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While talking to some mates the other night about the new rules and such for AoS one of my mates posed an interesting question, If AoS fails do you think GW will return to the old fantasy format and release a 9th edition or will they simply give up on fantasy and dedicate them selves to 40k, or will we perhaps see something else?

I was wondering what dakka's opinion of this is, If AoS fails then whats next?

PS: im not saying that AoS will fail or that it should, only what happens IF.

I think they have things planned out at least a few years in advance. It would not surprise me if it goes on longer than it should if it fails.

But given they tried to 40k up Fantasy, I think chances are they will stick to what works for them and it is 40k .

But yea I am not too sure, I think it entirely depends on how they handle the new faction models to be honest.

If it fails completely, I can't imagine they'll do anything other than drop it all.

Honestly, I think they're arrogant enough to think that if this fails, there is no market for Fantasy and they'll give up. It's untrue, because we all want a good system that scales well and has good internal balance. There is a market. But I don't think they'll see that. So I suspect if it fails, Fantasy is done at GW. If they outsourced the rules to FFG though, but kept doing models...holy crap. That would turn out perfect for everyone except our wallets.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
Honestly, I think they're arrogant enough to think that if this fails, there is no market for Fantasy and they'll give up. It's untrue, because we all want a good system that scales well and has good internal balance. There is a market. But I don't think they'll see that. So I suspect if it fails, Fantasy is done at GW. If they outsourced the rules to FFG though, but kept doing models...holy crap. That would turn out perfect for everyone except our wallets.

That right there is an idea that I could get behind!

 timetowaste85 wrote:
If they outsourced the rules to FFG though, but kept doing models...holy crap. That would turn out perfect for everyone except our wallets.

Been saying that for years...

Anyways, I think they'd just drop it. But I doubt Fantasy will just fail suddenly, right now I see it on the track of a slow decline into obscurity. Age of Sigmar doesn't look to have staying power. Even though a decent number of people like it I just don't see anything there that will hold interest and keep them coming back. Starting a new army would be the only thing, but since you can run anything you want I imagine that people will wear through the units interesting to them pretty quickly. For that matter I honestly I don't see 40k alone keeping GW afloat indefinitely, or rather, I don't think the popularity of 40k can counterbalance the utter stupidity of GW business strategies. I wouldn't be surprised to see GW go under and/or be bought out within a decade, provided they continue the current tend of doubling-down on what's causing their failures.

If AOS is a fail, GW will allow you to play a Wood Elves army alongside Eldars in 40k (battlebrother)

We don't know how much revenue GW got from Fantasy but we can reasonably assume it was small and falling, or they would not have canned it.

We can also assume that 40K can sustain the company alone, since the company is making decent profits even with falling sales of Fantasy.

Therefore I don't think the failure of AOS would be a disaster in financial terms. It would be a serious failure in marketing terms, though. GW would have canned their longest-running game in favour of their first brand new system in 15 years, and it was a failure. That would look pretty bad for their market research and design departments.

I do think 40k alone can sustain GW right now (especially since it seems like it almost does), but I don't think that popularity will keep them afloat as they continue to hurt themselves with short-term success, long-term loss strategies. Its the sort of thing they have been doing for a while now, and its finally catching up to them. I don't have any faith that GW will manage 40k well enough to save them from themselves. Right now I see GW somewhat like a large vehicle at high velocity, but steadily decreasing gas flow. The momentum will keep them going for a while, but failure is inevitable unless something changes. And who knows, it might. But given that GW has reacted to problems by further engaging in the practices that caused those problems the long-term future (years down the line) seems rather bleak for their financial prospects.

I'm at the sad stage where my biggest hope to really enjoy GW games in the future is that they will no longer be run by GW.

"Fail" is so broad. A better way to look at it is what GW has internally defined as "Succeeds", or "Fails to meet expectations".

Is success defined by becoming the #2 miniature collectible game, again? Or is it defined by break-even or 5% net profit or 20% net profit? Or is it revenue-driven, such that $50 million in sales is considered a success regardless of profit/loss? Or is it defined by a multiple of current sales?

I honestly don't know how much worse AoS can do than Fantasy; at the shops that I buy from, when I ask them what sort of sales Fantasy drives, it's always vaguely less than 10%. When I see weekly or biweekly restocks, sometimes there will be boxfuls of 40k, without a single Fantasy item.

Of course that's very anecdotal and doesn't actually mean anything, but like Kilkrazy said, the current sales and trajectory must be pretty awful for GW to have canned the game (and made plans to do so at least 18 months ago).

But to answer your question, "What if?"

Well the first thing would be to try to fix it with 2.0. Cater to the competitive players that they shun in 1.0. Make the rules more complicated. Consider unit activation. Release high value boxsets.

And there's always the nuclear option. If the game is really not selling, cease development of all models, release some crowd-pleasing ruleset that gives "people what they want", and drop the prices on models that have any equivalence (all the non super-premium models) in the market by like, 75%. Just flog the stuff at breakeven, just to take sales away from the competition and disrupt the market... in other words, if we can't make money from Fantasy stuff, nobody else will either. Let's be honest: Kings of War model sales would plummet if GW models sold at $1 per model. Or just wreck it for everyone, and sell $60 kits with 100 models for a single faction -- because after someone buys 2 dwarf boxes, they'll never need to buy a normal dwarf again. Then they're just looking at character and premium models.

Since practically everything current is in plastic, the molds are already paid for, and polystyrene is cheap, AND they have another game that's paying the bills, they could afford to do this. Then just play a war of attrition, and wait til other companies in the fantasy space struggle in a price war. Eventually some will just cry uncle and quit, or go into something other than the fantasy space. Might take 10 or 20 years, but what's a couple of decades, right? Nobody in their right mind will make HIPS molds to compete with $0.60 models, nobody making metal models could produce them that cheap, and nobody making resin models would be able to pump out boxes of 100s.

This has been done successfully in many other industries, like agriculture and industrial products. Since GW isn't in any sort of monopoly position (we're arguing that it would be a failed product anyhow), there's no antitrust remedy. It's definitely not playing nice though!

I think GW have invested too much already, if it fails I think they'll fall back to only doing 40k, take no risks ever again and fade into obscurity.