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..or, can 40k ever be "good"? When a company depends on an ever expanding model range, with new rules to boot, is power creep and "unbalancing" an inevitable? How much "support" is not enough, and how much is too much?

Don't have any answers, but I'm intrigued to hear others views. Drop us a comment with your thoughts!

https://skinflintgames.wordpress.com/2019/12/12/musings-on-game-design-or-can-40k-ever-be-good/

I don't need to read the article to answer.

In short? No. A "wargame" which is intrinsically tied to a model range (an ever increasing one at that) will always sacrifice rules on the altar of more sales. Ignoring the actual game rules, GW operates on a fairly unique type of wargamer - the collector/CCG style player. A properly written game shouldn't need a re-release every 2-3 years, etc.

The evolution of the game (or similar games) is rarely about making a better game, unless "better" means selling more. A lot of people disagree, but I firmly believe, for good reason, that GW makes the game "just good enough", and will not expend more talent/effort/time to do anything else.

It's akin to the revolution in the automobile industry in the early to mid 1990's, where companies realized they were making cars too well, and it wasn't necessary - in fact it was detrimental to future sales. You don't want someone to buy a rulebook and use it for 20 years, or buy models and use them for 20 years. You want consistent purchases, so you need to constantly evolve, rotate, "fix", change, produce, etc.

This is why I firmly prefer any rule set which is not tied to a miniatures line. Most independent games, or small game studios are still small enough to want to produce a really good product to be proud of. They may produce a rulebook and then go on to produce another rule set for an entirely different genre/period. As long as they pay enough attention to fix inaccuracies and answer the FAQs from customers, the product is more or less done.

GW can't operate like that at their size. They know this, and they know they have a captive audience. A great set of rules is not in their interest. It'd just be ditched 2-3 years later, etc.

People aren't asking for perfect or even good, they are asking for good enough. When they can show up with the army they like and have a shot at winning--even if the odds are against them, that is good enough.

No, that ship sailed long ago when they decided to focus on the models rather than the game. I forget the exact wording but Rick Priestly had a quote after he left GW about how they started to focus on sales and miniatures over the game.

As long as they do that, the game will exist as an afterthought because the primary focus is giving you a reason to buy models, with the game existing only to pretend that there's more than models. They even state that when it comes to design, the models are seemingly designed first without any input from the designers of the game and just thrown to the last to make rules for the game. There's no communication between departments to be on the same page as far as what some armies might need, or how a model idea can be tweaked to better fit the game.

Elbows wrote:I don't need to read the article to answer.

In short? No. A "wargame" which is intrinsically tied to a model range (an ever increasing one at that) will always sacrifice rules on the altar of more sales. Ignoring the actual game rules, GW operates on a fairly unique type of wargamer - the collector/CCG style player. A properly written game shouldn't need a re-release every 2-3 years, etc.

The evolution of the game (or similar games) is rarely about making a better game, unless "better" means selling more. A lot of people disagree, but I firmly believe, for good reason, that GW makes the game "just good enough", and will not expend more talent/effort/time to do anything else.

It's akin to the revolution in the automobile industry in the early to mid 1990's, where companies realized they were making cars too well, and it wasn't necessary - in fact it was detrimental to future sales. You don't want someone to buy a rulebook and use it for 20 years, or buy models and use them for 20 years. You want consistent purchases, so you need to constantly evolve, rotate, "fix", change, produce, etc.

This is why I firmly prefer any rule set which is not tied to a miniatures line. Most independent games, or small game studios are still small enough to want to produce a really good product to be proud of. They may produce a rulebook and then go on to produce another rule set for an entirely different genre/period. As long as they pay enough attention to fix inaccuracies and answer the FAQs from customers, the product is more or less done.

GW can't operate like that at their size. They know this, and they know they have a captive audience. A great set of rules is not in their interest. It'd just be ditched 2-3 years later, etc.

NinthMusketeer wrote:People aren't asking for perfect or even good, they are asking for good enough. When they can show up with the army they like and have a shot at winning--even if the odds are against them, that is good enough.

That is just. Wining or Losing are means of controlling model sales. In fact GW has figured out fast that the churn and burn method of the competitive types is far more of a money maker than the Collect An Army type that has an army and plays it for a long time. The Churn and Burn may resell on Ebay but the over-all meta, thanks to the internet, is more in line so people are less likely to buy the "out of favor models" on ebay than the current "new hotness".

This means prime sales. GW is intentionally breaking things having entered into the phase of life of a company where they take after shaving razor companies and panty-hose companies. They build the product to BREAK. In this case the rules are used as the "breaking" point which is even easier to do than with a machine where you might find it difficult to make something fail early without failing immediately.

Prior to 8th how many Dark Reaper's sold? That's just one example. But GW not only sells new models with broken rules it then breaks them after it's sold enough and needs to move other back product.

They recently tried the Junk Bundle with the MUST HAVE. It failed utterly (New Howling Banshees in a box with unwanted stuff that wasn't moving).. thus proving the best market model is to not bundle junk but to continue to tweak the rules as that will always sell. If they gave Raiders a 4+ invln and maybe extra move like a special 1cp thing that you could move them farther and then offload troops and they could charge full charge distance, or no overwatch (even better... the more broken the better in this day and age), they'd sell like hot-cakes. In fact the more broken the rule the more models it sells.

It's a crooked policy and it deviates from older, slower, policies. I believe this is an artifact of the end of every publicly traded company. It looks good on paper and even looks good over a short term.. but you EXHAUST your market (and GW is starting to do just that) which leads to a market crash.

People are getting sick of it and there are TOO many games, too many new models. The rules are turning into nonsense and swisscheese. People are lacking the funding to keep up and the general "attitude" is growing negative.

Thanks for the responses everyone! How much of this is a commercial inevitability though? Make the game, make the models for the game, start selling, build infrastructure, infrastructure must be paid for, focus on revenue to support infrastructure.. is there any way round it? I'd hate to see GW fail, it's such an institution... Do Privateer, Warlord, FFG, Battlefront have similar issues?

I don't think you'll see GW fail, though they're rapidly flirting with danger recently. They've chosen a business plan. Right now it's working.

However, they're slowly alienating people who are starting to call them on the nonsense. That small population who is leaving, is currently outnumbered by returning players and new business. As long as that stays the case, they'll be okay.

The last few years have been a little concerning, simply based on the speed of price increases. GW is so big they'd have to really feth it up to suddenly fail, but I can see them hitting a ceiling of growth in a few years.

It is inevitable that all good games turn bad due to rules and model bloat, yes (either that, or stagnate and die due to lack of interest). We should get used to the idea that games have a natural life cycle. For some reason GW seems exempt because its customers have a much lower bar for rules quality.

To be fair, you could just drop old units and trim down available units and maintain a balance.

YeOldSaltPotato wrote:
To be fair, you could just drop old units and trim down available units and maintain a balance.

Also known as Legend's-ing things.

Which is smart.

I was just looking through an old White Dwarf and realized that 40K is headed for the same fate as WHFB?

Why?

Generally speaking if you compare prices to play a game of 40K in say 2010 to the prices for a similar meta-level army in WHFB.. woah. If you compare WH40K 8th in 2019 to the WHFB.. you see a parralel in pricing despite the near decade separating them.


For example, what amounted to a High Elf "basic" meta army.. not a start collecting but an actual playable small army in a box.. it was 175USD in 2010 dollars. That would be about 230ish in today's dollars though it's hard to pin down. Mind you that's not a high-meta but a "starting level". You wanted a good sized unit of an elite troop type?? That would run you a good solid 125 bucks.. say for White Lion's or Sword Masters in three ranks worth. For one unit.

Now looking at the new Psychic Awaking Eldar Box.. you get the 230 price tag.. you look at the new SoB..

Yeah.. 40K is right on the path for WHFBing itself.

That's the risk GW is taking and they need to cool their heels and lower pricing before they self destruct.

Slow growth always beats out fast growth spikes in a long term business in durable goods (models are durable goods, not consumables.. paints are consumables). You want deep, long, stable, growth. Explosive growth is self-destructive get in and quit it market destroying gak that people do to make billions on the stock market regardless of the fallout to the business or market in question.

GW provides good value*



.

*Value-Work critical to the Customer and the Customer is willing to pay for it. The key part is that the customer is willing to pay for it

The customer is willing to pay for exactly what they are getting, so there is no need to do more.

I've gone from buying/painting 100$+ a month of models and attending a tournament (after an outlay of $1500 to get into 8th) to not buying anything/attending a tournament since the new SM dex dropped.

I was feeling burnt out from constantly chasing the meta to field an army that wasn't a rofl stomp for my opponent. Seeing units I bought/painted recently getting nerfed or straight up removed from the game has been tough as well as having my factions completely outclassed by the SM variants of THE SAME FING MODELS has really made me take a step back from the game.

I'm hoping others are feeling like me and I've seen the numbers at local tournaments dropping since the "marine meta" became a thing (via BCP). I doubt I'm the only one getting 8th fatigue, every time I try to come up with a new list I get to the end and realize marines do all the things I'm trying to do better and cheaper (BA, DA, SW, DW) and buying another book (PA) to add to my other books (CA 2019, marine dex, vigilus) is starting to get old.

GW has become to transparently greedy. It's obvious to me they are just trying to suck as much $$ out of me as they can instead of providing a good product and letting me buy things because I want them instead of needing them in order to field a competitive army. Price increases, model point decreases, bad balancing, changes just for the sake of changing things, staggered releases, rushed releases, tons of simple mistakes, bad and inconsistent rules (1st deepstrike is bad, here's 30 ways to 1st turn deepstrike...) all of this taken together had made me feel like a sucker for the $$ I've dropped on GW products since 8th dropped and forced me to take a step back from my hobby.

GW needs to be more transparent about why they make the changes they do in order for me to trust them again. I don't have a close group of gaming buddies that I can garage hammer with so I need the PUG game to at least be somewhat balanced or either my opponent or I is going to have a bad time. All I see are $$ per point increases and randumb changes that seem to encourage model churn rather than game balance.

There's so much more to game design as a product than rules. Something I wonder about is the change in Space Marine model design. In the previous iteration, the first-generation Marines all had interchangeable parts. It meant that you could really personalize things, and I think that short-packing the various markers of armour on the various kits was actually kind of ingenious - I spent years collecting two battle companies of MkVI marines then a couple of hundred CSMs using the T-visored helmets from the Berzerker sprues. Even the specific armour kits like the MkIII and MkIV have lots of variation and compatibility of parts that means you can use spares from one sprue to upgrade others.

There's a joke from my college days by an engineering student named Cote named Cote's Law. Originally it meant to apply to salsa and nachos, but I've increasingly found it to apply to games-as-products. The basic notion is that whether you run out of nachos or salsa, you refill and then run out of the other one first. So long as you only run out of one, then you still want to get the other. It's like the opposite of tessellation.

But you look at the kits now, SM and CSM alike and you see that they're less kit-bashable. Not impossible, but less so. I think for a while prior to 8th my hobby was literally buying SMs, with a little Warhammer thrown in to justify it, and I stopped in 8th to concentrate on my Tyranids. Now, although the Primaris are just gorgeous models, I just find no interest in buying any. Somehow or other I ran out of nachos and salsa when it comes to SM, and it's kind of confusing to (a) really like the models, and (b) not be interested in owning them.

YeOldSaltPotato wrote:
To be fair, you could just drop old units and trim down available units and maintain a balance.

That could potentially maintain a healthy ruleset in the long term, yes. But invalidating old models is thin ice indeed. We barely tolerate it even from GW, other companies wouldn't survive the players' wrath.

Over the years, GW has discontinued various models. Most of the time, it was just characters that didn't make it from one book to the next, but it's also included things like:
* Chaos hounds
* Chaos cultists (in some editions, and not in others)
* mounts for characters
even back in the days of 'You'll have to make your own models for some of these' books. Back then, if that happened to a unit, you might get suggestions about what to use the models as, instead.

And if you're willing to put the pitch forks down for a few minutes:
* In a reasonable situation, balancing adjustments to the point costs of models is supposed to be a good thing.
* In a reasonable situation, adjusting a model so that it goes from 'not worth using' to 'worth using' is supposed to be good thing.
* For the first several years of a game's existence, introducing a new model/unit/rule that "shakes up the game" should be a good thing.
* Once upon a time, GW was legitimately switching from the 'it's a new game, people have small collections so there needs to be a small format to play' to 'it's an older game, people's collections (and the model line) are big enough to merit larger formats'.

On the other hand, GW has over the years had problems with 'generational' power creep, and a price per model that you could probably compare to CEO compensation rates in the US rather than inflation rates.

Disclaimer: The last time I played 40k, my army creation process was mostly 'Have I unpacked enough points worth of models yet?', switching boxes during the process.