Games Workshop opens office in Spain amid lack of bilingual staff

GAMES WORKSHOP has opened an office in Barcelona after struggling to recruit enough foreign language speakers in Britain.

The Warhammer parent company said yesterday it had chosen to open a base in Spain in hopes of combatting a shortage of multilingual staff.

The company told investors: “To mitigate staff recruitment gaps, especially those with language skills in the UK based European Trade team, in November we opened a new trade sales office in Barcelona.”

It added: “Brexit has added extra costs, but we now see these as the new cost of doing business, so we are managing what’s in our control to improve our margins.” Games Workshop was founded in 1975 by hobbyists John Peake, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, who ran it as a mail order business out of their London flat selling handmade, wooden games.

They opened their first store in Hammersmith, west London, in 1978.

In 1983 they debuted Warhammer, the tabletop fantasy game that would go on to become an international phenomenon spanning books, comics and video games.

The business experienced an increase in interest during the first year of the pandemic as people stuck at home developed an appetite for painting and playing with its miniatures.

Games Workshop last month agreed a deal with Amazon to produce films, television series and other media that will be set in its Warhammer 40,000 universe.

Billed as the first deal of this scale for Amazon, Man of Steel star Henry Cavill has been enlisted to star in and executive produce the franchise.

Games Workshop missed its sales target despite record half-year revenues for the six months to last November, it said yesterday.

Its sales grew 7pc to £226.6m over the six months to Nov 27 last year, but the company said this “isn’t where we wanted to be, particularly in the US”.

Kevin Rountree, chief executive at Games Workshop, said: “We will continue to focus on making the best miniatures in the world, sign new licensing contracts with partners to exploit our IP outside of our core business and support our staff.”