"Flames of War - Major Price Decrease on Books" Topic

Just announced by BF is a significant drop in the prices of their books. Link talks about how prices are now lower on soft and hard cover books.

This includes the upcoming Barbarossa book. This price drop makes picking up more than just the books I'll play more appealing.

link

This is surely a recognition that people are using Easy Army and not buying the books.

I use both Easy Army and the books,
I definitely need Barbarossa and will probably pick up a few compilations I am missing.

Wow, what great news! Looks like I will be picking some books up!

BF are absorbing easy army and will replace it in near future. Much speculation on not only the format but on price and whether ea users would have their ea access shifted to the replacement e system. No real details other than something is coming and ea wont be around long term.

What happens to EA has me worried. I have spent a fair chunk of change on it over the years and hope BF will honer those of us who have.

Does Easy Army cost money? I've been using for KoW recently and It seems to be free for that game.

You are correct that non-Flames of War games supported by EA are free.

It costs money for the Flames of War lists that come from published books. For FoW stuff that's available for free like PDF lists and one published book, the Forces of War that's included with the hard cover rulebook, it's free.

Since KoW and the other stuff he does (Bolt Action?) involve other companies, not sure what will happen with them. So far Greg hasn't charged for them, though.

I don't know if this was due to EA. While there would have been a move towards that for long established players, newbs are unlikely to discover FoW via that app. No company sacrifices margin as a long term strategy, they very likely have found a cheaper printer and have fiddled with the sales price, but they won't have reduced their margin.

Their margin will probably be the same at the new lower price but the income per book will decline in line with the new lower price.

It would be almost impossible for BF to make as much money in total at the new lower price simply from a cut in printing costs.

For that to be the case they would need to be paying $5 USD per soft back less than they did before to get them printed. If that is the case then their old printer must have seen them coming, there is no way that printing a book like Barbarossa should cost $5 USD to start with.

Or they could be taking a loss to sell more figures.
It has been said here that BF already barely breaks even on the books. My North Africa book was so cheaply made it fell off my desk and all the inner pages fell loose. This is an "expensive" hardback.

If their strategy is to take a loss on the books and make up for it with model sales, they struck out with me. I buy the books and buy cheaper models elsewhere.

Having been taken advantage of by Games Workshop for 20 years, I have no problem with their current book prices as long as they remain good resources & they don't keep pumping out new editions to render them obsolete. I also have no problem paying for EA. It's a great tool and Greg does a great job with it.

You won't be paying for EasyArmy anymore. It's basically frozen in place until the plug gets fully pulled in 2015.

"Forces if War" is the future EasyArmy for FoW. What you paid already for in EasyArmy will not carry over to "Forces" according some post by JP on the BF forum he made.

Speculation is that Forces will cost more than EA did. So in addition to rebuying access to list you already paid for with EasyArmy, expect to pay even more when you rebuy access to those same list under Forces.

I guess it's great that BF is lowing book cost. But it sure seems like they've already figured out where they'll make it back up.

VB

"Oh we have no plans to kill easy army."