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One thing I noticed recently is how low prizing tends to be in miniatures games. I'm a little confused as to why this is -- it seems like GW makes plenty of money, has a really popular game, etc. but for whatever reason tournament play doesn't have anywhere near the same level of prizing that you can find in the world of card games. I'm not even discussing poker here or other "gambling games", just TCGs like Magic: the Gathering, Flesh and Blood, etc.

Magic is of course the "elephant in the room", and maybe it's unfair to compare such a big title to most other games, but Flesh and Blood is a relatively new game by a relatively new company in New Zealand. The prize for winning Flesh and Blood Worlds is I believe $100,000 USD, plus highly valuable promotional items. The prize for coming in 32nd at Flesh and Blood worlds is $2k USD! I've never heard of any miniatures tournament offering anywhere close to this -- even winning the extremely competitive ITC circuit is I think a few thousand dollars -- cool to win certainly, and kudos to Frontline for putting on that event, but nowhere near what the card game world offers.

To me, miniatures games and card games have lots of similarities. Both involve elements of army composition, determining the "metagame", etc. -- but for whatever reason card games often seem to have major monetary prizes at tournaments while miniatures don't. What's up with that?

How do tournament sizes compare? It takes a lot of space and a lot of time to run a 40k event. How many people they have paying the entry fee?

Vs with cards, you can pack a lot more people into the space and turn over more tables, letting more people in who are going to shell out the fees.

More fees in, more cash out.

Part of the reason I'd argue is that no company in Wargames (or at least scifi-/fantasy) is big enough nor has focused on the competitive market in the same way MTG has.


Basically GW didn't go after the competitive scene at all and during the Kirby era when MTG and things like e-sports were becoming a thing and getting bigger; GW was pulling out. The shut down their own events and didn't really support the competitive scene. This left it in the hands of fans who just kept running it as they had for years. Some big events here and there yes, but nothing vast and no real big online viewing platform either to generate lots of views, fans, clicks and marketing ad revenue and potential.


Basically Wargaming remained small scale and niche and has continued to basically be so. It gets sponsoring from basically its won brand products and such and from stores and the like ;but there's been no real big/successful push to make it a spectator sport event or to push it into becoming a major competitive event that can generate attention, interest and thus command big prizes.




Other aspects come into play too and Nevelon raises good points as to other barriers toward it scaling up to something like what MTG has.

 Nevelon wrote:
How do tournament sizes compare? It takes a lot of space and a lot of time to run a 40k event. How many people they have paying the entry fee?

Vs with cards, you can pack a lot more people into the space and turn over more tables, letting more people in who are going to shell out the fees.

More fees in, more cash out.

Entry fees are sort of inconsequential to the prizing for these big events a lot of the time -- I think FAB Worlds main event entry fees wouldn't even cover the top prize, much less venue costs and all the other prizing. The key issue is whether the company is willing to invest in organized play. LSS (makers of FAB) put I think a million dollars into organized play cash prizes for the year, which sounds like a lot but might not actually be so much if parsed as a marketing expense.

 Kingsley wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:
How do tournament sizes compare? It takes a lot of space and a lot of time to run a 40k event. How many people they have paying the entry fee?

Vs with cards, you can pack a lot more people into the space and turn over more tables, letting more people in who are going to shell out the fees.

More fees in, more cash out.

Entry fees are sort of inconsequential to the prizing for these big events a lot of the time -- I think FAB Worlds main event entry fees wouldn't even cover the top prize, much less venue costs and all the other prizing. The key issue is whether the company is willing to invest in organized play. LSS (makers of FAB) put I think a million dollars into organized play cash prizes for the year, which sounds like a lot but might not actually be so much if parsed as a marketing expense.

It's not about the fees or exposure, it's about the headache of running it. Wargames have a much more nebulous structure than card games. In most tcgs you have very set ways of playing out your strategy, timing is fairly ironclad and positioning of cards is rarely relevant. With wargames, especially ones where you don't have models moving in strict blocky regiments, there's a lot more room for people to mess around with trying to squeeze in an extra half an inch or agonize exactly how to position their squad members to maximize cover. It can even be a problem with things like X-Wing where you have standard templates for movement. Add in the various complexities of rules interactions and it just becomes more trouble than it's worth.

So it's a lot of work for fairly minimal gain but plenty of cost, especially if you're footing the bill for a significant cash prize that will bring out the absolute worst in some players.

Card games carry much better margins than miniatures games. The pack of cards you buy for $4-5 bucks cost literal pennies to manufacture and ship, and they're probably printing millions of packs per set. TCG publishers can afford to put that kind of money into their promotional budgets as a means of developing the market for the game, and the game is more broadly accessible to general audiences than a miniature game.

Miniatures do not have such aggressive margins and have much smaller production runs, as well as the fact that events take longer and accommodates people, etc means there's less of a draw there for the level of support needed to support that kind of prizing.

Actually despite what I said earlier, I'm now wondering what the Warmachine events at the height of MK2 were shaping up like. Certainly not on the same scale, but I wonder if they were pushing in that direction as it certainly felt that they were as the competitive side was a big focus.





Also another trick that MTG are getting into more is sponsoring. Just look at all the limited edition sets they are doing right now. Heck they even did a GW one. All those firms that aren't "MTG core market" are being marketed too and who knows a few might decide that it benefits them to sponsor/back MTG events for additional marketing in the future.
It's building relationship bridges for Wizards that might turn into profitable sponsors or event sponsors and the like.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Card games carry much better margins than miniatures games. The pack of cards you buy for $4-5 bucks cost literal pennies to manufacture and ship, and they're probably printing millions of packs per set. TCG publishers can afford to put that kind of money into their promotional budgets as a means of developing the market for the game, and the game is more broadly accessible to general audiences than a miniature game.

Miniatures do not have such aggressive margins and have much smaller production runs, as well as the fact that events take longer and accommodates people, etc means there's less of a draw there for the level of support needed to support that kind of prizing.

GW has huge profit though? They could easily do this if they wanted to -- I suppose for them it just doesn't seem like it'd be good return on investment, since the competitive scene isn't as much a focus as it is for some of the card game companies.

GW certainly could, and probably asmodee, but after that it's an unaffordable prospect to most of the industry

I think that there are very simple reasons for that. Putting money into tournaments won't bring GW (or other wargaming company with a fraction of the budget) anything in terms of increased sales. The main market is not competitive events or even the games. The main market is pretty miniatures. Of course, there are the competitive players, but they're there anyways and I don't see there suddenly being wildly more of them if tournaments started offering huge cash prizes.

That, and wargaming rules are much more fuzzy than TCG rules, which means that there are many more edge cases. And I for one think that you could make a very profitable reality show out of all the fights you'd get if there was serious money on the line.

Keeping money out of it is a good idea to have the focus be more on the hobby and sportsmanship. This kind of games rely on people playing together as much as against each other and having more incentives to cheat or only play for themselves are probably not going to be a good idea in the long run.

Miniature games are more of a hobby that has the side benefit of allowing you to play against others compared to card games that are mostly just games.

People are into this hobby for the various aspects of the hobby and not just to have a game to play competitively. Monetary value has very little to do with it. Card games on the other hand are quite monetized and a lot of the core concept about events for a lot of those players revolve around EV, estimated value. There you kinda need the cash prizes for a lot of the players to even think it is worth it to show up. People like to win and compete in this hobby too but it is as much if not more to socialize with others around the hobby than actually having a shot of winning anything.

I spent about 1k $ to attend ArdaCon this year for MESBG and came in third place out of about 170 players. I got a 3D printed trophy and a diploma for it and my only complaint about the prize support is that there wasn't anything for the hobby aspect of it. (5 days of events and 1 army got a medal for best painted) There is no way they would be able to have prizes that makes it worth it to attend just for the chance of winning that but I would have like to see more support for the hobby aspects since that would promote better looking armies without any risk of people playing dirty to get prizes.

The main reason on GW's side is a combination of not gaining anything from it and probably not really wanting to encourage competition for financial gain in the first place. 40k is bad enough as a competitive game right now, I can't imagine how much worse it could get if five- or six-figure sums of money were on the line.

It doesn't make much sense in a game where balance is an afterthought and game state can be changed irrevocably by clumsy fingers or bumping the table with your belly.

 Overread wrote:
Actually despite what I said earlier, I'm now wondering what the Warmachine events at the height of MK2 were shaping up like. Certainly not on the same scale, but I wonder if they were pushing in that direction as it certainly felt that they were as the competitive side was a big focus.

I got fairly involved in all of this at the time and it was definitely a desire both from the community and from PP. The answers really come down to logistics and the money just not being there to support it. I think the biggest Warmachine event was probably the 320 player WTC with the next closest probably being the WFW (formally WMW) Last Chance Qualifier which got in the 250 range. Lets be clear, minis games are niche. Even as big as GW is, I think the largest tournament is still shy of 1000? It's a respectable size, but nothing compared to the audience that supports card and esport scenes. On top of that, everything in minis just costs more to run; minis tournaments simply do not scale profitably.

First off, you've got event space itself. 100+ tables fills up convention spaces pretty quickly and gets very expensive. It's also not enough to just provide space; the tables themselves are a huge cost that became one of the big reasons Warmachine lost so much table presence as it shifted to 2D templates. There needs to be other revenue streams, but again, the money just isn't there. Sponsorships are a big one, but they come down to viewership which again, we have a tendency to overestimate. Realistically minis streams are struggling to crack 10k views and for good reason. Minis games are very hard to present in an engaging way. It's very hard to see board position on camera and even then, minis games tend to be pretty boring to watch. To make things worse, convention internet capable of supporting a stream is really really expensive and you'll probably struggle to attract enough sponsorship money to cover it along with the cost to transport the setup.

What really clinches it though is just that minis have a pretty notable barrier to entry. It's not like Overwatch or MTG where the hype translates in anyone with a passing intrest and $10 to burn is going to try the game out and get hooked. Minis games take a lot of money and effort to play and realistically don't have anywhere near the ongoing costs as microtransaction laden games like CCGs and FTP online. They also have serious production constraints that limit their growth. If GW's playerbase doubled overnight they'd really struggle to meet demand and could easily bankrupt themselves trying to grow to meet a bubble that doesn't last.

That's effectively what it all comes down to; minis games are way more of a passion than a successful business model. The margins are bad and the audience is low, but the people on both ends are passionate enough to keep things going anyway. It just limits how big they can get even among the games that are relatively big within the fanbase.

Slipspace wrote:
The main reason on GW's side is a combination of not gaining anything from it and probably not really wanting to encourage competition for financial gain in the first place. 40k is bad enough as a competitive game right now, I can't imagine how much worse it could get if five- or six-figure sums of money were on the line.

Yeah. There's silly amount of cheating as it is. 5-6 digits and...huh.

As is game to require either would require LOT longer game times compared to size of game...or requires some level of trust to speed games along.

Game isn't also easy to spectate. Live viewing? It's...good enough as side thing to listen while doing something else but it's hard to make it engaging one that you can actually follow.

Gets better with heavily edited but even that's tricky.

What's the biggest viewership in streams atm anyway? I don't see thousands of viewers at once generally. And without those why would anybody really sponsor big prizes?

On the viewing side lets not for get games like golf and snooker and even Chess manage to have more general viewing than Warhammer games and all 3 of those sports I'd argue are really dull to watch.

Snooker is lots of standing around a table staring at it (EXACTLY like a wargame); whilst Golf is lots of moving around a lawn and then 5 seconds hitting a ball. Chess can be ages of just watching nothing happen on a board waiting for choices to be made.



I think the thing is if you have the right media setup; the right advertising and the right commentators and video setup you can make watching paint dry a spectator sport that people would watch. Throw some betting/gambling and Team loyalty on top and boom you've got yourself a viewership.


Of course there are other issues and its not as simple; but I think that in some ways the fact that it isn't a spectators game right now means that we don't have the infrastructure in place to make it a spectators game; rather than the game being impossible to spectate in . Other duller and just as slow games can manage to make it work.


This, of course, doesn't get around other issues raised

For sure. One of the best streamed events for Warmachine was always the WTC because as a team event, they could jump between tables when things were slow (similar to how gold works). You just need people on the floor directing the commentators. You can also do a lot with a multiple camera angles, particularly for dice rolls and action shots. The problem with it all is just that its all really expensive to produce and unlikely to actually be profitable for a long long while.

Just getting a barebones stream up is a lot of work for very little benefit. For it to be profitable you would need a large event and a large viewing audience.

We are lucky at our club that one of our members is more interested in streaming than gaming so he has his own setup that cost a couple of grand that he brings to the club for events. He happily streams a 32 man event the entire weekend for a pizza each day as compensation. But if we had to actually pay someone for it we wouldn't be able to afford it at all. Maybe if we ran a 100 player event we could use a large share of the fees for it but there is no way we would recoup the expense from the streaming itself.

We at the club would like to make our streams and events better but right now it isn't really worth it to spend any money on it. Any improvements has to come from our "guy" 's own work and pocket. Just too much work for us now. If we could get access to a location right next to our current one we would be interested to set up a permanent streaming setup in one of the rooms and reduce the workload a lot. When you have a permanent setup and only stream/film one game every now and then it isn't too bad but when you have to set up and take down everything and try to capture the vibe of an entire tournament at the same time it gets much harder.

 Overread wrote:
On the viewing side lets not for get games like golf and snooker and even Chess manage to have more general viewing than Warhammer games and all 3 of those sports I'd argue are really dull to watch.

Snooker is lots of standing around a table staring at it (EXACTLY like a wargame); whilst Golf is lots of moving around a lawn and then 5 seconds hitting a ball. Chess can be ages of just watching nothing happen on a board waiting for choices to be made.

Snooker you get to see board easily and action is fast.

Chess is better comparison but of course there again board is generally visible and it's more suited for viewers to think themselves what to play next. And commentators doing same. You can improve your own game way more there.

 Overread wrote:
On the viewing side lets not for get games like golf and snooker and even Chess manage to have more general viewing than Warhammer games and all 3 of those sports I'd argue are really dull to watch.

I don't think they're equivalent at all. Snooker and golf may both take a long time to play but there's very clear, discrete elements of "action" in each that are very easy to follow and understand. I don't need to know any context at all to watch a golfer hit a tee shot or an approach shot and still be able to admire the shot and process whether it was good or bad. The same in snooker. Frames can last a long time, but there's something happening on a minute-by-minute basis that is understandable and watchable in its own right.

Chess is a bit different, but in the case of classical chess most of the airtime of an event is taken up by analysis. I don't think 40k is a deep enough game to sustain that sort of analysis during all the "dead" time between things actually happening on the board. Additionally, chess has blitz and bullet competitions, which are better suited to general viewing.

40k doesn't have one problem with making it watchable in a live environment. It has dozens. The game itself is slow and there aren't really frequent, equivalent action points to the sort of things you see in golf or snooker to keep viewers' attention. For the most part, it's really difficult to see what's going on at the table because you either need to zoom out to get the big picture, and lose the ability to actually see which models are which, or you go close in to see the models but lose any sense of how that ties in to the rest of the board. Even the "action" isn't that engaging since most attacks roll dozens of dice, multiple times so any individual roll is not easy to track or particularly meaningful in its own right.

The right set-up could alleviate some of these problems and maybe a very advanced set-up allows you to mitigate almost all of them but I think you'd still end up fighting against the reality that spectating a game of 40k from afar is just not very engaging becuase the game is not really designed to make it so.

Also so much of 40k is about distances. You can zoom out but it's really hard for viewers to tell what's the distance between units are. There can be world of difference between 7.7" and 8.2" but that's hard to see from the screen. And even commentators likely won't know.

And yeah dice rolling isn't that exciting when it's big piles of dices with rerolls resulting in lots and lots of rolling and often not for much of effect. 20 ork boyz shooting results in lots of dice rolling but little effect and your average viewers are likely going to yawn at that.

Not helped that tournament armies try to remove dice rolling as far as possible...

Though to be fair big flashy thing doesn't have to be important in the long run for the player and still be interesting enough for viewership as poker shows but not sure does that really work here either. Would you watch tournament coverage where heavily edited clips switch to different boards. "Here's vehicle explosion rolll....It's a 6! Watch all the mortal wounds being spread!" without actually that event having impact for the game win. Big explosion, possibly with CGI animation for added fun. Showy yes, would there be enough viewers to make it worthwhile?

tneva82 wrote:

Though to be fair big flashy thing doesn't have to be important in the long run for the player and still be interesting enough for viewership as poker shows but not sure does that really work here either. Would you watch tournament coverage where heavily edited clips switch to different boards. "Here's vehicle explosion rolll....It's a 6! Watch all the mortal wounds being spread!" without actually that event having impact for the game win. Big explosion, possibly with CGI animation for added fun. Showy yes, would there be enough viewers to make it worthwhile?

I think the problem with that is it's not really equivalent to, say, a single shot in golf. You need too much context for any given roll/action in 40k so cutting between tables to try to distil things down to just the most exciting moments doesn't really work. Even with something like a vehicle exploding (assuming it actually happens in the first place) isn't actually all that exciting to watch anyway, nor is it usually that impactful.

I've seen a couple of streaming set-ups where they have a reporter summarising what's happening at various other tables, who they cut to during the more boring parts of a player turn. That works OK, but still feels too much like filler content to cover for a lack of engaging activity.

Another thing I just realised about making 40K (or any tabletop wargame) a monetised game is the issue of terrain. People already complain about the terrain being unfair but now imagine what it will be like when serious money is on the line. All tables would have to be absolutely identical (down to the mm) and that means that it will look boring. And one of the few things tabletop wargames have going for them (in terms of streaming) is what it looks like.

And then there's the general streaming issue as many have mentioned. Most of the time, there just isn't much going on, the actually relevant moments are fairly sparse, and there are few real surprises or tense moments. It's also very hard to see what's going on and dice rolling isn't something that makes for much excitement.

 Overread wrote:
On the viewing side lets not for get games like golf and snooker and even Chess manage to have more general viewing than Warhammer games and all 3 of those sports I'd argue are really dull to watch.

Snooker is lots of standing around a table staring at it (EXACTLY like a wargame); whilst Golf is lots of moving around a lawn and then 5 seconds hitting a ball. Chess can be ages of just watching nothing happen on a board waiting for choices to be made.

Both are still significantly quicker than watching someone measure and move 40 Orcs a few inches. You also can't really get a good grasp of line of site etc, whilst in snooker you've got a perfect view of the table. It's the same with chess where the viewer can try to anticipate the next moves. There's a lot less armchair playing in chess/snooker than something like 40K which almost invariably ends up as a "line up, move forward, shoot" game.

That said, whilst I enjoy watching snooker, I can't understand why anyone would watch golf considering you can't even see the ball.

Imagine the arguments over distance and RAW vs RAI cases if there were 6 figure prizes. Haha.

I'd pay to see that.

Even a fairly meek dude like me can get a fairly strong advantage by being a "bully" at the table vs a more inexperienced opponent, or one that is not 100% familiar with my codex. I can only imagine the cheaters going at each others at the top tables. Haha.

 triplegrim wrote:
Imagine the arguments over distance and RAW vs RAI cases if there were 6 figure prizes. Haha.

I'd pay to see that.

Even a fairly meek dude like me can get a fairly strong advantage by being a "bully" at the table vs a more inexperienced opponent, or one that is not 100% familiar with my codex. I can only imagine the cheaters going at each others at the top tables. Haha.

Honestly, I'm expecting some kind of nerd MMA. So that should get some viewership. Although I'm now wondering if people would bring old metal models just to beat each other harder.

That's definitely another issue that Warmachine ran into. While streaming definitely exposed how much people are already willing to cheat when there's nothing of value on the line, it also demanded perfection in something inherently imperfect. The community absolutely ripped itself apart, both by building a massive wall of distrust between players but also just putting crushing expectations on players to execute flawlessly. There was absolutely nothing fun about it.

 Dolnikan wrote:

 triplegrim wrote:
Imagine the arguments over distance and RAW vs RAI cases if there were 6 figure prizes. Haha.

I'd pay to see that.

Even a fairly meek dude like me can get a fairly strong advantage by being a "bully" at the table vs a more inexperienced opponent, or one that is not 100% familiar with my codex. I can only imagine the cheaters going at each others at the top tables. Haha.

Honestly, I'm expecting some kind of nerd MMA. So that should get some viewership. Although I'm now wondering if people would bring old metal models just to beat each other harder.

The first rule of dreadsock fight club is we do not talk about dreadsock fight club.

Dreadsocks literally hit different now than they used to.

In my home state cash prizes are considered gambling and are illegal. We can only win gift cards, store credit, or merchandise. Anything else must be run by the lottery commission and taxes must be paid.

It's similar to those phone calls you get about "being chosen for free airline tickets". Yeah they're free... If you pick them up yourself. If a business mails you the tickets they become a "prize" and you have to pay taxes on them. If you pick them up yourself they're a "gift" and are not taxed.
Either way it's just a scam to sell you timeshares.