Shannar, Sealord wrote:I think Brexit did them a big favor. That and video games, it was a great year for GW video games.
Bundles surely played a role, but I suspect that it's smaller than the role played by the decline in the pound and game royalties.
This is actually the kind of information GW can't (easily) hide. Since they their (half year) results for investors, we can put a number on these.
Total pre-tax profit: £13.8m vs £6.3m last year
Royalties: £3.3m vs £1.5m last year
Revenue: £70.9m vs £55.3m last year
Revenue at constant currency: £62.7m vs £55.3m last year
So royalties indeed more then doubled (I'm guessing mainly Total war), but they are still only about 1/6th of the total profit, which is actually less (% wise) then the 1/4 it was last year.
Revenue was up 7 million (in constant currency), so even without the drop of the pound there is growth. Margins also increased at the same time (which is probably in part due to the drop of the pound) by about 4%, which probably accounts for another 2,8 million profit. But if we factor this in then pound and royalties only account for 4.5 of the 7.5million increase in profit. So they still managed to increase profits by 3 million on their own, still a respectable 50% increase.
It should be noted that (from what I can see in the half year report) about half of that increase is due to "Non-core" sales, which is anything that is not directly related to the game AoS, 40k or LotR. In this case mainly Blood Bowl and a new form factor for White Dwarf. It should always be seen if they can repeat this next year (though they're planning on it).
It's hard to find an easy overview of the financial history of GW (I don't feel like browsing through 5 different reports and I can't find an easy overview of the past few years). But they definitely seem to be doing better then in the past few years.
Rod