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So im sitting here plugging through my Conquest Sorc Kings army. Loved the models, loved the lore, loved alot of it.
But im also sitting here wondering why bother ynow? the game died(Or more never was really born in this area) leaving me with it and my 4 core group of friends with our armies, and they(alongside me) moved to warmachine. But even war machine feels like a shadow of its current self.
I also played competitive MCP for a long time, until i had a come to jesus moment when i played at a tournament an hour south of me, and all my opponents where people i played.......who i met and hour north of me. the crew remained the same, the location didnt. then i tried to get local games, and i still have to drive.
I remember early late 2000s early 2010s when you had tons of other games all vying for the "Second Game" the one people played besides Warhammer, or left Warhammer for. Warmahordes, Malifaux, Infinity, Dropfleet commander. All my local stroes carried that and had events and game nights.
But now.....its just Warhammer wherever you go. i never see events from any other games advertised.
When i asked my local store if they will carry Gundam or starcraft, the laughed, only wargame they are going to carry now is 40k and the minimum of whatever they are required to.
Did GW really kill that market? was it outside forces like the state of the ecnomy and time?

Every game has up and down moments, even 40K. It’s just that GW can keep that going even during those times.

Our store has a variety, 40K is common, but not played that much. Necromunda and Mordheim every year has players coming out of nowhere to play. Every campaign I have players turn up I haven’t seen in forever.

MCP is huge with a completely separate community, they don’t really want or care about the big GW stuff. And lots more kids giving it a go.

If your store doesn’t care, then it’s possible your store just isn’t good.
But I do think the current economic state is really bad for wargaming, which is both time consuming as a hobby and expensive.
Even a skirmish game looks expensive when you need to invest $50+ paint. And then learn, turn up to things.

I also think popular culture isn’t really helping. Building a community does take work, you need people there that are friendly, inviting, able to help and support anyone. But you also need to recognise when people are causing friction or problems. It doesn’t take much for a community to be ruined by a single person.
Especially in small hobby’s that do need at least one other player. I have been in a few groups over the last ten years that honestly I was glad when the campaign ended and didn’t bother even keeping in touch with. It’s not worth it.

It is said that half of all businesses fail in their first five years.

If GW killed off all the other gaming options, NE Ohio didnt get that memo....

Especially at the shop I call home.
We've got no end 40k, but also strong support for:
(In no particular order)
●AoS
●Old World
●Horus Heresy
●Bolt Action
●Konflict 47
●Trench Crusade
●MCP
●Blood Bowl
●BattleTech
A bit of Legion Imperialis, Flames of War (all versions), LoTR, & the new iteration of Car Wars also see some play.
Probably something I didnt list as well.

And we just added Bushido to the list.
2 of the guys were playing it the other week, a number of others saw it & thought it looked cool and asked the shop.
Shop put out some feelers to gage interest.
Interest was high enough for them to place an order.
Order came in Wed. They are now sold out & setting up a larger order.

And if you want to play something? Someone in my area probably plays it.

Another shop plays all GW stuff. They alternate leagues of 40k/AoS/LotR.
But if table space is available you can play whatever.

3rd shop a bit out is alot of 40k, but also has a Warlord Games group every Fri.
Also a bit of Gaslands.

40k has always been the big dog. When you've been in the hobby for a few decades, you realize that everything else is will die. It does sound though like your local shops suck. We've got Battletech, Halo, Legion and other games going strong in the area at local shops.

Ultimately though if you want to game other things, the hobby store might not support that long term. You need a group of people meeting on their own terms, playing the games they want to play, possibly playing in their own locations.

If you'd want to play Conquest, do so. If it's just the figs and lore you like, maybe try and get them back on the table with Age of Fantasy. Make your hobby YOUR hobby.

There was far less competition for the second main back in the day. You would have the big one, then the second would usually be another GW game or WM/H, FoW, some other historical, Battletech. You could really start getting out in the weeds with Wargods or Void, but there weren't THAT many options.

Now you have an entire smorgasbord just from GW. They support five games just in the 30-40k setting right now, so you don't even have to go that far to find an alternate game. And the rest of the industry is even more chopped up.

When the WHFB group died locally, about a third stuck with 8th/9th Age, a third switched over to KoW, and the rest scattered to 40k, Infinity, WM/H, etc. Surprisingly there wasn't much crossover, people tended to stick with one replacement for Fantasy as they already had secondary games. A lot of the 'etc.' group were out of minis or gaming as a whole within a few years. I know one guy is still playing 40k and another has switched over to mostly playing Magic, but they are the only ones left. The KoW group asted a bit longer, but the smaller pool to play within meant that their events were way smaller and less frequent, so they had a hard time keeping a community, let alone attracting new players. A few of them came back with TOW, but a lot of them are also out entirely or switched over to Kill Team or 40k. The 9th Age group lasted about as long as the KoW for the same reasons, though a fair number of them became the core of the TOW group (but not all).

It also feels like the secondary games are far more 'disposable' now. Of all the old secondary games, the only two that I would be reasonably sure of getting a response to are Blood Bowl and Battletech. Frostgrave was hot for a couple years, but I guarantee that if I asked around if there was interest in a game day, it would mostly be 'maybe, but I would be more into Mordheim/Silver Bayonet/Hide, Stone, and Bone'. Even our Trench Crusade days have struggled to get more than 3-4 players recently. There are just so many options to dabble in, but nothing really 'sticks'.

Only GW is a lifestyle brand, the rest are just games.

 Robert Facepalmer wrote:
There was far less competition for the second main back in the day. You would have the big one, then the second would usually be another GW game or WM/H, FoW, some other historical, Battletech. You could really start getting out in the weeds with Wargods or Void, but there weren't THAT many options.

Now you have an entire smorgasbord just from GW. They support five games just in the 30-40k setting right now, so you don't even have to go that far to find an alternate game. And the rest of the industry is even more chopped up.

What day was that exactly?
Sorry, I've been doing this (miniature wargaming) for 40+ years.
I just cant agree with you that there weren't THAT many options "back in the day" (whenever you think that was). There were, YOU just weren't aware of them. OR your forgetting/dismissing things/lumping stuff into giant catch-all categories ("Historicals").

Yes, 40k has been the elephant in the room & eating up huge swathes of retail shelf space for a very long time.
And yes, internet + Kickstarter + 3d printing has alliwed for a huge volume of stuff in recent years.
But there's always been a smorgasbord of options. And in every scale you can imagine.

I think the popularity of secondary games varies a lot by region.

> Now you have an entire smorgasbord just from GW. They support five games just in the 30-40k setting right now, so you don't even have to go that far to find an alternate game.

Yep! "Be your own competition" is an old adage for business. Yum! brand's "KenTaco Hut" of owning KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut is a classic example.

In the 80's, GW had boardgames, Epic scale, and 28mm scale games in the same universe. But it looks like today's alternatives let you use your mini's in multiple skirmish games.

ccs wrote:

I just cant agree with you that there weren't THAT many options "back in the day" (whenever you think that was). There were, YOU just weren't aware of them.

Which, funnily enough, highlights a part of the problem today as well. For people who spend time online following gaming news, there are a wealth of gaming options. For the average person, most of the smaller games essentially don't exist. Particularly since the various social media platforms moved previously-organic exposure behind a paywall. It's really, really hard for a new game to get noticed without spending a lot of money (which new games rarely have) on advertising, unless they happen to catch the lightning at precisely the right time to have the right people start shouting about it from the rooftops.

And even them, you still have the problem of everyone playing 40K, so comparatively few gamers being willing to step outside the box where they will have less access to other players.


I also think it's made worse these days by GW's offerings being such veteran, sprawling behemoths. Whatever sort of army you want to play, you can find it in 40K, and if you get bored with your army there are a ton of other models you can add to your collection, and plenty of other factions to explore when you get bored with that. But that's only the case because 40K has been going for so long. Newer games by necessity start with smaller model ranges and fewer factions, and so people wait to see if the range expands (which it doesn't, because people are waiting for the range to expand instead of buying models to power that expansion), or they buy into it but then lose interest after a while if the game doesn't gain enough traction to fuel an aggressive release schedule because they have played all of the options and have no real avenue to expand.

I've found 40k players in China, Japan, India and Egypt. It's an expensive game but there players everywhere.

Why is there no GURPS equivalent? No mini-agnostic game? I dunno. Maybe One Pages Rules and 3d printing can manage that

There have been a lot of mini agnostic offerings over the years. They've failed due to (I suspect) a lack of sufficient exposure and lack of an attention-grabbing setting... Because, as proven by GW quite successfully over the years, the quality of your rules is ultimately much less important than how much people are drawn to the game setting.

The big advantage for 40K since….2017(?) is their offerings are more than just 40K.

Now you’ve got 40K, Kill Team and Necromunda sharing a universe and offering different experiences. Combat Patrol as well I suppose.

Heresy offers two scales, again each providing a different experience.

AoS has Underworlds and I think WarCry is still more or less going?

Old World

Blood Bowl.

So if you do get tired of a given game? There are others to choose from before you move out of GW’s Bubble. And importantly, with different price brackets. No I’m not going to be a silly boy and say any are outright cheap.

At the moment 40k is in a really good place and whenever that's the case it tends to crowd out other games in the market. The early 2010's were a pretty dark time for the game so a lot of other games got some room to thrive.

That said, it really depends on how players organize and support games and what they want out of them. If your goal is to play in the biggest tournaments, then you're very likely to narrow down your options to a single game and at that moment that game is likely to be 40k. If you're more just interested in playing games there's a lot more room for variety.

Every community starts with a small group excited about a game and if there's interest it will grow. Not all games do unfortunately but its important to reassess what people are excited about. Locally we have a weekly miniatures night. 40k is the bulk of the games of course, but a lot of other stuff sees play. If something starts showing up regularly, we'll assign one night of the month to be dedicated to that game as the second game and if it keeps growing it'll often get more. Sometimes games are hot for a bit but kind of fade out and get played as people are excited to play them.

The question you have to ask yourself is what you really want out of these games. MCP, Conquest and Warmachine are all great at the moment. Which of them do you most enjoy? Which one do you want to spend time on? Let your friends know and be vocal about wanting to play.

Also keep in mind, 40k is honestly great at the moment. It's not the wrong answer, particularly if you want to just take part in a large active community. Just keep in mind having your secondary armies built up has its own purpose. I've got a lot of stuff in storage, but I've made a lot of friends simply because when someone new asks "does anyone play X?" I jump at the chance to pull things off the shelf and play an old game with someone new.

 insaniak wrote:
There have been a lot of mini agnostic offerings over the years. They've failed due to (I suspect) a lack of sufficient exposure and lack of an attention-grabbing setting... Because, as proven by GW quite successfully over the years, the quality of your rules is ultimately much less important than how much people are drawn to the game setting.

I wonder what the measurement would be of success for OPR? It's a tough (Apples vs Pancakes...?) comparison because GW is Huge and everywhere and OPR makes most of their $ selling STL's and much of that via Patreon.

They have almost zero presence in stores and are only a minor presence at Cons, but they have thousands of subscribers and when you talk about agnostic games, OPR is usually a part of the conversation.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

Did GW really kill that market? was it outside forces like the state of the ecnomy and time?

1. No...at least not intentionally, their high prices, and new edition/book spam drove a lot of people, including myself away from their games, which opened the door for a lot of competitors. But the miniatures are still so badass it's hard to not want to buy just to add to or start collections. However, GW does have one major power and that's brand recognition. It's like the Ford or GM of the ttwg model world. They are so big, that smaller competitors, even if they make a better product, don't get the name recognition. In a way it's like ttrpgs were D&D rules the roost, no matter what warts the actual product has on it. And yet there are plenty of competitors that are better, but a store overlooks them to stock because they don't think they'll draw interest, and then that becomes a self fufilling prophecy when the people that ARE interested in Warmachine, Mechwarrior, Dropzone, etc. can't find a brick and mortar store to get things, and find a place to play. Hopefully that explanation isn't too word salady.

2. That's again yeah, a part of it, I'll try to not get on the political soapbox, but in the US because of the tariffs and high cost of shipping... anything really. Plus, the high cost of... everything... that's only going up. It has taken a lot of the hobby dollars out of people's pockets. And not everyone has a 3d printer, or money to invest in one to uh... offset some costs. So they do stick with the comfortable thing they know will always be available to play. The plague didn't help either, though that DID make things like tabletop simulator explode.

The other thing is, there has been one game that actually surpassed GW and made 40k/AoS, etc. the 'second game' for all of a blip in time, and that was X-Wing, which, was 1. cost effective, 2. For time, rules stable, 3. Had a powerful brand identity, and 4. Only used a 3x3 mat instead of the minimum 6x4 space most GW games want. So it blew up but then it got mismanaged, and while the onset of 2nd was really good the AMG edition just nuked all the good will the game had. And GW had that reliable, and stable, long in the tooth presence.

That said, if you are looking for a 2nd game (Or like me, it's the primary game now.) that has a growing, and fun community check out Gaslands.

Bit off topic, but I do wish I could find people playing Dropzone Commander and Frostgrave around here. Both games I got miniatures and books for, but no one to game with.

For my gaming group it's the "first game" 40K (which wasn't actually our first game) that has died as a rules system. Noone wanted to follow the rules churn anymore so we switched to One Page rules. However, it's mostly played with GW figures so GW still gets money from us.
My most played game currently is probably Star Wars Armada, though.
We also have the occasional Oathmark and LOTR game and I'm doing solo ST Attack Wing games.

So, to answer the OP's question, why do "games fizzle out" - with 40K it's definitely the rules churn, but also the No models no rules policy, which threw out some of our models (and I'm not talking legends, but outright not having rules for them anymore). It doesn't help that other rules are much cheaper and more convenient by being available online and not through some weird subscription service that also wants you to buy a 40€ book to have its rules in an app for all of 2 years...

Second games emerged to fill obvious gaps in the market. Warmahordes succeeded when 40k was at it's worst, rules wise. X-wing nailed the "low cost of entry prepainted" game.

Even the third tier of games did that. Malifaux was a skirmish game when that was not common. Flames of War served the historical market by leaning into the "based on the war based on the movie" aspect.

Basically, to have any success, you need a niche, and then you need to avoid one of the many things that can befall a smaller game.

1) GW just eats your lunch. This isn't 100% what happened to WMH, as MarkIII was struggling hard core, but the resuscitation of 40k with 8th edition erased any hope of it coming back. Guildball kind of faced this with bloodbowl, but I don't think that's what killed it.

2) you run out of IP/history to draw from. X-wing in particular suffered from this, and Legion is scraping the same constraints. At some point you start running out of iconic stuff and start putting out K-wing bombers, Squirrel Girl, or Romanian cavalry.

3) your range gets too big to stock. WMH and Flames hit this wall where it got to be daunting for a shop to stock everything.

4) you run out of design space. this is the third iteration of "can't grow any more" and in some ways the real cube/square law for any game. At some point, unless you remove options, the game becomes either A) too sprawling and full of exceptions to exceptions and gotchas (x-wing), B) too filled in, with all the possible playstyles iterated on (guild ball, WH Underworlds), or at worst, C) Both (WMH).

5) you don't mismanage your way from a modest success. Nearly every second game hit a point where the owner could have done something better. WMH had a famously catastrophic transition to Mark III which showed that they either did not play test nearly as much as they claim or their playtesting was not effecting. X-wing picked the moment they ran out of interesting ships to sell to switch to a second edition, making everyone pay money to just keep playing and the majority went.. naw. Guild Ball decided to weirdly blame the fan base for their decision to cancel the game.

6) finally, you have to avoid just plain old bad luck. Look, everybody has a sad story about their bad beats, but some things do happen that change the viability of a game. X-wing was probably already dead but there's reason to believe that Armada had more life in it save for the double whammy of being shunted to AMG and the dramatic increase in the cost of prepainted models. More expensive product from a less resourced company? not gonna happen.

BTW, these reasons are all mostly things GW is immune to. They own their own IP, they trim their product range (which is the biggest most stores carry anyway), they tweak the game to find roles for new units, they are professionally managed and have avoided the worst of the own goals since their dark days, and they're well capitalized.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

ccs wrote:
What day was that exactly?
Sorry, I've been doing this (miniature wargaming) for 40+ years.
I just cant agree with you that there weren't THAT many options "back in the day" (whenever you think that was). There were, YOU just weren't aware of them. OR your forgetting/dismissing things/lumping stuff into giant catch-all categories ("Historicals").

Yes, 40k has been the elephant in the room & eating up huge swathes of retail shelf space for a very long time.
And yes, internet + Kickstarter + 3d printing has alliwed for a huge volume of stuff in recent years.
But there's always been a smorgasbord of options. And in every scale you can imagine.

I think that in absolute terms, the diversity of options in the past was probably higher. If nothing else, with everybody being pewter and black and white rulebooks, you just had a really low barrier to entry.

Outside of real niche outposts of the hobby, it's tough launching a game with metal models now. Infinity still does it, and they seem happy with their level of business.

When people say there are more options now, they probably mean that there are more options for hard plastic miniatures from professional companies. And that is certainly true.

 Polonius wrote:


2) you run out of IP/history to draw from. X-wing in particular suffered from this, and Legion is scraping the same constraints. At some point you start running out of iconic stuff and start putting out K-wing bombers, Squirrel Girl, or Romanian cavalry.

5) X-wing picked the moment they ran out of interesting ships to sell to switch to a second edition, making everyone pay money to just keep playing and the majority went.. naw.

6) finally, you have to avoid just plain old bad luck. Look, everybody has a sad story about their bad beats, but some things do happen that change the viability of a game. X-wing was probably already dead but there's reason to believe that Armada had more life in it save for the double whammy of being shunted to AMG and the dramatic increase in the cost of prepainted models. More expensive product from a less resourced company? not gonna happen.

BTW, these reasons are all mostly things GW is immune to. They own their own IP, they trim their product range (which is the biggest most stores carry anyway), they tweak the game to find roles for new units, they are professionally managed and have avoided the worst of the own goals since their dark days, and they're well capitalized.

I mostly agree with you but X-Wing actually had a lot more it could have pulled from, there's so many fighters, bombers, and other support craft between the 3 eras that they were never near the bottom of the well. There's multi-page documents that fans of the game had as 'wishlist' (I know I was guility of it too) Plus the game was so interesting that newcomers would see a ship they never heard about and go learn about it and its famous pilots. The switch to 2nd edition was bumpy but the conversion packs allowed a fairly seamless transition. One that was FAR easier than the current 40k edition flip of every 2-3 years. It was the AMG 2/5 rules that NUKED the player base. A lot of us wanted some casual mission-based play or game modes outside of 'line up and shoot the other team down' games. But AMG ham fisted it, wrecked a relatively balanced system overnight, and made playing with aces mandatory as the game actively punished you for taking rookie pilots over named ones. They could revive the game overnight if they went back to the rules at 2nd's launch. As far as the increased cost, EVERYTHING prepainted or not ballooned.

Most people in my local community:
- Officialists. GW is THE company. A model/game that is not from GW: NO.
- Competitive: WH40K and AoS have the most tournaments, so those are the games to go.
- Sunken cost: they will not change games because they have invested so much in WH40k/AoS.

Snowball effect. So no other game has a chance.

, ridiculous, I know.

 insaniak wrote:
There have been a lot of mini agnostic offerings over the years. They've failed due to (I suspect) a lack of sufficient exposure and lack of an attention-grabbing setting... Because, as proven by GW quite successfully over the years, the quality of your rules is ultimately much less important than how much people are drawn to the game setting.

Perhaps it is time to launch my long-awaited original game Battleaxe in the 401st Century!

Manufacturing can be a big problem with many non-GW games. If your game is not model-agnostic, it seems like manufacturing and shipping have been real problems for most companies since before Covid. If you can't get your hands on the actual product, you'll eventually move to a new game. Even if the product eventually shows up, the "new" factor will have worn off.

GW have stock issues as well, but I find they're not nearly as bad as some other miniature lines where some models seem to never be available and the second-hand market is less useful.

I would push back against the idea that there was more diversity in the past. Maybe at the the local game store there was, but the wider miniature wargaming space has more minis and more games than ever before.

I don't have numbers, but I'm pretty sure there's as many or more wargames being produced and in production and as many or more miniature lines. We've lost some of the classics, but there are tons more and alot of old lines continue (as usual) to find new homes and get back into production. It's also an amazing time for non-GW plastic model production.

Almost all this is in the small and indie space, but it only takes 2-4 people to pick an indie game and play it. Whether you want something generic or something unique with it's own minis, There are dozens and dozens of choices out there today.

 Eilif wrote:
I would push back against the idea that there was more diversity in the past. Maybe at the the local game store there was, but the wider miniature wargaming space has more minis and more games than ever before.

Most mid sized companies relevant in retail spaces in the 00s and 10s are dead or on life support (Battlefront, Privateer Press, FFG...) so that's probably where the sentiment that diversity is down comes from. But we are in the golden age of self publishing and direct sales.

Another reasons games die that hasn't been mentioned yet is licencing

it can be surprisingly cheap to pick up an IP licence to base a game on (or even licence a rule set if you own an IP but dont have or want to hire in experince in that area)

however if the game does well it inevitablely hits the time for licence renewal and sometimes the IP ower will ask for far, far more cash for the new licence (after all this is a game that's doing well) which means it's not profitable enought to go on with, or equally bad decide they no longer want to work with you because they've had a better offer from a more well known brand, they've decided to make their own game, or they want to take their IP in a different direction and your game no longer fits the bill

I suspect that in terms of getting games into stores the fall in the number of big distributors doesn't help either. Stores like ordering from places they get a lot of stuff from, it means they easily meet minimum order thresholds, and because they get at lot of stuff from them deliveries are fairly frequent.

Games that have to be ordered from a smaller distributor (or even worse direct) are less likely to get shelf space as they require more work, and even if the store is prepared to do that they risk having empty spaces on the shelves as they cant put in an order when something goes out of stock

Back before the plague times, I chatted with the owner of an FLGS regarding Bolt Action and why there wasn't a larger presence for it.

It essentially boiled down to BA being so cheap to make that anyone other than Warlord selling them basically couldn't stock loads of it because it just wouldn't bring in cash. Warlord already sells it at the price best for them, so an FLGS can't offer savings like with other ranges.

Things like Flames of War, 40k/AoS, and even random dice games were all possible to do this with because the manufacturer would sell them at high prices that FLGS could undercut with discounts but still make profit off them.

Turns out when you sell high, other people can sell low.

A lot of game success has to do with boring stuff that has nothing to do with the part customers care about (ie rules and cool toys) and everything to do with boring stuff like manufacturing and distribution. GW's actual advantage is that they've successfully invested public funding and partnerships with things like LotRs into their infrastructure to have control of these elements.

Being in a position to own the entire process from sculpting to tooling to printing and distributing has let them survive often through unpopular policies. Rejecting online discounters avoided devaluing the product. Codexes provide a regular new product for existing fans that they mostly purchase from retail partners. The direct contact forces them to manage the product line and properly manage SKUs and producing things that sell with the kind of volume to make HIPS profitable.

As much as we like to blame unpopular rule changes for these things, the reality is its usually more of a business failing. For all the finger pointing, what really killed Privateer was failing to manage its distribution partners. They made a game that just couldn't be stocked in the average store. There were so many SKUs that had all largely been hugely devalued by online discounters including an absolute glut of niche, expensive kits that most of their business shifted to online sales. While good for the player, it meant that they didn't have a reliable way of getting big initial purchases and the game wasn't reaching new players who pick it up off the shelves. The main reason cited for selling to SFG was simply to gain access to the distribution network SFG had created by getting their board games on store shelves. PP couldn't do it themselves anymore because all those bridges had been burned.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 KingmanHighborn wrote:

I mostly agree with you but X-Wing actually had a lot more it could have pulled from, there's so many fighters, bombers, and other support craft between the 3 eras that they were never near the bottom of the well. There's multi-page documents that fans of the game had as 'wishlist' (I know I was guility of it too) Plus the game was so interesting that newcomers would see a ship they never heard about and go learn about it and its famous pilots. The switch to 2nd edition was bumpy but the conversion packs allowed a fairly seamless transition. One that was FAR easier than the current 40k edition flip of every 2-3 years. It was the AMG 2/5 rules that NUKED the player base. A lot of us wanted some casual mission-based play or game modes outside of 'line up and shoot the other team down' games. But AMG ham fisted it, wrecked a relatively balanced system overnight, and made playing with aces mandatory as the game actively punished you for taking rookie pilots over named ones. They could revive the game overnight if they went back to the rules at 2nd's launch. As far as the increased cost, EVERYTHING prepainted or not ballooned.

The issue with 2.0 is one of timing and in a lot of ways, paying for the sins of 1st edition. The conversion packs were great, but X-Wing was a game built on forcing players to buy ships for every faction for upgrades and hadn't built itself as a faction based purchase model. The conversion packs were fine from a faction perspective, but for most players it meant buying all of them while also having some of their newest toys split off into new factions. I don't really know many players who considered buying a single conversion box a viable option and the full set was a big ask to not get any new toys.

The bigger deal though in my mind was the lack of new content. Since the prequel kids hadn't quite hit the nostalgia window that's created the modern reappraisal, FFG didn't release anything from that era (outside some "old" Rebel tech) until after 2.0. The Rebel and Empire options that formed the bulk of the playerbase had been bled fairly dry at that point. For the players looking to buy the conversion kits there simply wasn't any new toys for 2.0 to sell them. Even the 2.0 starter was the third iteration of an X-Wing and 2 TIEs.

X-Wing always wildly exceeded the expectations for it and I think to a degree the plan was to ride it out as long as they could. If long term sustainability was a real goal, the transition to 2.0 needed to happen closer to when Scum was released, IMO. As for AMG, I think its pretty clear they were handed the job of managing the game until the product that was already in the production cycle got released and finding ways to sell what they could for a game that had already been cancelled behind the scenes.

ccs wrote:

 Robert Facepalmer wrote:

What day was that exactly?
Sorry, I've been doing this (miniature wargaming) for 40+ years.
I just cant agree with you that there weren't THAT many options "back in the day" (whenever you think that was). There were, YOU just weren't aware of them. OR your forgetting/dismissing things/lumping stuff into giant catch-all categories ("Historicals").

Yeah, it has just under 40 years for me, but thinking of what was available in the late 80s and early 90s was either something from Citadel, something from FASA (Battletech, Star Trek), some historical, of which the only consistent system I remember was DBA/DBM.

Then you start getting into the weeds where Wargods is a 'big' game. I have probably seen one game of Flintloque being played, which is more than i can say for Dark Heaven or a bunch of other 'also rans'. I've seen a bunch of D&D, LoTR, and Star Wars games, but the only one that had any kind of consistency was Star Wars due to the West End miniatures supplement, the rest being some kind of homebrew. If you told me outside of playtest, less than 100 games of Shock Force have been played EVER, I wouldn't be surprised.

I know Grenadier and Ral Partha had rules supplements for their ranges, but even at the time nobody took those seriously.

What hidden gem of the 80s-90s have I forgotten? It must have been truly underground if I can't think of some random blister back, book, supplement, ad from WD/Dungeon/Dragon/Pyramid, or con booth discount bin.

Don't forget Mutant Chronicles/Warzone and the fantasy version - Chronopia?

They were everywhere in the late 90s early 2000s.