How are kids even supposed to get into Warhammer any more?Price rises so that a single unit is like £50, Games Workshop stores not even having playable tables in them and clubs full of boomers and L-terrain freaks.Where is the new blood supposed to come from?
Every Saturday I'd go to GW Hull, with about £2 for the bus and £1 for a bag of spiced chips or sausage rolls for lunch. Big backpack and ice cream tubs lined with kitchen roll for my precious armies, I never bought a case.I was shy at first and basically stood around looking at the bright red shelves, then after a while there were about a dozen kids around my age, early teens. We'd play all day, usually 1000pts of 40k 3rd/4th. They could just about fit four tables in. Made some good friends, some I still see years later, and still remember lots of moments, like when they had a conversion competition day and brought the massive shop bitz box out (which I filled my pockets with lel) or when one of the chavvier kids got banned for a month because he invited a pisshead in for an introductory painting lesson.Some of us were fairly mature and allowed to attend "Veteran's night" on Thursdays, where the shop stayed open and I got my first cracks at Blood Bowl and Necromunda. We'd go on group trips to the Sheffield Battle Bunker, and most importantly Games Day on the coach. We even ended up doing stuff like going to gigs and the pub underage, with the staff and lads over 18.There were like four main staff and several part-timers, hopefully we didn't annoy them too much.Now I walk past and it's only open 6 hours a day, 5 days a week. There's one lonely staff member and ten years ago there'd maybe be two kids scraping their Primaris around a plastic Realm of Battle table. Now it doesn't even have that and I don't think I've seen more than three people in there at once. There's a big club, two other clubs, and three good LGSs now so it's not the hub it once was.
>>96439358Kids gonna blast $100 on some baby shark skin for CoD. It is not like they have no access to dad's money.
>>96439358It's dead jim.
>>96439358They aren't. Modern GW's market is 40yo manchildren filling their shelves with "merch" about the game they barely play anymore and clueless middle class parents & grandparents buying stuff as presents. If your mum walks in and drops 500 quid or a grand on what you need to get started and six months later your gran walks in and drops another few hundred then GW don't give even the tinest fuck if you decided to just throw it all in the bin. They don't need to retain a core customer base for word of mouth marketing anymore they're big enough that they get a constant trickle of people just via faggot loretubers popping up in people's feeds, people seeing the Amazon shit, and videogame tertiaries memeing themselves into believing they'll enjoy the tabletop. They plan every product release on the basis that they will sell out within the first few weeks - ideally with preorders alone - and that the volume they shift in that period will completely pay for their R&D costs and provide a nice profit, so sustained sales are irrelevant and small by comparison.GW aren't a wargame company and haven't been for a long time now. They're on the FTSE100 for fuck's sake.
>>96439358I still think it's weird how many niche crossover interests a person needs to have to get into 40k. you need to like building and painting models, be into rts games, and also table top games. honestly I only come to /tg/ because I only like minies and model kits, warhammer is a huge rip off. some ancient tamiya 1/35 figures look just as good as their mins but cost 16 usd instead of 50-60. even more expensive kits from hasegawa, wave, bandai are still considerably cheaper and better than gw.I don't see much long term interest or any interest at all from kids, it seems to be a dad hobby.
Yeah, no, you don't actually give a fuck about how little Timmy eight-and-a-half spends his (parents') money. What you mean is "how am I going to afford all the plastic crack I want on a broke as student income without it eating into my booze/gatcha/onlyfans-simping/whatever else-money". And the answer is most likely just "paint what you buy before you buy more instead of just feeding the grey mountain".
>>96439358They're not and it's by design. You really think modern kids, who have an attention span of about 30 seconds, will sit down and spend hours building, painting and playing with little plastic dudes? Call me jaded but do kids even play with action figures anymore? Or plastic army men? It seems to me like if it doesn't have a screen on it they want nothing to do with it. I might just be talking out my ass my only experience is with my cousins and coworkers kids.
>>96439358Most companies don't really give a shit about "new blood" or cultivating future fans. Everything is about making the line go up this quarter. And as others have pointed out, everything's about appealing to middle-aged dorks with money to spend now. This kinda dawned on me when my dad was bitching about there aren't many cheap WWII model kits to build. Which made it click with me, actual kids don't do hobby stuff anymore, your base is older guys who want hyper-detail and accuracy(it was a joke on the Bolt Action FB group that some kit had an idler wheel with the wrong number of teeth on it).
>>96439358They're not. GW makes money from two things: parents buying intro sets for little Timmy who will forget about it in two weeks, and whales. It's mostly the whales, but parents' purchase also make a significant portion of their income by GW's own admission. Timmy himself will never buy a single box of GW products because he can't afford them with his own money but also as >>96439823 points out, he's a tiktok addicted fuck that will never do anything but stare at his phone anyway.
>>96439358I just saw the Tyranid half of the 40K starer box on Ebay for £42. Yeah, kids will be priced out of a lot of the range and need to be careful about what they buy- just like I was never going to be able to collect Mordor Orcs or Wood Elves when I started playing LotR SBG as a lad. The Internet makes it easier than ever to find other people to play against, nerd culture in general has become acceptable so they'll be able to find kids to play with in school.You're talking absolute shite and either didn't play as a child or are childless yourself.
>>96439358Games Workshop could always solve this by making a faction with free STLs. The faction doesn't even have to be good since everybody plays 40k regardless. Most of their money comes from the paint division anyway.
>>96439358Dude, you can buy a pack of plastic soldiers for under a fiver. There nothing stopping them from using cardboard standees, it's what I did back then.
>>96439358Going into a warhammer store as a kid in 1999 was fun. There were dozens of people playing games and more painting at tables. They showed me how to assemble and paint a few models. A free space marine, termagant and hormagaunt. That store is still open but there is never anyone in it except on saturdays and they only have one small table.
>>96439823>They're not and it's by design. You really think modern kids, who have an attention span of about 30 seconds, will sit down and spend hours building, painting and playing with little plastic dudes? Call me jaded but do kids even play with action figures anymore? Or plastic army men? It seems to me like if it doesn't have a screen on it they want nothing to do with it. I might just be talking out my ass my only experience is with my cousins and coworkers kids.Two of my cousins, ages 14 and 16, got into Warhammer a few years ago. I'm normally all for complaining about 'kids these days' but, nah, they'll happily spend hours painting and gaming. They started when they were 11 or 12 so they've stuck with it for a few years although they seem to have lost interest now (the eldest has discovered gigs and girls which is probably a good thing for him desu). It was nice while it lasted though, they're from separate sides of the family so having a shared hobby brought them closer.
>>96439358>kidsIt's a hobby for adults with disposable income>New bloodHas nothing to do with age
>>96439358manchildren who find out about it from video essays and videogames probably. 150-200 USD starter packs will price out most kids, and getting a young kid interested in expensive table top when there's a million other things they could be doing online for free is very hard. A manchild can afford to spend 500$ a year on wargaming, most kids can't. Even growing up, the only kids I knew in highschool that played were rich, so their parents could afford to blow money on kits. New blood will come from increasingly wealth and autistic adults, although if they keep price gouging without really making other changes to make getting in more accessible, the playerbase won't increase. It doesn't really matter to GW though, they're happy enough if thousands of people buy a starter box or other kit they never paint and never end up playing a game.
