Editing Games Workshop (section)

==/tg/ Analysis Of Games Workshop==

===Blind Deaf-mutes===
In a [http://www.iii.co.uk/news-opinion/richard-beddard/games-workshop-agm%3a-relentless-profit-machine meeting with shareholders], Games Workshop exhibited their attitudes quite plainly (and may or may not have mistaken 1/5th for a half). 
*"- the word “Game” in Games Workshop encourages the misconception that games are its business, but that only about 20% of Games Workshop’s customers are gamers. The rest are modellers and collectors. Maybe half of them think about playing now and then. The other half have no intention. People actually walk into the stores because they’re curious about modelling fantastic armies."

When asked "-if the company would sell games with pre-painted easy to assemble miniatures like the popular Star Wars themed X-Wing game" they said:
*"It wouldn’t be a hobby business then, it would be a toy company."

*"-introducing products at new price points is different to reducing the recommended retail price, something the company resolutely refuses to do. It’s considering “putting more value in the box”, discounting in other words, when people buy in number. That ought to encourage gamer-modellers."

*"Potentially lucrative income from licenses granted to video games producers like the much anticipated and soon to be released Total War Warhammer will always be incidental because video gamers do not become modellers, and Games Workshop doesn’t know how to make good video games."

In their 2015 Financial Report, they stated:
*"The Group does not undertake research activities."
In the same report, the words "market" and "research" never referred to the same subject. They claim their main audience is teenagers, although they also state that the hobbyist crowd is their main fanbase. Furthermore, they make assumptions about their fanbase despite admitting that they do not research about them.

So what can be learned? Games Workshop has absolutely no long-term plan other than to make more expensive models, and cater to those who can drop thousands in a single impulse buy. Rather than expanding and reaching out to new customers, they are intentionally becoming a niche market for an elite crowd. In other words? 
"Fuck you, you smelly hatless Irishman."

===The Digital Age (And Completely Missing the Point)===
Games Workshop would sign a deal with Apple to sell eBooks on the interwebz, instead of Amazon (the largest retailer worldwide), because then the books would have to be cheaper. Games Workshop refused to understand the fact that eBooks ''almost always'' cost less than what they would if bought from a book store. That 1 pence discount doesn't count.
(From GW point of view, even tho it's stupid to put the same price on eBooks as the Hardcover Army Books/Codices, it makes sense. Because if they were to sell them cheaper, they would sell much less books, meaning they'll lose money from the traditional books. Yes, it cost $80 in Australia for both the eBook and the Hardcover, which again is bullshit.)(A load of crap, 90 dollars for Hardcover Codex, 70 for ebook, in Aus.)

Though in this regard, GW does seem to be slowly figuring out what works: Dataslates are a cheap effective means of deploying models without committing to entire armies/detachments. Essentially like microtransactions. While around £3 might seem like a lot of money for only a few pages of crunch and only two or three new units/formations, they are some of the cheapest products GW have released in a good long time and they do also use these to repost entire rules sections dragged out of the codices in addition to the product itself, so you never needed the codex if you never owned it in the first place.

Some of the Dataslates are extremely high quality (like [[Cypher]]) and are virtually must-haves, while some others are complete dross (Reclusiam Command Squad?) that were dreamed up over a 5 minute coffee break just to sell something. But with the advent of 7th Edition, armies can be made up entirely of dataslates ''(or just go unbound)'' so they are no longer telling you how to build your army any more and you can keep it cheaper by bringing only a few models to make up your chosen formation.

[[File:Gamesworkshopinanutshell.png|thumb|300px|right|Games Workshop's probable downfall.]]

Oh, and they sell them in various formats so you don't need that iPad if you don't have one since eReaders can be downloaded for free and if you still don't have anything to read them on, then have a [[FAIL|think]] about how you got onto the Internet.
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===Why Games Workshop is Bad and Should Feel Bad===
One anon's perpsective on why GW hasn't collapsed in on itself yet. Keep in mind that was written some time during the Derpening when reading this.
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Never mind that large groups are often less efficient due to the fact that most people like to agree and be part of a group, even if the group is wrong. Forget that the burden of hard work is often shrugged off thanks to the assumption that everyone else will be carrying enough of the real challenges to pull things through (and that when things go wrong, it's a flaw of human nature that people don't like to admit and accept when they screw up). Instead, focus on the fact that the people heading GW – or most large corporations for that matter – are successful, rich, ordinary men who are blessed by good fortune in an unfair universe and probably don't realize the reality. Further, examine the knowledge that, according to Sun Tzu and a variety of psychological studies, successful rich people with the aforementioned profound luck are the folks most likely to make stupid mistakes out of anyone!

Now you know why GW (or the entire world, for that matter) is run the way it is.

A source of some debate on /tg/ is whether or not it is actually charging prices that make sense for the hobby. All logic points to a resounding “no”, but another interesting social phenomena is this: fanboyism is an inbuilt human process. Whenever money is spent on a good, especially a luxury item, man has a way of increasing the illusionary worth of that item.

Imagine buying tickets to see your local team play football, and they lose. It's not even a good game, to be honest. People around the country were disappointed. However, those tickets cost a lot of money, and having spent all that money for so little in return makes a person feel stupid. We grope for other things, then, to make the tickets worth while rather than admit we were wrong (even if we were only wrong due to events beyond our control) and learn from it. Yes, it was cold, but your wife was there, so you bonded! The beer was too expensive as well, but they sold your favorite brand! You had an experience! It was fun! Yes, those tickets were worth it in the end.

We'll even do this with soft drinks. Even if brain probes reveal a man likes Pepsi more than Coke, going back and telling the man what he was drinking can actually ''alter his memory'' so that he remembers liking the Coke more. It's amazing.

GW products are exactly the same way. They're ludicrously expensive. Even people who support GW fervently wish they weren't. It hurts. In a rough economy, it's hard to play the game. You spend months, years – who knows how long waiting for that new codex, it turns out to be awful compared to expectations (hello, Tyranids!) (UP YOURS ASSHOLE.), and now you've either got to suck it up and keep playing (got to buy the new Trygons, I guess, even though they aren't ''that'' great), or take a huge monetary loss and give up. Fanboyism steps in and makes it all okay. You're not just buying the models, but the game and the network utility too, so 40k is still totally fun and cool!

Big corporations, and GW as well, are predators. They feast on fanboyism. Like the [[Dark Eldar]], they prey on your suffering and write sick, stomach-turning poetry about the flowing, green streams of vital wealth they siphon from your being. You are a toy (''moreso than the articles they sell''). [[Hot Chicks|That cute girl at the convenience store you see all the time?]] Thanks to GW, you have to choose between inviting her to the theater and buying that new squadron of Guardsmen. Those of you scoffing at the dilemma, shut up; those Guardsmen won't cheat on you, dump you for someone else or nag nearly as much after you've had them for a little while, so it's <s>[[Neckbeard|totally a tough call.]]</s>{{BLAM|'''*BLAM!* HERESY!!! NOT CHOOSING THE EMPEROR'S FINEST IS HERESY!!!'''}} 
But putty in their hands you may be, there are still some principles of basic economics that imply GW ''might not be earning enough revenue,'' and surprisingly, they can only lose more money by raising prices! There's no real way of knowing how things really are within GW without a look at the delicate, inner machinery of their business. But it does all come back to our first consideration: GW is run by the type of person most notable for making poor decisions – lucky, successful people, and a group, no less.

Whatever idiot wrote the following has no _actual_ business sense. Revenue ≠ Profit. Profit = Revenue - Cost... yes, but still give you a good idea about GW policy.

The situation is thus: there is more to money flow than just the bottom line, though often it's all we think of, but basically there's income, cost, and revenue. What is of most concern is revenue, which could also be thought of as [[profit]]. GW sells their models for a greater amount than what they cost, and the amount they make is revenue!

So now, there's revenue, and then there's marginal revenue. Revenue is just how much you make. Sell a thousand Guardsmen and make ten thousand dollars? Your Guardsmen revenue is $10,000! Marginal revenue, on the other hand, is how much you make ''compared to selling one less of the item''. In this case, the Guardsmen have a marginal revenue of $10. Each Guardsman made a profit of $10, and if you sold one less Guardsman, you'd make $10 less. See? Easy. Well, for this simplified example anyway (in reality there are a lot of fixed start-up costs, but point made).

Now let's raise prices. From now on, we'll sell half as many Guardsmen per box, and the boxes will cost the same. Now marginal revenue is $22, because every time a Guardsman is sold, we bring in $20 per Guardsman plus an additional $2 gets saved thanks to the Guardsmen we didn't make! This is cool – we're in business, just like GW, /tg/! Let's do that again – our customers are fans, they'll bear it! Now we'll sell five Guardsmen to a box, and we have a marginal revenue of $45!

Okay, wait, wait. I've got it. I'm a genius. Let's sell one Guardsman. Sell it for the same price we used to sell twenty of them! We're going to be rich! Marginal revenue is going to be amazing! Like, what, over a hundred dollars a purchase?

So what's our profit in the end? What! Negative? How!? We're making ''so much'' per model! The marginal revenue is ''so high''!

The answer is simple. Not enough people are buying one crappy Guardsman for $200 dollars. A few of the fans are sticking it out, hating us relentlessly, but newcomers to the game see the price tag and run screaming. People who can't afford it leave because they have no other choice, but they're happy in retrospect. Even some of our most loyal customers finally decided to just date that girl after all – one gets more of their money's worth from her ([[This Guy|one way]] [[Hot Chicks|or]] [[Promotions|another]]) and they'll deal with her constant bitching. Actual revenue is at an all time low.

Believe it or not, lots of other companies really do make this mistake, albeit not often to this extent (unless you check out [[Forge World]], anyway. Anyone want a Tau [[Manta]]? Under £1,000). It's because maximizing marginal revenue is very easy. It's simple arithmetic, and if your market base is rather inelastic (and GW's market base certainly is due to the high investment requirements of their games), a lot of times price changes won't have a huge impact, so it's easier to focus on. GW is at some point in the middle here, where it has started to become questionable.

It's hard to say if they're making right decisions or if their pricing makes the most sense. It's becoming the status quo that their games are really a hobby of those with absurd disposable income, which is not a quality described of the young men who are presumed to make up 40k's primary demographic. It's possible that they're targeting young teens with parents who will buy the models for them, but that's hard to say as well since parents will lack the dedicated fanboyism to continually invest in the absurdly priced hobby.

Mix in unbalanced rules that unfairly favor certain factions, long wait times between army updates, [[Casting|inferior model quality]] compared to what's provided to model hobbyists outside of the wargaming industry, and GW may have a recipe for a failing market.

In fact, by using some math and basic market theory, we can actually take a look at how much GW is supposedly spending to bring our hobby to us.

The list below will give us some basic numbers to work with. We know that GW currently sells its rule books at $74.25. What we don't know is GW's actual costs or how many books they're selling. These things have an impact on the math, but we'll sort of fudge it. Now, based on that alone, we want to price our book at twice what it costs to make the thing. In the real world all this nice math has the tendency to fly apart, but generally speaking that's the ideal manner of doing things. For example:

Quantity sold: 0 
Price of book: $0 
Estimated cost to GW: $0 
Marginal Cost: $0 
Marginal Revenue: $0
Total Revenue: $0

Quantity sold: 1 
Price of book: $74.25 
Estimated cost to GW: $37.13 
Marginal Cost: $37.13 
Marginal Revenue: $37.12
Total Revenue: $37.12

Quantity sold: 2 
Price of book: $74.25 
Estimated cost to GW: $74.25 
Marginal Cost: $37.13 
Marginal Revenue: $37.12
Total Revenue: $74.25

And so on. Since we're assuming that every book has a fixed cost to produce, we just get a rough idea of what it's actually costing GW to make rule books for us. Or so such is true only if we figure they're trying to price things according to a competitive market where the consumer sets the price. Basic economics says we want to have a marginal revenue equal to our marginal cost if we want to work with a price we can't really control, and that's what this does.

See, there's a few things to consider. The first is that, in a competitive market, people are just going to buy the cheapest product. That means whoever is selling cheapest kind of wins the day, but while GW could maybe sell their rule books at $20 each, they'd be suffering huge profit losses that are not directly proportionate to the change in price. Instead, they'll try to follow along with what the market is doing, and to their very best possible effort, they'll try to lower their costs so that the marginal costs equal the marginal revenue (or, again, their prices are basically double their production costs per item). That just simply maximizes revenue, since if they raise prices their competitors will undercut them and GW will be able to sell nothing.

But honestly, if you've read this far, then hopefully you're braced for this shock. According to estimates from a few publishers, it only costs about $3 per book to publish 5,000 hardback books, and that cost decreases as you publish in greater bulk. 40k books do have a lot of pretty pictures, so maybe that increases costs somewhat, but again, costs generally tend to get smaller as you order more of an item, and it's pretty likely that GW is not just settling for a measly 5,000 books internationally. They sell all over the world.

So where are all these other costs popping up that should cause GW to spend $37 on every single book they produce? In small production quantities, we'd consider the cost of labor. Who knows how much Matt Ward demands to be paid to lick every rule book before it leaves the factory! What do the photographers want in compensation? Actually, ''stop''. At GW's production rates, those expense considerations become almost ''completely negligible.'' You pay Matt Ward a salary to lick all the books. It's a yearly thing. You pay him once and you're done, so by the time you've produced a million books, even if you paid Matt a million dollars to slobber on every single page, Matt is only increasing the cost of the books by a dollar each.

Margins are all that matter. GW talks about overheads and so forth as an excuse, but that's insanity. In a perfectly competitive market you don't increase prices to cover overheads. You reduce the overheads because they're predictable annual costs that you more or less established on your own! Besides, you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily raise prices like that, seeing as how your competitors are supposedly keeping you in check! So really, what we can infer is the following:

A. Basically, GW has no competitors controlling their pricing right now. (This was especially true in the old days. Nowadays, this is less of an excuse as wargames and miniature companies branched out into all sorts of different fields. Thus, the monopoly GW used to have is no more.)

B. They are price gouging their players to fill the pockets of the people who run the company. (This scares off a lot of players, especially ones who have to buy a bunch just to keep up with the inconsistent update schedule or wish to start with a full army. Thus, the only people left are the people rich enough to afford it and those too ignorant to really think otherwise/the GWIDF)

C. Their pricing is not directly related to their costs, and anything they say to the contrary is a big fat lie. (This particular argument is used by Recaster supporters and proponents of 3-D Printers as they slowly advance in complexity to begin making more accurate and good-quality resin models.)

D. You could play another game, but all your friends are playing 40k anyway and you don't want to feel left out.

'''E. Fuck Games Workshop'''. ''' ''FUCK THEM WITH A FUCKING CHAINBLADE. NO. MAKE THAT A DAEMONHAMMER.'' '''

This article also explains the problem with Australian prices, in a slightly less detailed manner; [http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/04/the-iron-fist-how-games-workshop-intends-to-monopolise-the-online-sale-of-products/]

Games Workshop have sat pretty at the top of the miniature wargames shit-heap for many years (indeed, the scale models industry tries to ignore that they're the biggest single seller of miniatures) and have abused this position to increase their own profits. However, fortunately for the long suffering gamer alternatives are emerging. [[Privateer Press]] for example produce the games [[Warmachine]] and [[Hordes]] and offers slightly cheaper models and starter sets. In the market for wargames Privateer Press and Coolminiornot are rapidly emerging as a viable challenger to GW's monopoly while Reaper Miniatures takes them on using the same tactics that made them in the first place; licensing IP's, and making things for other games. They are the Tau, Dark Eldar, and Chaos to GW's Imperium.

Also worthy of note is [[Mantic Games]] who produce [[Kings of War]], a fantasy battle game in a similar vein to Warhammer. The rules system was even written by former GW man Alessio Cavatore (essentially succeeding at what every frustrated ex-GW employee since 1988 has dreamed of) and it is fast, fluid and a lot more "fun" than Warhammer. The company is pioneering the use of plastic-resin alloy (or 'restic') as a cost effective alternative to pewter. Oh, and equivalent plastic models cost about HALF what GW charge (e.g. GW High Elf Spearmen (16 models) - £20, Mantic Games Elf Spearmen (20 models) - £13.99) the trade-off however is that Mantic models look like hammered dogshit. Mantic are basically the war gaming equivalent of Asylum films.

One can only hope that these new upstarts will beat down GWs monopolistic hold on the [[wargame]] market.
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===A Sobering Look at GW's Near Collapse===
On top of all the other financial considerations involved with a company like Games Workshop, there's one major concern that was probably gravely overlooked by the company as it raised prices and cut smaller retailers out of the picture: a concept called "network utility". A lot of products are useless unless they're used by a ton of people. A fax machine is a good example - if everyone owns a fax machine, then one person can use his own fax machine to send pictures of his ass to everyone on earth. That's a good value for a single person, and really makes the fax machine worth buying! However, if fewer people buy fax machines, it becomes less and less desirable to own one. After all, why buy a machine that's only capable of sending a picture of your butt to your grandmother, the only other person who still has a machine? Grandma is never impressed, anyway.

A similar concept exists with GW, and they've ignored it over the past couple of years, especially as they've cut models out of starter sets to reduce costs. If you go down to your local game store and everyone is playing Warhammer 40k, not only are you more likely to get into it because of friendly recommendations, but you're also likely to start playing because you know everyone has an army and everyone can play with you! Even if you aren't personal friends with the folks at your local game store, you know that anywhere you go, the people you meet at the FLGS can play the game with you!

The more difficult GW made it to carry their products, the more game stores turned to alternatives to fill shelves. [[Spartan Games]] and [[Privateer Press]] quickly moved in to fill the void with creative new IP (at least until they ran into their own problems). [[Fantasy Flight Games]] upped the ante even further with Star Wars product that was table ready straight out of the box. The network utility of FFG's products was huge because it was so accessible, making it the go-to for casuals looking to buy into whatever had the most players, despite FFG's extortionate pricing.

Now, models (and games in general) have gotten more expensive; granted, only scaled in price with inflation, but since wages have largely stagnated in a lot of markets these past couple decades, to the typical consumer the costs still feel like they've gone up and the players notice the hikes. When a product gets more expensive, people naturally quit buying it. This thins the dedicated player herd.

Meanwhile, GW also drags its feet when it comes to codex updates, and when it does update, there's no telling whether or not a new codex is going to be a complete load of shit. The Tyranid codex being a huge let down for two editions running is probably one of the most critical examples. Anyone who collected Tyranids as a main army has pretty well given up hope by now, and they've quit collecting. Other players with armies in similar straits, likely feeling abandoned during 5th edition when GW focused exclusively on Space Marines, have also probably drifted away from the hobby. Of course, there have also been a few people who just quit playing out of disgust because their local meta was a bit too hardcore and there was no way to win games without exploiting the broken, disjointed lack of balance.

Although Games Workshop continued to hike up prices and showed fantastic profits in the short term, these issues probably alienated too many people, and as they roll along with the next edition and new codices, they're probably discovering, with great horror, that there aren't enough players buying into it anymore. Worse, the effect can snowball out of control, and GW will probably lose their market control in one big flash of failure. Almost overnight, it'll suddenly seem that 40k has evaporated.

When there are too few players in the game, it's no longer true that you can go to your FLGS and play with any stranger in the store. There's always that one guy - that rich asshole who owns every army in the book and consequently has some of the most boring, broken, frustrating army lists to play against. But do you really want to play against that guy every single weekend? Eventually, you quit showing up to play 40k as well, and once you're gone, even that dick with all his money has no more reason to play. The final pillar falls, and Games Workshop is no more.

In other words, the player base has always been the most important foundation of the company, and it was always GW's greatest strength. Not the model quality, not the rules, not the setting or any of the IP that they keep suing their fans over. The reason Games Workshop dominated was because everyone played their games. As soon as that's no longer the case, the company can't save itself by releasing new models or updating the rules. Their reign is over. They topple, because the foundations have shrunk.

===GW The Bully===
{{Topquote|It's like we're in an abusive relationship|Some random anon describing GW scumfuckery.}}
Games Workshop has long had a history of being one of the most litigious companies in regards to its IP in ''existence''. One needs look no further than our own [[Pauldrons]] article to get an idea of how bad it is, in that it uses its designs to openly fight any company that dares have any remote similarity to its own models in any way, shape, or form. You have any wargame with armored dudes with big pauldrons? Lawsuit. You run a company that makes third-party components for existing models? [[Derp|Lawsuit]]. You make anything remotely resembling any GW IP ever and aren't a massive company that could actually contest the giant copyright stick GW is swinging around and make them look like the idiots they are? [[Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies|LAWSUIT]].

Whilst GW has a lengthy history of overstepping boundaries in its war to enforce its copyright, it had decided to go [[Deathstrike Missile Launcher|nuclear]]. [http://boingboing.net/2013/02/06/games-workshop-trademark-bully.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter In 2013, GW launched the claim that it owns the phrase ''Space Marine''], ignoring that sci-fi has used the terminology for the better part of eighty years (and showing their hypocrisy as Games Workshop shamelessly stole the term 'Eldar' from [[Tolkien]]; yes, he invented the word 'Eldar'). The story in question "Spots the Space Marine" is about a middle age housewife, nicknamed Spots, being recalled back to the Marine corp (ie a Real Marine, in space) to fight giant enemy crabs (in space). It had nothing to do with GW's Space Marines or the Warhammer 40K setting.

*The History of the term "Space Marine"; The first known use of term 'Space Marine' was made by sci-fi author Bob Olsen (real name; Alfred Johannes Olsen, 1884-1956), who first used the term in his short story "Captain Brink of the Space Marines" from his "Amazing Stories" series, first published in '''1932'''. Warhammer 40K started as the Second Edition of Rogue Trader and was released in 1993, while [[Rogue Trader]] itself was released in 1987. Games Workshop was founded in 1975 and even its oldest founding member (Ian Livingstone) was born in 1949. Therefore, the term Space Marine was in use for forty-three years before Games Workshop existed and over a decade before any of the founders were even born. Plus, with a bit of use of copyright law, in 2026 (seventy years after Bob Olsen died), the term Space Marine could theoretically become public domain, then GW would no longer be able to copyright it then.

This means that what GW tried to do was plagiarism, which is a direct violation of copyright law. Games Workshop's strategy to make "space marine" less generic involved launching high profile, bullying attacks on every professional author or artist who isn't associated with a huge company who uses it, trying to make it so people hearing the phrase immediately conclude that [[Derp|it ''must'' be related to Games Workshop]], because ''everyone'' knows [[Eldrad|what enormous cocks]] they are whenever anyone else uses the phrase. These attacks were not, again, targeted at any opponent that could credibly fight back; this is because if it actually came to attempts to litigate over the phrase, GW would be laughed out of court. It wasn't not going to stop GW from being cocks, though. In fact, as of 2014, [[Herp|Games Workshop's website still has 'Space Marine' listed as one of their copyrights]]. This copyright backlash made them rename the Imperial Guard "Astra Militarum" (This is not the correct Latin declension for "Star Military." If it was the correct declension, then it would be just as hard to trade mark as "Imperial Guard"), but their hard-on for Space Marines stopped GW from renaming the codex something original, such as "Adeptus Astartes".

After the failure and fiasco of the suit against Spots the Space Marine, GW would post a lengthy and self defeating rant on their own Facebook page, which basically displayed the ignorance of those writing the post. Shortly afterwards, the Facebook page went down after the backlash it caused. Several who queried GW over the pages removal were told that GW wished for the experience with the fanbase to be more personal, thus people should be following their own GW stores.

Their bullying came back to bite them in the ass after a failed attempt at suing third-party manufacturer [[ChapterHouse Studios]]; when they refused to back down from GW's threats to sue them for making unauthorized models (specifically Mycetic Spores, the Doom of Malan'tai, and the Parasite of Mortrex), the lawsuit went to court- which GW [[FAIL|failed]] to argue the majority of alleged copyright breaches. Apparently, just writing up the rules for a model doesn't give you the sole rights to making that model after all. Undaunted, GW did the next best thing-[[Rage|they removed the offending entries from the Tyranid codex]], burning the fur coat to spite the fleas. Way to put the customer first, GeeDubs. At least now we know how to save the galaxy from the Tyranids: make and sell unsanctioned Tyranid models.

Now, despite their changes for the better, their hypocrisy came back to haunt them in August 2017 when[https://spikeybits.com/2017/08/games-workshop-is-being-sued-for-62-5m.html Games Workshop got sued in the US to the tune of 62.5 million for, among other things "...stolen Intellectual property of others to establish it’s Warhammer 40,000 game in the 1980s"] Fans felt bad, worried about the future of the hobby or cheered that what goes around comes around (the latter since GW sued people for far less; see "Spots the Space Marine" above). However, given the lawsuit's bizarre, poorly written and ignorant case (eg; H.R Giger does not own the idea of aliens who use other species for their reproductive cycle and accusing Games Workshop of being European Communists) Moore's case fell apart and was dismissed in October 2017. Imagine failing to sue GW over stolen intellectual property when 40K is essentially made of other people's IP. Perhaps this was intentional, assuming double jeopardy applies to lawsuits.

Of course GW's early copyright mistakes have also bit them in the ass; [[Tony Ackland]] still owns his Daemon designs as discussed above, and [[Kev Adams]] was only ever sculpting generic greenskins which he still owns the molds for. Both lend their talents (and IP work) to the company [[Knightmare Miniatures]], who produce Daemons based on the original [[Realm of Chaos]] art, the sculpts of Kev's greenskins both new and old, and a number of 40k-related works as well. If you're wondering why GW never went after them, the two are VERY popular among the tabletop gamer community so they could easily raise the funds needed to defend themselves in court (Kev himself has already demonstrated that given the money the community raised to fund surgeries for him after he got stabbed in the fucking eye by a burglar), and since GW themselves ripped off their work the same way most 3rd party companies rip off theirs then there's always a chance they could lose the rights to make Daemonettes/Plaguebearers/Horrors/Bloodletters/Black Orcs/Night Goblins and so on in a countersuit. While renaming Black Orcs and Night Goblins as Orruk 'Ardboyz and Gloomspite Gitz might be an attempt to deflect this, Bloodletters, Horrors and Daemonettes would still be vulnerable.

===The ₽₹¥€£$===
[[Image:1271198871887.jpg|thumb|right|250px|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSxQnZ3TM8 Games Workshop's typical meeting board]]]
'''In the grim darkness of the near future, the prices must beat inflation.'''

GW is infamous for their steep prices, and they would have been replaced by a more reasonable company for gaming dominance if their popularity wasn't XBOXHUEG compared to their competitors. These price hikes have been around forever, as the rise of video games (people buying fewer models in general over time) and currency inflation have necessitated "adaptation to a more niche market". The infamous price hikes that /tg/ will remember (and be ass-mad about) forever occurred within the decade span from 2005 to 2015. Between these dates, it is safe to say that every model kit raised its price 50%, with some kits doubling in price. Note that /tg/ came into being during the price hikes, and spent most of it's lifetime (and all of it's formative years) suffering under them.

Games Workshop also have a nasty habit of making prices proportional to how good a model/unit is in-game, rather than the actual cost of materials and manufacture.

Of course, if we really want to stop the price hikes, [[/tg/]] should probably start a legitimate campaign to give perspective and shine the spotlight on other wargames like Warmachine, but /tg/ can't get REAL shit done! Regardless, it definitely won't stop until Brexit related nonsense and the Corona Pandemic are over.

The prices didn't stop them or their model customers. However, due to GW's recent bout of shittiness, people have turned more and more to 3D printing only to discover just how vast an amount GW has actually been gouged people over the years. This revelation has gone viral in the 40K community and, unlike GW, the makers of BattleTech encourage fans to use 3D printing whereas GamesWorkshop has had a small meltdown on the subject. Talk about being hoisted by your own petard.