"GW Made to Order" Topic

This from a Facebook post.

Made To Order Update! First batch available October 15th.
Sometimes products we haven't made for a while become available for a limited time. These products can be found on the Made to Order section of the webstore. They will always be available for at least 48hrs, but the more you order the longer we'll keep them on sale! As we won't be making them until we receive the orders these can take up to 28 to despatch!
You'll get the usual email to let you know they're on they way.

I don't play 40k anymore, but I do have some IG forces I wouldn't mind rounding out.

Xin

Do they really need to resort to high-pressure sales tactics such as you see on late-night infomercials?

Is this s UK thing? Didn't see it on GW US.

This is awesome.

GW haters: "They suck. They took all the old models that I love and made them out of production."

GW: We are putting all the old models back in production on a rotating basis.

GW haters: you suck for making this a limited time thing.

"Do they really need to resort to high-pressure sales tactics such as you see on late-night infomercials?"

This isn't a high pressure sales technique. This is "if you want them, get them because we can't afford to keep a million codes in production at the same time."

I wish that they would do this for the warmaster range as there's a few holes I'd like to fill without paying ridiculous eBay price's

Well, I love Blood Bowl, and I have over 2,000(yes. 2,000+) Blood Bowl/Fantasy Football figures.

I am excited that GW are set to release the game again. But I was hopeing they would release some BB figures…

These will make someone happy.

I agree with Pictors. Glad they are doing this, and I hope they make it a regular thing, and extend it to Warmaster!!

I think they suck because that list doesn't have what I want.

"a million codes in production at the same time"

I'm willing to be proved wrong here, but I would say that GW has in fact about *half* the miniatures in production that they used to have in the days of the big Citadel catalogue. That's not counting Forge World, and considering how much of their catalogue vanished overnight when Epic was eliminated. . .

It would probably depend on how you count it.

If you look at the catalogue you have separate entries for:

Marines blister
Marine boxed set
Marine with plasma gun
Marine with melta gun
Marine with flamer
Marine with heavy bolter
Marine with lascannon
Marine with missile launcher
Marine sergeant x 2 or 3
Marine with plasma cannon
Marine devastators box
Assault marine
Assault marine sgt.
Assault marine boxed set
and eventually Marine with Multi melta

And so on plus variants for each with Space Wolves and some for Dark Angels and Blood Angels.

Now you have
Space Marines boxed set
Assault Marines boxed set
Devastators boxed set

plus variants for blood angels, space wolves and dark angels.

So you have eliminated a lot of SKUs without getting rid of any actual model types. You can build all of the above with those three boxed sets.

The same was done with most races.

They have eliminated a lot of specialist games stuff to refocus on 40K and AoS.

But they have added a number of new factions and greatly expanded the rest.

Instead of just Grey Knight Terminators in packs of two you now have a whole Grey Knight army.

Every army has flyers and many have large tanks or robots.

So they may have a lot fewer codes, but the core games have a lot more options than they used to.

I would imagine this is a huge plus for independent retailers. It means that you can carry the whole range of things without having to guess ratios for what people want.

I remember wanting to buy a unit of something or other and not buying anything because they only had a blister pack or two of what I wanted and I needed 5 or them having the right number of figures but not the right combination.

Now I just buy a box. Easy-peasy.

So you are probably right. They probably do have about half the SKUs that they used to have but the codes they have provide retailers with more variety in a single purchase and allow the customer to get what they want in one place.

Having it all that way now, bringing back ALL of the old codes at once would probably be pretty unmanageable. If they are going to bring them back in lead the casting and storage of the molds, figures and so forth might not be something they have the space for. You might bring so many old molds from the storage facility at a time, cast them up until the demand runs out and then take them back and bring the next lot out.

Makes sense to me.

But steel injection molds don't rot and fall apart; they will be just as viable three days from now as they are today. There is no purpose at all to them placing a 48-hour limit on orders other than to drum up a fanboy feeding frenzy. I find that to be a distasteful sales tactic. Sort of like the commercials where they say that, if you order in the next 10 minutes, you get a free X to go with the Y that you ordered… and then that commercial is replayed eight or ten times a day. That 10-minute thing is obviously intended only to prey on the feeble-minded or people with poor impulse control.

I want Mordian troopers. I have far too many special/heavy weapon troops and officers. I just want some regular old footsloggers.

"But steel injection molds don't rot and fall apart; they will be just as viable three days from now as they are today. There is no purpose at all to them placing a 48-hour limit on orders other than to drum up a fanboy feeding frenzy. "

I don't think they are casting things from steel injection molds. I think they are casting them from rubber molds in metal.

There is a very good purpose for them to put stuff up for 48 hours. That is that they might only have the capability of doing so many molds at a time and a lot of people might want a lot of different things.

So if there is demand they will keep casting until the demand runs out, then they will get to the next thing. When demand runs out on that then they do the next thing.

It is only 48 hours as long as no one is ordering it.

You can find it distasteful all you want but it really is nothing like the analogy you suggest.

"There is a very good purpose for them to put stuff up for 48 hours. That is that they might only have the capability of doing so many molds at a time and a lot of people might want a lot of different things."

It begs the question, why do this in the first place?
48 hours limit doesn't mean everyone and their grandmother can't order 13 each and that would translate to many more shop time.
Seems rather half assed.

If you consider most wanted miniatures and stuff doing a limited run for Warmaster, Necromunda, Mordhiem, Empire would definitely draw a lot of attention.
Then again the demographic for those are smaller.

I think it's more a case of testing the waters to see demand for these armies before committing resource to designing new miniatures.

"It begs the question, why do this in the first place?"

Because you can make money doing it.

"48 hours limit doesn't mean everyone and their grandmother can't order 13 each and that would translate to many more shop time."

Yes, as long as this is still selling and they are making money off of it they keep producing it. When demand drops off they switch to the next thing.

It seems like a good idea to me.

I'm confused.

If they're made-to-order, why are so many items showing "out of stock" on the website?

Couldn't GW just….er…… make them to order?