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White Dwarf Editorial comments by Ian Livingstone

It is hoped that WHITE DWARF will serve as a vehicle for articles and comment on SF/F games.
Issue #1 June/July 1977

Remember, White Dwarf is only as good as the reader allows it to be. We need your support either in the form of contributions or criticisms to make each issue better than the last.
Issue #3 Oct/Nov 1977

Twentieth Century Fox who hold the copyright on Star Wars currently employ a group of heavy-duty lawyers who are quite willing to sue any pirates into oblivion. They certainly have the right to protect their copyright, but whether their motive is purely self-protection is debatable.
It seems evident that nobody will gain from this strict enforcement of copyright laws, but the SF/F hobbyist will definitely lose.
Issue #5 Feb/Mar 1978

As with every specialist hobby, we believe that advertisements are an integral part of the hobby magazine as they help to make people aware of new products and developments. Remember, not everybody has the luxury of a games shop within a mile or two of his home.
Issue #7 June/July 1978

Our existence depends on you, our readers, and we thank you for your support.
Issue #12 April/May 1979

Gaming as a hobby is still in its infancy and it is essential that gamers are brought together at established venues if the hobby is to grow.
Issue #13 June/July 1979

There are several ways of looking at price structures. In defence of the manufacturers is the fact that the unit costs of production are so much higher for a hobby game than a mass market game like Monopoly. But the hobby games manufacturer has to make profits to enable him to research new titles. Then comes the dilemma between the number of components to be included in the box vs. profit motivation.
A reassuring analogy can be made with (vinyl) record albums. We pay around GBP5.00 for a thin pice of plastic worth approximately 2p. But it is the amount of enjoyment we get from that piece of plastic which is important, and the same can be said of hobby games.
Issue #17 Feb/Mar 1980

It does seem, however, that gaming with metal figures will become more of a luxury, with the average price of a humanoid figure being 60p in 1985. It might be considered that this still represents good value for money, but the percentage price rise is a little difficult to swallow’
Issue #60 Dec 1984

Some interesting editorial comments and made more interesting when read in relation to todays WD and GW in general.

Mik


Automatically Appended Next Post:
One thing of note is that this is from the old Games Workshop team... before Kirby and others even joined up.

However, a couple of issues were certainly pushed to the limit by the current team.

Mik

It's a totally different magazine now, content dictated by corporate interests; it's all obvious advertising, advertising dressed up as articles and sub standard battle reports and hobby items. It's just awful as a hobby magazine, if you want pretty pictures and adverts it's probably ok...

And Games Workshop is a completely different company now. Under Livingstone and Jackson it was really all about selling and promoting role-playing games (and associated figures) distributed by GW (though not exclusively so) not much about wargaming per se.

When GW started being a company that designed and sold its own wargames - ie Warhammer (mid 80s as I recall) and associated figures, White Dwarf changed. But until (I think) the late 80s, maybe even 1990, it still ran a mix of Warhammer and rpg articles. It became more of a marketing tool but retained elements of a 'proper' magazine.

Even when it pushed Warhammer games entirely, it was initially not too bad (so long as one wanted to play Warhammer) as there were often freebies for the various games given away with the magazine -- as they had done from time to time in 'the old days', I remember a bar-room brawl game (paper 'board' and counters, plus specific add-on rules for necessary flavour) for Runequest coming with one issue, for instance.

Now it seems to me to be much more of a catalogue. But it evolved into that over a long period.

What is it about money that turns men into machines, eternally scheming for your dollar?

Artemo wrote:And Games Workshop is a completely different company now. Under Livingstone and Jackson it was really all about selling and promoting role-playing games (and associated figures) distributed by GW (though not exclusively so) not much about wargaming per se.

Their criticism of Star Wars lawyers is particularly ironic. But at least GW haven't gone for fan sites because they don't portray the Warhammer universe in a manner they are happy with. Lucasfilm have targeted fan sites with adult fiction and other things because they don't think it fits in with the image of the films. That's like GW attacking Dakka for whats his name's NSFW Tyranid PWNograpy thread. Sorry I forget it now, was on the front page earlier.

Artemo wrote:And Games Workshop is a completely different company now. Under Livingstone and Jackson it was really all about selling and promoting role-playing games (and associated figures) distributed by GW (though not exclusively so) not much about wargaming per se.

When GW started being a company that designed and sold its own wargames - ie Warhammer (mid 80s as I recall) and associated figures, White Dwarf changed. But until (I think) the late 80s, maybe even 1990, it still ran a mix of Warhammer and rpg articles. It became more of a marketing tool but retained elements of a 'proper' magazine.

Even when it pushed Warhammer games entirely, it was initially not too bad (so long as one wanted to play Warhammer) as there were often freebies for the various games given away with the magazine -- as they had done from time to time in 'the old days', I remember a bar-room brawl game (paper 'board' and counters, plus specific add-on rules for necessary flavour) for Runequest coming with one issue, for instance.

Now it seems to me to be much more of a catalogue. But it evolved into that over a long period.

WHFB was published in 1983.

The key period for Games Workshop was during the mid 80s to early 90s when they gradually stopped publishing and selling a wide variety of distributed and licensed games like Call of Cthulhu, Traveller and so on. As they dropped those lines they changed to only publishing and selling their own titles like Talisman, Judge Dredd (RPG and Boardgame) and Warhammer.

The mag stopped being a general use RPG/tabletop mag and became in-house promotion. It still had relevance if you played GW's own games, while GW was still publishing a wide variety of games. During the 90s they gradually dropped all their games except those based in the WH/40K background. Gradually, most of those titles were dropped or relegated to the Specialist Games wilderness, and allowed to wither on the vine.

So by the mid 2000s we have WHFB, 40K and LoTR as the only content.

And that is how Games Workshop became the biggest wargame company in the world.

One thing I used to really like about WD was all of the super custom tables and terrain articles. Now all we see is kitbashed GW plastics on Realm of battle boards.
Yes GW, we know you make them. Please quit pushing them so hard.

It's the HHHobby.

Kilkrazy wrote:It's the HHHobby.

Und you vil enjoy it!