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 Madoch1 wrote:

 oldzoggy wrote:

 Elbows wrote:

Considering you could fit all that information into a softback book for less than one of the current books...that's how?

And how would this effect the game that is played ?

Actually i was thinking that it would make some of the armies easier field, like chaos. They need an all encompasing codex. separating the demons and csm codex is and was dingheaded. But also, if you own several faction, like me, you wouldnt have to carry around so many books. But in reality it would work best in conjunction with the consolidation of rules.

again, just my opinion.

It would be easier. You would have a few books for all your armies, maybe even one if you owned similar factions. It would also fix the ally problem because fluffy allies could still exist and unfluffy ones would be gone

 Psienesis wrote:
... every game currently competing with GW that provides rules for free is sufficient evidence, as those games are eating GW's lunch.

I disagree. GW's sales are flatlining, but I think that has more to do with the prevailing economic conditions than encroachment from free-to-learn wargames. Warhams is an expensive hobby, and a lot of people just don't have any money at the moment. Even at that, GW are still many times larger than their nearest competitors and a lot more visible - nobody's eating their lunch. They have no incentive to give away their rules for free, and I suspect the shareholders would lynch Rountree if he even suggested it.

I know 40k has a huge footprint in the UK, but that is simply not the case outside of there. 40k, in the US, is known mostly by reputation (for good or ill), while games like Malifaux, X-wing, Infinity Wars and so on are "the" tabletop wargames.

It didn't use to be this way, but that is the reality of the market now.

I have to disagree again. GW's financials for 2016 show they're making roughly the same amount of revenue in continental Europe that they are from sales in the UK, and slightly more than either from sales in the US and Canada (I think it was £35m vs £32m vs £40m or thereabouts). They have a lot of outlets here, but draw more revenue from the US and Canada. I don't think any other mini wargame companies are making anywhere near that in the US. Far as I know PP only draws $7m in revenue a year in total.

 Madoch1 wrote:


Actually i was thinking that it would make some of the armies easier field, like chaos. They need an all encompasing codex. separating the demons and csm codex is and was dingheaded. But also, if you own several faction, like me, you wouldnt have to carry around so many books. But in reality it would work best in conjunction with the consolidation of rules.

again, just my opinion.

The issue with choas isn' the amount of codexes. CSM, DAEMONS, KHORNE D K. Its the insane amount of supplements. Just putting daemons together with CSM will only result in more of those, since GW does have to release books. I would rather have those books to be codexes than supplements.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 TheLumberJack wrote:


It would be easier. You would have a few books for all your armies, maybe even one if you owned similar factions. It would also fix the ally problem because fluffy allies could still exist and unfluffy ones would be gone

It seems to me that fixing allies should be done by changing allied rules in the core rules, not by killing off factions or purging obscure rules / units that make those armies unique just to cramp those armies all into one book.

The issue with choas isn' the amount of codexes. CSM, DAEMONS, KHORNE D K. Its the insane amount of supplements. Just putting daemons together with CSM will only result in more of those, since GW does have to release books. I would rather have those books to be codexes than supplements.
.

I know it is not the biggest issue with the faction. Its more of an issue with the game in general. But doing it would help when it comes time to update factions and such. If you had one big codex, say for chaos, it would allow you to update an entire mega-faction easily. That way if if csm get an update, so do demons.

And just to clarify, i'm not saying any factions should be squatted.

If the game had a living rulebook available for download it wouldn't be that difficult to stop it from becoming stale because underperforming rules and units could be tweaked until they supported a diverse metagame. If players became dissatisfied they could add a brand new unit and take their force in a different direction. If the game was balanced reasonably well this wouldn't mean pissing money and effort away.

Even if you cut the main rulebooks down to Space Marines, IoM, Chaos, Orks, Eldar, Tyranids, Necrons and Tau you could still have a lot of room to create one-off mercenary or alien units that could be published under their own category in the army list section. Creating just one or two things now is more difficult because you have to fill a whole book.

 BBAP wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:
... every game currently competing with GW that provides rules for free is sufficient evidence, as those games are eating GW's lunch.

I disagree. GW's sales are flatlining, but I think that has more to do with the prevailing economic conditions than encroachment from free-to-learn wargames. Warhams is an expensive hobby, and a lot of people just don't have any money at the moment. Even at that, GW are still many times larger than their nearest competitors and a lot more visible - nobody's eating their lunch. They have no incentive to give away their rules for free, and I suspect the shareholders would lynch Rountree if he even suggested it.

I know 40k has a huge footprint in the UK, but that is simply not the case outside of there. 40k, in the US, is known mostly by reputation (for good or ill), while games like Malifaux, X-wing, Infinity Wars and so on are "the" tabletop wargames.

It didn't use to be this way, but that is the reality of the market now.

I have to disagree again. GW's financials for 2016 show they're making roughly the same amount of revenue in continental Europe that they are from sales in the UK, and slightly more than either from sales in the US and Canada (I think it was £35m vs £32m vs £40m or thereabouts). They have a lot of outlets here, but draw more revenue from the US and Canada. I don't think any other mini wargame companies are making anywhere near that in the US. Far as I know PP only draws $7m in revenue a year in total.

Every other game on the market has shown ever-increasing sales volume over the last decade. The economic situation in the Western world might be grim, but it's not really impacting hobby spending. What GW's numbers show is a shrinking number of sales, but sales of products with increasing price-ranges. Their profits are flat, their per-unit sales have been declining for a decade-plus.

 Psienesis wrote:
Every other game on the market has shown ever-increasing sales volume over the last decade. The economic situation in the Western world might be grim, but it's not really impacting hobby spending. What GW's numbers show is a shrinking number of sales, but sales of products with increasing price-ranges. Their profits are flat, their per-unit sales have been declining for a decade-plus.

Fair enough, but none of that provides GW with an incentive to give their rules away for free. They'd need to recoup that revenue at the very least, and I don't think they would. Not everyone who buys a Codex buys models from the army to go with it.

I think that the current system of 'Release supplements and new campaign books to fix balance issues' isn't a bad thing in principle, and it's actually quite similar to how X-wing handles it - They don't update the rules for old ships, they just release new 'Upgrade' cards that are free and provide new buffs and rules for new ships that have lost utility and aren't taken.

The problem is GWs decision to always include fluff in every book. Don't get me wrong, I love me some good fluff, but when I'm bringing three or four rule books to a game, that's a lot of extra pages that I really don't need to be lugging around. Angels of Death is a pretty dense book, as far as rules go. It has to include 3 pages each for 6 chapters to get their own special chapter tactics and relics and decurion, it includes new rules for Cataphractii and Contemptors, it includes new Psychic Powers, and it includes something like 10 new formations, but that's still only about 40 pages of rules, assuming they leave the pictures and flavor text in. (I wouldn't want to lose the pictures and flavor text, mind, because if nothing else it makes it easier to find everything.) The book is almost twice that, though, for no reason other than to justify the cost. (Except if GW charged five or ten bucks less and sold a no-frills version, they'd also be saving a bunch of money on printing.)

On top of this problem, though, there's the problem of maximum supplement - The problem of 'Which books are still legal?' isn't a problem, exactly, but the problem of 'How many books even are there?', and it can be difficult to keep track of every available option when you've just got so many overlapping choices. (I think CSM now have three different versions of the 'Librarius Conclave but with a twist', for example.)


I think they've been mostly good on model releases lately. Their new boxes have gorgeous models, the re-prints are a great idea, the box sets are reasonably priced for the amount of content you get. And I think supplements aren't a bad idea for keeping rules simple, in a way, because new players can just pick up a codex and start using formations once they're comfortable with the basics. I just think they need a way to cut down on the bookkeeping, especially for an army like Chaos who already have way too much bookkeeping.

 Psienesis wrote:
Every other game on the market has shown ever-increasing sales volume over the last decade. The economic situation in the Western world might be grim, but it's not really impacting hobby spending. What GW's numbers show is a shrinking number of sales, but sales of products with increasing price-ranges. Their profits are flat, their per-unit sales have been declining for a decade-plus.

A decade ago, GW was just about the only game company, so their losing share to smaller companies is not a surprise. It's easy to grow when you're small, and hard to hold when you're huge. Really no different from GM USDM back in the 1950s vs GM in the 1980s.