of getting kids and people previously unconnected with wargaming and miniature painting into those hobbies. They are the gateway, the entry point. They get the sales from ‘new players’, we get people to lure away to different systems later. That is not a bad economy to have.

    No-one is going to be at Salute who doesn’t already wargame, unless they’re some poor sod of a significant other who’s been dragged along. Games Workshop’s target market is not there. Forge World’s is.

    There are discount retailers who do not bother going to Salute because it simply wouldn’t be worth them trying to knock heads with Wayland. Wayland will have chosen their stock selection based on what people bought in previous years, and I think this bears out my original thought – there is no logical sense in paying money to go to Salute just to buy Games Workshop product.

    • http://pinsofwar.net/ Zweischneid

      You’re definitely on to something with the “two markets”, the “beginners” and those already in the hobby.

      Good point.

      As is, in theory, the other point about paying entry to buy GW-stuff, though admittedly that hasn’t deterred people in previous years, nor does it stop legions of people from buying full-price GW stuff at each Games Day.

      When I was on the UK games day last October, people were carrying off whole trolleys full of GW purchase, and certainly not only the “new” and “Forge World” stuff. Some guy had like 50 boxes of Chimeras, Leman Russes, etc.. .

      It still puzzles me to this day. I wouldn’t even have bought that amount on stuff on Games Day even if there was a discount, simply because I wouldn’t have wanted to carry several cubic feet of boxes around with me.

      • theresponsibleone

        Is there a difference between the attendees at a GW organised event and an independent one? I suspect so, but don’t have data to back up my suspicions…