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 insaniak wrote:
If your miniatures are expensive, people will buy cheap knock-off regardless of how convoluted you make your setting. The counter for that is to make your miniatures good enough that enough people buy them to counter those who just want cheap alternatives.


The sad thing is that GW seem to have taken this page of the playbook with AoS, as the minis for that game have been largely outstanding. If they had put this much effort into crafting their WHFB armies, it might not have declined so much in the first place...

There really is a stark difference in miniature quality between the two systems. I looked at some of the beastmen the other day, and they do not even compare to what has been put out since AOS. Monsters like the Chimera and Cockatrice vs that of the Magamadroth and Maw-krusha are really striking.

I played WHFB with my TK army, and I was not very happy at all when the AOS conversion came about. I didn't even try it until recently, where I determined it is a lot of fun and dove headlong into it. I will say that player count is up much higher than Fantasy ever was, at the wargaming FLGS.

A point my father makes every time I see him, which isn't as often as I'd like, is that in business if you're not growing you're failing. As I understand it, the notion is that your income needs to be able to both support outstanding costs of prior production, and any debts incurred getting more product out the door.

I'm planning on running a Kickstarter soon, so this has been squatting on my head for a fortnight, but it makes sense to me because I need to get a certain amount of money to (a) provision backers with rewards, AND (b) be able to afford an order of product to supply via retail. Every order I make of 1000 units from the manufacturer needs to support the next 1000 units, and all my other expenses including development of the next product.

So I can see why successful games fail, if they can't maintain that momentum month over month. If you can't buy another 1000 copies to sell, then you're not going to have the income to supply any demand for your product.

morgoth wrote:

barboggo wrote:
A generic high fantasy setting really needs regular old knights, horses, and archers for it to be relatable and understandable, otherwise it feels more like "alternate" high fantasy which is fine but a harder sell for the average person and also a bit misleading for those looking a replacement for WFB.

Yeah, but the problem with those regular miniatures is that people buy cheap knock-offs like Kings of War and others, so it doesn't seem like a viable business idea anymore.

Good lord, you're like GW's perfect customer ain't you?

 Grimtuff wrote:

morgoth wrote:

barboggo wrote:
A generic high fantasy setting really needs regular old knights, horses, and archers for it to be relatable and understandable, otherwise it feels more like "alternate" high fantasy which is fine but a harder sell for the average person and also a bit misleading for those looking a replacement for WFB.

Yeah, but the problem with those regular miniatures is that people buy cheap knock-offs like Kings of War and others, so it doesn't seem like a viable business idea anymore.

Good lord, you're like GW's perfect customer ain't you?

Nah.. I haven't bought Fantasy in nearly 20 years and I wouldn't buy their AoS miniatures, I find a lot of the range completely goofy, like shark surfers and whatnot.

That said, I think it's important for gamers to also understand why WHFB doesn't exist anymore, and that it's their own greed as gamers to get cheap fillers that killed the profitability and thus the reason for a company to invest in it.

People can try and blame it on GW for any number of reasons, the fact is most WHFB players were looking at KoW thinking "DAMM I ain't buying gak from GW now that I found cheaper elsewhere". I even remember thinking that once even though I didn't play Fantasy anymore.

I.E. it has nothing to do with GW, and everything to do with how copyright works, some things you can't Copyright and that means anyone can supply lower quality alternatives and drag you down with them in a price war you cannot win due to prior investments designed to actually get people to be interested in miniatures at all.



When the internet became standard and production costs went down, the days of WHFB were numbered, as anyone with the ability to produce cheap alternatives now had the means to spread them without actually having to do brick&mortar sales, a barrier to entry which had otherwise protected their low-to-zero-IP stronghold so far.

In other words, WHFB is a relic from another era that could not exist today due to shifted market dynamics. mkay.

morgoth wrote:

That said, I think it's important for gamers to also understand why WHFB doesn't exist anymore, and that it's their own greed as gamers to get cheap fillers that killed the profitability and thus the reason for a company to invest in it.

Yes, it's totally the fault of the players that while they were asking for cheap rank fillers, GW was halving the model count in boxes while leaving the prices the same...

 insaniak wrote:

morgoth wrote:

That said, I think it's important for gamers to also understand why WHFB doesn't exist anymore, and that it's their own greed as gamers to get cheap fillers that killed the profitability and thus the reason for a company to invest in it.

Yes, it's totally the fault of the players that while they were asking for cheap rank fillers, GW was halving the model count in boxes while leaving the prices the same...

You forgot that they also slowly made smaller regiments less and less useful while bigger regiments got the inverse treatment via the rules.

You think you had it rough? Why I remember when some of the first plastics came out for Warhammer Fantasy....and you had to buy a box with 10 each of 6 different armies...sucks if you liked only one army, and had to get 50 other plastics with the 10 you did want...
http://www.solegends.com/citboxes/pbs3whfbregs/index.htm

Rank-and-flank tactics don't work when the models are 28mm - the mismatch doesn't work. OTOH, if they were massed strips of 3mm models on bases with the same footprint, then everything would look "right". At 1/10 the height, you'd have 100x the models on the board, so a 5x4 unit of 20 bases would have 2,000 strong. An army of 100 bases is 10,000 men. 10,000 men per side is very comparable to the strength of an army in the Wars of the Roses.
.

It was also that people were tired of "armies" by around 2005 and skirmish style games with a lower model count were becoming more popular.

WHFB introducing steadfast and making people need to have larger regiments was a moderate factor in killing whfb off as well as the cheaper alternative models that people were flocking to (in our area the vast bulk of players bought from the plentiful 2nd hand market and it was rare that any new product was ever bought. Our local stores largely stopped carrying whfb around 2011/2012 even though we had a very active player base, simply because no one wanted to buy anythiing new and were using the 2nd hand market exclusively)

WHFB 7th edition in my area was largely MSU and checkerboarded tiny units of cavalry. When it switched to needing blobs of infantry, people quit. If they had kept 8th edition with MSU and made it more about hero hammer again, AOS may not have happened. There's still that pesky 2nd hand market and easily made alternatives due to generic fantasy tropes thing that contributed as well though.

Looking at AOS today, its all about big monster heroes and buffing and very little to do with armies. Its more related to 5th edition whfb (hero hammer) than any army game and thats I feel by design and market research.

Actual army games like warmaster where you have 10mm or whatever small scale to represent your blocks of troops never caught on here and largely never caught on mostly anywhere, which led to its quick demise back in the early 2000s with specialist games and its no surprise it never returned. Its just not something that you can really profit off of due to lack of mass interest.