Double poasting for topic change.
To me, this image explains why GW will not survive if it doesn't reach down to an audience with less cash.
These are Gundam kits for beginners. $5-6 gets an interested kid's allowance or birthday money and lets him take the hobby for a test drive. He gets a complete, easy-to-build model that he can assemble in an hour.
Maybe he hates it and the kit gets shitcanned. Maybe he thinks it's boring, and the model sits on his desk for a few years before he throws it away. Or maybe he turns into a titanic nerd willing to buy a $200 kit and all the panel liners and paints he needs to make it look good.
GW currently does not have an easy, inexpensive "gateway drug" like this. Giving the spergy consoomer nature of their audience, they may not be able to sell something like this to kids without some stinky, fedora-wearing manchild elbowing them out of the way to buy ALL THE THINGS off the shelf at Target.
There is no Heroquest or Battle Masters like there was when I was a kid. The closest thing I can think of is those box games at Barnes and Noble, but even those cost about the same as a video game. And what is your average kid with $50 of birthday money going to pick--a new vidya, or some weird models to a weird game with complicated rules?
Thanks for coming to my SPED Talk.