Wargamer.com reports on GW's letter to shareholders Re: Warhammer+

[Kastor Krieg]

https://www.wargamer.com/warhammer-plus/streaming-service-has-115000-subscribers

 

https://www.wargamer.com/warhammer-40k/amazon-film-deal-wont-harm-setting

 

Aside from the Amazon deal commentary, WH+ has only 115k subscribers and only 5 mln views in total (!!!). There are tons of singular YT videos that have more views that then entire Warhammer Plus platform.

Edited January 11, 2023 by Xenith

[MithrilForge]

wow...that's not that many subscribers... and yeah the views is a bit of a shock!! ...

 

M. 

 

[WrathOfTheLion]

115k viewers would be an income of what, almost $6 million (USD) per year?

 

I don't think that's a bad amount for what it is or was expected to be. What would be interesting is what their budget is for the platform. I doubt it's profitable yet, but what the investment/return is would be interesting information and I think more important than just raw subscriber values.

 

Ah it's in the article, look at me not reading. I'm shocked it's profitable, normally you'd want to run it at a loss given your investment the first year or two for expansion.

Edited January 10, 2023 by WrathOfTheLion
reading :D

[Flaherty]

115,000 subs strikes me as quite a lot, considering there isn't a free tier! 

 

I'm curious, what would you consider a healthy number? Is there a widely accepted tally of people who play GW games? The 40K subreddit has ~571K followers. Alfabusa and MajorKill have 435K YT subs. 

 

If you could get all 115K to subscribe for the year at $60/per, that would be ~$7M or 2% of the trailing twelve months of revenue. Not bad for a relatively new initiative!

 

The more worrying bit in my mind is that they're reporting only $3.5M in revenue, suggesting that a lot of folks churn. Considering you get a free mini with the program that would retail for basically 2/3rds the annual cost, that's not ideal.

[phandaal]

15 minutes ago, Kastor Krieg said:

Aside from the Amazon deal commentary, WH+ has only 115k subscribers and only 5 mln views in total (!!!). There are tons of singular YT videos that have more views that then entire Warhammer Plus platform.

 

Armoring of a Space Marine and the Horus Heresy Cinematic Trailer both surpass 5M views on YouTube, so even compared to other GW releases it looks bad.

 

Now we see why GW devoted a paragraph to their YouTube success in last summer's investor report while W+ got a blurb saying it still exists.

 

At least this finally puts the "have you seen the numbers???" retort to bed.

[Nephaston]

Honestly, for how niche our favourite settings are, 115k subscribers is not terrible, especially if they managed to turn a profit. Though I admittedly don't know much about the finances of streaming services and the like.

[phandaal]

$3.6M revenue for 115,000 subscribers is about $31 per person.

 

In terms of other things Games Workshop sells, that is less than one character model per person, or about half a box of Intercessors.

 

In terms of profit (against their $2.9M budget), that is about $6 in profit per person.

[WrathOfTheLion]

Just now, phandaal said:

 

Armoring of a Space Marine and the Horus Heresy Cinematic Trailer both surpass 5M views on YouTube, so even compared to other GW releases it looks bad.

 

Now we see why GW devoted a paragraph to their YouTube success in last summer's investor report while W+ got a blurb saying it still exists.

 

At least this finally puts the "have you seen the numbers???" retort to bed.

Won't most of their views be restricted to that pool of 115k subscribers though? Unless there's a ton of people watching whatever open videos are there, it's going to mostly be a function of how many videos that pool has watched, plus from any churn (subscribed/dropped) over that time period.

[Captain Idaho]

It's a very modest result but I suspect GW created the platform to present as part of a portfolio to 3rd parties they want to invest into them. As an example, Amazon and the series they're creating.

 

On that basis, it's a success?

 

Question is, what's next? Now that Amazon are on board, maybe the shows being created will go on Amazon instead?

[Blindhamster]

Don’t think you can compare youtube subscriber numbers to Warhammer+ subscriber numbers, you could compare youtube “join”/“member” numbers though.

[Nephaston]

2 minutes ago, Flaherty said:

The 40K subreddit has ~571K followers. Alfabusa and MajorKill have 435K YT subs.

Following on reddit and subbing on YouTube are both free, the paid variant for YouTube would be Memberships which afaik are $5 at the base level. Though I don't know if we can see the number of members these two channels have.

 

Regarding free videos on YouTube, I assume those are monetized and generate Ad-views and thus money. I would love to know how much say the horus heresy trailer generated, though if I had to make an uneducated guess I would say the Ad revenue would be less than the 115k subscriptions even if the views are less.

[phandaal]

2 minutes ago, Captain Idaho said:

It's a very modest result but I suspect GW created the platform to present as part of a portfolio to 3rd parties they want to invest into them. As an example, Amazon and the series they're creating.

 

On that basis, it's a success?

 

Question is, what's next? Now that Amazon are on board, maybe the shows being created will go on Amazon instead?

 

I expect this was indeed one of their goals. Showcase some of what could be done in order to get bigger deals and bring in licensing fees.

[Battle Brother Steppenwolf]

2 hours ago, phandaal said:

 

Armoring of a Space Marine and the Horus Heresy Cinematic Trailer both surpass 5M views on YouTube, so even compared to other GW releases it looks bad.

 

Now we see why GW devoted a paragraph to their YouTube success in last summer's investor report while W+ got a blurb saying it still exists.

 

At least this finally puts the "have you seen the numbers???" retort to bed.

5m views from 115k subscribers is like 43 videos viewed per user. That’s not too bad considering that there isn’t a whole lot on the service to begin with. 
 

Do people really think that a paid video service is going to get as many views as a free videos though? 

[Flaherty]

Just gave the annual report a proper read through. They have just under 1M subscribers to their email list. ~700K have a "my warhammer" account. 

 

Per Nephaston, I checked MajorKill's Patreon – he has ~7,600 supporters who kick in ~$13K/month, though it's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.

 

 

[SkimaskMohawk]

It's not so simple as Warhammer+ being a paid subscription vs the free YouTube subscriptions.

 

They pushed this service with so many incentives: gift cards, a free model, an entire editions worth of rules, old lore content, and an army builder were all incentives to get people subscribed and in the position to watch videos as they rolled out.

 

Literally all they had to do was roll out the shows that they advertised. In hindsight we can tell that it was a pretty convoluted business pitch and not a serious endeavor, explaining the low quality of the app and lack of sustained content. But those factors deterred people from renewing.

[WrathOfTheLion]

41 minutes ago, SkimaskMohawk said:

It's not so simple as Warhammer+ being a paid subscription vs the free YouTube subscriptions.

 

They pushed this service with so many incentives: gift cards, a free model, an entire editions worth of rules, old lore content, and an army builder were all incentives to get people subscribed and in the position to watch videos as they rolled out.

 

Literally all they had to do was roll out the shows that they advertised. In hindsight we can tell that it was a pretty convoluted business pitch and not a serious endeavor, explaining the low quality of the app and lack of sustained content. But those factors deterred people from renewing.

I'd suspect they have more subscribers now, not fewer. Otherwise, they'd've made (115000 * $60 -> ~6.9m USD) instead of ~3.6m USD, so a relatively large part of that 115000 must not have been subscribed at the beginning of the fiscal year.

 

Edit: I guess it's a half year, so theoretically they could've had $7.2m USD, so 7.2m / $60 is roughly 120,000. So fairly close to what I'd expect.

 

That, or the 115,000 number is funky in some way. Hard to tell without a month to month breakdown of how they got their revenue from it.

 

As for the lack of content, this is actually visible in the numbers though. Normally they should be running a deficit right now, not a profit. With a new endeavor, you want to be in a position to invest any extra money back in on the premise of future profit once it expands.

Edited January 11, 2023 by WrathOfTheLion
added half year approx

[spessmarine]

genuinely impressed they have a 6 digit subscriber count, was expecting less

[phandaal]

1 hour ago, Battle Brother Steppenwolf said:

5m views from 115k subscribers is like 43 videos viewed per user. That’s not too bad considering that there isn’t a whole lot on the service to begin with. 
 

Do people really think that a paid video service is going to get as many views as a free videos though? 

 

I think the number of views they get is much less relevant than the fact that their income amounts to half a box of Intercessors per subscriber over the course of six months.

[Arbedark]

7 hours ago, phandaal said:

$3.6M revenue for 115,000 subscribers is about $31 per person.

 

In terms of other things Games Workshop sells, that is less than one character model per person, or about half a box of Intercessors.

 

In terms of profit (against their $2.9M budget), that is about $6 in profit per person.

 

For a 6 month period that is pretty close to maximised revenue given the subscriber numbers though, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here? To get that revenue a very large chunk of those subscribers were subscribed for the full 6 months, so the revenue per subscriber couldn't be much higher. If W+ was doing as poorly as many people hope then the churn would be much higher, and thus revenue per subscriber would be closer to one month's revenue, not 6. 

[Lord Marshal]

The low number of views isn't a surprise. Pretty much everybody was dismissing it until they announced the 'free' model. To most people W+ is a glorified model-subscription service with some video/app extras thrown in.

[Xenith]

6 hours ago, phandaal said:

 

I think the number of views they get is much less relevant than the fact that their income amounts to half a box of Intercessors per subscriber over the course of six months.

 

...would you like them to charge more?

 

Like this is mad. They made another $3.6m that they would not have otherwise got. Money is money and there are a lot of companies that will invest, work and succeed on smaller margins if there is a profitable business case.

 

To be honest, I'm amazed it has that many subs, and made that much money. 

[Cactus]

GW have failed to sell me any primaris marines but they've got me for 2 years on Warhammer+ so far. That's a better deal for them than the half box of intercessors I would never buy.

 

The Vault is a really good concept but the execution is awful which is probably why the conversation always focuses on WarhammerTV.

[G8Keeper]

An improvement in the search function on the vault would improve it massively.

27 minutes ago, Cactus said:

GW have failed to sell me any primaris marines but they've got me for 2 years on Warhammer+ so far. That's a better deal for them than the half box of intercessors I would never buy.

 

The Vault is a really good concept but the execution is awful which is probably why the conversation always focuses on WarhammerTV.

 

[Felix Antipodes]

For me the Vault was the big incentive for joining WH+ when it was announced.  The model was a bonus that made it more financially attractive.  If they got that done right, and got the army builder app to at least a battle scribe level, there would be less complaints about the product.  It’s still worth my cash though I’m not blind to its faults.

[TrawlingCleaner]

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