1) I tend to pick my stuff up 2nd hand off eBay, but the bidding is pretty competitive so its always really hard to grab a bargain there these days.
2) The pros are its cheap, the cons are you may have to repaint a ‘pre-loved’ model that was assembled and painted by a 10 year old.
3) Does it make me a d*ck that I laugh when I notice someone get carried away and bid more for a 2nd hand model piece of cr*p than it would cost them to buy the model brand new?
4) Even with eBay I haven’t bought ANY models since September, I would rather paint what I already have…I have lots 🙂
For all of the speculation that GW wants to go to directly-only eventually, you’d never know that they actually wanted to succeed in that goal based on the sorry state of their own website. I’ve never been even remotely tempted to purchase a single thing through them directly. I suppose if there were ever a limited edition whatever that I wanted it could theoretically happen, but even then I feel like I could probably get a second-hand one through ebay.
I also find it shocking that they do so little to actually drive traffic to their own website. The fact that White Dwarf Daily is literally 90% advertisements for whatever they released in a given month means that there is no incentive to actually even visit their site, and presumably people have to first visit your site before considering purchasing something.
It constantly boggles my mind that they are willing to concede so much online real-estate to meta-blogs like BOLS (which is also terrible) when they could easily simply actually release daily content that people would want to view and read. Take a look at Wizards and their approach to daily Magic editorials on their website and consider how much of a marketing punt GW’s website truly is.
Jaded Gamercast 
You can’t buy limited edition anything anywhere else. And that’s all I buy from the GW webstore.
1) I tend to pick my stuff up 2nd hand off eBay, but the bidding is pretty competitive so its always really hard to grab a bargain there these days.
2) The pros are its cheap, the cons are you may have to repaint a ‘pre-loved’ model that was assembled and painted by a 10 year old.
3) Does it make me a d*ck that I laugh when I notice someone get carried away and bid more for a 2nd hand model piece of cr*p than it would cost them to buy the model brand new?
4) Even with eBay I haven’t bought ANY models since September, I would rather paint what I already have…I have lots 🙂
Pay where you play. Nuff said.
For all of the speculation that GW wants to go to directly-only eventually, you’d never know that they actually wanted to succeed in that goal based on the sorry state of their own website. I’ve never been even remotely tempted to purchase a single thing through them directly. I suppose if there were ever a limited edition whatever that I wanted it could theoretically happen, but even then I feel like I could probably get a second-hand one through ebay.
I also find it shocking that they do so little to actually drive traffic to their own website. The fact that White Dwarf Daily is literally 90% advertisements for whatever they released in a given month means that there is no incentive to actually even visit their site, and presumably people have to first visit your site before considering purchasing something.
It constantly boggles my mind that they are willing to concede so much online real-estate to meta-blogs like BOLS (which is also terrible) when they could easily simply actually release daily content that people would want to view and read. Take a look at Wizards and their approach to daily Magic editorials on their website and consider how much of a marketing punt GW’s website truly is.