Tuesday 7 September 2010

Oh my good God!

GW never ceases to amaze me. Not with their models, but their ridiculously high prices.

They've just put the advanced orders up for the High Elf second wave. £25 for either a box of 10 Phoenix Guard. That's £2.50 each for a plastic model! And then they have the cheek in the 'Today' article about them to suggest field White Lions as a 30 stong horde. That's £75 for a single unit. No characters, just 30 plastic (plastic!) models! I remember a few years ago I could get 20 cadians for £18.

Is it just me or is GW trying to price people out of the hobby? First £45 for the fantasy BRB, now £25 for 10 frickin' models?! It's like they don't want any customers.

Now I was considering getting a box or two of both the Phoenix Guard and the White Lions but quite frankly this is going to be way too big a dent in my hobby fund to justify.

Sorry for the rant, but this has gotten me properly worked up, which hasn't happened for a long time.

7 comments:

  1. They have always been a total rip rip company.
    So I decided on a new army... So from scratch to make a 40k demon army.
    1x code
    10x bloodletters
    5x plague bearers
    3 bloodkrushers
    and a hero..

    oh £100...
    For the pretty much basics...

    I took it on the chin and moaned at the person about GW making their stuff for the share price for the umpteenth time.

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  2. I know GW are expensive, but this is even more extreme than usual. I think GW is trying to recoup their losses from IoB.

    "So you've saved all that money with our shiny new starter set. Why don't you give us all that money you saved anyway with these shiny elves that you need to make that starter kit viable as a decent army"

    It's just their way of milking all the kids who bought IoB out of the most amount of money possible, whilst leaving those of us without parents to sponge off staring sadly into our empty wallets

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  3. The worst part about it is that we (community as a whole) WILL pay for it, one way or another GW will get their dollar, pound, euro, etc. Why? Because we love to game, even those of us who may look for "other" ways to obtain our models via ebay, trading, etc someone still had to first purchase the latest edition of the models just to find out that they couldn't foot the bill for their dream army and had to sell off some of their stuff to...buy groceries and pay the electric bill. Bonus for us deal seekers, but still sucks that GW is ramming us a new one for a bunch of plastic toys.

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  4. You're right, GW is trying to price themselves out of business. I've been buying from eBay exclusively, which is sad, b/c it takes money away from my struggling local game store.

    Of course, it wouldn't kill either GW or the game store to hold a sale now and then, the cheap bastards...

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  5. I was talking to Joel about this sort of thing recently. As you may not be aware he works as an accountatn for one of the topo four accountancy firms in the UK. He said that it is the best business model for a retail company to follow during a recession to put the prices up. While we may all moan and groan about it we still buy the products thus putting money back into the system and heloing to get out of the recession.

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  6. They're not trying to force people out the hobby at all. We're in a world wide recession, everything has gone up, so fuel to take deliveries to store, cost of metals and plastics has gone up. G.W won't asborb these costs so they're passed onto us, so G.W still makes the same profit but costs the consumer more in the long run. It's how it goes.

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  7. Mercer's pretty much right on this one.

    That being said, GW does have to worry about the competition. The best example I've got is Warmachine; while the models are similar in price (if not higher) you don't need as many to play.

    Compare that to the price of owning any Horde army, and yeah...

    I mean, there are things GW could be doing better (mostly on the rules side, and branding themselves, and actually ADVERTISING and GOING TO CONVENTIONS and the like) but prices going up is...normal.

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