I think the craziest thing with this change is they went from a webstore that had their models displayed everywhere to one where their brand is plastered everywhere in their place and only a few models here or there.
No that’s the business. The game and models are a third and second to the brand. This end game strategy. They are exploiting everything they can to the max with no regard to what doesn’t continue to make money.
I actually think this is their first fantastic step back towards helping out small businesses. It gives us even less reason to use the webstore over buying from a FLGS. Well done, James!
I was literally thinking just that. I'm now far more likely to go to Element Games or similar online stores for both their discounts and easily navigable sites.
One of the worst things is that the 360 pictures are gone. They were really helpful for checking how some of the smaller details were painted on the models...
Yeah... I mean I never bought models direct from GW anyway, but as someone who's interest is like, 80% in the converting and modeling side of things, being able to see the whole picture is *kind of a big deal*. Back to google image search on that one I guess. *facepalm*
As a web designer I often referred to their original webstore as an example of an excellent website. Just a great reference point, taking developers and clients to it and showing them all things it did right (all the categories immediately at your disposal, breadcrumbs and yet also liveliness with new releases immediately theming the frontpage.
There were a couple of bad links that had remained there for a few years, and the paints section never made any sense. But compared to the new store, it was award winning. What do you think this is going to do to their sales?
Agreed, it was concise and you can go straight to something that you want. The site now is a cluttered mess filled with shit. I have no idea where I am even supposed to go.
The filters for factions should probably have been radio buttons on the old design (people rarely want to look at two factions together), but at least it was largely keyboard accessible. The new site isn't, if you don't use a mouse/trackpad/touchscreen then you can't access the Shop link or the search bar.
There is tag for that called "Horus Heresy". AFAIK every single "legends" model on sale is regular unit in HH? Just don't market them as 40K units (or, better yet, actually write units for them good enough to include them in 40k).
Looking at the mobile version I thought “huh, this is really unfriendly for the user… but maybe it’s not optimised for mobile. Might be better on desktop.” So to hear that it was *designed* for mobile is absolutely unbelievable. If they paid $6m for that… they need their money back.
I legit thought the same. Reminds me of news pages where 70% of the article is giant ads. Text is small, images are big and just look like some Warhammer themed stock photos. What blows my mind is they turned a webstore into what looks like a news site with advertisements but the advertisement sare the models they sell...
I really like the combination of GW and FW but the overall design is too modern. There’s no color and it feels lifeless. It almost feels like they designed it to be used in the in-store tablets at GW stores.
Just took a look at the store. There isn't a symbol for "finecast" anymore. The only thing letting you know something is finecast is clicking "read more" on the kit's page and reading the last paragraph.
That's pretty much exactly what it's made for. Well, partly, at least. Let's be real here, a lot of hobby veterans likely aren't actually ordering from GWs webshop anyway because they can get it cheaper elsewhere, except for exclusive releases and those are just plain easier to get in store, if you have one close to you, which likely will be the case at least in Europe's biggest markets (UK, Germany, maybe France)
Holy shit. 6million. I work in consulting and I figured this had to have been some internal work. If they paid a company for this shit i wouldnt be suprised if that company is paying penalties to GW for failure to meet contract terms. This site is disgraceful
How's this different when the CEO many years back (Kirby? iirc) that used his wife's company to make the website (that we were used to until a day ago) and that also cost several million as well. All these sound like inside trading and corruption within business circles.
So many of us had theorized previously that GW honestly does not play-test the 40k books prior to their release (or they do and the fact they're often broken is by design) and now it would appear that theory extends towards their webstore and customer interaction testing? Fascinating.
You can also add their first attempt at the 40k app to that list. It barely worked two years after launch, even though they marketed it as 'complete' after just three months. Kinda like Games Workshop don't believe they need to even try anymore.
@AlaskanWolf16 When you swipe on an image, it pulls up a servo skull. Every single model page does this, it's obvious that the 3D scrolling isn't operational yet. Not everything is an insidious plot dude.
I miss the days when clicking on an army’s tab gave you a one page blurb about who and what the army was in the lore along with artwork that could help inspire you with ideas.
Oh come on, you don’t like factions that clump the armies of the Imperium, except Marines, ALL of Chaos, and ALL XENOS as equal? Because all Xenos are pretty much interchangeable…
If there's one positive we can get out of this situation is that more people will probably start using Ebay or 3rd-party retailers to buy their Warhammer stuff now.
@@falsehero2001 Well, as disappointing as their lack of promotion for Middle-Earth games for most of the last decade or so has been, they are supposedly losing the license in the foreseeable future, so with everything else they sell being Warhammer IP, it makes sense to rebrand the company. "Games Workshop" as a name is really just a nostalgic reminder accurately reflecting at most the first sixteen years of its existence up until 1991. And I assume that the higher-ups have been hating it for decades at this point for sounding too generic, so it feels like it has been inevitable for a long time. Quite possible that the Middle-Earth license has been the only thing keeping the name around.
i mean, they might as well drop the name at this point. they really arent GW anymore. im not going to pretend like the company was always awesome, but they at least used to _care_ about their universes. now its just soulless crap pumped out by corporate suits. this isnt Games Workshop anymore. this is Primaris Games Workshop. "it's better now. because we said so."
The plan, for years, has been to get rid of the GW branding. It's not easily marketable, it's bad for SEO, it's not great from a licensable IP perspective, and it's not culturally relevant any more. When people think of Games these days they think of video games, not tabletop. The shops have all been renamed, the only boxes that carry the outdated GW logo are from old stock. GW won't exist as a brand in years to come and they've made that clear.
One of the things I really liked about the old site was clicking on some models then being able to scroll down and get a list of paints that were used. I never copy their whole paint scheme but a lot of times there would be some parts I really liked and it showed what paints were used to create it. I bet it sold some paint for them too. Hopefully they put that back at some point.
My local game stores now have a better website than Games Workshop does. Truly a small business with a website built off a basic template looks better than this. I like being able to order forge world stuff from the same store as GW but that's the only positive thing I have to say about it. Everything else is awful and I want to go back immediately.
@@richardfoulger4486 yeah, but before it was just nice to know "Hey this plague smoke uses this colour, maybe I'll try the recipe" when browsing, having a seperate app makes it more annoying
@@richardfoulger4486 the problem is the citadel colour app is, well, complete shit. You can't look up a paint, and see the recipes it works with, or look up a base paint, and the highlight colours for it. Instead you can look up a recipe, that's it. And they are completely missing some colours from it.
I dont particularly like it. Its nice that forge world and the gw store is combined but thats about it. The website is confusing with no real filters (its nice that I can check what minies are metal but I would like more specific filters outside of 40k, marines, dark angels), lacks personality and the charm of the old one with those miniatures showcases and genuinely feels like it was made purely for mobile. Like come on, some of the borders dont fit and the pictures are tiny
The impressive is that the pissed off fanbase still giving them endless amount of money, so tbh... why would they change? They get what they want: money.
Wow, that's a mess of a website! The UI overlaps on mobile and all the photos are low resolution. Hell, it even let's me ship an order my local store (which has been closed and the building condemned 6 montha ago). I'm tempted to send it - see what happens 😅
That's how they paid for it before too lol. Just you wait too, they will increase the price to 3rd party sellers to by another 5% one of these days. They are scum and that's the level they work at. They will make it so you have to go to they're cancer site. Thank fuck for 3D printing lol, I 3D print everything out of spite now.
I think it’s funny that this site is for people new to the hobby but warhammer has a massive barrier to entry and most other GW policies expand that barrier
The new store has a lot of void space that is very white but also somehow has very big pictures, on a monitor it hurts my eyes after just a minute or two.
I thought it couldn't be that bad, then I checked it out and couldn't find a single aspect that was an improvement over the old design, but lots of changes that made it an objectively worse user experience. I also saw that 35 out of the 53 Tyranid products were listed as being out of stock, which seems crazy, but I don't know if that's related to the UI re-design.
That's true, but I couldn't find a way to change how many items were displayed by default. It seems hard-coded to only load the first 12 items, and then forces you to click "Show More" at the bottom to load another 12, which might negate the time saved from loading faster @@Shippo89
The Nids being out of stock has been like that pre site change, its been difficult to get most of the nids models(mostly the old ones) as for what i heard its due to the major growth from covid/post covid that they couldn't keep up for some kits
Feels like they are catering to their target audience. My 75 year old dad could read that website across the room, and looking at the prices for the new Sigmar figs he's the only one that could afford them.
You know what we had 20 years ago? Functional websites. Now we have "web design" as envisioned by toddlers. I want to scream in all caps at the "designer" that when I go to a website on a computer, that a compromised phone layout is not desirable, I'm not a tiktok degenerate who can only swipe in one direction. It's been an ongoing regression and it's frustrating beyond belief to constantly be subjected to this level of incompetence.
I agree 10000%, it's fucking abysmal. It's typical of GW though at this point they are so ready to throw everything that's good away to bring in new players that they have annoyed pretty much everyone who actually buys their plastic shite. Not to mention them ruining the animation communinity on here just to manipulate everyone onto Warhammer+ I can't fucking stand them.
@@roboffen2741 And every single site has to be screaming white, just in case you had anything left of your retinas after being subjected to those visual hate crimes.
What the shop is missing atm and is actually important for ease of use is a propper filter for roles related to the table top. Trying to find a certain type unit, say fast attack, out of the entire line of that fraction is, especially if you are new to it, ny impossible.
It's funny, if you use the upper-left SHOP dropdown and select Warhammer 40k, at the very bottom of that list is an option for 'Unit Type'. Then it brings up every item in their store, but changes the 'Filter' element in the top-left to let you filter by various keywords, but those keywords don't account for all the different battlefield roles or races, and you can't select more than 1 filter option at a time, so it's essentially useless on multiple levels.
What is fast attack?....it doesn't exist anymore..... all the things that we searched for don't really exist in 40k any more. So that's probably why it's gone. There are no real battle field roles other than "characters, battle line, other"
Last I checked, they got rid of the 360° model view. I found it super helpful when painting, as it helped me figure out what was metal/ wood/ whatever on the backs of models.
I do like the consolidation of FW and GW into one site. Especially for Xenos factions exclusive to 40k, it seemed weird to separate a few units from the whole selection.
I miss the 360 degree pictures of models. It was super helpful when painting was the main reason I used their website at all. I only buy directly from their website if the item I want is sold out in every hobby shop in the country
I used to spend ages just roaming around the GW webstore, full of colour, themes, picture, and personality. When I had a spare five minutes I’d do the same on the FW site dreaming of buying the perfect models. Now I land on a grainy picture of someone rolling a dice and have to click through 3 text screens before I actually get to models. Once there, the pictures are lifeless and dry and I have to scroll forever with no way of filtering my preferences properly. I’m afraid this is simply not good enough if GW want me to spend more buying it from them than FLGS.
I've worked on making online stores in the past. The old GW store was pretty bad, but the changes make it look like pre-ads Amazon. This isn't a 5 million dollar investment: It's a 20 minute hackjob. Hopefully AB-testing show them that the conversion rate has tanked, navigation time has dropped, and they roll some changes back, fast.
Browsing entire ranges using the "show more" button is also a pain in the butt. A range like Astra Militarum has 80+ entries and the shop only loads 12 more entries at a time when clicking "show more". That means a not insignificant number of clicks to browse the entire range as they didn't include a "show all" button this time around. Considering there is empirical evidence showing that every click necessary to find what the customer wants on a webshop increases the risk of losing business, it's such a weird design decision. The Emperor forbid you're browsing any of the Horus Heresy Space Marine ranges with 150+ products.
So I play Space Marines, but it's a custom faction (Iron Snakes). There's no Generic Space Marines filter for 40k or 30k on the website. Your only option is to see the newest released models or you have to pick a Chapter and then screen through all the chapter specific models to find a generic unit.
I'm missing orders from my account and no more wishlist has me frustrated. Finding things all other again is a huge pain. I get it but come on keep my orders and let us keep our wishlists.
It will always be 'games workshop' in my books. It's not that I hold the name in high status... its just that I've been calling it that for 20 years. People like me probably won't put in the small amount of mental effort to go along with change.
Similar, except they mostly lost me when they rebranded from Citadel to Games Workshop back in the day, once the original crew left/retired and Citadel went to GW and entered the corporate world it all started to go downhill from a hobby perspective (even as it made bank as a business), the mail order trolls were the backbone of the company!
Should have an option for ‘new player’ and ‘veteran player’ so you don’t have the new player spam on the new website. 😊 plus GW should do a questionare for customers telling them for example: how long have you been involved with the hobby?” Etc etc.
Seens like business ( or devs more likely) people who haven't used the website have very much tryed to go on stylish, modern, graphic design side while ignoring most quality of life features :(
another thing about the forge world integration which is nice is that i can finally get forge world items delivered to my local store for free shipping
bringing botthe main and FW stores together i think is for the better given the reliance of HH, blood bowl, necromunda and the upcomming legions and old world will have on them for models and parts, means people can see everything in 1 place and not split over 2. i miss the wishlist thing, plus the new page is missing some orders that i have that are currently "open" from made-to-order stuff (the BA bandai figure and a seperate order for rogue trader), ontop of my pre-order from 2 weekends ago also not being listed (yet a order i made last friday is listed)
They're also missing some stuff I think - was looking for the special edition Einhyr Champion and it's no longer there when I believe it's meant to be available until the 6th November
I still had the old link in my browser history, and it redirects accurately. The pictures are all missing, and when I first checked, it also lacked an "add to basket" button, but I just checked again, and you can actually buy it.
One odd thing I've noticed: When you click "shop", you have to browse all the way down to the subfaction before you see any products. BUT: if you go to the address window and edit the url, you can go back to the /warhammer-40000 level (or /age-of-sigmar etc) and see every model for that game system. Or /warhammer-40000/space-marines for everything in the major faction.
@@SmashingSnow you have to go to a small side scrolling menu at the bottom of the page, choose other warhammer 40,000 games then choose the game from another side scrolling menu. Really unintuitive. If you're internet savvy you should find it but so many people aren't. It wasn't exactly straightforward on the previous site but at least most people knew where to look due to it being the same for years.
Not checked out the new website yet but I just wanted to mention that from a technical point of view it's entirely possible to optimise a website for both PC and mobile - you don't have to focus on one or the other, so if their website isn't working well on PC then that's a bug not a feature
You have to click through so many things to get to the stuff what you want. New customers will be overwhelmed and old ones will just leave out of frustration.
One of the things missing is the unit/base sizes in the description. It's useful to know the base sizes models for a multitude of reasons. Now, after clicking through several models, this information is just missing.
It feels like they've combined the market and shop website, well I say shop, but I mean catalogue as this is just where I look at miniatures before buying them somewhere cheaper.
Just tried browsing the new site for a few minutes on both phone and desktop... emphasis on the word "tried". Whoever they hired/contracted for this redesign utterly robbed them blind and needs to never work in the web design industry again.
I loathe mobile design. Even on a phone I hate using it but to force that sort of design on me when I'm using a PC? Fark that. Giant pictures, lots of scrolling, hard to navigate, no thank you.
Been a follower and a customer since 1985. ...Back when there were only 4 stores. ....I've seen every crazy trend they have tried to implement. ...They will return to Games Workshop again soon. ... you'll see.
I'm a software developper and i'm very surprised by the new design, it's realy not good IMO. The UX is very bad from what i can tell, and the UI ... Well ... I would say it's very sober, almost bland, i dont see the "artistic" side of warhammer through it.
Got the email, had a look. Had to queue for a few minutes to get on it. Found layout and navigation awkward. Think they could have done with some more UX time. Not a fan. Good job i rarely use them to order from 😂
i went into my local store today to get a friend who just started some paint and tools for his birthday. i didnt know what paints id need for an ork army so i thought id have a quick look at the website for the ones they use to have at the bottom of the listing to find it gone. meant a bit more guess work seems a odd more given their want for new players to remove the helpful list of all the paints youd need for that model
They shouldn't even sell forge world models anymore if they're not going to allow people to play with them such a money grab. It should mention model is illegal to use in games and not supported by games workshop app
Looked at the shop and WOW, it's absolutely awful. It really feels like 80% of the space is empty and unused and the overall it feels like made for a touch screen not a PC.
also, none of my addresses have migrated over. I also dont think anyone is going to stop calling them Games Workshop. Calling them Warhammer doesnt sit right. The game is called warhammer, not the company
I really hate the removal of the 'stuff like this' and the 'painting' section. Makes it a lot harder to find similar stuff you might want, and I hate to lose the immediate painting suggestions
I'd *hope* this is driven by date on GW's end, but given how much nicer the new site feels on mobile vs desktop, I'd assume they designed it for mobile first as most of their customers are purchasing via mobile vs desktop.
As a Web Designer is page is seriously freaking me out. It ticks so, so many boxes of what you should NOT DO when designing a web store, it's just insane that it was greenlit. Also the money spent on this, just wow got they heavily overcharged. Probably did not bother to ask for offers at other agencies and just went for the most trendy and fanciest. Anyhow this design is a very typical one for the UK and the USA design studios. A combination of mainly utmost minimalism, (fancy) showcasing, colour scarcity, one paging and a brand landing (page) - I apologise, but I don't know the correct english terms for the design. These design themes combined is already a bad idea, as they are contradictory, you can't have utmost minimalism and colour scarcity, while you try to (fancy) showcase. Also a one pager for a shop, thats simply impossible, as a shop will always has subpages. Imagine the whole shop on one page, have fun waiting for it to load. What a web stop has to achieve is inviting customers to stay and spend time, while at the same time be very easy to read, use and path/map. A visitor should know at any time where he is, how he got there, what to expect, find and be able to go back step by step, as well as switch to a different section by a simple click. A low amount of clicks to reach the target is another high important rule to stick to. Furthermore does a customer wants to see as many products as is possible at once, adding more or switching to others with a simple click (while having options), be able to compare, filter, search (contex and index too, not just name), see the price, understand what it is etc. Just alone these few rules are mostly not obeyed. You constantly get lost and have to start anew, especially on mobile ironically enough, you always have to go through the menu or start to switch to a different section, can't even backtrack. The movement isn't uniform, some pages are one pagers with continous down scrolling others you've to scroll horizontally or they are just a static or are a weird mix. You've to do an excessive amount of clicks, the site feels uninviting and cluttered with useless stuff, the search function is pretty useless as it is, you can only see a handful of products per site, etc. I could continue like this for a long time, probably write a master thesis why this web store is sucks. But it's already getting too long. In short, whoever made this page for GW and charged them a ridiculous amount for it, should really come back to earth and QA outside of their bubble and consider what the main device for browsing a webstore still is for the majority (desktop, though most purchases done are via mobile). Warhammer. com has an awful User Experience, one of the worst I've ever been made and truly a shame for a companie the size of GW and a subpar, confusing and barely thought through UI. It's not all bad, but the page should really be changed asap, as GW won't benefit from it long term.
I think the craziest thing with this change is they went from a webstore that had their models displayed everywhere to one where their brand is plastered everywhere in their place and only a few models here or there.
Yah I was shocked I was like cool but where are the models and art if someone showed me this landing page I would have no clue what they sold
The website is so bland and colourless. And some of the pictures are so corporate...
Far from fun, vibrant and alive.
It really looks like a regular corp brand site than a hobby site
No that’s the business. The game and models are a third and second to the brand. This end game strategy. They are exploiting everything they can to the max with no regard to what doesn’t continue to make money.
It’s terrible, looks like Business to business type website, not really a consumer friendly webstore
I actually think this is their first fantastic step back towards helping out small businesses. It gives us even less reason to use the webstore over buying from a FLGS. Well done, James!
I was literally thinking just that. I'm now far more likely to go to Element Games or similar online stores for both their discounts and easily navigable sites.
Doesn't bother me because I pretty much never buy directly from them. I've always buy models from local owned gaming stores or 2nd hand models.
well they have models that can only be bought online at their site. :(
An annoying thing for LGS is that if they have a discount on GW models, new customers may not know which are forgeworld and dont get the discount.
@@NecroGoblin-yl2fx believe me I can get them without going through GW directly
One of the worst things is that the 360 pictures are gone. They were really helpful for checking how some of the smaller details were painted on the models...
Yeah... I mean I never bought models direct from GW anyway, but as someone who's interest is like, 80% in the converting and modeling side of things, being able to see the whole picture is *kind of a big deal*.
Back to google image search on that one I guess. *facepalm*
Jesus Christ.... really? Who works there?! What were they thinking...?
This. I really liked that feature.
Well said.
@@mistformsquirrelcheapskate
As a web designer I often referred to their original webstore as an example of an excellent website. Just a great reference point, taking developers and clients to it and showing them all things it did right (all the categories immediately at your disposal, breadcrumbs and yet also liveliness with new releases immediately theming the frontpage.
There were a couple of bad links that had remained there for a few years, and the paints section never made any sense. But compared to the new store, it was award winning. What do you think this is going to do to their sales?
Agreed, it was concise and you can go straight to something that you want. The site now is a cluttered mess filled with shit. I have no idea where I am even supposed to go.
The filters for factions should probably have been radio buttons on the old design (people rarely want to look at two factions together), but at least it was largely keyboard accessible. The new site isn't, if you don't use a mouse/trackpad/touchscreen then you can't access the Shop link or the search bar.
I expect they are going to tank hard until either they fix the UI or they bring back the ease of use.@@jorgemontero6384
They never had proper breadcrumbs on PDPs and I had hoped they’d add it in a redesign, but they somehow made it worse
they should really add tags to the legends models to prevent a new player from accidentally buying them
"They should" and GW don't go lmao.
Gw is not exactly a respectable company. They don't care.
There is tag for that called "Horus Heresy". AFAIK every single "legends" model on sale is regular unit in HH?
Just don't market them as 40K units (or, better yet, actually write units for them good enough to include them in 40k).
Each of FW are image labeled with "Expert model". There is also a small by-line of them being resin. Still bad tho.
Yeah. I have a friend that bought a squad of scout snipers the other day and had no clue
Looking at the mobile version I thought “huh, this is really unfriendly for the user… but maybe it’s not optimised for mobile. Might be better on desktop.” So to hear that it was *designed* for mobile is absolutely unbelievable. If they paid $6m for that… they need their money back.
They'll release a few Space Marine Lieutenants and get their money back.
dude they'd need to sell over 200,000 of them lmao @@DJCallidus
I legit thought the same. Reminds me of news pages where 70% of the article is giant ads. Text is small, images are big and just look like some Warhammer themed stock photos. What blows my mind is they turned a webstore into what looks like a news site with advertisements but the advertisement sare the models they sell...
I particularly like the way on the mobile site the add to cart pop up covers a third of the screen and won't go away...
Also on my phone the navigation buttons overlap text
I’m totally shocked that GW is messing up something on the business side…
they should focus on putting stock no sense having a new site with nothing on it ...
lolz this :)
Are you really shocked? Are you really😐
@@jessicalacasse6205facts!!
And yet year on year they are increasing in gross revenue and net profit. Terrible business model really.
I really like the combination of GW and FW but the overall design is too modern. There’s no color and it feels lifeless. It almost feels like they designed it to be used in the in-store tablets at GW stores.
I loved the old gw webstore, felt like walking into a brick and morter almost. Now we have the primaris webstore!
Just took a look at the store. There isn't a symbol for "finecast" anymore. The only thing letting you know something is finecast is clicking "read more" on the kit's page and reading the last paragraph.
It literally looks like ikeas and I’m not kidding
That's pretty much exactly what it's made for. Well, partly, at least. Let's be real here, a lot of hobby veterans likely aren't actually ordering from GWs webshop anyway because they can get it cheaper elsewhere, except for exclusive releases and those are just plain easier to get in store, if you have one close to you, which likely will be the case at least in Europe's biggest markets (UK, Germany, maybe France)
You need to feel a website? 🤔
Holy shit. 6million. I work in consulting and I figured this had to have been some internal work. If they paid a company for this shit i wouldnt be suprised if that company is paying penalties to GW for failure to meet contract terms. This site is disgraceful
yeah, no way this site cost them 6million......
sounds like money laundering lmao
I assumed it was internal given the sloppy poor work
How's this different when the CEO many years back (Kirby? iirc) that used his wife's company to make the website (that we were used to until a day ago) and that also cost several million as well. All these sound like inside trading and corruption within business circles.
It sounds like the person that does their pricing model saw an opportunity to convince them to spend this amount on a website 😂
So many of us had theorized previously that GW honestly does not play-test the 40k books prior to their release (or they do and the fact they're often broken is by design) and now it would appear that theory extends towards their webstore and customer interaction testing? Fascinating.
You can also add their first attempt at the 40k app to that list. It barely worked two years after launch, even though they marketed it as 'complete' after just three months.
Kinda like Games Workshop don't believe they need to even try anymore.
The biggest thing I miss is the 360 view. I liked to use that for painting
Almost certaintly to make it harder to import the models into TTS.
@AlaskanWolf16 When you swipe on an image, it pulls up a servo skull. Every single model page does this, it's obvious that the 3D scrolling isn't operational yet. Not everything is an insidious plot dude.
And occasionally for building stuff: "WHERE does that go?" (pulls up picture, rotates to the correct view) "Ah, right, got it"
They spent 6 million dollars, and they got *that*?
It's absolutely abysmal!
That, and a whole webstore linked to their ERP behind it.
I don't even want to think what you could buy with the same amount of money...
I miss the days when clicking on an army’s tab gave you a one page blurb about who and what the army was in the lore along with artwork that could help inspire you with ideas.
Oh come on, you don’t like factions that clump the armies of the Imperium, except Marines, ALL of Chaos, and ALL XENOS as equal?
Because all Xenos are pretty much interchangeable…
@@Ragnaroknrol As a Black Templars player I find your second statement agreeable and not Heresy. As you were, Brother.
If there's one positive we can get out of this situation is that more people will probably start using Ebay or 3rd-party retailers to buy their Warhammer stuff now.
Somehow this managed to make it into top 3 GW blunders of 2023
The new store feels like an early beta rather than a full upgrade, plus I worry about them just throwing out the GW branding
Lord of the Rings slips further into obscurity.
@@falsehero2001 Well, as disappointing as their lack of promotion for Middle-Earth games for most of the last decade or so has been, they are supposedly losing the license in the foreseeable future, so with everything else they sell being Warhammer IP, it makes sense to rebrand the company. "Games Workshop" as a name is really just a nostalgic reminder accurately reflecting at most the first sixteen years of its existence up until 1991. And I assume that the higher-ups have been hating it for decades at this point for sounding too generic, so it feels like it has been inevitable for a long time. Quite possible that the Middle-Earth license has been the only thing keeping the name around.
i mean, they might as well drop the name at this point. they really arent GW anymore. im not going to pretend like the company was always awesome, but they at least used to _care_ about their universes. now its just soulless crap pumped out by corporate suits. this isnt Games Workshop anymore. this is Primaris Games Workshop. "it's better now. because we said so."
The plan, for years, has been to get rid of the GW branding. It's not easily marketable, it's bad for SEO, it's not great from a licensable IP perspective, and it's not culturally relevant any more. When people think of Games these days they think of video games, not tabletop.
The shops have all been renamed, the only boxes that carry the outdated GW logo are from old stock. GW won't exist as a brand in years to come and they've made that clear.
Early beta? You are insulting this fine greek letter... That's not even gamma... That's omega...
I miss the 3d rotating model mode, where you can see the model from different angle T.T
don't tell me they got rid of that ? that was the ultimate GW painting guide.
@@davedogge2280 it seems on release date it was not available. Now some products has 3d mode. Maybe the website was not finished on release date.
One of the things I really liked about the old site was clicking on some models then being able to scroll down and get a list of paints that were used. I never copy their whole paint scheme but a lot of times there would be some parts I really liked and it showed what paints were used to create it. I bet it sold some paint for them too. Hopefully they put that back at some point.
My local game stores now have a better website than Games Workshop does. Truly a small business with a website built off a basic template looks better than this. I like being able to order forge world stuff from the same store as GW but that's the only positive thing I have to say about it. Everything else is awful and I want to go back immediately.
Personally, I liked the old one more. The expanded product range is sweet but in terms of presentation and design, it leaves a LOT to be desired.
It’s a shame they removed the painting advice too, they used to give recipes for the schemes they showed.
They have a free app that does that
They got citadel colour for that. Separate webpage/app
@@richardfoulger4486 yeah, but before it was just nice to know "Hey this plague smoke uses this colour, maybe I'll try the recipe" when browsing, having a seperate app makes it more annoying
@@derekeaton-loken4528 I bet it wont be free for long.
@@richardfoulger4486 the problem is the citadel colour app is, well, complete shit. You can't look up a paint, and see the recipes it works with, or look up a base paint, and the highlight colours for it. Instead you can look up a recipe, that's it. And they are completely missing some colours from it.
I dont particularly like it. Its nice that forge world and the gw store is combined but thats about it. The website is confusing with no real filters (its nice that I can check what minies are metal but I would like more specific filters outside of 40k, marines, dark angels), lacks personality and the charm of the old one with those miniatures showcases and genuinely feels like it was made purely for mobile. Like come on, some of the borders dont fit and the pictures are tiny
It's impressive how consistently GW pisses off its fan base.
Whats even more impressive is how many people keep supporting them afterward. they'll keep doing it as long as people keep giving them money.
@@UrbanmechAceand that's why we can't have nice things
The impressive is that the pissed off fanbase still giving them endless amount of money, so tbh... why would they change? They get what they want: money.
On their website right now and damn it looks cheaply made. The other store felt quick and comfortable to use.
It was never quick.
@@sainttom365 ?_? What are you talking about?
I used the wishlist feature quite frequently, helped with remembering what models and paints I wanted to buy in the future
Wow, that's a mess of a website! The UI overlaps on mobile and all the photos are low resolution. Hell, it even let's me ship an order my local store (which has been closed and the building condemned 6 montha ago). I'm tempted to send it - see what happens 😅
6 Mil for that site...they got absolutely robbed. Bet they'll recoup the cost by increasing prices though
That's how they paid for it before too lol. Just you wait too, they will increase the price to 3rd party sellers to by another 5% one of these days. They are scum and that's the level they work at. They will make it so you have to go to they're cancer site. Thank fuck for 3D printing lol, I 3D print everything out of spite now.
The new website isn't very good. Typical though GW takes something good and breaks it just because no reason
I think it’s funny that this site is for people new to the hobby but warhammer has a massive barrier to entry and most other GW policies expand that barrier
The new store has a lot of void space that is very white but also somehow has very big pictures, on a monitor it hurts my eyes after just a minute or two.
I thought it couldn't be that bad, then I checked it out and couldn't find a single aspect that was an improvement over the old design, but lots of changes that made it an objectively worse user experience. I also saw that 35 out of the 53 Tyranid products were listed as being out of stock, which seems crazy, but I don't know if that's related to the UI re-design.
I found that pages loaded faster. That's really the only improvement.
That's true, but I couldn't find a way to change how many items were displayed by default. It seems hard-coded to only load the first 12 items, and then forces you to click "Show More" at the bottom to load another 12, which might negate the time saved from loading faster @@Shippo89
The Nids being out of stock has been like that pre site change, its been difficult to get most of the nids models(mostly the old ones) as for what i heard its due to the major growth from covid/post covid that they couldn't keep up for some kits
Every second click I get a error
Can say from EU only 4 are out of stock
They remove the "here's the paint we used for the showpiece" section... 😢
Happy to report that My Mini Factory works great
Cults3D even works better currently and it's laggy as fuck most of the time. At least you can find what you want on there lol.
Feels like they are catering to their target audience.
My 75 year old dad could read that website across the room, and looking at the prices for the new Sigmar figs he's the only one that could afford them.
You know what we had 20 years ago? Functional websites. Now we have "web design" as envisioned by toddlers. I want to scream in all caps at the "designer" that when I go to a website on a computer, that a compromised phone layout is not desirable, I'm not a tiktok degenerate who can only swipe in one direction.
It's been an ongoing regression and it's frustrating beyond belief to constantly be subjected to this level of incompetence.
I agree 10000%, it's fucking abysmal. It's typical of GW though at this point they are so ready to throw everything that's good away to bring in new players that they have annoyed pretty much everyone who actually buys their plastic shite. Not to mention them ruining the animation communinity on here just to manipulate everyone onto Warhammer+ I can't fucking stand them.
100% agree with you! I've been seeing this trend so much, no design just implemented .... badly.
@@roboffen2741 And every single site has to be screaming white, just in case you had anything left of your retinas after being subjected to those visual hate crimes.
they have also lost the paint information for each model
What the shop is missing atm and is actually important for ease of use is a propper filter for roles related to the table top.
Trying to find a certain type unit, say fast attack, out of the entire line of that fraction is, especially if you are new to it, ny impossible.
It's funny, if you use the upper-left SHOP dropdown and select Warhammer 40k, at the very bottom of that list is an option for 'Unit Type'. Then it brings up every item in their store, but changes the 'Filter' element in the top-left to let you filter by various keywords, but those keywords don't account for all the different battlefield roles or races, and you can't select more than 1 filter option at a time, so it's essentially useless on multiple levels.
What is fast attack?....it doesn't exist anymore..... all the things that we searched for don't really exist in 40k any more. So that's probably why it's gone. There are no real battle field roles other than "characters, battle line, other"
Last I checked, they got rid of the 360° model view. I found it super helpful when painting, as it helped me figure out what was metal/ wood/ whatever on the backs of models.
Really not a fan so far. Navigation is a bit of a pain
I do like the consolidation of FW and GW into one site. Especially for Xenos factions exclusive to 40k, it seemed weird to separate a few units from the whole selection.
I miss the 360 degree pictures of models. It was super helpful when painting was the main reason I used their website at all. I only buy directly from their website if the item I want is sold out in every hobby shop in the country
I used to spend ages just roaming around the GW webstore, full of colour, themes, picture, and personality. When I had a spare five minutes I’d do the same on the FW site dreaming of buying the perfect models.
Now I land on a grainy picture of someone rolling a dice and have to click through 3 text screens before I actually get to models. Once there, the pictures are lifeless and dry and I have to scroll forever with no way of filtering my preferences properly.
I’m afraid this is simply not good enough if GW want me to spend more buying it from them than FLGS.
I've worked on making online stores in the past. The old GW store was pretty bad, but the changes make it look like pre-ads Amazon. This isn't a 5 million dollar investment: It's a 20 minute hackjob. Hopefully AB-testing show them that the conversion rate has tanked, navigation time has dropped, and they roll some changes back, fast.
Browsing entire ranges using the "show more" button is also a pain in the butt.
A range like Astra Militarum has 80+ entries and the shop only loads 12 more entries at a time when clicking "show more". That means a not insignificant number of clicks to browse the entire range as they didn't include a "show all" button this time around.
Considering there is empirical evidence showing that every click necessary to find what the customer wants on a webshop increases the risk of losing business, it's such a weird design decision.
The Emperor forbid you're browsing any of the Horus Heresy Space Marine ranges with 150+ products.
So I play Space Marines, but it's a custom faction (Iron Snakes).
There's no Generic Space Marines filter for 40k or 30k on the website. Your only option is to see the newest released models or you have to pick a Chapter and then screen through all the chapter specific models to find a generic unit.
I'm missing orders from my account and no more wishlist has me frustrated. Finding things all other again is a huge pain. I get it but come on keep my orders and let us keep our wishlists.
I know my most recent order is missing from the list
Same here I order the rogue trader book and now its gone
Hitting the Warhammer icon on the site and being greeted with a bunch of presumably HTML....at least we can always rely on GW to do it the GW way!
It's like the models, you get it in bits and have to assemble it yourself :D
Yeah, it's a huge no no in cyber security to show the internal file structure of your webserver, which is exactly what those HTML pages are doing....
Clicking on ANY forge world model spews HTML. The redesign is broken so badly you can't even buy things
It will always be 'games workshop' in my books.
It's not that I hold the name in high status... its just that I've been calling it that for 20 years.
People like me probably won't put in the small amount of mental effort to go along with change.
Similar, except they mostly lost me when they rebranded from Citadel to Games Workshop back in the day, once the original crew left/retired and Citadel went to GW and entered the corporate world it all started to go downhill from a hobby perspective (even as it made bank as a business), the mail order trolls were the backbone of the company!
The new site should be more mobile friendly? Than they missed the goal big time…
Should have an option for ‘new player’ and ‘veteran player’ so you don’t have the new player spam on the new website. 😊 plus GW should do a questionare for customers telling them for example: how long have you been involved with the hobby?” Etc etc.
Yet another reason to never buy directly from their store. I agree with your points.
Seens like business ( or devs more likely) people who haven't used the website have very much tryed to go on stylish, modern, graphic design side while ignoring most quality of life features :(
Form before function for sure. It's the main problem with web design now.
Imagine spending 5 million on that....
6 million dollars to make your website worse lmao.
Someone saw Windows 8 and said "Yes, this is a very good and popular design which we should copy"
another thing about the forge world integration which is nice is that i can finally get forge world items delivered to my local store for free shipping
A code to unlock access to the old webstore will be available in core rulebooks
bringing botthe main and FW stores together i think is for the better given the reliance of HH, blood bowl, necromunda and the upcomming legions and old world will have on them for models and parts, means people can see everything in 1 place and not split over 2.
i miss the wishlist thing, plus the new page is missing some orders that i have that are currently "open" from made-to-order stuff (the BA bandai figure and a seperate order for rogue trader), ontop of my pre-order from 2 weekends ago also not being listed (yet a order i made last friday is listed)
There's a famous web design book called "Don't Make Me Think". James Workshop obviously took it as a challenge.
They're also missing some stuff I think - was looking for the special edition Einhyr Champion and it's no longer there when I believe it's meant to be available until the 6th November
Agreed. I might be mistaken but couldn't find a wurrboy in orks.
I still had the old link in my browser history, and it redirects accurately. The pictures are all missing, and when I first checked, it also lacked an "add to basket" button, but I just checked again, and you can actually buy it.
wurrboy is only available in the killrig kit. You cannot buy it as a single unit :( @@nickpeachey4199
the wurrboy is only available as part of the kill rig kit@@nickpeachey4199
One odd thing I've noticed:
When you click "shop", you have to browse all the way down to the subfaction before you see any products.
BUT: if you go to the address window and edit the url, you can go back to the /warhammer-40000 level (or /age-of-sigmar etc) and see every model for that game system. Or /warhammer-40000/space-marines for everything in the major faction.
Necromunda and Kill Team are buried deep in the site
That sucks.
@@SmashingSnow you have to go to a small side scrolling menu at the bottom of the page, choose other warhammer 40,000 games then choose the game from another side scrolling menu. Really unintuitive. If you're internet savvy you should find it but so many people aren't. It wasn't exactly straightforward on the previous site but at least most people knew where to look due to it being the same for years.
??? Buried deep in the site? They are literally 2 clicks on the homepage.
Not checked out the new website yet but I just wanted to mention that from a technical point of view it's entirely possible to optimise a website for both PC and mobile - you don't have to focus on one or the other, so if their website isn't working well on PC then that's a bug not a feature
New website has some good features but is missing some of the awesome old stuff like 360 images, paint suggestions etc
You have to click through so many things to get to the stuff what you want. New customers will be overwhelmed and old ones will just leave out of frustration.
Before you could see the paints for each unit. Now you don’t have that
I feel sorry for the GW employees trying to manage the preorder day as it’s really difficult to create an order now
One of the things missing is the unit/base sizes in the description. It's useful to know the base sizes models for a multitude of reasons. Now, after clicking through several models, this information is just missing.
It feels like they've combined the market and shop website, well I say shop, but I mean catalogue as this is just where I look at miniatures before buying them somewhere cheaper.
Just tried browsing the new site for a few minutes on both phone and desktop... emphasis on the word "tried". Whoever they hired/contracted for this redesign utterly robbed them blind and needs to never work in the web design industry again.
I like that they've combined the two.
No too stoked by their new UI.
It is what it is. I only buy from GW if its a store exclusive product.
My only complaint with the old website was the long loading times, one of the only things that hasn't changed.
That's crazy. As a develper I am baffled.
I thought I was tweaking when I saw this change. They better add an option to use old GW layout like Reddit!
Cool that they combined but the site it self is terrible if that's a 6mill site they hot ripped off bc the old separate sites where soooo much better
I literally just made up several wish lists last week, and now they are gone. Go figure
I loathe mobile design. Even on a phone I hate using it but to force that sort of design on me when I'm using a PC? Fark that. Giant pictures, lots of scrolling, hard to navigate, no thank you.
I think the old store design was honestly fine, why couldn't they have just done the forgeworld merge and keep the store looking the same?
I've lost my company champion made to order because they don't migrate it to the new site XD nice one GW...
Been a follower and a customer since 1985. ...Back when there were only 4 stores. ....I've seen every crazy trend they have tried to implement. ...They will return to Games Workshop again soon. ... you'll see.
I'm a software developper and i'm very surprised by the new design, it's realy not good IMO. The UX is very bad from what i can tell, and the UI ... Well ... I would say it's very sober, almost bland, i dont see the "artistic" side of warhammer through it.
We now know what project the guys who designed the first 40k app got afterwards
Got the email, had a look. Had to queue for a few minutes to get on it. Found layout and navigation awkward. Think they could have done with some more UX time. Not a fan.
Good job i rarely use them to order from 😂
Another issue is, if you’re sorting by system, but then select New or Pre-order, it will show you ALL New or Pre-orders, not just the system you’re in
I was literally gonna buy a Master of Possession today after work, and he's *gone*
Of all the things GW has done that no one asked for-this one is one for the record books!😂
Seems incomplete. Needs more work. Better art and better navigation icons
i went into my local store today to get a friend who just started some paint and tools for his birthday. i didnt know what paints id need for an ork army so i thought id have a quick look at the website for the ones they use to have at the bottom of the listing to find it gone. meant a bit more guess work seems a odd more given their want for new players to remove the helpful list of all the paints youd need for that model
They shouldn't even sell forge world models anymore if they're not going to allow people to play with them such a money grab. It should mention model is illegal to use in games and not supported by games workshop app
Looked at the shop and WOW, it's absolutely awful. It really feels like 80% of the space is empty and unused and the overall it feels like made for a touch screen not a PC.
They will have to slowly fix this overtime. It feels a bit rushed to me. I def think they could have had a better sorting system.
also, none of my addresses have migrated over.
I also dont think anyone is going to stop calling them Games Workshop.
Calling them Warhammer doesnt sit right. The game is called warhammer, not the company
Overhaul the wrbstore all they want, it won't help them with all the ill-will they've built up over the past decade.
The new webstore is incredibly hard to navigate. I have no idea how to access the community page now. I can't find preorders anymore.
Last
I really hate the removal of the 'stuff like this' and the 'painting' section. Makes it a lot harder to find similar stuff you might want, and I hate to lose the immediate painting suggestions
People are never happy. It’s not that bad and now everything is in one place .
yup!! I like it personally - it's just new, it's bound to be tweaked and improved as time goes on
@@Waaagghhh it will.
Just tried it. It is that bad.
How much did gw pay you to defend their 6 million dollar site overhaul? Lol
@@Mechagodzilla128 ha! Nothing, I just don’t get bent out of shape over small things like website design.
:) $1,000 @@Mechagodzilla128
I'd *hope* this is driven by date on GW's end, but given how much nicer the new site feels on mobile vs desktop, I'd assume they designed it for mobile first as most of their customers are purchasing via mobile vs desktop.
i 3d prints everything with 99% perfect copy. refee in tournament dont even notice.
As a Web Designer is page is seriously freaking me out. It ticks so, so many boxes of what you should NOT DO when designing a web store, it's just insane that it was greenlit. Also the money spent on this, just wow got they heavily overcharged. Probably did not bother to ask for offers at other agencies and just went for the most trendy and fanciest.
Anyhow this design is a very typical one for the UK and the USA design studios. A combination of mainly utmost minimalism, (fancy) showcasing, colour scarcity, one paging and a brand landing (page) - I apologise, but I don't know the correct english terms for the design. These design themes combined is already a bad idea, as they are contradictory, you can't have utmost minimalism and colour scarcity, while you try to (fancy) showcase. Also a one pager for a shop, thats simply impossible, as a shop will always has subpages. Imagine the whole shop on one page, have fun waiting for it to load.
What a web stop has to achieve is inviting customers to stay and spend time, while at the same time be very easy to read, use and path/map. A visitor should know at any time where he is, how he got there, what to expect, find and be able to go back step by step, as well as switch to a different section by a simple click. A low amount of clicks to reach the target is another high important rule to stick to. Furthermore does a customer wants to see as many products as is possible at once, adding more or switching to others with a simple click (while having options), be able to compare, filter, search (contex and index too, not just name), see the price, understand what it is etc.
Just alone these few rules are mostly not obeyed. You constantly get lost and have to start anew, especially on mobile ironically enough, you always have to go through the menu or start to switch to a different section, can't even backtrack. The movement isn't uniform, some pages are one pagers with continous down scrolling others you've to scroll horizontally or they are just a static or are a weird mix. You've to do an excessive amount of clicks, the site feels uninviting and cluttered with useless stuff, the search function is pretty useless as it is, you can only see a handful of products per site, etc.
I could continue like this for a long time, probably write a master thesis why this web store is sucks. But it's already getting too long. In short, whoever made this page for GW and charged them a ridiculous amount for it, should really come back to earth and QA outside of their bubble and consider what the main device for browsing a webstore still is for the majority (desktop, though most purchases done are via mobile). Warhammer. com has an awful User Experience, one of the worst I've ever been made and truly a shame for a companie the size of GW and a subpar, confusing and barely thought through UI. It's not all bad, but the page should really be changed asap, as GW won't benefit from it long term.
What I really hate is that they got rid of the charts in their paint store, those were very useful.
the good thing about merging the lines to one site is that you can see more models that are artificially out of stock