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I want the rules, and nothing but the rules. I'll buy a faction book with art and fluff for the one or two factions I care about if given the option, but otherwise, I'd appreciate having the offer to buy cheap rules.

They'd actually make more money from me that way. Funny how that works.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 MagicJuggler wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 MagicJuggler wrote:
Rules on a Wiki and a free app. If they're a "models company" first, and Corvus Belli can do it...

You mean the wiki that only just recently got brought up to N3? That for something like two years was still the old rules?

Yeah. The Infinity Army thing is nice and all, but there's a reason it's free. They built Infinity Tournament System functionality into it and they use it for data collection purposes.

You make the tournament functionality and data collection sound like a bad thing (unless by bad thing, you mean Corvus Belli is collecting personal data rather than popularity of certain units/playstyles).

The point.
You've missed it.
They have a vested interest in keeping the Army Builder running and constantly updated. The guy who's in charge of it("V") started doing it as a fan project and was later hired by CB to run it full-time.

As it stands, they've said they use the Army Builder as a kind of "market research" keeping tabs on units that get put in there to decide what to produce next. But even with that said, it's worth noting that another key reason they do this?

They aren't a big enough company to jump queues at printers.

No, I think I'm getting the general gist. They're small enough and not publically traded so they are thinking more in terms of "how won't we piss off our consumer base" rather than "how can we maximize our profit margins". Both are important, but the first can lead to the second, while the inverse is not necessarily true.

Searching in the ipad 40k rulebook is absolutely horrible, because of GWs insistence on putting lore in the rulebook. Try searching for "charges" and you get told of the great and glorious charges on the tyranid hordes by the Mary Sue regiment on Murderplanet.

 Purifier wrote:
Searching in the ipad 40k rulebook is absolutely horrible, because of GWs insistence on putting lore in the rulebook. Try searching for "charges" and you get told of the great and glorious charges on the tyranid hordes by the Mary Sue regiment on Murderplanet.

That's basically a description of every battle against the AI I've ever had in a DoW game

40k has never been smart or subtle. Or even consistent. But the one thing you can rely on: It's full of screaming maniacs charging at machineguns because chainsaws > bunkers.

auticus wrote:

 Yarium wrote:
Hardback is sexy. What they should do is have Hardbacks for people that like the book, and the downloads for a much lower cost for the price-conscious consumer.

They tried that for AOS with free rules for a little while.

Turned out no one wanted to buy the book at all if the rules were free.

Pretty poor way for a company to stay in business. Turned out the vast majority of their market were this:

I wish they just made the rules; I don't care about the fluff or painting guide or any other nonsense, I just want rules to play the game. For people like me it's paying $50 for 10 pages in a 150 page book.

So... if they are going to give the option between cheap and hardback, they might as well never do hardback again. And if they gave the option between just the rules with no fluff or anything else and the army books as we know them, they might as well not ever produce army books with anything other than rules.

I rather disagree that most people were "we'll pay more money for a book of rules than a digital version". I think that AoS failed because of how the free digital rules for AoS were somewhat crap and offered no balanced army construction other than "make the armies as big as you want" and "make up your own missions."

Simply put AoS' problem wasn't the fact that they were digital or free, but that they were either crap or incomplete.

 Purifier wrote:
Searching in the ipad 40k rulebook is absolutely horrible, because of GWs insistence on putting lore in the rulebook. Try searching for "charges" and you get told of the great and glorious charges on the tyranid hordes by the Mary Sue regiment on Murderplanet.

Rev up those cogitators and learn how to strip out pages from ebooks.

 Purifier wrote:

Freman Bloodglaive wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:

Freman Bloodglaive wrote:
I think I'm just going to keep playing from my Indexes. I like the fact there are no real wargear options, just WYSIWYG, and everything is self explanatory.

Enjoy having everyone refusing to play you.

Meh. I have enough models that I can play against myself.

I honestly think very very few people would refuse to play against you. I also think you'll see some tasty rules in your codex and cave in.

You're probably right. I'll miss being able to field my entire army with only three books though. (Chaos for Fallen, Imperial 1 for Ultramarines and Space Wolves, Imperial 2 for Custodes, Inquisitors, and Sisters of Silence).

All the information in all Codex's are eventually free with Battlescribe updates.

 Tokhuah wrote:
All the information in all Codex's are eventually free with Battlescribe updates.

Remind me what Battlescribe is?

Softback. Cheaper and easier to store/carry.

 Selym wrote:
Remind me what Battlescribe is?

It's an app army builder. Works on both Apple and Android.

As for the topic... I will probably buy the hardcover. I wish it came with a digital copy as well but I realize that's not going to happen.

 Tokhuah wrote:
All the information in all Codex's are eventually free with Battlescribe updates.

But not always accurate updates. They are only as accurate as the assumptions of the person writing the file.

---------------------------------------------

On a less serious note, one advantage to hardback is that it is easier to "get the point across" with hardbacks due to their weight and rigidity. Much like the difference between the metal dreadnought and plastic when it comes to using a sock.

 Charistoph wrote:

auticus wrote:

 Yarium wrote:
Hardback is sexy. What they should do is have Hardbacks for people that like the book, and the downloads for a much lower cost for the price-conscious consumer.

They tried that for AOS with free rules for a little while.

Turned out no one wanted to buy the book at all if the rules were free.

Pretty poor way for a company to stay in business. Turned out the vast majority of their market were this:

I wish they just made the rules; I don't care about the fluff or painting guide or any other nonsense, I just want rules to play the game. For people like me it's paying $50 for 10 pages in a 150 page book.

So... if they are going to give the option between cheap and hardback, they might as well never do hardback again. And if they gave the option between just the rules with no fluff or anything else and the army books as we know them, they might as well not ever produce army books with anything other than rules.

I rather disagree that most people were "we'll pay more money for a book of rules than a digital version". I think that AoS failed because of how the free digital rules for AoS were somewhat crap and offered no balanced army construction other than "make the armies as big as you want" and "make up your own missions."

Simply put AoS' problem wasn't the fact that they were digital or free, but that they were either crap or incomplete.

Everyone I know literally said "why would I buy the hardback army book when the rules are free and the army book has nothing in it that I don't already have and I don't care about fluff."

To whit - when GW started putting rules in the army books (before GHB) people started complaining that the rules were no longer free and that they had to buy the book and that the rules should be free.

These were all people that were playing and enjoying AOS, not people that hated that AOS wasn't an esport.

 argonak wrote:
I I'm pretty sure they just copied the college textbook industry for this whole deal.

$50 is cheap for a college textbook, one of my postgrad texts was £175 ($280). Not one was less than £60 (~$100) :-) (And this was 25 years ago.)

heh I had a java book for a class that was $450.

 auticus wrote:

So... if they are going to give the option between cheap and hardback, they might as well never do hardback again. And if they gave the option between just the rules with no fluff or anything else and the army books as we know them, they might as well not ever produce army books with anything other than rules.

Nope. I stated my opinion; it appears that the vast majority of people in the GW ecosystem love all that fluff and other stuff that I can't be bothered with. I loved the idea of the indices due the lack of filler but alas they were a temporary placeholder. I'll continue to buy army books for the armies that I own and continue to photocopy the 10 pages that matter from each of them and let the books collect dust on a shelf.

 BaconCatBug wrote:

Freman Bloodglaive wrote:
I think I'm just going to keep playing from my Indexes. I like the fact there are no real wargear options, just WYSIWYG, and everything is self explanatory.

Enjoy having everyone refusing to play you.

Playing indexes only is what I'm planning to do as well. I imagine we will not be alone, especially as many people will still have to wait for their codex to drop - quite possibly for a year or more.

 auticus wrote:

 Yarium wrote:
Hardback is sexy. What they should do is have Hardbacks for people that like the book, and the downloads for a much lower cost for the price-conscious consumer.

They tried that for AOS with free rules for a little while.

Turned out no one wanted to buy the book at all if the rules were free.

Well, if what Charistoph above said was true, sounds like the free rules were just taste-tests of the real rules, and they were free. I'm suggesting a limited print-run of hard-covers for the folks that do really care, but most people can download the rules at a cost for those that are price-conscious. There will always be people stuck inbetween (such as the responder who said they like books and not ebooks), but this method would likely increase profits for them while also more thoroughly satisfying the larger percentage of people. Because yeah, there's a large group of people that just want rules, no fluff. But the people that do like the fluff and the feel of a book in their hands will pay (even more of) a premium for that. They already do this with the collector's edition to some extent.

I think if we're just talking business value that this model:

Hardback fluff and rules: $50
Rules only 10-page pamphlet: $10

Is absolute failure on their part.

Anecdotal numbers and best guesses. Lets say... we have 1000 people who play warhammer.

Lets say based on polls, forums, etc that the number of people that care about fluff is 100. I'd say 10% is a good ballpark for the people I've known in my life that actually care about the narrative. The vast majority don't in my experience. This value cannot be hardcoded scientifically without a global poll but I think 10% is pretty close.

So 100 people buy the $50 book for the narrative. GW makes $5000 from them.

The other 900 buy the pamphlet for $10, so $9000 from those people for a total of $14,000 in sales.

Or ... GW just makes one version of the army book for $50.

1000 people spend $50 for a total of $50,000 in sales.

Now granted some of those 1000 people will go "i only care about rules, I'm not spending money on fluff, Eff you GW" and not buy anything.

Whats that number? Lets say its 25% of the 1000. I think thats a larger number than accurate but its an easy one.

750 people spend $50 for a total of $37,500.

Wargaming is very inelastic. $37,500 is still a lot more than $14,000 going with the $50 flat model. GW knows from AOS that a ton of people will just take the free rules or the rules-only version that costs a lot less.

And even with a percentage in people not playing out of principle, the $50 flat model is still going to net them double or more what they'd get if they did the gamer-friendly pamphlet on the cheap.

As a publicly traded company - that is what I would expect them to do. They'd be shooting themselves in the face if they offered the cheap pamphlet of just the rules even though that is what I'd say 9 out of 10 of their consumer base scream for, because a good chunk who complain bitterly about not caring about anything but rules will STILL buy the $50 book if thats all that is offered, and GW keeps a much nicer profit.

Digital-only - cheaper on the consumer. Also no cost to GW. Also a win-win for them.

Then there's the "if it were cheaper I'd buy MORE which would give GW more money so they are stupid". That is often not the case.

We can see in the $50 vs $10 model that said person would have to buy FIVE rules pamphlets to make up for ONE army book. I'm sure there are some people that would do this, but the vast majority of people I know would NOT do this.

This is a big gamble and a risk and one that if I were a stock holder would raise hell over if GW decided to try it out, because to pull the same profit as the $50 model they'd be banking on enough people buying a ton of pamphlets vs the inelastic knowledge that people will buy the books anyway.

The rules pamphlet would have to come up in price. Which would enrage the cost conscious even more. "ITS ONLY 10 PAGES WHY THE EFF ARE WE PAYING $20/$25/WHATEVER GW YOU ARE SCREWING US" would be the cry.

For my money I'd stick with the safe bet.

Well, they ARE doing that for the main rules; you can buy the $50 hardback, the $8 "start playing" softbound, or as in my case, pick up the free 8-page rule pamphlet/free download.

Would it work to split a codex out like that? I'm not sure. They tried something similar with knights in 6E (a rules + base fluff and an in-depth fluff codex) and that they didn't repeat it seems to indicate the model did very poorly. On the flip side, the indexes seem to have been really well recieved - but they generally were multi-army and weren't competing alongside existing indexes.

They might be able to get away with doing split rules/fluff books if there isn't an overlap or the all-in-one version is touted as a collector's or "expanded" version instead of "standard". <EDIT> After a moment to think, I believe the best split would be to do a Base book - with the basic lore and unit roster and core army rules, and an Expanded book, which does a deep delve into the lore, has the special strategms and other distinctive flavorful rules, and perhaps the rosters for the unique heroes. The main aim would be to ensure there was no overlap between the two books, and that the "expanded" book have any rules that aren't "necessary", but appealing/"nice to have"/"flavorful".

I think they will have much better luck with a hardbound/softbound release system - release the book in hardbound format, and then about two months later, drop the book as softbound. Early adopters can buy into the hardbound version, the more budget consious can wait for the softbound release to hit.

 auticus wrote:

 Yarium wrote:
Hardback is sexy. What they should do is have Hardbacks for people that like the book, and the downloads for a much lower cost for the price-conscious consumer.

They tried that for AOS with free rules for a little while.

Turned out no one wanted to buy the book at all if the rules were free.

Pretty poor way for a company to stay in business. Turned out the vast majority of their market were this:

I wish they just made the rules; I don't care about the fluff or painting guide or any other nonsense, I just want rules to play the game. For people like me it's paying $50 for 10 pages in a 150 page book.

So... if they are going to give the option between cheap and hardback, they might as well never do hardback again. And if they gave the option between just the rules with no fluff or anything else and the army books as we know them, they might as well not ever produce army books with anything other than rules.

I thought no one wanted to buy the books because Age of Sigmar was a terrible system when it first came out

auticus wrote:Everyone I know literally said "why would I buy the hardback army book when the rules are free and the army book has nothing in it that I don't already have and I don't care about fluff."

To whit - when GW started putting rules in the army books (before GHB) people started complaining that the rules were no longer free and that they had to buy the book and that the rules should be free.

These were all people that were playing and enjoying AOS, not people that hated that AOS wasn't an esport.

Having a complete ruleset is not an esport. It's only when the GHB came out that AoS became an avid interest to those who hadn't converted over to 9th Age.

The simple point is that if GW just wants to be a model company, their rules should be simple, clear, and free. They didn't fall under any of those until Age of Sigmar, and the only thing that AoS and DI have is simple. They sure aren't clear, and they aren't completely free.

Other companies want to sell models, but they also want to sell a game. How many Proposed Rules have considered converting 40K in to another current system like Gates of 40K or Boter Action? Why would they do that if they considered 40K rules to be any good. They aren't.

AoS had problems not because they charged for rules, but because they were crap and incomplete. That's it. It wasn't because they were free, because I had plenty of local people not having a problem with the cost, but the quality. That has been GW's problem for an incredibly long time. Their ability to write a quality game is pure crap. They can charge $400 a book or nothing, and the quality of the words within them will not have changed.

Well we have differing experiences then. The people I know that play AOS weren't going to buy any books that were not needed. They were fine with the free four pages and the default scenario.

It was only until GW decided to put things in the army book that you needed for matched play that people began reluctantly buying the books again.

The people that didn't buy AOS because it was "crap and not complete" are not the same people I'm talking about.

GW releasing free rules and then publishing hardback books hoping people will buy that anyway was a mistake on their part. If the rules exist for free or vastly cheaper, people by large and far are going to flock to that, because it would seem the vast majority of the players of GW games give little to no damns about the narrative and don't want to pay for anything but a thin pamphlet of rules for $10 or so.

For what it's worth, I left feedback on their facebook page to indicate that it would be in their interest to produce a softcover option on release, or they run the risk of pushing people back to the internet for rules or right out of the hobby again.

I'd like to support the new GW - I will not support the old GW antics.

I for one would love to have mini rulebook back, I don't need or want to bring the fluff with me to every game, I would like something similar for the Codex. A mini codex that's rules and points values for $20? I would buy the hardcover for home and the mini book to play with.

 auticus wrote:
Well we have differing experiences then. The people I know that play AOS weren't going to buy any books that were not needed. They were fine with the free four pages and the default scenario.

It was only until GW decided to put things in the army book that you needed for matched play that people began reluctantly buying the books again.

The people that didn't buy AOS because it was "crap and not complete" are not the same people I'm talking about.

GW releasing free rules and then publishing hardback books hoping people will buy that anyway was a mistake on their part. If the rules exist for free or vastly cheaper, people by large and far are going to flock to that, because it would seem the vast majority of the players of GW games give little to no damns about the narrative and don't want to pay for anything but a thin pamphlet of rules for $10 or so.

We probably do have different experiences. The people I know and the people who have posted on boards I have read, have stated that the GHB has everything that they felt was missing from AoS, aside from the general quality of rules.

The simple fact that people felt that they "needed" to buy the book in order to keep playing AoS demonstrates this concept. AoS is just as playable now as it was when it was launched without buying a single book. It is only when people want to have a coherent army building structure (i.e. points and FOC), missions, and "Formations" (I forget the name) that they need those books. This demonstrates how much was missing from the free rules that GW provided.

Given the fact that they have only just released the Indexes, and the fact that they're supposedly going to be doing an AoS type thing by releasing updated versions every couple of years, I would rather have the softback. Aside from that, my softback rule book from 7th is actually in better condition at this point than my hardback Blood Angels Codex.

I like hardback, but I would much prefer them come out with soft cover first then hard cover later. I prefer soft cover for lugging the books around because its lighter and holds up better getting beat around a backpack at work and the game store. I like having the hard backs on my bookshelf at home for eye candy, and toting around the house for quick fluff or rule checking.

As regards codexes, give me hardback any day and all the fluff possible, I love that stuff. The only issue I have is the BRB, it's huge, and there is no mini version, except for the core rules sheet, but I've already basically memorised them. I only check up for army and mission stuff, and it's not great trawling through the giant BRB. Bring back the small, softcover rule book that was basically just the rules and came in most 7th boxed sets. As for the whole 'You had to have 50 $50 books to play the game,' I never had that, it was just bring the codex, tau, guard or IK, or maybe 2 of them if I was running the IK or gue'vesa, plus the mini rule book and that was it, and that was basically all I saw other people doing as well.

 Charistoph wrote:

 auticus wrote:
Well we have differing experiences then. The people I know that play AOS weren't going to buy any books that were not needed. They were fine with the free four pages and the default scenario.

It was only until GW decided to put things in the army book that you needed for matched play that people began reluctantly buying the books again.

The people that didn't buy AOS because it was "crap and not complete" are not the same people I'm talking about.

GW releasing free rules and then publishing hardback books hoping people will buy that anyway was a mistake on their part. If the rules exist for free or vastly cheaper, people by large and far are going to flock to that, because it would seem the vast majority of the players of GW games give little to no damns about the narrative and don't want to pay for anything but a thin pamphlet of rules for $10 or so.

We probably do have different experiences. The people I know and the people who have posted on boards I have read, have stated that the GHB has everything that they felt was missing from AoS, aside from the general quality of rules.

The simple fact that people felt that they "needed" to buy the book in order to keep playing AoS demonstrates this concept. AoS is just as playable now as it was when it was launched without buying a single book. It is only when people want to have a coherent army building structure (i.e. points and FOC), missions, and "Formations" (I forget the name) that they need those books. This demonstrates how much was missing from the free rules that GW provided.

I think that we are talking about two different things.

I am specifically talking about the people that were playing AOS, and enjoying AOS, without the GHB. In pre-GHB days of AOS, no one wanted to buy the campaign books or army books (no one coming from the pool of people enjoying the game) because they weren't needed.

Then points came out and artefacts and special rules for the army, and people suddenly starting buying the books because they wanted those things and couldn't get them for free.

IF GW had made the points free, the artefacts free, etc ... I guarantee they would have continued not buying the books.

You are referencing people that werent playing AOS before GHB and are only playing nowt hat points are introduced, which is a different pool of people.