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Kiwidru wrote:
Dawn of war (all of them): made more than enough money to survive... couldnt keep players interested due to bugs/terrible patches/no improvement of rules. Axed when player pool dwindled to low.

These were very successful games with multiple expansions and are still played to this day. They are not MMOs - they're not designed to continue in perpetuity. There is no "axing" of regular video games like this, the main reason there is no DoW3 atm is due to the publisher going under. We can hope Relic still manages to make it under their new overlords, Sega. You were right about WAR, not about DoW though.

 Yonan wrote:

Kiwidru wrote:
Dawn of war (all of them): made more than enough money to survive... couldnt keep players interested due to bugs/terrible patches/no improvement of rules. Axed when player pool dwindled to low.

These were very successful games with multiple expansions and are still played to this day. They are not MMOs - they're not designed to continue in perpetuity. There is no "axing" of regular video games like this, the main reason there is no DoW3 atm is due to the publisher going under. We can hope Relic still manages to make it under their new overlords, Sega. You were right about WAR, not about DoW though.

i played all the dow games and expansions. dow 2, chaos rising and the other one were all fairly terrible from a glitch/balance/driving away customers... graphically it looked ok, but it looked WAY worse than Company of Heros, even though they both ran on the same engine and DOW2 was released years later. in terms of squad movements, cover, destructible environments, stat availability, resource management, everything was clunky.

... so basically i stand by my statement. there is no reason it shouldnt have worked, other than blatant mismanagement and ignoring the player base's desires/concerns until they finally gave up on it. Also, im fairly sure that there is no multiplayer of any of the games still going, at least not on the steam top 100 (which means less than a thousand people a day log on worldwide)

Kiwidru wrote:

 Yonan wrote:

Kiwidru wrote:
Dawn of war (all of them): made more than enough money to survive... couldnt keep players interested due to bugs/terrible patches/no improvement of rules. Axed when player pool dwindled to low.

These were very successful games with multiple expansions and are still played to this day. They are not MMOs - they're not designed to continue in perpetuity. There is no "axing" of regular video games like this, the main reason there is no DoW3 atm is due to the publisher going under. We can hope Relic still manages to make it under their new overlords, Sega. You were right about WAR, not about DoW though.

i played all the dow games and expansions. dow 2, chaos rising and the other one were all fairly terrible from a glitch/balance/driving away customers... graphically it looked ok, but it looked WAY worse than Company of Heros, even though they both ran on the same engine and DOW2 was released years later. in terms of squad movements, cover, destructible environments, stat availability, resource management, everything was clunky.

... so basically i stand by my statement. there is no reason it shouldnt have worked, other than blatant mismanagement and ignoring the player base's desires/concerns until they finally gave up on it. Also, im fairly sure that there is no multiplayer of any of the games still going, at least not on the steam top 100 (which means less than a thousand people a day log on worldwide)

I'm not saying it's the end all, be all, but all of the Dawn of War releases, save the one done by Iron Lore (I think that was the company?) score an 80 or above on MetaCritic, so they were generally well received and praised. And it was an example of GW doing right by there IP. Those games got me into 40k and I have none of the issues you're stating. Yea, it's not got a crazy following CoH has, but it's the best 40k series to date. I think you're pretty much the first dissenting opinion I've seen here. And it probably received a lesser amount of legs in post release support because, in the grand scheme of gaming, 40k isn't that big. While there is enough fans and lookie-loos to make it a profitable venture in video gaming, it doesn't have the market draw of a Call of Duty to sustain a long multiplayer tail. It's not bad game, thus multiplayer died. Rather it's a case of a company with limited time capabilities and funding to do other titles. Relic was pushed into scramble mode because of the THQ fallout.

Now if you want to see a buggy release, just wait for Warhammer Total War that's supposed to be coming. I love those games, but man are they hot street trash on release.

"Warhammer total war" has so much potential but Creative Assembly have been getting progressively more buggy and more arcadey over time to the point I no longer buy their games.

Seconding DoW getting me into 40k! There's no way DoW "didn't work" as a game given universally high ratings and multiple successful expansions. Multiplayer in 95% of games fades faster than it did in DoW and I still see 5k players online in Dawn of War 2. Definitely need more games like DoW than any other 40k licensed game, though Space Marine had its moments too.

Yonan is still right though: No games were "axed". They're not MMO's and not designed to last forever. The games (with the exception of Soulstorm) were all very popular and big sellers. And even if you want to talk about faults and failures, none of those things are the prerogative nor the responsibility of GW. They were neither the developers nor the publishers of those games, so it was out of their hands.

The Specialist Games were axed because they weren't making enough money.

Personally I have never played any of them except Blood Bowl, but other people did/do. How viable they might be with proper support I don't know.

The computer games just ran out of natural life. When you publish a boxed game, you expect to sell 80% of your lifetime sales in the first month or so. Games are usually taken off the shelves within three months because something new has arrived.

Digital distribution has of course changed this scenario somewhat.

If GW can figure out how to return their license revenue to its former height, that could totally change their future prospects. But that's the same as just saying if they can figure out how to return miniatures revenue to its former levels, then they will be fine. I didn't see any semblance of a plan for anything in their report.

Licensing income is the icing on the cake. There were years in which it made a good contribution to profits, but it never amounted to more than a couple of percent of overall turnover.

The core games business has to be healthy to support licensing.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

The computer games just ran out of natural life. When you publish a boxed game, you expect to sell 80% of your lifetime sales in the first month or so. Games are usually taken off the shelves within three months because something new has arrived

I don't think that's true. Mantic has sold 3 times more dreadball since the kickstarter ended and risk has been out for decades. Most products sell more over the long tail if marketed broadly enough.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The Specialist Games were axed because they weren't making enough money.

I wasn't talking about the Specialist Games.

Backfire wrote:
Again, there does not seem to be much evidence about such a collapse of sales. Kirby reported that the last quarter was better than the third one (although it better be with the huge website promotion campaign and first weeks of 7th edition), so it does not seem they're in a middle of quick collapse.

But you're saying the 4th quarter was only really an improvement due to 2 big hitters - the new edition of their flagship ruleset, and a pair of webstore freebies (2 limited edition Spare Marine Captains). The first is something they can't do much more frequently whilst keeping customers, and the second is something they haven't done in a long time (free stuff*), though they could do that more often. I'm not sure if the webstore promotion generated many sales, or if it just brought them forward.

What are they going to be able to do to keep up that level of spending? A new Fantasy Battles Edition and another few web offers? Maybe a new Apocalypse edition?



*I wonder if the £4m includes the notional cost of all the freebies in the promotion; at £15 each, it'd make a bit of a dent in the headline figure and would mean they didn't get quite so badly shafted on the website. I still can't believe they genuinely paid that much, so I'm sure there's some shenanigans involved.

A new Apoc edition is unlikely, given 6th had one. I think the Space Marine Codex release probably pulled a lot of weight as well, as did the release of Imperial Knights - I doubt they can replicate those again any time soon.

I really don't know what other heavy hitters GW have left to put out. A new fantasy release maybe?

Herzlos wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:

The computer games just ran out of natural life. When you publish a boxed game, you expect to sell 80% of your lifetime sales in the first month or so. Games are usually taken off the shelves within three months because something new has arrived

I don't think that's true. Mantic has sold 3 times more dreadball since the kickstarter ended and risk has been out for decades. Most products sell more over the long tail if marketed broadly enough.

It is for 'computer' games.

You do get evergreen releases but these sales are still never the same as within the initial launch window.

 liquidjoshi wrote:
A new Apoc edition is unlikely, given 6th had one. I think the Space Marine Codex release probably pulled a lot of weight as well, as did the release of Imperial Knights - I doubt they can replicate those again any time soon.

I really don't know what other heavy hitters GW have left to put out. A new fantasy release maybe?

I think this might be why they are releasing SW, BA, and possibly even GK back to back one after the other, since SM armies sell the most.

It's interesting to note that Warhammer Fantasy was considered a game for serious gamer's at one time. 40k was looked at as light weight. GW then managed to mess up Warhammer Fantasy without bothering to fix 40k.

Although the argument needs no more proof it's just another example of GW just being interested in selling models.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The Specialist Games were axed because they weren't making enough money.

Do you know that for a fact? People say that about Squats being squatted, but it's not true. They weren't massive sellers but their reasons for being dropped weren't done to poor sales. Similarly, games like Necromunda were kept around a very long time for something that didn't make enough money to justify itself. It featured in White Dwarf on and off over many years and even had entire new releases of some gangs. Most specialist games only last a year or two anyway because GW know there's a short window of high profitability so cut support.

The problem seems to be the idea that specialist games are some sort of distraction to their core games instead of a supplement. Secondly, poor performance in their specialist games are often due to their poor support which customers quickly pick up on. Sometimes they get a couple if White Dwarf articles before vanishing, as if people are seriously expected to only play a game for 3-6 months. The way specialist games have been handled was always very patchy, Inquisitor was just shocking IMO. There was poor availability of figures with stuff released and rapidly removed from catalogues, most simply wasn't advertised. I appreciate that inquisitor wasn't that popular, but it was strangled be GW.

 Wolfstan wrote:
It's interesting to note that Warhammer Fantasy was considered a game for serious gamer's at one time. 40k was looked at as light weight. GW then managed to mess up Warhammer Fantasy without bothering to fix 40k.

Ironically, at least here it was 5th edition 40k which helped to put Fantasy under. Before that, WHFB was more popular of the games, and Fantasy players looked down on 40k. Then 5th edition came out with AOBR and objective based missions and people bought AOBR like crazy. Meanwhile, WHFB was suffering from huge meta unbalance as Chaos Daemons were enormously overpowered. People hoped that 8th edition would fix the game, but it did so only by creating new problems, so lots of people simply gave up, or didn't see it worthwhile to return.

 liquidjoshi wrote:
A new Apoc edition is unlikely, given 6th had one. I think the Space Marine Codex release probably pulled a lot of weight as well, as did the release of Imperial Knights - I doubt they can replicate those again any time soon.

I really don't know what other heavy hitters GW have left to put out. A new fantasy release maybe?

Codex Thousand sons, Codex Emperors children, ETC, ETC.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The Specialist Games were axed because they weren't making enough money.

Do you know that for a fact? People say that about Squats being squatted, but it's not true. They weren't massive sellers but their reasons for being dropped weren't done to poor sales. Similarly, games like Necromunda were kept around a very long time for something that didn't make enough money to justify itself. It featured in White Dwarf on and off over many years and even had entire new releases of some gangs.

Kirby mentioned in previous report that their sales decline began in Spring 2013 - exactly when GW discontinued the Specialist games. Coincidence? You decide!

The truth is, most games have limited self-life anyway. It is actually surprising that some Specialist Games were kept along for so long as they did, given that it was obvious that model range was totally obsolete and they probably no longer sold very well. What is a shame, though, that GW appears to have completely given up anything outside the 'core' games, and of those, LOTR/Hobbit seems to be going as well. I am one hundred percent sure that Blood Bowl, some kind of Skirmish game and space combat game still would turn comfortably profitable.

 Mr. Burning wrote:

Herzlos wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:

The computer games just ran out of natural life. When you publish a boxed game, you expect to sell 80% of your lifetime sales in the first month or so. Games are usually taken off the shelves within three months because something new has arrived

I don't think that's true. Mantic has sold 3 times more dreadball since the kickstarter ended and risk has been out for decades. Most products sell more over the long tail if marketed broadly enough.

It is for 'computer' games.

You do get evergreen releases but these sales are still never the same as within the initial launch window.

My bad. I was reading on my phone and missed the "computer games" part, thinking "boxed game" referred to board games / starter sets.

 Yonan wrote:

Kiwidru wrote:
Dawn of war (all of them): made more than enough money to survive... couldnt keep players interested due to bugs/terrible patches/no improvement of rules. Axed when player pool dwindled to low.

These were very successful games with multiple expansions and are still played to this day. They are not MMOs - they're not designed to continue in perpetuity. There is no "axing" of regular video games like this, the main reason there is no DoW3 atm is due to the publisher going under. We can hope Relic still manages to make it under their new overlords, Sega. You were right about WAR, not about DoW though.

That and the way the gaming market is going. At the moment with games (and films) the makers are frightened to take risks. It has happened every time there has been a global financial crisis with films, and now with computer games because they have moved in to the main stream. At the moment a game (or a film) has to either be a huge, instant, sure fire best seller or a small budget inde job that might be a cult hit, but costs almost nothing. Anything in the middle just isn't getting funding, and GW's license is not valuable enough to gat the sales of, say, GTA or Call of Duty. They are also not a tiny developer that can keep making low budget games until something sticks.

Backfire wrote:
I am one hundred percent sure that Blood Bowl, some kind of Skirmish game and space combat game still would turn comfortably profitable.

I do find it odd that they haven't re-done blood bowl. Seems like it should be obvious, for a few reasons. First, it is a good way to get people in. Make each of the teams as a plastic box set, with rules, possibly even making the main rules without any teams, just put card tokens in, keep the cost of the rules down, and make it in essence a board game, sell it for £30-£40. Get people in to a crossover between a board game and wargaming. Sell the teams as expansions, with full rules, so they can be sold though GW, hobby/wargames shops, and through board games shops. Secondly, last time I went to warhammer world it was the weekly bloodbowl night, and the bar was packed with players, both staff and public. Its clearly still a very popular game. You would have thought staff would be nagging management and wanting to work on this.

Herzlos wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:

The computer games just ran out of natural life. When you publish a boxed game, you expect to sell 80% of your lifetime sales in the first month or so. Games are usually taken off the shelves within three months because something new has arrived

I don't think that's true. Mantic has sold 3 times more dreadball since the kickstarter ended and risk has been out for decades. Most products sell more over the long tail if marketed broadly enough.

I meant computer games, I should have been more clear.

GW owning their own shops could keep games on the shelves as long as they want, of course.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The Specialist Games were axed because they weren't making enough money.

I wasn't talking about the Specialist Games.

Specialist Games come within the general area of discussion of GW's product strategy as do FFG's RPGs, peripherally.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The Specialist Games were axed because they weren't making enough money.

Do you know that for a fact? People say that about Squats being squatted, but it's not true. They weren't massive sellers but their reasons for being dropped weren't done to poor sales. Similarly, games like Necromunda were kept around a very long time for something that didn't make enough money to justify itself. It featured in White Dwarf on and off over many years and even had entire new releases of some gangs. Most specialist games only last a year or two anyway because GW know there's a short window of high profitability so cut support.

The problem seems to be the idea that specialist games are some sort of distraction to their core games instead of a supplement. Secondly, poor performance in their specialist games are often due to their poor support which customers quickly pick up on. Sometimes they get a couple if White Dwarf articles before vanishing, as if people are seriously expected to only play a game for 3-6 months. The way specialist games have been handled was always very patchy, Inquisitor was just shocking IMO. There was poor availability of figures with stuff released and rapidly removed from catalogues, most simply wasn't advertised. I appreciate that inquisitor wasn't that popular, but it was strangled be GW.

I agree with all that you say. All I can offer is that if the Specialist Games were selling like gangbusters, GW would have been happy to continue with them.

But in fact I think GW saw 40K as a more productive option. Remember that Specialist Games went the way of the Bitz service during the Mark Wells era, when an awful lot of apparently peripheral stuff was cut in order to cut costs and return the company to profit. It all may not have been a good idea.

Apocryphal story about accounting.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Specialist Games come within the general area of discussion of GW's product strategy as do FFG's RPGs, peripherally.

By what metric? Specialist Games were the games that came under the Specialist Games banner. Video games were not under that banner. Warhammer Historical was not under that banner. WFRP was not under that banner. The 40K RPG's never fell under that banner.

I, Yonan et. at. were talking about video games being axed (of which the DoW series was not; a multiplayer community dying out isn't the same as a game being axed), not about Specialist Games being axed as a wing of GW.

GW hardly makes any decisions about how a video game does, anyhow. That's a bit of a distraction from the conversation. The company they licensed the rights to get to make those decisions, and I doubt they do much more than notify GW when they make them.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Specialist Games come within the general area of discussion of GW's product strategy as do FFG's RPGs, peripherally.

By what metric? Specialist Games were the games that came under the Specialist Games banner. Video games were not under that banner. Warhammer Historical was not under that banner. WFRP was not under that banner. The 40K RPG's never fell under that banner.

I, Yonan et. at. were talking about video games being axed (of which the DoW series was not; a multiplayer community dying out isn't the same as a game being axed), not about Specialist Games being axed as a wing of GW.

The topic of this thread is GW's annual report and the prospects for the company going forwards. As such, past activity by GW including licensed titles and discontinued games that might be re-activated are certainly valid subjects to discuss.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The Specialist Games were axed because they weren't making enough money.

Personally I have never played any of them except Blood Bowl, but other people did/do. How viable they might be with proper support I don't know.

The computer games just ran out of natural life. When you publish a boxed game, you expect to sell 80% of your lifetime sales in the first month or so. Games are usually taken off the shelves within three months because something new has arrived.

Digital distribution has of course changed this scenario somewhat.

Not having a go at you Kilkrazy, but this is what I've been railing about these last posts.

Some people are convinced that a specialist game, an 'entry' level game is what GW needs to stop the ship from hitting the iceberg.

Again, I repeat, the idea that people are put off getting into GW's world due to a lack of such game, is ludicrous.

You summed it up nicely: specialist games never made cash. Let's wind the clock back 10-15 years.

White dwarf was packed full of specialist game features and articles. Heck, I'm sitting two yards away from a pile of WD magazines full of necromunda stuff. Mordheim had the town crier. The old citadel journal used to do the same. I'm pretty sure that magazine bombed.

And yet, despite all this support, despite all this plugging, they still didn't sell well. Who can blame GW for ditching that? Not me, as much as I loved those games. A few people on this site may gnash their teeth, but money talks, and the public wanted to hear something else.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:

The problem seems to be the idea that specialist games are some sort of distraction to their core games instead of a supplement.

I took the time to read the first couple of pages of Gorkamorka Da Rulez today. They say outright that Necromunda and Gorkamorka are skirmish games designed to give an introduction to the 40K universe and game play. Written by Priestley, Chambers, and Thorpe. Those guys got it. Somewhere along the line, the company lost it.

Like I said earlier, they've gone from affordable to aspirational. Until they address that, along with community engagement and everyone's shorter attention spans, they're in trouble.

Necromunda had two editions, Blood Bowl and Space Hulk had three editions, and Epic had four editions, all had supplements for at least one edition. Clearly they didn't sell and make money.

Well, I don't think that a specialist (skirmish) game or a range of them would save GW by itself. But I do think their retail chain is a huge fixed cost that they are making relatively poor use of for promoting the company and their games. Partly because they actually only have two games now, both of which are very big, expensive, complicated so anyone who goes in the shop hasn't got very much welcoming to look at in a broad sense, especially in one man shops.

Adding a few skirmish/specialist games could help in two ways. Firstly by giving new recruits a cheap and easy entree to the wider GW universe, secondly by giving GW a controllable project of limited risk that would net a quick cash reward. This only works of course if they get it right (Space Hulk) and don't balls it up like Dread Fleet.

Not all the old specialist range were financially successful, especially in the long run, though some would argue this was partly due to GW's bad handling of the properties. Some of them were very successful though, at least when they were still fresh.

The problem for GW is whether they can figure out what would make a successful boxed game. They very obviously failed with Dread Fleet, which was their first original idea for at least 10 years.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
By what metric? Specialist Games were the games that came under the Specialist Games banner. Video games were not under that banner. Warhammer Historical was not under that banner. WFRP was not under that banner. The 40K RPG's never fell under that banner.

It always struck me as particularly odd that they produced so much stuff that you couldn't get in the stores.

For instance, it was Warhammer Ancient Battles that brought me back into wargaming, after finding Warlord Games (this was before Hail Caesar). I went into 2 GW stores to buy WAB and none of the staff had even heard of it. It wasn't on the website, there was no mention of it. Eventually I found some in an RPG heavy games shop nearby where everyone was telling me how awesome Warmachine was. Because of that it was probably another 6 months before I went near anything GW again (after discussing my 28mm Celt army with a friend, we got back into 40K). If any GW store stocked or could order in Warhammer Ancients, I'd have bought from them on the spot and probably spent more money with them over the years, but as I had no reason to go into a GW store, I didn't spend a penny.