Another year, another price hike for Warhammer miniatures
In what has become an annual tradition, Games Workshop has announced an across-the-board price increase to its miniatures for the popular Warhammer tabletop games. Games like Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, and the recently launched Warhammer: The Old World are titans in tabletop miniatures, but are often lamented as some of the most expensive miniatures skirmish games that you can play.
That complaint isn’t without merit, but the high prices also aren’t without reason—Games Workshop’s miniatures are certainly some of the most detailed, impressive ones you can buy, with by far the most varied range of models. Games Workshop, however, is increasingly facing competition from higher-resolution, cheaper 3D printers and an army of home sculptors selling the license to print as many of their designs as you’d like.
In a post pragmatically titled “2024 Pricing Update” on its Warhammer Community website, Games Workshop announced that prices will increase between 3% and 5% on many of its products, varying depending on what they are. The prices for some products won’t increase: Paint pots, paint sets, White Dwarf magazine, and Games Workshop’s Black Library fiction won’t get more expensive. That hasn’t always been the case in the past.
The 2022 price increase was a major point of pain, with the cost of miniatures rising by around 5% across the board, with books, scenery, and resin minis rising 10% and metal miniatures spiking a whopping 20%. The 2023 rise was an average of 6% for plastic miniatures, and another rise for resin miniatures.
US-based tabletop industry publication ICv2 has pointed out that this is the third year in a row that Games Workshop has publicly announced a price increase. Prior to these more public posts, which started in 2022, Games Workshop’s price increases were mostly buried in corporate reports and generally topped out at about 3%. Though it has caused ongoing shipping concerns, Games Workshop has also—at least publicly—escaped many of the worst effects of being a UK-based manufacturer during and after Brexit.
Games Workshop is the only game in town for the official Warhammer miniatures, and those game worlds have never been more popular—that much is true. But years of above average, compounding price increases make other miniatures games look pretty good, and might also drive tabletop gamers toward the horde of counts-as, lookalike miniatures from resin printers and indie sculptors.