Ah but they recognise 40k is about saturation selling for a fairly poor game. Far better in their eyes to cultivate a large amount of churn and burn business with youngsters than cultivate long term sources of relatively low income per year from each player.

Of course I dissagree with the premise that it would harm the core business. This is in part baed on an experiment in the US on promoting BFG - it sold well, but 40k sales dropped by almost the same amount resulting in less profit overall. I think if it was dissasociated like the fantasy flight games licence from the core operation (Horus Heresy for example, despite the high price tag, can't be played in GW shops and is not aimed at their core young gamer market) they would simply be getting fixed royalties and a percentage of sales with no outlay, no risk to their various IP and little effort. Indeed I'm surprised shareholders haven't demanded every penny be wrung out through activities like this.

I might be wrong, but I think a large part of their revenue is people starting the game, buying minis crazily for a few years, and then stopping and selling the lot on ebay. Simply new people (specially as their audience got younger over the years) start the same cycle again. Long time customers ("veterans") are important as a prestige/reputation factor but they don't represent that much of their income I guess.

And anyway, I'm not as sure as you are that there is such a point. I've bought my first 6mm GW miniature in 1990 ? 1991 ? And I'm still cranking money in their stuff.

Try a few months.

GW's research indicates that the majority of their customers at any one time have been playing the game for less than 1 year.

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Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

This short ? I Thought I heard something similar some time ago, but it still amaze me.

When TRC talks about "churn and burn", he ain't kidding.

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Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

'Veterans' are not really key to GW's success.

Generally they hang around the stores, talk a lot, beat the 'core customer' when the do play games and then moan about how much cheaper, better it all was x years ago. I can understand why GW don't really want such 'customers' interacting with their core market. Now if you can charge such players a fortune to turn up to WHW and play in a competition then its another story!