Flawed Empires

…BECAUSE IT WORKS ITS WAY INTO THE SOUL Over the last few months, GW released an old favourite. It was a game from 1996 called Necromunda . A popular skirmish table-top game based on their Warhammer 40,000 setting, 2nd Edition, before all the big-ticket, cash grab and piss-poor rules changes that screwed the game for everyone. The appeal of that version of the hobby was small ‘squad’ sizes. It provided greater accessibility for players whose funds were limited. It got canned for that very reason. GW likes its sales to be big. A lot of cash in a single sale. The mindset of the greedy is fairly predictable. They ditched the small sales because the cost-profit ratio appeared small. But what smarter companies realise is that a lot of small sales provides a lot of return. It caters to a broader market base. Price them out of the market and suddenly you find your profits shrink too, the smaller market base only purchasing a limited number of big ticket items. Whoops. So alon...

…EVEN AFTER SCRAPING THE SHIT OFF… So what can we learn from the ineptitude of GW? There are many, many lessons. And companies like CMON and Kickstarter would do well to heed them. Marketing 101 is all about supply and demand. You have a product (supply) and the market provides the demand. They want it, you have it. Market research is key. Price is marketing 102. You can charge what the market is willing to bear. A shortage of desirable product will allow you to charge more as the market competes to acquire it. But this is where it gets tricky. GW dominated the supply. It quickly discovered that it could charge far more than the product was worth because there was no competition. But, as time passed, its product became so poor in quality, and its attitude toward the market so vile, it became undesirable. Combined with escalating pricing, the demand decreased. The market didn’t want what GW supplied, or inflicted. Competition appeared. Profits were used to destroy that wherever...