midian wrote:
Please, explain me the logic in releasing a limited box edition in 10mm to "attack" a marginal market (vs. 28mm) as is the 6mm market.
GW is not worried about Dropzone commander or Distopian wars. Those games are not selling anything in GW terms of business.Their only competition in sales is PP WarmaHordes. No need to react.
OK this is very long, but you DID ask for it.
Ultimately, this isn't a story about revenue, it's about profit-- in this case through margins. How does a company maintain high margins? Competitive forces tend to erode them over time. Resisting this requires some kind of sustainable competitive advantage-- what Warren Buffet calls "building a moat around your business". Modern business scholars have identified several sources of sustainable competitive advantage, but GW runs their business using the 80's era business-school playbook. For that we go to Michael Porter. Without going into detail, the idea is to structure the industry such that there are significant barriers to entry for a potential rival. Even the threat of a possible entrant can drive down prices, so industry structure is all-important for this school of thought.
GW builds these barriers using four basic building blocks. The first is their background-- it's distinctive enough that they can get IP protection but generic enough that a big setting can let them cover all the popular tropes. It also lets them threaten legal action if someone's generic power armor troops look too much (or can be argued look too much) like Space Marines (tm). The second are their retail stores: a customer who never sees other brands or games won't be tempted to buy them-- plus they crowd out the independent game stores, which any new game company would have to launch from. The third are the events: game store events and grand tournaments, where third party minis and games are a no-no. Finally, there's the rule set. If all your friends play 40k at GW stores, then even if you hear about some other game and buy the minis, you're unlikely to find another player to game with. Even if you do, GW games are filled with tricky and ever-changing loopholes. A player who's climbed the learning curve of 40k and only plays that loses their advantage if they're trying to learn BattleTech, Stargrunt, or Uncharted Seas.
A hypothetical competitor has two possible choices if it wants to muscle in on GW. The first is to challenge them in their central market: 28mm. GW already dominates 28mm. Any counter-moves they make in or near that scale, they'll do using one of their flagship products. As we can see, it's a forum where they have all the muscle, so it's not a likely area of attack.
So the much more likely line of attack is in a peripheral market. That is, another scale or another game concept. In that situation, GW doesn't need to dominate every conceivable game. Instead, they can use the logic of how new products emerge. New products, like fashions, fads, and political and religious movements, expand according to what sociologists call a "contagion model". They grow exponentially. So GW tries to snuff out emerging game fads by releasing a "vaccine" that dampens the enthusiasm among their core player base. "Ahh, uncharted seas? Yeah, pretty cool, but I just bought Dreadfleet so let's play that at the GW store." The game doesn't need to be out for long, because by the time it's off the shelves, the growth rate of the potential rival has already peaked.
I'd say there is a better chance of that happening (Amanda do you hear me ?!), then Epic 2014 ... 
