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“The End and the Death: Volume 3” is the last book from the “Siege of Terra” series
Special Editions were limited to 2,500 units for £50
Resellers have been flipping them for $400
It’s a story as old as time: a company releases a hyped product, resellers pile in and buy a bunch, then the company cancels orders to try and get back at them. That makes sense on paper, but what ends up happening is that restock that follows up gets hit by resellers even harder. The pattern was repeated again earlier this week, when Games Workshop restocked a limited number of Warhammer 40K volumes. Popular with fans and popular with resellers, these books are now reselling
You know what Warhammer is right? Here’s the short version. Warhammer 40,000 is a fantasy universe developed by the UK company Games Workshop. Set far in the future and depicting a deadlocked state of total warfare, it’s very popular with a certain subset of nerds.
Playing Warhammer 40K means buying, assembling, painting dozens to hundreds of officially licensed figures. It’s often assessed as one of the most expensive hobbies out there.
Games Workshop has been developing the 40K setting for years, with books, games, comics, and a few TV series. Today we’re looking at a particular piece of 40K media, “The Siege of Terra” book series.
It’s a ten book series that first released in 2019. Five years later, the tenth and final book has been published, “The End and the Death: Volume 3”, which is itself the third part of trilogy.
Because it’s the conclusion of a popular series, the new book’s release has been highly anticipated. Games Workshop has played into the hype by producing a limited number of Special Editions.
Compared to the standard hardbacks, “The End and the Death: Volume 3” Special Editions are bound in a crimson faux-leather with gilted page edges, as well as several extra pages of exclusive art. Special Editions cost £50, and first went up for preorder on January 13.
Resellers were well aware of this release. This initial release was full of orders from resellers, and Games Workshop would fire back around a week later. They put out a blog post announcing that they were cancelling orders to customers that attempted to buy more than one book, and that a limited restock would be coming soon.
Unfortunately, we saw an influx of people trying to purchase multiple copies, some aiming to make a resale profit – underhanded tactics worthy of Erebus himself.
If you were sloppy and got your orders cancelled, oh well. But for other resellers, this was a prime opportunity.
Only 2,500 of these books were produced in total, and the restock was only a fraction of it. This was a Warhammer fan’s last chance to get one, and resellers were determined to get there first.
When the new copies restocked through the Black Library webstore on January 24, a massive queue formed. Wait times were above an hour for some customers, and Games Workshop ended up pausing the queue for a brief time to try and cope with demand.
After a few hours, all of the books had sold out. Make no mistake, many of these ended up going to resellers in the end.
Yes, despite a noble effort from Games Workshop to combat the reselling scourge, it didn’t matter in the end. Chances are they made things worse by shining a spotlight on the previous release.
If you’re advertising that your products are so popular that people are fighting over them and willing to scalp them for ten times retail, people are going to notice.
Right now, Special Editions of “The End and the Death: Volume 3” are reselling for about $400. Prices are more less the same after the restock, and eBay is showing a healthy volume of sales for this book.
Games Workshop offers a pretty generous 14-day return window for unopened goods. In the very unlikely event these products failed to resell, you could simply return them for a full refund. Of course with the prices we’re seeing, that’s not really a concern.
As far as hobbyists go, Warhammer fans are a pretty easy target for resellers. They’re already spending thousands of dollars per year to assemble figures, so what’s a couple hundred bucks for a book to put on their shelf?
Annoyed? Outraged? Hungry? Sorry! If you don’t like resellers, then don’t pay inflated prices for dumb shit. Be mad at companies for producing artificially limited runs of products, hyping them up, and then never restocking them.
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