Banging on the Walls
February 21, 1999 in Articles
Wow, it’s been a long week. The site went up on Wednesday and is doing great. I want to thank all of you for visiting and sending me your comments. The vast majority of them were quite positive and it’s nice to know that all my work has paid off. But this is an editorial, right? I’m supposed to give my opinion about something, something that is either controversial or interesting, something that causes people to think. Okay, he goes:
I don’t like Games Workshop. I know that’s not the most original statement in the world. It’s probably one that’s said countless times every day by gamers all around the world. Forget Wizards of the Coast, Games Workshop is our evil empire. Great, so I’m stating the obvious, saying something that became ingrained a long time ago. What’s making me bring it up now? Some of you may read the newsgroups and you may have seen the recent threads about GW cutting off discount stores. It seems that GW has decided that they can tell you how much you are going to sell their product for or they refuse to sell to you. Now, when you couple this with the fact that GW can often account for more that fifty percent of a store’s business, giving the discounter no choice but to raise his prices back to retail, you end up with something that looks a hell of a lot like price fixing. I’m no expert of business or economics, but I know that price fixing is a Bad Thing.
Two years ago, I worked shortly as a clerk in a gaming store. As part of my job, I read all the info that came from our distributors, including the GW “Official Rumors.” Very few things have scared me quite like those little pamphlets. I remember one that told owners exactly how to show GW products in their store, how to make it so that people thought GW was the best thing available right off the bat. It explained how to hook people on Warhammer 40K so quickly that they never had a chance to learn about superior games like Warzone. There was another one that explained the evils of discounting and portrayed any store that committed such a sin as the enemy in a style that reeked of the Red Scare. Now they try to fix prices. You know, if any non-gaming company pulled these types of things, they would be under investigation immediately. Just think about Microsoft. Why, then, do we put up with it?
I have always been amazed at the rabid nature of many GW fans. They love their game so much that they aren’t even willing to consider anything else. Take Warzone, for example. I happen to love the game. I’ve demoed it for several 40K players and every one of them immediately agreed that it was clearly the better product, that GW’s game was so terrible in comparison that it was almost not worth playing. Do you know how difficult it was to get these people to try Warzone in the first place, however? They laughed at it, they made fun of the figures, and they ridiculed the fact that you only needed one d20 to play (this last one continues to baffle me). It was like trying to sell a new operating system to people who can’t get enough of Windows.
One thing that everyone can agree on, even the GW thralls, is that Games Workshop is overpriced. Sure, their figures are probably the best in the industry, if you like disproportioned, statuesque, pointy-headed things. Still, when you show a GW player other figures at much lower prices and comparable quality, they just ignore you. They don’t want to be reminded that they’ve been sucked into a trap, one that requires them to purchase specific figures if they want to play (no substitutions here) and, after they’ve bought all those figures, changes the rules so they have to buy even more. How much does it cost to field a playable GW army? $300? $400? Maybe if every one of those armies were painted like the figures in White Dwarf it would be worth it. Want to know how much it costs to get a fully playable Warzone army? Less than $70. Really. And the figures (at least the newer ones) are just as nice.
It’s time for people to stop putting up with this oppressive British invasion. It’s time for us to step back and reevaluate the games we play. Is it really worth putting up with terrible rules and expensive figures just so we can continue to be screwed in the future? A revolution is needed. Let me suggest http://www.target.se as a place to start.