Let's have a GW rumors and sneak peeks thread!

[me_in_japan]

despite not actually having much connection to GW these days, other than Underworlds, I'm still on their mailing list, so I heard about this a bit ago. It baffles me. It honestly does. I mean, the questions in my mind are:

What is the purpose of this service, to GW? i.e. How will it make them more money? As I understand it, for a year or so of service, it's priced roughly equivalent to a box of minis, maybe two. So, as an alternative to this subscription model, they could (somehow, magically) persuade an equal number of people to buy a single box of minis and get the same amount of money (of course this very vaguely assumes that production costs of said box are equivalent to production costs of the content of this service. Clearly this is nonsense, but indulge me for a mo...) These people can be existing customers, or new ones. I can't help but think it's a lot easier to do that than to set up an entire animation wing, produce tutorial vids regularly, and so on, and continue this endeavour for a year, or even more.

Who is this aimed at? It seems as though theyve taken what could have been by far their most powerful marketing tool (a number of animated series) and...walled them off from the general public? Say what? Why? Why would you do that? Surely if even only one in a hundred viewers ever acted on impulse and walked into a GW store after watching a show, the company would still massively increase their revenue compared to the income theyd get from current customers subbing to the service. Plus, you have to assume that Netflix or whoever would also pay GWs a bit for the licence.

What is the logic for putting their army builder apps behind a paywall? Do they not want their already enfranchised customers to be able to list build and see what other units would fit well into their army, inspiring them to pop out and pick them up? I don't understand how this makes business sense. Surely it would be far more profitable to tout an actual free, updated army builder app, with rules and all that shizzle, and just track users' list building preferences, take that data, and use it to produce more marketable rules/minis? Not to mention the impulse buys it'd lead to when a user sees that they "only" need one or two more units to fill their list out nicely, etc. Hell, what if there was a link to the webstore in the army builder? Like, you could enter your collection into the army builder (to "organise your miniature collection"), then when you list build it could line em all up with a "in collection" or "click here to purchase" button? Tell me that aint some profitable shit right there. You could even make the purchases in-app, if you were feeling techy about it, like the Amazon app or summat.

Overall, I think warhammer animation is a fine idea, but GW clearly have no idea what to do with it. A medium like TV is NOT FOR THE EXISTING FANS. It's for pulling in new ones. Anything else is a huge waste of resources. Likewise an army builder app is there to encourage players to buy more minis. If it's not being leveraged to do that, then why not just leave it to Battlescribe and save yourself some money?

Overall, I consider this a massively squandered opportunity from GW.
*tuts and shakes head*
No sir, ah don' like it.

[jus]

@mij: hmm yeah I think you've raised some interesting points. I'm by no means an expert but perhaps....
the purpose of the service, priced as it is, is a very unsubtle but probably very effective means of product placement. Similiar to the Horus Heresy book series. I wonder how many people, having no prior inclination to buy Death Guard, read about how cool they are, learn about their history/ tactics/doctrine/ primarch and then start looking at the Death guard in a new light?

Compound this with a release of a new range of Death Guard models and rules. See how this erodes away at the inhibitions of gamer to buy new stuff?

From: Death guard not interested! OR I'm on the fence about them -> well after reading the book they're actually kinda cool ->Oh so that's why they turned traitor--> Mortarion is a badass,--> New MODELS!!?

Now, I would consider myself an existing fan, and I myself started an Ultramarines army after reading "know no fear" (Excellent Ultramarines novel from the Horus Heresy series) I even have a Roboute Guilliman (that I should finish painting. Perhaps I should read the book again!)

So they got me. And that was just with a book series.

Imagine if they could do the same with animated shows? I don't think the plan is for GW to charge everyone for one box of minis and call it a day. But rather that that one box investment would eventually cascade into fans, new and existing, to fall in love with the IP enough to buy box upon box of featured minis.

From the trailers, we have a blood angels void battle against the tyranids, striking scorpians, tau....

[Primarch]

I think everyone is aware of my views on GW. So it should come as no surprise when I say that I think this is a brilliant move on GW's part.

Wait, what?

We are not, and have not been for a great many years, GW's target audience. We are all aware of the various unofficial parts of the hobby. 3rd party bitz and minis, Youtube painting channels, discussion forums etc. GW may occasionally release some nostalgia inspired mini, but they are mainly gunning for newcomers to the hobby who will buy new armies from scratch, are unaware of other games and channels, and who can become loyal, devoted customers.

When new customers enter the hobby, their local store manager or gaming buddy can point them at the GW channel as a means of hobby support. All the lore, tutorials and apps you need in one place. Even some animation and a free mini to make it even better value. Sure, the paywall means that prospective customers can't see the animation, but I'm fairly sure kids will show there mates some of the shows on their phones or tablets.

GW has ALWAYS been focused on being the one-stop hobby provider. From minis and rules to paints and tools. This just takes them to the next, more digital, level. Once punters realize that there are other, cheaper paints, free apps and (depending on your opinions), better and cheaper games available, GW potentially loses revenue. Fulfilling all of the customers' needs for longer keeps those hobby funds flowing in one direction.

Between video games, comics, novels and the large number of hobby stores selling their product, I think GW are pretty good at reaching new customers. This GW channel is a way of keeping them for a longer period.


Naturally, I'm not touching it with a ten-foot pole.


TL;DR - It's a tool for retention, not promotion.

@Jus - The BL novels are singularly responsible for me spending all of the money I used for GW products in the past few years. And yes, Know No Fear is awesome.

[me_in_japan]

There’s certainly some logic in approaching it as a tool for retention, not promotion. I think that’s an extremely good point, actually, and one which I hadn’t considered.

However, I also see a trend towards hobby burnout, which I’m becoming extremely familiar with when it comes to magic. The approach seems to be that if customers will buy X items per year, then companies release 2X items in an effort to have customers buy that, too, simply because it’s aggressively marketed to them. This will almost certainly work on paper - profits will go up, in the short term - say 2-3 years. But, the more it goes on, the more the whales start to matter, and the more that regular players get pushed out due to lack of resources. With Magic, there has always been the rush to keep up, in order to keep your decks as competitive as possible. When WotC ramped up the release schedule, that forced players to buy more every year. That’s been going on a a year and half now, and I see massively increasing numbers of people saying “yeah, I used to buy a box of everything, but I can’t afford it at the rate they’re coming out now, so I just buy singles on the secondary market.” The drop in customers buying direct from WotC here is balanced out by whales who MUST buy the collectors editions of everything, and also by Secret Lairs (which is a newish thing which is basically direct single sales to consumers) but GW (coming back to my point) don’t have this option. They run the risk of milking their existing customer base so hard that they force them away. For example, kid sees animation, kid wants new army based on that, kid stops buying previous army, leaving it half done. This is fine once, maybe even twice, but after that the kid is going to start feeling frustrated and start looking elsewhere.

Essentially, I can’t help but think that increasing revenue by focussing on existing customers at the expense of drawing in new ones is a flawed plan. It won’t show up soon, but give it a couple years and we’ll see GW either on a major push to pull in new customers or a ridiculous (even by their standards) money suck on existing ones.

I reckon. *nods firmly in conclusion*

[The Other Dave]

If it's not being leveraged to do that, then why not just leave it to Battlescribe and save yourself some money?

'Cause Battlescribe is butt.

Which sort of gets at what I think is my fundamental position on WH+ - that animation in particular, and apps too if you want good apps, cost money to produce, and those artists and developers deserve to get paid. (The point about apps is sort of put paid to by the fact that the 40K app is, or was last time I checked, "better but still pretty bad" and yet not free, but OTOH I only hear good things about the for-pay parts of Azyr.) There's an argument to be made that GW should absorb those costs in the name of outreach, but I think that would, in the end, only lead to sub-standard output and/or underpaid content producers.

[Jye Nicolson]

You can beat open source with closed source but it's not cheap. If GW don't half-ass it their apps will surpass Battlescribe + Buttscribe at some point. If they just have a couple of grads in a basement somewhere not so much.

[me_in_japan]

I agree completely that useful apps should be paid for so's the devs can get paid, no doubt. I think I kind of perceive warhammer+ as being an animation...channel? with other hobby stuff bolted on, and it's that that's confusing me. I feel that if they separated out the TV stuff and the hobby stuff they would be more successful with outreach/retention.

[The Other Dave]

Personally, yeah, I imagine the animation would work better on, say, Netflix, but who knows how that works. But I think that their pivot to WH+ as "basically everything they produce that you consume through a screen" (and it does make me wonder what'll happen to WarhammerTV and their Twitch channel, come to think of it) is probably not a bad move, considering the volume of animation content they have in the pipeline (i.e., not enough to justify a monthly subscription really).

[Konrad]

I could personally care less about "Warhammer Subscription/TV/Appstore whatever. But no surprise, I mean, it is the 21st century after all. Don't all the PC/Playstation/Ninetendo/etc. game companies do the same thing?
I'm hardly an expert, but all said and done digital content must be cheaper and easier to make and deliver than actual plastic dudes. Just from a quick scan of "Warhammer TV" google blurbs, it looks like they have all sorts of stuff in the works, new games, animation, even a live-action TV series! The end-game for GW has to be "get popular and iconic enough to get bought by Disney". The game is in the end irrelevant just like in the end the comics have become irrelevant for Marvel. Read somewhere that just the original "Iron Man" made more money alone than the entire Marvel Comics company made selling comics did in 70+ years. You could think of all those years and years of comics just as preparation for the real thing. Sure, some nerds still read comics, just like some nerds will still actually play the games, but if you can get every junior high school kid to buy an "Astartes" pencil case, then you have made it.

[The Other Dave]

A few more AoS previews came up over the weekend.

Yes, yes, more Stormcast, very nice.



I mean, they are very nice, I guess I just feel about SCE the way MiJ feels about Space Marines. The scouty arrow dudes in particular are cool. But this preview batch is competing with "orcs and goblins riding around on the backs of trolls and such":


...and that is very hard to beat.