Reply To: Hobby Weekender 28/06/2019 The Industry and Social Media

[Anonymous 0xp 0]

1.  The only reason there is a debate over whether a Jaffa Cake is a biscuit or a cake is taxation.  If it is a cake, the UK government couldn’t tax it, if it was a biscuit they could.  Considering that they are mostly made up of the similar ingredients, the technical difference between what is classified as a cake and what is classified biscuit is that when stale, a biscuit is soft, but when stale a cake is hard.  To me it makes no difference (other than perhaps price) as to what it is classified as I gain the same utility from eating a Jaffa Cake or a Jaffa Biscuit no matter what it is called.  If someone ran a post like this on Reddit, I might join in it as well, as it is all the same to me.

2. “Is this a ploy to move away from one platform to their own for money and control?”  Once you added a negative adjective to the word ploy the question becomes loaded and has added connotations to the question and GW’s motives.

3.  If companies had the time and resources and thought it was beneficial to market like a massive video games company, wouldn’t they already be doing it?  Outside of GW and Fantasy Flight, which companies have the resources to do this?

If I ran a small company, I would look to see what the competition are doing and what the more successful and growing similar companies are doing and what I could with the resources available.   Wargames Atlantic and Bad Squiddo seem to have built up a good following in completely different ways in their use of social media and marketing.

To expand this further …Loads of companies are putting up previews and what is coming soon on their social media.  PSC, Perry, Warlord, Victrix, Bad Squiddo, Lucid Eye are all doing it for example, indeed Warlord are going down the road of putting videos well in advance of products launch – see SPQR for example, but I wouldn’t say they have done a great job in this case.  Warlord now employ over 80 people world wide so are obviously at the stage they can afford to invest more in their marketing and promotion.  The OTT newsfeed is full of what companies are previewing on social media and a lot of OTTs content is based of companies coming in or sending in product to be previewed or reviewed in advance of sale.    If you look at Wargames Atlantic they are putting everything out on social media – we know before the end of the year we are getting Persians and Irish in plastic, plus Halflings are on the way after that. The internet is also full of people constantly asking when products are being released, so I understand why small companies don’t announce things well in advance.