There's an interesting discussion of the GW situation, involving people with investment and business background, over on RPG.net
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?713 ... re-straits (towards the end of the thread, you can read more up to date analysis). A cogent set of remarks can be found here:
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?713 ... st17561921Quote:
GW wants to act like a utility company. Their business strategy makes the assumption that they provide to a small group of hobbyists, but, in any given population, there is a fixed percentage of people who want to spend their time painting little genocidal spacemen. In markets they already exist in, they don't believe that the audience for little plastic spacemen can shrink or grow significantly. Instead, they concentrate on building a moat, consisting of a well defended IP and a distribution network that makes life hard for competitors, to prevent anyone else from getting into the little unpainted plastic spaceman market. "Growth" comes from increasing margins and moving into new geographic areas. (Whether this is a viable mid-term strategy or [word deleted] nuts is a question still in the air.) GW knows that their sales fluctuate, but they believe that it'll all even out in the end. To protect against this, they keep a good-sized cash reserve so they can ride out the bad years. It's not like they have better things to spend the money on, since the demand for their product is fixed.
The thing is, however, the
Hobbit has nothing to do with this. It's a sort of separate, but related, issue. It's the GW-method hitting the realities of licensed merchandise (which is what the Hobbit range is). GW was not the only company bidding for the Middle-earth license, back in the day, Wizards of the Coast were in there too, as were other companies. The saga of the LOTR SBG has been about the relationship and friction between New Line's licensing-merch department and GW and GW's particular ways. It was a gamble to bring in another market into their "utility" model. It's just that the water source (so to speak) wasn't entirely reliable or to their liking. Further, the customer base were not the sort of customer base GW normally goes after. Point being, though, that "we" Tolkien/film fans were an opportunity for them, not vice versa. The result has not been entirely comfortable. Their attitude has always sort of seemed to be: we have given you your precious merchandise! Now play ball with our way of doing things.
Whatever befalls GW in the next year probably will have little enough to do with the Hobbit. The core decisions will be made around WHFB (40k seems stable) and the Hobbit model will likely follow WHFB decisions. If WHFB starts getting cheaper starter kits, the Hobbit will do much the same (in the hope that they can replace in volume sales what they lose in elite sales). Whatever decisions made about finecast, pricing and so on will have nothing to do with us, but rather with core factors such as WHFB. The Hobbit is probably a stable, low volume collector base right now. The centre of gravity of Middle-earth merchandise has gone somewhere else, by now, to Lego, most likely. Merch companies will also be keenly aware of the half-life of Middle-earth as a commercial entity. Gollum exists in pop culture now, but no one is queing up to boy gollum dolls. As I tend to mention (a lot), I remember walking by the GW in Berlin, passing a crowd of Berlin hipsters ogling the Helm's Deep display. That's a once off phenomenon that's not going to happen again.
I don't honestly know what's going to happen with the line. It will likely carry on till about 2016, and then take a final bow. The SBG system may very likely be repurposed for some sort of Warhammer property. The miniatures will become collector's items. Not a bad end to an impressive range. Eventually someone else will make another miniatures game, but that will involve an entirely different license and business model.
In the meantime, a bit more actual line support and less price rises couldn't hurt.
{ PORTAL }
Print view
Top
