Beardies & Grognards
If you go to the Urban Dictionary you’ll find a definition of ‘beardie’ that is close to what I consider the real thing. It properly links the term to war gaming, but defines it as any player of Warhammer and this, I believe, is incorrect.
A beardy, really, is any old gamer. Grognard is another term for the same thing, which is slightly funnier because it has GROG and NARD in it, as did most of the parties I went to in college. Grognard comes from the Napoleonic wars, and is French for “Beer Scrotum.”
Grognard is usually used to specifically mean “any old gamer who complains about the new hot games that all the kids are playing and which he does not grok, unlike the term ‘grok,’ which he does grok, and which alone certainly makes him a beardie and probably a Grognard as well.”
To understand where the term Beardie comes from, you have to know something about how smart the guys at Games Workshop are.
Games Workshop produce both the Warhammer miniatures game, which is fantasy, and Warhammer 40,000, another miniature war game which is science fiction. They are far and away the most successful miniature wargame company in the history of the hobby and one of the most successful gaming companies in any category. They make many hundreds of millions of dollars off their game. No one has even come close to challenging their dominance in many years. Decades.
The world beat a path to their door, but not because they built a better mousetrap. Because they realized it’s not act of catching the mouse that matters to their customers, it’s the chase.
In order to play a miniature wargame, specifically in order to play in a sanctioned tournament, you need to
- Buy the miniatures
- Assemble them. This requires;
- Cyanoacrylic glue, which is to say Superglue, but usually of a different consistency than brand-name Super-glue
- Accellerant, which is a special chemical that makes the superglue dry instantly (producing a phenomenal amount of heat energy at the same time, watch your fingers!)
- Putty, because sometimes the glue isn’t enough, and…
- A drill to insert pins for strength, because sometimes the putty isn’t enough.
- Prime them
- Paint them which requires many colors of paint and ink and brushes of many stripe and probably…
- File down the parts that don’t fit together. This requires a file.
- Cut off the bits of errant metal left over from when it was originally made, requiring an X-Acto knife, and finally,
- Store it all, which requires something to keep all this shit in.
What you don’t need is: a rulebook. Because someone you know probably has one and you only really need it at the gaming table anyway.
The result is that you by definition spend considerably longer preparing your army for the game than you do actually playing. If a game takes six hours, that’s a long game. Assembling an entire army can take months.
Therefore the folks at GW have rightly identified that they don’t sell the game, they sell the craft. Everything that goes into making your army. The actual game is secondary. The mousetrap isn’t the point, it’s everything that leads up to placing it on the floor and seeing what happens.
The ideal Games Workshop customer is between 15 and 17. That’s not based on observational analysis, that’s based on their own internal memoranda. 15-17 is ideal for many reasons. Kids this age have a lot of free time to spend on the craft. Which means they’ll spend more money. 15-17 is about how old you have to be to really understand the game and make tactical and strategic decisions.
Games Workshop runs their own stores, about which more in a minute, but whether it’s their store or a regular game store, the parents are the ones spending the money. The parents need to feel comfortable dropping their kids off at the store for hours, unsupervised, with a wad of cash in their pocket.
This is why people older than 17 are not GW’s ideal customers. GW doesn’t want them. They actively discourage these people. For one thing, Games Workshop is constantly releasing new stuff. If you’ve been playing the game for a couple of years, you already have several complete armies and have invested a lot of time in painting your mans and you’re not super motivated to ditch them all and buy the new thing. You, reasonably, want to continue using the mans you have. This does not put any more money into GW’s pocket.
Furthermore, to be frank, the game is not very well designed. It doesn’t need to be, and GW knows it. The people playing it are young, enthusiastic, in love with the setting, and are not likely to be critical. They wouldn’t know if the game was well-designed and wouldn’t care if they did know. After you’ve played for a while, you begin to question the rules. You begin to look for something better. And GW isn’t interested in providing it. In part because they don’t want you to keep playing after this point. They want you out. Not only because you want to continue using the armies you’ve created, and therefore aren’t going to spend more money, and you complain about how dumb the game is, but because…
You’re old. You’re not a kid anymore. You don’t have to look like Gary Gygax to be off-putting to a parent, you can just be college-aged. Parents feel comfortable leaving their kids unsupervised in a store with other kids. Not with older kids, much less adults who are also gaming. And GW knows it. They’ve done the research.
And that’s what a beardie is. The opposite of GW’s ideal customer. Anyone who’s too old to play with the teenagers. Anyone who’s not a teenager themselves. The beard is the telling sign.
It’s a brilliant strategy and one that’s worked for them for 20 years. I met some of their head people when I was at Decipher and we were making the Lord of the Rings RPG. GW was making the LotR miniature wargame. We were talking about integration and cross-promotion. I used the opportunity to talk to them about some of their famous fuckups. And I came away thinking “wow, these guys are smart.”
Famously, Blizzard pitched Warcraft as a Warhammer RTS. GW looked at it and said “no, we don’t think this is a good idea,” and turned them down. Blizzard filed the serial numbers off, released it as Warcraft and a massive hit franchise was created. Then they did it again with Warhammer 40k and Starcraft. To those of us in the trenches, this made GW look like fools.
After meeting and talking with them, I changed my mind. “We had been thinking about video games for a long time, we learned a lot about what it would take to do them right. Blizzard was well-positioned to dominate their industry and that was obvious to us, but we weren’t. We didn’t want to get into a business we weren’t properly positioned to dominate. Warcraft would probably have been a hit had it been a Warhammer RTS, but probably not as big a hit, and we wouldn’t have been in control the way we wanted to be.”
This makes sense when you consider that these people are already dominating their own industry. They aren’t looking for a break. They’re already kings of their hill. They didn’t think Warcraft would tank, they didn’t think the guys at Blizzard were dumb, they thought “this isn’t our business, and we don’t think we’d excel here the way we do in our industry.”
That takes a kind of restraint and strategic-level planning most companies don’t have. Most companies, when presented with a phenomenal opportunity, grab it, whether it’s well-suited to them or not. Now, this usually happens when the company is small and will grab any opportunity, but even huge companies make this mistake. Witness Time Warner and AOL.
They don’t even talk about themselves as being part of the games industry. They refer to themselves as “the Games Workshop Hobby” even as they instruct their people not to refer to themselves as being in the game industry.
The guys at GW are the smartest dudes I’ve met in this or any industry. Smart. That does not mean nice. And if you’re a game retailer, you probably know what I mean.
Games Workshop runs their own stores. They are clean, well-lit, staffed by clean, smiling, friendly people who know what to ask you, when, and know when to shut up. It’s not unlike a Scientology center. They’re so nice, it’s creepy. They are given training, they have lists of things to say. A flowchart. If someone comes by and stands outside the window looking at the painted armies on display, an employee comes outside, greets you warmly and asks “Do you know what you’re looking at?”
It’s a precisely calculated question because GW knows that IF you are the kind of person who’s going to stand outside and gawk then you probably DO NOT know what this game is, or even THAT it’s a game!
It is, you might be thinking, technically illegal to make, distribute, and sell your own product in your own stores. That’s what’s called a multilateral monopoly. To get around this, GW also sells to other distributors who turn around and sell GW’s product to normal retailers.
Those normal retailers can either order from GW or from a normal distributor. Usually they order from the distributor because they’re not only ordering GW stuff, and the entire reason distributors exist is so the retailer can place one call and get all his stock from several manufacturers.
But for those who’s stock is mostly GW games, they often order direct from GW. GW tracks this. If you’re ordering a lot, GW thinks you’re selling a lot which means the game is popular in your area. So they give you a temporary discount. Can’t be a permanent discount because then there’d be no reason to order from the distributor and that would be illegal too. With the discount maybe you’ll order more. If you do, GW makes a note of it, takes your discount away, and opens a GW store right next to you. Or nearby. You get the idea. You’ve proven to them there’s a demand, probably more demand than you can afford to meet without GW giving you a discount, so they know this is a good place to open a store.
This is perfectly legal, but its douchebaggery of the highest order and therefore I must respect it, even while it repulses me.
When I was working with George Vasilakos, a good friend of mine who runs Eden Studios and runs his own store, I was able to order product directly from the distributor. Huge discount. I was spending thousands of dollars on miniatures (not GW’s, I am, after all, a beardie), and saving a lot of money.
There was a GW store across the street, at The Block at Orange, in Orange County. One day I needed some paints and I didn’t want to wait, so my friend Craig and I walked over to the GW store. Craig made a note of how clean and bright and nice and…creepy it was. Clean and bright and nice is good, don’t get me wrong, and God knows the gaming industry needs more of that, but there is such a thing as too much and this was it.
When I had my paints and a few brushes and was ready to check out, the nice guy behind the counter smiled at me and said “If you spend 15 dollars more, you’ll get one more bone.”
I am not used to people smiling at me and telling me how lucky I am to get boned, so this was noteworthy. I asked what he was talking about.
He realized that I was a new customer and with enthusiasm pressed a small card into my hand as he explained. It was instantly clear. This was one of those cards they punch every time you buy a gelato or a sub sandwich and once you have 10 or 12 or whatever, you get one free. The stamps they used had skulls on them, hence “bones.”
“Oh,” I said. “I get it. Well, that’s ok, I’ll stick with what I’ve got.”
“Are you sure?” He said, in the manner of someone trying to get me to eat just one more bite, forcing me to explain.
“No, I don’t usually shop here. I usually order everything from Alliance.” The aforementioned distributor. In other words “I circumvent your ideal revenue stream.”
He curled his lip at me, pulled back and said “Oh…then you don’t get any bones at all,” and snapped the card out of my hand.
As we left the store, my friend Craig was smiling. I looked at him.
“Man,” he said, grinning, “I don’t know what any of that meant, but you sure pissed him off.”
I said smart, remember. Not nice.
End of Line
Popularity: 15% [?]
(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...Recently
January 25th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Hey Matt,
Was refered over to your blog by the Wick, and I must say that I find your diadactic douchbaggery to be my kinda entertainment.
I must say, as a long time “Beardy” player of GW games, you’ve most excellently described the situation that I have for many years unconsciously felt, but never been able to put my finger on until reading this post.
I’m glad privateer press has come about, for they do not actively attempt to alienate their playerbase like GW is doing.
I look forward to many more interesting and entertaining writings/musings from you. I’d love to hear more about the insights you have into GW.
joe
January 25th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Joe, glad to have you aboard!
Privateer Press is doing great, though still just a drop in the bucket compared to GW. They’re success is predicated on the fact that, unlike all the other companies who’ve challenged GW, they didn’t try and steal GW’s customers. They went after the people I describe in this post. Older gamers who want a better game and don’t want to spend as much money.
I don’t have a whole lot more to say about GW. Only thing I left out was the time GW sued Blizzard.
February 28th, 2010 at 11:21 am
I loved the article, I don’t even touch GW but I empathize entirely, I’m a D&D geek and Hasbro is slowly doing the same thing to my game. And yet, if I were to stab these people, I’M the one that would go to jail..