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Comment by xhkkffbf | Hacker News Reader

It don't mean to diminish Warhammer's success, but part of the reason why it's one of the "biggest companies" is because many of the other big companies have slowly disappeared. Britain used to have a viable ship building industry that employed huge amounts of people. It's gone. It can't compete. And the same story is repeated again and again. Companies like Morris Garage and Triumph used to compete on the world stage. No longer.

Again, I'm proud of the Warhammer folks. It's just the fact that it's one of the "biggest" makes me sad.

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"We don't make anything" and "there are no large British companies" are memes that help people feel better about perceived decline. It's not really representative.

https://www.londonstockexchange.com/indices/ftse-100/constit... ; you can easily sort by market cap. GW are on page 4. Perhaps remarkably close to the two supermarket chains, Sainsburys and M&S, but those are much lower margin.

The top has "proper" global manufacturing companies: Astrazeneca, Unilever, Glaxo-SmithKline, BAE, Rolls-Royce. Along with the resource extraction companies, and Britain's major services export industry: banking.

(oddity: there are two Coca-cola companies on the FTSE, CCEP and CCH, which presumably exists for some weird tax reason)

Then you get into the question: what counts as a "British company"? There are plenty of overseas-owned UK success stories that are still significant UK employers and bringing money into the UK, such as ARM. Conversely, does a company which is listed on the FTSE but has most of its operations all over the world like RTZ count as "British"? Successful British startups quite often exit and vanish from discourse, while continuing to operate.

To my mind the important questions are "does this bring in valuable forex?" and "does this result in substantial UK employment?" Those don't necessarily have to be in the same company. The big employer list looks different: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1218430/largest-uk-based...

HSBC still up there (over 200k UK staff!), but there's a lot of food service (Compass), retail (Kingfisher you will know as B&Q) and so on.

I've not even got into the videogame industry (very good export industry, and seemingly responsible for the success of Warhammer). If you insist on making physical objects your perspective is going to be unnecessarily narrow.

Yes. One advantage GW has, is that it has never outsourced manufacturing. The miniatures are still made locally, so they haven't lost their expertise, nor are they threatened by a former contractor turned competitor.

> The miniatures are still made locally, so they haven't lost their expertise, nor are they threatened by a former contractor turned competitor

Deeply skeptical that that's actually much of a factor in their success.

Their success is down to a bunch of factors: near monopoly position in their niche, total vertical integration, obsession with design and marketing, and I think crucially, having the kids who grew up playing coming into a high-spending age bracket.

That said, I think there's something to the comment. The vertical integration is key, IMO. They own the IP, manufacture and distribution. There's a lot of power in that business model: short supply chains, all profit kept in house, a lot less faffing around with third parties.

They have kept skills in house. Two of their great original designers have retired at the company in the last few years. I don't think that's been the one critical factor in their success, but they're well-respected figures who knew the business and were very much a part of building that fanatical brand loyalty. One of my gaming group occasionally plays with the great John Blanche.

And man, keeping manufacturing in the UK. As a Brit, despite my many misgivings about how they operate as a company, I gotta love that. Again, I don't know if it's they key factor here, but they've been doing this for decades, they're good at it, and that's got to help the bottom line.

Keeping things in the UK would have been a difficult decision to maintain, particularly as overseas manufacturing was taking off, but it's clearly paid off in the long run.

> near monopoly position in their niche

how do you identify their niche? Miniature wargaming has a bunch of competitors[0], and so does genre publishing.

I suppose they have more physical shops and places to play[1], and it's easier to find people to play with, so that may be what you're think of.

I myself never played the TT game, but I love the world of 40k, and have spent a lot of time consuming related content. I'd pay for WarhammerTV, if they just let me!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_miniature_wargames

[1] I recall looking slack jawed at the awesome miniatures in a GW shop in.. Maidenhead, I think? 60k people. Around ~1993, I was a kid in a "english studying" holiday.

The near-monopoly comes from network effect. There are plenty of other games, I'm more of a painter and have models from a load of them, but I've only ever played GW games as that's what my friends play.

I can't think of anything that comes close on tabletop in terms of number of active players. I've just moved to a new town (pop ~5K), there's a club and that wasn't surprising. I wouldn't expect that with any other wargame.

makes sense, thanks for the explanation.

Yeah, it's much like D&D in TTRPGs and MtG in CCGs. Anyone you meet who is into those kinds of games will almost certainly play those specific games, and potentially exclusively them, and finding players for any of the many other games in the genre is much more difficult.

Aren't most 40k minis cast resin? The process is incredibly simple, I don't think outsourcing it to China would save a lot of money, just bringing those minis over the ocean would probably cost 10x as much as making them locally.

Injected plastic. Resin occasionally, but it's premium and GW have pretty much discontinued it.

There's definitely a quality component, which will be part design and part manufacture. GW minis are substantially better quality than other brands.

The interesting thing now is resin-based 3D printing! I've done a load and it's great fun. The process is not quite ready for mainstream adoption, resin is icky, but that's the exciting thing to watch out for in the space.

Somehow all this was done seemingly deliberately, as some MBA new hire project at a BigCo. Like how Google kills off half their useful services because nobody in the C suite knows what they're for.

Also, they (the Callahan government) had a plan to bring state of the art semiconductor manufacturing to the UK. Basically TSMC but in Wales. Thatcher killed it.

It was a massive shame the TV-toy project at Sinclair did not work out. It was a SOC/low cost computer based on the Inmos transputer (Called the T400, an M212 without dedicated link hardware) around 1983. That might have kept Inmos afloat- they were responsible for a lot of the RAM chip innovation, VGA standard, transputer etc. so the world would have looked very different. I do wonder what could have been with that chip paired with the Slipstream chip, oh well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer TV-toy

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/inmos-and-the-transputer TV-toy

https://www.transputer.net/tn/50/tn50.html M212 details

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/271372-flare-technology-an... 9.2mb/s bandwidth+sequencer_list

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