TOW vs AoS sell-out guess!

[Tyresia83]

Hi all,

 once all the core factions will have a range available to sell (and hopefully not constantly OOS), how much do you think TOW can reach in terms of market share within the GW portfolio? like X% of AoS is doing.

Curious to hear the community opinion... the fact that TOW is constantly OOS doesn't mean they produced a lot, so maybe the game is till very very small in absolute numbers.

Happy playing everyone!

[Tonhel]

Rob (Honest Wargamer) said in his latest video that the sales expectations for TOW were blown away. What it means compared to AoS we will never know. But I assume that AoS with its much larger budget and lots of new plastic kits still outsells TOW by a big margin.

I am just happy it sells well. 😉

 

 

[Sarouan]

When Cursed City box was sold the first time, sales expectations were also "blown away". Turned out they simply made a way too small number of boxes initially. So it really doesn't mean anything in comparison to AoS.

It's also messy because people can perfectly buy some AoS kits for TOW (Gloomspite Gitz for night goblin units is one of the obvious ones), and vice versa.

Better talk about stock numbers in 1 or 2 years ahead. That's where the real long term standing of the game can be truly seen. Cursed City after its initial release was...much less enthousiastic, to say the least. There are still unsold boxes in my GW store, and that's already telling a lot...

[Sception]

cursed city might have done better but for the bizarre release disaster, though the game being kind of notably less good than similar competitors, including earlier versions of warhammer quest, certainly didn't help.

[Sarouan]

On 4/21/2024 at 3:19 AM, Sception said:

cursed city might have done better but for the bizarre release disaster, though the game being kind of notably less good than similar competitors, including earlier versions of warhammer quest, certainly didn't help.

It had nothing to do with competition, just a question of GW building up the Hype and failing to estimate correctly what would be the demand in this COVID time period. Once the sale window is missed, you can't go back.

Here with TOW, you could argue competitors are "way better" and already established (Conquest, Kings of War, 9th age (lol)...). Still didn't stop people from buying same old design miniatures. Because it's not really about the "quality of rules" or "playing a better game" ; it's about going back to Warhammer Fantasy Battle, most of the time.

[Tonhel]

1 hour ago, Sarouan said:

It had nothing to do with competition, just a question of GW building up the Hype and failing to estimate correctly what would be the demand in this COVID time period. Once the sale window is missed, you can't go back.

Here with TOW, you could argue competitors are "way better" and already established (Conquest, Kings of War, 9th age (lol)...). Still didn't stop people from buying same old design miniatures. Because it's not really about the "quality of rules" or "playing a better game" ; it's about going back to Warhammer Fantasy Battle, most of the time.

I think there is certainly something to say for KoW or Conquest. Both are great rulesets, but as you said it is not Warhammer.  I am not a fan of 9th Age. I jumped to it from the moment they created their forum. It started great, but than out of fear for GW and an obsession for balance/tournament play they started to change a lot, which resulted that I stopped with it and went full in on AoS.

GW is just bad add estimating demand for their products. I.e with Kill Team, always sold out way to quickly.

[Sception]

5 hours ago, Sarouan said:

It had nothing to do with competition, just a question of GW building up the Hype and failing to estimate correctly what would be the demand in this COVID time period. Once the sale window is missed, you can't go back.

Here with TOW, you could argue competitors are "way better" and already established (Conquest, Kings of War, 9th age (lol)...). Still didn't stop people from buying same old design miniatures. Because it's not really about the "quality of rules" or "playing a better game" ; it's about going back to Warhammer Fantasy Battle, most of the time.

It was more than just underestimating initial demand.  After the initial release and immediate out of stock, GW scrubbed cursed city from its website as though it never existed.  None of the expected announcement of expansions, mixed messaging on whether or not it would ever be back in stock, gw people refused to discuss it when asked, while models that seemed like they were intended to be cursed city expansions were released for AoS directly instead.  It was bizarre, and the complete info blackout on Cursed City lasted several months.  So long that people who liked the base game gave up on ever seeing official GW expansions and started writing their own, while speculation went wild over what exactly happened.  The going rumor for a while was that some part of the cursed city rulebook had been plagiarized from some other game.

Eventually the Cursed City box came back in stock, but it was weirdly and way later.  And eventually expansions for it were released, though instead of having new models like previous warhammer quest expansions, they were just rules for using models that had already been released for AoS in Cursed City, which only reinforced the impression that some products originally intended for Cursed City had been re-routed to AoS.  And given the long, long period with only the base game having been available at all, however briefly, it really didn't help that the base game wasn't very good.

I don't know what the actual situation was, but it manifested ~very~ differently from the usual GW struggles to keep a popular product in stock, and absolutely hurt Cursed City far more than, say, Old World or Horus Heresy have been hurt by their constant stock issues.

[Sarouan]

35 minutes ago, Sception said:

It was more than just underestimating initial demand. 

It was, though. The rest you describe is simply a fear to angry reactions that people posted after some twitter affirmations that Cursed City wasn't limited production on first pre-order (it was), and lack of internal information. There was no conspiracy involved, only people telling stuff without being informed on the real situation and not wanting to repeat that mistake again ("if you don't know, say nothing").

But it honestly didn't have any consequence on Cursed City sales (it was sold out already, anyway). When the second wave happened, situation was different : no more Hype, no more Covid confining at home (that's why selling a solo game was interesting at that time), no more "new miniature only available in the box" situation (Cursed City happened before the new battletome for vampires, and was indeed the first place to have the new skeletons / zombies miniatures) so people weren't that interested anymore into buying a copy.

Here, with TOW, situation is certainly another, but I'm pretty sure the fact game is still new and hyping is still playing in its apparent popularity. Like Horus Heresy in its time, and like it, I believe we will be in a same "stagnant" situation a couple years later...when Hype is down and people will start to see the same disadvantages of Old World as they already existed in WHFB (complexity of the game, difficulty of recruiting new blood, "lack of new releases"...)

[Tonhel]

36 minutes ago, Sarouan said:

Here, with TOW, situation is certainly another, but I'm pretty sure the fact game is still new and hyping is still playing in its apparent popularity. Like Horus Heresy in its time, and like it, I believe we will be in a same "stagnant" situation a couple years later...when Hype is down and people will start to see the same disadvantages of Old World as they already existed in WHFB (complexity of the game, difficulty of recruiting new blood, "lack of new releases"...)

Lol, sign me up for a stagnant situation in a couple of years, as worst it means we had a couple of great years with TOW releases.

Imo when they killed of Warhammer. In that time there was also an upwards trend of skirmish focused gaming. R&F gaming was fading (imo). But as most thiing in life it is like a wave motion graph. Ups and downs. TOW will rise and on a certain point it will decline.

Edited April 22 by Tonhel

[Gaz Taylor]

5 hours ago, Tonhel said:

GW is just bad add estimating demand for their products. I.e with Kill Team, always sold out way to quickly.

I think there is an element of that but I suspect they like to operate on a FOMO model as it means that they mostly sell out of most stuff and don't have any stock sitting around on shelves or in warehouses. The issue is that they aren't super agile to respond to demand in some cases but I think this is a capacity issue and they can't change what they are making on the production schedule easily. 

 

[Sception]

Rather than a horus heresy type future, I expect more of an eventual middle earth style status quo - a good game that plays well sleepily persisting on a mostly static old model line available exclusively through the online store, seeing rare updates and even rarer new releases, yet well thought of and well appreciated by its players.  A game largely unbothered by the constant meta uphevals of regular new army books, editions, and balance patches that the main games get - on the down side lacking the hype that drives new player interest, but on the up side you can buy a unit without worry that its in-game abilities will change dramatically by the time you get it painted.

We'll see, though.

[Tonhel]

18 minutes ago, Sception said:

Rather than a horus heresy type future, I expect more of an eventual middle earth style status quo - a good game that plays well sleepily persisting on a mostly static old model line available exclusively through the online store, seeing rare updates and even rarer new releases, yet well thought of and well appreciated by its players.  A game largely unbothered by the constant meta uphevals of regular new army books, editions, and balance patches that the main games get - on the down side lacking the hype that drives new player interest, but on the up side you can buy a unit without worry that its in-game abilities will change dramatically by the time you get it painted.

We'll see, though.

I could live with a Middle Earth like support, but I am hoping for more, a lot more. 🙂

[Sception]

Hope springs eternal, and the initial release ~does~ seem to have been a lot more positively received than GW was expecting, so we may yet see expansion beyond the limited scope that the game finally launched with.  I certainly wouldn't complain if we see a return to something closer to the scope that the Old World was initially previewed with, including entire new ranges for Kislev and maybe even Cathay, and more legacy factions returning to full support as their ranges are slowly replaced or retired from AoS.

But even if The Old World persists more or less as it is now, I'm still pretty happy with it.

[Aphotic]

I've totally ditched AOS for TOW anyway. As far as I'm concerned, AOS was always a placeholder board game masquerading as a war game anyway. My club has played TOW and 40k exclusively since TOW launched. Nobody is touching AOS, haven't seen a game of it played in almost 5 months.

[Beliman]

1 hour ago, Aphotic said:

As far as I'm concerned, AOS was always a placeholder board game masquerading as a war game anyway

40k too?

[Vomikron]

3 hours ago, Aphotic said:

I've totally ditched AOS for TOW anyway. As far as I'm concerned, AOS was always a placeholder board game masquerading as a war game anyway. My club has played TOW and 40k exclusively since TOW launched. Nobody is touching AOS, haven't seen a game of it played in almost 5 months.

This is great to hear. I’m glad AoS exists but it just doesn’t scratch my war gaming itch. 40K too for that matter. I’m glad GW is in a position of popularity that they’re able to devote resources to games that are  a little crunchier and niche. Necromunda and TOW are my main focuses at the moment.

[JerekKruger]

6 hours ago, Vomikron said:

This is great to hear. I’m glad AoS exists but it just doesn’t scratch my war gaming itch. 40K too for that matter. I’m glad GW is in a position of popularity that they’re able to devote resources to games that are  a little crunchier and niche. Necromunda and TOW are my main focuses at the moment.

I find myself in a similar place to you. I haven't quite given up on AoS yet, but it's definitely a distant second in my focus. I completely understand the appeal of a crunchy game. There's just someone I love about a big complex ruleset with lots of options to sink my teeth into.

[Tonhel]

Same here, I will get the AoS starterset and I expect to still play AoS, but will not start a new army. So it will be fleshing out my CoS and StD. For me AoS was indeed a placeholder or appetizer for the real deal.

I am more of a hobbyist than a gamer, while I love to play tabletop games. It's not so easy to play more than 1-2 times a month, but I have a lot of more painting time. For this reason alone TOW is much more interesting for me. When collecting / painting an army for TOW. It feels so much more as my army and my characters. While with AoS, it's more I am just painting generic tokens. Beautiful tokens to paint, but there is no character in it. This is ofcourse very subjective. But AoS units/characters are bland imo.

[Ejecutor]

On 4/18/2024 at 8:47 PM, Tyresia83 said:

Hi all,

 once all the core factions will have a range available to sell (and hopefully not constantly OOS), how much do you think TOW can reach in terms of market share within the GW portfolio? like X% of AoS is doing.

Curious to hear the community opinion... the fact that TOW is constantly OOS doesn't mean they produced a lot, so maybe the game is till very very small in absolute numbers.

Happy playing everyone!

If I would have to say a % I would go for 20% of the AoS sales as max.

[Sarouan]

If we can avoid the uninteresting debate "TOW iS a BeTtEr gAMe thAn AoS", I would be grateful. I really don't need to relive the times when old Battle and new AoS / 40k communities were throwing poop at each other's faces for useless ego / pride purposes. Let's just accept they are both games meant for different sensibilities of players, shall we ?

As for the real % of sales, unless we have a real leak from people working in GW sales department, we'll never know (and you'll never find that kind of reliable information from Valrak ;) ). But knowing how Battle sales were always lower than 40k even in its golden age from official GW stats released at the time, and knowing that TOW is here a "secondary game" to AoS like Horus Heresy is to 40k...yeah, I totally expect the stock numbers are just low.

[Nezzhil]

The sales are too dispar right now.

- Khemri and Bretonnia sold well at first.
- O&G doesn't do it that well and it takes more time to sell the first batch of stock. Although the second wave is doing a bit better with the Orcs boarboyz being a real best seller.
- Resin new models are selling as well as other Forgeworld resin models.

The game is doing okay. The old kits sales are so dispar and we can expect something similar to dwarfs or chaos, meanwhile elf sales will be better.

Is the game is outselling other games? No, it is not. The community is supporting 3D so much and that implies zero to GW. We need to wait to see how it will work when new factions arrives in two or three years.

[Sarouan]

3D printing is an obvious way to build your army from scratch, but communities advocating for it are specifically those who tend not to care about official GW events and rather play among themselves. Or don't really care about supporting their local stores.

Some well known 3D patreons / 3D printed stores have been hit by a "cease and desist" order from GW because their products were advertised as miniatures for TOW - which, obviously, they were designed for but GW really doesn't like it when other people try to make it look like it's "fine to play for TOW officially" (they never say it straight, but they always suggest it because they know that's how they sell more of it ).

[Tonhel]

I can't imagine the hobby anymore without 3D printing. I am having a lot of fun with the Avatar of War Orcs & Goblin mini's. The trolls are amazing! Even with AoS, my CoS army (before the new book) a lot of the mini's I used were from Highland miniatures.

3D printing is my number one resource for historical and fantasy miniatures. For TOW I only buy the books (all of them) and the truly new stuff. Could this result in a failure of TOW. Yes.  While I love TOW, I have zero interest in buying 20 year old mini's.

Lol, For Bretonnia I still haven't been able to buy a single new resin miniature. For O&G I atleast managed to get the resin Black Orc Warboss. So GW is it also making very hard to get the new mini's and even books.

Same is true for AoS, I am subscribed to a dozen patreons/tribes. If I find good looking STL's I will use those instead of buying GW mini's, which are to expensive for what they are.

For AoS vs TOW, I could imagine a big plastic release of Cathay / Kislev to match any AoS army release in the same year. Certainly Cathay.

 

 

[Sarouan]

Well as soon as Cathay and Kislev will be officially previewed on Warhammer Community, you can be sure all the known patreons for 3D printed "not TOW" miniatures will "suddenly" work on "Bear and Vodka Kingdom" and "Celestial Dragon Empire" models. What a coincidence it will be.

There's an interesting debate to have on that topic, to be honest some already did (I suggest people to listen to Guerilla Miniature Games' videos made on that matter). Suffice to say here that no matter what 3D printer fans say about it, it's still a privilege to own and use a 3D printer "at home" - and 3D printing services can vary greatly in quality depending of the resin used, the scale made "right", the way miniatures are cured / prepared, and so on. It's still not replacing miniatures sold in retail for a lot of reasons other than "GW bad grrr".

Having printed a whole army of Highland Miniature dwarves with my own, sure, I can say it "looks" easy. But to get where I am now, I did have to learn a lot of things in 2 years before having a quality I can say is "close" to professionnal production in terms of quality and durability. Still not beating the pleasure to build GW plastic models, though...but yeah, I love conversions and now that I know how to use 3D software, I can convert models directly with the files before printing and it adds a whole new universe of possibilities (I even sculpt my own models from time to time). Again, that's not something you can do when you receive your first 3D printer you just purchase with bottles of cheap resin...and not everyone enjoys to do that either.

Edited Friday at 04:28 PM by Sarouan

[Tonhel]

@Saurian, it's the same for AoS. From the moment something new is announced, some patreon/tribe will have a look a like version. This set below costed me 10 dollar. I had those in february. So less than 10 euro. 😄 

They are not 100% copies, but we all know what they could resemble. So if yo don't play within a GW store / event, these are perfect.

Yes, you are correct 3D printing is for the more experience hobbyist. I started with a Phrozen 4K mini with Phrozen 4K resin. Late december 2023 I bought an Elegoo Mars 4 Max, much cheaper than my phrozen, bigger printplate, faster and perfect quality. I only use Elegoo ABS 2 resin. Already used 6 liter without a single misprint (or atleast one that wasn't my fault when I messed up the supports). I love my 3D printer, for historicals it is a gift from heaven. 

I.e