Just read a post on the Games Workshops forums about which rules, rules-updates and FAQs one is supposed to play Warhammer 40k by. Which brought up a though I have about that firm since long time ago: They have all these awesome miniatures, stories, universes and characters, and yet their codices (army specific sub-rulebooks if you want) have ruleholes as big as a sumo-wrestler in it and they bring forth nazi-like policies about their stuff.
As a counterpart to Games Workshop (GW hereafter) I will list Wizards of the Coast because they are the other major player in the otherwise known as geeky or even worse art of playing games (Tabletop and Trading Card games that is). Wizards cashcow is without a doubt Magic the Gathering. Sure the cards aren’t particularly cheap, but especially when you start buying individual cards you need rather than hoping to get some good card in a random booster pack, you won’t spend as much as you have to on a nice and shiny Warhammer 40k army, models, painting stuff, books and all.
Anyway, to get to the punch line: Games Workshops rulebooks get revisions like 1 or 2 weeks after release. And of course if you want those revisions nicely printed you have to buy a new book, or download them from the net (if they are nice to you), or often you have to buy their monthly magazine to get the latest updates. So after a while you have like your rulebook, codex, 5 sites of printed out FAQ text, a few magazines with erratas and so on.
Wizards on the other hand update the texts on their cards regularly, and when they find a loop in one of the rules they will close it immediately. Also they have constands, as in daily, updates, news, tips, articles, rants, features, tactics and more on their website. GW, while having a forum per sé, have a policy about their stuff that isn’t funny anymore. I mean I can fully understand wanting to license and copyright your work and all. But closing threads and banning people because they quoted 2 lines of text from the rulebooks to proof some point or show something that doesn’t quite fit with that rule is nothing but rude and (for a lack of a better term) Micro$oft-ish.
Now, to finally come to the conclusion of this rant: Wizards primary sales come from their cards, which they of course copyrighted, but they give the players an always up-to-date rules library and articles on the hobby to really keep them at bay and into the game. It is understandable that they want to let everyone know, when some card or art from them is shown somewhere that it comes from them.
Now what would GW do in such a situation? Right, sue everyone that uses images from you on their private homepage that they made because they love the hobby and want to tell people about it. Or stop letting other stores selling your stuff and therefore giving you money passivly and just sell everything via your shops that are like 1 per 50 kilometers at best.
What Wizards did was the following: They coded Autocard. Now you only have to implement 2 lines of javascript into your website and can make links to every card (image) they ever produced in a nice and shiny popup window from your site. Now that’s what I call a good decision both marketing- and player-wise.
So does this mean that GWs primary sales come from rulebooks too because they guard their written rules like a 6 inch diamond? Of course not, their biggest sales come from their miniatures - so keeping everything that evolves around them, like making good rules for fun games with your expensive minatures would be a good idea.
Of course I know about next to nothing about big business strategies, I only see 2 very different companies with 2 very different approaches to 2 very similar markets.
I hope GW will somehow get a huge market decrease to let them think about their position again, may it be for the first time. Now excuse me while I kiss the sky.
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