In 2013-2014 GW's revenue dipped below £120m, and it was only making ~12m in profit per year. Sales were down, and return on capital employed dropped as well.


To put things into perspective, GW is selling around ten times as much as they did back in the 6th/7th edition. 40k 7th was arguably even a flop - sales were dropping during the 7th ed launch. 2015 saw a pretty big increase in sales with AoS dropping, but it died quite quickly and the company stagnated around that ~16m profit figure. Losing sales and only barely managing to remain even after cutting all stores to one-man operations was tricky and the stock price reflected it - if you are doing massive cost-cutting but remaining the same in terms of profitability, the company is going to die.

However, in 2017, revenue increased by a solid 25% and profit more than doubled thanks to Primaris. This growth continued, with revenue going from £158,114,000 in 2017 to £219,870,000 (and profit again nearly doubling from 38m to 75m) in 2018. From there, the growth began to slow but was still constant, growing about 10% a year in both revenue and profit from 2018-19, another 10% profit increase in 2019-2020.

People often talk about the huge Covid bump GW got but even that (~60% profit increase yoy and some 40% revenue increase yoy) was still smaller than the massive Primaris boost.

Games workshop was floundering and cutting costs everywhere it could just to break even, but Primaris caused 40k to explode in popularity, revenue and profit. This is an objectively true statement as told by GW's own stock reports. Current GW sells over 5 times as much as they did in 2014, which was the release of 7th.

tldr PRIMARIS IS KING and SAVED 40k