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With the release of 6th I was expecting a lot more people to show up to gaming. I decided to stop by my FLGS that about 6 months ago averaged 8-10 people in tournaments. Showed up Saturday to see how many people were playing,as I had just obtained the rulebook on Monday and wanted to see some tournament play. There were only 4.... all Tau and Spezz Mahrines. I asked the clerk how many people have been showing up since 6th: "yeah this is pretty much it. Warmahordes is growing right now though..."

So: Is 40k dying or geting bigger in your area? Seems like 6th drove away some locals and people are getting into the newer games.....

6th edition hasn't changed the number of people who play at my FLGS.

As for in general, it's increasing. My FLGS started in what was basically a glorified closet. It got so big that roughly 4 years ago they moved to a bigger place in a strip mall. It's getting so crammed that it's trying to move into a bigger space. It would have already had not a deal fallen through recently.

The only empirical fact any of us can truly state is that GW's unit sales have been falling year-on-year for a good five years now. It's probably fair to assume from this that 40k's worldwide popularity is shrinking rather than growing.

In my wholly subjective experience, I can certainly say that my gaming group have mainly drifted away to Malifaux and Dark Age, and that though the tournaments I sporadically attend are still well-attended, the age demographic is noticeably higher, and the numbers lower than only five years ago. 6th edition has certainly done nothing to arrest this trend - indeed in my case it has accelerated it.

Also: "dying", not "dieing". Do you not know why those little red lines appear when you type?

Seriously, I think you are expecting too fast an adoption.

6th Edition is out.. how long? A month? Dark Vengeance? A week?

I doubt that it will really saturate the 40K-clubs and player base until at least the likely gigantic wave of Dark Vengeance Boxes that'll be sitting under Christmas trees around the world.

English Assassin wrote:The only empirical fact any of us can truly state is that GW's unit sales have been falling year-on-year for a good five years now. It's probably fair to assume from this that 40k's worldwide popularity is shrinking rather than growing.

Yes, but to be fair, sales of EVERYTHING have been going down over the last 5 years. You know, because...



As for other games, yeah, a lot of 40k players over the years have gone over to a large number of indie games that pop up. And then they fail. And then the players are back to playing 40k.

Malifaux is hot right now, but in 5 years nearly everyone who is playing Malifaux right now will be back in 40k. Just like confrontation, just like AT49, just like another dozen games you haven't heard of before, despite the fact that they were "better" games that were going to "beat" 40k.

In our area it is certainly growing, our play group has added about 12 people in the last 6 months. Weve spent so much at our local store they are buying out the neighboring shops for more GW retail space.

I'm looking at warmachine right now, just for something faster to play. Guard set-up times, make one cry deep down. Sometimes an army that is 92% pewter makes me a sad panda.

I have seen quite a bit less at mine, It used to be wwe would have 4 tables playing, now only like 3.
I think people are just mostly are confused about 6.

40K used to be "the only game in town" at my LGS but not too long ago Warmahordes exploded in the area as the dominant game.

Lately I've also seen quite a few veteran 40K players shelve/Ebay their armies complaining of "too many balance issues" in 40K.

 Ailaros wrote:
As for other games, yeah, a lot of 40k players over the years have gone over to a large number of indie games that pop up. And then they fail. And then the players are back to playing 40k.

Something else is the whole 'GW sales are shrinking, other companies are growing, I quit 40k to play another game, so sales show everyone is doing what I did!' thing is missing a lot of data.

Yes, there are people who have moved entirely to a new game. But there could be people buying less GW products but also another companies products. There could be people not buying GW or anything else, but still playing because their army is 'finished' or for whatever financial reason (I know I haven't bought much in the last year for my bugs, but I play games with them every other weekend). There could be people still only playing GW products, still buying, but just not as much. There could be...

There's a lot of assumptions in the line of thought that because GW's unit sales are reducing, and other companies are increasing, that everyone is simply moving to new game systems. And it's not something I've seen, at least as anecdotal evidence. Everyone I see at my FLGS plays multiple games.

We have a ton of people playing in my area, far more than at the tail end of 5th when I started playing. We had so many people in last sunday that we could barely move, and the only thing stopping people from playing was that some guy had 2 tables covered with model stuff.

It's a weird love hate relation at our club. We love the wacky, crazy rules in friendly games, but absolutely hate them during tournaments. House ruling is very common for us, as we can change what we want out of the game pretty easily. One game I played with a guy was essentially cities of death. We played a 4x4 table with so many ruins on it we could barely move. However, we kept all the random tables out, even though the game itself was very silly and fun. We never used the tables as we were sick of them at that point. The game before that, my opponent and I decided to fill the board with mysterious terrain, and play with as much of the crazy stuff as possible. Some terrain pieces had 3 different things going on at any time. It was hilarious as well, but had it been a tournament, we would have ragequitted turn 1 .

Not sure if it'll go up or down from here though. We don't have much new blood. Most of these "new" players are guys who had stopped playing at the end of 5th out of boredom. If the prices don't go down though, I have a feeling it'll start a slow decline back to how it was last December as none of the new players will be able to afford to start an army at any reasonable speed :\

During 5th our local FLGS had between 8-10 guys showing up on game night looking to roll some dice. Since 6th has hit, we are down to 3 consistently. We also had a small movement of some players over to Flames of War.

 Ailaros wrote:

Yes, but to be fair, sales of EVERYTHING have been going down over the last 5 years. You know, because...

True. But spending on escapist diversions are often counter-cyclical and tend to go up during times of economic hardship and down when things are boomin'

During 5th we had around 12 people consistently show at my FLGS.

Since the advent of 6th we have bumped that number up to 24+ on a weekly basis. We have plenty of people who either got into or got back into the game due to the new rules/models/whathave you.

It also helps that the folks at my store dont view wargames as an either or hobby. The majority play 40k, most also play fantasy, about half play either dust warfare, malifaux, or warmachine. But out of that only 1 person actually gave up 40k to go play something else.

I have no idea.

Socializing is... not my thing. Not in person, anyways. Even on the Internet it's not usually my thing.

As a result, I play WH40k exclusively at home. The only time I'm at Games Workshop is to buy models or paint or what have you.

As a result of THAT, I have absolutely no idea how popular any game is around here.

 Zweischneid wrote:

 Ailaros wrote:

Yes, but to be fair, sales of EVERYTHING have been going down over the last 5 years. You know, because...

True. But spending on escapist diversions are often counter-cyclical and tend to go up during times of economic hardship and down when things are boomin'

Wanted to point this out but you beat me to it

My area seems pretty stable, some people quit during 5th, some 6th, some have returned, some haven't. People drift to other games for a while and eventually drift back. The comparisons between tabletop and video gaming are legion.

well I still see a lot of new player threads and requests for rule clarifications and the like on these pages often by many new players so I suspect we're all closet playing somewhere out there.

As to GW sales going down, I suspect E-bay'ing is responsible for alot of that. It's much more international now. I can buy stuff from America at much cheaper prices that new models locally. often with good paint jobs!

 Ailaros wrote:

The old adage goes that a picture can be worth a thousand words. If only this one were.

Accounting to the figures collated by distributors Diamond, the hobby games sector grew in volume by at least 20% in 2011, and is projected to do the same this year, recession or no recession. That excuse, like GW's declining sales figures, looks ever more pathetic in that light.

 Ailaros wrote:
As for other games, yeah, a lot of 40k players over the years have gone over to a large number of indie games that pop up. And then they fail. And then the players are back to playing 40k.

Malifaux is hot right now, but in 5 years nearly everyone who is playing Malifaux right now will be back in 40k. Just like confrontation, just like AT49, just like another dozen games you haven't heard of before, despite the fact that they were "better" games that were going to "beat" 40k.

You've made this smug, complacent argument before; last time you did I pointed out that Privateer and Wyrd have both been around for a decade, and - though their end-of-year accounts are not public - if their expanding release schedules and willingness to invest in plastics are any gauge, are enjoying positive growth during this boom.

I don't anticipate either of them overtaking GW within the foreseeable future, but don't be so blinkered as to pretend that they are not facing genuine competition, particularly given that Warmachine recently overtook Warhammer Fantasy as the second most popular wargame sold through hobby stores.

Personally, I haven't given up playing the occasional game of 40K. But I have pretty much given up on buying anything new from them. Their prices are just too high now. I also fall into the group of people that feels they have serious balance issues. Instead I now spend most of my time playing Flames of War.

 Zweischneid wrote:

 Ailaros wrote:

Yes, but to be fair, sales of EVERYTHING have been going down over the last 5 years. You know, because...

True. But spending on escapist diversions are often counter-cyclical and tend to go up during times of economic hardship and down when things are boomin'

Were that universally true, yacht sales should have been going through the roof over the past few years. They have not.

Only SOME escapist diversions go up during a recession. Specifically ones with a very low up-front cost like beer and junk food. Everything else goes down with the rest of the economy.

 Ailaros wrote:

Were that universally true, yacht sales should have been going through the roof over the past few years. They have not.

Only SOME escapist diversions go up during a recession. Specifically ones with a very low up-front cost like beer and junk food. Everything else goes down with the rest of the economy.

Ok, should have been clearer now. Escapism involving fantasy worlds, sci-fi, action fantasies and/or alternative existence where life is "simpler", "more adventurous" and more starkly drawn than the "normal" life tend to boom in recessions.

Escapist fiction is fiction which provides a psychological escape from thoughts of everyday life by immersing the reader in exotic situations or activities.
The term is not used favorably, though the condemnation contained in it may be slight. Those who defend works described as escapist from the charge either assert that they are not escapist—such as, a science fiction novel's satiric aspects address real life—or defend the notion of "escape" as such, not "escapism"—as in J. R. R. Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories" and C. S. Lewis's quotation, in his "On Science fiction" of Tolkien's question of who would be most hostile to the idea of escape, and his answer: jailers.
Genres which can include elements of escapist fiction include:

Bodice rippers / Romance novels
Chick lit
Comic Books and Cartoons
Detective novels
Fantasy fiction
Horror fiction
Pulp fiction
Science fiction
Spy novels
Thrillers

I would file a yacht more in the category of status symbols (like fast sports cars, diamond necklaces, private jets, etc.., which all tend to go down hard in recessions).

 Ailaros wrote:
Were that universally true, yacht sales should have been going through the roof over the past few years. They have not.

Only SOME escapist diversions go up during a recession. Specifically ones with a very low up-front cost like beer and junk food. Everything else goes down with the rest of the economy.

And as the citations I provided demonstrate, the gaming hobby is indeed booming, it's GW's Hhhoby that isn't.

I know it's easier to make glib remarks about yachts, but it's more polite and constructive to actually read and engage with the posts people make in reply to your own.

It's a weird situation here. We were having a bit of a boom in the first semester as new people started making armies, but that was mostly halted by 6th Edition, and some of our veterans took a break from the game. Our club shifted to Flames of War, Infinity and even Mordheim.

However, now some people are giving it another try, in a smaller group to keep the IG and Necron codex creep-abusers out. It seems to be going a bit better.

I honestly am seeing more and more people joining up to play in both my home town and college town. I like it >=)

My locale scene seems to have grown with 6E. I would say we gained about 4-5 people who have not payed since 3E or 4E.

Also the local store just launched a 6E escalation league and we got 45 people in it, huge number of players.

Where I play our numbers have gone up over all. We lost a few people but that is because we play at the local college and several people graduated or dropped out, but we added more players this year as well.

It is really the only miniature war game that people in the area play.

Heres another thing to think about. Warhammer models are pretty durable (they dont wither with age), and the people that play it usually sell their armies to someone else if they leave the game. So even if gw sales are going down, the number of players and armies can still be going up, hell if they lost 20% of sales for each of the last 5 years, that could mean we added like 80% more players each year (though I'd figure it'd be more like 10-20%, still thats a lot). I think most people who play generally collect one or two armies worth of guys and leave it at that. Maybe they buy an extra model here now and then, but that certainly wouldnt give GW a sales increase. I know when 6th ed came out my local store sold out of the books instantly and they bought a whole lot of them.
And until this last set of FAQ's came out I'd say they deserve to have lower sales. But they actually fixed most of the stupid rules, go GW!

I would say that it's growing in my area. We've gained 3 or 4 new players in the past 6 months or so, and they seem to be down at the FLGS all the time. That being said, most of my personal friends who used to play have all but dropped it, mostly due to school taking all their money and time. out of the 5 of us that used to play, there are two of us left that play with any regularity.

I know in my local area it seems to have taken a hiatus, but that may just be me not having as much time to get to the store as well to play. Also the release of 6th edition and DV conencided (roughly) with the start of school, so that is probably pulling some people away as well.

I'd say if it did anything, it ended up hurting Fantasy. That's what I've seen at my store at least. We had a decent amount of fantasy players until 6th was released. Now Fantasy night just doesn't happen anymore.