Originally posted by Drake Farstrider
You do raise a good point about the competition, they had none in the wargaming market for about the last ten years, that is untill Rakham and Warmachine came along. But I see some of the same problem\'s with those 2 game lines as with GW\'s their prices are pretty high.
Well, for WARMACHINE stuff, they\'re not that bad, actually. You have to consider two additional things for these minis, in comparison to the GW stuff:
1. You don\'t need anywhere near as many models to play a game. So, your overall price for an army is
much less for WARMACHINE.
2. All of Privateer\'s models are pure metal. There\'s no plastic whatsoever, other than the base. So, paying $25 for a box of 6 or so metal minis just doesn\'t rub people quite as rough as paying $30+ for a box of 12 plastic ones. Of course, that\'s for trooper types; the \'jacks are much more reasonable, given that they\'re comparable to dreadnaughts.
I think one of the biggest things that GW has had on its side is the \"fluff\" factor. They had neat models, a half-way decent game system, but most of all they had fluff that people really liked. The more recent editions of the games seem to have (in addition to breaking the rules, IMHO, to be not much more than Yahtzee + Checkers) dropped a lot of the fluff that made it fun. I mean just compare the newer Chaos Codex for 40k and the one for 2nd Edition 40k as an example.
With their target market at 12-16, their main selling point was neat models and crazy fluff that kids could babble about. There doesn\'t seem to be as much there, now. Privateer Press has done a
fantastic job with their fluff, and it\'s hard to deny the big steam-powered robots are cool.
I think the biggest threat to GW is not them pricing themselves into oblivion (kids will always buy crap if it\'s what they want; and let\'s face it, GW\'s market is really kids), but rather that there are actually competitors with a creativity in their settings that GW hasn\'t had to deal with previously. Of course, what the hell do I know; I\'m a computer geek, not a marketing expert.
