Spem hier de leuke en interessante links die je wil delen.

[Beastherder]

Superchic, hoor

iemand heeft tijd en geld te veel

5:40
Hoeveel Forgeworld Titans heb je nodig?


Wat het voor mij helemaal af maakt is het luipaard-print tapijt (0:55)
dat straalt toch echt klasse uit

[Son of a Dreadnaught]

[quote="Beastherder"]Superchic, hoor

iemand heeft tijd en geld te veel

5:40
Hoeveel Forgeworld Titans heb je nodig?


Wat het voor mij helemaal af maakt is het luipaard-print tapijt (0:55)
dat straalt toch echt klasse uit

[Son of a Dreadnaught]

[Terentius]

We hadden het nieuws van meneer Kirby's vertrek en zijn 'ramblings' al gehoord, maar nu het hele verhaal:

http://investor.games-workshop.com/wp-c ... ebsite.pdf

Kort door de bocht: Het ziet er niet bepaald rooskleurig uit voor Games Workshop.

Interessante, maar niet verrassende, aankondiging: "We do no demographic research, we have no focus groups, we do not ask the market what it wants."

Hier een (geinig) artikel over dit nieuws m.b.t Kirby:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/1099 ... -good.html

En hier wat commentaar van mensen die er kennelijk wat meer van af weten:

As someone who has looked for troubled companies for the greater portion of my career, the half year financials stood out as a company in a lot of trouble. It has nothing to do with my feelings about the game or their contempt for their customers. It was strictly looking at it from a business perspective.

[...]

Here's the thing. We are all now talking about how these numbers are really bad. If you think this is bad, just wait until we get a load of the next period half year results.

GW pulled out all the stops in the last year and still declined. They managed to tick down the losses in the last period by 3% (from 11% to 8%) but that does not show the true effect of 7th edition yet - that will be in the next period reporting. In other words, there are a lot of customers who left BECAUSE of 7th edition (for many various reasons) and this will be felt soon over the next period.

GW also shows no sign of letting up on the price increases. I have never seen a single company in my life (that being only a short 50 years), continue to ratchet up pricing this fast. It speaks volumes to this one thing: GW knows they are in very serious trouble, but they don't know why they are. They have managed to cover up the customer losses for the last decade with the price increases, so why not do that even harder than ever before.

The most telling number in the whole financials, however, even more than the dismal revenues and massive plummet in profits was the cost of sales numbers. Considering the large drop in revenues, the Cost of Sales was relatively flat. This means that it most likely represents fixed costs in getting their product to market. That being said, if you do the math, a 15% drop in sales will put GW into negative territory. The only way to avoid that, is to begin cutting sales costs and with that further revenue erosion will happen. This cycle is then a rinse and repeat and thus the term "death spiral".

At this point, I honestly believe GW cannot fix things. Seventh edition was the last point they could have done it and it didn't happen. Their independent channel relations are shattered, they charge a premium price for a sub-market product, and they are completely ignorant of the real issues they face. As it is, even bringing in a new a great CEO and letting him/her have free reign to fix things would have a hard time doing so with the amount of time left before the collapse takes them.

I know to many I am very pessimistic on GW. However, I have seen this tune played one too many times in quite a few businesses to not know what I am looking at here. While many think this period is bad, I'm willing to say that you all haven't seen anything yet. GW pulled out all the stops and couldn't even get to flat line in the last period. Now, the revenue losses will accelerate very fast from here and in 12-18 months time, we will all be saying how rosy this report looked in comparison.

A few quick notes after reading the entire thread:

1 - The core problems with GW are ultimately now time and management.

Time, in that the best time to begin fixing most of the issues they had was with the 7th edition release of 40k, and instead of fixing them, they doubled down on what was wrong. This has shortened their runway to survive (I think moderately, others think more dramatically).

Management, in that the beliefs of their management are both strongly held and strongly incorrect. Without replacing the management (Kirby included), GW cannot be cured. At best, an untimely demise can be delayed.

2 - All of GW's problems are fixable.

I've written about this at length on a certain other forum which I will reference later, but the sad/tragic/comic/all-too-common punchline to the GW story is that they appear to be a football (in the European sense) club dead set on scoring own goals. There will be nobody to blame at the end other than themselves, though they will inevitably go down blaming everyone else, as the ignorant always do.

3 - 40k is not over-saturated, the products are limited in scope (due to lack of vision, not lack of possibility) and overpriced.

If they fixed the core issues with rules / game size / pricing, they would grow (like everyone else in this space). We are in a geek renaissance. Comics have all but gone mainstream. Video gaming is ubiquitous. GW should be able to grow.

4 - On the topic of other forums, and the community view of GW, I think the real issue is just lack of understanding.

Obviously, that's easy for me to say - I'm a finance professional (I work on Wall Street, I run a trading desk, I have an MBA, etc.), but the level of discourse around GW's financials is, on average, low on information.

I find that most of the supporters of GW, from an economic standpoint (which is very different than just liking 40k), don't understand how a business works and have no experience with it. You get statements of a quality equivalent to "they are profitable, how could things be wrong?" without realizing that many firms have flipped from profit to dead quickly. You get things like not understanding how to compute falling unit sales, so people think higher revenue = more customers (that's not true if revenue went up 5% and prices were up 25%).

I've sparred with people on Warseer in particular and have very sharp elbows at times, and I will say I feel I've always been treated fairly by the mods there (and, in reality, some of the most virulent trolls have probably been banned as a direct result of their attempts to flame me, though the mods there are too decent to admit that). So if the tone of the discourse about the company is off base in places, it's probably due to lack of information and individuals who are clueless more than anything else.

BoLS in particular has a very low bar of competence, B&C is so narrowly hobby focused they don't really want threads about the economics there (and thus I don't have a view on the average knowledge of posters, as I suspect a lot of the more informed parties just don't post there on this topic at all), but Warseer has been fine. Master Minis has had a very good series on the economics of GW as well. So it's out there, but you have to dig to find informed parties. Or read all the annual reports yourself. I have them going back to 1997 if anyone really enjoys being super bored

Hier is de laatste post in die serie waar deze persoon naar verwijst: http://masterminis.blogspot.de/2014/07/ ... rt-15.html

[Son of a Dreadnaught]

[rimg]http://i.imgur.com/TC2peSF.jpg[/rimg]

[Terentius]

Ik denk dat sommige van jullie er wel bekend mee zijn, maar ik zag het nog nergens zag staan:

Meer dan een eeuw geleden bracht de populaire schrijver H. G. Wells (bekend van werken zoals War of the Worlds en The Invisible Man), een boekje uit over miniature wargaming genaamd Little Wars, waarvan de complete titel overigens nog beter is:

Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books.

Omdat dit door velen als een soort van genesis van onze hobby gezien wordt, wilde ik het eens doornemen. Mooi dat de auteursrechten inmiddels vervallen zijn. Het boekje is hier te vinden:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3691/3691-h/3691-h.htm

En voor de mensen die liever naar plaatjes kijken:

[kaleith]

Voor de 40kers is er een notabele "release" uit, de alpha van chapter master:
http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Chapter_Master_(game)
het spel werkt, hoewel met een te verbeteren UI en nog gameplay bugs, maar nu kan iedereen een chapter master zijn, van zowel custom chapters als de bekende.
Je starsystems kunnen compleet fucked worden door de meeste 40k rassen (enige uitzondering atm dark eldar), en de inquisition is de inquisition(lees: onredelijk en heresy calls om het hoekje).
Voor een leuk "experiment", geef een planetary governor een chaos-tainted artifact.
De hoeveelheid dat hier naar de fluff gekeken word is absoluut hoog, obscure dingen zitten vaak er ook in, bv het moeten harvesten van geneseed (2/dooie mareehn) die je dan om kunt zetten (langzaam) naar nieuwe marines. Noot wel dat dit op het moment meer een simulation is als een spel, het is niet gemaakt om balanced te zijn.

[mathijs97]

ziet er goed uit

[Leandertje]

voor de genen die er wat om geven.

http://www.3ders.org/articles/20150125- ... -fist.html
http://www.instructables.com/id/Gary-St ... ce-Marine/

kunnen de verzoeken na de zomer bij mij in dienen

[joost]

[quote="Leandertje"]voor de genen die er wat om geven.

http://www.3ders.org/articles/20150125- ... -fist.html
http://www.instructables.com/id/Gary-St ... ce-Marine/

kunnen de verzoeken na de zomer bij mij in dienen