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GW generally makes me sad these days :(


I love the models, really like the games..but I really dislike the company and how it behaves. Theres making a profit (as any good company trys to) and theres being a ****!

WD's decline in quality is just another symptom >.<

and I agree with Ugavine. If they still had the random games, cardboard extras, free models, heck even as he said stickers I may consider buying it!

I suspect the move away from 'freebies' was because they brought very little return. I had space Hulk in the 90s, and there were two or three expansions provided in WD that added a lot to the game. Now granted, i only bought the magazine because they contained the free material, so it wasn't exactly free -- but I bet GW lost money on the deal. Now you could maybe say that retaining my loyalty by giving me 'free' things is a smart move, but GW seem to me to be quite good at those sorts of sums, and they seem to have arrived at the answer that it isn't...

From my perspective, pretty much every change made in WD since, oh say 1986-ish has been (so far as I can tell not having bought many issues) worse. But GW are clearly finding those changes better for them.

Skinnereal wrote:I got Block Mania for free when I subscribed some time ago. That's a full boardgame, for the convenience of getting WD by post.

I don't remember anything on the cover apart from a single by Sabbat, but it was decades ago.

They've done lots of cardboard inserts and the occasional figure, sometimes metal, on the cover. In the early #200s they were putting card in every issue; new datafaxes for vehicles, walls, buildings, counters for special scenarios, they did an Ork watch tower for Gorkamorka and scenery for a bretonnian jousting game, then a little later was the Ork "Brewhouse Bash" game which I enjoyed several times.

White Dwarf has the potential to be an awesome magazine.

But increased ads, poorly written articles, and general nonsense = EPIC FAIL in magazine world. :-(

If they did give some kind of freebies or added extras for subscribing, I would be willing to give it a go.

White Dwarf has the potential to be an awesome magazine.

But increased ads, poorly written articles, and general nonsense = EPIC FAIL in magazine world. :-(

If they did give some kind of freebies or added extras for subscribing, I would be willing to give it a go.

As I say, I suspect they don't because it's massively cost-ineffective for them to do so. Sadly.

Has anyone ever read any other magazine so cliche to their hobby?

I got Bass Player from America on mail order and have stopped lately due to it just becoming an ad-fest. I mean it is even worse than WD. Although they do openly admit they've had to do it to keep the magazine a float through these hard times.

Still - most magazines are going this way and it is a shame because I read stuff in mags much easier than on the web. Oh well!

I used to buy climbing magazines , and though adverts increased in size (though probably actually diminished in quantity as small players stopped using the magazines for advertising or just went bust), because the magazines were/are independent, they generally didn't seem too product-focused (though the critical quality of reviews declined sharply in recent years, which Isuspect was editorial decision making so as not to piss off the advertisers).

In the 70s/80s I used to read SPI's Strategy and Tactics, which was unbiased and excellent despite being an in-house magazine for a major player in the board wargaming market. Free game every issue! (But SPI went bust...)

I agree that all magazines (at least the ones I subscribe to) are going the way of advertisement-intensive. I understand that they need to make money to stay afloat, but they have to balance the quality aspect of their product too.

I am willing to pay a premium price for premium qualilty. I am NOT ok with paying premium price for lackluster products.

for coursework at school we had to do a study of 'advert' to 'news' ratios in newspapers (on the same day so all the stories were similar), i bet you could do the same betweeen WD's of recent times and years ago and it wouldnt be good.
not sure that sentence makes sense, sorry.
i mean the amount of adverts in WD have increased by a stupid amount since the when i used to buy it regularly

Artemo, I don't recall the example off-hand, sorry, or indeed where I read about it (possibly on the UK RPG industry mailing list, possibly on the uk.games.roleplay group). I can remember it was from a reliable source though. Might have been to do with the GW editions of RuneQuest -- I've a feeling that they specifically went for the licence to do UK editions of RQ because they lost the right to be sole importer of D&D, and thus switched over a load of coverage from D&D to RQ? Could be wrong, though.

Likewise, I don't recall the reviewer in question. It was a relatively late-era review, I think. I doubt they'd mind too much if an AD&D adventure got a bad review, as long as most of them didn't.

Revenent Reiko wrote:i mean the amount of adverts in WD have increased by a stupid amount since the when i used to buy it regularly

I think the really bad thing isn't actually the volume of pages dedicated to adverts, but the way that many 'articles' have just become advertising pieces at the expense of genuine hobby content.

Howard A Treesong wrote:

Revenent Reiko wrote:i mean the amount of adverts in WD have increased by a stupid amount since the when i used to buy it regularly

I think the really bad thing isn't actually the volume of pages dedicated to adverts, but the way that many 'articles' have just become advertising pieces at the expense of genuine hobby content.

tbh i cast them in the same light as adverts, they arent any different except the volume of text used.

I stopped getting WD for a simple reason - my subscription stopped being honoured. They owed me about four issues and just stopped sending them. I gave them a call and they claimed they sent out more copies. Nothing ever arrived though. Gits.

It was around that time I was becoming very disillusioned with GW after being treated quite badly in store and seeing their increasingly tiresome rules. That was when I first encountered "all models must be painted to play in store". Most of my army was, but I think I had a unit of Stikkbomberz that weren't finished yet. My opponent and I ignored them and played any way, but it was just so rude, particularly as I'd travelled an hour to get to a store to play.

logg_frogg wrote:Sinister even! Wasn't there a point where they were giving out Gorkamorka Boxed games /w subscriptions??

Yes there was. That's how I got my second copy of the game - it actually included Digganob too (they didn't advertise that).