Games Workshop has taken action against scalpers who bought up limited edition copies of The End and The Death: Volume III, by cancelling their pre-orders. An article posted on Monday on the Warhammer Community website states “we have rejected any orders where a purchaser has tried to get more than one copy” of the highly anticipated final Horus Heresy book.
The extra stock from the cancelled orders will be up for sale at 8am PST / 11am EST / 4pm GMT on Wednesday, January 24; great news for collectors who were denied a copy of the in-demand Horus Heresy book when it first went up for pre-order on Saturday, January 13.
With just 2,500 copies of the limited edition version of End and the Death: Volume III available, demand was intense. GW set a limit of just a single copy per customer, but that didn’t stop some buyers – likely assisted by bots – from acquiring multiple volumes.
Wargamer reported that an estimated 10% of the limited print run had been bought up by scalpers, based on sold and listed copies we found on eBay, where they typically sold at a 500% markup. Other estimates put the number as high as 20%.
Games Workshop’s webstore was upgraded earlier this year, implementing a queuing system during prominent pre-order windows, to prevent outright crashes caused by high site traffic. Since the initial End and the Death pre-order, the site developers have added an authentication step to the end of the queue to prove the customer is a human, not a bot.
The fact that the Warhammer webstore has become such a battleground for fans and scalpers hoping to grab new products suggests that Games Workshop is failing to produce enough stock to meet demand. Want to know what Games Workshop is doing about that problem? Check out our report on GW’s early plans to open a new Warhammer factory.
Source: Wargamer
