Games Workshop Hate Mongering Part 1

Lets be honest here, you go onto any forum remotely related to wargaming, and you will see the hate threads. So where does this hate come from. like most things on the Internet people follow a trend, and it seems as though most people follow a trend of hate when referring to GW. And for the most part I see the trend setters as those few who have been in the hobby since the start. the rogue traders amongst us. There knowledge and experience of the hobby make them the trend setters. The only issue is most of these people are blinkered to the rogue trader era. complaining about prices being too high, rules are broken. etc etc.

So lets put some things into perspective, first of all price. The main argument is that back in the good old days GW was cheap, you could grab 5 models for £2.50 and its true you could. But lets also take into account the average wage back then was £6000, not much is it. But that's not strictly true in today's terms, as we haven't added in inflation to that. And the average wage of the UK today is £19000 so that's a rise of 216%. So let's take the rogue trader space marine box set. 30 marines for £9.99 using the UK inflation rate available on most government sites, that would be £36 for 30 marines today. Now lets look at quality. Because £36 for 30 models is a great deal. when compared to today's price of £2.50 per space marine, 30 years ago a space marine would cost £1.20 so about half the price. However what about quality?

Rouge trader Era

Today's Era 

 

And that's where things start to fall off, Sure the hate trending rogue traders era wargamers remember the cheaper prices, but seems as though they forgot how much the quality has changed also. So this one could be classed as personal choice. do you A: have more models for your money, and live with the models looking like final fantasy VII characters with over sized heads and arms. Or do you B: go for less models for your money yet have models that are stunning to look at, when compared to the £1.20 space marine rogue trader era models?

Now some gamers will go for the cheaper nasty looking models, and these are what we refer to as the 3 colours or less gamers, the ones that simply want to play the game and don't care about the look of the models in the army, these are the guys that would not think twice about cracking out those Cardboard cut outs from 2nd edition. The ones that will proxy Books as land raiders and such. And then you have the collectors, the ones that prefer to fully paint a model before it is used on the table, the ones that will sooner loose than proxy a unit. And these will almost certainly choose the more expensive yet much nicer looking units.

So costing wise on a comparison to sum up this section, would see that wile our space marines are twice the price, they also have twice the options on the sprue and more than twice the quality. And what is also very strange is that people complain about paying £2.50 for a space marine that comes with every option in the box. But yet no one bats an eye lid at paying £4.60 for Forge World marines that are all stuck in generic poses and have no weapons included. With forge world its a case of you can afford it or you cant, so why do people treat gw any different, It would be like me hate mongering on car forums because I cant afford a  Koenigsegg and they don't seem to care at the fact I cant afford one.  

Then there is the competition as such. PP, Mantic Games, Battlefront miniatures etc etc. all of these produce great games and some great competition for GW. However people buy to much into these companies. PP are quickly trying to become the next GW and that's no mistake. Once they have enough customer base you will see the company change just like GW did, However PP are hardly cheap. Compare the game sizes to GW games and sure it is cheaper. But if you only played Kill team sized games of 40K GW would also be cheap, (cheaper than PP that's for sure) Then we have Mantic games, They make some great games they really do, Dreadball, Kings, Deadzone, Mars Attacks. But yet this company can sell games for very cheap for a few reasons, number one being the the fact they have no overheads what so ever they practically fund an entire run of games from kickstarters and nothing else. I wont get into why this is bad for kickstarter as I have done that in a previous blog post. There is also the quality of the models. Sure they look great on the website, but when you get your plastic miniatures in your little bags from mantic the casting is what is knows as sprueless. Its cheaper to manufacture but the quality suffers, want to know another example of sprueless casting?

   

Yup that's basically why Mantic games stuff works out cheaper. I wont get into the fact that Mantic games have the same rule set for every game in there company until Part 2, when I try to break a few myths about rules. So thanks for reading, And I undoubtedly expect some hateful comments below. As i don't follow the trend, Sure I don't like some items GW do and I don't like How they price stuff up sometimes. But that's not hate that's just observational disagreement. And because of this I may be considered a "fanboy" so be it.