Forgeworld Stripping AoS models

[Overread]

Whilst the title might be a little overblown in that there's no confirmation of a widespread removal, FW has removed several kits from sale over the past weeks from the AoS line and, being GW, its impossible to get any firm information on any future potential removals. So I'm highlighting this since if you DO want FW kits chances are you might want to grab them now.

Note that the stock is hard to follow because it appears they are using regional stocking levels on the site. So some removed kits in the USA are still on sale in the UK and other regions and vis versa

Also if you are interested in kits which have been removed use the "contact us" email for FW to air your concern about the removal of kits. Remember the person answering emails is not likely anyone involved with the choice to remove them, so remain polite.

forgeworld@gwplc.com

UPDATE
LAST CHANCE to buy model list:

Skinwolves
Wolfrats
Clawlord on Brood Horror
Myrewurm
Magma Dragon
Carmine Dragon
Bile Troggoth

Models currently removed from sale:
Sayl the Faithless and Nightmaw
Basilisk
Warpfire Dragon
Orc Command Set
Kazyk the Befouled
Tamurkhan the Maggot Lord

[Ashendant]

I'll have to keep checking these lists to see if I have most images from these backed up on the wiki and the webpages saved on the internet wayback machine so they can later be used as sources.

[Vomikron]

This likely has to do with making room for the Old World and cleaning house of any minis that will not be supported or just have low sales.

[Golgfag]

1 hour ago, Vomikron said:

This likely has to do with making room for the Old World and cleaning house of any minis that will not be supported or just have low sales.

Seems strange if that is the case, as are they not all models that were released for WFB and just transitioned over to AoS?

[Vomikron]

32 minutes ago, Golgfag said:

Seems strange if that is the case, as are they not all models that were released for WFB and just transitioned over to AoS?

That’s true. But I’m sure that aging molds and low sales make it less likely to continue supporting them especially with some unspecified form of support coming for a new edition that may be in a different scale or different visual direction.

[Overread]

It's partly GW/FW's fault about the low sales as well. It doesn't help that GW doesn't market the FW stuff for AoS all that well compared to the GE central lines. The other issue is some of the odd non-udpates to the rules for some models. 

So some of the low sales are their own issues and that's before we get to recasters and the issue over the overseas prices (which went up a lot when GW changed how they shipped out FW models - which was a total disaster in marketing terms) 

[Golgfag]

Prices have always been the biggest negative for me and have stopped me purchasing more from FW, not because I cannot afford them but because so many other companies seem to be able to produce better resin casts for cheaper prices, had too many issues with past FW purchases, I expect a higher quality product for that price.

[novakai]

their is an off chance that some models may return in the future like how they rerelease the Exalted Verminlord (now the Warpgnaw) and the Idol of Gork but I am guess that reserved for their better selling items

[Fairbanks]

I hate Forge World.

Its like watching a football team with an All star Defense but a terrible Offense (sports references over everyone’s heads)

I’d rather just see HH and The Old World stuff in plastic under GW’s umbrella at GW prices and quality. 

[stratigo]

Forge world has been a mess for years. Longer than just the tragic loss of alan bligh. Bligh papered over the fact that the dudes in charge of forgeworld really were not good at business and cared mostly about making ww2 tanks in 40k. 

 

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Andy Hoare has been given the reigns of forgeworld as a whole (From the model range to the specialist games to the horus heresy), so I suspect forgeworld will be going through a reorganizing period, and this will include dropping a number of older kits and prepping for a push of Horus Heresy to get that back on track. But also doing the ground work for the Old World.

[RuneBrush]

On 12/8/2019 at 4:52 PM, stratigo said:

Forge world has been a mess for years. Longer than just the tragic loss of alan bligh. Bligh papered over the fact that the dudes in charge of forgeworld really were not good at business and cared mostly about making ww2 tanks in 40k. 

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Andy Hoare has been given the reigns of forgeworld as a whole (From the model range to the specialist games to the horus heresy), so I suspect forgeworld will be going through a reorganizing period, and this will include dropping a number of older kits and prepping for a push of Horus Heresy to get that back on track. But also doing the ground work for the Old World.

Andy hasn't been given the reigns of Forge World.  Tony is still in charge, but responsibility of the various game sub-divisions now falls under Andy's remit.  Age of Darkness (the HH ruleset/models) has struggled since Alan passed away because he was a venerable behemoth capable of doing the work of ten people.  They are however now finding their feet and I believe I heard that additional resource is being put their way once the building expansion has been completed (sometime next year).  Reorganisation and streamlining started back at the beginning of the year.

On the subject of product lines being withdrawn, this is entirely down to sales and the decision comes from business people outside of the various design teams that we see on a day to day basis.  In short a product needs to make a certain level of sales in order to justify it having space in GW's warehouse.  This is because every location in a warehouse has a baseline cost - so heating, insurance and business rates (to name but a few).  This means that the dozen or so people who buy a Warpfire Dragon aren't going to generate enough income to keep that model there long term.  This is pretty common business practice.  However one positive is that GW do keep hold of model masters, so having models brought back is entirely feasible.

[Kaleb Daark]

34 minutes ago, RuneBrush said:

...

On the subject of product lines being withdrawn, this is entirely down to sales and the decision comes from business people outside of the various design teams that we see on a day to day basis.  In short a product needs to make a certain level of sales in order to justify it having space in GW's warehouse.  This is because every location in a warehouse has a baseline cost - so heating, insurance and business rates (to name but a few).  This means that the dozen or so people who buy a Warpfire Dragon aren't going to generate enough income to keep that model there long term.  This is pretty common business practice.  However one positive is that GW do keep hold of model masters, so having models brought back is entirely feasible.

It's a quid pro quo in that respect.

Lets take Fimir for example.  Great models, and a userbase keen to exploit.

However you release a warscroll saying that there needs to be a witch to lead them, but the witch model never arrives.

The grand alliance destruction army book doesn't have any of the forgeworld models in it, nor do any of the battletomes have any mention of the forgeworld models as allies etc.

You're back to a situation where a guy is surfing a spreadsheet saying "that stuff isn't selling ... bin it" but for stuff to sell, people need to know about it and there has to be a space for it and a need/want.

We're back to Brets, where neglect and lack of attention and imagination on GW writers part meant that the user base starts to ignore them and they get phased out due to lack of sales. 

How many empire landships would have been sold back in the day had WHFB and GW allowed them into the game and put them in the empire armybooks instead of saying that you couldn't take a model from FW to a throne of skulls?

The Mammoth would have sold again in droves had you been able to take it in your warriors army - who didn't want a 24 wound hero mount / troop carrier / warshrine bearer?

But no.  Once again, we have that situation of GW not acknowledging their own product and in so doing turning potential revenue away.

The Rowntree's dream statement  of people buying stuff for the sake of its a nice model in the context of keeping a company afloat is no longer true, it's the gamers that now provide the revenue not the collector of individual pieces because they're a nice thing to paint. 

So in the case of the fimir, it's hardly the fault of a player with a wad of cash in his pocket burning a hole  wanting that fimir unit, but by its own warscroll is saying that it can't be run in context because a pivotal character is missing. (broadly speaking).  At least roll the initial models out with a hero or command group or something so that at the very least the warscroll ties up with it.

The new blood walking into the game needs to know they're there, and seeing a model he can't buy in store but looks amazing in his battletome will make him want to explore further.

Monstrous arcanum was another great missed opportunity, and with the forbidden power and endless spells you could bring back the concept of the scrolls of binding and the allied monster table from the original Arcanum, which was truly done right.  Every fireslayer and chaos dwarf player would have a magma dragon in their army.

What marauder themed Slaves army doesn't want the skin wolves to have the slaves keyword in their scroll?

FW has a limited resource pool and this is where the rules and lore writers in the main mothership can help,  THEY can bring the profile and product awareness to the forgeworld model through their writing and through the imagery in the tome itself, would it really hurt to have Legion of Azgorh as an ally in the main battle tome and avoid the endless dribble rules lawyering that goes on as a result on forums like this regarding eligibility.  And it would stop the sloppy rules writing that is the FW trademark - which isn't their fault as they're just beyond stretched.

"Slaves can't take legion but legion can take slaves blah blah not in the tome blah blah."

That khorne dragon really needs to be in the blades of khorne book, as does the other special character series models - otherwise who will ever know about them? - and then the giant khorgorath might actually get that keyword!

Slaves to darkness with a chaos siege giant anybody?

Edited December 10, 2019 by Kaleb Daark

[Overread]

Yeah that's my problem too - FW is removing stuff that doesn't sell, but at the same time FW and GW aren't doing enough (in my view) to make that stuff sell. Things like the Warpfire Dragon aren't even that expensive any more. Times have changed.

 

FW prices (excluding the sudden rises for overseas) have pretty much remained in the same ballpark region that they have for 20 odd years or more. Meanwhile at the same time GW's prices have gone up. I don't just mean by inflation, I mean the actual cost of plastic kits from GW. We've got big £70 and even £90 models from GW. GW has even had duel army boxes now breaching the £100 mark. So suddenly those big expensive FW models aren't even that out of the question for someone who is already a GW target market. AoS is even better than 40K in that regard and a majority of the models are just at or under the £100 mark. Heck things like Wolfrats are pretty much at the same price that a 5 unit cavalry/elite unit would be from GW.

 

Market wise FW should be doing better than ever before. However they don't seem to be. I think new generations of gamers just don't know FW exists (I've even encountered some who didn't even know it was an offiical GW company and just thought they were  a 3rd party firm); GW doesn't market them enough. Sure they might put up a splash page when something new gets released; but when they released udpated Battletomes they didn't show FW model options; they didn't give a whole page dedicated too "And here's some shiny stuff you can get from FW to compliment your new Skaven army" etc... So with AoS basically not really getting many releases to draw attention to it within FW its running purely on classic models that GW isn't really marketing.

Heck the last FW AoS model I saw was in one of the themed army displays and was a basilisk - one that they've just removed from sale.

 

This is what annoys me somewhat; GW has made FW standard use, but doesn't market it to games enough to generate sales for FW models to keep them in production. In the distant past when a £30-5 Dreadnought or Dragon was the most expensive GW model then yes FW was in a world of its own - plus you couldn't get it in the shops you could only mail-order it. Today internet shopping is very normal; prices are more equalised between the two arms of the company. 

[Golgfag]

FW models need to be included in army books so more players see them as options, seems crazy to me that for example scrolling through the Maggotkin book that units like Plague Toads are not in there, the models exist, they are a cool concept, stop leaving money on the table GW by giving players reasons not to purchase them. 

[Overread]

Even if they don't go in the Battletome GW central could at least sell the FW book for them - even if only as a digital copy for free on the store page for the faction. 

[EccentricCircle]

You've got to wonder whether they are deliberately trying to avoid selling too many of them. Given that forgeworld use much more old fashioned manufacture techniques, its possible that their operation simply can't handle the mass demand that would come with GW actually marketing them to the ever growing audience. Its possible that they'd rather under sell, and lose money, than not be able to fill orders and earn bad will that way as well.

With the rest of the company moving away from resin and towards plastic, forgeworld could soon be a bit out of date in that respect as well (and I say this as a big fan of forgeworld models!)

[Overread]

Resin isn't out dated, in fact it still beats plastic in terms of fine detail and potential angles that you can cast with. Sometimes you notice that plastic parts have really odd shapes or edges - sometimes that's GW hiding mould and join lines (which they are getting rather good at); but sometimes its because the shape can't be cast with a plastic casting system. 

Resin has its advantages and many nonGW companies use resin extensively as its much cheaper to work with in terms of mould costs. 

Where it falls down is that you can't mass produce it anywhere near the same scale that you can with plastics. So yes there might be some element of GW not wanting to boost FW sales beyond their capacity. However far as we can tell from the outside, FW is far from hitting its limits of resin casting. Furthermore I don't think GW makes a loss; its more that they want a higher and faster return on investment for new FW moulds and that models that are slow selling are basically being dropped. This suggests that FW should have more sales (within niches at least) to account for models under-performing in sales.

 

Right now FW, esp for AoS, is far from over-marketed and is almost not marketed. IT makes me wonder if there's some politics going on within GW that results in this. A few community articles now and then on established FW models would not break the bank so something has to be stopping them appearing for AoS. A lack of new releases is one aspect. 
 

[Malios]

Forge World used to be awesome.

At the start of this decade, in a time where GW had little interaction with the community, Forge World was the Australian hobbyist's best friend. Not only was Forge World cheaper then retail GW back then, (good conversion rates, yewwww!) but they were giving us what we the consumers wanted. Chaos Dwarfs? Forge World had you. Heresy era and mk6 armour for space marines? Forge World had you. Specialist and heavy weapon options (mainly for space marines because GW were stingy in their plastic kits)? Forge World had you. Awesome looking kits like the Verminlord before they had plastic versions? Forge World had you.

The now discontinued Imperial Armour books were quality products (excluding the rules which got out-dated pretty quickly) and the early heresy black books blew anything GW did at the time out of the water.

The best value books though were the Forge World master class books: being painting books, they don't really age and still have some really handy tips.

....then everything went pear-shaped 2015 onwards. Essentially, as GW were starting to clean up their act, Forge World did the opposite. The loss of direction for the Heresy with Bligh's passing, the out of nowhere last chance to  buy for entire ranges and the substantial price increases for converting into local currency (in many cases double the price for Australians) were the nails in the coffin. After a decade of really good releases, I lost faith in Forge World very quickly.

What has made things challenging for Forge World in my opinion has always been the lack of retail support and the lack of advertising. The wide-spread recasting of Forge World products is also a modern problem that Forge World (and by extension GW) has to face.

Because Forge World isn't well advertised (it may appear in White Dwarf sometimes, but not always. Its social media presence is also not announced by GW as much either) and not seen in GW / warhammer stores, it often only caters to the "veteran hobbyists" and "warhammer enthusiasts" who have the stable income to afford it and the knowledge to find it. That really limits the target audience and isolates the targeted consumers (ie 12- 20 year olds) from purchasing their stock outside of Nottingham. In modern times this is absurd, considering that Black Library is widespread in GW stores so there's no real excuse for it anymore.

To also touch on the recasting problem (because its a separate topic in itself,) the advantages of resin also means that it is easier to recast. Whats scary is that the -demand- for Forge World products are there, but the utterly ridiculous pricing drives consumers to recasters who often match or exceed forge world's quality for 1/3 of the price. Why pay $180 Australian plus shipping for a Primarch when recasters will match the quality and clean up the model flash for you for $25? Beyond the ethics of it, there's little reason with such a substantial difference to not go with the latter.

So yeah, Forge World are in a really strange spot. They're isolated from the main company from a communication perspective and are often slow or caught unaware by releases (book 7 for heresy and 7th edition 40k release as an example.) They're also isolated from GW's primary consumer base because they're not sold in stores or advertised very well. They're also discontinuing their main heresy, 40k and AoS ranges left right and center and only supporting boxed games like Blood Bowl and Necromunda. I'm fully aware of SKU limits, worn out resin moulds and poor sales as reasons to discontinue stuff, but compared to where they were six years ago... leaves me a bit disappointed.

[Edit] as an Australian consumer, I wasn't aware that FW pricing in the UK has remained pretty even compared to GW's unjustified price hikes. You learn something new every day.

GW really are the WotC of this industry... It sucks that they are so far ahead of their competitors financially that there's no real competition to keep them in check.

Edited December 11, 2019 by Malios
Spelling

[Nezzhil]

Bye, bye, Plague Ogres... You never been beatiful

[Baron Klatz]

I wonder if the rumored gargants army will see a few special models pop up there now?

I'm definitely okay with FW dropping old fantasy kits since it makes room for new Age of Sigmar models and realm giants would be right up their alley after that epic Khorne dragon rampaging around Aqshy.

[finngamer]

Dread Maw gone in the US store.

Gorgeous model with no way to ally it, I wonder why it didn't sell.

[Overread]

Plague Ogors are also gone from the UK store and likely to vanish from others.

 

And yeah Dreadmaw was an ally for Destruction - a faction left out without battletomes for ages and then, like everything else, GW never updated the Dreadmaw to a general ally unit and never advertised it. I agree its a fantastic looking model, yet again another that I just never had any reason from FW nor GW to buy other than a display model. 

Great shame I'd oft wanted to find an excuse to get one. 

[EccentricCircle]

I picked mine up just in the nick of time it would seem. Lovely model, and will be great for D&D and Dune inspired gaming, even if it's too awkward to use for aos.

[FallenSerf]

11 hours ago, finngamer said:

Dread Maw gone in the US store.

Gorgeous model with no way to ally it, I wonder why it didn't sell.

As is the Basilisk apparently

[Overread]

Yep its in the original post. 

 

I keep eyeing the magma dragon and worrying that I don't have £100 to panic buy one and worrying that having seen the Warpfire and a few other fairly staple things go that it could be gone at any point!