Tabletop Minions - Why Isn't Wargaming Dead?

[Slave to Darkness]

5 hours ago, MARK0SIAN said:

 

Then on top of those things you’ve got the cost and the time investment and it becomes a hard sell to anyone, not just younger players.

Hard to get new blood as well when parents buy everything, hell even back in my day my stepdad said the 40k compendium was too much as £12 quid... 'Supplemental rules?!?! They charge this much for something you cant even use without a more expensive book?!?!' 

[MegaVolt87]

On 8/3/2022 at 1:31 AM, MARK0SIAN said:

Younger kids definitely have a lot of low effort activities vying for their attention these days but I don’t think it’s fair to land it all on them. I’m entering middle age now and I honestly don’t think I’d be willing to put in the effort needed to learn this game now if I’d never played 40K before, it’s just too much. As soon as someone told me I’d need to download several updates to the core rule book and the codexes themselves plus the points update and the balance dataslate then manually cross reference it all I’d just switch off. And that’s  before you even get into how complex the actual game has become. 

Then on top of those things you’ve got the cost and the time investment and it becomes a hard sell to anyone, not just younger players.

 

Its quite a black mark to the GW hobby certainly. Younger people like apps, its too much of an ask for them to buy into GW's beloved dead tree model. Even the new HH main rulebooks have errors between the box prints and the stand alone. Thats not an issue when you can change the content quickly electronically. GW needs a strong videogame presence, that way it can feed people into 30k/40k. TWW has gotten many people into AoS + waiting for the old world setting. Older people have less time to grow the community and GW has priced out the Timmy's with the state of the pricing model GW has at the moment. I think GW is fighting hard now to retain the old vets to stick with them for tabletop and so they should be. GW really needs to open the chequebook and stop with the behind the lounge lose change funding to make premium content, the cheap animation is hurting their brand and IP.  

[twiglets]

1 hour ago, MegaVolt87 said:

GW needs a strong videogame presence, that way it can feed people into 30k/40k. TWW has gotten many people into AoS + waiting for the old world setting.

It's done a bit for AoS, but AoS Realllly needs it's own Dawn of War/Total War moment to truly flourish. Apparently frontier are making an AoS RTS that is supposed to come out late next year, and Nexon have a license and are probably making what sounds like a Genshin Impact style game for pc/console/phone. I guess we will see how that goes, maybe it will be the moment AoS breaks out and catches up some of the ground with 40k.

1 hour ago, MegaVolt87 said:

d GW has priced out the Timmy's with the state of the pricing model GW has at the moment.

Naw, Warhammer has always been a middle class hobby. If you look at modern pricing lists and compare them to pricing lists in the 90s and account for inflation then the average model price is about the same. The variation in price is what trips people up because one price being up or down doesnt mean the average has changed. Some models are cheaper than they were in the 90s, and some are more expensive. That variation existed in the 90s too, I've heard it's because they run a fixed cost pricing structure and they price by demand and sales and projections

1 hour ago, MegaVolt87 said:

I think GW is fighting hard now to retain the old vets to stick with them for tabletop and so they should be. GW really needs to open the chequebook and stop with the behind the lounge lose change funding to make premium content, the cheap animation is hurting their brand and IP.  

If you mean Warhammer plus, yeah maybe, but then that might be in the pipeline. I kinda suspect the biggest problem they are having right now isn't funding but that animation is taking way longer to create than they expected and is over running all their deadlines or running into other problems like russia or the lockdowns in china. 

As a company brand new to animation they did kinda go all in head first managing, writing, and voice acting for a dozen animated shows at once, which is kinda nuts. 

Outside of W+ I just hope Eisenhorn is as good as The Expanse and doesnt get Halo-ised

Edited August 8, 2022 by twiglets