Cursed City pre-orders come… and go
Warhammer Quest: Cursed City now has a release date – 10 April, 2021. I can’t speak to elsewhere, but in Australia the pre-orders went up at midday, and by 4pm anyone wanting this new set was greeted with this:
I’m one of the lucky ones, as I received an email from my LGS about the preorders going live and was able to secure one of their 9 copies. The 4pm time is simply when I happened to refresh the GW page, they were probably gone before then, so I hope you were quick.
The Cursed City set is proving popular, I don’t recall the other Warhammer Quest releases selling out like this. The price is less than I feared, but still more than the price of a game like Gloomhaven, which provides fewer miniatures, but more game for your money.
If you missed out, I am confident that Games Workshop will be restocking as quickly as possible. For me this will be a gift to be opened once I have painted my existing miniatures collection, and I wanted to ensure I would have a box to hand!
Scent of a Gamer 
Hype + FOMO + Artificial Scarcity = Instantly OOS.
I Wish Games Workshop would stop playing this sort of manipulative game with us.
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I was reading through a thread of disappointed people and it occurred to me that even though GW told my LGS they would be allocated 9 copies, that doesn’t mean they will get them all, so we’ll see if I even get mine!
Although the same thing happened with Blood Bowl Season 2 and that’s is readily available now.
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Yeah, I don’t know how much COVID can be used as the excuse for this right now. It feels much more like artificial scarcity in order to train the customer base, even if this particular product will be made available again a little bit later.
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I’ve actually thought they’ve handled the imbalance between supply and demand pretty smoothly lately. First wave, don’t sell more than you have copies produced, and send copies out to local retailers before opening the preorder floodgates online. Limit boxes to one per household. If they go the same route as with Indomitus, second wave will be unlimited but with no guaranteed delivery date – they’ll keep making them and sending them out, but still operating at reduced capacity.
I realize my perception entirely builds on believing their scarcity to not be a situation manufactured with ill intent.
My local store already received their boxes, so I had the chance to dig through the contents yesterday š
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Thanks Fredrik, my feeling is these problems could be reduced if they were prepared to take preorders a bit sooner by announcing things further in advance. The limit of one per order was a good first step.
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I feel like the limited nature is manufactured. Indomitus “apparently” took them by surprise, and so they went M2O for the second wave which was not unlimited. This is a matter of simply not enough being produced (or made available) when they have all of the numbers and metrics to be able to gague consumer interest well in advance.
I’m sure “sold out immediately” looks good on someone’s balance sheet or report, though.
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It’s crazy how GW are handling these box launches. I wasn’t looking to buy but I saw it was sold out on my usual sources at 10:04am. Ridiculous!
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Yes, I was fortunate that I was in front of my computer to receive and act of the the email alert immediately.
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They need to fix this business of it saying “No longer available online”. Given the distrust that they stirred up with Indomitus it would be easy to look at that and assume the game was strictly limited edition and now gone forever. I don’t think that’s the case but that information should be coming from GW directly rather than secondhand from other suppliers or based on supposition. At least they’ve made it one copy per order now – no-one needs to pre-order more than that if it means other people are going to miss out.
Anyway, that’s my moan over – I managed to snag myself a copy by going direct to GW, can’t wait to get my hands on it. Hopefully its popularity will encourage them to do a lot more with this, it looks like a setting that’s ripe for expansions. š
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Maybe they should take pre-orders further in advance and then produce to demand? Sounds crazy though!
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Yeah, I’d be happy with that. Or even just carry on the way they have been but instead of saying “No Longer Available” say something like “All the advance copies have sold but we’re working on making more, if you want to pre-order go for it but it might take a while to reach you” or words to that effect. Like I say, I’m pretty certain it’ll be back but that’s easy for me to say, I snagged a copy. It’s the fact that it’s becoming routine now, if you want one of these big releases you have to be sitting at the computer at the very moment it goes on sale, hitting F5 and fretting, and not everyone is able to do that (and even if you can, as I was this time, it takes a lot of the fun out of it).
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Agreed, I don’t like the feeling of having to rush through check out in case my item is gone by the time I try to pay for it.
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I mean, I like supporting my FLGS more than buying anything from GW direct, but I really feel lately like GW haven’t been doing themselves a whole lot of favors with releases and with supply/demand and with the goodwill of the fandom in general.
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