News: Games Workshop makes Flames of War even more attractive!

After much rumour and speculation, Games Workshop (GW) this week announced new trading terms for their UK independant stores. You can read the full details over at Maelstrom and Wayland Games sites. The upshot of this is that to most Australian gamers the Games Workshop systems just got a lot more expensive from the end of May. I have no doubt that in time other avenues to achieve the same good price from UK indies will surface. (Erm... Ebay?) However, it's more GWs attitude to fixing the price discrepancy. Instead of conducting some price adjustment to make shopping in Australia more attractive, why not just prevent Australians shopping elsewhere? Not cool and I really don't think the move is going to benefit local gaming stores at all. Combined with GW's recent announcement of their Finecast range, which if you can believe it will cost more than the outgoing metal models, and the total picture for Australian GW product fans is financial pain.

So yes. A bit of anti GW rage. I have fond memories of the GW that once was. Growing up in the great county of Cheshire in the UK, when they opened the Stoke on Trent GW store with their famous buy one get one free offer. Man those were the days. I appreciate that every company needs to remain profitable but it's gotten to the point where it seems like Australians are being asked to fund a poor and unsustainable business model for GWs Australian activities. In the end, I feel disappointed that GW hasn't really looked after it's player base and frankly this cost issue is the nail in the coffin for me personally. Quite before this I was sick of the powercreep and super unit domination the company was promoting so it's probably time I firmly voted with my feet.

That brings me to the relevant part of this post to our Flames of War centric blog. Battlefront reduced their prices in Australia again since my last cost rant. Prices were reduced on boxes above $50. Sure, the Maelstrom ban also occurred where Battlefront refused to wholesale to Maelstrom any longer but that didn't hurt our pockets as buying Flames of War in Australia is barely any different to buying from the UK. Long may that continue! Furthermore, Battlefront have some awesome customer service! Read about that here.

I think now is the time to post up a few 'How to start Flames of War' articles in the blogosphere. Here at Bunker 3030 I reckon we can author a couple of those and as a fairly recent new player myself I have some experiences to share!

More on this topic soon!