I think GWS problem is they've never totally made the transition from 80s-90s Hobby Store front behemoth to the the digital age until it was too late.
In the day, their biggest strength was in retail, in drawing people in with the figs and the huuuggggeeee battles. (I know that's what got me as a kid.) They opened stores dedicated to their own products, some of which were really lavish. They got invested in a lot of infrastructure. I've been told by some hobby store managers that GWS also really aggressive pursued retail they didn't own, putting in a lot of clauses and requirements for selling their stuff, hosting tournaments, etc...
In this day and age though, games have by and large moved out of the stores and online. Hobby stores I think don't do as brisk a business on hobby gaming as they used to. They're back to just straight hobby stuff like RC cars and safe stuff to stock like Magic. With all the scaling back, instead of pivoting to deal with how people buy and play these games, GWS doubled down, raised prices and closed stores. I guess they figured in the hobby market, they'd just try to be exceptional at what they did and let the price reflect that (they've said as much at one point) along with a good dose of trying to increase profits along the way. Sure, they had a pretty robust web store (and actually did offer a lot of discontinued content in digital format, for which I was eternally grateful for at the time), but the prices were at the absolute top dollar, they didn't pass any savings on to the customer.
And then they started getting really greedy, in my mind. Instead of validating people's grossly expensive purchases by keeping editions going, they started making new editions regularly and insanely expected their fan base to continue rebuying the game over and over again. They shut down all their side projects like Mordheim, Necromunda, Blood Bowl, basically anything that wasn't 40K or Fantasy. These were games people played to stay in the GWS world, and spend some money, without buying into $400 worth of shit. This also was in the period when people were begging for the 40k license for video games, so fans could essentially do the same thing, and GWS were kinda "Meeeehhhhh" about it, only realizing it was good business when Dawn of War hit the scene. This is around the point at which the web store also got shittier too. They stopped offering discontinued rules and supplements, period, and started making bundles instead of offering a lot of stuff as singles. (Which they used to, for a while you could find a lot of the figs you wanted sold individually. Instead of buying a fig as part of a command squad to get some what of a deal on more figs, they just only sold the command squad for one giant lump sum. Thanks GWS. I think this had something to do with not essentially fucking the Hobby Stores as well by letting online shoppers undercut the boxed units GWS sold them.)
They woke up to the possibility of licensing the franchise for video games a while ago and are now, kind of predictably, going apeshit with it, green lighting probably 10? games in the last 5 years. But they didn't shift their business soon enough to really protect the table top business from bad practices. Years of abusing fans with new editions and pricing and shelving games that weren't the core business have basically killed people's good will and willingness to see what's new. I know it has for me, as far as table top goes.
I don't understand WHY they're so stubborn? Surely the evidence is overwhelmingly in support of the notion that their popularity is steadily decreasing. I mean, between the pricing and the lack of the massive, plot line advancing tournaments, the fun just isn't there anymore.
GWS is just notoriously stubborn and aggressive about business. Consider their milieu. Attacking perceived violations of their IP, defending themselves from accusations of infringing other people's IPs (Michael Moorcock, Starship Troopers, the list goes on), defending the franchise against moral outrage, neckbeards (the most vocal and easiest to displease of all fans), at one time being the undisputed king of table top wargaming....they've been in business for coming up on almost 40 or 50 years. They're part of the old guard, and they've always been kind of cutthroat when it comes to the actual business of the franchise.
And that has a lot to do with how intractable they are too. I think the distance between the people that created GWS and the people that now run it is growing too. GWS has always sort of felt coldly corporate and I think it's just gotten worse as more old timers get out of the scene. They sought equally aggressive business people to hand the company off to, who don't have the attachment to their creation or the fan base that sustains it. So perhaps the people who control the fate of the company are just planning to squeeze it until they're only doing two things: mail-ordering figs to deplete their stock and licensing the IP out for video games and books. (I think the Black Library will probably continue to have legs long after the TT business falls apart completely.) At which point stockholders will bail and someone will buy the rights to it, and 40k will just be another Battletech/Mechwarrior/Shadowrun/White Wolf/All the games and IPs from the 80s and 90s I loved, which will occasionally resurface from time to time when someone is willing to throw enough money at whoever holds the IP so the it can be "reborn" for a shitty game or two.
There's your grim dark analysis.
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