Games Workshop Turn Around Plan

GW clearly needs a turn around after flat and declining sales for like 6 years and decreasing market share.  They have raised prices and cut costs multiple times and while that maintained profitability it appears to have hit the limit.  They have trimmed the sales side so much that their is now a single manager between the retail managers in a region(NA, UK, Europe) and the CEO.  While this might seem like a great idea at first as fewer layers make you more dynamic, I think that is incorrect.  With each of the region managers in charge of monitoring 100-150 stores how much time can the devote to any of the stores or the managers ideas.  Even if the store managers have great ideas why would you share them as you are in an essentially dead end job for internal hiring.  You would keep it close to the vest to protect your performance vs other managers to keep your bonus up.  Another thing I heard recently was that someone was trying to call the mail order team down under and never could get in touch with anyone after more than a week of trying.

Luckily they are going to be getting new leadership in the next year so that does offer hope for them to return to their glory as the undisputed go to company for games in the miniature wargames arena. This discussion will focus on 2 words: Games and Customers.  I took these two key words and searched the recent financial release to see what the company is thinking about these two concepts.

Games Workshop 2013-2014 Report: Same Old Same Old

GW has released their financial report for the June 2013 to May 2014 year.  Results carry over pretty similarly from their half year results.  Sales are down ~ 8% and profits are down about ~25%.  Even though Tom Kirby is stepping down their seems to be no plans to change course.  Continue high priced product offerings with more and more sales funneled through webstore.  They plan on sticking around for the long term with no real plans to expand the player bases.  Managing the business purely for cash generation.  The did call 4.5 M pounds of expenses as exceptional (firing people only costs money this year) so that they are not counted in the 25% profit drop.  Including those yields like a profit drop of closer to 50%.

Interesting notes, they republished the trade and GW store sale breakdowns again after several years of not showing them.  I wonder if this is because the embargoes helped improve those numbers.  In the US they list, 56% trade, 13% Mail Order (Web), and 31% GW Stores.  Now remember these sales are in pounds not units.  Since GW only gets 50-60 pence on the pound from trade sales, this means that in terms of units it is 72%, 8%,  and 20% respectively.  That there 100 stores localized in limited areas can generate 20% of their sales in the US is pretty impressive or it could indicate the the trade sales have really fallen recently.

Another thing to see is that while overall sales were down ~8%, internal sales were down 15% from product and supply.  This indicates that the average mark up of the products increased which is probably a combination of lower trade sales and the new limited edition products.

GW notes that they cut management levels down essentially removing middle management.  Each store manager now reports to 1 manager for the region (Europe, UK, and NA).  All of the trade sales team reports to 1 guy located in the UK.  This is cost cutting but might be a cool aid problem since there will probably be no one with different ideas with such thin ranks.  They seem to always be referring to the risks of their employees like a group is going to up and quite to start their own miniatures company.

When we look over the last year GW should have had strong sales, they did new space marines, the knight, and released 7th edition for 40K just in time for all the presales and initial deliveries to fall into this report.  It is important to note though that the year they are comparing to also had 6th edition released since that was released in the summer of 2012 which falls into the 2012-2013 year that this is compared to.  I wonder how bad the numbers would have been if they had not pushed that release up into May and left it in the normal summer release window.

I am sort of disappointed after reading the preamble yesterday, I was expecting some more interesting stuff.

This is Just Incredible

Back40K is providing a link to Kirby's Preamble to GW Year 2013-2014 financials that appear to be coming tomorrow.  If you have any interest in the goings on at GW you need to read this.  If reads like someone giving people the middle finger as he walks out the door.

Ugh

 I honestly do not know what more to say.

Well maybe that the new ships look like

Lego Hobbit: Lonely Mountain Preview

Lego is previewing the Lonely Mountain set at San Diego Comic Con this week.  This set is pretty expensive even as license sets go at $129.99 for 860 or so pieces.  You get 5 minifigures, dwarf mine and throne room scenery and Smaug. Smaug is about twice as big as the dragon in the recent castle Dragon Mountain set but unfortunately he is not brick built, instead made with large custom molds.  He seems bigger than the Rancor from the Star Wars line and does not look bad but not very Lego like which is a real disappointment.

X-Wing Miniatures: Imperial Aces

Up for inspection is the Imperial Aces expansion set for the X-Wing Miniatures Game.  It is essentially buy two tie interceptors and get nothing free.  That is not entirely true but lets see what we have in the box.

Full LRB 6 Book Up on Cyanide Site

Cyanide is nice enough to be hosting a full version of the LRB 6 Blood Bowl Rules right now as GW has disavowed the game.  Since the GW website reboot the official copy of the rules have not been found on the GW site.  Hopefully fans have downloads of all the rulebooks that used to be up their for their games.  I know that I have copies of Blood Bowl, Epic, and Dark Future but would have like a copy of Mordheim and Necromunda also which I never downloaded.

The Blood Bowl version hosted by Cyanide has the art, diagrams, background sections and also has the Chaos Pact, Slann, and Underworld teams right there in the team roster section.  Most complete version I have seen so go get yourself some rules.

Reaper Shows a Pile of Bones II Samples

Reaper finally showed off some production samples in their most recent Kickstarter Update for the Bones II kickstarter.  Hopefully they have left themselves time to actually inspect the samples to prevent the clearly bad molds from the first kickstarter from reoccuring.

Stormclaw and Future Campaign Box Sets

So GW tried something different this past week to attract hobbyist's attention.  They put up for pre order a limited release campaign box with a mini rulebook, slim scenerio book, and some existing sprues with 2 limited edition plastic characters.  I will admit that I am intrigued by this move.  I have no interest in the set as I only have vanilla marines and nids and have negative interest in starting any other armies for a game I have not played in a few years now but as I GW watcher I try to keep an eye on what is happening.

D&D Basic Available for Download

Wizards of the Coast has been nice enough to put some of the D&D Basic rules up for download.  It looks to be essentially the player guide part and measures in at 110 pages.  From my quick glance through, it looks much more like a simplified 3rd edition than anything like 4th.  It seems like yesterday that we were determining THAC0's.  Oh well, I had some 4th stuff and never played so I will probably just read this download and file it away for the future.

Crazy Ukraine Traffic

Anyone else on Blogger seeing crazy traffic out of Ukraine.  I have gotten 3 times more accesses from Ukraine in the last day than the rest of the world combined.

Legend of Drizzt: D&D Boardgame

The Legend of Drizzt is the last of the series of 3 cooperative games that wizards of the coast released a few years ago.

The game is packaged the same way as the Ravenloft and Ashardalon ones with a tray to help sort the tiles and miniatures but bags are helpful to keep all the different counters organized.

Lego Lord of the Rings: Wizard Battle

Today for your viewing pleasure, I have some images of a small Lego Lord of the Rings set, Wizard Battle. This is a small set and is really all about the Gandolf and Sarumon minifigures.  

Help: Miniature Storage Options

So, I have finally after living in my house for 6+ years gotten to within sight of finishing my basement project.  I hope that this means I can get some of my gaming stuff better organized as this shelving unit that I used to use years ago will now be used for other stuff and I will try to get my stuff out of the blue plastic tubs in the garage.  My stuff only fits in those tubs now since it is not painted so can be crammed together in model unsafe ways.  I have a ton of 28 mm scale figures to store but luckly I am light on tanks and those larger scale items.

I am looking for an economical storage solution that can travel.  Anyway have any suggestions?  All the case companies seem pretty pricey for such a collection.  I looked at KR Multicase but even though basic cardboard case with foam is like 50 dollars shipped.  I have been investigating making my own card+foam where you can buy 20 handled cardboard mailers that are 20*11*5.5 inches for like 70 dollars shipped.  The foam costs more but even pull and pick foam to fill one cases adds up to about 15 dollars which is less than half the costs of the KR case.  So about 20+ dollars a case if you include some plasticard to help with layer separation.  When you are talking about 1000+ minis to get out of piles in megaforce boxes or white citadel boxes, you do need to watch the cost.

Those 20 boxes will take up about 18 cubic feet which is about 1 shelving unit which will still need to be supplemented with things for storage of the game boxes that I want to keep.

DungeonBowl

I got together with some of the members of the Blood Bowl league I am joining for a 4 player game of Dungeonbowl.  Now the rules for Blood Bowl are pretty well established having been mainly the same for 20 years now with just fine tuning on the skills and league stuff.  There are a couple variations on the rosters to make the teams more balanced that you can find but the core is the same.  Dungeonbowl is really not like that.  There was an official 2nd edition release for which I show my board from above.  There were then releases done through White Dwarf for 3rd edition which used heroquest type tiles or online but nothing truly official in a long time.

PSA: Target Lego Clearence

Just a heads up to people that Target has clearanced out several sets 30-50% off probably to make room for new releases.  Specifically up for grabs is a lot of Chima themed stuff.  I mainly stick to the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings License stuff and my son is still a few years away from that level so I passed on dropping like 150 dollars on different large Chima sets.  I was tough for a hoarder like me to pass them up but maybe you might want to check it out.  I did pick up a Castle set with a Dragon and a cool Creator Plane.

Great Family Trip to Chicago

My office was closed down this week so they could do some building improvements so we used the time off to go on an early 4th of July trip.  We drove over to Chicago for two nights and hit some of the main sites.  I have been called a trip "national socialist" by my family before due to some of my scheduling choices but it paid off on this trip.  I got us up very very early(4:15 wake up) to get to us from home to the Field Museum at opening.  It paid off as we got to see many exhibits with less crowding.  Above we are enjoying the dinosaur fossils all by ourselves.