It is the 3rd Millennium. For more than a hundred months Games Workshop has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Nottingham. It is the foremost of wargames by the will of the neckbeards, and master of a million tabletops by the might of their inexhaustible wallets. It is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with business strategies from the early Industrial Revolution Age. It is the Carrion Lord of the wargaming scene for whom a thousand veteran players are sacrificed every day, so that it may never truly die. Yet even in its deathless state, GW continues its eternal vigilance. Mighty battleforce starter-sets cross the online-store-infested miasma of the internet, the only route between distant countries, their way lit by a draconian retail trade-agreement, the legal manifestation of the GW's will. Vast armies of lawyers give battle in GW's name on uncounted websites. Greatest amongst its soldiers are the Guardians of the IP, the Legal Team, bio-engineered super-donkey-caves. Their comrades in arms are legion: the writing team and countless untested rulebooks, the ever vigilant redshirts, and the writers of White Dwarf, to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from other games, their own incompetence, Based Chinaman - and worse. To support Games Workshop in such times is to spend untold billions. It is to support the cruelest and most dickish company imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of sales discounts and Warhammer Fantasy Battle, for so much has been dropped, never to be re-published again. Forget the promise of cheaper digital content and caring about the fanbase, for in the GW HQ there is only profit-seeking, Space Marines and Sigmarines. There is no fun amongst the hobby shops, only an eternity of raging and spending, and the laughter of former employees who left GW to join better companies. |
