Monday 10 March 2014

Maintaining a positive Monday attitude!

Having come back from Dark Sphere with a fair few new models and a healthy new respect for bikes in Kill Team, one might expect that would be the subject of this weeks post but instead I'm going to mull over a different topic. Have GW killed off our their customers excitement for conversions?

The reason I bring this up is that whilst we were at Dark Sphere for the Kill Team event (great fun, but due to an app f*#^ up my final post of the event has been absorbed by the cloud, sorry!) i noticed that the three of use were far more enthusiastic and willing to purchase product at Dark Sphere than we where at Warhammer World. And even those at WWorld who spent their hard earned cash were predominantly doing so at Forgeworld.

This got me wondering why? Whilst the 25% discount was a slight factor, for what I bought it didn't amount to much more than £13 so i discounted that as my primary motivation. Then it hit me, we were looking at products that were either conversion or basing options. Whilst we did enjoy looking at all the options for other games it was all the little £6 to £10 kits that had us really excited for ways to spruce up our armies. Then it hit me. This is what GW has lost. With all the new dual kits, big kits and plastic characters we no longer have access to 'pocket money' kits that mean you will pick  on a whim. I realised that I'd suddenly started filling up my basket with lots of little bits in addition to the Ogre models, which I would have had to buy boxsets of unneeded models to get.

Now you would be forgiven for thinking my Monday musing was based on whether or not GW have shot themselves in the foot but actually it is this: how much stock does a games store need to carry to be viable? GW seems happy to say 'order online and come back' for specialist items whist your traditional game store is a customer service nightmare with thousands of products to track and (for some companies) bother to price up. Even with the veritable cornucopia of products at Dark Sphere there were still things which I would have added to my purchase if they had them (though there were missile launchers which I liked that were nearly £8 for 5 but I needed 15 which is what put me off).

So are we just cheapskates looking for the lowest price or has some companies desire to consolidate products into larger boxsets restricted the ability for players to tinker and impulse buy?


1 comment:

  1. Interesting topic that i think encompasses two of GW's larger decisions from recent times: Getting rid of the bits service and how often they now consolidate multiple kits into one.

    I totally accept that getting rid of their bits service had to be done, And made even more sense now metal minis are all but gone. They did seem to be going down the right track and releasing their own conversion packs but releases of those have seemed to dry up a bit. And they arent available to look at in person in their stores anyway.
    However, them releasing so many 'dual' kits is starting to get a bit tiresome.

    If a squad of (for arguments sake) necron deathmarks was a £15 kit and there was half a dozen bits i wanted from it, im much more likely to be willing to just spunk £15 on that kit for the bits i want than the £20.50 on the immortals/deathmark kit.

    Its kind of like theyre trading these kits on the illusion of value, yes youre getting a lot of bits on those sprues, but honestly, and i want responses here, how often have any of us bought a dual kit and actually used more than 1 or 2 of the bits you end up left over with once youve built the variant you wanted from the box?
    Off the top of my head i can think of one, When i built my Khemrian Warsphinx i kept the necrosphinx torso with the intention of turning it into a Hierotitan (i started, and its half finished. but it does look a bit shit so far so ive put it in a box and left it ever since)

    On the flipside i did keep the sepulchral stalkers parts from my necropolis knights kits for ages and ended up just throwing them away recently to make enough space in my bits crate for everything else.

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