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Back in the 1990s, GW had their virtual monopoly and while other games like Warzone, Void, Steel Legions and others popped up in the 90s and the first few years of the new millennium, it was always in the back of people's heads that going with a non-GW game was a risk in that you never knew how long the company would last trying to compete with GW. Rackham killed Confrontation and AT-43, for example. Mongoose and Starship Troopers would be another example.

So what has come and gone in the last while? What have you started and now the company that makes it no longer exists? Or has shelved the product line. Let's skip GW's specialist games for this discussion and concentrate on non-GW games.

Or have we gotten past the point where people are hesitant about going with non-GW games because they're not sure they'll last? Has Warmachine/Hordes, Infinity, Flames of War, Malifaux, Dystopian Wars, etc., finally broken into the market enough that it's no longer an issue?

I think the biggest minis game flop was Wizard$'s collectible minis games: D&D, Star Wars, Starship battles. Talk about massive power creep, it didn't take long for older minis to become unviable for most of the game. Now a lot of us are stuck with a crap-ton of pre-painted minis that we xan't use or unload...

The SWM virtual sets have gone some way towards breathing new life into older pieces. Even without that, though, my Star Wars minis are still seeing plenty of table time.

It was a bit of a shame when it was dropped, though. Still waiting to see just what FFG does with the minis licence. They surely have to have more planned than just the star fighter game.

One you might not know about is russian "Ring of Rule" game. 28mm, bretonnian-like humans (http://www.ringrule.narod.ru/Images/galery/r_inf/h_c01.jpg http://www.ringrule.narod.ru/Images/galery/bers/b_d02.JPG), roman-like undead (http://www.ringrule.narod.ru/Images/galery/c_legion/s_cen01.jpg), orks (http://www.ringrule.narod.ru/Images/galery/orcs/03.JPG) and elves.

Manufacturer (Zvezda) is a company that mostly produces airplane kits and smaller scale historical miniatures. It has an established distribution system and all that, so Ring of Rule was everywhere in Russia for a while. Around 2006-2008. But it was basically made of fails, and eventually ceased to exist. I would not even say they had to compete with Warhammer FB, because they were much more affordable and available.

People have never been hesitant about trying non GW games. And GW has never had a monopoly , virtual or otherwise.

Mageknight. Also DnD minis and Dreamblade.

 insaniak wrote:
The SWM virtual sets have gone some way towards breathing new life into older pieces. Even without that, though, my Star Wars minis are still seeing plenty of table time.

It was a bit of a shame when it was dropped, though. Still waiting to see just what FFG does with the minis licence. They surely have to have more planned than just the star fighter game.

FFG hinted at a skirmish Starwars game at Gencon in the future. Not sure when. Next year? 2014?

Think they are waiting for the starwars miniature market to dry up a bit so people won't be tempted to proxy their minis with WotC's minis, or keep it to a minimum anyway.

28mm-ish game is practically a given. Imagine the money they would make on Darth Vader, Luke and Solo alone.

I would expect plenty of board games as well.

However, if it is true that Disney wants to buy Hasbro (has that been debunked or still a rumor?) I would expect FFG's licence to be rather short.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 heartserenade wrote:
Mageknight. Also DnD minis and Dreamblade.

I hope dream blade stays dead forever.

In addition

wizkids had some other games that died of. Pirates (loved the game, didn't like the "models"), Horror Clix, Action Clix (Street fighter, Halo, and I think Gears of War). Mech Warrior.

Axis and Allies Miniatures is dead.

War at Sea may as well be considered dead.

Arcane Legions by Wells Expeditions (neat little game but terrible miniatures)

 Mr. Burning wrote:
People have never been hesitant about trying non GW games. And GW has never had a monopoly , virtual or otherwise.

You cannot deny in the UK it certainly seems that way, almost as if GW want to keep it that way...

Which brings me onto my next point

 frozenwastes wrote:

Or have we gotten past the point where people are hesitant about going with non-GW games because they're not sure they'll last? Has Warmachine/Hordes, Infinity, Flames of War, Malifaux, Dystopian Wars, etc., finally broken into the market enough that it's no longer an issue?

From a UK perspective it depends entirely on where you live. In many of the cities containing some of the older GW's that were established in the mid nineties the gaming communities are still firmly rooted in this being a "GW town" and will be heavily reluctant to get into anything not GW. Though this opinion is starting to wane it is still (from personal experience here) frustratingly difficult to get anyone to try something other than GW's games.

I also forgot that HorrorClix is dead. Very cool minis, never got to play the game.

That being said, HeroClix is having a resurgence in my area.

Arcane Legions is officially no more, and Ex Illis is something of a shambling, rotting zombie, having been raised from the dead, but with very few prospects of getting up to speed again.

 Holdenstein wrote:
Arcane Legions is officially no more, and Ex Illis is something of a shambling, rotting zombie, having been raised from the dead, but with very few prospects of getting up to speed again.

Problem with Ex Illis is it was ahead of its time. in about 5-10 years time the rest of the industry will have caught up (we could have said the same about companies being 100% online and releasing entire rulebooks and expansions on pdfs 10 years ago) the whole computer program thing was too "out there".


Before I forget,there is also VOR: The Maelstrom too, which did try to do the Kickstarter thing 2 years ago, before it became the hip thing to do. I firmly believe they should have another go at it as KS seems to be a license to print money ATM.

So we have prepaints, Ex Illis, Arcane Legions, a failed revival of VOR. I had heard of Ring of Rule (a local shop even had some of those). Zvezda is still alive and kicking even if they're concentrating on their historical market.

This is nothing like the graveyard of the 1990s or early 2000s.

 SoloFalcon1138 wrote:
I think the biggest minis game flop was Wizard$'s collectible minis games: D&D, Star Wars, Starship battles. Talk about massive power creep, it didn't take long for older minis to become unviable for most of the game. Now a lot of us are stuck with a crap-ton of pre-painted minis that we xan't use or unload...

I've no regrets for the figures I bought, they help you portray significant battles and all that with visual representations.

I love my colossal Red Dragon. My pc's never got strong enough to fight it, but I still love the figure. Wish I could find a horde of the figures someone just wanted to let go of.

How about HeroScape? It is sadly officially dead, which is a shame because it was pretty cool. Also the Marro Hives made excellent Tyranid terrain.

AT-43, may it rise like a phoenix from the ashes.

Well for me I have noticed not necessarily lines coming and going, but just being distributed on a smaller scale. I've seen games like Dark Age, Anima Tactics, Helldorado, Incursion and the like being distributed more through online than they are in flgs. I am very glad there are alternatives on the market (Dust, Infinity, Warmachine, etc. and the smaller lines)!

SoloFalcon1138 wrote:I think the biggest minis game flop was Wizard$'s collectible minis games: D&D, Star Wars, Starship battles. Talk about massive power creep, it didn't take long for older minis to become unviable for most of the game. Now a lot of us are stuck with a crap-ton of pre-painted minis that we xan't use or unload...

I wouldn't really call D&D minis a flop though - they had 12-15 good sets. They were always intended to serve dual purpose as D&D gaming miniatures & skirmish battle minis. If you liked both games they were and still are fantastic. It's not like a dead CCG - the cards become literally worthless unless you can find the tiny percentage of people still playing the game. Yes - some of the "power rares" will drop in value if they're just a generic humanoid figure - but all the monsters, dragons, mooks etc. are still valuable to roleplayers and should sell easily on ebay if you bundle them in lots of useful monsters for DMs.

I always though D&D minis was a really great game - all the fun of making constructing the "perfect" evocative warband, and very tactical. It really just needed the rules tightened up, and possibly some older cards getting updated like how Magic cards get updated online. Instead they pulled a Mageknight 2.0 and rendered everything obsolete, released a new brand of minis to match the D&D 4.0 aesthetic, including as a big slap in the face - badly painted reprints of minis that had just come out in the last 3 sets, some of them still sitting on the store shelves. By the time they got around to releasing the much-promised updates of all the old cards to the new system most of the old players had long abandoned them. Finding no one playing the mini game anymore they dropped all skirmish rules and thought to just rely on the roleplayers to buy enough minis ... two or three sets later the whole line was dead.

Sad - but also kind of fascinating to watch them have such a promising start, then just slowly destroy everything.

Piston Honda wrote: Wizkids had some other games that died of. Pirates (loved the game, didn't like the "models"), Horror Clix, Action Clix (Street fighter, Halo, and I think Gears of War). Mech Warrior.

Just FYI - I think the Wizkids street fighter, gears of war etc etc lines are really more like one-off runs that are designed to slot in with Heroclix - not independent games. So in that sense they never 'died off' - they only ever intended one set to cash-in on a current movie or video game release.

Not sure about Halo-clix though as I think that was a stand-alone system.

SoloFalcon1138 wrote:I also forgot that HorrorClix is dead. Very cool minis, never got to play the game.

That being said, HeroClix is having a resurgence in my area.

In theory you can play HorrorClix in a Heroclix game... want my huge box of Horror clix for your old D&D minis?! :p

I had three problems with HorrorClix that made an interesting game very hard to get into and very very hard to spread to a group:
1) No clear indication of when the game ends! Playing till all monsters were dead was nigh-impossible - the rulebook simply stated that you should choose a match-time that all players agree on. Uhhh... what? That is a very very odd mechanic and very clunky. Really needed a clear and achievable goal or a set of missions.

2) Bizarre activation rule made *swarm* forces like zombies unusable. Coming from D&D minis where everyone got to activate each member of their squad once each turn, the clix rule of activating two minis back and forth (two times then they had to cool down for a turn) forever meant that the game VASTLY favored choosing a team with 4 of the most powerful monster you could. What use is having 20 slow shambling zombies when, by the time I've had a chance to move all of them once, your entire team has gone 5 times over? It is literally impossible to *swarm* a more powerful mini - and IIRC - no flank bonus even if you did. There were some miniatures with a horde rule that moved together as one activation, but not enough - either evryone under a certain points cost needed that rule, or everyone needs to move their whole team once each turn. The swarm problem was compound by the last point...

3) The two tiny maps in the starter set got boring very very quickly. The two starter maps were far too small and even mid-sized monster bands could end up in a boring traffic jam in hallways. It wasn't until the third expansion set or so that they released larger, themed maps BUT they were made convention gifts only - not even available in their online store. Long time later I ended up picking one up on Ebay along with a Heroclix map that was generic enough to play on - much larger, much more open - it was fantastic but too little too late. Horrorclix out of the box was a very frustrating game for new players and it made it a very hard sell to anyone in my gaming group.

 Mr. Burning wrote:
People have never been hesitant about trying non GW games. And GW has never had a monopoly , virtual or otherwise.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but GW actually has an effective monopoly. No other miniature company is even close to what GW represents. Not even close.

 Sigvatr wrote:

 Mr. Burning wrote:
People have never been hesitant about trying non GW games. And GW has never had a monopoly , virtual or otherwise.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but GW actually has an effective monopoly. No other miniature company is even close to what GW represents. Not even close.

Warmachine outsells WHFB in the USA (40k is #1 of course)

Let's not turn this into an argument over the definition of the word 'monopoly', hmm?

Stick to the topic, which is about other miniatures games that have come and/or gone, not whether or not GW has or ever had a monopoly on the miniatures gaming market.

I don't know how well Reaper's Warlord game is doing (at least they can still sell the models for other purposes, so not as much of a loss for them). But their CAV game hasn't done well. Which is a real pity, because I enjoyed the game, and I think the models were better than many of Battletech's designs.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
But their CAV game hasn't done well.

Probably because nobody has heard of it. Their generic fantasy stuff sells because it's good, and people will go looking for generic fantasy miniatures. But something as niche as a walking mech game is only going to sell if you promote it... and as far as I've seen, they never have.

AT-43 and the Mongoose games (Starship Troopers and the modern war one) are obvious examples.

I would argue alongside insaniak that models like Star Wars Clix (or whatever -- I have a load of Halo Clix) are also perfectly playable with the original or alternative rules. I specifically bought Halo Clix when they were cheap to use as generic SF troops in 28mm RPG and skirmish games.

I've got a ton of AT-43 models for Cogs, Xerians and White Star. They are perfectly playable with AT-43 or other SF rules. All bought cheap once the game was on remainder.

Of course, customers waiting until a company collapses and the models get cheap is not a viable business strategy.

The models still work, though.

Starship Troopers - myself and some other guys invested in the game, made terrain, everything to make it a cool set-up. Then Mongoose/the system went bellyup and that was that. We played games for a while afterwards, but I think the knowledge that there was nothing new coming eventually meant they were shelved.

Real shame as I thought it was a great system, and very tactical once you got into the swing of things. But it suffered from having only 3 factions which was never going to be enough: 1 awesome faction (mobile infantry), 1 which was OK (the bugs) and 1 truly terrible line (the 'skinnies' - which no-one could be convinced to buy).

The roadside is littered with the bones of dead game systems.. so many have gone over the years. Considering the new technology around these days (specifically the internet) I think it means that games have more of a chance to prosper and build up a 'critical mass' - the level where enough people play it to take off. On the other hand, the recent boom of the wargaming industry (I read somewhere 20% growth last year?) means that inevitably some of those are going to fail. Hell Dorado for instance, which is a great game system with some really cool models, but suffered from a lack of proper rule support.

I hated the "random figures in a box" model of DnD minis, especially if you want to use them for a DnD game. You want a pack of orcs? Too bad, you need to buy multiple sets and maybe you'll get some! And back then those were the only minis I have, and I thought they were absolutely great detail and painting-wise. Know I know better. Still, if you buy them en masse you'll get a decent variety of figures, most of them you won't use in both the minis game and classic DnD.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
But their CAV game hasn't done well. Which is a real pity, because I enjoyed the game, and I think the models were better than many of Battletech's designs.

I enjoyed it too - enough to buy quite a few CAV minis. Couldn't move my group away from BattleTech though, so they languish on my shelf, mostly unpainted. Including a special Dictator that had upgraded Guass Cannons... But I can't find the stat sheet for it.

rigeld2 wrote:

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
But their CAV game hasn't done well. Which is a real pity, because I enjoyed the game, and I think the models were better than many of Battletech's designs.

I enjoyed it too - enough to buy quite a few CAV minis. Couldn't move my group away from BattleTech though, so they languish on my shelf, mostly unpainted. Including a special Dictator that had upgraded Guass Cannons... But I can't find the stat sheet for it.

If you mean the Rach faction-specific Dictator '70 instead of the Open Market Dictator '60, this file has the data card for it:
http://www.reapergames.com/resources/rc08cav/RC08_Rach_Beta.pdf

It's too bad AT-43 died. I was really looking forward to the transport looking vehicles.

That and I'm a fan of the Gorillas.

I really, really liked MW Clix.

In August 2008, I pre-ordered Assault on Black Reach from GW Direct for $60. While waiting for it to ship, I went to my local unfriendly hobby shop (which has since closed, not-sadly) to whet my appetite.

I got my first actual 40k mini there - a Necron Immortal - as well as some paints that when I got home I discovered where half-used and dried out (they used the store paint to paint the in-store minis then put them back into stock.. but now I'm digressing.

On the way to checking out with those paints and a $9 bottle of GW PVA glue (sigh) the Mechwarrior Clix Dark Age starter box caught my eye. I picked it up and thought that I might play that with my friends while we learned how to play 40k and I got the minis painted up, just a brief distraction.

It turned out that we enjoyed Mechwarrior Clix substantially more then 40k. It was cheaper, easier to get into, simpler, and more fun. I still feel that way.

Right after they went under, I ordered a case of clix boxes for the last expansion. They were cheaper then shoats at the time. We decided to play random box games - we'd each take an unopened box and that was our force for the game. It was a total blast.

Great game. Re-reading what I wrote here for typos, I wonder why we don't play it again. Just because they aren't making more doesn't mysteriously make my boxes of mechs disappear.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:

rigeld2 wrote:

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
But their CAV game hasn't done well. Which is a real pity, because I enjoyed the game, and I think the models were better than many of Battletech's designs.

I enjoyed it too - enough to buy quite a few CAV minis. Couldn't move my group away from BattleTech though, so they languish on my shelf, mostly unpainted. Including a special Dictator that had upgraded Guass Cannons... But I can't find the stat sheet for it.

If you mean the Rach faction-specific Dictator '70 instead of the Open Market Dictator '60, this file has the data card for it:
http://www.reapergames.com/resources/rc08cav/RC08_Rach_Beta.pdf

I'm guessing that's it. I got mine as an award at a tournament Reaper held when CAV released at a local con.
That doesn't look like the stats in my rule book though... I guess they released a new one. Like I said - I couldn't get them to make the switch so I stopped paying attention. Thanks though!

Yup, found the second edition on their website.
http://www.reapermini.com/pdf/CAV_2_v1_1.pdf
Totally going to dig this back out.