Games Workshop: Demographic Recapture, Narrative Moat, and Rule-Driven Monetization
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By 70% returners, you mean people who have done Warhammer for a number of years?
That's specifically people who visited the café before. Our staff would know them by name and we'd say hi to them. We're trying to shift to new players because the simple back-of-the-envelope math on this is: if you look at Games Workshop's revenue and then you look at the number of competitive players, competitive players—which is to say players who will play frequently and also go to tournaments—can't be more than 20% to 30% of their revenue. There's a huge chunk of people who are buying these models and playing the games who are an untapped market. We've shifted our focus a little bit to target these players. We're trying to increase that percentage. Right now it is 70% or so returning players.
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So essentially, when my army gets very bad, I'm not going to consider switching to another tabletop or another hobby, or just quitting?
No, definitely not. Because it's such a monopoly, in any game store, 95% to 99% of games—quite literally—will be Games Workshop IPs.
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If it is only millennials and only returners, there is going to be a headwind at some point long-term, because they did not try to attract new younger people.
If you go to Games Workshop's own stores and Warhammer World, which is that huge venue I mentioned before, a huge number of people are parents and kids. It is something that they are still targeting, but their main systems are not quite there. I suspect, as you say, within five to 10 years, they may see that they need to bring in another young cohort, because that previously worked so well for them. The returning cohort from those who were children in the 1990s and 2000s is fueling huge growth for them. They may have to refocus their main systems. But those magazines are explicitly around bringing kids in. They have very easy-to-understand guides for building models and painting.
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