A company doesn't need high stock prices to continue doing business. Sure stock holders might be unhappy with tanking stocks and stock holders do have influence on the direction of a company, but at the end of the day if a business makes enough money to keep the lights on then stocks prices don't really mean that much.
GW is making a profit, temporary or long term stock prices just reflect peoples speculations and isn't a reflection of how well the company is actually doing.
Then in that case, GW is doing extremely well, especially when they raise prices on their products, yet they get sold out within days after the price increase.
Technically true, but I'd argue that 80s and 90s woke is a bit different than 2020s woke.
More along the lines of modern woke is a more evolved version of 80s and 90s woke. The same people who pushed 80s and 90s woke on us, if they haven't gotten excommunicated by the woke tribe, are also supporting modern woke as well.
You give them an inch, they take a mile. You give them gay weddings and abortions, they start talking about how sexy women in media is objectifying and how a man chopping off his balls makes him a woman.
Sadly we're just in another transition period for the franchise. It started out as a tongue in cheek IP with a couple of digs at right wing politics and political figures, then it became "edge heavy metal cover" IP basically the grimdark era, and now it's transitioning into a more mainstream IP and attempting to appeal to modern political norms and ideas. The problem is that we find ourselves in the time where everything is political and everything is used as propaganda.
Most of the fans think that the zenith of 40K is that time when everything was edgy. But to be fair, that was a reaction to how most entertainment in the late 80s and early 90s was safe and sterile. Just like Starcraft and Fallout, 3rd Edition Warhammer was there to be a sort of counterbalance to the general spirit of the 90s and how safe everything was. Think of the Batman, Superman, Transformers, and GI Joe cartoons where death was a rarity, if they even have it at all.
Now you have wokesters making themselves known, and the last big thing that people loved was the MCU. So of course, now they're trying to copy both with superhero Primaris marines and by appealing to wokesters by bringing in Femstodes and painting conservatives like Carl Benjamin as the bad guy. I wouldn't be surprised if more loyalist Primarchs come back and form a sort of Justice League or Avengers-style group, and the new bad guys are right-wingers within the Imperium who are super-religious, who want to bring back the Imperium Eterna and roll back any changes the Primarchs might make. Or a group of male aristocrats complaining that women aren't sexy enough, linked to some cult of Slaanesh, bringing his influence to the pleasure worlds.......
True, but I always interpreted it as GW being a company primarily focused on selling plastic and things like lore being a secondary concern. Combine this with how large and complex the lore is and the effort it would take for any Black Library author to actually keep everything lore consistent and to a degree I think many BL authors don't really care about the IP, it's not their IP they didn't create it and don't own it) and many of them are just 'mercenaries' hired by a company to write stories for plastic minis (I think this also explains why some authors inject their own preferences and politics into the stories, as to get a sense of ownership or a sense or sense of actual impact to the IP).
I've seen other franchises have a better grasp of their lore and canon. Gundam, for instance, has sprawling works and several different canons, and there's no confusion where each work fits in which canon. Hell, the Star Wars Expanded Universe is technically older than Warhammer itself, with comics from the 70s and 80s still counting as canon up until the Disney sale. In one of the later-era novels, Luke Skywalker's wife was killed by the apprentice of a Sith woman whom he fought in the old Marvel comics from the 80s.
But you are right. Many BL authors don't really care about the IP in general, they're like Dave Filoni who only care about their own interpretation of the IP.
So the no-canon thing to me is basically just authors trying to be witty while covering their on asses from criticism working for a company that doesn't care.
Basically, yes. GW only truly cared about the miniatures, they don't care about the lore, they never did. The opposition for Femstodes came from suits who said that they didn't have Femstodes models, but that can easily be fixed. And of course, the Primaris broke the lore even worse, yet they were pushed like the next best thing when they came out and they even sold well.
BL writers had been lazy even before the woke.
Yep. Like I said, other franchises' writers worked hard enough to keep to a canon, but BL authors go with the whole ''no canon'' thing because they're too lazy to keep track of a canon.
He was specifically referring to the shitty grifting youtube channels claiming that the stock price had tanked(it didn't) and GW is going to fall apart any day now thanks to femstodes(nothing has changed, shit sells out within an hour same as it did before). Yes, stock prices are normally a reflection of speculators, but there isn't enough average joe trade volume to have any impact on the stock price in any meaningful way unlike say... a nationwide beer company being slammed in the media weekly for a year. So significant changes really only come up with a product release or financial reports.
Exactly. These Youtube channels keep selling the idea that GW is crashing and burning thanks to the boycott, yet business is booming, their stock prices are doing fine, and their merchandise sells out rather quickly. It doesn't support the narrative these grifters are pushing; the exact opposite is happening. This isn't the same as Disney not making a buck off Star Wars or Bud Light getting BTFO'd for going woke.
This has always been the case. That's why so much lore changed after rogue trader, that's why the entire necron faction changed overnight from being a vaguely egyptian themed rip off of Terminator, it's the same reason votan popped into existing out of nowhere as squats. Just purely considering the massive changes that GW has made to the lore over the decades, the femstodes thing is laughably minor by comparison to practically everything else. Some of it's because society as a whole and it's interests changed(don't expect to ever see the daemonculaba come back), some of it's because they wrote some really dumb shit back in the day that they don't want to fess up to(grey knights slaughtering sisters of battle to bathe in their blood like khorne berserkers comes to mind, or hell... inquisitor draco), usually it's just because they want to sell models(primaris).
Times really were different back then. Hell, remember when rape as drama was common in comic books? Not anymore. If you write such stories, you'll get slammed for being a pervert or a sexist. So I can't imagine them showing Grey Knights killing Sisters of Battle for their blood. But this makes the whole ''nothing is canon'' statement useful, since they can just write that stuff off as ''lol it was just a rumor/unreliable narrator BS'' and forget that they ever wrote such things.
The Femstodes are indeed a laughably minor change, especially when compared to the Primaris utterly breaking the way Space Marine chapters recruit and train their guys. At least with the Femstodes, all you need to do to make them acceptable is to say that the daughters of Terran nobles were also accepted alongside their sons. So instead of the Custodes coming from only the sons of the Terran nobles, you can alter that with two words and say that the Custodes ''came from the infant sons
and daughters of the Terran nobles.'' You wouldn't have to drastically alter how a group recruits their soldiers by having them suddenly accept randos from another planet when they've only ever trained and hazed folks that they recruit at a young age.
So for a lot of people who just want minis it's not convincing enough. If we ever get to the point where it's 3D printing is as simple as a buy the print, plug it in and immediately get high quality prints then GW is screwed (basically a Star Trek replicator). But until then people will likely still just pay the premium and buy from GW.