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Why did WFB fail? (serious question) I have my thoughts about it, but I want to hear why you thought it failed. Did you never try it? Started to but gave it up? Played for a long time before giving up? Die hard till the end?
WFB is dead and I want to know why.
I always wanted to buy into it and get an Empire army, but never pulled the trigger. For me it was the fact that to buy a full army it would take far too much time and money. It was too intimidating. And then when 8th rolled out and I heard the changes how magic was too over powering, more bigger monsters being the focus and the codexes weren't close to being balanced, I lost interest.
Also, I looked at beastmen, but when I heard how outmatched they were, I gave up the idea.

But that's me. Tell me why you think WFB died.

Bonus topic: Could it have been saved?
I believe so. All it would have taken was good rules that got people excited.

8th didn't kill the game here (though AoS certainly delivered a hard blow). There was still a nice contingent of players (for a backwater country like mine at least) that gathered en masse each year to train and elect players for the ETC and played quite regularly through the year. There was certainly a "player rotation" so to speak when 8th hit - random charge length, steadfast and the strong magic were the things that alienated the players that left at that time.

IMO it certainly could have gotten better here - the fan base was there to educate younger players. Some streamlining/fixing of the rules to appease older players, some price decreases to lure new ones and I could see it slowly expanding. GW is now pressuring 2 stores to distribute their products and is unsuccessful at both places - they certainly picked the "right" moment to expand here :| . There's one die-hard store that has distributed their products since time immemorial and still does, but it could've been so much better...

I moved away from a community that was almost exclusively 40K (in four years I never saw a game of WHFB happening in the local GWs) to a place that was around 60/40 in favour of Fantasy. It varies from place to place, and that was a bit of an eye opener for me.

In general, I'm pretty sure WHFB was failing to bring in enough money. GW is a big company after all, and in order to stay that way they have to make wise business choices that don't always please everyone out there. AoS is a new game with free rules and everyone's existing armies can be used - smart move. There's new armies to play, new models to invest in and a whole load of 'expansions' like the BRB and various campaign/scenarios to keep people interested. It's much easier to get into and costs nowhere near as much as WHFB ever did.

The main reason it died is because it wasn't making enough money, pure and simple. I think the idea of a new set of good rules wouldn't work; there would be just as many people unhappy with the changes. In bringing out a game with only four pages of rules and very clearly stated rules in each war scroll, there's very little to argue about. And even if a player finds something to argue about, the rules suggest rolling it off and getting on with the game.

I don't think WHFB will come back, and I don't think it needs to. There are plenty of cheaper alternatives. Kings of War is booming since July, not that it wasn't doing well already. KoW is cheaper and a number of people will tell you it's better than WHFB is/was anyways.

 slowclinic wrote:
I moved away from a community that was almost exclusively 40K (in four years I never saw a game of WHFB happening in the local GWs) to a place that was around 60/40 in favour of Fantasy. It varies from place to place, and that was a bit of an eye opener for me.

In general, I'm pretty sure WHFB was failing to bring in enough money. GW is a big company after all, and in order to stay that way they have to make wise business choices that don't always please everyone out there. AoS is a new game with free rules and everyone's existing armies can be used - smart move. There's new armies to play, new models to invest in and a whole load of 'expansions' like the BRB and various campaign/scenarios to keep people interested. It's much easier to get into and costs nowhere near as much as WHFB ever did.

The main reason it died is because it wasn't making enough money, pure and simple. I think the idea of a new set of good rules wouldn't work; there would be just as many people unhappy with the changes. In bringing out a game with only four pages of rules and very clearly stated rules in each war scroll, there's very little to argue about. And even if a player finds something to argue about, the rules suggest rolling it off and getting on with the game.

I don't think WHFB will come back, and I don't think it needs to. There are plenty of cheaper alternatives. Kings of War is booming since July, not that it wasn't doing well already. KoW is cheaper and a number of people will tell you it's better than WHFB is/was anyways.

But the real question is: why didn't it earn enough money? Is it just the idea of a massed battle fantasy game won't appeal to enough people? I don't see that. I think if done well it could absolutely be popular. Also, I don't think making good rules is ever a bad thing. I think good rules attract players that like good games. The problem is, I'm not sure GW is capable of making good rules anymore. But if they did, I think fantasy had just as much of a chance as anything else.
Agreed about KOW.

But the real question is: why didn't it earn enough money? Is it just the idea of a massed battle fantasy game won't appeal to enough people? I don't see that. I think if done well it could absolutely be popular. Also, I don't think making good rules is ever a bad thing. I think good rules attract players that like good games. The problem is, I'm not sure GW is capable of making good rules anymore. But if they did, I think fantasy had just as much of a chance as anything else.
Agreed about KOW.

I just don't think it attracted enough new players. Especially from a young person's point of view, 40K looks cooler. I started out in Fantasy when I was very young, and quickly noticed there was no-one nearby who played, but were all over 40K. This was going back to 10-14 years ago. I think a lot of people see GW and immediately see 40K, and that's the way things have been for a long time in my experience.

The second point wasn't explained wonderfully. "Good rules" suggests that the rules in place weren't good enough. People will find problems with any rule set that comes out. Each edition some armies get nerfed and others are improved greatly, creating quite a significant imbalance. That's not to say this doesn't happen in 40K, because it does and that's not going to change either. Good rules wouldn't result in an imbalanced game to the lengths that WHFB could be. At least in the way the rules play out in AoS, payers are less restrictive and can base games around a mutual acceptance of what's fair or not, which is harder to do when there's a point restriction. A WAAC player can still exist, but it's pretty obvious that it isn't going to be a fun game and I've seen players not getting games because of this attitude.

I think GW have made a choice based mostly on their profits. There's a big Horus Heresy game coming out in a few weeks, and almost everyone in my local GW are buzzing about it, far more than they did about AoS. This store was primarily WHFB before AoS came in. If a major release based around the Horus Heresy is there, that says a lot about where GW see strong returns.

We don't really know if WFB sales truly plummeted as much as it's been sometimes said. Games Workshop does not release detailed sales numbers for each game of theirs. We only know for certain their sales have fallen by around 25% since 2013, and while that could be due to a number of diverse reasons, it's mostly believed the main culprit was 40k 6th edition.

As for Fantasy, it had its golden age by the early 00s with its 6th edition, stagnated during 7th and had been in decline since late 7th (perhaps due to steadily increasing prices and game balance being thrown out of the window thanks to certain armybooks). 8th didn't seem to improve things around, rather the contrary, but we cannot really say it "killed" Fantasy because we don't know reliable, concrete numbers, only anecdotical evidence. I can say it pretty much killed Fantasy in my area, but that's just it, anecdotical evidence, nothing more.

Perhaps Fantasy was not failing that hard. At least not enough to scare GW to the point of scrapping the game. Instead the official death* of Fantasy could have been merely a corporate decision taken years ago, maybe even before GW's sales began to drop dramatically two-three years ago. In any case, I'd bet something the outcome of the Chapterhouse case speeded things up way, way faster than any sales numbers. Their latest financial report speaks of an intention of revamping their entire "stale" catalogue. Whatever that exactly means, I highly doubt 40k will be left in its current state for long, specially taking into account that after the Tau release there are only four main factions left to update to the current edition. It's not even been two years since 40k 7th edition was released and we're nearing the end of the release circle, so a "40k End Times" should be considered as a possibility.

* a game like WHFB belongs, first and foremost, to its players, and it will be alive as long as its players want it to live.

When I left gw in September of last year, fantasy accounted for around 7% of sales. It was dead. People had armies that they occasionally added to with new army books, but few new gamers got into it, and few existing players regularly bought new armies. It just didn't make money. Plus, don't forget that they had had 8 attempts at creating a solid rule set with balanced armies. They couldn't do it. The rules writers blame the community for deliberately trying to break the game with op lists (which they did, but in fairness more thorough playtesting, or beta testing involving the community would have resolved).

In the end, we vote with our wallets. Whfb just wasn't getting the votes.

 JamesY wrote:
When I left gw in September of last year, fantasy accounted for around 7% of sales. It was dead. People had armies that they occasionally added to with new army books, but few new gamers got into it, and few existing players regularly bought new armies. It just didn't make money. Plus, don't forget that they had had 8 attempts at creating a solid rule set with balanced armies. They couldn't do it. The rules writers blame the community for deliberately trying to break the game with op lists (which they did, but in fairness more thorough playtesting, or beta testing involving the community would have resolved).

In the end, we vote with our wallets. Whfb just wasn't getting the votes.

So, you say imbalanced armies and poor rules are to blame for the failing of fantasy?
What about the rules was so poor?

I agree with everything you've said up there. Although leaked information is never reliable, apparently a lot of 'inside sources' told of sales in Fantasy dropping dramatically. It's not much to go by, but seeing what people bought throughout the course of a day in various GWs, and I'm often in for 8-10 hours for painting sessions, 40K purchases outnumbered Fantasy purchases by at least 20:1 without exaggerating.

A 40K End Times could be possible. I like the idea of a Nids takeover or even the rest of the Necrons finally waking and cleansing the planets again. Even if that were to happen, I'd imagine it will be a considerable number of years before the game sees any significant changes.

Regarding your closing quote: Yes, absolutely. I still play Mordheim, and there's more dedication in the players I've met than there ever was when the game was 'alive'. Just looking at the AoS board, a majority of the posts towards tactics and army lists are still for WHFB. Granted, you can argue that AoS army lists are kind of redundant, but I still find the lack of general tactics a little disappointing.

@ mwhistorian No I never said that, I love whfb. I was saying that in reference to the op that a rewrite would solve the problem of poor sales, as if it was that easy.

 JamesY wrote:
@ mwhistorian No I never said that, I love whfb. I was saying that in reference to the op that a rewrite would solve the problem of poor sales, as if it was that easy.

I never said it would be easy.
But if 9th came out and solved the problems people had with 8th, (without the typical GW thing of changing other things to be worse) don't you think that would have helped sales? I do.

 MWHistorian wrote:

 JamesY wrote:
When I left gw in September of last year, fantasy accounted for around 7% of sales. It was dead. People had armies that they occasionally added to with new army books, but few new gamers got into it, and few existing players regularly bought new armies. It just didn't make money. Plus, don't forget that they had had 8 attempts at creating a solid rule set with balanced armies. They couldn't do it. The rules writers blame the community for deliberately trying to break the game with op lists (which they did, but in fairness more thorough playtesting, or beta testing involving the community would have resolved).

In the end, we vote with our wallets. Whfb just wasn't getting the votes.

So, you say imbalanced armies and poor rules are to blame for the failing of fantasy?
What about the rules was so poor?

Interesting… I'm not going to contest what JamesY is saying here, as it backs ups a lot of speculation I went with, but I didn't think it was that drastic all round. 7%? Wow.

The rules allowed OP players to justify their lists. AoS scrapping a points based system and promoting mutual agreements is one of the game's biggest triumphs, IMHO.

Although around my club WFB had it's fans, most people didn't like it because it was too complex in it's rules and because the magic system was way over powered. GW prices didn't help either. 40K remains extremely popular though.

They probably thought the same when they released 8th ed, and 7th...

Perhaps 9th ed might have been the one to save it, but the sales didn't warrant the investment in trying to improve it, or at least that seems to be the decision that was made.

I really enjoyed playing 8th edition Fantasy and thought it was a good game. The horrific spells like Pit of Shades could be very nasty to play against (especially for some armies like Lizard Men), and there were some loopholes in the rules that never got resolved. (Night Goblin Fanatic hits a regiment of just one RnF and a character. How are hits resolved? Etc)

I think the thing that killed it though was simple. The changes that meant you need 4 boxes to build a regiment rather than 1.

This was a combination of the horde rule, increasing minimum frontage to 5 models wide and dropping down to 10 models a box.

One of the best things AoS has going for it is as soon as you buy and assemble a box it's there ready to be used in your army.

 JamesY wrote:
When I left gw in September of last year, fantasy accounted for around 7% of sales. It was dead. People had armies that they occasionally added to with new army books, but few new gamers got into it, and few existing players regularly bought new armies. It just didn't make money. Plus, don't forget that they had had 8 attempts at creating a solid rule set with balanced armies. They couldn't do it. The rules writers blame the community for deliberately trying to break the game with op lists (which they did, but in fairness more thorough playtesting, or beta testing involving the community would have resolved).

In the end, we vote with our wallets. Whfb just wasn't getting the votes.

It's not my intention to call you a liar, but honestly I have a hard time believing such numbers.

Do you mean 7% overall sales or 7% sales regarding your area, region, country, whatever?

The part about the rules writers... holy cow. If they were competent at their jobs, people would not be able to break the game in the first place. The insane arms race (culminated by Ward's Chaos Daemons) that murdered 7th edition was not the players' fault.

In fairness, regular faqs would have helped immensely, and the khaine magic rules sorted the issue of high powered spells by making them hard to cast. I never thought hordes were as big a thing as people seemed to think, as you only really got the benefit of the bonuses if you were fighting another horde, unless you were monstrous infantry, in which case the unit was probably a third of your army anyway.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Korinov wrote:

 JamesY wrote:
When I left gw in September of last year, fantasy accounted for around 7% of sales. It was dead. People had armies that they occasionally added to with new army books, but few new gamers got into it, and few existing players regularly bought new armies. It just didn't make money. Plus, don't forget that they had had 8 attempts at creating a solid rule set with balanced armies. They couldn't do it. The rules writers blame the community for deliberately trying to break the game with op lists (which they did, but in fairness more thorough playtesting, or beta testing involving the community would have resolved).

In the end, we vote with our wallets. Whfb just wasn't getting the votes.

It's not my intention to call you a liar, but honestly I have a hard time believing such numbers.

Do you mean 7% overall sales or 7% sales regarding your area, region, country, whatever?

The part about the rules writers... holy cow. If they were competent at their jobs, people would not be able to break the game in the first place. The insane arms race (culminated by Ward's Chaos Daemons) that murdered 7th edition was not the players' fault.

Believe me or don't I don't care at all, but it was 7% of overall sales, hence the drastic move with endtimes/aos. And I am not defending the opinions of the writers, only relaying them. I loved 8th ed, but I only game casually with friends, so issues were never a problem.

It was too complicated for people and didn't have Space Marines. How could it possibly compete with 40k?

IMO it was several factors.

One, it failed because 40K was easier so people spent more money on 40K. GW seeing this promoted 40K more. Most releases were 40K models, new 40K factions are released etc. So people buy more 40K and less fantasy. So GW releases more 40K stuff and less fantasy stuff to capture the sales. It starts a cycle that feeds itself. Armies went years without new updates. Meanwhile 40K is chugging them out with some new beautiful plastic sculpts while fantasy has the same ugly kits that have been out for 20 years. Think about it, for years you got less and less fantasy releases, but then GW releases a bunch of books and miniatures for end times and all of a sudden people start getting back into fantasy. However it was too little too late and then GW drops it for AoS.

Second reasons I think is the rising prices. As GW raises prices people only have so much money to spend. So if you have a fixed amount of money to spend on miniatures and the prices go up, you have to choose where to spend that money.If 40K is more popular you spend your money on that. Sure some people only play one system or another but a lot played both.

Third reason is kind of linked to the second but 6th, 7th and 8th edition each required more miniatures (especially 8th). While its coold to field hundreds of mini's on the table it got tedious to paint them all. I felt like I was painting wound counters, you rolled so many dice and pulled mini's off the table so fast why bother painting them all? Add in the rising cost as mentioned in #2 and lack of new miniatures from #1 and eventually you just said forget it and went onto something else.

We wrote:
One, it failed because 40K was easier so people spent more money on 40K. .

I don't think 'which one is easier?' is the primary consideration for most people when choosing a game. If I'm looking for a mass-battle game in a fantasy setting, it's not going to matter how easy another game in a completely different genre is to play... it's not going to be what I'm looking for.


Having said that, I wonder if we had reached a point where the WHFB settings relative generic-ness was working against it. While the generic high fantasy setting was precisely what appealed to me about it, given how much fantasy fiction has moved on from the sort of 'Elves/Dwarves/Barbarians and Dragons' stuff I grew up with, it's entirely possible that the setting was just too bland for newer (ie:younger) gamers. So in that regard, the blowing up of the Old World in favour of a bunch of mystic space bubbles would make a certain amount of sense.

From my perspective and experience there were a few reasons here:

1) moving in blocks turned a lot of people off.

2) the importance of the movement phase turned a lot of people off

3) the fact that if you screwed your movement or deployment off would put you at a big disadvantage turned a lot of people off especially as compared to 40k

4) fantasy in general (the setting) turned a lot of people off here

5) the number of models needed turned a lot of people off here. This is broken down into a few areas.

5a) total number of models exceeding 20-30 models turns a lot of people off

5b) having to take not elite core turns a lot of people off.

6) the size of the ruleset turned a lot of people off, particularly with games like xwing becoming popular that have a tiny rules pamphlet.

7) the people that were interested had a very deep second hand market to buy models off of, and I know about 90% of our fantasy players here never bought anything new if they didn't have to, sticking to ebay and local buy/sell groups to get hteir armies for 40% or even more of the total price.

Loved and still love the setting - got more and more disenchanted with the game.

There were some improvements (premeasuring) in 8th ed btu not enough to keep me playing - magic was more and more broken the more you played it and lots of stupid elements to it.

Quite enjoying AOS............

auticus wrote:
From my perspective and experience there were a few reasons here:

1) moving in blocks turned a lot of people off.

2) the importance of the movement phase turned a lot of people off

3) the fact that if you screwed your movement or deployment off would put you at a big disadvantage turned a lot of people off especially as compared to 40k

4) fantasy in general (the setting) turned a lot of people off here

Hadn't WHFB been about blocks and movement since, I don't know, 3rd Edition? Or further back?

All these don't sound like anything that would kill 8th, especially with the popularity of KoW and Warthrone showing that block based fantasy games are still a viable market.

5) the number of models needed turned a lot of people off here. This is broken down into a few areas.

5a) total number of models exceeding 20-30 models turns a lot of people off

Agreed here. The Horde rules made big units the order of the day, especially since smaller units could be easily wiped off the table with the insane magic system that 8th brought in.

5b) having to take not elite core turns a lot of people off.

6) the size of the ruleset turned a lot of people off, particularly with games like xwing becoming popular that have a tiny rules pamphlet.

Not sure about the first, and the second could easily be alleviated with the IoB rulebook. That just seems like AoS prejudice. 40k's 6th and 7th edition rulebooks aren't particularly anything to sneeze at.

7) the people that were interested had a very deep second hand market to buy models off of, and I know about 90% of our fantasy players here never bought anything new if they didn't have to, sticking to ebay and local buy/sell groups to get hteir armies for 40% or even more of the total price.

Agreed again. GW's habit of increases prices and decreasing the amount of miniatures in a box is a big turn off when 30-40 units are kind of a must. Then you toss in big expensive monsters, crazier magic, etc.

Oh, and don't forget that GW didn't release ANYTHING for WHFB for the first 8-9 months after its release, and then came out with a terrible Orcs & Goblin book. 8th didn't start on the right foot.

Hadn't WHFB been about blocks and movement since, I don't know, 3rd Edition? Or further back?

All these don't sound like anything that would kill 8th, especially with the popularity of KoW and Warthrone showing that block based fantasy games are still a viable market.

I'm not responding globally. I'm just saying why fantasy wasn't huge here where I am.

I'm sure block fantasy games are a viable market, just not one that is going to net a company a bunch of money. Especially if they can just use existing models or use the deep 2nd hand market.

AOS prejudice has nothing to do with the thing on the size of rulebooks. Those people don't play 40k for the same reason. Big complex rulesets seem to turn more people off where I am than attract - though Infinity is picking up ground despite having one of the more complex systems out there right now.

Warhammer Fantasy never really got magic very well, at least to me. It ran through periods where magic was too complicated, then too strong, then way too random, I just never really felt like they got it "right". Didn't feel satisfying.

Other than that I think Warhammer Fantasy is a pretty perfect game system. And it's not dead; at least not to me, I'm still playing it.

To have succeeded with Fantasy, GW would have had to give it additional support and provide an incentive for people to be buying their miniatures.

I think 40k becoming such a pop culture phenomenon helped kill Fantasy (and many of GW's other ranges). First 40k is all over the pop culture, then it attracts a bunch of new players, then GW focuses on it over Fantasy, then there were oodles of people who couldn't find steady Fantasy groups but could find 40k groups everywhere. So they switch to 40k, even though they'd really rather be playing Fantasy. And over the years these people get into 40k and forget about Fantasy. GW showed that it wasn't able to solve this death spiral. They couldn't answer the question Why should I be playing Fantasy/Epic/Batlefleet Gothic/whatever else when I could be playing 40k instead and finding a more active community around me? The solution would have been to keep Fantasy miniatures more affordable for gamers general use and to try to highlight the things that made Fantasy unique and different from 40k. ("You like big tactics, being a mythological general- come play our Fantasy game! You can play that too!")

Sigmar is doomed- love it all you like, but it's just basically GW trying to port over the things that made 40K become a pop phenomenon and they aren't doing a good job with it. Age of Sigmar is boring and hollow.

Well I am friends with a manager and he said that his paints and supplies sold more than fantasy. When he told me that I was shocked personally and I starting to think WHY as well.

I personally think its multiple factors when ever I see a young kid come in he asks what do you like? Fantasy or sci fi? Armies and soldiers fighting for their gods. Or space marines super soldiers?

They commonly went with 40k plus GW pushing 40k so heavily because it was actually making money. Fantasy began to stagnate.

The difficulty of getting a valid army because of the price, I know people who hated ranking up and dat rulebook.

Now? In his store since AOS came out he is actually selling fantasy stuff. Why? I dunno people are buying stuff now the problem is there is such a huge difference in areas.

Now for GW the crux of it was it simply was not making money. I think this is a question that cannot be answered since there is a lot of factors and different reasons why fantasy did not sell.

I don't know if sci-fi is inherently more popular than fantasy. In the publishing world the opposite is true. Fantasy sells way more than sci-fi.
I think people want good games.

Some factors which I think killed fantasy

Ending the outrider program
Rising prices people where forced to pick one game
Kids like guns more then bows, 40k attracts the younger crowd.
The size of the game grew so much over each edition.. I played back in 3rd edition and came back in 8th. I was shocked how many models you needed now.
Lack of support from GW. Fantasy was second fiddle to 40k when I came to releases.

My list is based on personal experiences and talking to friends.

1. Prices. It just was not worth it anymore.
2. Army books. It almost assured some armies would fail against others.
3. Tournament playing style. Too much of a game of gotcha combos.

I am a pretty avid fan of WFB. It was almost impossible to have a fun and balanced game while most players were trying to get the game over in seconds with a 2 turn splatter.

In that respect I really am intrigued by the no points aspect of AOS. But why couldn't they just add that to WFB 8th?

I am still planning on collecting and building my oldhammer forces, but for me GW is no longer a part of the Warhammer hobby.

Here is why Fantasy died.

Fantasy was always more popular with the more adult segment of gamers. Partly through a combination of being more expensive and more tactically engaging, it was also more attractive to the competitive players as its rules were more balanced and skill was a greater component. 40k is more engaging for the shorter attention spans of younger players. Over time, GW went out of their way to alienate this segment of the gamer population by cutting support for competitive events and making the barrier to entry for WHFB even higher with rising prices. This lead to no new blood in the game itself.

This gives GW the false impression that people don't like WHFB. After all, sales are flagging. They interpret this as people being dissatisfied with the product instead of people being priced out of the game and large numbers of people with existing armies and not buying entire armies together. So they decide to scrap the product and roll out the crappy AoS, the exact opposite of what they should have done. Or at least had AoS be a new game and not replace WHFB.