Warhammer maker Games Workshop has suffered a major shareholder revolt after handing millions in bonuses to its top bosses.
The Nottingham-headquartered company saw almost 21 per cent vote against its remuneration report and nearly 27 per cent vote against its remuneration policy at its AGM today (Wednesday, 18 September).
Following record sales and pre-tax profit for the listed business, Games Workshop handed its chief executive, Kevin Rountree, a bonus worth 150 per cent of his base salary.
Its chief financial officer, Rachel Tongue stepped down from her role after 27 years at Games Workshop at the AGM and is to be succeeded by Liz Harrison, also received the same percentage bonus.
Rountree has a total pay packet of £1.87m which is made up of £787,000 in fixed pay and the same amount linked to targets.
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Under the firm’s policy, each executive director must use 67 per cent of the 150 per cent bonus to buy shares in Games Workshop after tax and hold them for at least three years.
I 'member when the cost of figurines was based on the amount of lead in them. I also 'member the ‘bits’ box in the Sheffield GW store. I built whole metal terminators out of stuff salvaged from that for pennies.
Once it became clear they were moving to all plastic and to a cost based on in-game value I noped hard.
Imagine if the bonus was paid in figurines. They’d get almost 2 complete sets, every year!
One and a half, tops.
Well it takes quite the big-brain genius to say “hey what if we raised prices another 10%?” every year so they both clearly earned that money.
I’m kinda surprised revenue is up 11%, I thought they dropped off a bit after the big surge of new customers during lockdowns. Guess they recovered? Maybe it was money from the 10e launch and Leviathan sales last year?
I Know space marine 2 has been fairly successful as a game
This is for the period ending June 2024, so it wouldn’t have been out yet. I do wonder what kind of cut GW gets from the licensee, though, as there were certainly a lot of other games out in that period. I don’t imagine something like Rogue Trader or Darktide were bringing in that much money, though.
usually though, games are not remotely close to sales of merchandise and is a drop in the bucket. For IP like pokemon, yugioh, and such, the video games is such an insignificant amount of money compared to merchandise. basically all major ips held worldwide make top dollar based on merchandise sales.
