Reply To: Is GW's constant "limited release" marketing starting to bite back?

[zeker1966 1633xp 2]

So it makes business sense that these box sets are limited runs. As someone above points out you don’t want to end up with too much product because it ties up money and costs money because you need to warehouse it. They could do another print run but they have limited “bandwidth” in their production line as they have other products to produce. As they said all the contents of the boxset will be made available but you’ll have to wait until 2020.

I know a lot of people want them to produce a single book per game so that you don’t need to continuously purchase books and have all the rules. From the companies point of view there are two things going on here. If they did that it would (1) lock in the models that they produce (and they would all have to be designed prior to the release), and (2) it would reduce the amount of publicity they get for the releases. The incremental releases makes total sense from a company point of view and honestly more companies should do it. We pay way more attention to products and games on release so the best way to have your product at the front of mind is to have lots of releases. GW does this by have about one release per game per month (perhaps 2 months). This means that the game is always getting attention. There are lots and lots of games that have a release, get a bit of airtime, and just disappear into the background. We don’t hear about them until a 2nd edition is released. Kickstarters are even worse because they produce the entire product at once, release it and often that is it. Slightly larger companies like Mantic might be able to do a couple kickstarters for the same game but they would probably be served better if they did releases similar to GW. Having said that though I think GW has the advantage that they are giants by comparison and can afford to hold back and the incremental releases basically are realized as a near constant funding source. It isn’t clear to me that Mantic or Warlord would be as successful at it. Though Warlord does play that game, at least with models, to some extent.