Is there a specific reason for this? Does WHH just not sell? Historical armies have never been easier to collect with all the plastics coming out, I'd have thought some aspect of GW would want to cash in on that.
And they just won't sell the remaining stock they have? That's pretty crap.
"Does WHH just not sell?" IMO, a company has to make the product available to buy. Clash of Empires and War & Conquest and in particular Warlord Games books are easy to purchase from different sources. Buying a book direct from a manufacturer as the only source at a high price doesn't work so well.
Originally Posted by Ben
GW's business model is centered around selling high volumes of minis at premium prices. Everything has to be geared towards that so if they release a book it has drive those mini sales. If a book or product doesn't then they stop doing it even if taken on it's own it turns a profit. It has to be balanced against the profits that could be made if those resources were directed into something that does sell lots of minis. This is why WFRP was dropped, why Mordheim and Necromunda were dropped and why Blood Bowl was pulled from the shelves and made direct sale only.
It was one thing for a bunch of historical gamers working for GW to adapt WFB and release a rulebook as a side project. It's another for GW to continue it with ongoing support. In many ways it's been a miracle it's lasted this long. Ultimately it was a product made for a market that GW don't operate in and don't understand and would never turn a significant profit for them.
Last edited by redben; 25-05-2012 at 14:13.
And of course if people are having fun playing historical games they aren't buying a new space marine army.
An awful lot of this does come back to return on investment. Space marines outsell the entire Warhammer Fantasy range, which is why you get a new space marine book every year. Warhammer Historical may very well be profitable, and would have been more profitable if they'd sold it in shops, but nowhere near as popular as 40k, and to a lesser extent fantasy.
I didn't get WAB2, even though I'm the core market for it (pretty much an ex GW gamer interested in historicals), because I'd have needed to order it from forgeworld and it would have cost me about £65 for the new rulebook and army lists.
If I'd been able to walk into a store and buy WAB2 and Armies of Antiquity 2 in sequential months it wouldn't have been an issue, but laying down £65 in one go to upgrade two books I already had was too much for me as a working parent.
If it had been convenient for me to buy it though, I'd have them on my shelf now.
I think that is pretty much it: GW is primarily a manufacturer of minis. They sell rulebooks to support their minis.
Hail Ceasar keeps rolling along- good timing to release that bit of news right after Warhammer Historical closes it doors. I have just finished reading the SAGA rulebook but for bigger games I will look at Hail Ceasar and Clash of Empires.
War & Conquest is another option, especially considering it was written by Rob Broom.
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I've got some time off work so I'll get off my **** and finish my skirmish-small battle historical rules, because then if I moan about the quality of the rules I have only myself to blame.
Pretty depressing news and adds to a crappy week.
Not necessarily.
For me the writing was on the cards long before this sale, and it was looking dodgy when Rob Broom was there. As soon as GW started shutting down parts of the business and reducing stock lines in the stores, WHH was doomed. In fact I'd say that WHH was watching over its back when SGs were being withdrawn from the stores.
Free your hobby! Be creative and stop slavishly following the damn Book.
RIP Brimstone.
I used to read the GW Other Forum, but I am much happier now.
Inevitable and exactly what we all thought would happen when Rob Broom "left"
It's a crying shame that all the lovely work put into the later WAB books will now be unavailable, unlke the specialist games resources on the workshop site. Well done GW, just p!ssed all over a very established WHH customer base, Gar... to think i actually walked into a GW today and had a nosey over warhammer boxed set. Yet again you manage to disappoint and enrage in equal measure...
not. happy.
Ben,you're spot on with Space Marines but Warhammer Historical was never very profitable, if at all.
"Rules of Engagement", WW2 wargaming in 28mm, at www.greatescapegames.co.uk
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Yeah, because the money in miniature wargaming is in the miniatures. Far higher volume of sales, much better return on investment, you can sell them to people who don't give a toss about your rules set if the quality or price is right.
Because GW never went into that market, even in limited metal ranges, in the time a lot of people here have been gaming, they were basically paying to develop rules sets that they wouldn't see the big pay off from, mini sales.
If forgeworld had done a gladiator range to go with Warhammer gladiators they'd have sold more, as well as selling them to people who didn't give a toss about the rules but played other rules sets, or collected forgeworld minis, or just liked the thought of muscular oiled male bodies in miniature form. But forgeworld didn't want their money.
Warhammer Historical was great while it lasted, and helped introduce more people to historical gaming, but now I think about it and read the comments of others it was a labour of love from a few people at GW and I'm really surprised it lasted as long as it did.
The whole web site being memory holed is a kick in the nuts while you're down though.
I think there is something to be said for miniatures selling rule systems as well though. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen a company come out with a new lines of historical minis and I get an idea of the kind of games I want to play then rush out and look for a set of rules to go along with the army I want to purchase. There is a cooperative nature with historical minis and rules which allows players to not only match minis to rules, but rules to minis as well. I may only have one Ancient German army, but I have a dozen sets of rules that I use to play with them, from skirmish games to giant battle games. Many rule-systems work well no matter what basing system you use, and if you leave a few single based minis to "make change" then you can jump into skirmish rules as well.
My point is that claiming that coming out with a rulebook is a one sided proposition that only helps miniature sellers and not the rule sellers isn't strictly true. If you write a good book, people interested in the periods it covers are likely to check it out no matter what company's miniatures they collect. Let's not forget that rulebooks and such are also a good advertisement for miniature producers as well, which often offer some incentive to the people publishing the rules.
I think FW/GW's choice to cut their historical rules is based on a poor understanding of the market, something that they have over-come many times in the past in spite of crappy decisions thanks to the popularity of their core products and their large share of the gaming market. A good company milks every asset, while Games Workshop greedily expends all it's resources trying to outstrip itself on core product sales. It's only real market strategy for making up lagging revenue seems to be price hikes and rule manipulation to encourage sales while they make little effort to exploit investments in popular and potentialy profitable side projects. What's really sad is that they have spent the money to develope projects like warhammer historical and specialist games, and have truely created some fantastic games. They money is invested, the products have proven popular, and they know how to maintain interest through supporting a product with timely releases and article support.
It's like a gold miner who wants only gold and ignores all other resources found on his property like silver, coal, gems, and oil. People are lining up to buy the stuff they leave laying in the dirt, but they will only sell the gold.
Last edited by UberBeast; 26-05-2012 at 00:46.
A crying shame. I really enjoyed Legends of the Old West.
The Collect Call of the CthulhuI will keep this in mind in case I ever want to be a Necron bride.
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Rulebook and miniatures sales drive each other. The problem comes in profit margins if you're only in the rulebook side of things. They're much lower than for miniature sales and GW is geared towards the high profit margins from those sales. Their rulebooks exist to serve that. Could GW make a profit from selling historical rules driven by sales from other companies minis? Or course they could but it would be low yield and those resources would be more profitably spent elsewhere.
I am wondering if this is an ongoing by-product of trying to define the company for city investors, coupled with the current economic climate and a board that appears to have a set agenda in mind.
Free your hobby! Be creative and stop slavishly following the damn Book.
RIP Brimstone.
I used to read the GW Other Forum, but I am much happier now.
GW have been jettisoning lines which don't shift lots of minis since Bryan Ansell still owned the company, this is nothing new.
Agreed, but the environment is different, and that is what I am questioning.
Free your hobby! Be creative and stop slavishly following the damn Book.
RIP Brimstone.
I used to read the GW Other Forum, but I am much happier now.
Very sad, and I'm kicking myself now for not buying more of their books while I had the chance.
That said, I know there are lots of alternatives to WHH, but I was curious for the three games that I was most interested in (Trafalgar, Gladiator, and Legends of the Old West), what do my fellow history players consider the best alternate rules?
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I would like to point out that GW's profit margins on minis are substantially higher than most other companies, or at least they are before you consider the support they dump into B&M stores and other reinvestment. I don't actually believe that the profit margin for their books are really that poor when compared to everyone else producing rulebooks and making money from them. Besides, it's clearly not about profit margin with books because they have followed a very similar strategy with fanatic games of cutting a profitable subsidiary then using the resulting lowered sales figures to justify the cut.
Games Workshop has the best market penetration and name-brand recognition of all miniature gaming companies by far, and the quality of their historical books could easily have combined with this to make profitable sales. You have only to look at all the companies that do not have the same resources as GW, but which turn a profit. When it comes down to it, there are hundreds of gaming companies with little to no market penetration thriving on rule-book sales, typically with no line of miniatures to support their books. GW's focus on their mainline products borders on the obsessive, especially when all the difficulty in creating truly great products like those from warhammer historical and fanatic games is already done for them and could be maintained with comparatively minimal support.
What I'm saying is that they already have the products. They have researched, produced, and distributed them. All the hard work of breaking the ice is really done, now it's just a matter of selling. So why is it that a profit margin that works for everyone else in the business (and GW's books are certainly on the high end of the price chart) doesn't work for a company that has much greater experience, resources, and market penetration than everyone else in the business?
It's because of their obsession with Warhammer and Warhammer 40k. They don't want to put a historical book on the shelf next to a Space Marine codex because their market strategy is to FORCE people toward their main systems. It isn't that they don't make money on the historical books, even really good money. It's that they want every dollar gamers spend to go into their extremely over-priced core games because every player hooked can't afford to play other games. It's like walking into a department store clothing department to shop for a sweater and all they have is one brand, one color, and it's so expensive that you could purchase 5 sweaters from someone else for the cost of a single sweater from GW. Their reasoning is that if they do not invest in other products then people will be forced to purchase their single product on GW's terms. And what happens in real life? Well, people stop going to that department store and look for smaller stores that offer a wider range of products and at more reasonable prices.
That's the truth of the so-called good decision to get rid of Warhammer Historical based on profit margins. It's just another step down an unrealistically aggressive and short-sighted marketing strategy lined with missed opportunities and wasted potential.
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