Games Workshop Moves to Cut Off Australian Online Retailers

How much does Games Workshop want to rule the World?

A great article on Ten Copper tells the story...

Games Workshop has always had a somewhat fearful relationship with the internet. While it’s easy to paint the big company of any market in a negative light, this is not an exaggeration: in the past, Games Workshop has shut down its own forums, has purged every scrap of free rules or hobby content from its website until it became nothing more than a shop, and has served more takedown orders than you’d think possible for a company which literally makes tiny plastic space men.

But whether it’s shutdowns, shutterings or takedowns, one thing is clear. Games Workshop is the lumbering, conservative giant of the miniature wargaming world, and it has approached the internet with the same absolute desire it brings to every other aspect of its business: control.

In 2011, Games Workshop was faced with an unspeakable threat: many of their players (mostly from Australia) were purchasing goods direct from the UK and the US — and in the process saving incredible amounts over Games Workshop’s inflated local prices. Their response wasn’t so much a warning shot as an atomic bomb: a draconian new set of trade agreements that imposed unprecedented restrictions on where third-party retailers could and could not ship their products.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://tencopper.com/article/2014/08/games-workshop-secretly-moves-to-cut-off-australian-online-retailers/

It is really a good read.

Loken