What you're seeing here is a re-launch of the entire
AT-43 game I think.
Round one: a bunch of gamers, mostly artistically-inclined sorts from the looks of it, design a game. Lord knows where they get the money from. They work off the idea that there are a lot of people who want to play Warhammer 40,000 but who don't want to build or paint anything. Then they look at other things that people don't like about
40K, like the amount of time it takes to play a game, or the complexity of the rules which can take a while to learn such that new players really don't actually start playing the game competitively for a while.
They take Paolo Parente's DUST idea, supposedly, they turn it into
AT-43 rather than making a Wierd War II game. They create simplified rules, they make it really short time-wise to play a game, they design it around 2D terrain with 3D elements sprinkled on like salt and pepper, and they sell pre-paints. They make the Army Books like Codexes, they make the fluff rather
40K-like...recipe for success, right?
Wrong. What may have looked like a good idea to artists who were enamored with their own creations wasn't very smart business-wise. Wargaming is already a niche product...so carving a niche in a niche was probably pretty foolish to try. People can say that Rackham was trying to create its own audience rather than compete with
40K, or for the attentions of existing wargamers, but I think that's
bs.
Tabletop wargamers don't mind complexity. If they wanted simple games they wouldn't play tabletop wargames. They don't mind modeling or painting as a whole. Complexity and the hobby aspects are integral parts of this genre of game. It's what the players want...so what happens when you get rid of them?
What happened with Confrontation is a good example, perhaps...they had a stable player base using traditional metal models. I've heard of that game spoken of fondly by WFB and Warmachine players. Supposedly they had some really nice models.
Then Rackham abandons that game and that business model in favor of this new "pre-paints" model, and now you might as well write off Confrontation. It's not even the blip on the radar that
AT-43 is. They went from "slightly relevant" to stealth mode.
So Rackham creates
AT-43 with this pre-paints model in mind from the start. They price
AT-43 pre-paints at regular model prices and sell it to a niche of a niche audience.
They wrote rules which weren't robust and poorly written, they limited themselves to 2D terrain tiles which aren't very exciting and prescribed terrain setups which take away so much of the imagination of tabletop wargaming...and pretty soon filed for bankruptcy protections.
Then they got some venture capitalists who might have had some idea as to how one runs a business.
First, the Army Boxes. If you're going to sell pre-paints, sell at pre-paint prices, i.e. cheap. Whether or not they can sell army boxes for $70 and then continue selling high-priced Unit Boxes and support themselves remains to be seen, but this was a good business move. The sooner they can get Army Boxes out for all the existing
AT-43 factions the sooner they can broaden the appeal of the game by offering multiple aesthetic choices. Aesthetics of playing pieces draw a lot of people into a particular tabletop wargame. "I liked the look of this army."
Second, the rules. They've abandoned the old plan of releasing all eight
AT-43 armies before doing a rules revision because they've probably realized they don't have the time for it.
AT-43 has a horrible reputation for rules and company support for rules updates. Considering
AT-43 isn't a hobby at all and is just a game, you can't afford to have bad rules.
This is, in essence, a drawn-out relaunch of the product. They're banking on people not caring about the first two factions, Therians and UNA, because they were the first ones out there. They're "old." I've been selling my Therians and you almost can't give them away. No one cares. I sold my Red Blok for a profit. Still popular, first Army Box.
COGS are new. New energizes the existing player base, so they're the second Army Box.
Karmans are still on firesale all over the place, so they don't seem to be so popular...but new factions sell. So ONI becomes the third Army Box. Try to energize the player-base. See if you can get stable knots of players here and there exposing their friends to the game, and now you have these $70 Army Boxes for friends to sell friends on. It's not a bad idea.
I also think sometimes it feels like a last gasp. Rackham Entertainment isn't going to get another round of venture capitalists to back them if this doesn't work. They need to grow their audience, not just sell to the existing audience which clearly wasn't large enough to support profitability the first time around. They're competing with games that have huge standing audiences which offer ease of finding a game with just about anyone, everywhere. They need to get
AT-43 out there and played a lot more than it is now to make the game seem like a viable choice for existing and new gamers who pretty much only see Games Workshop products being played.
Nothing will kill player enthusiasm for a game quicker than not seeing other people playing the game around you.
So there's a real argument for releasing new armies a.s.a.p. to keep new and flashy products coming out to jazz up the player base; and if one reads the existing campaign material, the plans for ONI were clearly laid at the time Frostbite came out, they just got delayed due to the economic troubles. This re-launch is more taking existing design elements from before the restructuring and just releasing them in a different fashion.
Now I think they've gone through most if not everything they had in the hopper prior to filing for bankruptcy protections. It's possible that some work on Krygs was done, but now they really have to wait until 2nd Edition rules come out. Or both need to be worked on concurrently with the 2nd Ed. rules taking precedence whenever resources can't support both projects...but after the ONI Army Box comes out I think the steam of this restructuring will have spent itself a little, and we'll see what happens. Either the game grows or it remains a niche of a niche product and either that's enough profits to justify the company to keep going or they start losing money again and the writing's on the wall.
I'll be keeping an eye on it mostly to decide what to do with my UNA army...if the game feels like it's going out of style time to sell. If the game gets popular and people start playing it around me I have a huge army to play with. Maybe if 2nd Edition rules feature more robust terrain support and a proper mission generator the game might get interesting again...but if I get bored of waiting then the UNA army goes too...and because that army is so difficult to find certain units for, all of which I have due to a lucky find at a
FLGS which was willing to give me firesale 66% off prices just to get the crap off their shelves where it had been collecting dust for eight months, that means I can probably make a large profit off selling my UNA than I did with my Red Blok.
So win-win for me.
I just want to break even if it comes to that...and in the meantime, I've got Flames of War,
40K, and now Space Hulk to keep me occupied.
