You bet your ass GW sold out. They’ve been selling out for years!

Selling out of models (eyyy!)

As you can see, as of the time of writing this, the 4 most popular battleforces from the Christmas wave sold out almost instantly, as with the Crux Terminatus release only a couple weeks earlier:

So what’s going on?

Production issues? Demand spike? Manufactured Scarcity? Scalpers? Disrupting influences from the warp?

Probably all of the above and possibly more!

I have the benefit of having worked in a high-volume, consumer-facing, injection-molded plastic business, IN supply chain, (*say that 3 times fast) so I may be somewhat uniquely qualified to understand some of the pressures and considerations the have.

From their financial reports I’ve read, Games Workshop doesn’t tend to carry that much inventory and since they produce everything in-house, machine capacity and utilization are of the utmost importance.

In supply chain management, if you’re not keeping things ‘in stock’ you have to be able to make them quickly. But every time you need to switch to making something new, you have to shut down the machine, clean it, change the tools, etc, which loses time that could be spent producing. It’s a constant balancing act, especially if you have a lot of different products to make.

They need to crank out entire production runs and switch tooling with minimal downtime to ‘meet the mark’ as far as customer demand and new production runs like releasing ~8 battleforces (and more counting AoS and other product lines) will take weeks of production capacity.

All this has the net effect of leaving GW less able to react to sudden spikes in their demand curve. At the cost of preventing huge losses from sudden dips…

Anyway, that’s just 1 angle…and I don’t want to bore you with my waxing philosophic on this for too long, but there’s a good bit that could be said for the other parts and I want to say it.

GW knows people who are paying attention are waiting to buy these. Sometimes for most of the year.

Filling the entire demand curve leaves a gap in your future revenue you have to then go fill. By under-supplying these larger, in-demand boxes, they increase customer loyalty and maintain a premium, exclusive price point.

Yes you heard me. Without getting into politics, Warhammer is one of the MOST exclusionary hobbies in the world, simply because of the costs and availability.

There are ~8500 stores that sell Warhammer products in the world, including GW stores. If you assume most stores get somewhere between 2 and 10 copies of a given box at release, that puts the total production run somewhere in the range of 60,000 copies (I don’t know what they actually are) that will ever exist for a hobby enjoyed by millions.

That exclusiveness means customers who weren’t fast enough or didn’t get one are rarely angry enough to overcome the enormous sunk cost invested into the hobby and abandon it. Because they also know that if they really wanted to they can almost always buy one online well past the ‘sell out date’, even if they have to pay a bit more.

You just can’t expect to get a 3-year old out of print box for MSRP prices…

Scalpers exist. They buy up as many of these as they can and then mark them up on the secondary market. I’ve found (in my brief time back in 40k) that they tend to scoop up anything limited or offered in major retailers (eg target, walmart, amazon) and then jack up prices (again on the secondary market)

This behavior is unavoidable with limited, in-demand print runs of any product. In fact, the only way to prevent it would be to implement some draconian ordering policies or for thousands of hobbyists to become the scalpers!

That’s a novel thought for another newsletter, but I’ll leave you with this - would you really be mad at someone who bought out all the Dawn of Wars and then sold them to people who actually wanted them at the retail price instead of for a 2x markup?

How do you tell who’s who is the million dollar question…

Okay this was half a joke but honestly, look at where we are. The broader economy is not doing great (in late 2025). Mass layoffs, AI uncertainty, and other doom and gloom scenarios abound, but GW stock is skyrocketing!

If you’re surprised by this, go look at their financials from 2005-2011 - the bookends around the ‘great financial crisis’.

Spoiler - Record sales years!!!!!

Warhammer is a bubble. Not like that. A perpetual, safe, harmonious, easy-breezy floaty thing. Financially…

Warhammer is at the early stages of transitioning from niche hobby to global phenomenon, and time is short to still be an “early adopter” (yes, even 30-50 years late). We all know Space Marine (2? I didn’t play haha) brought 40k closer to mainstream, and most of us by now know that the Henry Cavill <> Amazon deal will do that at at even broader scale.

Popularity is rising, which means more people into the hobby, and germane to this discussion more demand on limited supply products. Games Workshop themselves can’t even predict what this will look like, but we can tell what they’re preparing for -

Massive investments in additional production and storage capacity in the US tell me they’re expecting 2026 and 2027 will be the years of Warhammer (40k specifically) in America.

And I’m here for it.

So GW - please keep selling out - it’s ultimately a great thing for all of us when there are more of us!

The events content will be coming soon™ - I plan to start digging into competitive 40k a bit more in the future. Goals for now include figuring out how one can even participate; it seems very opaque.

Anyway, since we’ve just had the World Championships of Warhammer it makes sense to pick this up with the 2026 season.

I don’t think I’d do very good, but it would be nice to know how to even try!

A fun puzzle to solve for another day…

Here I want to share random things I find interesting or helpful as I come across them; eventually I’d like to compile these tools into a list for new folks to use for help in all aspects of the hobby.

I found this tool randomly browsing reddit this week - https://40k-event-tracker.nuxt.dev/ - pages and pages of winning lists. I’m not sure how active the development on this is but will be interesting to see how it comes along.

That’s it for tools for now. The only others I know and use you’re almost definitely already aware of, but that will be a good post for another time.

Social Spotlight

_{Here I’ll talk about the top 40k posts of the week across social media that piqued my interest}

You may remember seeing a Buzz Lightyear Space Marines army on social media sometime over the last year or so…for me it was not that long ago i saw it for the first time.

Well, every hero needs a nemesis, and one Reddit user was happy to oblige us with an Emperor Zurg conversion - https://www.reddit.com/r/Warhammer40k/comments/1oypsbg/i_was_about_to_paint_mephiston_when_the_voices/

To save you the effort:

I think this is fantastic and clever response to the army of Buzzes and hope to see more!

Jokes aside, I thought the green and purple on this stealthy boy contrasted so well! You can check the post out at https://www.reddit.com/r/orks/comments/1ozqdaa/does_anyone_know_what_this_model_is_called_or_if/

Presented without comment (seriously just go watch it) https://www.reddit.com/r/AdeptusMechanicus/comments/1oxmpck/my_sydonian_skratos/

Well, I enjoyed it at least….probably a bit to much

That’s it - those are MY top posts for the week. What were yours?

I’m starting a 40k retail store and I figure there’s got to be a couple others out there like me - I’m spending so much money on Warhammer I figured it’s probably cheaper to run a store. Now’s your chance to have a de-risked (for you) version of that!

The numbers work for me if we can make rent as close to zero dollars as possible for me. To that end I need about 20 folks who would be willing to contribute $100/mo through a Patreon membership.

I’ll cover the rest of the costs out of my own pocket including physically manning the store, and you get (really good) discounts and free shipping on Warhammer 40k anywhere in the US.

Win-win?

If you think so, and would like to help out and benefit personally in the process - you now know how!

When I get a few patrons I will sign a lease on a retail location and begin store operations ASAP (will take 1-2 months for licensing and permitting for the business).

The website (part of it) is live at BoardApe .com as well.

I’m ready to move on this I just need some people to step forward and help me (help you).

That’s a wrap? This was a ton of fun to put together and I hope to do more.

Till next week, this has been your