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Sounds like they're including the Battletech Kickstarter as part of this? Which does seem a little odd to put alongside sales of existing items from stores

 Tastyfish wrote:
Sounds like they're including the Battletech Kickstarter as part of this? Which does seem a little odd to put alongside sales of existing items from stores

At the same time if people are paying right now for a KS then that's money being spent on a specific brand within the hobby right now. Even though it might create a one year artificial high in sales for one firm, its still a reflection of market impact and means that that money can't be spent on other brands in the hobby.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Hanging in there? This is a far better result than just "hanging in there". This is moving up the ranks. Gen-Con's on right now, and Catalyst should be shouting these results from the rooftops.

Hanging in the top ten is a big deal, which was my point.

Huge amount of fluff, lots of fans, not surprising that given good support it would come back strong, particularly with Gen X in full nostalgia/"Hey kids, here's what we used to play" mode.

 Tastyfish wrote:
Sounds like they're including the Battletech Kickstarter as part of this? Which does seem a little odd to put alongside sales of existing items from stores

Probably including the store owner options.

 Stormonu wrote:
Makes me so sad that X-Wing isn't even on the radar anymore (or Star Trek Attack Wing).

X-Wing is such a great game, it deserved a far better fate than what it has become.

This is why I stay with 40k. Despite the ups and downs with the rules, it's the only game I can go to a completely new city almost anywhere in the world and be sure I can find opponents. I remember when Warmachine was in the top 3 and took over my local scene. I remember Star Wars being #2 for several years in a row and people speculating about it overtaking GW for the top spot. Of course just a few years later and those games have not only dropped out of the top 10 of this list but aren't being played at all in a 50 mile radius of me. You'll probably be able to say the same thing about Battletech in a few years. 40k and AoS are the constants, everything else rotates every few years as people get bored or greedy companies ruin the game with a new edition that sucks.

Battletech has the bonus of being fully owned *barring that annoying firm in the USA that keeps trying to send out legal letters cause one time they possibly had rights to host an animation in the USA*

So they can just keep going.

The big risk with Starwars games, as with any licenced game, is that the licence owner can kill the whole thing by raising the licence fee or just deciding "naw its done we don't want it any more" or even sending the licence to a new firm.
Plenty of licenced tie-in material goes that way.

 Overread wrote:
Battletech has the bonus of being fully owned *barring that annoying firm in the USA that keeps trying to send out legal letters cause one time they possibly had rights to host an animation in the USA*

It's very much not.

BattleTech, the game, is owned by whomever owns Topps now (I forget the name). The video game rights though are completely owned by Microsoft. And TV/movie rights are completely owned by an entirely different company. On top of that, miniature production rights are owned by Iron Wind Metals in perpetuity, and Ral Partha owns the rights to continue producing all BTech models up to a certain production date (basically all the old stuff). The BattleTech IP, as a result, is horribly fragmented. Catalyst hold the license to produce the game currently, but they're not the first group since FASA to do so. They do not own BTech.

As far as Harmony Gold goes, their eyes were bigger than their stomach in the last attempts at a lawsuit, and they went after everyone (including video games) and got all their claims dismissed with prejudice. So they're done. They can't come back at BTech ever again.

Pretty pumped for Malifaux to be in the top ten.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

And is no one going to comment on yet another attempt to shift blame by a certain someone? He's just gonna get away with the "blame everyone else except sacred and holy GW, who can do no wrong"?

Nope. Why?

 Overread wrote:
The big risk with Starwars games, as with any licenced game, is that the licence owner can kill the whole thing by raising the licence fee or just deciding "naw its done we don't want it any more" or even sending the licence to a new firm.
Plenty of licenced tie-in material goes that way.

Yep. See also Decipher's Star Wars CCG. Lucas got greedy, ended the license, figured WotC would throw something together just as good. Nope.

Toofast wrote:

This is why I stay with 40k. Despite the ups and downs with the rules, it's the only game I can go to a completely new city almost anywhere in the world and be sure I can find opponents. I remember when Warmachine was in the top 3 and took over my local scene. I remember Star Wars being #2 for several years in a row and people speculating about it overtaking GW for the top spot. Of course just a few years later and those games have not only dropped out of the top 10 of this list but aren't being played at all in a 50 mile radius of me. You'll probably be able to say the same thing about Battletech in a few years. 40k and AoS are the constants, everything else rotates every few years as people get bored or greedy companies ruin the game with a new edition that sucks.

If I remember correctly, I'm sure some of my mates were playing Battletech in the 1980s before 40k was released.

And this bit?

40k and AoS are the constants, everything else rotates every few years as people get bored or greedy companies ruin the game with a new edition that sucks.

I'm sure GW aren't in the slightest bit greedy at all, making everyone buy a new edition every 3 years to the month, often with a new edition that sucks, with changes for the sake of selling the new edition.

I would rather play a good game for five years than an expensive rotating pile of crap for twenty.

But different strokes for different folks!

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Overread wrote:
The big risk with Starwars games, as with any licenced game, is that the licence owner can kill the whole thing by raising the licence fee or just deciding "naw its done we don't want it any more" or even sending the licence to a new firm.
Plenty of licenced tie-in material goes that way.

Yep. See also Decipher's Star Wars CCG. Lucas got greedy, ended the license, figured WotC would throw something together just as good. Nope.

Decipher also had issues with an employee embezzlement that meant they couldn't afford to renew the license IIRC

Both GW and catalyst showing that consistent supply of product is key to drive sales.

GW with supply issues and Catalyst improving supply into channel.

Who knew.

 Gallahad wrote:
I would rather play a good game for five years than an expensive rotating pile of crap for twenty.

But different strokes for different folks!

It’s been awesome to have a diverse gaming landscape, being able to do battletech, Warmachine, Mordheim, and now marvel crisis protocol in the next few weeks.
As well as a bunch of less known ones, and 40k isn’t taking off again.

It’s great, lots of fun and can change it up

Also battletech is nice for practice painting, since even a mistake isn’t huge worry.
I been trying out camo for a Mercenary group, learning a lot !

 MajorWesJanson wrote:
Decipher also had issues with an employee embezzlement that meant they couldn't afford to renew the license IIRC

The statement they put out at the time was the Lucas wasn't interested, period. He owned Hasbro, which had acquired WotC, so the plan was to bring Star Wars back in-house because Lucas was both greedy and a control freak.

Remember, by this point the prequels were coming out, whereas the Decipher game was fueled by original trilogy nostalgia. Lucas clearly wanted to capitalize on what he was sure was a windfall without sharing the profits.

Lucas didn't "own" Hasbro. He had a license with them.

 Tamereth wrote:

 Stormonu wrote:
Makes me so sad that X-Wing isn't even on the radar anymore (or Star Trek Attack Wing).

X-Wing is such a great game, it deserved a far better fate than what it has become.

Both of these died locally when they did their edition changes, and tried to force people to spend money to keep playing with the models they already had. Its a real issue for any game that requires accessories unique to each model to play, then you change the rules so you need different ones.
I know personally when x-wing 2.0 came out I price up how much the conversion packs would cost and hitting £400 just for cards and tokens, and knowing it didn't 100% match all of my collection I stopped playing, as did many others.

For star trek attack wing I actually liked the rules changes, but suddenly all new releases had the ships / upgrades massively cheaper than the old sets and there was no update to re-cost the old stuff. So you couldn't play competitively unless you replaced your collection. I went from playing in a tournament a month (and ranking top 10 in the UK) to boxing my stuff up in the loft.
.

Though for STAW the old cards and ships continued to be usable in the new edition (if you can even call it that, it was more like a 1.1). And some cards like Picard 9 stayed at the top, no? (I'm not into the competitive aspect of the game, though).
I think the real bummer for STAW was the incredibly bad release policy outside of the USA. Ships were produced one time and only/ maybe got a reprint sometime later. Or just didn't. Additionally you had loads of limited price ships and OP boxes that you couldn't get if you joined too late or never played at tournaments. Even the new faction packs seem to be produced in rather limited numbers and are hard to get 2 years later. Availabity was a constant problem and still is.
Not trying to lecture you as I'm sure you're aware of most points, just wanted to add an additional perspective .

 Kanluwen wrote:
Lucas didn't "own" Hasbro. He had a license with them.

It was reported at the time that as part of the deal, Lucas received stock in Hasbro.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
Lucas didn't "own" Hasbro. He had a license with them.

It was reported at the time that as part of the deal, Lucas received stock in Hasbro.

'owning stock' =/= 'owning the company', otherwise I would own UPS.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

 Tamereth wrote:

 Stormonu wrote:
Makes me so sad that X-Wing isn't even on the radar anymore (or Star Trek Attack Wing).

X-Wing is such a great game, it deserved a far better fate than what it has become.

Both of these died locally when they did their edition changes, and tried to force people to spend money to keep playing with the models they already had. Its a real issue for any game that requires accessories unique to each model to play, then you change the rules so you need different ones.
I know personally when x-wing 2.0 came out I price up how much the conversion packs would cost and hitting £400 just for cards and tokens, and knowing it didn't 100% match all of my collection I stopped playing, as did many others.

For star trek attack wing I actually liked the rules changes, but suddenly all new releases had the ships / upgrades massively cheaper than the old sets and there was no update to re-cost the old stuff. So you couldn't play competitively unless you replaced your collection. I went from playing in a tournament a month (and ranking top 10 in the UK) to boxing my stuff up in the loft.
.

Though for STAW the old cards and ships continued to be usable in the new edition (if you can even call it that, it was more like a 1.1). And some cards like Picard 9 stayed at the top, no? (I'm not into the competitive aspect of the game, though).
I think the real bummer for STAW was the incredibly bad release policy outside of the USA. Ships were produced one time and only/ maybe got a reprint sometime later. Or just didn't. Additionally you had loads of limited price ships and OP boxes that you couldn't get if you joined too late or never played at tournaments. Even the new faction packs seem to be produced in rather limited numbers and are hard to get 2 years later. Availabity was a constant problem and still is.
Not trying to lecture you as I'm sure you're aware of most points, just wanted to add an additional perspective .

While technically you could use the old ships the new stuff was just made cheaper. I.e. an 24 point named bird of prey, or the new ones which were something like 14 points, same model, same stats. The old stuff could have been faq'd to change the points, but they refused making it unplayable. A few old captains / upgrades may have still made the cut, as the difference between a 3 or 5 point upgrade wasn't enough to take them out of the game.

The prize ships were less of an issue as they were in a rotation were older ones were banned from use after a certain number of the OP tournaments. However the OP kits stopped shortly after the updated rules / starter were released.

Stock availability here in the UK became an issue, because few places stocked it.

 Stormonu wrote:
Makes me so sad that X-Wing isn't even on the radar anymore (or Star Trek Attack Wing).

X-Wing is such a great game, it deserved a far better fate than what it has become.

Was a great game. After the questionable 2.0 reboot and then AMG's complete destruction of the game "MCP with spaceships" can die on the trash pile of forgotten games. I'm not at all surprised it has dropped off the top-10 list, the handful of people still playing seem to be mostly victims of the sunk cost fallacy who have too much invested in the game to move on. And those people aren't really buying new stuff anymore.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Tamereth wrote:
Both of these died locally when they did their edition changes, and tried to force people to spend money to keep playing with the models they already had.

Yep. The edition change brought way too much attention to the fact that the cards have zero in-game purpose whatsoever and exist purely as a proof of purchase system. You can play the game exactly the same way with a printed list from a squad builder but FFG/AMG demands proof of purchase if you want to play in any official events. And so when FFG tried to get greedy and harvest another round of "pay to play" taxes the community decided that and found another game to play.

I suspect a big part of why GW can get away with the same business model is that most people are pirating all of the rules and don't pay the edition tax. If the majority of GW's customers had to pay full MSRP to buy a new set of books every three years I'm not sure even the critical mass effect of their dominant market share would save them.

For the longest time, all the way back to when Codexes were first a thing back in 2nd, an edition change simply represented a new rulebook, starter box if it appealed, and then a long wait for your new book (if you got one.)

Consequently much of the GW player base is likely still conditioned to view a new book with a certain amount of excitement, and it will likely take the silent majority a little while longer to swing from "yay, new book" to "what? Another one?"

X Wing players, conversely, had nowhere near that length of time to potentially be invested in the game, it was just too new. On top of that, we were already a bit irritated at being sold "fixes" for old ships under the guise of new boxes with repaints or some other superficial excuse to sell us errata (on top of regular printed erratas.) It was apparent, long before the swap to a new edition, that the cards were a handicap to the game, outside of the proof of purchase mechanic you mentioned.

That said, I was happy to pay for new cards for a new edition, and said so long before it happened. Sadly, by the time it did happen I was already falling out of love with the game, and then the expansion packs themselves were flawed (they nickel and dimed on the number of copies of certain cards, meaning I'd actually need two of some to field legal lists with the models I owned) so at that point, alongside growing interest in other games, it just made sense to bail.

It looks like MCP is following a similar pattern too, with the recent announcement of a new starter (with new sculpts of the same characters as the first, aka "repaints") and new cards to update the changes, errata and new mechanics that have appeared since the first release. It will be interesting to see if the variables between the two games and any alterations they make to the approach will result in a different outcome over the next couple of years.

 Azreal13 wrote:
On top of that, we were already a bit irritated at being sold "fixes" for old ships under the guise of new boxes with repaints or some other superficial excuse to sell us errata (on top of regular printed erratas.)

Oh god, I'd forgotten about that piece of shameless greed. "If you want to use the TIE advanced (and you do, it's now very powerful) pay $100 for a copy of the card that makes it viable, and no you can't just print a copy of the rule text because proxies aren't legal".

Yep, a $100 TIE Advanced with a free Imperial Raider than would hardly ever see table time.

 Ghaz wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
Lucas didn't "own" Hasbro. He had a license with them.

It was reported at the time that as part of the deal, Lucas received stock in Hasbro.

'owning stock' =/= 'owning the company', otherwise I would own UPS.

Yes, but owning enough stock does = owning the company. Just ask Elon Musk.

The amounts under discussion were in the hundreds of millions of dollars and Lucas' net worth even then was in the billions.

The reportage at the time indicated that Hasbro got the licensing in exchange for giving Lucas a large stake in the company. Given his earlier maneuvering with Kenner (which Hasbro subsequently acquired) and the timing (1997, as he was clearing the decks for the prequels), it was widely speculated that he was positioning himself to profit from a surge of toy sales for his movies, and part of that was regaining control of the IP from earlier licensees.

The larger point is that companies who tie themselves to an external IP often become a hostage to it.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Ghaz wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
Lucas didn't "own" Hasbro. He had a license with them.

It was reported at the time that as part of the deal, Lucas received stock in Hasbro.

'owning stock' =/= 'owning the company', otherwise I would own UPS.

Yes, but owning enough stock does = owning the company. Just ask Elon Musk.

The amounts under discussion were in the hundreds of millions of dollars and Lucas' net worth even then was in the billions.

The reportage at the time indicated that Hasbro got the licensing in exchange for giving Lucas a large stake in the company. Given his earlier maneuvering with Kenner (which Hasbro subsequently acquired) and the timing (1997, as he was clearing the decks for the prequels), it was widely speculated that he was positioning himself to profit from a surge of toy sales for his movies, and part of that was regaining control of the IP from earlier licensees.

The larger point is that companies who tie themselves to an external IP often become a hostage to it.

Again, owning stock =/= owning the company. It's that simple. He may have enough stock to sit on the board, etc. but he DOES NOT OWN THE COMPANY.

FFG's "the cards our rules and stats are written on are official game pieces that cannot be reproduced without the express permission of Major League Baseball," policy was one of the silliest ideas I've ever seen. Rather unfortunately for them their X-Wing game was such a great entry point to tabletop for new players that their player base in turn actually bought into that lunacy. And even if they didn't the whole 2nd edition conversion kit scheme seemed too onerous to try and DIY your way through.

Battletech meanwhile is awesome, and as long as they deliver on their new Kickstarter it should stay strong for years to come. Will people eventually tire of buying new robots? Yes, and it may too run its five year cycle of popularity like every game that isn't 40K. But I'm pretty sure all that 1970s D&D got them in touch with and allowed them to sign a deal with Satan which is keeping them on top. They're the exception that sits on top of the pile.

 frankelee wrote:
Rather unfortunately for them their X-Wing game was such a great entry point to tabletop for new players that their player base in turn actually bought into that lunacy.

I think mostly it was just that for most of 1.0 it wasn't a huge deal for most players. If you were buying new ships you were mostly getting the cards you needed and you only rarely had any pressure to buy something just for the cards. And the pace of new releases was slow enough that buying 1-2 copies of each new release was a reasonable financial commitment, especially while FFG was still releasing the OT and most popular EU ships that everyone wanted. Nobody liked needing official cards but outside of a couple of blatant cash grabs with the huge ships it was a fairly minor background annoyance. It wasn't until the 2.0 reboot that there was suddenly a need to spend a bunch of money on a card tax to continue playing and FFG's greed became too much to ignore.

it is funny, as the conversion kits for 2nd were the most reasonable part of that release cycle as "upgrades" without ships or card packs should have been released before instead of the need to buy a random ship several times to get the necessary cards
But somehow fans advocated against that when people ask for a 10€ card pack to get the errata/updated cards and than got salty when it was done in that way.
the 2.0 upgrade was just a got reason for people who were already unhappy to drop out

For Star Wars Legion it was already done different and the Cards of the season sold as stand alone card pack
so at least they learned something from it