The Social Media Scandal Continues

It seems that Games Workshop's removal of their social media accounts caused a little bit of a stir. Some people got quite upset about it all; some claimed that they had paid a good deal of money to GW, and the very least they could do was to keep a Twitter account open; others cranked the lever to FULL PANIC MODE and started predicting the decline of Games Workshop - citing poor sales of Warhammer Monthly and the Imperial Knights (yes, some people really are that crazy that they think the Knights aren't selling...); others took it much more calmly and began looking into the possible reasons and examining what this could mean.

And that's what I've been doing.

A few things popped up yesterday (and I've just checked then again today for screen grabs). Firstly, a friend of mine popped this onto Twitter:

A search today brought no results for this, however. The only web based job GW are advertising is as a 'Web Content Administrator' for Black Library - which is the guy who uploads the latest products. Not quite the same thing. I can't validate what Jim has said above, sadly, so I must discard it as evidence. I will, however, admit that I believe he's correct: in my opinion, this is just a rejig and we will have that social media back. I explained why I think so yesterday. 

Secondly, I stumbled across this:

Now, the placeholder itself is not exciting, nor is it at all indicative of what the future website will look like. It does, however, tell us two very important things. 

1) Look at the URL - it is a sub-domain of the main games-workshop.com domain. This means we're likely to see a shift from the current www.forgeworld.com and www.blacklibrary.com to a more centralised blacklibrary.games-workshop.com and forgeworld.games-workshop.com. This makes sense from a web developers perspective as it puts all of your media into one place. Easier to edit, easier to maintain, you can do more exciting things with it. 

2) April 7th is the day that warhammerworld.games-workshop.com goes live. Again, this is not an indicator that the new site goes live in April - just the Warhammer World one, including a new blog. We might even see some social media re-arise. Remember when they did the tale of gamers twitter account for that eBook series? I imagine we'll get a direct Warhammer World feed now. 

I imagine that by shifting the infrastructure centrally, we might even see Warhammer World Event tickets going back on the GW website, and of course, the full Black Library and Forge World catalogues. This is great news if you like to support your local Hobby Centre - and even if you don't, it means you'll be able to do all your shopping in one place and, I imagine, all under one shipping scheme and being able to use GW vouchers. 

Okay, so you can use GW Gift Vouchers on ForgeWorld currently, but involves sending them off and waiting ages. Now, I imagine you'll be able to go into your local Hobby Centre, pick up some plastic Space Marines, order some Forge World upgrade packs and the latest Black Library book (which you won't now have to pay postage twice for) and pay with Gift Vouchers or cash. Win. 

What does this mean for the social media though? Well, I finished yesterday's blog with the comment that I didn't get why they would roll Black Library, Forge World and GWDigital into one account. Now, I'm getting the feeling that's what we might see happen. Black Library and GWDigital are practically intertwined anyway, and if it's all available from the one site, there's no need to separate Forge World or Citadel Games Workshop from each other. 

I guess we can only wait and see. April 7th isn't too far away, and I bet we'll have a better understanding of it all then. 

Before I go, I wanted to show you this as well. It looks like Games Workshop are looking to revamp Warhammer World considerably. I think it looks fantastic, can't wait to hear more about this.