How is it that GW is richer than ever, but the actual GW stores (sorry Warhammer™) and White Dwarf magazine are complete husks compared to what they used to be?

When I was a teen, the GW was the place we all met up and played. With like three full-time staff and several part-timers. All sorts of events and Veterans night and a painting roundtable. They'd cram in as many 6x4' tables for games as they could.

Now there's one member of staff and a few half-size intro boards and it just looks so forlorn and sterile.

I wonder if eventually they'll all start closing at a rate of knots, seen as unnecessary in the days of Twitch reveal stream hype and FOMO box queuing on the website. White Dwarf too seems really lost when I look at a copy now, compared to the Warhammer Community site.

I get that most sales are online now, but yeah I don't know why they didn't keep the focus on the stores as a place for people to play and get into the hobby that way, basically keep them interested. Moving to larger units at retail parks instead of the tiny high street stores that are typical in the UK, given that high street footfall is dead as fuck anyway.

>>96174725 (OP)
>How is it that GW is richer than ever
>With like three full-time staff and several part-timers. All sorts of events and Veterans night and a painting roundtable. They'd cram in as many 6x4' tables for games as they could.
>Now there's one member of staff and a few half-size intro boards and it just looks so forlorn and sterile.
Gee, I wonder how cutting costs is increasing profits....

>>96174754
Kids really do seem to have a hard idea grasping that just catering to their every whim isn't always the best way to make a buck. Funnily enough they then also have a hard time with the idea that the shit they want might be popular overall and thus end up expensive/rare.

>>96174754
No their income has basically exploded since it got more mainstream to play Warhammer, a few little cuts is nothing in comparison to the rapid increase in popularity.

>>96174748
>larger units at retail parks

I'd never even considered that.

They did experiment with the Battle Bunkers in the 00s, it just meant a larger shop in the US but in the UK they opened up a handful of large units, mostly on industrial estates, with like 30 tables for events. I went to the Sheffield one on a "field trip" planned by my local GW.

In fact the GWs even used to organise a coach trip to Games Day. That was always a great day out. Man.

the stores have always been shit though. I have no idea why they even exist.
Especially when they placed them in nonsensical very public embarrassing spots and 75% of the time the staff are utter assholes.

>>96174725 (OP)
They moved the focus from making enjoyable games/places to making more money. If they could move entirely to people giving them money without any cost/responsibility on GW's part, they would.

>>96174874
>They did experiment with the Battle Bunkers in the 00s, it just meant a larger shop in the US but in the UK they opened up a handful of large units, mostly on industrial estates, with like 30 tables for events. I went to the Sheffield one on a "field trip" planned by my local GW.
>In fact the GWs even used to organise a coach trip to Games Day. That was always a great day out. Man.
They did battle bunkers here in Aus, too. Worked out well enough, I figure, we almost had on in the A.C.T before the pivot into the 1 man shops instead, damn shame, there were a few nice spots for it. They also did the coach for Games Day when they brought them back in the 2010s. I remember the first revived GD, in the venue there were also auditions for a reboot of an old talent search TV show, the calls to WAAAGH were so loud and frequent that it kept disrupting recording for them. Good times.

I have nothing to add, but anecdotally I went to the GW store near me just to check it out and it was super sad. Just one guy working there and no one else there at all. The store hours were complete shit, it was closed by like 5pm and opened at like 2pm. The guy there said people only come by on Sunday to hang out and all they played was like the fucking AoS skirmish game.

>>96174725 (OP)
I don't understand who buys direct from GW. I understand for stuff like resin characters/monsters/warmachines for stuff like Fantasy where direct is almost always your only option. But for 90% of the catalogue you can buy from a local third party store and get a 10-20% discount and support the place you actually play. But at the end of the day those third party sales also support GW.

>>96174725 (OP)
Because luxury retail is a tough business with thin margins. That GW can be profitable when card shops go under is a testament to GW corporate being very good at their jobs.

As for WD, people just don't read magazines anymore. Places like Discord and Reddit have taken the place of community building that was once served by magazine circulation and letters to the editors.

>>96174874
Battle bunkers were sacrificed due to incredibly retarded decisions by management when they grossly over extended with MESBG money and then faced the huge retraction after the end of the original trilogy. There is no evidence the bunkers lost money or didn't increase engagement, the company just saw the rent and staffing and said fuck it.

>>96174725 (OP)
GWs one man stores have been very successful as a strategy. They also have a performance based strategy for upgrading and downgrading stores to be staffed vs one man and to have more open hours.

If you had a large format staffed store that was replaced by a small format one man store its because it was underperforming.

They also changed strategy in the US a while ago from putting stores in random strip malls next to harbor freight tools to deliberately selecting high foot-traffic areas, but because this seemingly obvious strategy was an experiment most of the stores were small. Additionally they did recently open another warhammer café thing.

So in the US at least the general state of GW retail locations is kind of improving.

>>96176850
Thing is it actually used to be kinda fun to browse and pick out a couple of blisters, or drop in on my ride home to get a pot of paint rather than wait a few days for an online order to show up. The staff were actual hobbyists and I recall times I wandered in for some trivial purchase and ended up shooting the shit for an hour or so because the guy working the till had heard third-hand about a conversion project I was doing he thought sounded cool. GWs used to be awesome.

But that was 20+ years ago. These days there aren't any cheap little minis to pick up, my decrepit old eyes can browse stuff better in nice big online images than squinting at boxes(not to mention that pics taken by regular plebs do a better job of showing off the models than nuEavy Metal's shitty style anyway), they don't seem to bother keeping more than half the paint range in stock at any time, and the staff are an endless procession of uninterested interchangable wagies who don't give a fuck about Warhammer beyond whatever the sales memo tells them they need to sell to hit their KPIs for the week. It's *just* a store, in an age where the internet exists.

And this >>96176944, >>96176875 kind of mentality just illustrates what's wrong. GW's modern management have done a great job minimizing their expenses to the point that their retail outlets are capable, in aggregate, of being profitable. Or at least not lossmaking. *But selling you shit wasn't the point of GW stores*. They existed to recruit, to foster communities that would generate word of mouth, to be destinations people *wanted* to visit just for the sake of it, and then hey I might as well buy that thing I liked that was in last month's WD while I'm here etc...

>>96177259
...cont

Their rebranding, their retail strategy, their business strategy - it's all great stuff for investors, at least for the medium term, but the reality is the good times can't roll on forever and while the current approach to their retail arm is cost-efficient and looks great in a quarterly report, look at the difference in calibre of customer that comes from either strategy: those of us who grew up with GW as-was are still invested 20, 30, 40 years later and when times were lean after the LotR bubble burst and Kirby started padding his retirement fund it was the hardcore fans they could keep milking for revenue, meanwhile most of the fetuses they're roping in these days have no real attachment to anything - the stores aren't communities, the games are all on rapid rules cycling, the marketing is all slick and no charm; do we really think these kids are going to be ride or die in 10, 20 years when the next downturn hits the company? Most of them don't last more than a couple of years before their pocket idiotbox lures their attention away to something else now, while it's popularity is riding high.

What investor-focused businesses always fail to grasp is that there are some things which you can't measure their value in raw money.

>>96177259
>They existed to recruit, to foster communities that would generate word of mouth, to be destinations people *wanted* to visit just for the sake of it, and then hey I might as well buy that thing I liked that was in last month's WD while I'm here etc...
Interesting. Why are all those old LGS you're nostalgic for bankrupt and buried, or in the case of GW stories, downsized into the one-man shops you see today.

>>96177303
Actually my local GW moved to a bigger premises in a more expensive and central location, then they enacted the modern strategy so it's now a big and expensive to rent soulless box with one staff member.

And again, you illiterate shittard, the point of the stores wasn't to make money, you colossal mongoloid, at least not directly in the sense of "this is a retail chain that exists purely to sell things at a profit". GW's retail chain functioned as their *marketing*. The point of it wasn't to make every single store a profitable venture in its own right, it was to make them close enough to profitable that they weren't a complete anchor on the company while putting the GW brand on high streets all over the UK and then the world, to put a wholesome "use your creativity, your hands, and your brain too" hobby in front of parents' eyeballs every time they went into town to shop, to present an image to the public outside of a bunch of young lads having a great time together. The existed to say to everyone who saw one "this is more than *just* a product being sold, this is a community and YOU can be part of it...".

>>96177523
>The existed to say to everyone who saw one "this is more than *just* a product being sold, this is a community and YOU can be part of it...".

People don't go to a place for community anymore, especially in the nerd sphere. I'm not making a value judgement about that, but that's just how it is.

Hell, I imagine that part of the reason 40k is as popular as it is is that there are parts of the hobby that don't require you to interact with other people at all. You can just paint minis and watch lore videos and still "be part of the hobby."

>>96177523
>the stores were a loss leader
Says who? You?

>>96174725 (OP)
Certain “people” buy a thousand dollars of minis and shit they’ll never paint every month from gw. You know, the kinds that are highly susceptible to fomo tactics

>currency inflates
>inputs cost more
>must raise prices now to offset future costs
>costs for current quarter reflect current expenses
>price increases show on current quarter's sales reports as higher revenue
>this is reported as profit

meanwhile the brick and mortars have to bear the brunt of higher product costs today (both in product stock and lost sales), which affects their bottom line

tl;dr magic line go up if you zoom in

Idk maybe I just got lucky but I randomly walked into a GW store 4 years ago to start playing Warhammer and literally have not had a single regret ever. Maybe my store is an outlier but the employees that work there are some of the friendliest people I have ever seen working retail and the store is consistently filled with scheduled games and events

GW branded stores are, explicitly, the staff will literally tell you this outright, entry points for newfags, who they expect to go to an LGS later.