I have a few very important rules that I refuse to compromise. Most of them are moral in nature, and the kind of anger they tend to engender is a big reason I don’t talk about politics here. But there’s one that’s absolutely sacrosanct, and I will go out of my way to uphold it even at great personal cost.
That rule is: I will never give Games Workshop money.
So, you either know what I’m talking about, or this is going to take some serious explanation.
Games Workshop is a company that makes games. Says what it does on the tin. They’re most famous for the Warhammer series of games, which began their existence as fantasy and science fiction tabletop miniatures games before spawning video games, cartoons, and all sorts of other ancillary content. But originally, it was a game where nerds painted little metal and plastic figures and pushed them around on a table rolling dice to simulate warfare.
Now, I don’t loathe Games Workshop because they created an expensive and predatory hobby. The little plastic and metal figures are ridiculously pricey, and the company regularly changes up the ruleset so that the miniatures you field in one battle may eventually become sub-optimal and require replacement, or they might possibly even be outlawed entirely. And it’s not because the settings they create are utterly tiresome and grim, or even that they inspire the kind of wrestling-fan arguments where nerds who are to other nerds what regular nerds are to normal people endlessly debate which faction are the “good guys.” (Spoiler alert: It’s none of them. The only winning move is not to play.)
No, I loathe Games Workshop because I had to do business with the company in a professional capacity.
Back in the day, carrying Games Workshop products was easy. The company’s artists would sculpt miniatures of, say, Space Marines or Space Orks or Space Elves or Space Dwarves. Each one was a static, unique figure, and you built your army by picking and choosing from those models. If you wanted to field a Space Marine army, for instance, you needed a variety of Space Marines with various weapons and gear, and you could pick those out from the catalogue and order the ones you wanted. You’d tell us “I want four of 52001 and two of 52003 and one of 52005” and we’d place the order and get you the models you wanted. And everyone was happy.
Well, Games Workshop wasn’t, because they thought they could squeeze more money out of the hobby. So after the friendly local gaming stores pushed their weird, grim little wargame into the heights of popularity, they redesigned the ordering system to utterly fuck over the shops.
Enter the new SKU system. The company, instead of keeping inventories of each individual miniature under its own numeric code, began streamlining their inventory system. Instead of picking out models by individual numbers, all of a sudden there were single SKU codes that had multiple miniatures in them. If you bought a blister pack of 9503, for instance, you would get two Space Marines—but the two models were chosen randomly from a set of about 6-8 possibilities.
Now, in the beginning, this wasn’t a huge deal. A single Space Marine SKU might have eight different possible Marines in it, but they were largely similar. Mostly, they’d have the same weapons but be different poses, to give your army a little visual distinction. But you might occasionally get a Marine with a weapon you didn’t want to field, at which point you could decide to alter your army list or modify the miniature on your own hook.
The problem started to show with character models. Unlike the standard “grunts” of your army, characters were named individuals, or units of a specific rank and loadout that made them unique (or very limited) on the field. A sergeant, or chaplain, or psychic, or general would be their own unique individual character model. And so they began to issue SKUs with multiple character models in them. But unlike the generic Space Marines, if you weren’t prepared to field “Hogmar the Mighty,” that miniature was utterly useless to you.
Then you started to get into the insanity of having SKUs that had units from entirely different factions in them. Whereas getting a Space Marine with a weapon you didn’t need was easy to work around, and getting a character you weren’t planning to field might just require changing up your army list, if you were a Space Elf player and you got a Space Ork, that lump of metal and plastic was utterly worthless to you in the game.
And then we ran into an issue where the rules would change faster than their manufacturing toolsets, so a given model might become sub-optimal or even be outlawed entirely, but would remain as part of the SKU with other, more useful models for quite some time.
So, each SKU might have eight possible models in it, four of which were generally useful, two of which were useful only in certain scenarios, one that might be useful only once in a blue moon, and one that nobody could use for any purpose whatsoever.
Now you have to understand that each of these miniature blister packs were transparent, so if you had the blister in your hand, you could very easily see what miniatures were in it and decide which pack to buy. But, and this is the crucial bit—game stores could only order by the SKU code.
Which meant that the shops—and only the shops—were playing a gachapon game with the distributor. We couldn’t control what miniatures we got, we could only buy stacks of the blisters and put them on display, and then our customers could pick and choose from them and pick out the ones they wanted. When we placed the orders, we’d hope for the miniatures that people would buy, but we couldn’t guarantee what we’d get. If we’d happen to draw a dozen blisters filled with garbage miniatures, that was just our bad luck. And our customers could pick through them and get the few that were actually in demand, and then they’d complain at us about our selection.
Also around this time, Games Workshop also began focusing heavily on brand compliance. If you wanted a decent discount, you had to follow their rules. Which meant you had to carry a certain percentage of the available product, you had to have official signage (and sometimes official racks to store the items on), you couldn’t place certain competing products too close to theirs. They would send field reps around to your store, and if you broke too many of the rules, your discount could get pulled. If they saw people playing the game in your store without the models being painted with official Games Workshop paints, you’d hear about it.
This all came to a head at Lion and Unicorn one summer day. One of our regular customers wanted to field a bespoke unit of some arcane variant trooper. It might have been Noise Marines, armored soldiers sculpted with ridiculous-looking musical instruments that were sonic weapons. Since they weren’t a very in-demand unit, there was one SKU that had them in it, and there were maybe three figures to choose from. The other 5-7 figures in the SKU were utterly worthless to this particular player, and at least three of them weren’t of use to anyone in the entire game, having been deprecated from the rules.
He wanted to know if we could order him an entire unit of the Noise Marines. Of course we couldn’t, we could only order the SKU, and in each blister, each miniature would have about a 30-40% chance of being useful to him, and each miniature had about the same chance of being utterly impossible to sell. So we reached out to the distributor, who we’d had a good relationship with and had given a ton of business.
“Hey, I’ve got a customer here that wants a full unit of Noise Marines. Is there any way we can get you to ship us the blisters with the actual Noise Marine figures in them, maybe just this once?”
“No,” the distributor said cheerily. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do, you tell them to write in to the company, and we’ll be happy to sell them the individual models they need directly.”
“So let me get this straight,” I asked. “We can’t order the miniatures our customers want, we have to roll the dice. But if we send our customers directly to you, you’ll give them whatever they need. But you won’t do that for us.”
“That’s right.”
“One moment.”
I passed this compromise along to the owner and returned to the phone with his answer. “That’s gonna be a no-go. And can you do me a favor—the next time your field rep comes by to check our signage, can you give me a call? I need to make sure my owner’s not here, because he just told me he’s going to shoot your guy in the face. And I don’t think he’s joking, and I don’t want to end up on the news.”
To his credit, the distributor simply told me, “I’ll make sure to call first.”