The Warlord Titan is the largest and most expensive single Warhammer 40k model that Games Workshop produces, a resin behemoth the size of a toddler which takes months to build and paint. Thanks to information from a fan society, we can estimate that Games Workshop makes around $493,000 each year selling just this one Warhammer 40k kit.
The idea for this analysis comes from a Reddit comment by Redditor Autarch_Bellerophon. We’ve run the sums ourselves and we reckon they hold up – though take everything with a grain of salt, as there are multiple steps of approximation.
The first bit of information comes from the Titan Owners Club, a group of Warhammer 40k fans dedicated to building, painting, and playing games with Warhammer Titans. The Titan Owners Club is a hobby within a hobby, a group of gamers who meet up at Titan Walk events to display their models and even fight 28mm scale games using Adeptus Titanicus rules. At WarhammerFest 2023 we saw a Titan Walk featuring a converted, four and a half foot tall, 28mm scale Imperator Titan.
Every Titan that is produced by Games Workshop comes with a numbered registration certificate, and the Titan Owners Club keeps a register of Titans owned by its members. The most recent Warlord Titan registered on the TOC is Warlord 1912, Dies Luctum from Legio Phasma.
That might not be the most recent Warlord Titan produced, but it gives us a ballpark figure. Games Workshop started minting Warlord Titans in May 2015, representing eight years, nine months of sales. Assuming consistent sales, GW has sold 18.2 Warlords every month, or around 218.5 every year – we’ll round that up to 220 on the assumption that some more Warlords have been sold without being registered with the TOC.
At current prices, a Warlord, fully loaded out with two arm weapons, carapace weapons, and of course a head, costs around $2,501.50 – $2,549.00, or £1,617.50 – £1,645, depending on which weapons you give it. The price is different depending on which territory you buy in, but we can determine an average using the exchange rate from GW’s 2022-23 annual report, $1.2 USD to £1 GBP for earnings. Roughly, each Warlord gives GW $2,241 in revenue. Ish. Approximately. We haven’t accounted for the poor souls buying them at Australian prices…
That means, on average, GW makes $493,000 in revenue each year selling Warlord Titans. That’s revenue, not gross profit (after taking out the cost of materials), nor net profit (after deducting salaries, cost of buildings, support services, amortization of capital assets, etc.): we won’t make a guess on that.
GW’s overall revenue for 2023 was approximately $565 million – so Warlord Titan sales accounted for almost 1/1000 of a percent of GW’s income in that period.
Want to put Warlord Titans on the tabletop without dropping over $2,000? The recent Legions Imperialis The Great Slaughter gives rules for massed Titan battles in the far smaller epic scale. Check out our Legions Imperialis review for our thoughts on that system as a whole.