WFB new specialist game?

[Vermis]

It's just a pity the livelihood of many families depends on GW as it feeds the bitterness machine.

[andys]

"We might see a smaller playerbase, but very lucrative one to emerge from these rules and miniatures."

Surely a smaller playerbase - presumably buying fewer miniatures because they are so expensive - means less production, leading quickly to redundancies?

Are they attempting to become the Rolls Royce of the gaming world?! Can't see that working out TBH.

[empireaddict]

"Easy-to-pick-up, difficult-to-master is the Holy Grail of the game design".  That sounds like Warmaster to me!

As for AoS, it does seem to be GW pressing the re-set button after testing to destruction their long-term strategy of seeing how much gamers will actually pay for annually less and less plastic (not metal) per £.  I suppose the worse case for them is that if it doesn't work they can just rebrand it again as Warhammer 20k?

[Stormwind]

I'm not bending my knee to all the corporate apologists defending it.  GW has been stripping itself down - 1 man stores, trashing SG, finecast, raising prices, discontinuing scenery and whole swathes of back catalogue...  When all it needed to do was make a FUN GAME.

[CyberShadow]

"We might see a smaller playerbase, but very lucrative one to emerge from these rules and miniatures."

Surely a smaller playerbase - presumably buying fewer miniatures because they are so expensive - means less production, leading quickly to redundancies?

Are they attempting to become the Rolls Royce of the gaming world?! Can't see that working out TBH.

I think that the article likened them to the 'Apple' of the wargaming world, and I think that this is a very good analogy. Its a business approach where style sells over substance, that reputation rules. And this is something that GW has is spades, both positive and negative.

The point is, if you can make £100 selling 100 items at £1 profit each, or 2 items at £50 each, you pick the latter, because it means less resources, factory time, staff investment, packaging, shipping, etc.

Yes, this strips down the company to a minimum (and also renders it less flexible and able to adapt to a changing market) but from a business sense, this is standard procedure.

I dont have numbers, but I would also assume that a 'collector' customer is far more obsessive than a 'gamer' customer. Collectors (and I speak from experience) buy full sets, have one of everything produced, and cultivate sometimes significant collections. Gamers buy an army, often several, but rely on a variety of range.... Which seems to be something that GW are cutting back on.... Which collectors would be more resistant to than gamers, I think.

[Aldhick]

I'm not sure about the Apple likening. To use Apple, you don't need another guy, while playing a game you do. Wargaming is strongly dependent on community. And community is something that GW has corossed out from it's vocabluary, furthermore it was systematically deconstructing it in the name of sale rise. Rols Royce or Apple it may be in the miniature world, but as long as their busyness is based on gaming, they won't succeed with their current attitude. I'm sure that under given circumstances it's a huge gamble they are gonna to lose.

[andys]

The point is, if you can make £100 selling 100 items at £1 profit each, or 2 items at £50 each, you pick the latter, because it means less resources, factory time, staff investment, packaging, shipping, etc.

At the cheap end of the market, you can afford to lose 10% of your customers, because having cheap products, it's easier to attract new customers to replace them.

I personally spend £30-odd pounds per month on average - this buys me several Warmaster units from alternate manufacturers. For £30 from GW these days you get a single unit or one large figure. How much younger gamers spend I've no idea but it would take them some time to collect an army. By which time they might have lost interest and moved onto some other activity. Reducing the customer base even further.

Losing 10% of a much smaller customer base is going to be far harder to replace. Standard procedure it may be - but in this market, where there's lots of cheaper competition, it's asking for (even more) trouble.

[Darkson]

It's not as if, unlike Tuomas says, GW are at the forefront of the miniatures market anymore.  Yes, they do still produce some nice figures (and some absolute turkeys, lets be honest) but then so do other companies, sometimes smaller, sometimes larger.  They definitely don't produce the best models in the world, despite their marketing blurb.

[horizon]

@ Cybershadow:
on the net there are already conversions on the new models. So different models will not stop people from going wild.

[jchaos79]

I ve seen (quite fast) a couple of reports on you tube and what I saw it remainds me to Confrontation. I am talking about the look of the game.

[Dave]

The more I see this game, the more I think they just marketed it wrong. If it were marketed as its own game (or even just said, it's its own game WFB will still be around), there would have been less of a fallout. Instead, the response they got was "the sky is falling" and people immediately go on the offensive against it because GW hasn't said one way or another what's happening with WFB.

[Easy e]

I think it is pretty clear what is happeing to WHFB. 

It just got Specialized!  Or do you prefer the term Squatted? 

[CyberShadow]

The more I see this game, the more I think they just marketed it wrong. If it were marketed as its own game (or even just said, it's its own game WFB will still be around), there would have been less of a fallout. Instead, the response they got was "the sky is falling" and people immediately go on the offensive against it because GW hasn't said one way or another what's happening with WFB.

I agree with this, and in a lot of ways this is a real mirror of Epic 3rd Edition. I still think that 3rdEd was a great game and would have done really well. The issue was (in my mind) that it was marketted to Epic players. They didnt like it because it was so different that it changed the theme of the game from second edition, and non-Epic players didnt like it because.... they didnt like Epic.

AoS in a lot of ways is the same thing. WHFB players dont like it, but its not supposed to be aimed at them. But the people who might like it, wont touch it, because its GW and Warhammer.

The real problem here is that this was a marketting and business decision, and nothing in this scenario seems to be as a result of 'the game'. Names are changed to allow IP protection. Races are combined to limit stock on shelves and reduce a massive range. Miniatures are changed to inhibit 3P printing copies. Nothing there says 'this game is important to us as creators', and it shows. This process also meant that GW CANT keep WHFB as it was, alive, because all of those reasons are why they needed to kill it off and press the reset button.

[Geep]

I agree with the above as well.

The more I read about it and watch battle reports (curiosity always gets me), the more I think it could be quite a good game. It's not, but it could be (the rules holes are awful, but it wouldn't take much tweaking to fix it). The problem is, it's not Warhammer. It's nothing like Warhammer. It doesn't appeal to mass-ranked gamers, it appeals to some 40kers, but It's not marketed to any outside groups- so it can't help but get only a small sliver of the market..
I also think the game needs a DM (if only to curb the most horrible rules), but that's never mentioned.

[Aldhick]

Does anyone wonder the reactions of WHF players? We were experiencing the same thing two years ago... but we are just few people compared to the WHF player base.
 
 As for the rules - it's pretty sloppy job. Why they try to translate the rules into Czech when they even can't do it properly anyway? GW has been obviously focused on miniatures, not the rules for quite a time, as they already declared.

But whatever they do, did, or have in mind, you don't treat your old customers like that.