Last Chance to Buy: Everything FW

[Guest]

Dunno if anyone else is following it, but last few months, FW has be dropping support for lots of items on their site.

Lots of Youtube stuff on it. Kinda feels like GW is liquidating FW.

Example:

Lots more.

[Guest]

Title is probably an overreaction on my part, but selling everything AND THEN informing people that FW was done, would be a classic play from GW. Age of Sigmar all over again.

The other, rather distinct possibility, is that FW is updating their kits and will be combining previously separate kits with a new, updated mold and assembly instructions. If those Alpha Legion Terminators are any indication, the future FW kits look very nice.

But I become hesitant to buy things when FW isn't explaining why, week after week, more and more items are "last chance to buy."

[PourSpelur]

Most of the time when something looks crazy like this, explanation is mundane and boring.

Could be many, many things. Maybe when Whasisface took over GW he changed some criteria for FW as well.

Possibility 1

*Numbers are arbitrary and fully made up*

Old system: any kit that sells 50 units per month gets molds remade when they wear out.

New system: any kit that sells 100 units per month gets molds remade when they wear out.

All the stuff on "last chance" is 51-99 unit per month stuff

Possibility 2

Plastic production has a historically long build up time. GW had FW pull the items because they're aiming to add similar kits in plastic and don't want to cannibalize future plastic sales with current resin ones (at a lower margin).

Possibility 3

A consultant looked at the many offerings by FW and found the extra overhead of multiple similar kits is greater than the extra sales generated by them.

The only ones who really know are on the GW board and they're not telling us.

[WestRider]

I've heard stuff along the lines of what PourSpelur is talking about from people in the comments on War of Sigmar who have been right about stuff like this in the past. Basically, there's been a lot of shakeup over there since Alan Bligh died, and the standards for how well something has to sell to stay in production have gone up.

Someone also noted that the actual list of discontinued items is significantly smaller than it seems at first, since a number of them are bundles, and all the individual kits that made up those bundles are still available. The main categories that are really getting cut are the MkII stuff, since conversion kits for the plastic MkIII and MkIV kits are massively outselling it, and Castaferrum (2nd-7th ed "standard") Dreads, since those don't sell anywhere near as well as the Contemptors and other heavier variants.