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Hasbro picks up the rights­...Fast forward a year where rules are abandonned, models are now action figures.

The New 40K animated show where squads of Chaos Marines are facing down Harlequins. The Chaos Marine throws a grenade while yelling "Nurgle I choose you!" Out pops a mini-nurgle and some senseless playfighting follows. Lesson of the day is learned roll credits.

 Erik_Morkai wrote:
Hasbro picks up the rights­...Fast forward a year where rules are abandonned, models are now action figures.

The New 40K animated show where squads of Chaos Marines are facing down Harlequins. The Chaos Marine throws a grenade while yelling "Nurgle I choose you!" Out pops a mini-nurgle and some senseless playfighting follows. Lesson of the day is learned roll credits.

That would still be miles ahead of the current edition of 40k.

PhantomViper wrote:

 Erik_Morkai wrote:
Hasbro picks up the rights­...Fast forward a year where rules are abandonned, models are now action figures.

The New 40K animated show where squads of Chaos Marines are facing down Harlequins. The Chaos Marine throws a grenade while yelling "Nurgle I choose you!" Out pops a mini-nurgle and some senseless playfighting follows. Lesson of the day is learned roll credits.

That would still be miles ahead of the current edition of 40k.

I thought that was the current edition of WH40K....

The Auld Grump

It's impossible to release worse products than GW does, so I'll be fine with whatever comes out of it. Outsource to China, lower prices, add a QA department, hire an actual rules-writing team, etc.

 Erik_Morkai wrote:
Hasbro picks up the rights­...Fast forward a year where rules are abandonned, models are now action figures.

The New 40K animated show where squads of Chaos Marines are facing down Harlequins. The Chaos Marine throws a grenade while yelling "Nurgle I choose you!" Out pops a mini-nurgle and some senseless playfighting follows. Lesson of the day is learned roll credits.

Are we really that far off?

Da Stormlord wrote:
To be honest, I think they'll get through this. They need to lower prices, stop OP characters for 6 points in 40k, and listen to feedback they were ignoring.

What dreamland are you living in?

Companies that listen to their customers are not, "forging a narrative".

Why does everyone think Hasbro would kiddiefy the GW games?

WOTC (who I believe would do a faithful job with the IPs) can get very dark in their books. See: Book of Vile Darkness.

I think Hasbro gets a bad rap because people mix up IPs

- Pokemon is owned by Nintendo, card game published by WotC from 1998 to 2003, WotC never owned Pokemon.

- Yu-Gi-Oh! is owned by Konami

Relevant Hasbro owned IP:
- G.I Joe
- M.A.S.K.
- Transformers
- Zoids
- Dungeons & Dragons
- Magic: The Gathering
- Axis & Allies
- Risk
- Heroscape
- Ouija

 KingmanHighborn wrote:
Why does everyone think Hasbro would kiddiefy the GW games?

WOTC (who I believe would do a faithful job with the IPs) can get very dark in their books. See: Book of Vile Darkness.

Because some people are very much failing to recognize the laughable state of GW's grimdark status. Santa Grimnar is not the scary and you can put the words "murder" and "fang" together all you want but you still have a toy robot.

Even the Daemons aren't really scary anymore; bloodletters are just Gene Simmons clones and who's afraid of Gene?

If gw whent bankrupt I ... I dont know what I would do probaly somthing more violent than vengful mork.

 agnosto wrote:

 KingmanHighborn wrote:
Why does everyone think Hasbro would kiddiefy the GW games?

WOTC (who I believe would do a faithful job with the IPs) can get very dark in their books. See: Book of Vile Darkness.

Because some people are very much failing to recognize the laughable state of GW's grimdark status. Santa Grimnar is not the scary and you can put the words "murder" and "fang" together all you want but you still have a toy robot.

Even the Daemons aren't really scary anymore; bloodletters are just Gene Simmons clones and who's afraid of Gene?

Both GW's and Hasbro's 'grimdarkness' are arguably already a kiddification. The 'dead kewl' factor, and the 'desire to be very grown up/fear of childishness' thing that CS Lewis banged on about.

No doubt some kids think Santa Grimnar and Gene Simmons bloodletters are badass and wikkid. If you don't anymore, well... congrats on growing facial hair.

I don't see the Gene Simmons/Bloodletter thing but whatever.

I don't have a problem with Grimnar's model, maybe 'tech up' the wolves some so they actually look 'capable' of pulling that thing, even if it is a hover vehicle. So it's just a bit 'silly' but 40K has a lot of 'silly' but still it's not 'kiddie'.

All I'm saying is Hasbro would not turn Warhammer and 40K into a white washed 'safe' thing, like 4Kids or something.

There would still be plenty of blood, death, planet explosion, tyranid devouring, ork and daemon rampage, dark eldar torture and BDSM, etc. etc. They might even make Daemonettes legitimately sexy again like Diaz's sculpts were.

 KingmanHighborn wrote:
I don't see the Gene Simmons/Bloodletter thing but whatever.

Its the tongue...look at him in his KISS makeup, the tongue, hair/cone head - bloodletters are pretty straight forward Gene Simmons knock off.

 Sean_OBrien wrote:

 KingmanHighborn wrote:
I don't see the Gene Simmons/Bloodletter thing but whatever.

Its the tongue...look at him in his KISS makeup, the tongue, hair/cone head - bloodletters are pretty straight forward Gene Simmons knock off.

It could be worse.... They could be Richard Simmons knock-offs.

If GW went bankrupt it would improve 40k.

 Ventus wrote:
If GW went bankrupt it would improve 40k.

feth and YES!

You win.

If GW went out of business, the ones who cry about GW would still cry about GW miniatures being outrageous on Ebay.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Erik_Morkai wrote:
Hasbro picks up the rights­...Fast forward a year where rules are abandonned, models are now action figures.

The New 40K animated show where squads of Chaos Marines are facing down Harlequins. The Chaos Marine throws a grenade while yelling "Nurgle I choose you!" Out pops a mini-nurgle and some senseless playfighting follows. Lesson of the day is learned roll credits.

Erik! Dude that one made me laugh, reminded me of the 80's cartoons.

If they go bankrupt, we get to eat their flesh....

I didn't write the rules, people.

If GW went bankrupt....

Microsoft would pick up the video game rights for 40K. A 40K MMO comes out a year later, as does an 40K Epic RTS that threatens Blizzard's SC2. The SC3/Epic II wars begin...

Then GW would melt the molds down for the the metal they could sell.

Mantic would become the defacto producer of not-WHFB, and the models would start to resemble GW's more and more over time.

Then a year later, Fantasy Flight would make an offer for the game rights, as the price of the IP would have dropped to a reasonable level because the GW directors would have been poaching it around at a ridiculously inflated price previously. Once purchased, FFG would put out a few board games/card games associated with 40K, maybe bring back a few specialist games.

In the meantime, 80% of gamers would have sold their 40K stuff to the remaining 20% at 15% of its value. After six months of sell-offs, scarcity would drive the prices up to 200% of prior prices.

At which time FFG would begin limited releases of some of the core (infantry) armies in plastic (Marines, Chaos [Marines], Orcs, Eldar, IG), and would use kickstarter to fund some of the secondary armies (SoB, Tau, Necrons).

Once the kickstarter(s) start delivering (late), FFG would revive Warhammer Fantasy, licensing it out to Mantic to make the official models. FFG continues to produce the Warhammer RPG (2nd edition revisited) in house.

If GW goes bankrupt it's likely they will have completely destroyed 40k by the time they go down.

They have a long way to go before bankruptcy, they will close stores, start selling things off and milk 40k for all it's worth before they go down.

It's then up to some other company to decide if the broken husk of a corpse that is 40k is worth picking up and trying to bring back to life.

What about the Dawn of War games + other warhammer games? Do they still hold value?

 Norn King wrote:
What about the Dawn of War games + other warhammer games? Do they still hold value?

I'd say so, my 14-year old loves to play Dawn of War/Dawn of War II. Personally, I like the Space Marine console game, and Space Hulk has always been popular. If GW really does go under, I can see the video game rights being the first thing snapped up. (Then the IP/Fluff. It's the models I think that will die an uncertain death).

I don't know about others, but I'd personally buy 5"-7" tall articulated action figures of space marines (or Eldar) to display. Hell, I've got a display of 3 1/2" stormtroopers & G.I. Joes, I'd love to put some marines beside them.

...Hmmm, I could go nuts with a space marine land raider + 10 marines in 3 1/2" scale. Or just about anything 40K at that size - I mean, I used to collect the 21st century "toys" and thought they were great for display (and play with them when no one was looking).

If GW Went Bankrupt, I would pull on my biggest remaining connections to buy a few IPs (I am on a first name basis with Google's Director of Technology, who has helped me out in the past in many ways, as well as being childhood friends with the founders of Ensemble Games, who had the very successful Age of Empires as well as Halo Wars).

Specifically The Lord of the Rings and a spin-off license of WH40K (I want to do an actual Sci-Fi game when humanity was still in possession of the hard science as a whole, and maybe have a hand in the recreation of the foundation of the Empire - which I hear is now called "30k" - and the continuation to 40k, ala Asimov's First Foundation prior to the Second Seldon Crisis).

I am pretty sure I could make a convincing case to Tony and Ray that this would be a worthwhile investment.

Now that I think about it....

I kinda hope this happens.

MB

If GW went insolvent then the LotRs/hobbit Licence would be terminated and revert back to the Owners, so you could apply to NewLine/Tolkien Estate/Whomever owns this.

It will revert back soon enough anyway as I can see GW holding on to it any longer than its current term.

 notprop wrote:
If GW went insolvent then the LotRs/hobbit Licence would be terminated and revert back to the Owners, so you could apply to NewLine/Tolkien Estate/Whomever owns this.

It will revert back soon enough anyway as I can see GW holding on to it any longer than its current term.

We (some guys I know from UCLA who are going into Film Making) are already working on a Middle-earth project for which we will not need to buy any rights, and we have spoken to the Tolkien Estate... We are soon to approach others as well..

But the project is intended to be a ten, 44min per episode project.

The "Goblins" I have done as miniatures are actually originally done for this project (and I have humans, Elves, and Dwarves in the line.... But we need a new 2D concept artist, as I am not fast enough in 2D to finish the dwarves), and are just posed and altered high-poly animation meshes.

We found a legal loophole which will allow us to do an end run around both Newline and Saentz to get something to show The Tolkien Estate that we can assemble a team that will do proper Justice to the remaining unlicensed works...

The eventual goal is to be able to negotiate with whoever holds the licenses in the 20's to be able to completely re-do the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (and, indeed the ENTIRE Tolkien canon, from the Ainulindalë on) as a ten season cable series that spans all Three Ages of Arda, plus the earlier ten ages prior to the waking of the Children of Ilúvatar.

But if GW folded, and the licenses for the miniatures were up for grabs, it would give us leverage to use in production.

And we could produce miniatures that we closer to what Jackson showed in the movies (the Perry's are good, and the stylistic differences are not due to them, but to GW decisions), and produce a game for massed battles that actually worked properly for Middle-earth.

MB

BeAfraid wrote:


The eventual goal is to be able to negotiate with whoever holds the licenses in the 20's to be able to completely re-do the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (and, indeed the ENTIRE Tolkien canon, from the Ainulindalë on) as a ten season cable series that spans all Three Ages of Arda, plus the earlier ten ages prior to the waking of the Children of Ilúvatar.



MB

That sounds....boring. Tolkien created a rich world and part of that was due to all of the background information he built into it; however, having read the Simarillion, I nearly scooped my eyes out with spoons from boredom and I hold a degree in history and am used to reading things that basically read like the bible (so and so begat so and so and so on). I seriously can't imagine that work translating well to the small or large screen; people will fall-down dead in their seats from lack of caring about how Ea was created or disharmonious singing powers. Furthermore, there are so many contrived names that people will just give up and not care. People can keep up with a small band of adventurers because there's a finite pool of characters but the books of the Silmarillion literally read like a historical or religious text which is why I think Robert M. Adams had it right when he opined that more people would buy the book than actually read it due to the success of Tolkien's previous works.

Anywho. Off-topic but, for the love of all that is holy make up some stuff if you do this project to at least make a pretense of it being actually interesting to more than a handful of hardcore nerds.

 KingmanHighborn wrote:
Why does everyone think Hasbro would kiddiefy the GW games?

But then I don't get why anybody thinks Hasbro would want to buy GW, unless it were at an unlikely knock-down price. They already own a (better-known) hobby games marque and generic fantasy IP (i.e. WotC and D&D, respectively), and their previous ventures into both running a retail chain and publishing a miniature wargame were abandoned for not turning high enough profits.

Were GW to go into liquidation (something still very unlikely in the medium term, their financials have been poor of late, but not catastrophic), or were a buy offer to be made to shareholders from outside (also unlikely, as the company is at present, if not over-valued, certainly very highly valued proportionate to its turnover) it would come from a huge (but non-marque, and hence unknown to geeks) IP investment firm like Eurazeo (new owners of Asmodee, Days of Wonder and Fantasy Flight).

Weeeell, imagine what you can do if GW is put under WotC. Suddenly, Warhammer becomes a part of D&D universes officially. Or a Warhammer-themed block for M:tG.

Unlikely, though. And I dunno if it's worth buying GW for.

Going to say what I say every time this thread pops up in one way or another.

Fantasy Flight will buy them and everything will be good.

 agnosto wrote:

BeAfraid wrote:


The eventual goal is to be able to negotiate with whoever holds the licenses in the 20's to be able to completely re-do the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (and, indeed the ENTIRE Tolkien canon, from the Ainulindalë on) as a ten season cable series that spans all Three Ages of Arda, plus the earlier ten ages prior to the waking of the Children of Ilúvatar.



MB

That sounds....boring. Tolkien created a rich world and part of that was due to all of the background information he built into it; however, having read the Simarillion, I nearly scooped my eyes out with spoons from boredom and I hold a degree in history and am used to reading things that basically read like the bible (so and so begat so and so and so on). I seriously can't imagine that work translating well to the small or large screen; people will fall-down dead in their seats from lack of caring about how Ea was created or disharmonious singing powers. Furthermore, there are so many contrived names that people will just give up and not care. People can keep up with a small band of adventurers because there's a finite pool of characters but the books of the Silmarillion literally read like a historical or religious text which is why I think Robert M. Adams had it right when he opined that more people would buy the book than actually read it due to the success of Tolkien's previous works.

Anywho. Off-topic but, for the love of all that is holy make up some stuff if you do this project to at least make a pretense of it being actually interesting to more than a handful of hardcore nerds.

The first time I was in college I got a chance to study with Joseph Campbell dealing with mythic and narrative structures.

I had been studying Campbell since I was 15, and have continued that study in the 30 years since.

There are narrative structures that would make the Ainulindalë and Valaquenta completely understandable to any audience.

And despite people's difficulty with the names (I am always puzzled at that difficulty) not all of them need to be explicitly given in order for the work to hold together, as they are peripheral characters who are not specifically identified beyond the omniscient voice of the writing.

Plus... We also have Narn í chin Hurin, Unfinished Tales, The Letters of JRR Tolkien, Tales from the Perilous Realm (only a few of which are both explicitly and specifically applicable to Middle-earth, but all of which are tied to Ëa), Bilbo's Last Song, and the Twelve Volumes of The History of Middle-earth, to say nothing of the roughly twice this volume in unpublished material at Marquette and Oxford Universities.

We have realized that some of the cannon will need narrative expansion (filling in specifics and stories to create episodes in the 2nd and 3rd Ages prior to the end of The Watchful Peace.

But none of that would require the alteration of the canon (changing what already exists in Middle-earth, Arda, or Ëa, as Peter Jackson did in destroying most of the 2nd and 3rd Ages in his warped depiction of what people claim is a movie of Tolkien's The Hobbit.

Those movies are no more The Hobbit than are give guys in black robes handing out pizza and beer in an auditorium are Communion during a Catholic Mass. Both happen to have content that shares a few features, but the essential elements of each are absent from both.

It is not as difficult to bring a story from a book to any screen and have it be entertaining as people make it out to be. One of the BIGGEST mistakes is in thinking that there must be changes to the story to do so. Only the narrative structure is in play. The details of plot can remain precisely fixed, down to lifting the dialog directly from the book.... Take a look at a movie that pretty much did this (To Kill a Mockingbird), and you will see one of the best adaptations of a book to the screen in existence.

As for GW....

I doubt they are going anywhere soon.

But given their direction, it may well be that they surrender certain aspects of their licenses as they move further from the mainstream gaming industry and further and further into niche territory.

MB