New Warhammer shop in London

On  the way out to a drunken lunch with my ex-personal assistant today I nipped into the Games Workshop store in Oxford Street to pick up some paints.  French chap in there told me that, having moved down from the first floor in the Plaza Shopping centre to the ground floor, they would be moving, in April, to a new shop in Tottenham Court Road.  This will be their number one shop in the UK and will be "impressive".  It will be branded as a Warhammer shop.

I moaned about the rubbish support for The Hobbit and he said that the filmmakers caused problems for GW by changing the look of the troops at the last minute.  So their Thranduil was mounted on a horse, as the original artwork suggested, but then they had him on a stag for the film which was a last minute change which took them by surprise.  I asked if there would be any plastic forces for the Battle of Five Armies and he replied "possibly" but he was French and, therefore, unreliable by definition.

Games Workshop stores rebranding and Perry News

Lots of people seem to have noticed the re-branding of a number of Games Workshop shops to just "Warhammer".  Apparently, just three shops have been done so far: Chiswick, Bath and Edinburgh.  The Legatus sent his Scottish correspondent out yesterday to get a picture of the Edinburgh one (well, it is only five minutes from her flat).  Now, there seem to be a number of comments about this move, from, "a name change won't make any difference to them going down the drain" to "everyone calls it the Warhammer shop anyway so its sensible to reflect that".  Re-branding is big business and you can bet that GW would have had to hire a very expensive consultant to do this.  

 Lloyd's logo by Alan Fletcher (1984)

I used to work at Lloyd's of London and got involved in a re-branding process there in the nineties, due, largely, to my artistic background.  We had a firm that, after many months, suggested changing the name from Lloyd's of London to Lloyd's. Probably because the previous logo (above) had looked like we were called (Lloyd's Lloyd's of London - it was much derided when it came out) They came up with all sorts of fanciful logos involving (largely inappropriate - as they well knew) nautical elements but I suspect that all along that was just to guide us to their preferred solution: A new font for Lloyd's and less writing (less is more in the branding world).  This process cost just over £1 million and that was without the cost of changing all the stationary etc.  Having been involved once, I got dragged in to the same process at a subsequent company.  The discussions about which colours reflected which core values and such like were truly bizarre!   The new Warhammer store design looks like it should be on an interior design shop rather than one selling toy soldiers and isn't hip and edgy like the new 40,000 graphics so, maybe, on second thoughts they did do it themselves.  It will be interesting to see how this develops.

So, from a purely artistic point of view the new shop front is very elegant (too elegant for fourteen year olds?).  It's not part of a country-wide roll-out but just a trial.  The real issue seems to be the number of people who go into the shops looking for Playstation games and the like (I've heard this happen on a number of occasions) so from this point of view it's sensible.  The only slight negative I can see is that there is an increasing wave of anti-military (or, more properly, anti-war) feeling amongst some parts of the population and Warhammer sounds more aggressively martial than Games Workshop.

Anyway, my daughter said it was packed yesterday; the busiest she had ever seen it and she had to wait ages to take these pictures as, there were so many people at the window and taking pictures of their splendid Goblin Town diorama.  Inside she said all the branding and the bags remained the same (she was very brave, as a nineteen year old girl, stepping over the threshold!).  Now the real question is, is whether a move like this, iceberg like, may just be indicative of other radical thinking going on at Games Workshop now Tom Kirby is off.  Or not.  

More interesting to me is that the Perry brothers have announced (via a comment from Alan Perry on TMP) that they will be doing a full range of Peninsula War figures.  I wish they'd stop messing about with "what if" wars in Canada and lovely but of very limited use Retreat from Moscow figures and get on with them  (but they are artists.of course). However, at the rate I paint it won't matter anyway!   

I was hoping to get on with my Romans today but now my sister has announced that she is coming over to tea.  Better go cake shopping!

Some lost opportunities and a dancing daughter...

Amidst all the Tour de France frenzy I did actually get an hour's painting on my Afghans done yesterday.  I don't usually paint as many as eighteen figures at a time but they are going slowly but surely.  There is some urgency as I have ordered all the new British and Sikh figures too!  I missed Paint Table Saturday last weekend ,due to stuff we had to do on the extension, so this picture is what I might have posted.  The Old Bat is painting the walls but I get called in to do all the fiddly bits, high bits and edges.  

The Tour is messing up sorting out some of my boxes of figures, which I had planned to do, as I have stuck my stage map over some of them.  So I can't get at the right box to put my newly painted Darkest Africa figures away.  At least I am not sad enough to have filled in all the results.  When I was younger I was a great wall-chart sort of fellow, so anything which had bits you could fill in yourself was always a must for me!

Actor John Barrowman and Charlotte yesterday evening

I had to finish painting early yesterday evening as my daughter Charlotte was dancing at the opening of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.  Charlotte was very excited to meet John Barrowman, as she is a big Dr Who fan!

A couple of lost opportunities on the wargames front this week.  Games Workshop have launched some 40K scenery tile equivalents of their Warhammer battleboards.  For someone like me, who has no craft or DIY skills (or tools!)  whatsoever, I was really excited about wargames scenery in a box which you just clipped together but the reality was that GW blew it by including lots of skull pits and other nonsense.  They could have produced something with real crossover appeal for historical wargamers (or even Lord of the Rings players) but didn't.  The promised extra terrain boards for things like rivers never appeared, either. 

This time they have produced an urban board for 40K but this has been bodged too.  Firstly, there are only two individual tile designs in the set of six (unlike six individual ones in the earlier set) but even worse each has a very distinctive element (a Warhammer logo and some sort of fallen stained glass window/church floor thing) which means that both will make it obvious that there are only two boards repeated.  Why not make something more anonymous looking that could be used for other games too (I know, I know, there are no other games).  I have quite a lot of 40K stuff which I might have considered painting up and using on a ready made landscape like this, but not when it looks so silly.  It's like producing a generic urban street board for WW2 and placing a huge swastika and eagle on the surface.  It doesn't add anything to the product but it does diminish it. 

The next disappointing product was Osprey's new Battle Plan American Civil War computer game.  Osprey is all about excellent visuals but this looks like something produced 20 years ago.  I first played Shogun: Total War at a friend's house fifteen years ago and liked it because it looked like a wargame with lots of little figures running about (alright, they don't really run about in an actual wargame, unless you have had too much absinthe) .  This is a step back from that and even though I can see that producing moving figures would be expensive  (this looks like a very low budget production) but the blocks representing troops aren't even 3D and the maps are very dull.  Can't see them shifting many of these.  If you can't do it properly don't do it at all!

Games Workshop prices and The Hobbit

Scott had an excellent rant yesterday about the prices of Games Workshop's new figures from The Hobbit.  The premium they are paying in New Zealand (I reckon £48 a box instead of £25 in the UK) is frightening.  Middle Earth citizens should get a discount it seems to me!

I was in Games Workshop's Oxford Street store yesterday buying some Erebor Dwarves, which is going to be my new Hobbit force (having already painted some Grim Hammers).  I usually try to get in and out without engaging with the staff, if possible, but it was a slow afternoon (not surprisingly given the prices) and I was pounced upon before I had got six feet inside.  "What's your name?" asks the troll.  "Why do you need to know?" I reply, in the increasing manner of British people who do not like any unnecessary information about themselves being known by Evil Organisations such as the government, Yahoo or Games Workshop.   "I like to know the name of our regular custormers," says the Troll.   Now why does this annoy me?  After all when I go into the Tapas Bar in Leadenhall market or Latium restaurant (coincidentally, just  up the road from GW's Oxford Street store) I like being greeted by name as a regular customer.  The answer, I think, is because the interest is entirely fake and you know the staff have been trained to be as ingratiating as possible.  What they may believe to be a welcoming environment actually creates a creepy and, frankly, un-British feel in the shops.

Anyway, while they disappeared downstairs to get the dwarves, as they weren't on the shelves, I had time to rant on about the lack of Hobbit articles in White Dwarf (again).  "But we do this month," says troll proffering the new White Dwarf.  No, you have twenty pages of advertisements for new products.  There is no gaming content.  Still I bought it for the painting guides (I really am going to have to get those Mirkwood Rangers).  Then I got the Desolation of Smaug supplement and a new razor saw and left having spent £59 when I had intended to spend £20 and still only had ten miniatures!  

One interesting development that I hadn't really taken in. with the new releases. is that several of the new individual figures, such as Legolas Greenleaf, are plastic kits.  Not Finecast, just plastic.  Does this mean that they have realised Finecast has its limitations? The price, of course, at £15, was at Finecast level.

Now, nothing is going to happen as regards GW prices as it is a publicly listed company.  The Legatus was in the senior management team of a large plc a few years ago and it was a complete eyeopener to attend board meetings.  It became clear that most of the board members had no idea what the company was really about.  All they were interested in was driving up share value.  Everything was about "keeping the City happy".  Announcing that year on year prices are going up will make the City very happy.  Cutting prices will not.  But would cutting prices mean more sales?  That's a risk and British plcs do not take risks, as I know from my current job.  French, German, Spanish, American and Dutch firms take risks,  British ones don't.  It's become an issue within government and is a cause of great frustration to ministers trying to promote UK companies abroad.  The usual comment is something like: Senior director "Yes, I can see the opportunities for our firm here but the board won't go for it.  Too risky."  So don't expect lower prices, ever!

As long as the product is good I'll keep buying GW's Tolkein figures.  I'm not interested in substitutes because I want my figures to look like those in the films.  I am concerned, though, that The Hobbit figures have been poor sellers and that we may not get figures for the Battle of Five Armies which is all I really wanted from the range all along.

Games Workshop Hobbit figures - they cost WHAT?

Hunter Orcs

Here I am in rather hazy Dubai unable to paint at the weekend again so time, instead, to look at the new Games Workshop figures for The Hobbit.

I had been looking forward to the announcement about these since I found out at the Perry stand at Salute this year that the twins were busy working on them..  I found GW's rather pointless teaser trailers a bit annoying and five days ago for them to say that they may or may not be releasing figures at all was frankly ludicrous.  TMP readers seemed generally down on the quality of them, pictures having been leaked on a Spanish wargames site, saying that they were either too Warhammer-like, Finecast or too expensive.

Hunter Orcs on fell wargs

Well, I have looked at the pictures of them and so far I think they look good.  I can't imagine that New Line films would authorise miniatures that don't look exactly like the originals in the film, which is why the original Lord of the Rings figures are so much more anatomically correct than other GW ranges.

As to Finecast, I did buy a set (haven't painted them yet) and I thought they were excellent so I am not an automatic hater.

What did shock me was the price, however.  Now we have got used to seeing fantasy character figures going for around £4-£6 each, not a problem as you only need one, but £45 for four foot figures?  This is what GW are charging for the White Council set.  The figures are truly lovely and Gandalf looks exactly like Ian McKellen but £11.25 for one figure? For £45 I could get two bottles of Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc, or a ticket to see the Crazy Horse girls on the South Bank, or five Osprey's or eighty Perry plastic Prussians...

Here we have Finbul the Hunter on foot and mounted on a warg.  £25 for this set!  Now the ordinary troops are less than this but still expensive for plastics - £20 for 12 Hunter Orcs, for example.  Now, I am sure that I will end up getting most of these figures, despite the price, but will ration my purchasing so that I will paint as I go.  I enjoy painting GW's Tolkein figures but they are so detailed they take ages, so slowing my purchases will not be a problem.  If I was a fourteen year old with limited pocket money, however...

There is, as ever, an introductory boxed set, Escape from Goblin Town which includes a shortened version of the rule book (for Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring you got the complete rule book with the introductory set), and 56 figures plus a scenic item for £75.  This seems better value and to ensure up-front sales they are making it a limited edition and offering a one-off Radagast the Brown figure with it.  I can't help thinking that, like the plastic Fellowship in the Mines of Moria set, the plastic character figures (Gandalf, Bilbo and the dwarves) will not be as good as the eventual Finecast figures they release.  At least £100 for the Finecast set I suspect.

The standard rule book is, the now typical £50, for a 288 page book, which seems like a positive bargain compred with the White Council set.  I really wonder whether GW might have actually priced themselves out of big sales (and I'm sure these releases loom large in their corporate business plan for 2012/2013) with these prices.  Certainly I can't see the casual, non-wargaming, buyer picking these up as they did with the Fellowship of the Ring set (helped by their availability in a UK high street bookshop).

I don't mind paying for a quality product.  I just picked up the massive Taschen book The James Bond Archives for £70 (now £99, heh, heh) from Amazon.  It's so big you literally could attach four legs to it and turn it into a coffee table.  But it's a wonderful book and I am happy to pay that price for it.  But £45 for four 28 mm figures?  It's like the £5 they want for a small tube of Pringles in the Grand Hyatt Dubai where I am typing this.  "You're having a laugh!", as my son would say.

Now I really want these figures but what worries me is that if they don't sell (and launching figures costing this much in the middle of a recession is a big risk for GW) then they won't produce more for the other two films and where would my 28mm Battle of Five Armies be then?