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And today we are breaking down Games Workshop. This episode is another examination of the business of IP. And whether it's Disney, Electronic Arts, Nintendo, there are so many businesses out there built around a core IP franchise.
And Games Workshop and its Warhammer franchise may not be as familiar to our North American listeners, but this episode will tell you why that may be changing very soon, or you can just Stay tuned on your Amazon Prime or search around your local area to see if there are
Warhammer.
or retail shops in your location. My guest is Todd Wenning, president and CIO of KA Capital. And Todd shares his own personal story uncovering Games Workshop many years ago. He gets into the fun evolution of this business. which ties into the vertical integration that it has today. And he shares what lies ahead as awareness of Warhammer grows and those loyal enthusiasts that have been around for generations welcome more into their world. So please enjoy this episode on Games Workshop.
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¶ Introduction to Games Workshop
All right, Todd, it is great to have you back. You gave us one of my more enjoyable episodes last year with Echolab and some of the unique details about that story. So anyone who hasn't listened to that episode, I would definitely point you to that. But today we're here to talk about Games Workshop, a business that I have seen popping up.
I actually had someone else reach out, a former guest interested in doing a breakdown on it. There seems to be growing interest in this name for obvious reasons. It's a fascinating story that we'll get into. But I just wanted to start out with the simple introduction because I think there's IP in here that some may be familiar with, but it is what I would consider kind of in the niche hobbyist category.
And you can elaborate on that in terms of what Games Workshop is as a business and what they might be known for.
Matt, thanks for having me back. It's great to be here. I love listening to the show and any way I can contribute, all the better. Games Workshop is, my opinion, the best company that most North American investors at least have never heard of. It's a really fascinating story. As you mentioned, it combines intellectual property. There's network effects. There's television show coming out.
There is a lot to dig into with Games Workshop. So it's a company I came across in probably 2019. I had heard of it. I used to work in the UK and I had heard of it rumblings, but I hadn't really known much about it. Once I started diving into the company, I thought this is really one of those companies I needed to have in my radar. And then once I launched my fund, saw the opportunity to buy some and have been a shareholder since. Very excited to talk about Games Workshop today.
¶ History of the Warhammer IP
Maybe you can get into some of the IP we have. infamous brands associated with IP, Marvel or D C and how they operate as a framing in mind, but what makes up Games Workshop in terms of that special IP and their way that they monetize that, operate it, and nurture over it.
So it's probably good to start with the history of Games Workshop. There is deep lore about Games Workshop's origins and backstory, as well as the narratives of its stories. It's a very beloved IP and a very beloved company. And that's part of what makes it a really special company. In the late nineteen seventies, a group of three men in the UK were building wooden games, backgammon go.
Around that time, they caught wind of this new thing that was hitting the US called Dungeons and Dragons. They thought this is really fascinating. And so they had some connection with the owner of Dungeons and Dragons. in the US. And so they became the UK distributor for Dungeons and Dragons.
And eventually they saw how this connection between narrative and gameplay was coming together. And they opened their own store, started selling their own games that they were making, started selling Dungeons and Dragons materials through those. In the early 1980s, they decided that we're gonna create our own game. The first game that they came out with was called Warhammer.
And it was loosely based on the Lord of the Rings kind of era medieval fantasy role-playing. What they did was instead of doing a tabletop game where people sit around and tell stories, they have miniatures. involved. The miniatures are part of the game. You get these miniatures and they're very ornate.
Now they're plastic, but back then they were metal alloy and you could paint them. Each of your characters has different attributes and you roll dice. There's similarities to Dungeons and Dragons. About two years later, they came up with this new concept versus Warhammer, which is more medieval fantasy, and it's called Warhammer 40,000. It's basically the Warhammer world forty thousand years into the future. So it became this grim dark Science fiction fantasy world.
where you have a human race that's fallen. They're fighting against different alien factions across the galaxy. You can play as a humanoid or you can play as an alien faction. And you can pick which one appeals to you the most. I'm not sure if it was part of the plan or not, but when you have a world that takes place forty thousand years from now, you can build a lot of backstory behind that to the present.
just endless stories and IP around how things got to where they are. That's created new storylines for the business. So it gets really deep, very intricate. So if you're thinking about the Tolkien world or the Game of Thrones world where they just keep adding new context to the backstory. It's very similar. So it can go very deep. Games Workshop actually owns their own publishing arm called the Black Library.
that produces a lot of this narrative. They are actually vertically integrated all the way from paint to publishing. They manufacture the miniatures, they make the paint, Citadel, the publishing, they do the distribution, they do the stores. They own it top to tail. It's a very fascinating business in terms of how they control all of it and the allure of their IP and how beloved it is with their fans.
¶ Games Workshop's Evolution
I'm curious, you don't often hear about the origins being in the distribution and then evolving into the creation of a world and a game and narrative around it. Were those original founders still very much a part of that storyline into the eighties as they took off with the homegrown IP? Did they play a major role? Or was it someone else coming into the fold that helped them evolve that side of thing?
One of the three decided that he wanted to just go back to what they were doing before, working on wooden games. The other two really got into this fantasy world and narratives and tabletop gaming. They brought in other people. So there was a couple of major outsiders that came in and helped them develop this game. And it spawned into this.
subculture of people who just really love the narrative and dove into it and wanted to play it, engage with it, and connect with other people, which is a big part of the story today.
You alluded to this. It sounds like the evolution of that story takes place both in publishing, whether it's books, graphic novels, whatever it might be, in addition to the miniatures, is it fair to call them figurines? Yeah.
The way it's framed is they are miniature war games. They are not figurines. They are tabletop gaming pieces. They are things that we engage with and use to achieve our mission in the game. So we gotta be careful what we say.
It's an important distinction in terms of how they're used and I maybe didn't appreciate the definition of figurine to begin with. So learn something way beyond businesses on this show. In terms of the brick and mortar concepts, there are Warhammer stores.
¶ Warhammer Retail Stores
Are they distributing obviously Moorhammer related IP products? But is there also still third party product that gets distributed through those stores as well?
No, so they have their own retail stores, as you mentioned. So they have about five hundred and seventy-five around the world. And about fifty-five percent of those are in Europe and the UK, about thirty-five percent are in North America and ten percent in Australasia. And you probably don't even know that they have a store in your town. If you live in a
semi-major city in the US, you probably have what's called a Warhammer store. So if you go to Google and type in Warhammer store near me, you probably have one. I don't know this for sure, but we have one in Cincinnati. Might be one in Pittsburgh, might be one in Cleveland. But a lot of these stores are run by enthusiasts. About 75% of their stores are single staff stores.
So these are just enthusiasts who thought I get together with my friends anyway to play this game and I might as well have a store and have everything set up there and make some sales and make a little money while I'm doing it. So a lot of them are in strip malls. The stores are fairly small, but they're stacked to the gills with just games workshop materials.
They do not distribute any third party. That's about twenty percent of the revenue comes from the retail channel. Sixty percent of the revenue goes through the trade channel, which is the third party. And so that's where they might be in hobby stores or I'm not sure if they're in Walmart, but they might be in like a Walmart store somewhere. These are all distributed to third party independent sellers.
¶ The Numbers Behind Warhammer's Popularity
I looked to understand the concept of a Warhammer store and found there was one just a twenty minute drive for me. So I can attest to that being the truth. Just to have some context about this market. I think it is very enthusiast driven, but it continuously amazes me the level of enthusiasm. I think you can even look at something like Marvel movies and the real appreciation and diehard nature of some of the fans of the origin stories back to the Stan Lee days.
and what that generated for that IP over time. Do you have any way of contextualizing just the size of this type of market and games workshop revenue is one data point, but I'm curious about that.
It's a lot bigger than you probably think. There are 790,000 people around the world who've signed up for the My Warhammer emails. Free, regular emails that go out to people who are interested in Warhammer. About two hundred and forty eight thousand people are subscribed to Warhammer Plus, which is a fifty dollar a year subscription. Now this number is up from 115,000 three years ago. It has doubled.
over the past three years in terms of people who are willing to not only subscribe to the emails, but also pay for the unique interactions they have with the company. So this is bigger than you might expect and growing very rapid.
when you mentioned the origins, was there demographic concentration or geographical concentration where this was
¶ Geographic and Demographic Concentration
really material in Europe first before expanding outwards. How key is Europe to the story? You mentioned the fifty-five percent number earlier, but I'm curious about that as well.
It started in the UK. It feels like a very British company. They're based in Nottingham. The world of Warhammer, the big showcase store, is next to their headquarters in Nottingham. They're actually building a new world of Warhammer in Washington DC that comes out in twenty twenty seven. So that's another part of the story. But it's a big cultural thing in the UK. A lot of young men in particular. It's not always men, but it tends to trend towards young men who get really into this game.
Henry Cabell, who I'm sure we'll talk about in a minute because he's producing the Warhammer series for Amazon. He's a big fan, so he'll get on talk shows and talk about it. And a lot of people grew up playing Warhammer. Maybe the similar way to you and I might have collected baseball cards and gone to baseball card shows. So it's a very hobby driven type of business. Management talks about the hobby gene that they'll have that customers have, the hobby gene.
Not everybody has that. That's a big part of the people who buy it. In terms of age, it tends to be young men between the ages of ten and say eighteen. And then a lot of times they fall away from the hobby because it's an expensive hobby. The starter box that I bought was about seventy dollars to give you an idea. So it's roughly video game type level and it can go much, much higher.
So you can get individual units that cost hundreds of dollars, if not more, depending on what you're doing. So it's a very expensive hobby. And so a lot of times young players are supported by their parents when it comes to buying Christmas gifts, birthday gifts, things like this.
A lot of times what happens is they discover the opposite sex or they discover someone who they want to partner with and they just get distracted for 10 years or so. Then in their 30s and maybe in their forties, they come back to it. That tends to be the trend of the ages and the interests in Warhammer.
Once you lose access to the rental funds too, it becomes more focused on the budget until you get back out of that hole. But it is interesting when you have the demographic evolution where as they come back to the hobby, they might also have their own children to help break into the hobby. And I can imagine that happens quite a bit. I think you've laid out who in theory would be the competition, but I'm always very curious when it comes to having the hobby gene, what attracts
¶ Competition from Other Games & Hobbies
People to Magic the Gathering versus Dungeons and Dragons versus Warhammer. Are those the right competitors to think about when you think about where competition exists for the business?
In some ways, yes. I think a lot of it comes down to what your friends are playing. Warhammer is a lot about community and having something to do with your friends in an increasingly digital world. It's a great way to come together in a physical world and enjoy time together. One of the things that separates
Warhammer from say Dungeons and Dragons or Magic the Gathering is that you can latch onto various parts of Warhammer. You might really enjoy the gaming, or you might really enjoy the collecting. Or you might really enjoy the painting. I don't want to go too deep in myself into this world because otherwise I start mixing up investing in the narrative of the business, but I did get a starter set and you paint these figures and you have to do multiple layers sometimes to get them right.
And so you spend hours of your time putting these things together. And so if you can get really into painting them, some people actually paint them if they're really good at them and sell them. You can latch onto various parts of the hobby without having it compete with Dungeons and Dragons or Magic the Gathering. It could be that you really like collecting these space figurines or these medieval fantasy. They actually produce the Lord of the Rings official tabletop game.
If you want to collect armies of orcs fighting elves in the Lord of the Rings, you can do that by buying Games Workshop products.
Yeah, it's always interesting to me in terms of the symbolism of when you see something that is a niche hobby evolve. And one of the key moments I think is when you see the resale with customization, there's just something that represents there's a market above this market that now exists and that
is representative of an ecosystem and people willing to spend the time to create a business around the original IP is usually telling in terms of the level of enthusiasm there. The other question I had was
Vertical integration seems like it can be very impactful for Games Worm Shop, particularly because of that community element that you mentioned. If you have a traditional hobbyist store, they might have a Magic the Gathering monthly event. They might not, but I'm sure that pretty much all Warhammer storage have these events. Is that normal in the industry based on what you've seen?
So Games Workshop does put on a lot of competitions and events. The attendance numbers are much larger again than you would probably expect. It's very much a bonding type of business. One of the things I like about this business is there's hidden network effects. If one friend starts to play, another friend starts to play and it starts building and the community that you build around you gets stronger, which makes games workshop stronger.
And the entire value of the whole ecosystem gets stronger. We think about network effects and Google, Facebook, and eBay, but really thinking about in the physical gaming world, you don't really think about it, but Games Workshop has it.
¶ Margins and Cash Generation
You gave us some sense of the revenue breakout with retail and trade. I'd be curious what the other twenty percent is, so maybe we could start off there.
So the other twenty percent, fifteen percent comes from online and five percent from licensing. The online can just be people who order from Warhammer.com. It can be the subscriptions that I talked about earlier. I think they do my estimate is that their annual run rate on that number of subscribers is about 12 million pounds. It's rising, but still small part of their business. And then the licensing business is the remaining five percent. And that can be
cyclical. They might have a big licensing deal come in with a video game. So if you go onto the Switch marketplace or a PlayStation, you'll be able to see Warhammer games. And so they license their IP to the video game producers. That business and really high margin. So it's well over ninety percent in a typical year. Ninety, ninety five percent is what I have in mind. As a firm, their gross margins are about seventy percent. It is almost
like a luxury product when you think about those margins. And they have significant pricing power. So if you think about their retail stores, my guess is they do about eighty to eighty five percent gross margins in those stores where they control the process. Online is probably similar. Their costs there being logistics and distribution. And with trade, I think their gross margin is my guess. They don't disclose this, but it's probably fifty, fifty five percent.
thereabouts when they sell to the wholesale. So it's a very strong model from an economic standpoint. They're even at the margins are over forty percent. It's a very cash generative business.
the licensing point, I still remember reading there's all this lure about Ralph Lauren, but if you go back into the early biographies, it it was a failing business really under a lot of
¶ Growth Drivers & Prime Potential
Stress until he licensed a fragrance. And that was like a huge profit driver and cash generator. It always made licensing in my head a completely different concept. But nonetheless, even if that sits atop the chain, fifty percent, seventy percent gross margins are quite impressive. On those buckets. Would you point to any single bucket being a large growth driver going forward as you think about expansion? DC store seems like.
that can make a big leap into the US and having a prime show. Seems like they're doing things with the IP that are sensible from both an attention and awareness standpoint. But what would you point to just kind of from a growth perspective?
So if we think about the network effects that I mentioned, with the TV show coming out, I think it'll appeal to a lot of people who have never even heard of Warhammer. They might Go check out their local store. All of a sudden, you got a new node in the network. And they introduce their friends and so on and so forth. If you look at what's happened with
The Mario movie, for example. When the Mario movie came out, Nintendo management said we were surprised. We had high expectations, we were surprised by even how much that drove what we wanted them to do, which was buy Nintendo video games. And when The Witcher, which is also starring Henry Cavill back in Netflix, came out.
That was sort of a stagnant video game series and the sales went through the roof. People, they see IP, whether it's Lord of the Rings or whatever, and they want to continue to engage with that IP. They want to stay with it. My investment thesis is that this will lead to stronger sales in the higher margin.
categories. It'll certainly drive interest in trade. People might go to a hobby store instead of knowing there's a Warhammer nearby, or maybe they don't have a Warhammer nearby and they go to the hobby store, in which case it's lower gross margin. But I think that will increase
some of the licensing revenue that they have, which is ninety percent gross margin, the online business, which I think is eighty, eighty five percent gross margin, and certainly drive traffic into the the Warhammer stores, which is again about eighty, eighty five percent. And that's where management wants you to start your experience in a Warhammer store. When I went to go buy my Warhammer starter kit, Warhammer 40,000 to be specific, I walk in with my kids and there's probably
Six or seven 30-year-old men sitting around tables playing this game. They all kind of look up at me to see like, hey, is this guy one of us?
Yeah.
I was sorry, asking questions and they were talking to my kids and I think it's just a great way to get a feel for what Warhammer is, what they offer, how the game is played, what sort of social events are around it. It's a great introduction to the experience and to the community.
It's a very interesting thing that we're starting to see more of. You mentioned the Mario movie, which I can tell you was the first movie I got my son to watch in full. That meant something to me in terms of the nostalgia of playing the game growing up. But also on another extreme, F one drive to survive. And I think a lot of people are trying to use that as a blueprint. So you can see how that drives additional interest and entryways and potentially for a certain type of buyer as well.
So that's quite interesting. On the licensing, I'm just curious, you mentioned it can fluctuate quite a bit. How does that work? Is it just the sense of if you're licensing a video game, you're gonna have that initial bump in year one, but until you release a new game, you're gonna have that natural decline curve?
¶ Licensing Model & Tariff Volatility
Most of their licensing historically has come from the video game partnerships and so it depends on when consoles are launched, when games are developed. And so it can be a little lumpy. When it hits, it goes right to the bottom line pretty much. There's very little operating expense related to that. It really just falls to the bottom line. So I'm thinking that as the movie comes out, that will lead to more licensing deals, whether directly from Amazon.
or from new partners and video games, et cetera. So I think that will remain a very cash generative part of the business for a long time.
Just in terms of being UK operated, did the tariff volatility end up impacting them at all? And it's just one of those questions that comes to mind as you mentioned. origin and having that strong footprint there in the UK, how caught up in all of that activity did it get and how much does it actually impact the business?
So that was some of the concern earlier in twenty twenty five. The stock sold off or was stagnant a little bit. The concern was that management said after their annual report came out, they work on a different schedule. terms of their reporting schedule. But when the May report came out, they said we're concerned about tariffs and what the impact might be to our gross margins. And then the stock had a nice jump pe a couple of weeks ago because they said in their November report that
Actually it didn't impact us as much as we expected. And then we saw this week. So we're talking on January twenty second. We saw when there were concerns about new tariffs, the stock sold off a little bit again. They are impacted by it, but again, this is why the vertical integration helped.
quite a bit. Not only does it help protect them from IP theft, which is one of their biggest concerns, but also it helps them control their supply and they have complete control of their supply at all times.
¶ Why the Business is Defensible
You mentioned those gross margins, which to me feel very impressive. Is there any way to contextualize that versus peers? I don't know if there are others that are public that you can compare it to, but I'm curious about that.
It's such an idiosyncratic business that there's really not a ton of good comp. The best comp is the Wizards of the Coast unit at Hasbro, which owns Match of the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, and they have similar IBITA margins, around 40%.
This is very lucrative IP and it's very, very difficult to get. You mentioned nostalgia earlier. You can't just create this IP. Let's say you wanted to go out and compete against Magic the Gathering or Warhammer. I would just say good luck because it takes decades to build up that nostalgia, those deep connections. And importantly, that enables you to pass it down to the next generation. I played this growing up. I'm going to show you how to play it.
Similar to the way we played games with our sons or our children on Nintendo. We played it growing up. We share it with them. Nintendo doesn't have to win them over on their own. We're doing it for them. We're the salespeople. It's just extremely difficult for anybody to come in and compete with these deeply seated, deeply rooted experiences in IP.
I'm still amazed at that ability to transition from being known for distribution, manufacturing, all of that, into building out this. world building storyline and all that goes with it because that is such a massive undertaking and takes such creativity and a special type of gene. So more credit to them. I think you see now everybody's just dying to get a wordle created and there's so much demand for people who can make games like that.
And get them attached to, let alone this. On the point of where margins go, are there any either headwinds or tailwinds where you expect them to materially change from the level that they're at? Obviously if you have a mix ship.
¶ The Relevance Risk
Which sounds like it could theoretically happen in the future if you get more online consumption. But is there anything that you think would materially change that trend line from where they are today?
So on the positive side, we touched on the network effects building and the manufacturing facilities are high fixed costs. They have more throughput coming through them that should increase margins. The risk, you know, it's really trying to Stay relevant because network effects are great when your product's relevant and they can unwind just as fast when you're irrelevant. That is something I'm always keeping my eye on is are they staying interesting to their fan base?
One of the risks is that they gouge prices, right? They push prices too hard. And that's a common piece of feedback you see online. That doesn't mean people stop buying it, but people are saying, hey, this is just getting too expensive for me. And so I think
Games Workshop does a good job, in my opinion, of stewarding that and thinking longer term. They have a very long term view. I don't think that they are trying to maximize short term profitability at the risk of long term relationships and gains. But that's certainly a risk if they get to the point where they have to raise prices due to inflation and that just gets out of control for their core customers.
you started looking at it in nineteen and that's certainly a tenure at this point in twenty six of looking at the business and its history. Do you have any sense of whether it has ever had stretches of time where it maybe went out of popularity or lost some of the luster that was associated with it?
For sure. If you look at the chart, you can see where it falls apart. What happened was they got the license, the agreement to manufacture the Lord of the Rings. Miniatures, those games. It was such a bonanza. I'm sure you can remember in the two thousands how big Lord of the Rings was and they have three movies and everyone got really excited about it.
What happened to Games Workshop was they kind of took their eye off the ball when it came to investing in their own IP. They were just making so much money working with Lord of the Rings that they weren't keeping their IP fresh. When Lord of the Rings movie stopped coming out, that traffic stopped. Now they didn't have fresh IP. They got in some real challenges. In 2008, there was a real scare that they might go under.
That was an important moment. And I think a lot of great companies, if you look back at their history, there was probably a moment somewhere along the line where they had a near-death experience. Great companies say we're never doing that again.
We will not take on debt. We won't do whatever got us in trouble the first time. We're gonna fix that. And that's certainly what Games Workshop has done. And so again, it's just super critical that they continue to invest in their IP. They release new additions. And so that keeps
the IP fresh. Some people might say, oh, I didn't like this edition or whatever, but they'll buy the next one. The idea is just keep it fresh, keep it going, investing in the business, staying relevant. That's the key to Games Workshop's business.
¶ Games Workshop's Unique Flat Structure
Is there a creative director that sits on top of managing that IP? I think a lot of the success of Marvel and those movies should be attributed to Kevin Feige, who was a diehard fan and made sure that evolution into the theater was done with thoughtfulness around the most enthusiast Marvel fans, but could also be consumable by normies like myself. How does Games Workshop approach that? Do they disclose who looks over it? What's the storyline there?
They have a very unique organization as well. So it's a flat organization. It's not a strict hierarchy. They actually have it set up where there's two groups. One group is focused on core retail. So dealing with the stores, dealing with the manufacturing. And there's another group that's focused entirely on IP. They take that IP part of their business extremely seriously as they should.
I think a key to games workshop success, this modern success post two thousand eight is that they've realized we really need to build up this IP again, make it deep connection with the users and the game players.
¶ Capital Allocation & Dividend Focus
back a bit to the financial model or the spreadsheet oriented questions. In terms of capital allocation, I assume with EBITDA margins at forty percent, a decent amount of that flows into free cash flow. What do they invest in if they do have to reinvest capex? And how would you just describe the overall capital allocation framework for the business?
They have a very unique approach to returning capital to shareholders. I think their average dividend payout ratio is about 80%.
Very UK of them.
It is very dividend focused. There's another company in the UK called Admiral Group, which is a car insurance company. They have a very similar process where they figure out, here's all the cash that came in, we're gonna keep a buffer, make sure that we are able to be secure in case there's COVID or something different comes up and emergency.
And whatever's left over, we give it to our shareholders. It's very simple. I believe they have authorization to buy back stock, but I don't believe they've done it before. They haven't really had a two thousand eight type period where the stock was super cheap either.
Their approach is, hey, we're just going to give you whatever is left over. I think it's a very shareholder friendly approach, especially for their type of business, because you can imagine being as cash-rich as they are, they could easily fall into the empire building trap. where they just start buying up studios and all these sorts of things and they are just relentlessly focused on what they do. So I think that is the right capital allocation process for them.
¶ Valuing Games Workshop
And you mentioned a bit about the stock net getting overly cheap. Do they have a way of thinking about valuation or do you have a way of thinking about whether it's PE or anything else, just to frame the valuation framework that you would use for a business like this?
So for this type of business, I think, because it pays such high dividends, really cash flow oriented, it's a discounted cash flow model is what I use. I forecast what I think's gonna happen with the margins. and figure out what that turns into cash and then discount that cash back to the present. And that's how I model the business.
You might look at the stock today, I think it's trading for about thirty times earnings, which is not optically cheap. But if you think about the potential for margin increase and this network effect acceleration. We might look back and say that wasn't
Too bad the pay.
You had a very nice write up recently when forty times earnings, I think was the actual headline is actually cheap. I often think that there are some impressive businesses out there that are like that and you need to look for characteristics and I could see your angle here, certainly, and thirty times, not forty times. More reason.
¶ Three Man Risks for the Business
On the risk side of the equation, I think we've kind of alluded to several throughout or what you would keep your eye on the most. Is there anything else that you would add to it or one in particular that you would highlight as the risk that you think most about for the business?
In terms of the risk, there's a couple of things. Kevin Roundtree, who we haven't mentioned yet, who is the CEO and writes, in my opinion, some of the best annual reports out there. I mean, if you're an annual report fan, you have to check out Games Workshop. You can imagine if you were the CEO of a business with this sort of fantasy IP.
you would be inclined to create these two hundred page glossy annual reports with all the IP you have to kind of show off what you've done. It's like a Word document. It's a simple Word document. And he's got some great lines that he puts in those reports. And he says, We believe shareholder value is created primarily by not destroying it. So he has these great one liners that
any sort of Buffett fan would just love and I do too. And he repeats him every annual report. So he kind of drives it home. He's been CEO since twenty fifteen and it's been extremely successful. And he's fifty five years old, so still pretty young. Could go on for a long time, but there's always the risk that Kevin decides, I've done a great job. I've got other plans in life. I want to move on. One of the concerns is what does the post Kevin Roundtree games workshop look like?
Seems like they have a blueprint for success to execute on, but you just never know. There's always the risk of a management transition not going well, someone who doesn't connect with the fans. So there's always that risk. The key risk, however, is just avoiding irrelevance. If you go on online and you go to Warhammer chats and things, people will be upset about prices or this addition.
But that's okay. When you're looking at IP, what you care about are people who are passionate, one way or the other. The worst thing that can happen is just a yawn, indifference. So if they care, that means that they will buy when they are happy, but they still really love the IP. And so as long as Games Workshop continues to harness that, it'll be great. AI is a potential concern or a potential benefit. It's unclear at this point.
Management has come out and said that we don't want our IP creators to use AI because they're afraid that it'll get mangled in the AI world or stolen or something like that. What's interesting is that part of the backstory to Warhammer forty thousand is that humans used AI and it turned everything bad. They had to fight against AI robots.
This is all coming kind of full circle in a weird way. Hopefully that's not our future. But they are naturally concerned about their IP getting stolen and misused and diluted somehow. And so I think that's another Risks. That's probably three risks that are right there to keep an eye on.
I think the point on Kevin highlights the importance of the people that oversee IP are so incredibly important and some of those other points are noteworthy as well. Maybe Warhammer forty thousand will become some type of Nostradamus like tail and you add even more lure to the story. This has been fascinating. I mentioned before, I absolutely love businesses built around IP and particularly when they find ways to really nurture it while building a nice business around it.
¶ Riches in Niches & Other Lessons
What are the key lessons that stand out to you from analyzing this business that you would potentially think about looking for elsewhere or applying elsewhere as an investor?
I think a lot of it has to do with Sticking to what you're good at and embracing the quirkiness the community, the narrative that you're building around those things, you might be surprised at how big that market really is if you have a very niche interest, especially with the way the internet is today.
There's a community somewhere, you can find them. This is a very positive for the world community for people to get involved in. It's human connection, bringing people together. In the digital world everybody feels isolated and fragmented and
I feel like this is one type of game that can bring people together. I think that's really healthy. From a lesson standpoint, I just think lean into your narrative, lean into your community, lean into your niche. I think that's a good lesson that I've drawn from the games workshop world.
Very good point. You were mentioning network effects and even the feedback loop. The feedback loop can get loosened because you're introducing new things and it's not as tight as it needs to be, but when you can have that focus, it really ties together nicely and riches in the niches. Something I always
Like to reference, it's always amazing. And the internet can open your eyes to just seeing how many niches are out there. I compare it to living in A thousand or fifteen hundred years ago when there were thriving civilizations that nobody really knew even existed, and you might stumble upon them and think to yourself, wow, who knew they were out here? Well, Todd, this again has been a pleasure. I've learned a lot and I'm sure the audience has as well. So thank you very much for sharing.
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