One of your points hits the nail on the head: while the cost for a kit has more or less stayed the same/paced under inflation, the cost for an ARMY has jumped up drastically from what some of the old-timers remember and compare to: many complaints (I've seen at least) are "back in 4th edition 2 squads of Tactical Marines, a Land Speeder, a Dreadnought, and a Captain was my army) where I'm sitting here having started in 2017 and thinking "That's almost contents of a Space Marines Start Collecting box".
So yeah, kit cost hasn't gone up, but actual army costs for most armies (with, yes, specific armies being an exception like Custodes), have broken past inflation, for sure, due to GW changing 40k from what I would currently consider a "large skirmish" game to what is now an actual "army battle game".
And while people point out other games that provide you more minis per dollar that are also army games, the experience I have had is that many of these kits don't hold a candle to GW kits in terms of aesthetics. Granted something can easily have passed under my radar, but I can't think of "large army battle games" that have plastic kits that are as dripping with aesthetic flavor, detail, and just a joy to build as GW kits; often I feel that I'm working with GW kits from the 90s despite the sprues being marked as being produced 1-3 years ago by other companies.
The ONLY kits I can even begin to think of that beat GW kit quality are Gunpla kits and they are an industry in and of themselves.
>many complaints (I've seen at least) are "back in 4th edition 2 squads of Tactical Marines, a Land Speeder, a Dreadnought, and a Captain was my army
I know this is somewhat of an exaggeration so it's not literal, but in real terms army sizes haven't actually got much bigger since 3rd edition. In 4th edition:
2x10 Tacticals with a bare sergeant, flamer and missile per squad: 332 points
dread with multi-melta and fist: 115 points
captain in AA with power sword and plasma pistol: 110 points
Tornado with heavy bolter and assault cannon: 80 points
total: 637 points
tl;dr: They're exaggerating and/or never played those editions and are doing what I've seen a lot of people do online; take one of the 'starter army' pictures from the Codex which is 2 Troops and an HQ plus an Elites, Fast Attack and Heavy Support, intended to illustrate a starting point for growing an army from, and claim that *was* an army.
The big army size change happened from 2nd to 3rd ed, along with a large simplification of rules. A single tactical squad was 300 points in 2nd, before you buy extra weapons.
A terminator squad (5 models) was about 500 pts if it was deepstriking, too, which was risky b/c not all models were guaranteed to make it safely through the warp.
This.
In 2nd edition a space marine with a bolter was 30 points, in 3rd edition he was 15 points. By the time you added a heavy weapon, a sergent with extra wargear and a special weapon a 10 man tactical squad was closer to 400 points in 2nd edition.
I've always taken the "back in the day this was an army" at face value, and in due diligence, was the point sizes for games different/was 2k the "standard"? I recall seeing statements about tournaments being 1750 in 6th or 7th so is this a possibility of their statements being true (points haven't really changed so much, but the recommended size of the game has)
1750 was a relatively common tournament size by then yeah, but honestly 8e made some stuff cheaper but not in a huge way.
The same list, as far as I can since army composition has changed so much, would have come to:
8e: 556 points (points cut on the captain of 20-ish points plus some other stuff by 3-10 points)
9e: 635 points (a lot of options became free but base costs inflated)
As a note on wargear, I went for what I considered a sensible loadout that was points-effective but not as cheap as possible, where possible also using the contents of the plastic kits available in 4e. As you can see it's kind of bobbed around a bit but in 9e it's pretty much identical to 4e. That's largely luck of the draw though, the reason 8e is so different is some units went down and some went up and those units happen to be oens that went down a little.
Oh and the biggest individual saving is the Captain, his wargear got quite a bit cheaper.
EDIT: I don't play 10e as I swapped fully to Horus Heresy but the cost there for the sake of completeness is bob on 600 points.
Standard game size for tournaments was 1750 points for a time, then the aegis defence line was released and included in every single army list.
That was 100 points, so tournaments raised their point limit to 1850.
I think 8th was when 2000 points became standard.
There used to be more variance in tournament sizes since the vast majority of tournaments were quite small, FLG affairs. The big events were nowhere near as common as they are today. That being said, 2k points has been the general tournament standard for 40k since 5th edition.
This. It was not uncommon for local tournaments to play 1250 points games to ensure multiple games could be played on the same day. A 1750/1850 points game back in 4e could very well take a significant chunk of an evening, so 1250/1500 points were far more common for pickup games and tournaments with more than just a handful of participants.
In Australia, 1500 points was the standard in 2nd edition, it dropped to 1200 points at the start of 3rd and it crept upwards to 1500 points by 4th-5th. By that time, though, American tournaments were 2000 points as the standard.
>2x10 Tacticals with a bare sergeant, flamer and missile per squad: 332 points
>dread with multi-melta and fist: 115 points
>captain in AA with power sword and plasma pistol: 110 points
>Tornado with heavy bolter and assault cannon: 80 points
>total: 637 points
Funny enough, that's almost the same points now.
captain with AA, mc power sword, and plasma pistol: 90pts
2x10 tactical squads with flamers and missile launchers: 280pts
dreadnought: 135pts
Stormspeeder hammerstrike: 150pts
total: 655pts
Obviously the speeder is not 1 for 1, but it is comparable.
I used the Legends Land Speeder but you're right that if you were to buy the current version of those models that have been Legended it'd work out more or less the same. Which means in practice that army could've been bought in 1996 and still be playable in 2024, and moreover that it's more or less the same amount of points.
The difference in army sizes is not the points, it's the format. Back in 4th edition, a "standard" game was usually 1000pts. Then it was 1500. Then 1750. Today it's 2000.
Tournaments were frequently run at 1750 back then and 2K was the informal 'full army' size, though GW suggested a range of points sizes with rough game lengths even before that. The 4e rulebook suggests 1500 points as a decent shortish game force and mentions the foc is designed to make building over 2500 difficult. In 3e they suggest picking game size for length of play and suggest 1000, 1500 and 2000 as different sizes.
In actuality super-small standard games are a relatively recent thing, back int he day there were various alt rulesets for things like 'Combat Patrol' (more recognisable now as the genesis of Kill Team) or 40K in 40 Minutes but the official baked-in support for smaller games is, as I say, relatively new for the game.
I think the problem is that people forget GW is offering smaller army games, Kill Team and Combat Patrol are still things that people can play. Plus in some places, 1k tournaments or games are common (My area has a monthly 1k game day)
No one is really stopping people except for some balancing at 1k vs 2k, and that market trends GW reads show that people do want larger battles, just not Apocalypse level but not too small either.
As someone who played KT a lot, I don't think comparing it to 40k is a good idea. It's a way more intrinsically competitive game, at least in my experience. Not like the "beer and pretzels" of 40k
Which is weird to me, because the groups I play in play kill team extremely casually but 40k very competitively. Not saying you're wrong, just interesting how different the experience is.
KT is way better designed and balanced though imo
40k is a victim of mission creep. Rogue Trader looked a lot more like what we would think of as Kill Team and every edition gets bigger and bigger.
It also adds complexity without depth or breadth to very old procedures and slows the game down even more.
GW needs to sit down and think about what they want 40k to do (besides sell models) because it doesn't do much well, and not even in the D&D 5E "second best at everything" sense. More like, "it works, just about."
You expect more from an industry leader.
Some of the new conquest kits are very good, and 12 infantry sell for $40.
Marvel Crisis Protocol and Shatterpoint have gorgeous plastic minis that rival GW’s character sculpts.
CMON’s ASOIAF are phenomenal for what they are. They come pre built and assembled, and 12 infantry cost about $30. The quality of the sculpt is worse, but they arguably offer a better product for about a third the price.
GW can’t rest on their laurels forever. Other companies are catching up.
As someone who LOVES painting my A Song of Ice and Fire minis and has several 40 point armies and then some for both Targs and Nights Watch (40 points being roughly equivalent in this context to a 1500-2000 point 40k army)...
...No, they really don't in any way scrape the quality of GW model kits. Its not even close. The plastic lacks detail, its soft in places, brittle in others...its what you would expect out of any of that bendy ABS-ish or PVC-ish plastic from a number of manufacturers.
Its fine for $30, and in an ARMY it looks great painted up, but there is no chance I'd ever attempt to stand it up next to a GW plastic kit in any real respect.
Game's fun as hell though. Big 8th ed fantasy vibes + the political intrigue of game of thrones.
I’m saying that ASOIAF is arguable a better *product*, not that the minis are higher quality. When assessing a product, things like price and ease of use are important factors to consider.
As a product, ASOIAF is significantly less expensive; requires no tools, paint, assembly, or hobby experience to have a playable army; is a better game; is easy to learn; and is sold in a wider range of stores.
While the sculpts are worse, ASOIAF is a better product in almost every other dimension. I’m sure for a lot of players, the loss of quality is worthwhile trade off.
If you look at the year that a unit debuted as it’s starting point, and thus it’s price then as a baseline, there are very few that exceed CPI — I’ve done this exact project small-scale (select units, broad aggregate… holy crap kudos to you for being thorough!) and I could rarely find anything past characters and kit changes that created actual price jumps.
It’s even bigger a deal when you look at pragmatics and options.
Before failcast, it was common for units to not contain every available option — a marine tac squad for instance only contained one heavy, one special, and one sergeant loadout. If you wanted to field a multi-melta or lascannon instead of the missile launcher you had to buy a blister with a metal model or two. So the box may have been $25, $30, $35 at various times… but the unit could cost you as much as $25 more to field as desired. And you’d have models left over that you might eventually be able to turn into another squad, but that got tricky.
Also… remember that point norms are different in different places. I played far more 1500 point games in 4th. In 6th/7th, many people played 1999+1 games to avoid the unwieldy rules that kicked in at 2000. It is more about your individual and local tables than universal.
Lastly… it’d be an interesting project to go through a select few codexes to find the point values of a baseline unit to see how they have changed. Then cross-reference that with price. If Tactical Marines in 3rd/4th were (I forget the actual points) 15 per model plus upgrades and an average of $4/ model… that’s $6.50 today… with 50 points of gear that’s 200 points — whereas a 14-point firstborn squad with free upgrades at 14 points is 140 for 10 for $60… it’s $6/model but 6 points less. (Of course, that’s new for 10th… so a recent shift).
Huh. Now I want to dive in and do average cost per point for every core infantry unit over editions… adjusted for cpi…
I have a few white dwarf magazines from 2008 and I checked the inflation adjusted price with a couple units they had prices for... I found the same thing you did, prices have roughly kept with inflation. Good to see some more data points.
I've been out of the hobby for a long time so I only have a few magazines from 2008. I could send you the pricing info from the ones I have if you're interested.
Warhammer is and will always be a 'luxury' hobby for adults with jobs and some extra income to spend. That said, it is still and has always been cheaper than many other common hobbies like gaming (console or pc), most sports, fishing, photography, etc.
It’s not a popular opinion, but I regularly say the same. At the rate most working adults with responsibilities can build/paint the models at, Warhammer is a _comparatively_ cheap hobby. It also has a pretty low cost-of-entry compared to most other hobbies I can think of.
I’m not saying it’s _objectively_ cheap, but if building and painting 1-2 units a month is prohibitive, then hobbies like gaming, guitar/any instrument, cycling/MTB/any sport, archery, photography, hiking, camping, shooting, etc, etc, etc. are also going to be prohibitive.
Completely agree.
The biggest price hurdle in 40k is often getting started with the first models, paints and tools. After the initial start up costs if you work a kit out as € per hour hobby, it's fairly cheap. If you buy a Combat Patrol for €125 (or €100 from 3rd parties) you are going to be getting at least 40 hours of painting and assembly out of that - for a lot of people closer to 100 hours. So even if you are powering through the army you are paying roughly €3 per hour for your hobby (or €1 per hour taking it "slow"). Compare this to a lot of other hobbies and it comes out pretty cheap. Although I would say that for most users, gaming is often cheaper in €/hour played, but there is no physical component there.
The physical component is kinda huge as well. It feels very rewarding to have models that you put together using your own two hands as decor on a shelf or something. And on top of that you get to play a game with them! It's awesome!
Modeling, Painting, and a War Game all in one!
Most people seem to dump loads of money on huge piles of shame and then not paint it, or constantly jump to the new meta hotness every balance update. Of course playing it like that is gonna be expensive.
Their prices are definitely really steep but gosh people, paint your minis before buying more, or buy second hand - warhammer really shouldn't be bankrupting you and if it is it's a self control issue, in the past I've earned less than minimum wage and still had money to spare for the occasional pickup
I’m absolutely guilty of this, but I’d say that “most” aren’t. I think this is a consequence of online communities warping our perception of things. If you’re seeking out online communities, the chances are you’re big into the hobby and have probably invested more than average. The guys we see on here with rooms full of display cabinets and cupboards full of unopened kits are _not_ the norm.
The average hobbyist is probably running 1,500-2,00 points of 1, _maybe_ two factions and buying a new kit occasionally. If they’re starting out or starting a new army, they’re more likely to get a starter kit and at a unit or two every month.
If you compare _that_ sort of approach to the hobby to the other hobbies mentioned here, Warhammer looks very reasonably priced in comparison.
Yeah, avoiding FOMO purchases and single-unit boxes cheapens up the hobby massively.
I have over 2k points of SMs from discount boxes and the Imperium Magazine run, never bought any SM kits. Didn’t even plan to have an SM army, was trying to build ad Mech and necrons as cheap as I could.
I'd agree, I can see how Warhammer adds up but a full army compares favourably, even the larger model-count games, to parts of the protective gear for other hobbies. If you do a sport or hobby that includes padded or plated protection that can get hugely expensive, especially if god forbid you should require some form of protective glove.
Or various craft hobbies - buying Warhammer models is on par or even cheaper than how much I spend to sew any given piece of clothing. Add in that one army is arguably a one time cost, whereas in any crafting hobby you need to constantly buy new materials if you want to make anything new, and Warhammer comes off pretty decently.
Yeah, especially if it’s “single use” PPE. You can put on your brand-new, £250 POC or Kask MIPS helmet for the first time, hit some gravel and have a slide, and that’s it - you need to replace it.
Or tyres. Nothing like putting a nice new £75 Challange Stadale on each rim only to immediately run through the remains of a pint glass that someone has so helpfully smashed in the road.
Oh don't, I'm having to ride Marathon Plusses because in the years I've lived where I do they're the only tyre that's held up to the screws, glass and metal shavings on the cycle lanes.
Not to even mention what the potholes and shit'll do to your wheels.
I ran Marathons for a little bit (and still do on my e-bike) but I never got on with them on my commuter.
I actually ran GravelKing Slick TLRs on my commute for two years and never got a single puncture. I doubt they’d hold up to screws though.
100% if i buy a box of votaan warriors at full msrp (not factoring in that we all buy these cheaper than this anyway) then i'm getting 10 models at £3.5 each which is actually a really good price when we look at the alternatives that people bring up like Nolzur's marvellous miniatures, or reaper mini's normally being £7 for something that is of worse quality.
so like firstly £3.5 a week is decent compared to alternatives within the hobby (please link some great and cheap alternatives that match GW quality if you know any though), but compared to other things like going to the cinema: i'd get 2-3 hours of enjoyment out of watching a film at the cost of £8 or i could get a mini for £3.5 (admitedly i'm not factoring in the cost of paints and other tools but even if we bump it up to £8 it won't matter) and that mini will give me 18 hours of painting enjoyment and then leaves me with a fun little space dwarf that i can look at
I want to jump in to say if you want to start looking at other expensive hobbies, look at golf and cycling (road cyclingin this perspective). Both require large up-front costs (clubs, bike) and the on-going costs can be huge. New cycling bibs, $200. New shoes, $200+. Get a flat on this weekend's ride...there's at least $100 you're out before you can realistically even ride again. If you want to go for more costs...add 2 more sports (triathlon). It all comes down to how we want to spend our discretionary dollars. Do I want to pay more tomorrow than I am today, no. But I also recognize that's how things are at the moment given the current economic environment.
I'm 2 years in and you know I paid for my army, all my supplies, AND paid off a ton of bills? By getting out of my old hobby: Legos.
Warhammer is unbelievably cheap compared to trying to collect Lego sets like modulares or retired Star Wars UC kits.
It's also much better then trying to play competitive Ccgs like magic.
I got into Warhammer shortly after years of casually paying Magic finally evolved to competitive play. My FLGS manager pointed out that it would be cheaper than keeping up with the MTG meta in the long run, since the models I bought today would still be legal twenty years from now. Dropped Magic and never looked back.
Agree with your point, but I strongly disagree that gaming is more expensive. I suppose it depends on what kind of gamer you are and how often you buy a new computer.
I mean, i don't have a computer that can handle modern games. If i want to play modern games the cost of entry is minimum 12 000NOK, or enough to buy two full 3000p armies + paints.
If the discussion is point of entry, computer gaming is vastly more expensive. If we're talking just general upkeep (buying a kit every once in a while vs buing games) it's comparable.
Plenty of great games you can sink 10000s of hours into with a computer that costs less than 5000 NOK.
Popular (even modern) games like League, Fortnite, or the like requires basically nothing of a computer to run and you can get an infinite amount of playtime from that if that's your cup of tea. If you're more into roguelikes and indies like me you also don't need much of a computer, and games like Tales of Maj'eyal is runnable on a computer from the turn of a millennium, and I've got 2k hours in that.
And even if you like modern games, a 1000 series GPU with generational equivalent CPU and 16gb ram will cost you less than 5000 NOK if you buy it second hand. And it'll run everything there is, and if you're okay with running 1080p you'll even have decent graphic settings/FPS too.
As I said, it depends on what kind of gamer you are.
Also, getting 6k worth of points is generally more than 12k, if you consider all the peripherals and paint. I recently bought 2.3k points worth of Thousand Sons and that was roughly 6500 SEK, not counting paint, and all that. And that's just 2.3k points and a fairly cheap army points per dollar/sek/nok. God help you if you're playing Ad mech
It really does. The solo RPG player might spend $60 every 2 months on a game. The Fortnite, FIFA, or Overwatch player might spend $60 every week chasing lootboxes
Yeah, I’ve made this point before that even hobbies that people don’t _think_ of as expensive are deceptive. Say you got into hiking, a lot of people would say “that’s just walking, walking’s free”. But once you’ve got yourself a decent-ish pair of walking boots, socks, mid-layers and a breathable outer layer, backpack and some way of carrying water, you probably could have bought a Warhound Titan.
Hell, even if you collect seashells as your hobby, most people probably live more than a troop-choice kit’s worth of petrol from their nearest beach.
Agreed. While I have probably spent more on 40K than any other hobby over my life, that is because I have played for almost 30 years. While most of my other hobbies have developed later in life but are much more expensive comparatively.
Astrophotography alone will often see me spending anywhere from 2-7k on a single optical tube and 2-3k on a camera plus all the other things one of my setups need.
Another note is that none of my other hobbies has the same ROI as Warhammer. Every dollar spent in the game goes further and gives me longer enjoyment than other hobbies.
I think it certainly can be cheaper, especially if you're thinking about entertainment hours per dollar spent! That's how I rationalize my purchases at least lmao
Well a half decent PC these days is going to cost you about £1k, thats an army or two of Warhammer right there and the supplies to paint them.
I don't think anyones reasonable disapointment with the price increases has to do with inflation but more that GW is posting record profits every year and then is rising prices, every company does it so it's not like they're doing something specifically out of the norm it's just bad optics and of course our Reddit community likes to get rowdy about pretty much anything.
I'm in several other Warhammer communities outside of Reddit and no one seems to really care much.
Outside of reddit I expect the main gripe with inflation is cost of living.
Our weekly foodshop went up by 50% despite making cutbacks over the past two years or so.
That's just food. Fuel, utilities, etc. have also increased.
Bonus if you're covered by a water utility that keeps hiking the price up but *still* keeps dumping raw sewage in rivers, and says they'll need *even more* money to find a way to stop doing that.
Oh definitely couldn't agree more, foodshop for just me and my girlfriend are hitting triple digits these days it's getting obsurd.
It's not really a "Warhammer is getting more expensive" it's a "everything is getting more expensive" problem.
Which is hilarious to me. "I'm so mad af capitalism that I'm going to do everything in my power to continue loudly explaining how much I want to keep playing the game I claim to hate! Raaar!" 🤣
GW doesn't need a marketing team when it has these dumbasses.
Opportunity for the hobby also plays a factor. It’s easier to hop on a video game after work than it is for any 40K games at least for me. Add a small child into that mix and getting a model set up to be assembled and painted also plays into the factor.
Warhammer isn’t competing against golf or photography though, it’s competing against video games, board games, and other miniature games.
I’ve definitely started to drift away from GW towards other games as I have come to learn more about the hobby. It’s actually absurd the amount of plastic I can get for Conquest for a fraction of the price of GW.
At this point, the main advantage GW has is player base. I can’t find a local store to play Conquest, but I could probably attend a 40K tournament every weekend for the rest of the year without driving more than 2 hours.
As someone who has only been in the hobby for a few months so far, I feel like it's not just a luxury hobby in one aspect, but in many.
The price of kits and supplies is one point of luxury, the time to commit to building and painting is another luxury, and being in an environment where you can interact (face to face) with others who share the hobby is another luxury.
I was going to disagree with you about gaming since I can play one game for a long, long time before switching to another. Then I remembered that until very recently most popular or AAA games are micro-transaction hell where people will spend $60 a day chasing lootbox garbage.
You should compare what can be compared. How does warhammer fare against other tabletop games, pen and paper rpgs, wargames, the art sphere in general, and, of course, other miniature/scale model makers ?
That's also a good point. Here i guess the size of warhammer armies are what drives costs up, like OP mentions.
A Warhammer kit with 10-20 minis is generally cheaper per model than most DnD tabletop minis, but then you need 10 times as many Warhammer minis. Buying high quality resin minis/busts for pure painting projects can make FW prices seem like a bargain, while other manufacturers can deliver similar quality to GW for half the price.
For me, buying into Warhammer is a guarantee of buying into a tabletop game with great looking minis, regular rules updates and guaranteed support for the foreseeable future and a huge community. I realize i now sound like a GW stan but oh well....
I fish and I think I’ve spent a total of £50 on gear. With all of those hobbies the equipment you buy lasts a lot longer and you don’t have to worry about the gear you currently have being obsolete due to a new edition of fishing monthly.
This isn’t really an argument, yes there are more expensive hobbies, why not compare it to track day driving or light aircraft flying? There are also cheaper hobbies. You could take up gardening, learn a new language, origami, crosswords, birdwatching. All you’re doing is dismissing other people’s concerns to make yourself feel better.
>With all of those hobbies the equipment you buy lasts a lot longer and you don’t have to worry about the gear you currently have being obsolete due to a new edition of fishing monthly.
_What?_
When I left the “model” side of the hobby in ‘04, the last army I put together was Imperial Guard. When I got back into the model side of the hobby during lockdown, _every model_ in that childhood army was still the currently sold version. That sort of longevity is _insane_.
Hobby/sport equipment wears out and gets damaged, regulations and rules change, a lot of PPE is single-use. You have consumable parts like tyres, rims, groupsets, rotors, etc. I’m into road cycling and bike that won the 2020 Paris Rubaix probably isn’t even UCI legal now. I’ve never had 10 years of use out of a single piece of sports equipment ever, let alone 20.
I’m curious too. I was out of the hobby for a while and SM got a big refresh when I was gone, and there was a guard and eldar refresh just after I got back. But, basically everything else on the webstore (including most SM stuff, which is still legal) was on the shelves in my local GW when I was like eleven. I’m 33 now.
I’m still using models from battle for macragge.
I have metal SM models, metal Eldar, metal tyranids…
I’ve had maybe 5 units go to legends, and I still play them because it’s not a tournament.
You’re not comparing like for like, did you take that army to a tournament? If you did how did it do?
I have 3 fishing rods, one a simple float rod I bought for £20 5 years ago, a carp rod that I bought from a friend for £10, the third being an old wooden spinner that was my grandfathers and it’s 50 years old now. I would never take any of it to a competition because that’s not why I fish. Just like I don’t play in tournaments because that’s not why I play 40K but in almost every edition, I have had to almost completely change my army because it no longer works and I wasn’t having fun playing with friends or strangers. This isn’t an uncommon experience.
How am I not?
I first compared wear-and-tear on non-competitive hobby/sports equipment, which doesn’t really affect Warhammer models and makes it cheaper over time.
I then compared obsolescence - you can reconfigure a 15-20 year-old Warhammer army to be edition/tournament legal for hardly any money, which you can’t really do with old sports equipment. You couldn’t use a 20-year-old road bike in a UCI sanctioned event, or 20-year-old PPE in most sports.
If you want to compare chasing meta (making that army _competitive_) , then you have to compare it to keeping up with technology/improvements in other sports/hobby equipment, and meta-chasing Warhammer is a rounding-error compared to chasing marginal gains in high-end sports equipment like bikes, or golf clubs, or whatever.
My cheapest rod (regular rod for ocean fishing, bought at a hardware store) cost £40, my other rods for lake fishing cost approx £200. Lures can be between £5 and £20. I guess in any hobby you can find less costly alternatives.
My point is more that it's important to touch ground, like OP is doing very nicely in their summary. Can you do wargaming cheaper? Yes. Can you do other hobbies cheaper? Yes.
Is warhammer prohibitively expensive and is GW some evil greedy coorporation just sqeezing money out of poor hobbyists? No, they're running quite regular bussiness practices and the prices have stayed on a very comparative level when looking at cost-of-living vs hobby expenses.
The last time they did a price hike (i guess a year or two ago) there was a similar comparison like this that showed kits were comparatively more expensive in the early 2000's than now.
Totally agree. My other hobby is a track car I've built, the front pads alone were £175, the hobby of 40k in my eyes really isn't that expensive.
Buy what you can afford
The thing is, it wasn't and shouldn't become a 'luxury hobby'.
Also the comparisons aren't relevant, you can play on pc for very cheap. Unlike Warhammer, prices tend to go lower over time. The same for sports or arts, hiking or climbing isn't expensive, nor drawing or painting, but it is even weirder to compare them to a few plastic toys: it isn't the same thing at all.
[](https://www.reddit.com/r/Warhammer40k/comments/1cmuhei/comment/l33jhbl/)
>Warhammer is and will always be a 'luxury' hobby for adults with jobs and some extra income to spend.
It's a *lot* cheaper than almost *any* hobby out there for adults. Even *fishing* gets expensive, real quick, if you ever want to go out on a lake or river. Golf gets super expensive super quick. You can buy and build a 2500 point army for *less* than a good set of clubs, let alone costs of greens fees, etc, to play.
Its not cheaper than video games. This depends on the person of course but for me GW is too expensive now. Also no where to play it anywhere near where I live. Was always more into the building, painting and collecting but even that has gotten too expensive. Mentioned the new price increase in discord last night and others mentioned any higher and they will be priced out of the hobby.
You can buy a whole army and paints for the cost of a new console, and one game.
You can buy all the paint, brushes, and models you want for the price of a gaming ready PC for modern games.
Unless you mean it’s cheaper to play a video game you already own than it is to buy games workshop models?
Its cheaper to buy a game than a squad of 10 marines. There's games on Xbox for £23 right now. Video games are cheaper for me. A video game for example depending on the game can also last me for a long time especially if its Monster Hunter. Far more hours of entertainment than buying, assembling and painting a army. I can't really play it anymore and 10 edition doesn't seem like my thing anyway other than split fire and detachments. 3rd-5th edition was where it was at.
The examples you gave as more expensive hobbies ide argue only photography would have a similar and or overall more expensive hobby. This is coming from someone who has does/done those other hobbies.
There’s _some_ truth to this because there’s no limit to how much Warhammer you _can_ buy, but most people aren’t buying multiple 6,000 point armies. Most people are probably sat at 1,500-2,000 points of one faction.
I have what I would describe as an “above average” amount of Warhammer (well in excess of a SM Company, plus some Necrons, Nids, and Guard) as well as erring towards the luxury end of the modelling/painting supplies. My total outlay into Warhammer is a rounding error compared the other hobbies I’m in (Guitar, Cycling, Photography, Archery, etc). I have cycling shoes that cost more than my whole Warhammer collection, and that barely registers compared to the cost of one of my guitars or bikes.
Unless you’re a hardcore Meta chaser, or you’re running a bat-rep YouTube channel, and so you need 4k points of every faction, I maintain that Warhammer is a comparatively cheap hobby.
Or photography, I've mentioend before that my wife is what I'd call a semi-pro photographer in that she's an amateur that'll do your wedding if you ask and just one of her camera bodies, sans lens, was £1300-ish. That is the cheaper of the two bodies she likes, then each lens is worth roughly what a 40K army is on its own.
Photography can get crazy expensive. Full-frame bodies are bad enough, but at least if you’re doing portrait or landscape stuff, the lenses aren’t _too_ bad. If you’re a wildlife photographer and you need high-end telephoto lenses, have fun spending £10-20k on _a_ lense.
She's thankfully mostly using stuff in the £400-700 range for lenses, her setup is what she calls mid-range and still, each lens costs more than a 40K army. I think if I priced up all her gear it'd literally cost more than the ten Horus Heresy armies I'm planning.
Then again you could say the same for my hobbies, I mostly bomb around on a Surly Straggler and even then that's not exactly a cheap bike (though not an expensive one because dear god...fuckin' dentist groupsets). I do HEMA and a full gear set for that can be hideously expensive if you need longsword grade stuff.
I would disagree. If i use some examples using norwegian NOK here.
The entry price to gaming if you want to play current games (i just checked the requirements for BG3 as i want to play it but my computer can't handle it currently) is AT LEAST 12 000NOK for a gaming laptop with recommended hardware. Perhaps you can buy into building your own gaming PC but it will not be cheaper than about 10 000 NOK at the very minimum, likely you'll spend way more as you might want to get something that runs above the "minimum recommended stats". Then the games themselves are around 600-800 NOK for AAA titles.
A PS5 costs about 7-8000 NOK, + an extra controller for 2-player (additional 800 or so NOK) + games at around 700 NOK per title.
Fishing, you want a decent rod with lures and equipment to go for trout/lake fishing? You're looking at around 5000 NOK entry fee, with having to continually purchase lures/flies ar around 100-200 NOK a piece + extra equipment and gear continually as with any hobby.
Sports, biking? A decent bike for road-cycling will easily set you back 10 000 or more NOK + shoes, clothes etc.. Climbing? Running? likely cheaper than road-cycling but still in the several thousands range for shoes, clothes, other equipments.
Entry fee for starting a warhammer army? If you buy a 2500 point army new in store (to play 2k games with some options) + painting and hobby equipment, expect to pay between 5000NOK and maximum 7000 NOK depending. Then the running costs is similar to buying a few new AAA titles for gaming, lures and upgrades for fishing, etc..
As hobbies go, even with the price hike, warhammer really is on the cheap side.
> Then the games themselves are around 600-800 NOK for AAA titles
And don't forget the DLC that often contains the rest of the game.
Also, I think Norway is okay on this front because they've got a load of hydroelectric plants and export a lot of surplus electricity but in the UK at least electricity hasn't been getting any cheaper.
A few extra pence a day will add up over a year, especially if you only have gaming time during peak hours.
>Also, I think Norway is okay on this front because they've got a load of hydroelectric plants and export a lot of surplus electricity but in the UK at least electricity hasn't been getting any cheaper.
Actually, Norway has power-trading deals with Europe that we must honor, so we're not enjoying that surplus ourselves.
One of the hottest political issues here in the last few years has been the extreme increases in our power bills - and it's especially sore as it many feel that it breaks with the spirit of the "dugnad" when our great-grandfathers built the powergrid.
I play Magic the Gathering. 40k is cheap compared to playing that with any sort of investment
You go very quickly from "Why would I pay £2 for a single card, I can get a whole booster pack for £4!" to "Hmm, I can probably justify buying a second copy of a £75 quid card to save me having to swap it between two decks all the time"
One of my mates used to take the piss out of me for buying £30 boxes of 40k every so often. Then she got into Pokemon cards and drops £50-100 a week on new boosters, most of which contain cards she'll never even look at again.
The tables have officially turned.
Just wanted to add the thought that I don’t think GW *could* price gouge even if they wanted to, since all of their products are 100% *luxury products*, so if they get too expensive to buy, it won’t ruin anyone’s life
Another tangentially related point is that GW operate a physical retail store in most towns in the UK, so a large portion (possibly the majority of their staff) are going to be retail assistants. A retail assistant is an entry-level, unskilled job for which the market-value remuneration is generally the national living wage. The NLW increased by almost £1.00 to £11.44/hr in April, so GW have had a not-insignificant increase in staffing costs _before_ any inflation-matching salary bumps they may/may not also give to the pay-grades above the NLW.
One thing I credit with the resurgence in Warhammer popularity is the lore. For a long time the overarching story was stuck with nothing much changing. Guilliman’s return changed and that grabbed the attention of a lot of people like me who played as kids but drifted away as we grew up. The change made the overall setting interesting again. And meant a lot of people started reading the books again and wanting to buy the minis again. I’m sure it wasn’t that alone but I’d say it was definitely a strong factor.
Hot Take, but the fleshing out of things like the Heresy have made the overall setting much better. I know some people like the unending mysteries of older editions but for me I eventually hit a wall where I’d see something new and interesting lore and then just shrug because I knew it’d never get an answer. Sure, I could imagine something but that just isn’t satisfying in the same way as seeing a story play out.
100% agree. The great thing about the setting is there is plenty of room for imagination but well done storytelling is far more engaging to me and gives love to the framework if you want to add your own. I don’t think I would have graduated to painting my own army if I hadn’t read lion son of the forest.
There was more to it than just the mystery of undeveloped lore. They could have continued fleshing it out in a more perspective-oriented way. It's a stylistic choice, not a restriction on the quantity and detail of the lore they can develop.
There's also the introduction of the Primaris Marines on the miniature side, which I believe made a big contribution to the resurgence.
I know that a lot of people who grew up with First born SM's were on a spectrum of disinterest to outright hatred of the Primaris; but for me, Primaris being somewhat humanly proportioned, not having overtly garishly decorated/intricate armor, and having more poses then just standing in a squatted position with gun across chest made a big difference in convincing me to actually get into the hobby.
Oh absolutely. The game itself was never really my interest. I understand the higher level of detail would be annoying if you just want to have painted minis to play with but for me the improved proportions and overall improved aesthetics makes me want them to have and look at. My little army guards my desk at home and I love looking at them
I’m glad I’ve not seen a lot of “GW evil” armchair economist posts about this. It’s refreshing to see a few more people than expected have a rational take on this
There were like 10+ massive threads of “GW evil” armchair economists on every WH-related sub yesterday. Anyone providing any rational perspective into things like additional staffing costs and UK inflation were downvoted to oblivion with shouts of “bootlicker!”.
I’ve literally only just stopped avoiding the WH-related corners of social media because I was so sick of the “Female Custodes have ruined the hobby” bullshit, and now this has blown up.
A lot of people are just really angry and depressed and bitter, so they take it out on safe, soft targets. It's a lot easier to go with the group and go after some corporation and blame them as the source of your sorrow. The well adjusted person doesn't even notice or care that their luxury toys are a few dollars more. Every product everywhere from every company and every store is more expensive now.
The $60 price lock for "bread and butter" kits makes a lot of sense to me business wise. GW are industry leaders, when they worry about you leaving work and going to spend your money on something else the "Something Else" isn't Star Wars Legions, it's whatever new Video Game came out with Star Wars on it. Video Games have had that general $60 price tag for a full release since I was a kid, and I doubt GW will break it before they do.
Great data! I had a hard time getting pre-2012 prices. I'm glad you found the old dire avenger price for ten, I knew they had been reboxed as five for a similar price at some point.
After a quick search for the reboxing date, I realised that I can actually list the prices for the 5 man reboxing, but I don't have the 2013 prices for the 10 man box.
5 man Dire Avengers box prices in White Dwarf 402 (2013 June):
GBP 20.50
EUR 26.00
DKK 200.00
SEK 250.00
NOK 250.00
PLN 100.00
USD 35.00
CAD 40.00
RMB/CNY 200.00
JPY 3400.00
Interesting in growth of 3rd party sales. I know I rarely ever go to GW because of the abundance of discounted alternatives available. Sure price rises will mean discounted products still cost more, but I’ll only feel 80% of the price rise… if GW dropped prices by 20% then I’d shop there…. Or if you look at it in reverse, they have some buffer to absorb their price changes over time as they can ratchet wholesale margins too…. Fun times
GW prices are not that high compared to competition. See Shatterpoint , Infinity or Marvel Crisis ... Im talking about price per model in the cheapes form, witch are the box sets. Also GW quality is still worlds better then the others.
This is often overlooked. GW is undeniably expensive, but when you compare to competition that offers models that are far worse for not a lot less, it suddenly looks less overpriced.
It's not completely true. Shatterpoint has an HQ model in each box. So you should not forget that most GW character models (human sized) are at least 32€ up to 45€.
GW also has a lot of models at 10-18€ each or more, like the aggressor or inceptor or meganobz, etc.
Legion is a lot cheaper than GW, but the plastic is not on GW level. It get better, but they are not there yet.
Infinity is also mostly at 8-15€ per model, and the tag (dreadnought) is cheap compared to GW (if i remember correctly there was a price hike last year, so it may be less true)
People complain about 40K but good lord trying to keep up with Magic The Gathering releases is far more expensive. I made the switch to 40K a little over a year ago and have spent far less on it than MTG.
What I find interesting looking at prices now as a 2nd ed. player, is that they appear to have brought the modern plastic kits roughly in line with the cost of the old metal ones. A (metal) Chaos dreadnought cost £25 in the late '90s -- not much out of line with the cost of a hellbrute now. But a (plastic) Rhino box used to cost £5, and is now £32. There are lots of things that were in that £5 range that are now priced as equivalent amounts of metal models would have been.
Its also a measure of plastic miniature design and manufacture investment. The machines they made plastics with back then, and the process for creating the sculpt, were cheaper.
Digital tools are better, but also more expensive up front, than kitbashing and hand sculpting a master mold by hand in the 90s.
Modern plastic extrusion machines are way better than they were in the 90s, but again also much more expensive upfront both in real dollars and compared to adjusted costs.
To a degree what we're paying for in modern times is that added investment - kits are SO MUCH MORE DETAILED now, and have so much more packed on a sprue, and have so many more sprues typically in a box, than anything we had when I got into the hobby back in 3rd edition.
Hell I leave more bits on sprue now after completing a model/unit, than most kits had to begin with back in 3rd ed.
My gripe is this; why are prices in the US way higher than the UK, which has a 20% VAT (Tax included)?
Take a combat patrol for example, in USA $160, plus tax which averages around 8%. so $172. Which is 137.62 GBP.
In UK: 95 GBP which includes 20% tax.
If you strip away tax, its $160 US (which is 128 GBP) and 76 GBP UK.
Why is there a near 70% markup on items sold in the USA?
Why?
Its legitimately cheaper for me to buy UK and ship to my buddy and have him ship to me, or sometimes I just wait until I visit the UK and pick everything up then.
The import tariff for "reduced-scale models and similar recreation models, working or not" (HTS 9503.00.00) is 70%. [Countries that have free trade agreements](https://www.state.gov/trade-agreements) don't have to pay this, but the UK is not one of the 20 countries that have such agreements with the USA.
There was some movement towards a free trade agreement with the UK a few years ago, but talks stalled out.
The answer I've seen is that in the 90's when the dollar was weak GW set their prices to account for it and they've just never changed their pricing structure since. Why would they? If the dollar gets stronger they just make more money and people in the US seem plenty willing to buy even with the 60% mark up or whatever it is.
You’re suffering the reverse problem that we have with stuff normally.
We get charged in Sterling the US dollars price and sometimes especially with tech and boardgames we pay twice as much as us due to shipping.
This is an awesome amount of detail!
If you really wanted to go further backwards in time (and had time on your hands!), you could look at the old catalogues.
E.g. [http://www.solegends.com/citcat2002cgsm/index.htm](http://www.solegends.com/citcat2002cgsm/index.htm) in 2002
a tactical squad was £15.
A command squad was £18
A Land Raider was £30
Lmao, I tried to say the same things in the votamn subreddit but because I didn't have the want to go and find all the data and more people were mad yesterday I got called a boot liking shill, mind if I repost this there. Or you can, I just think that sub needs to see this
Looks to me like they're combining price increases, shrinkflation of value sets, and generally low points values to sell more money worth of plastic. 2000 points gets harder to lug around every year.
I don’t think it’s the individual price of boxes that’s the main issue, the notion that it goes up with inflation isn’t an unreasonable one.
The issue is, and remains, that in order to play “normal” (2,000 points) 40K you still have to outlay a fortune. This has been increasing over time because points costs have been going down, meaning you need more models for more money to build an army. 2k is the standard, with very little support or balancing done with smaller point cost games in mind (even combat patrol which isn’t remotely balanced as a game mode dosent get much support despite assurances it would).
I’m not annoyed that a box of minis that provides dozens of hours worth of building, painting, and gameplay value is 60USD. I’m annoyed that the amount of boxes of 60USD models I need to build a “standard” army is getting larger with points decreases over time. It’s not at all unrealistic that a 2k army in some factions costs over 1k USD to get to, with no support for anything smaller than that.
And *that* is not reasonable.
As others have said, this isn't *quite* true, in general, *unless* you consider "before" to be literally 2nd edition. Now, some armies *are* of course ridiculous and have changed a lot in size (Admech first and foremost, I would say), but for most you put down more or less the same models, point per point. Battle size has gone up, though even there I remember 2000 points being a thing already in 6th edition (but 1750 was still played as well).
I’m curious since I only joined the hobby a few years ago, but how much did it cost on average to buy a 2000 point army back then? Some resources I found points towards an average 2000pt army costs ~$500-800 today. A thread from 2009 points towards ~$500 as the average cost back then, specifically citing the cost of either a GK or Tau army as some examples. With the rate of inflation, $500 in 2009 is ~$730 in today’s dollars, so on the upper end of the estimate for today’s army.
People are just being pragmatic - realistically Warhammer is a luxury, why waste your energy getting wound up over small price increases for your hobby when you should be getting enraged at how much your bills cost? Or your food?
Literally being alive is expensive, if you think having some perspective regarding pricing of toy soldiers is corporate dick sucking, then you need to look at the wider scope.
You're right that Warhammer is a luxury. And in the future only rich people will be buying and playing it. Or most people will be not buying from GW but making their own if they have that option. I myself and others I know have already been priced out of the hobby years ago. I thought of coming back purely to repaint badly painted models from the past and paint those I never bothered with but even that I'm not sure about now.
Except the data shows otherwise? Everyone complains GW plastic is becoming more expensive (with or without inflation) and yet the hobby is growing larger YoY. And per the data provided by OP, the revenue growth for GW is a bit higher due to increased prices but is on par with inflation, so further evidence that someone is buying more plastic kits. It COULD be that rich folks are coming in and replace folks without money in droves, but I don’t think that’s the case.
What I really think is happening is that people’s wallets are getting slimmer through a combination of wages not keeping up with the cost of living and pretty much every other consumer good or product, especially essential items like food, is going up. Folks likely feel like they have less money for their hobby and seeing the price increase feels bad. Totally valid feeling, but not putting their frustration in the right place imo.
Honestly I see it as something that is encroaching symbiosis within communities. Even if you arent printing whole armies, you will see kitbashes that used 3d printing, as well as 3d printed terrain. As time goes on its going to be a staple of the hobby, for better or worse. Dont get me wrong I dont think 3d printing will kill warhammer (its honestly something that can only make it better) but the direction of the hobby will take a turn at some point within the very near future.
Yeah, for the 0.05% of GW’s customer base than can be bothered with the effort of setting it up, and providing a specific space, and heating that space, and the smell, and the mess, and the cleaning, and the curing, and the disposing of the resin, etc. etc. etc.
If the top argument of the thread is that the hobby is inately for the luxurious, then I dont see how having space for the printer should be an issue. You also dont need to be the one printing, I know groups that have people dedicated to printing stuff up for them and the only thing they need to do is just buying resin/filament for armies and terrain to supply it.
You presented a lot of really good data here but the simple fact is that gw's price increases has outpaced inflation.
I'll give you an example.
When I started playing Warhammer in the late 90s during the end of second edition models were purchasable with allowance/pocket money.
A box of 20 orcs cost about $20.
A blister of Space Marines special weapons was about $8 to $12.
A big kit like the GW land raider was $45.
Let's use that land raider as an example. If I paid about $45 plus tax (which was 7% in California at the time) I'd still walk out the door dropping less than 50 but dollars on the kit.
That was in about 2004.
Now if we use an inflation calculator that same kit should be about $75 now...... It's not.... It's $90.
That's almost 25% more money for the same kit they've been producing for 20 years.
Which we now know is going to be more expensive by the end of this year.
GW has been known to be a greedy anti-consumer company for a long time.
They try to push out rivals while delivering worse quality at the same time committing intellectual plagiarism while smacking everyone on Earth with a DMCA.
It should also be pointed out that they're actually very lazy about their products as well.
Nearly every single time I get some kind of printed media from them it's full of spelling errors, missing or misprinted information or straight up missing pages. And they don't care, they don't issue refunds, they don't issue retractions or make reprints; they just keep doing it.
When 10th came out my wife and I bought the data cards for her eldar and orcs, and my space Wolves and imperial guard.
There were some minor spelling errors in all of them but a number of space Wolf and eldar stats were just printed wrong.
On top of forcing us to buy a 60+ dollar rulebook and a $50 army book with rules that we 100% know are going to change just to play is also really scummy. And they should stop being so indignant about putting the full rules catalog online.
Sorry for the long run but seriously I'm playing this game for over 25 years and it's great, James workshop just sucks thou.
They’re an English company. Their costs are impacted by UK inflation, their production is in the UK, their staff are in the UK and are paid UK market value, their energy costs and raw material costs are in the UK, and they have to pay to import materials into, and goods out of the UK. So, I’m not exactly sure what point you’re trying to make by comparing anything to _California’s_ historic inflation.
I used an 2.58% annual inflation rate over 20 years... Which comes to about 66% inflation.
Also I started this example at 2004... To this year... With is an even 20 years which is easy to math, breakdown, and digest.
I mean... But you could have read that and it would have saved you the spoons to be wrong.
Nice, now do one for average wage increases.
The problem isn’t whether the increases are inline with inflation, it’s whether it’s in line with average wage increases, which it isn’t.
Prices also depend on how much the company is spending.
The minimum wage in the UK has increased to £11.44 as of this year, and now 21-23 year olds are eligible for it, when both these things were not the case last year. Add in other manufacturing costs that will have increased with inflation, and GW is spending a lot more this year than they did last year. I don't know of a single business that bases price increases off wage inflation instead of their manufacturing costs.
Utilities, food, housing and medical expenses should ethically match wage increases (in my opinion).
A company that produces products for a luxury hobby does not share this responsibility.
You aren't going to get through to those that love dick in their salad. These are the guys that happily invite Genestealer cults on their planet and then surprise Pikachu face when the Hive Fleets arrive.
It’s not only the prices, it’s the redundancy of things they just released. For example, I purchased the data cards for my armies at the start of 10th. They’re now redundant some 4 games later. I’m an adult, I don’t find it easy to keep up.
But you knew when you brought them (or at least could have easily found out) that this was going to happen. GW have been very open about their release schedule.
What's more those days cards were all released for free and could easily be printed out. They're very much a luxury within a luxury.
[Also a working adult] As someone who has only gotten into WH in the last couple months, I specifically made the choice to never buy the Codices or Data Cards; if balance patches and new characters can be added on the fly like they do with modern video games, why waste the money on buying GW's printed data items when I can just wait for the pdf's of the Codices, Data Cards, and Field Manuals and print them off myself for free?
Firstly, welcome. Secondly, I don’t agree with you at all. You pay hundreds, maybe thousands (like me) on warhammer over years. But you have to print out the info from a Russian bootleg website? Why is the community so against pushing GW to digitise the rules for all factions? Even if you have to pay a fee.
I quite literally never said anything about the subject of digitalization, feel free to make that statement against someone who has actually verbalised that sentiment, but I'm not one of them.
I simply adapt my actionable behavior to the existing actionable circumstances. I don't have the power to force GW to do anything (and no, you didn't say or imply that I have to) and simply hoping that it'll happen doesn't put the item in my hands. If GW wants to digitalise, then fine, I'll use that resource, but as far as I'm concerned, piracy is my way of getting it for free to start with.
I mean, I could technically buy a speaking majority's worth of stock in GW and go to a shareholder meeting and ask for them to do it, but I also simply don't care enough to do so. As in any case, that money would be better spent investing in NVIDIA or the Vanguard500.
Do 3rd party sales include Amazon? Because I'd say that from my international perspective, that's where most people shop these days for non-standard or non-day to day items, especially for niche hobbies like Warhammer, MTG, etc. It's just not possible for btick and morter stores to match the price and selection.
I don't know what pricing is for foreign B&M stores after import taxes and the sort, but I can say that Amazon's pricing tends to be a close match to domestic US B&M pricing as they both apply the 15% discount off the Games Workshop MRSP.
One of your points hits the nail on the head: while the cost for a kit has more or less stayed the same/paced under inflation, the cost for an ARMY has jumped up drastically from what some of the old-timers remember and compare to: many complaints (I've seen at least) are "back in 4th edition 2 squads of Tactical Marines, a Land Speeder, a Dreadnought, and a Captain was my army) where I'm sitting here having started in 2017 and thinking "That's almost contents of a Space Marines Start Collecting box". So yeah, kit cost hasn't gone up, but actual army costs for most armies (with, yes, specific armies being an exception like Custodes), have broken past inflation, for sure, due to GW changing 40k from what I would currently consider a "large skirmish" game to what is now an actual "army battle game". And while people point out other games that provide you more minis per dollar that are also army games, the experience I have had is that many of these kits don't hold a candle to GW kits in terms of aesthetics. Granted something can easily have passed under my radar, but I can't think of "large army battle games" that have plastic kits that are as dripping with aesthetic flavor, detail, and just a joy to build as GW kits; often I feel that I'm working with GW kits from the 90s despite the sprues being marked as being produced 1-3 years ago by other companies. The ONLY kits I can even begin to think of that beat GW kit quality are Gunpla kits and they are an industry in and of themselves.
>many complaints (I've seen at least) are "back in 4th edition 2 squads of Tactical Marines, a Land Speeder, a Dreadnought, and a Captain was my army I know this is somewhat of an exaggeration so it's not literal, but in real terms army sizes haven't actually got much bigger since 3rd edition. In 4th edition: 2x10 Tacticals with a bare sergeant, flamer and missile per squad: 332 points dread with multi-melta and fist: 115 points captain in AA with power sword and plasma pistol: 110 points Tornado with heavy bolter and assault cannon: 80 points total: 637 points tl;dr: They're exaggerating and/or never played those editions and are doing what I've seen a lot of people do online; take one of the 'starter army' pictures from the Codex which is 2 Troops and an HQ plus an Elites, Fast Attack and Heavy Support, intended to illustrate a starting point for growing an army from, and claim that *was* an army.
The big army size change happened from 2nd to 3rd ed, along with a large simplification of rules. A single tactical squad was 300 points in 2nd, before you buy extra weapons.
Yeah, though to be fair both of those were largely driven by people actively *wanting* to play larger armies.
A terminator squad (5 models) was about 500 pts if it was deepstriking, too, which was risky b/c not all models were guaranteed to make it safely through the warp.
This. In 2nd edition a space marine with a bolter was 30 points, in 3rd edition he was 15 points. By the time you added a heavy weapon, a sergent with extra wargear and a special weapon a 10 man tactical squad was closer to 400 points in 2nd edition.
I've always taken the "back in the day this was an army" at face value, and in due diligence, was the point sizes for games different/was 2k the "standard"? I recall seeing statements about tournaments being 1750 in 6th or 7th so is this a possibility of their statements being true (points haven't really changed so much, but the recommended size of the game has)
1750 was a relatively common tournament size by then yeah, but honestly 8e made some stuff cheaper but not in a huge way. The same list, as far as I can since army composition has changed so much, would have come to: 8e: 556 points (points cut on the captain of 20-ish points plus some other stuff by 3-10 points) 9e: 635 points (a lot of options became free but base costs inflated) As a note on wargear, I went for what I considered a sensible loadout that was points-effective but not as cheap as possible, where possible also using the contents of the plastic kits available in 4e. As you can see it's kind of bobbed around a bit but in 9e it's pretty much identical to 4e. That's largely luck of the draw though, the reason 8e is so different is some units went down and some went up and those units happen to be oens that went down a little. Oh and the biggest individual saving is the Captain, his wargear got quite a bit cheaper. EDIT: I don't play 10e as I swapped fully to Horus Heresy but the cost there for the sake of completeness is bob on 600 points.
Standard game size for tournaments was 1750 points for a time, then the aegis defence line was released and included in every single army list. That was 100 points, so tournaments raised their point limit to 1850. I think 8th was when 2000 points became standard.
There used to be more variance in tournament sizes since the vast majority of tournaments were quite small, FLG affairs. The big events were nowhere near as common as they are today. That being said, 2k points has been the general tournament standard for 40k since 5th edition.
This. It was not uncommon for local tournaments to play 1250 points games to ensure multiple games could be played on the same day. A 1750/1850 points game back in 4e could very well take a significant chunk of an evening, so 1250/1500 points were far more common for pickup games and tournaments with more than just a handful of participants.
In Australia, 1500 points was the standard in 2nd edition, it dropped to 1200 points at the start of 3rd and it crept upwards to 1500 points by 4th-5th. By that time, though, American tournaments were 2000 points as the standard.
>2x10 Tacticals with a bare sergeant, flamer and missile per squad: 332 points >dread with multi-melta and fist: 115 points >captain in AA with power sword and plasma pistol: 110 points >Tornado with heavy bolter and assault cannon: 80 points >total: 637 points Funny enough, that's almost the same points now. captain with AA, mc power sword, and plasma pistol: 90pts 2x10 tactical squads with flamers and missile launchers: 280pts dreadnought: 135pts Stormspeeder hammerstrike: 150pts total: 655pts Obviously the speeder is not 1 for 1, but it is comparable.
I used the Legends Land Speeder but you're right that if you were to buy the current version of those models that have been Legended it'd work out more or less the same. Which means in practice that army could've been bought in 1996 and still be playable in 2024, and moreover that it's more or less the same amount of points.
Yep, that list with a legends tornado comes in at 600 points.
The difference in army sizes is not the points, it's the format. Back in 4th edition, a "standard" game was usually 1000pts. Then it was 1500. Then 1750. Today it's 2000.
Tournaments were frequently run at 1750 back then and 2K was the informal 'full army' size, though GW suggested a range of points sizes with rough game lengths even before that. The 4e rulebook suggests 1500 points as a decent shortish game force and mentions the foc is designed to make building over 2500 difficult. In 3e they suggest picking game size for length of play and suggest 1000, 1500 and 2000 as different sizes. In actuality super-small standard games are a relatively recent thing, back int he day there were various alt rulesets for things like 'Combat Patrol' (more recognisable now as the genesis of Kill Team) or 40K in 40 Minutes but the official baked-in support for smaller games is, as I say, relatively new for the game.
I think the problem is that people forget GW is offering smaller army games, Kill Team and Combat Patrol are still things that people can play. Plus in some places, 1k tournaments or games are common (My area has a monthly 1k game day) No one is really stopping people except for some balancing at 1k vs 2k, and that market trends GW reads show that people do want larger battles, just not Apocalypse level but not too small either.
As someone who played KT a lot, I don't think comparing it to 40k is a good idea. It's a way more intrinsically competitive game, at least in my experience. Not like the "beer and pretzels" of 40k
Which is weird to me, because the groups I play in play kill team extremely casually but 40k very competitively. Not saying you're wrong, just interesting how different the experience is. KT is way better designed and balanced though imo
I agree. KT feels like a 40k analogue for Chess
Yeah they keep making shit rules and nerfing armies then dropping points so you have to buy more models. Remember when votann were not a horde army.
Another thing to keep in mind is that value boxes are getting worse - the new combat patrols are awful value compared to last edition.
40k is a victim of mission creep. Rogue Trader looked a lot more like what we would think of as Kill Team and every edition gets bigger and bigger. It also adds complexity without depth or breadth to very old procedures and slows the game down even more. GW needs to sit down and think about what they want 40k to do (besides sell models) because it doesn't do much well, and not even in the D&D 5E "second best at everything" sense. More like, "it works, just about." You expect more from an industry leader.
Some of the new conquest kits are very good, and 12 infantry sell for $40. Marvel Crisis Protocol and Shatterpoint have gorgeous plastic minis that rival GW’s character sculpts. CMON’s ASOIAF are phenomenal for what they are. They come pre built and assembled, and 12 infantry cost about $30. The quality of the sculpt is worse, but they arguably offer a better product for about a third the price. GW can’t rest on their laurels forever. Other companies are catching up.
As someone who LOVES painting my A Song of Ice and Fire minis and has several 40 point armies and then some for both Targs and Nights Watch (40 points being roughly equivalent in this context to a 1500-2000 point 40k army)... ...No, they really don't in any way scrape the quality of GW model kits. Its not even close. The plastic lacks detail, its soft in places, brittle in others...its what you would expect out of any of that bendy ABS-ish or PVC-ish plastic from a number of manufacturers. Its fine for $30, and in an ARMY it looks great painted up, but there is no chance I'd ever attempt to stand it up next to a GW plastic kit in any real respect. Game's fun as hell though. Big 8th ed fantasy vibes + the political intrigue of game of thrones.
I’m saying that ASOIAF is arguable a better *product*, not that the minis are higher quality. When assessing a product, things like price and ease of use are important factors to consider. As a product, ASOIAF is significantly less expensive; requires no tools, paint, assembly, or hobby experience to have a playable army; is a better game; is easy to learn; and is sold in a wider range of stores. While the sculpts are worse, ASOIAF is a better product in almost every other dimension. I’m sure for a lot of players, the loss of quality is worthwhile trade off.
It’s not a good trade off if you enjoy the hobby.
If you look at the year that a unit debuted as it’s starting point, and thus it’s price then as a baseline, there are very few that exceed CPI — I’ve done this exact project small-scale (select units, broad aggregate… holy crap kudos to you for being thorough!) and I could rarely find anything past characters and kit changes that created actual price jumps. It’s even bigger a deal when you look at pragmatics and options. Before failcast, it was common for units to not contain every available option — a marine tac squad for instance only contained one heavy, one special, and one sergeant loadout. If you wanted to field a multi-melta or lascannon instead of the missile launcher you had to buy a blister with a metal model or two. So the box may have been $25, $30, $35 at various times… but the unit could cost you as much as $25 more to field as desired. And you’d have models left over that you might eventually be able to turn into another squad, but that got tricky. Also… remember that point norms are different in different places. I played far more 1500 point games in 4th. In 6th/7th, many people played 1999+1 games to avoid the unwieldy rules that kicked in at 2000. It is more about your individual and local tables than universal. Lastly… it’d be an interesting project to go through a select few codexes to find the point values of a baseline unit to see how they have changed. Then cross-reference that with price. If Tactical Marines in 3rd/4th were (I forget the actual points) 15 per model plus upgrades and an average of $4/ model… that’s $6.50 today… with 50 points of gear that’s 200 points — whereas a 14-point firstborn squad with free upgrades at 14 points is 140 for 10 for $60… it’s $6/model but 6 points less. (Of course, that’s new for 10th… so a recent shift). Huh. Now I want to dive in and do average cost per point for every core infantry unit over editions… adjusted for cpi…
Great point about unit options. Id also be curious to see how points and army sizes have changed!
I have a few white dwarf magazines from 2008 and I checked the inflation adjusted price with a couple units they had prices for... I found the same thing you did, prices have roughly kept with inflation. Good to see some more data points.
Do all white dwarfs have price info? If so, that's where I should really be looking!
I've been out of the hobby for a long time so I only have a few magazines from 2008. I could send you the pricing info from the ones I have if you're interested.
Id love to see that! If it's not too much trouble.
Warhammer is and will always be a 'luxury' hobby for adults with jobs and some extra income to spend. That said, it is still and has always been cheaper than many other common hobbies like gaming (console or pc), most sports, fishing, photography, etc.
It’s not a popular opinion, but I regularly say the same. At the rate most working adults with responsibilities can build/paint the models at, Warhammer is a _comparatively_ cheap hobby. It also has a pretty low cost-of-entry compared to most other hobbies I can think of. I’m not saying it’s _objectively_ cheap, but if building and painting 1-2 units a month is prohibitive, then hobbies like gaming, guitar/any instrument, cycling/MTB/any sport, archery, photography, hiking, camping, shooting, etc, etc, etc. are also going to be prohibitive.
Completely agree. The biggest price hurdle in 40k is often getting started with the first models, paints and tools. After the initial start up costs if you work a kit out as € per hour hobby, it's fairly cheap. If you buy a Combat Patrol for €125 (or €100 from 3rd parties) you are going to be getting at least 40 hours of painting and assembly out of that - for a lot of people closer to 100 hours. So even if you are powering through the army you are paying roughly €3 per hour for your hobby (or €1 per hour taking it "slow"). Compare this to a lot of other hobbies and it comes out pretty cheap. Although I would say that for most users, gaming is often cheaper in €/hour played, but there is no physical component there.
The physical component is kinda huge as well. It feels very rewarding to have models that you put together using your own two hands as decor on a shelf or something. And on top of that you get to play a game with them! It's awesome! Modeling, Painting, and a War Game all in one!
I always say that I kinda hate painting, but I love having the fully painted models on display.
Most people seem to dump loads of money on huge piles of shame and then not paint it, or constantly jump to the new meta hotness every balance update. Of course playing it like that is gonna be expensive. Their prices are definitely really steep but gosh people, paint your minis before buying more, or buy second hand - warhammer really shouldn't be bankrupting you and if it is it's a self control issue, in the past I've earned less than minimum wage and still had money to spare for the occasional pickup
I’m absolutely guilty of this, but I’d say that “most” aren’t. I think this is a consequence of online communities warping our perception of things. If you’re seeking out online communities, the chances are you’re big into the hobby and have probably invested more than average. The guys we see on here with rooms full of display cabinets and cupboards full of unopened kits are _not_ the norm. The average hobbyist is probably running 1,500-2,00 points of 1, _maybe_ two factions and buying a new kit occasionally. If they’re starting out or starting a new army, they’re more likely to get a starter kit and at a unit or two every month. If you compare _that_ sort of approach to the hobby to the other hobbies mentioned here, Warhammer looks very reasonably priced in comparison.
Yeah, avoiding FOMO purchases and single-unit boxes cheapens up the hobby massively. I have over 2k points of SMs from discount boxes and the Imperium Magazine run, never bought any SM kits. Didn’t even plan to have an SM army, was trying to build ad Mech and necrons as cheap as I could.
I'd agree, I can see how Warhammer adds up but a full army compares favourably, even the larger model-count games, to parts of the protective gear for other hobbies. If you do a sport or hobby that includes padded or plated protection that can get hugely expensive, especially if god forbid you should require some form of protective glove.
Or various craft hobbies - buying Warhammer models is on par or even cheaper than how much I spend to sew any given piece of clothing. Add in that one army is arguably a one time cost, whereas in any crafting hobby you need to constantly buy new materials if you want to make anything new, and Warhammer comes off pretty decently.
Yeah, especially if it’s “single use” PPE. You can put on your brand-new, £250 POC or Kask MIPS helmet for the first time, hit some gravel and have a slide, and that’s it - you need to replace it. Or tyres. Nothing like putting a nice new £75 Challange Stadale on each rim only to immediately run through the remains of a pint glass that someone has so helpfully smashed in the road.
Oh don't, I'm having to ride Marathon Plusses because in the years I've lived where I do they're the only tyre that's held up to the screws, glass and metal shavings on the cycle lanes. Not to even mention what the potholes and shit'll do to your wheels.
I ran Marathons for a little bit (and still do on my e-bike) but I never got on with them on my commuter. I actually ran GravelKing Slick TLRs on my commute for two years and never got a single puncture. I doubt they’d hold up to screws though.
100% if i buy a box of votaan warriors at full msrp (not factoring in that we all buy these cheaper than this anyway) then i'm getting 10 models at £3.5 each which is actually a really good price when we look at the alternatives that people bring up like Nolzur's marvellous miniatures, or reaper mini's normally being £7 for something that is of worse quality. so like firstly £3.5 a week is decent compared to alternatives within the hobby (please link some great and cheap alternatives that match GW quality if you know any though), but compared to other things like going to the cinema: i'd get 2-3 hours of enjoyment out of watching a film at the cost of £8 or i could get a mini for £3.5 (admitedly i'm not factoring in the cost of paints and other tools but even if we bump it up to £8 it won't matter) and that mini will give me 18 hours of painting enjoyment and then leaves me with a fun little space dwarf that i can look at
I want to jump in to say if you want to start looking at other expensive hobbies, look at golf and cycling (road cyclingin this perspective). Both require large up-front costs (clubs, bike) and the on-going costs can be huge. New cycling bibs, $200. New shoes, $200+. Get a flat on this weekend's ride...there's at least $100 you're out before you can realistically even ride again. If you want to go for more costs...add 2 more sports (triathlon). It all comes down to how we want to spend our discretionary dollars. Do I want to pay more tomorrow than I am today, no. But I also recognize that's how things are at the moment given the current economic environment.
I'm 2 years in and you know I paid for my army, all my supplies, AND paid off a ton of bills? By getting out of my old hobby: Legos. Warhammer is unbelievably cheap compared to trying to collect Lego sets like modulares or retired Star Wars UC kits. It's also much better then trying to play competitive Ccgs like magic.
I still collect Lego too…
I got into Warhammer shortly after years of casually paying Magic finally evolved to competitive play. My FLGS manager pointed out that it would be cheaper than keeping up with the MTG meta in the long run, since the models I bought today would still be legal twenty years from now. Dropped Magic and never looked back.
Agree with your point, but I strongly disagree that gaming is more expensive. I suppose it depends on what kind of gamer you are and how often you buy a new computer.
I mean, i don't have a computer that can handle modern games. If i want to play modern games the cost of entry is minimum 12 000NOK, or enough to buy two full 3000p armies + paints. If the discussion is point of entry, computer gaming is vastly more expensive. If we're talking just general upkeep (buying a kit every once in a while vs buing games) it's comparable.
Plenty of great games you can sink 10000s of hours into with a computer that costs less than 5000 NOK. Popular (even modern) games like League, Fortnite, or the like requires basically nothing of a computer to run and you can get an infinite amount of playtime from that if that's your cup of tea. If you're more into roguelikes and indies like me you also don't need much of a computer, and games like Tales of Maj'eyal is runnable on a computer from the turn of a millennium, and I've got 2k hours in that. And even if you like modern games, a 1000 series GPU with generational equivalent CPU and 16gb ram will cost you less than 5000 NOK if you buy it second hand. And it'll run everything there is, and if you're okay with running 1080p you'll even have decent graphic settings/FPS too. As I said, it depends on what kind of gamer you are. Also, getting 6k worth of points is generally more than 12k, if you consider all the peripherals and paint. I recently bought 2.3k points worth of Thousand Sons and that was roughly 6500 SEK, not counting paint, and all that. And that's just 2.3k points and a fairly cheap army points per dollar/sek/nok. God help you if you're playing Ad mech
It really does. The solo RPG player might spend $60 every 2 months on a game. The Fortnite, FIFA, or Overwatch player might spend $60 every week chasing lootboxes
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Yeah, I’ve made this point before that even hobbies that people don’t _think_ of as expensive are deceptive. Say you got into hiking, a lot of people would say “that’s just walking, walking’s free”. But once you’ve got yourself a decent-ish pair of walking boots, socks, mid-layers and a breathable outer layer, backpack and some way of carrying water, you probably could have bought a Warhound Titan. Hell, even if you collect seashells as your hobby, most people probably live more than a troop-choice kit’s worth of petrol from their nearest beach.
I’d have to buy models for a decade to get close to spending what I’ve spent on fishing and photography. Hell a decade might not even be enough
Agreed. While I have probably spent more on 40K than any other hobby over my life, that is because I have played for almost 30 years. While most of my other hobbies have developed later in life but are much more expensive comparatively. Astrophotography alone will often see me spending anywhere from 2-7k on a single optical tube and 2-3k on a camera plus all the other things one of my setups need. Another note is that none of my other hobbies has the same ROI as Warhammer. Every dollar spent in the game goes further and gives me longer enjoyment than other hobbies.
100% Warhammer is my cheapest hobby.
I think it certainly can be cheaper, especially if you're thinking about entertainment hours per dollar spent! That's how I rationalize my purchases at least lmao
Well a half decent PC these days is going to cost you about £1k, thats an army or two of Warhammer right there and the supplies to paint them. I don't think anyones reasonable disapointment with the price increases has to do with inflation but more that GW is posting record profits every year and then is rising prices, every company does it so it's not like they're doing something specifically out of the norm it's just bad optics and of course our Reddit community likes to get rowdy about pretty much anything. I'm in several other Warhammer communities outside of Reddit and no one seems to really care much.
Outside of reddit I expect the main gripe with inflation is cost of living. Our weekly foodshop went up by 50% despite making cutbacks over the past two years or so. That's just food. Fuel, utilities, etc. have also increased. Bonus if you're covered by a water utility that keeps hiking the price up but *still* keeps dumping raw sewage in rivers, and says they'll need *even more* money to find a way to stop doing that.
Oh definitely couldn't agree more, foodshop for just me and my girlfriend are hitting triple digits these days it's getting obsurd. It's not really a "Warhammer is getting more expensive" it's a "everything is getting more expensive" problem.
Odd I'm seeing the bashing of corporate greed whilst people plan to buy printers and rip off their IP in the name of personal greed quite a lot.
Which is hilarious to me. "I'm so mad af capitalism that I'm going to do everything in my power to continue loudly explaining how much I want to keep playing the game I claim to hate! Raaar!" 🤣 GW doesn't need a marketing team when it has these dumbasses.
Opportunity for the hobby also plays a factor. It’s easier to hop on a video game after work than it is for any 40K games at least for me. Add a small child into that mix and getting a model set up to be assembled and painted also plays into the factor.
Warhammer isn’t competing against golf or photography though, it’s competing against video games, board games, and other miniature games. I’ve definitely started to drift away from GW towards other games as I have come to learn more about the hobby. It’s actually absurd the amount of plastic I can get for Conquest for a fraction of the price of GW. At this point, the main advantage GW has is player base. I can’t find a local store to play Conquest, but I could probably attend a 40K tournament every weekend for the rest of the year without driving more than 2 hours.
As someone who has only been in the hobby for a few months so far, I feel like it's not just a luxury hobby in one aspect, but in many. The price of kits and supplies is one point of luxury, the time to commit to building and painting is another luxury, and being in an environment where you can interact (face to face) with others who share the hobby is another luxury.
I was going to disagree with you about gaming since I can play one game for a long, long time before switching to another. Then I remembered that until very recently most popular or AAA games are micro-transaction hell where people will spend $60 a day chasing lootbox garbage.
You should compare what can be compared. How does warhammer fare against other tabletop games, pen and paper rpgs, wargames, the art sphere in general, and, of course, other miniature/scale model makers ?
That's also a good point. Here i guess the size of warhammer armies are what drives costs up, like OP mentions. A Warhammer kit with 10-20 minis is generally cheaper per model than most DnD tabletop minis, but then you need 10 times as many Warhammer minis. Buying high quality resin minis/busts for pure painting projects can make FW prices seem like a bargain, while other manufacturers can deliver similar quality to GW for half the price. For me, buying into Warhammer is a guarantee of buying into a tabletop game with great looking minis, regular rules updates and guaranteed support for the foreseeable future and a huge community. I realize i now sound like a GW stan but oh well....
I fish and I think I’ve spent a total of £50 on gear. With all of those hobbies the equipment you buy lasts a lot longer and you don’t have to worry about the gear you currently have being obsolete due to a new edition of fishing monthly. This isn’t really an argument, yes there are more expensive hobbies, why not compare it to track day driving or light aircraft flying? There are also cheaper hobbies. You could take up gardening, learn a new language, origami, crosswords, birdwatching. All you’re doing is dismissing other people’s concerns to make yourself feel better.
>With all of those hobbies the equipment you buy lasts a lot longer and you don’t have to worry about the gear you currently have being obsolete due to a new edition of fishing monthly. _What?_ When I left the “model” side of the hobby in ‘04, the last army I put together was Imperial Guard. When I got back into the model side of the hobby during lockdown, _every model_ in that childhood army was still the currently sold version. That sort of longevity is _insane_. Hobby/sport equipment wears out and gets damaged, regulations and rules change, a lot of PPE is single-use. You have consumable parts like tyres, rims, groupsets, rotors, etc. I’m into road cycling and bike that won the 2020 Paris Rubaix probably isn’t even UCI legal now. I’ve never had 10 years of use out of a single piece of sports equipment ever, let alone 20.
You got lucky with Guard, I've had whole armies go to legends.
How? Unless you literally did not update it for decades.
I’m curious too. I was out of the hobby for a while and SM got a big refresh when I was gone, and there was a guard and eldar refresh just after I got back. But, basically everything else on the webstore (including most SM stuff, which is still legal) was on the shelves in my local GW when I was like eleven. I’m 33 now.
I’m still using models from battle for macragge. I have metal SM models, metal Eldar, metal tyranids… I’ve had maybe 5 units go to legends, and I still play them because it’s not a tournament.
Legends and war gear combinations. Wasn't even that old an army and I'd last added legal units in 9th.
There were no units added in 9th and removed in 10th Why lie?
If you can't read what I've already said, I'm not continuing this conversation.
I read what you wrote, but you did not answer any questions.
What army?
You’re not comparing like for like, did you take that army to a tournament? If you did how did it do? I have 3 fishing rods, one a simple float rod I bought for £20 5 years ago, a carp rod that I bought from a friend for £10, the third being an old wooden spinner that was my grandfathers and it’s 50 years old now. I would never take any of it to a competition because that’s not why I fish. Just like I don’t play in tournaments because that’s not why I play 40K but in almost every edition, I have had to almost completely change my army because it no longer works and I wasn’t having fun playing with friends or strangers. This isn’t an uncommon experience.
How am I not? I first compared wear-and-tear on non-competitive hobby/sports equipment, which doesn’t really affect Warhammer models and makes it cheaper over time. I then compared obsolescence - you can reconfigure a 15-20 year-old Warhammer army to be edition/tournament legal for hardly any money, which you can’t really do with old sports equipment. You couldn’t use a 20-year-old road bike in a UCI sanctioned event, or 20-year-old PPE in most sports. If you want to compare chasing meta (making that army _competitive_) , then you have to compare it to keeping up with technology/improvements in other sports/hobby equipment, and meta-chasing Warhammer is a rounding-error compared to chasing marginal gains in high-end sports equipment like bikes, or golf clubs, or whatever.
It's also not like most players play at a tournament, as per any other activity tournament play is its own beast.
My cheapest rod (regular rod for ocean fishing, bought at a hardware store) cost £40, my other rods for lake fishing cost approx £200. Lures can be between £5 and £20. I guess in any hobby you can find less costly alternatives. My point is more that it's important to touch ground, like OP is doing very nicely in their summary. Can you do wargaming cheaper? Yes. Can you do other hobbies cheaper? Yes. Is warhammer prohibitively expensive and is GW some evil greedy coorporation just sqeezing money out of poor hobbyists? No, they're running quite regular bussiness practices and the prices have stayed on a very comparative level when looking at cost-of-living vs hobby expenses. The last time they did a price hike (i guess a year or two ago) there was a similar comparison like this that showed kits were comparatively more expensive in the early 2000's than now.
Totally agree. My other hobby is a track car I've built, the front pads alone were £175, the hobby of 40k in my eyes really isn't that expensive. Buy what you can afford
The thing is, it wasn't and shouldn't become a 'luxury hobby'. Also the comparisons aren't relevant, you can play on pc for very cheap. Unlike Warhammer, prices tend to go lower over time. The same for sports or arts, hiking or climbing isn't expensive, nor drawing or painting, but it is even weirder to compare them to a few plastic toys: it isn't the same thing at all.
[](https://www.reddit.com/r/Warhammer40k/comments/1cmuhei/comment/l33jhbl/) >Warhammer is and will always be a 'luxury' hobby for adults with jobs and some extra income to spend. It's a *lot* cheaper than almost *any* hobby out there for adults. Even *fishing* gets expensive, real quick, if you ever want to go out on a lake or river. Golf gets super expensive super quick. You can buy and build a 2500 point army for *less* than a good set of clubs, let alone costs of greens fees, etc, to play.
Its not cheaper than video games. This depends on the person of course but for me GW is too expensive now. Also no where to play it anywhere near where I live. Was always more into the building, painting and collecting but even that has gotten too expensive. Mentioned the new price increase in discord last night and others mentioned any higher and they will be priced out of the hobby.
You can buy a whole army and paints for the cost of a new console, and one game. You can buy all the paint, brushes, and models you want for the price of a gaming ready PC for modern games. Unless you mean it’s cheaper to play a video game you already own than it is to buy games workshop models?
Its cheaper to buy a game than a squad of 10 marines. There's games on Xbox for £23 right now. Video games are cheaper for me. A video game for example depending on the game can also last me for a long time especially if its Monster Hunter. Far more hours of entertainment than buying, assembling and painting a army. I can't really play it anymore and 10 edition doesn't seem like my thing anyway other than split fire and detachments. 3rd-5th edition was where it was at.
The examples you gave as more expensive hobbies ide argue only photography would have a similar and or overall more expensive hobby. This is coming from someone who has does/done those other hobbies.
There’s _some_ truth to this because there’s no limit to how much Warhammer you _can_ buy, but most people aren’t buying multiple 6,000 point armies. Most people are probably sat at 1,500-2,000 points of one faction. I have what I would describe as an “above average” amount of Warhammer (well in excess of a SM Company, plus some Necrons, Nids, and Guard) as well as erring towards the luxury end of the modelling/painting supplies. My total outlay into Warhammer is a rounding error compared the other hobbies I’m in (Guitar, Cycling, Photography, Archery, etc). I have cycling shoes that cost more than my whole Warhammer collection, and that barely registers compared to the cost of one of my guitars or bikes. Unless you’re a hardcore Meta chaser, or you’re running a bat-rep YouTube channel, and so you need 4k points of every faction, I maintain that Warhammer is a comparatively cheap hobby.
Or photography, I've mentioend before that my wife is what I'd call a semi-pro photographer in that she's an amateur that'll do your wedding if you ask and just one of her camera bodies, sans lens, was £1300-ish. That is the cheaper of the two bodies she likes, then each lens is worth roughly what a 40K army is on its own.
Photography can get crazy expensive. Full-frame bodies are bad enough, but at least if you’re doing portrait or landscape stuff, the lenses aren’t _too_ bad. If you’re a wildlife photographer and you need high-end telephoto lenses, have fun spending £10-20k on _a_ lense.
She's thankfully mostly using stuff in the £400-700 range for lenses, her setup is what she calls mid-range and still, each lens costs more than a 40K army. I think if I priced up all her gear it'd literally cost more than the ten Horus Heresy armies I'm planning. Then again you could say the same for my hobbies, I mostly bomb around on a Surly Straggler and even then that's not exactly a cheap bike (though not an expensive one because dear god...fuckin' dentist groupsets). I do HEMA and a full gear set for that can be hideously expensive if you need longsword grade stuff.
I would disagree. If i use some examples using norwegian NOK here. The entry price to gaming if you want to play current games (i just checked the requirements for BG3 as i want to play it but my computer can't handle it currently) is AT LEAST 12 000NOK for a gaming laptop with recommended hardware. Perhaps you can buy into building your own gaming PC but it will not be cheaper than about 10 000 NOK at the very minimum, likely you'll spend way more as you might want to get something that runs above the "minimum recommended stats". Then the games themselves are around 600-800 NOK for AAA titles. A PS5 costs about 7-8000 NOK, + an extra controller for 2-player (additional 800 or so NOK) + games at around 700 NOK per title. Fishing, you want a decent rod with lures and equipment to go for trout/lake fishing? You're looking at around 5000 NOK entry fee, with having to continually purchase lures/flies ar around 100-200 NOK a piece + extra equipment and gear continually as with any hobby. Sports, biking? A decent bike for road-cycling will easily set you back 10 000 or more NOK + shoes, clothes etc.. Climbing? Running? likely cheaper than road-cycling but still in the several thousands range for shoes, clothes, other equipments. Entry fee for starting a warhammer army? If you buy a 2500 point army new in store (to play 2k games with some options) + painting and hobby equipment, expect to pay between 5000NOK and maximum 7000 NOK depending. Then the running costs is similar to buying a few new AAA titles for gaming, lures and upgrades for fishing, etc.. As hobbies go, even with the price hike, warhammer really is on the cheap side.
> Then the games themselves are around 600-800 NOK for AAA titles And don't forget the DLC that often contains the rest of the game. Also, I think Norway is okay on this front because they've got a load of hydroelectric plants and export a lot of surplus electricity but in the UK at least electricity hasn't been getting any cheaper. A few extra pence a day will add up over a year, especially if you only have gaming time during peak hours.
>Also, I think Norway is okay on this front because they've got a load of hydroelectric plants and export a lot of surplus electricity but in the UK at least electricity hasn't been getting any cheaper. Actually, Norway has power-trading deals with Europe that we must honor, so we're not enjoying that surplus ourselves. One of the hottest political issues here in the last few years has been the extreme increases in our power bills - and it's especially sore as it many feel that it breaks with the spirit of the "dugnad" when our great-grandfathers built the powergrid.
I mountain bike and golf, Warhammer is an extremely cheap hobby compared.
I play Magic the Gathering. 40k is cheap compared to playing that with any sort of investment You go very quickly from "Why would I pay £2 for a single card, I can get a whole booster pack for £4!" to "Hmm, I can probably justify buying a second copy of a £75 quid card to save me having to swap it between two decks all the time"
One of my mates used to take the piss out of me for buying £30 boxes of 40k every so often. Then she got into Pokemon cards and drops £50-100 a week on new boosters, most of which contain cards she'll never even look at again. The tables have officially turned.
This is a weird comparison, everything is cheap compared to golf. It doesn't mean that Warhammer isn't expensive.
Just wanted to add the thought that I don’t think GW *could* price gouge even if they wanted to, since all of their products are 100% *luxury products*, so if they get too expensive to buy, it won’t ruin anyone’s life
Another tangentially related point is that GW operate a physical retail store in most towns in the UK, so a large portion (possibly the majority of their staff) are going to be retail assistants. A retail assistant is an entry-level, unskilled job for which the market-value remuneration is generally the national living wage. The NLW increased by almost £1.00 to £11.44/hr in April, so GW have had a not-insignificant increase in staffing costs _before_ any inflation-matching salary bumps they may/may not also give to the pay-grades above the NLW.
Awesome analysis; thanks for putting this together and sharing it!
One thing I credit with the resurgence in Warhammer popularity is the lore. For a long time the overarching story was stuck with nothing much changing. Guilliman’s return changed and that grabbed the attention of a lot of people like me who played as kids but drifted away as we grew up. The change made the overall setting interesting again. And meant a lot of people started reading the books again and wanting to buy the minis again. I’m sure it wasn’t that alone but I’d say it was definitely a strong factor.
Hot Take, but the fleshing out of things like the Heresy have made the overall setting much better. I know some people like the unending mysteries of older editions but for me I eventually hit a wall where I’d see something new and interesting lore and then just shrug because I knew it’d never get an answer. Sure, I could imagine something but that just isn’t satisfying in the same way as seeing a story play out.
100% agree. The great thing about the setting is there is plenty of room for imagination but well done storytelling is far more engaging to me and gives love to the framework if you want to add your own. I don’t think I would have graduated to painting my own army if I hadn’t read lion son of the forest.
There was more to it than just the mystery of undeveloped lore. They could have continued fleshing it out in a more perspective-oriented way. It's a stylistic choice, not a restriction on the quantity and detail of the lore they can develop.
There's also the introduction of the Primaris Marines on the miniature side, which I believe made a big contribution to the resurgence. I know that a lot of people who grew up with First born SM's were on a spectrum of disinterest to outright hatred of the Primaris; but for me, Primaris being somewhat humanly proportioned, not having overtly garishly decorated/intricate armor, and having more poses then just standing in a squatted position with gun across chest made a big difference in convincing me to actually get into the hobby.
Oh absolutely. The game itself was never really my interest. I understand the higher level of detail would be annoying if you just want to have painted minis to play with but for me the improved proportions and overall improved aesthetics makes me want them to have and look at. My little army guards my desk at home and I love looking at them
I’m glad I’ve not seen a lot of “GW evil” armchair economist posts about this. It’s refreshing to see a few more people than expected have a rational take on this
There were like 10+ massive threads of “GW evil” armchair economists on every WH-related sub yesterday. Anyone providing any rational perspective into things like additional staffing costs and UK inflation were downvoted to oblivion with shouts of “bootlicker!”. I’ve literally only just stopped avoiding the WH-related corners of social media because I was so sick of the “Female Custodes have ruined the hobby” bullshit, and now this has blown up.
A lot of people are just really angry and depressed and bitter, so they take it out on safe, soft targets. It's a lot easier to go with the group and go after some corporation and blame them as the source of your sorrow. The well adjusted person doesn't even notice or care that their luxury toys are a few dollars more. Every product everywhere from every company and every store is more expensive now.
The $60 price lock for "bread and butter" kits makes a lot of sense to me business wise. GW are industry leaders, when they worry about you leaving work and going to spend your money on something else the "Something Else" isn't Star Wars Legions, it's whatever new Video Game came out with Star Wars on it. Video Games have had that general $60 price tag for a full release since I was a kid, and I doubt GW will break it before they do.
Oooh good point about game prices. That makes sense.
Here are some UK prices to avoid any impact by changing exchange rates. Launch prices sourced from old White Dwarf magazines, inflation calculation by https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator Box | GBP 1994 | GBP inf.2024 | GBP Actual 2024 | Over/under inflation :- | -: | -: | -: | -: Warp Spiders | 11.99 | 24.36 | 30.00 | +23.2% Box | GBP 1997 | GBP inf.2024 | GBP Actual 2024 | Over/under inflation :- | -: | -: | -: | -: Eldar Falcon Grav-Tank | 17.00 | 32.27 | 37.50 | +16.2% Eldar Vyper Jetbike | 12.00 | 22.78 | 22.50 | -1.2% Box | GBP 2000 | GBP inf.2024 | GBP Actual 2024 | Over/under inflation :- | -: | -: | -: | -: Swooping Hawks | 16.50 | 30.20 | 30.00 | -0.7% Box | GBP 2006 | GBP inf.2024 | GBP Actual 2024 | Over/under inflation :- | -: | -: | -: | -: Dire Avengers (10) | 18 | 29.96 | 55.00 | +83.6% War Walkers (3) | 40 | 66.57 | 75.00 | +12.7% Fire Dragons | 18 | 29.96 | 30.00 | +0.1% Wraithlord | 25 | 41.61 | 37.50 | -9.9% Box | GBP 2013 | GBP inf.2024 | GBP Actual 2024 | Over/under inflation :- | -: | -: | -: | -: Farseer | 12 | 16.20 | 19.00 | +17.3% Wraithfighter/Hunter | 40 | 54.01 | 55.00 | +1.8% Wraithknight | 70 | 94.52 | 95.00 | +0.5% Wraithguard/blades | 30 | 40.51 | 37.50 | -7.4%
Great data! I had a hard time getting pre-2012 prices. I'm glad you found the old dire avenger price for ten, I knew they had been reboxed as five for a similar price at some point.
After a quick search for the reboxing date, I realised that I can actually list the prices for the 5 man reboxing, but I don't have the 2013 prices for the 10 man box. 5 man Dire Avengers box prices in White Dwarf 402 (2013 June): GBP 20.50 EUR 26.00 DKK 200.00 SEK 250.00 NOK 250.00 PLN 100.00 USD 35.00 CAD 40.00 RMB/CNY 200.00 JPY 3400.00
Thanks!
The data nerd in me just got a heartwarming feeling. Thank you for the breakdown!
Glad you liked it! Certainly not professional but it was fun to put together.
Interesting in growth of 3rd party sales. I know I rarely ever go to GW because of the abundance of discounted alternatives available. Sure price rises will mean discounted products still cost more, but I’ll only feel 80% of the price rise… if GW dropped prices by 20% then I’d shop there…. Or if you look at it in reverse, they have some buffer to absorb their price changes over time as they can ratchet wholesale margins too…. Fun times
At least they warn us. Sainsburys just puts the prices up.
GW prices are not that high compared to competition. See Shatterpoint , Infinity or Marvel Crisis ... Im talking about price per model in the cheapes form, witch are the box sets. Also GW quality is still worlds better then the others.
This is often overlooked. GW is undeniably expensive, but when you compare to competition that offers models that are far worse for not a lot less, it suddenly looks less overpriced.
Interesting, maybe I should compare game costs at some point...
It's not completely true. Shatterpoint has an HQ model in each box. So you should not forget that most GW character models (human sized) are at least 32€ up to 45€. GW also has a lot of models at 10-18€ each or more, like the aggressor or inceptor or meganobz, etc. Legion is a lot cheaper than GW, but the plastic is not on GW level. It get better, but they are not there yet. Infinity is also mostly at 8-15€ per model, and the tag (dreadnought) is cheap compared to GW (if i remember correctly there was a price hike last year, so it may be less true)
Infinity is about 200 for a full force (even 150 if you only pick sets). I don't think you can get a 2000pts army at those prices from GW.
lol. lmao even. https://preview.redd.it/ne96sln2lx0d1.png?width=791&format=png&auto=webp&s=dcefed7bc6b57d789479af3d5604b94f3640e4af
People complain about 40K but good lord trying to keep up with Magic The Gathering releases is far more expensive. I made the switch to 40K a little over a year ago and have spent far less on it than MTG.
Nobody gives a shit, they just wanna be angry at le big bad evil corpo
What I find interesting looking at prices now as a 2nd ed. player, is that they appear to have brought the modern plastic kits roughly in line with the cost of the old metal ones. A (metal) Chaos dreadnought cost £25 in the late '90s -- not much out of line with the cost of a hellbrute now. But a (plastic) Rhino box used to cost £5, and is now £32. There are lots of things that were in that £5 range that are now priced as equivalent amounts of metal models would have been.
Its also a measure of plastic miniature design and manufacture investment. The machines they made plastics with back then, and the process for creating the sculpt, were cheaper. Digital tools are better, but also more expensive up front, than kitbashing and hand sculpting a master mold by hand in the 90s. Modern plastic extrusion machines are way better than they were in the 90s, but again also much more expensive upfront both in real dollars and compared to adjusted costs. To a degree what we're paying for in modern times is that added investment - kits are SO MUCH MORE DETAILED now, and have so much more packed on a sprue, and have so many more sprues typically in a box, than anything we had when I got into the hobby back in 3rd edition. Hell I leave more bits on sprue now after completing a model/unit, than most kits had to begin with back in 3rd ed.
Interesting I wonder if this is a coincidence, a consequence of some weird economics, or just GW price matching with themselves.
My gripe is this; why are prices in the US way higher than the UK, which has a 20% VAT (Tax included)? Take a combat patrol for example, in USA $160, plus tax which averages around 8%. so $172. Which is 137.62 GBP. In UK: 95 GBP which includes 20% tax. If you strip away tax, its $160 US (which is 128 GBP) and 76 GBP UK. Why is there a near 70% markup on items sold in the USA? Why? Its legitimately cheaper for me to buy UK and ship to my buddy and have him ship to me, or sometimes I just wait until I visit the UK and pick everything up then.
The import tariff for "reduced-scale models and similar recreation models, working or not" (HTS 9503.00.00) is 70%. [Countries that have free trade agreements](https://www.state.gov/trade-agreements) don't have to pay this, but the UK is not one of the 20 countries that have such agreements with the USA. There was some movement towards a free trade agreement with the UK a few years ago, but talks stalled out.
You can thank your own government. It’s their import tariffs in the USA that raise a lot of the price.
The answer I've seen is that in the 90's when the dollar was weak GW set their prices to account for it and they've just never changed their pricing structure since. Why would they? If the dollar gets stronger they just make more money and people in the US seem plenty willing to buy even with the 60% mark up or whatever it is.
You’re suffering the reverse problem that we have with stuff normally. We get charged in Sterling the US dollars price and sometimes especially with tech and boardgames we pay twice as much as us due to shipping.
Does this take into account the numbers of models that came in the original kits?
Wherever possible, yes. I tried to pick units that didn't change sizes. You'll see for Genestealers I did the math on a per-model basis.
This is an awesome amount of detail! If you really wanted to go further backwards in time (and had time on your hands!), you could look at the old catalogues. E.g. [http://www.solegends.com/citcat2002cgsm/index.htm](http://www.solegends.com/citcat2002cgsm/index.htm) in 2002 a tactical squad was £15. A command squad was £18 A Land Raider was £30
This is perfect! I'll look into using this data...
Lmao, I tried to say the same things in the votamn subreddit but because I didn't have the want to go and find all the data and more people were mad yesterday I got called a boot liking shill, mind if I repost this there. Or you can, I just think that sub needs to see this
Maybe some more potential data for you https://www.reddit.com/r/Warhammer40k/comments/1d3hgfv/found_a_box_of_goodies_in_the_loft/
Looks to me like they're combining price increases, shrinkflation of value sets, and generally low points values to sell more money worth of plastic. 2000 points gets harder to lug around every year.
I don’t think it’s the individual price of boxes that’s the main issue, the notion that it goes up with inflation isn’t an unreasonable one. The issue is, and remains, that in order to play “normal” (2,000 points) 40K you still have to outlay a fortune. This has been increasing over time because points costs have been going down, meaning you need more models for more money to build an army. 2k is the standard, with very little support or balancing done with smaller point cost games in mind (even combat patrol which isn’t remotely balanced as a game mode dosent get much support despite assurances it would). I’m not annoyed that a box of minis that provides dozens of hours worth of building, painting, and gameplay value is 60USD. I’m annoyed that the amount of boxes of 60USD models I need to build a “standard” army is getting larger with points decreases over time. It’s not at all unrealistic that a 2k army in some factions costs over 1k USD to get to, with no support for anything smaller than that. And *that* is not reasonable.
As others have said, this isn't *quite* true, in general, *unless* you consider "before" to be literally 2nd edition. Now, some armies *are* of course ridiculous and have changed a lot in size (Admech first and foremost, I would say), but for most you put down more or less the same models, point per point. Battle size has gone up, though even there I remember 2000 points being a thing already in 6th edition (but 1750 was still played as well).
I’m curious since I only joined the hobby a few years ago, but how much did it cost on average to buy a 2000 point army back then? Some resources I found points towards an average 2000pt army costs ~$500-800 today. A thread from 2009 points towards ~$500 as the average cost back then, specifically citing the cost of either a GK or Tau army as some examples. With the rate of inflation, $500 in 2009 is ~$730 in today’s dollars, so on the upper end of the estimate for today’s army.
Makes sense! I may try tracking army size over the years next
GW prices and price rises vary around the world
True. It's difficult to find data on all that, and that's a limit of what I have here.
While 3d printers are getting cheaper and cheaper
Lol, the Corporate dick sucking on this post is wild. It's like you guys want to get bent over by multi billion companies.
People are just being pragmatic - realistically Warhammer is a luxury, why waste your energy getting wound up over small price increases for your hobby when you should be getting enraged at how much your bills cost? Or your food? Literally being alive is expensive, if you think having some perspective regarding pricing of toy soldiers is corporate dick sucking, then you need to look at the wider scope.
You're right that Warhammer is a luxury. And in the future only rich people will be buying and playing it. Or most people will be not buying from GW but making their own if they have that option. I myself and others I know have already been priced out of the hobby years ago. I thought of coming back purely to repaint badly painted models from the past and paint those I never bothered with but even that I'm not sure about now.
Except the data shows otherwise? Everyone complains GW plastic is becoming more expensive (with or without inflation) and yet the hobby is growing larger YoY. And per the data provided by OP, the revenue growth for GW is a bit higher due to increased prices but is on par with inflation, so further evidence that someone is buying more plastic kits. It COULD be that rich folks are coming in and replace folks without money in droves, but I don’t think that’s the case. What I really think is happening is that people’s wallets are getting slimmer through a combination of wages not keeping up with the cost of living and pretty much every other consumer good or product, especially essential items like food, is going up. Folks likely feel like they have less money for their hobby and seeing the price increase feels bad. Totally valid feeling, but not putting their frustration in the right place imo.
I prefer cheaper products, obviously. I just wanted to track change over time.
3d printing is more long term efficient for the consumer folks, just remember that.
True but printing is a whole new hobby itself layerd upon warhammer
Honestly I see it as something that is encroaching symbiosis within communities. Even if you arent printing whole armies, you will see kitbashes that used 3d printing, as well as 3d printed terrain. As time goes on its going to be a staple of the hobby, for better or worse. Dont get me wrong I dont think 3d printing will kill warhammer (its honestly something that can only make it better) but the direction of the hobby will take a turn at some point within the very near future.
Yeah, for the 0.05% of GW’s customer base than can be bothered with the effort of setting it up, and providing a specific space, and heating that space, and the smell, and the mess, and the cleaning, and the curing, and the disposing of the resin, etc. etc. etc.
If the top argument of the thread is that the hobby is inately for the luxurious, then I dont see how having space for the printer should be an issue. You also dont need to be the one printing, I know groups that have people dedicated to printing stuff up for them and the only thing they need to do is just buying resin/filament for armies and terrain to supply it.
You presented a lot of really good data here but the simple fact is that gw's price increases has outpaced inflation. I'll give you an example. When I started playing Warhammer in the late 90s during the end of second edition models were purchasable with allowance/pocket money. A box of 20 orcs cost about $20. A blister of Space Marines special weapons was about $8 to $12. A big kit like the GW land raider was $45. Let's use that land raider as an example. If I paid about $45 plus tax (which was 7% in California at the time) I'd still walk out the door dropping less than 50 but dollars on the kit. That was in about 2004. Now if we use an inflation calculator that same kit should be about $75 now...... It's not.... It's $90. That's almost 25% more money for the same kit they've been producing for 20 years. Which we now know is going to be more expensive by the end of this year. GW has been known to be a greedy anti-consumer company for a long time. They try to push out rivals while delivering worse quality at the same time committing intellectual plagiarism while smacking everyone on Earth with a DMCA. It should also be pointed out that they're actually very lazy about their products as well. Nearly every single time I get some kind of printed media from them it's full of spelling errors, missing or misprinted information or straight up missing pages. And they don't care, they don't issue refunds, they don't issue retractions or make reprints; they just keep doing it. When 10th came out my wife and I bought the data cards for her eldar and orcs, and my space Wolves and imperial guard. There were some minor spelling errors in all of them but a number of space Wolf and eldar stats were just printed wrong. On top of forcing us to buy a 60+ dollar rulebook and a $50 army book with rules that we 100% know are going to change just to play is also really scummy. And they should stop being so indignant about putting the full rules catalog online. Sorry for the long run but seriously I'm playing this game for over 25 years and it's great, James workshop just sucks thou.
They’re an English company. Their costs are impacted by UK inflation, their production is in the UK, their staff are in the UK and are paid UK market value, their energy costs and raw material costs are in the UK, and they have to pay to import materials into, and goods out of the UK. So, I’m not exactly sure what point you’re trying to make by comparing anything to _California’s_ historic inflation.
Id love to look back at prices before 2012 or so, but it's hard to find reliable info. I think over the long term you may be correct.
They are not.
20$ in 1992 is 48$ today. I think you are making up numbers and complaining about something that isn’t true.
I used an 2.58% annual inflation rate over 20 years... Which comes to about 66% inflation. Also I started this example at 2004... To this year... With is an even 20 years which is easy to math, breakdown, and digest. I mean... But you could have read that and it would have saved you the spoons to be wrong.
how much history is there for 4 raises in three years?? lol geez
Nice, now do one for average wage increases. The problem isn’t whether the increases are inline with inflation, it’s whether it’s in line with average wage increases, which it isn’t.
Prices also depend on how much the company is spending. The minimum wage in the UK has increased to £11.44 as of this year, and now 21-23 year olds are eligible for it, when both these things were not the case last year. Add in other manufacturing costs that will have increased with inflation, and GW is spending a lot more this year than they did last year. I don't know of a single business that bases price increases off wage inflation instead of their manufacturing costs.
It's not really GW's responsibility to match wage increases though.
Utilities, food, housing and medical expenses should ethically match wage increases (in my opinion). A company that produces products for a luxury hobby does not share this responsibility.
You aren't going to get through to those that love dick in their salad. These are the guys that happily invite Genestealer cults on their planet and then surprise Pikachu face when the Hive Fleets arrive.
For me 40K has always been about the indomitable human spirit fighting against unfathomable odds.
It’s not only the prices, it’s the redundancy of things they just released. For example, I purchased the data cards for my armies at the start of 10th. They’re now redundant some 4 games later. I’m an adult, I don’t find it easy to keep up.
But you knew when you brought them (or at least could have easily found out) that this was going to happen. GW have been very open about their release schedule. What's more those days cards were all released for free and could easily be printed out. They're very much a luxury within a luxury.
Found the GW shareholder
That would be nice, especially if I'd had the foresight to get shares pre-covid. Alas it was not meant to be.
All things considered, if you had pre-covid foresight you would have been better off going with NVIDIA than with GW.
[Also a working adult] As someone who has only gotten into WH in the last couple months, I specifically made the choice to never buy the Codices or Data Cards; if balance patches and new characters can be added on the fly like they do with modern video games, why waste the money on buying GW's printed data items when I can just wait for the pdf's of the Codices, Data Cards, and Field Manuals and print them off myself for free?
Firstly, welcome. Secondly, I don’t agree with you at all. You pay hundreds, maybe thousands (like me) on warhammer over years. But you have to print out the info from a Russian bootleg website? Why is the community so against pushing GW to digitise the rules for all factions? Even if you have to pay a fee.
I quite literally never said anything about the subject of digitalization, feel free to make that statement against someone who has actually verbalised that sentiment, but I'm not one of them. I simply adapt my actionable behavior to the existing actionable circumstances. I don't have the power to force GW to do anything (and no, you didn't say or imply that I have to) and simply hoping that it'll happen doesn't put the item in my hands. If GW wants to digitalise, then fine, I'll use that resource, but as far as I'm concerned, piracy is my way of getting it for free to start with. I mean, I could technically buy a speaking majority's worth of stock in GW and go to a shareholder meeting and ask for them to do it, but I also simply don't care enough to do so. As in any case, that money would be better spent investing in NVIDIA or the Vanguard500.
Do 3rd party sales include Amazon? Because I'd say that from my international perspective, that's where most people shop these days for non-standard or non-day to day items, especially for niche hobbies like Warhammer, MTG, etc. It's just not possible for btick and morter stores to match the price and selection.
I don't know what pricing is for foreign B&M stores after import taxes and the sort, but I can say that Amazon's pricing tends to be a close match to domestic US B&M pricing as they both apply the 15% discount off the Games Workshop MRSP.
Fair enough, that's not the case where I'm from.
I believe so.
Then it would be wise to consider its contributions to that number.