Games Workshop is “exploring options” for another Warhammer factory at its manufacturing site in Nottingham, UK. The potential of ‘Factory 4’ is mentioned in the firm’s 2023-24 half year report, published on Monday, as part of the firm’s “longer term capacity planning” to ensure it can meet rising customer demand for Warhammer products.
The first half of 2023-24 set records for Games Workshop’s revenue and profitability, with the launch of Warhammer 40k 10th edition in June 2023setting a new benchmark for sales in a single month.
Games Workshop has not been able to satisfy consumer demand for new releases: this Saturday, many Warhammer: The Old World launch products sold out on the first day of their pre-order window. Some highly anticipated product launches generated enough demand to crash the Games Workshop webstore – though the firm has released an overhauled web sales platform since that last happened.
While fans who have missed out on products on launch day will be keen for Games Workshop to ramp up its production capacity soon, they may want to temper their expectations. Games Workshop has a long institutional memory, and – according to the father of Warhammer 40k Rick Priestley, in an interview with the now defunct blog Unplugged Games – the firm almost went bankrupt in the 1990s by over-producing products that didn’t sell.
Games Workshop manufactures all of its “core products” at three factories in Nottingham. The firm states in the half-year report that “improving efficiencies” has “allowed numerous manufacturing output records to be broken”. 361 people are employed at these factories, with a total payroll of $7.5 million (£6 million) for the six months from June 2023, some of which is attributed to temporary staff costs.
Games Workshop is also dealing with legacy IT systems which have an impact on launch-day sales and fulfilment to third-party retailers. You can read more about their impact on customers and the firm’s plans to modernise them in this article.