My experience as a 40k player is that we are there despite GamesWorkshop and not because of them. If you want to play in-person then you will need to accommodate players that want to use customs or stand-ins (I declare this bottlecap to be a tank, sir) because the game is extremely P2W and unfriendly to experimentation otherwise.

The Pokemon community is like this as well. Everything happens on a bootleg website, partially because breeding and getting good stats is extremely time consuming, but also because the IRL scene is geared towards kids.

Not only do they not care, sources for quality counterfeits are actually a bit of a passed around community secret because gw is pretty quick to have them shut down. The counterfeits are quite a bit cheaper than gw for acceptable quality.