Games Workshop: Pricing Increase Coming In March
Games Workshop has announced a 6% increase on various products. Which products are going to be impacted and which ones aren’t?
Your hobbying is about to get more expensive. There’s a price increase coming in March and GW is giving everyone a heads up.
Most customers of Games Workshop are familiar with the price increases that happen semi-regularly. One nice thing is GW does actually warn people the price changes are coming ahead of time. But…yeah, no one likes a price increase. Now, is this a response to the increased cost of doing business getting passed on to the customer? Or is it a way to couch regular/planned price increase behind that infamous “inflation” scapegoat? It’s probably a “both/and” thing.
It is true that the cost of a lot of things has increased all over the world. There’s a myriad of factors contributing to that which we’re not going to get into. We touched on a few in an article about GW’s half-year financials back in January. But price increases from GW aren’t exactly new either. So while the former can be true that doesn’t make it mutually exclusive with the latter.
Games Workshop stock price, January 11, 2022 – January 10th, 2023, Google
At the end of the day they are a publicly traded company and their goal to stay around is to make money. They do that by making products that people want to pay them money for. Company’s really have 3 ways of making more money: cut expenses, raise prices, or increase sales. The problem is they only have direct control over 2 of those options as you can’t just arbitrarily decide to sell more if the customers aren’t buying. Economic theorizing aside, we at least know which products lines are getting hit and which ones are staying flat.
Games Workshop Price Increases By Product Line
What is changing:
Plastic miniatures
Forge World and Citadel resin miniatures
Standard and Artificer Citadel brushes
Spray paints
What is not changing:
Starter sets
Paint sets
Paint pots
Citadel Tools
Codexes, rulebooks and battletomes
Synthetic STC brushes
The big one there is the plastic miniatures. That’s the bread and butter and it’s getting a roughly 6% increase across the board. We won’t know the exact pricing changes until March the 6th. However you can bet that whatever plastic kits you are looking at purchasing today will be more expensive in March.
The exceptions to that are the starter sets which do contain plastic miniatures. It’s not entirely clear if that’s also including the Combat Patrol/Vanguard boxes (as those are replacements for the Start Collecting! boxes) or if it’s just the boxes under the “Start here” tab (like Extremis or Command Editions for AoS and 40k respectively).
It’s also nice to know that the cost of codexes, battletomes and paint pots aren’t going up either. Still…that price jump for all plastic kits is going to be noticed. You might want to plan your purchases accordingly.
