Sure, 40K and Fantasy have always been"expendable income, giant money-sink"games but I don't think that's there's any debate that they've progressively gotten worse about it. At one point you could play a game of 40K with 20-30 models or so, and I'm not even talking its skirmish roots. The worst part was probably for the 'horde' armies and having to buy metal figure blisterpacks, but that really wasn't due to GW trying to squeeze more money from the hobby like they seem to be now.
When they started implementing plastics they sold it as a way to cut costs. Thing is, they aren't exactly passing all those savings onto the players, and they've been steadily pushing up the pricepoints and the scale of the game for a long time now. I remember buying one of the old SM army boxes (was thinking of changing from Chaos) for around $100 I think it was, one of the old metal/plastic sets shipped in styrofoam. And while that box didn't have everything that I'd have wanted to play with, it came close. Now, even if you account for inflation you can't even remotely do that if you follow with what GW wants you to do anymore - Allies, Flyers, fortifications, stuff that used to be Apoc only...hell, if I wanted to keep my CSM army "up to date" I'd have to buy 2 separate codexes (CSM/Daemons), the new 6.5/7 BRB depending on how they do that this year, several hundred dollars of new stuff JUST from the latest codex (hellturkeys, Forges, etc), fortifications/superheavies if I feel that I need a counter to other stuff like that, and now they're talking about pushing out a "fix" for the CSM dex that should never have needed a fix in the first place, and even if it sounds like it makes things worse (paying for extra rules on already expensive models when other armies get stuff for free @ base costs) I'd still have to PAY for it. That's like selling someone a television that works like shit then pushing out a 'repair kit' that not only makes the issues worse, but is also nothing more than another planed source of revenue.
GW has jumped the shark so badly in the last few years that it's impressive to watch people quit. They even said not that long ago that they weren't going to try being a company that serves all gamers, but rather a company that focuses on a niche portion of the market. I'm paraphrasing heavily there, but I think they want to focus on the hardest of hardcore players and milk those whales for revenue instead of trying to reduce costs that players see and expanding their playerbase in the way that you see happening with WarmaHordes.
The new Dwarve stuff is a prime example. The Battleline is $165 worth of plastic that might not be enough to really get you started in Fantasy, and I could prob get started in Warmahordes for much less. They already had Gyros but not they have the the Gyrobomber in kit form (I'm shocked that it's only $45). Also Irondrakes. The new release bundle is $423.50, and the "grand army" set is a whopping $1,103.00. And to be honest, this seems tame in comparison to what some players have had to deal with when new stuff comes out.
Don't get me wrong, it's great to see "new" stuff, but I don't want to have to spend $400-$500 every few years just to stay 'competitive' (and I use that word loosely), and it isn't right IMHO that while they push the scale of their games ever larger that new players are faced with having to spend perhaps $750+ in some cases just to play the games that everyone else is playing. I would actually warn new players away from GW and tell them to play something, anything, as long as it isn't GW. Hell, there is only one FLGS in my area that even has games of 40k going on anymore - a lot of the games being played at other stores are stuff like FoW, WarmaHordes, Dystopian Wars, etc etc etc.
