Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

chaos0xomega wrote:
IIRC James said that he was never sure why that delay was there or what changed, etc. I think he said that "marketing" or whatever was outside of the studios control and in the hands of other managers.

In the corporate world many things can be delayed, often hinging on trivialities - all it takes is some jerk to not want to sign onto a protocol and its gonna sit there.

I dont think the 3 month delay was 'planned'. Gw cant write rules but they can do logistics. A power play by a middle manager who didnt know/care sounds completely possible to me. Add in a touch of kirby-era hubris and contempt for the fanbase/customers and it makes even more sense. The game studio has very little 'real' power in gw at the end of the day.

Been testing out the preview scenarios and while they're not a revolution, I think they do what I need them to do to make MK4 work. The "win by 3 end of opponent's turn" does a ton of the heavy lifting in this regard. It removes the "throw stuff away or instantly lose" feeling of the old scenarios that made things miserable at low points where you didn't have anything to throw away. You need to engage or the game will get away from you, but you lose in a kind of desperate gambit that the game has always been great at creating.

Things do get spread surprisingly wide and require very specific builds to play effectively. I'm not entirely sure what I think of this, but I need to adjust a bit to get a feel for things. I kind of feel like the game is in a place where a sideboard would fit better than completely separate lists, but I'm not sure how to do that with the Warjack differences between Prime and Legacy. I kind of want to get a look at the whole packet to get a better idea here.

The other big shakeup is definitely the flags and objective terrain. I think the idea is solid, but really requires some thought on terrain setups. It's very easy to accidentally give one side no option but a big piece that is easy to contest while the other can easily score from a safe spot. Laying things out where players have 2-3 interesting choices will take some time, but is ultimately really interesting.

Here's hoping PP releases an objective pack for it soon though.

It seems here (Warsaw, Poland) that mk4 does start to make a difference.

The second half of mk3 was for us local tournaments with 6-8 participants, sometimes cancelled and it carried over to the first months of mk4...

...but now Warmachine has full attendance on local torunaments (limit of 12-16 players filled) with many new players with new mk4 armies.

Country-wise the game has died, with no bigger, national events at all (there were still a few at the end of mk3), but locally it gets better, mostly due to the efforts of one of our WTC players promoting it left and right.

Nice to hear that, Cyel.
Another thing, PP decided to make available the starter battleboxes again. This is very good news, since now there's a cheaper entry point into Warmachine.

MK4 has definitely been a success. In the beginning the year we were losing players because of the slow rollout of armies but the second half of this year turned that around. At the WTC now in october people were SO PSYCHED.

It's really been amazing how many old players are coming back and how the game has begun to grow back again.

I'm having a blast with MK4 and honestly, gamewise/ruleswise I don't think Warmachine has ever been better than it is now.

Mk 4 has made a difference in my area too. It has gone from a dead game in my region to a regularly played game.

18 peeps at our last game and demo day, and 4 4 entirely new faces coming this sunday in addition to several from the last demo. Yeah, it still seems to be working.

I can only speak for my local area but it hasn't made any impact. Many of the old guard have left and what remains are struggling to get anything together. Nobody really wants to physically stock the game.

But it has been really nice to see pics of some of the growth in Europe

Another demo day, 15 people and at least 3 groups who did not get in because the damn doorbell malfunctioned.

It's just a matter of playing and showing the game off

Apparently Mk4 wasn't enough. Looks like PP is giving things up to Steamforged:

https://steamforged.com/blogs/brands/sfg-acquires-iron-kingdoms

An interesting development for sure. Steamforged games is another small company (~40 employees) that specializes on board games mostly through Kickstarter. They also went through a force reduction of 20 employees (1/3 of the company) just last May. Despite all the negative issues I brought up a few pages back, I just didn't expect things to go down this quickly.

What is missing is what is next for PP. Are they shutting the doors entirely? Do they continue on in some sort of consulting role with even fewer employees for whatever Steamforged decides to do with the property? I wonder this only because of these sentence's from the press release below.

Pulled from the announcement: "Going forward, we’ll work together on design and development of the lines. That, along with our expertise in creating games loved by many, makes us ideally placed to collaborate with Privateer Press in shaping the future of a hugely important franchise."

What is even more curious is what actually happens next for Warmachine/Hordes. MKIV is still less than 2 years old and another reboot just seems so unlikely. I am really leaning towards Steamforged wanting to do a large scale board game with the property as a way to revitalize the brand and maybe get more people into the game. But will they actually continue production of MKIV? Will PP stay around and handle the distribution of MKIV products? So many questions at this point.

Me personally though, I would want Steamforged to do a massive reset on the setting and go back to its roots in the story/setting.

To be fair most firms in this industry are small firms. Really big ones are few and far between and many already have their own game lines they are working on.

From memory a good many of the "firm buyouts" have been retail outlets like Wayland and TrollTrader buying firms and expanding into their own modest game companies.

Or they are small firms buying other small firms - a lot of the "garage" firms often sell to each other so that their mould and model collection remains a single entity.

@Overread
I can believe that and it also makes a lot of sense that this would be the case.

I didn't mean to be too negative on Steamforged, only that the company is struggling a bit and it will be interesting to see what they are able to do with the Warmachine/Hordes property while being a smaller company that doesn't have a large war chest to throw into the game.

 Noir Eternal wrote:

Pulled from the announcement: "Going forward, we’ll work together on design and development of the lines. That, along with our expertise in creating games loved by many, makes us ideally placed to collaborate with Privateer Press in shaping the future of a hugely important franchise."

The big line for me is from the PP side of the announcement: "Privateer will continue to partner with Steamforged Games to develop Warmachine, the Iron Kingdoms RPG, and future products based on the vast intellectual property library that has sprung from the Iron Kingdoms. Privateer will also continue to manufacture Warmachine models"

It feels like PP is largely just handing over distribution and marketing to Steamforged while continuing to "make" the game. This in a lot of ways makes sense, but its definitely an odd way to structure an acquisition. Still, its undoubtably the biggest issue PP has faced since early Mk3, so I get the idea, even if the contract sounds like a nightmare.

Shipping and with the rise in metal costs then production as well; has been a huge issue for PP for a long while.

It wouldn't surprise me if they were having scaling issues trying to ramp up 3D printing to big retail amounts whilst dealing with other issues. It could be they are just stuck unable to raise enough money to invest into a big enough production setup to step up their game and continuing on as they were was leaving them floundering.

Steamforged are at least a gaming firm so should understand some of the market and have more interest in re-investment and making it work than say a private investor (and honestly I'd wager PP's company health right now isn't the best for attracting an investor)

Generally speaking there's a severe lack of a good mid range manufacturing option in the industry. You either hit public investment levels to churn out sprue plastic or print incredibly small volume bespoke resins. Small companies are killed by growth because there's just nothing that can meet the demands of a popular game that isn't backed by shareholders.