Codex Orks - Informed discussion.

[DarkLink]

Actually, it was significantly more than that. I believe their total revenue a year or two ago was 250 million USD. The £60 might be a quarterly number.

[Defenestratus]

Games Workshop made 7.7m£ net profit on 60m sales last year. That argument doesn't hold water.

You seem to think thats a lot. For a single person, thats certainly a lot of money to throw around and spend on seemingly infinite resources. I work in a department of a larger company that makes about that much every quarter in gross revenue, and there are less than 30 of us which includes executive management.

Implying that revenue indicates internal resource elasticity is not logically sound.

[Path Walker]

I love when the game design geniuses and the business specialists come out to talk about how bad GW are.

[Charon]

I love when the game design geniuses and the business specialists come out to talk about how bad GW are.

Dont worry. They have their paladins at hand who defend their ruleset no matter how many pyrovores, mutilators or mandrakes they do.
It must be really hard to do a reality check as a "game designer" and ask questions like "does this unit make sense? Is this unit fun to play? Does the proper use of the unit feel rewarding?"

[DWest]

You seem to think thats a lot. For a single person, thats certainly a lot of money to throw around and spend on seemingly infinite resources. I work in a department of a larger company that makes about that much every quarter in gross revenue, and there are less than 30 of us which includes executive management.

Implying that revenue indicates internal resource elasticity is not logically sound.

Implying that they can't afford to acquire additional resources and staff when they have a profit of that size is not sound either. At one point in time, the point of profit was to make a company *grow*, not simply be stuffed into management's pockets as they run for the exit, but this isn't a criticism of GW in particular, it seems to be the default mode of operation any more.

The gross and net I quoted was from their December 13 half-year statement. In any case, 7.7m net on 60m gross is a profit margin of 12.8%. Consulting a chart of profit margins by sector (from [URL="http://www.businessinsider.com/sector-profit-margins-sp-500-2012-8"]here[/URL]), that puts GW significantly ahead of the S&P 500 average of 9%. They can afford to hire a proofreader.

[DarkLink]

They could afford it, but it may not bring them enough money to make it worthwhile. At least, that's how they currently feel, it seems.

[Defenestratus]

Implying that they can't afford to acquire additional resources and staff when they have a profit of that size is not sound either. At one point in time, the point of profit was to make a company *grow*, not simply be stuffed into management's pockets as they run for the exit, but this isn't a criticism of GW in particular, it seems to be the default mode of operation any more.

The gross and net I quoted was from their December 13 half-year statement. In any case, 7.7m net on 60m gross is a profit margin of 12.8%. Consulting a chart of profit margins by sector (from [URL="http://www.businessinsider.com/sector-profit-margins-sp-500-2012-8"]here[/URL]), that puts GW significantly ahead of the S&P 500 average of 9%. They can afford to hire a proofreader.

The simple fact of the matter is if GW decided that thoroughly playtesting their rule sets is a value driver instead of a cost driver, they would invest more in it.

As it is, from GW"s perspective, testing rules is simply an opportunity cost to creating new ones to package in a book and sell...

Its just like QA processes in any other business. Your XYZ Corporation business is Widgets, not QA of Widgets. You do QA on Widgets because if you didn't, a certain percentage of Widgets would hit the market defective or of substandard quality and you would lose consumer value comparisons. QA takes time, time is money and if time is being spent on what amounts to checking work that's already been done, then you're losing out on the revenue if those resources were instead creating new products.

As for hiring a proofreader, I'm 100% positive they already do have a proof reader. It appears that their editorial processes need improvement.

[DWest]

My question is- are they competent enough to spot when playtesting does switch over to a value driver, and how much longer can they keep afloat just on people buying the models regardless of the rules?

The next half-year financials should be coming out soon, yeah? It will be very interesting to see how this "models, then rules" release schedule has done for them.

[odinsgrandson]

When it comes to game balance they probably don't really have much of a choice, at least not without doing major ground shaking changes across the board and taking extreme risk.

True. It would probably require a full re-boot of their core book and all of the forces to go with it. Ala 3rd ed.

And that would alienate a lot of players all at once, and it would probably take a long time for it to really bring in new players.

Whether they have the resources, I don't think they can afford to make a change like that.

[daboarder]

True. It would probably require a full re-boot of their core book and all of the forces to go with it. Ala 3rd ed.

And that would alienate a lot of players all at once, and it would probably take a long time for it to really bring in new players.

Whether they have the resources, I don't think they can afford to make a change like that.

they built it, they should damned well fix it