Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
I'm sure that jokes been done already, several times.

So have the events it describes, I'll be willing to bet.

WayneTheGame wrote:
For me personally the worst thing is thinking of what could be. GW could be the top dog that others aspire to if they did things right.

For me, the worst thing is thinking that GW is still top dog for the time being, and others aspire to it via the same practises.

I think it's best if we don't have any top dog. The diversity in the historical side of things caused by an inability to copyright the past has lead to an incredible state in terms of number of market participants and consumer choice.

With each passing reporting period GW loses ground on revenue while increasing prices on their best selling items (new releases) so they are fading into irrelevancy to the majority of gamers. It's a good thing not to have one company dominate the industry.

 frozenwastes wrote:
I think it's best if we don't have any top dog. The diversity in the historical side of things caused by an inability to copyright the past has lead to an incredible state in terms of number of market participants and consumer choice.

With each passing reporting period GW loses ground on revenue while increasing prices on their best selling items (new releases) so they are fading into irrelevancy to the majority of gamers. It's a good thing not to have one company dominate the industry.

This is what I have been saying for years now, this is the best thing that can happen to the market, its because we had one company dominate the market place that held back wargaming from being healthy and having diversity. The more open wargaming is to competition and diversity the more amazing products will be produced and the more settings and gener's will be introduced to wargaming. This is something I do not understand why so many of you are so are so concerned about, GWs demise will be far from harming the industry but a very good thing for wargaming as a whole.

underfire wargaming wrote:

 frozenwastes wrote:
I think it's best if we don't have any top dog. The diversity in the historical side of things caused by an inability to copyright the past has lead to an incredible state in terms of number of market participants and consumer choice.

With each passing reporting period GW loses ground on revenue while increasing prices on their best selling items (new releases) so they are fading into irrelevancy to the majority of gamers. It's a good thing not to have one company dominate the industry.

This is what I have been saying for years now, this is the best thing that can happen to the market, its because we had one company dominate the market place that held back wargaming from being healthy and having diversity. The more open wargaming is to competition and diversity the more amazing products will be produced and the more settings and gener's will be introduced to wargaming. This is something I do not understand why so many of you are so are so concerned about, GWs demise will be far from harming the industry but a very good thing for wargaming as a whole.

That may be true in areas with a thriving wargaming community, what GW brought to the table was a game that was widespread enough that you could easily find a game. I'm collecting 15mm ww2 models fully knowing they're liable to sit on my shelf never getting used because I struggle to find people who play it. Overall there's diversity in wargaming, but realistically on a local level it can be as shallow as either you play 40k or you play Warmahordes. Of course I'm aware in some areas 40k might not be popular and it might be Flames of War that's the standard, but there is definitely an advantage to having a big boy in the gaming market for communities that are smaller and more splintered.

Theoretically, if you have multiple armies for a game system, are people/your friends willing and interested in playing that game with you using your models even if they're not willing to invest in it themselves?

That's what I'm planning for, myself. I have 6 WIP armies for LOTR SBG, and I plan to get a second army for SAGA, so I have spare armies to lend to potential opponents. I imagine that people might be more open to playing a game if they have don't have to invest in it themselves.

My,uncle is interested in mini wargaming,so I spent boxing day showing him how to paint. I'm into fantasy (Lord of the Rings and Game Of.thrones) and historical games (Dark Ages). He's into comic books, so I told him about the Knight Miniatures Barman game. I'm not especially interested in that myself but if he gets the models I'd jump at the chance to try it out. And vice versa probably.

Warhammer 40000 is too expensive a game for me to ever consider getting a 2nd army.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Theoretically, if you have multiple armies for a game system, are people/your friends willing and interested in playing that game with you using your models even if they're not willing to invest in it themselves?

Yeah I've tried that, I just end up with 2 armies sitting on my shelf instead of 1 You spend hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours assembling 2 armies, you convince a couple of people to play it, you play a few games, if no one jumps on board to collect it themselves, the armies go back on the shelf never to be touched again.

The main reason I persist with 40k is it's consistently been the game I could just pick up and play with whatever gaming community happens to be around at the time. Yes, it's an expensive game, but it's the one the most people play.

Granted, there are now a lot of people playing Warmahordes but that has never appealed to me.

What's even more expensive, time consuming and offputting than 40k is starting half a dozen different games of which you only ever play a handful of times

underfire wargaming wrote:

This is what I have been saying for years now, this is the best thing that can happen to the market, its because we had one company dominate the market place that held back wargaming from being healthy and having diversity. The more open wargaming is to competition and diversity the more amazing products will be produced and the more settings and gener's will be introduced to wargaming.

And then add in the internet where creatives can get in touch directly with their end users. Where we can buy hand cast miniatures from the other side of the ocean and get rules instantly in electronic formats (or print on demand printed and shipped in our own countries). Instead of needing enough interest through normal distribution channels, now people interested in bringing something to market can have their customer base spread around the globe.

This is something I do not understand why so many of you are so are so concerned about, GWs demise will be far from harming the industry but a very good thing for wargaming as a whole.

GW's demise isn't required. They just need to keep shrinking (or perhaps merely cease to grow while everyone else expands) until they no longer are the go to option for guaranteed opponents. This is already the case in many areas. And with GW cutting the operating hours of their stores and their concentration on low volume at high prices, even high volume areas for GW are going to have a reduction in customers which will compound over time as GW is reliant on word of mouth advertising and the network effect reduces the utility of their games as the local player base declines.

Higher prices + declining revenue = some combination of less people buy and less product being sold. Which means with the declining player base with each reporting period that passes, less and less people will go to GW as the default options, which means more declining revenue for them. It compounds over time and GW's high prices ensure competition producing miniatures in much, much smaller numbers can enter the market at sustainable margins.

I want more of the same: declining revenue, volume and profit in a growing market. GW should also keep distributing more than they make as dividends as that means there's no threat to the market of them suddenly wising up and trying to regain market share that has already been ceded. As much as I advocate for taking a few million of the dividend money and investing in a product development division whose responsibility is to return GW to growth, I'd rather they didn't do it. I'd rather they just keep raising the price with new releases, keep the barrier to entry with high starter prices and maybe cut their retail hours even further by completing the transition to single employee stores (there's still a surprising number of fully staffed GW stores).

This slow, orderly decline is the perfect environment for innovators to enter the market and I hope it continues for quite some time. When each local community atrophies to the point that choosing 40k or WFB is no longer a guaranteed way to find opponents, then people might be more inclined to pick products on their merits as miniatures and as games first and foremost rather than settling for what is most played. Now there still will be those for whom GW's offerings line up perfectly with what they want and GW can just be one of many options with no particular market dominance.

I still maintain that GW's expansion was largely the result of demographic factors beyond their control (the teenage children of the baby boomers in the 90s followed by the LOTR boom) and the last 10 or so years has simply been GW returning to a natural economic equilibrium for their product at the price they have chosen.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Yeah I've tried that, I just end up with 2 armies sitting on my shelf instead of 1 You spend hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours assembling 2 armies, you convince a couple of people to play it, you play a few games, if no one jumps on board to collect it themselves, the armies go back on the shelf never to be touched again.

I cut out the "if no one jumps on board to collect it themselves" and just host dinner party nights with a game I'm hosting. And run games of it at local gamin club days and conventions. I've never had a problem getting monthly games of anything I want, even complicated games like Battletech or Federation Commander or niche historicals like 19th century Central/South America wars for independence.

The main reason I persist with 40k is it's consistently been the game I could just pick up and play with whatever gaming community happens to be around at the time. Yes, it's an expensive game, but it's the one the most people play.

And with each passing reporting period we see less people are buying less while GW downplays the importance of game play. In 2009 there were surely more players than today and even then Jervis said at UK Games Day that most of their customers never play their games. GW is losing this advantage of opponent availability.

What's even more expensive, time consuming and offputting than 40k is starting half a dozen different games of which you only ever play a handful of times

The only reason to do that is if you make your fun dependent on other people starting a new army along with you after you build two starter forces. If you adopt a project based approach and run games a host, this is a non issue. Historicals have been humming along with this model since the plastic airfix explosion of the 1950s. GW's model is actually a recent aberration. This approach of expecting each participant to build and bring their own army is kind of strange when you think of it. Imagine Settlers of Catan but you have to bring your own roads, settlements, cities and some hexes. Or Chess, but you're expected to bring your own pawns. (Yes, I know the analogy isn't perfect, but analogies aren't arguments, just illustrations to help you understand).

The demographic and pop culture shifts that allowed for GW to reach the state of market dominance where this artificial construct of buying only half a game (and expecting someone else to buy the other half and bring it) is slowly coming to an end and we're getting back to the norm across the last 60 or so years of the hobby. The GW style approach of expecting other people to buy into the game before you can have a complete experience of the game and not have your purchase sit on the shelf is just inappropriate in a diverse market place. The only reason miniatures sit on the shelf is because you're not picking them up and putting them on the table with a friend you invited over for dinner/drinks and wargaming.


.

 frozenwastes wrote:
This approach of expecting each participant to build and bring their own army is kind of strange when you think of it.

Maybe.... but it's an appealing one which I think draws in a lot of people.

I've never had all that much luck hosting games with my own models. Maybe I'm not enthusiastic enough about it or maybe my friends just aren't in to it, but for the most part I spend hundreds of hours building armies for the sake of a couple of nights worth of gameplay. I'd sooner just play cards or board games

Not that I don't enjoy constructing armies... that's why I'm doing 15mm WW2 forces full well knowing that they'll probably never see more than a couple of games... but when it actually comes to playing a game, 40k has the appeal of just being able to pick up my army go to a club or FLGS and play a game.

Not that I think diversity is bad, I think diversity in wargaming is good, I'm just offering a counter point to the idea that GW's demise and 40k not being top dog would be best where in reality for the most part I just see me and many others playing even less wargames than I do now. If 40k disappeared tomorrow, around this area Warmahordes would be the new top dog, if Warmahordes disappeared I imagine it would be very hard to arrange any sort of game the same way it is currently hard to organise any game that isn't 40k or Warmahordes.

 frozenwastes wrote:
This approach of expecting each participant to build and bring their own army is kind of strange when you think of it. Imagine Settlers of Catan but you have to bring your own roads, settlements, cities and some hexes. Or Chess, but you're expected to bring your own pawns. (Yes, I know the analogy isn't perfect, but analogies aren't arguments, just illustrations to help you understand).

Chess has no "deck-building" aspect to it. I assume Settlers of Catan doesn't either. Games like Magic the Gathering and Warhammer give you a lot of leeway regarding your starting resources, so it is natural that these games would favour the BYO setup where they can tailor their starting resources to their preferences.

Here here! Nice post Frozen.

On a side note, I also have gone the dinner party route for a significant percentage of my miniatures gaming. On about a monthly basis I play a game where the miniatures, terrain, rules, and venue are my own.

7-9 folks usually show up to play, and we typically play for a marathon 8 hour session filled with good food and plenty of booze. This type of binge gaming has provided a startling amount of gaming satisfaction.

It is, however, very much an I'm-an-adult-now development. I have the disposable income to have a collection of miniatures and terrain for a dozen players, but don't have the time to go to the FLGS once per week. I do miss the heady college days of regular visits to the FLGS for late nights of gaming, driving home at midnight trying to figure out where a battle plan went wrong, heading out for post-war drinks.

C'est la vie.

Edit: I will add, however, that I think what Frozen is talking about is part of what has contributed to the popularity of games-in-a-box that we have been seeing. You can pack Zombicide in a box, carry it to a venue, and simply look for players. Same with Shadows of Brimstone, Super Dungeon Explore, Mice and Mystics, or any of the other miniatures-forward dungeon-crawler board games. I think there are lots of other reasons for the current popularity of this format, but I think the above is a strong factor.

FFG found the best of both worlds with a wargame that is terribly simple, has a low barrier to entry, is cheap enough to easily collect enough product to support multiple players, is eminently portable, can be played on most commonly-available surfaces, is built on a widely mainstream IP, and requires little investment of time but also provides room for hobby nuts to do some hobbying. A lot of those characteristics help to make a plentiful opponent pool.

Edit Edit: I just noticed that my post count is now progressing through the years of the American Civil War.

weeble1000 wrote:
It is, however, very much an I'm-an-adult-now development. I have the disposable income to have a collection of miniatures and terrain for a dozen players, but don't have the time to go to the FLGS once per week.

My problem isn't disposable income to buy multiple armies and games, it's that most the wargames I'm interested you need to paint the models and I just don't have the time to do that. It seems most the games I like involve a lot of options too, so they're really designed for BYO armies rather than me picking armies that I like and assigning them to people.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

weeble1000 wrote:
It is, however, very much an I'm-an-adult-now development. I have the disposable income to have a collection of miniatures and terrain for a dozen players, but don't have the time to go to the FLGS once per week.

My problem isn't disposable income to buy multiple armies and games, it's that most the wargames I'm interested you need to paint the models and I just don't have the time to do that. It seems most the games I like involve a lot of options too, so they're really designed for BYO armies rather than me picking armies that I like and assigning them to people.

Well, neither do I, but I find that gamers are pretty tolerant about playing with 'unfinished' miniatures when they don't have to do anything other than show up and play, LOL. I have also found that gamers who like to paint are usually happy to do some painting when all they have to do otherwise is show up and play.

I also usually provide a few little incentives for assistance with hobby stuff, such as some exp, small scenario benefits, or similar. It is easy enough to send someone home with a few miniatures after a game and get them back next month with a basic paint job. And then if no one is willing to help paint a few miniatures here or there, they can't really complain if all of the bad guys aren't painted this month.

 Pacific wrote:


There was a survey a while ago asking how wargamers got into games. IIRC it was 20% or so that came from those MB games initially, a not inconsiderable amount. The point is that like the lack of DeAgostini magazine tie-ins, lack of WD in newsagents*, lack of online presence, they all represent less opportunity for the prospective customers to get in to GW games, or even find out about them in the first place.

That is exactly how my girlfriend got into fantasy gaming - her mum ran HeroQuest for her. (We played the heck out of my old copy of HeroQuest on Thanksgiving - my girlfriend, her mum, her cousin, and me. The game still has a lot of play in it. )

The Auld Grump

weeble1000 wrote:

It is, however, very much an I'm-an-adult-now development. I have the disposable income to have a collection of miniatures and terrain for a dozen players, but don't have the time to go to the FLGS once per week. I do miss the heady college days of regular visits to the FLGS for late nights of gaming, driving home at midnight trying to figure out where a battle plan went wrong, heading out for post-war drinks.

This is very much where I am. Between finishing grad-school, job, wife, and now 6 month old daughter, I'm stretched pretty thin. When I do have leisure time with friends, I find all the prep and forging of narrative to get a game of 7th edition going extremely distasteful. Most of the people I usually play with have gone to board games for the quick, portable gaming fix. I still enjoy modelling but have a 1/2 built Knight Acheron on my desk, and a completely unassembled Megara under it, that I have been working in for 2 months now....

I remember the days of time but no money....almost fondly.

 agnosto wrote:

weeble1000 wrote:

It is, however, very much an I'm-an-adult-now development. I have the disposable income to have a collection of miniatures and terrain for a dozen players, but don't have the time to go to the FLGS once per week. I do miss the heady college days of regular visits to the FLGS for late nights of gaming, driving home at midnight trying to figure out where a battle plan went wrong, heading out for post-war drinks.

This is very much where I am. Between finishing grad-school, job, wife, and now 6 month old daughter, I'm stretched pretty thin. When I do have leisure time with friends, I find all the prep and forging of narrative to get a game of 7th edition going extremely distasteful. Most of the people I usually play with have gone to board games for the quick, portable gaming fix. I still enjoy modelling but have a 1/2 built Knight Acheron on my desk, and a completely unassembled Megara under it, that I have been working in for 2 months now....

I remember the days of time but no money....almost fondly.

If you've not already, pick up the third HH book from Forgeworld; the Strike Force rules work just as well with 40K armies as 30K, and it plays out like Kill Team crossed with Necromunda, but more flexible/fun than KT and with less intergame book keeping than Necro. I've pretty much stopped planning 40K projects as armies, working with Strike Forces means shorter games, less modelling work before I get the satisfaction of completing a project, and less money spent on each force(which of course just means I now have twice as many projects planned ).

AlexHolker wrote:

 frozenwastes wrote:
Yes, I know the analogy isn't perfect, but analogies aren't arguments, just illustrations to help you understand.

Chess has no "deck-building" aspect to it. I assume Settlers of Catan doesn't either. Games like Magic the Gathering and Warhammer give you a lot of leeway regarding your starting resources, so it is natural that these games would favour the BYO setup where they can tailor their starting resources to their preferences.

Yes, I know the analogy isn't perfect, but analogies aren't arguments, just illustrations to help you understand.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:Maybe.... but it's an appealing one which I think draws in a lot of people.

Which leaves us where we are now in the industry. If people have a healthy local 40k or WFB (less likely) community, and they enjoy GW's products and rules, then things for that particular area haven't changed much since GW's near monopoly during the LOTR years. I consider those with local 40k communities who also happen to like the game to be quite fortunate. I've seen what it looks like when the local community fades and the player base falls below the critical mass. It isn't pretty. People can get into a petty fortress mentality about their game vs other games. Independent stores find themselves in a hard situation where their customer base for a product is fading, but they can't just easily order it in through their regular distributors for the remaining volume.

I'm just offering a counter point to the idea that GW's demise and 40k not being top dog would be best where in reality for the most part I just see me and many others playing even less wargames than I do now.

I don't think anyone in this thread is predicting GW's "demise" any time soon. They're still posting a profit and are very vigilant about watching their costs.

You are quite right that those who rely on this product model of building half the game pieces and looking for someone else to supply the rest will get less games in when there is no go-to game along those lines. I also think that if an area has a go-to game for that approach, the people who play that, or play the 2nd most popular one are the worst possible people to invite over for a night of gaming. They already have exactly what they are looking for and if their community is at all threatened or in decline (some areas can have that fortress mentality where people think if they give an inch to a competing wargame, it could spell the end of their enjoyment if that other game takes over) they'll be extra wary of trying other options.

The type of people I invite to my games are the same people who, if they were free, would say yes if I invited them over for a movie night. Or to play a board game. Or whatever. If they are only acquaintances rather than friends, they're far more likely to be from a local board game club than trying to get people at the local store's Warmachine/Hordes night. And the goal certainly isn't to try to get them to also start an army. It's to have a fun night playing a game.

With every reporting period that GW is posting declining revenue while their prices go up (we know from the CHS lawsuit public files that GW sells new releases at a much higher rate than existing products, except for some core space marine items) that less product is being sold to less people. We have also seen the phenomenon of GW gaming in local areas falling below the critical mass point for the network effect to be of a benefit and people are no longer able to easily find pick up games. It's not a universal phenomenon though. I'm sure there will be areas where GW games are played regularly by a great many people long after they have disappeared from other areas.

Before the last financial report, PaintingBuddha (a former c-level executive) pointed out a few very simple things about GW. He pointed out the dividend thing that I brought up earlier in the thread (that GW's pay out ratio was indicative of future earnings) and that the fundamental disconnect GW has is between games and collecting/hobby. I bet GW is absolutely unconcerned about the network effect and whether or not you can find a local opponent. They do have an opportunity to have the issue brought to their attention though.

They recently hired a customer experience person who is to go around to all the GW stores and see what the successful ones are doing to sell more GW miniatures. Then report back to the CEO about what works. It's possible that the person will come back and tell them that hard sales are the thing. That when someone walks into a GW store, the stores making the most money are the ones where the employee pounces on the person and doesn't stop selling them on the product until they either buy it or get out. It also possible though, that the best performing GW stores will be ones that have thriving local gaming happening. And that developing organized play and focusing on the game experience drives sales.

Will GW be willing to hear that if it's the case? I'm not sure it is the case as I think GW stores that just concentrate on classic hard selling techniques will probably out perform the community builders, but if that's wrong and the gaming community builders have it right, will GW's CEO be willing to even hear it?

.

If the network effects do not mostly (80%?) involve GW shops, then the customer experience person will not collect accurate information about why people play (or stop playing ) GW.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
If the network effects do not mostly (80%?) involve GW shops, then the customer experience person will not collect accurate information about why people play (or stop playing ) GW.

That's a very good point.

And it gets the heart of the problem with the customer experience position in the first place. They're ignoring one of the central tenants of customer experience management-- that a product is a bundle of experiences. Instead, they're only concentrating on the customer experience of "purchasing our wonderful miniatures" (not kidding about the quote) and never even look at how the experience of the product itself is working out.

And if its true that the majority of the people who actually play (or played) GW games don't do so in a GW store, they'll be getting a skewed sampling of what's going on.

The point of this person's job though, is to figure out what works best for selling GW product to people in GW stores. Any talk about the actual product or what their customers do with it (or don't do with it) will be quite "otiose."

 frozenwastes wrote:
GW's model is actually a recent aberration.

But it's an "aberration" that has become the default in the non-historical market, and it's even present in the historical market. Can you really call it an "aberration" when it has defined the market for 20-30 years and shows no signs of ending?

The GW style approach of expecting other people to buy into the game before you can have a complete experience of the game and not have your purchase sit on the shelf is just inappropriate in a diverse market place.

No, it's necessary to have a diverse marketplace. A market which has lots of different 5-model skirmish games with little or no list-building is not a diverse market because it has eliminated all of the larger-scale games (where buying a complete game for 2+ people is not plausible). You might be rolling different dice, but you're still playing essentially the same game.

The only reason miniatures sit on the shelf is because you're not picking them up and putting them on the table with a friend you invited over for dinner/drinks and wargaming.

I think you seriously overestimate how easy it is to get people to play a game. Even if you have an open-minded group that is willing to try everything once it doesn't mean they're willing to play it again if they don't like the first game. So if you don't have an established community you're still taking the risk of having your games gathering dust on the shelf.

Peregrine wrote:But it's an "aberration" that has become the default in the non-historical market, and it's even present in the historical market. Can you really call it an "aberration" when it has defined the market for 20-30 years and shows no signs of ending?

I think I can call it an abberation within the context of the history of modern miniature wargaming. From the 1950s to now. It may not show signs of "ending" but I think it's showing signs of failing or having a negative effect on people getting in games of what they want to play. Even now people are lamenting the lack of opponents and trying to figure out how to get other people to not only play the games they want, but buy into and build them. GW may have created the expectation of a "you buy half the game, your opponent buys the other half" in a lot of people's mind, but for a lot of people it's just not working like it does when you have one option dominating the local scene (and you happen to like it).

A market which has lots of different 5-model skirmish games with little or no list-building is not a diverse market because it has eliminated all of the larger-scale games (where buying a complete game for 2+ people is not plausible). You might be rolling different dice, but you're still playing essentially the same game.

Larger model count games simply don't get eliminated when you have to buy, assemble and paint for 2+ people. It's still going strong in historical gaming with much, much higher model counts than in most fantasy or sci-fi gaming. This idea that you can either buy both sides and have tiny games or buy half a game and expect the opponent to supply the other half is a false dichotomy.

I think you seriously overestimate how easy it is to get people to play a game. Even if you have an open-minded group that is willing to try everything once it doesn't mean they're willing to play it again if they don't like the first game. So if you don't have an established community you're still taking the risk of having your games gathering dust on the shelf.

I really think the problem that people are having is that they are trying to sell people already in the hobby on trying their pet game. This basically involves an implied un-selling of what they are already doing. That's really, really difficult. I would never consider it easy, much less overestimate how easy it would be to accomplish.

I'd like to expand on this but it's too off topic--let's just say that I think recruiting opponents who are already active miniature gamers who regularly paint and play is a horrible idea and I think that's where people are finding their difficulties multiply when they introduce a new game. The issues are only going to become more widespread as GW's market share fades and it becomes more and more of a fight for people's time and attention in this "buy half a game and the opponent buys the other half" approach. Those who have seen a local scene devolve into a fortress mentality where every other game than the one they play is seen as a threat to the future of the gaming community know what I'm talking about.

I know I'm asking people to rethink how they look at their hobby and question some things they might not have given much thought in the past, but with greater and greater numbers of different games and miniature lines becoming more available as GW declines, this is going to be more and more of an issue for people. Also more of an issue for GW as when they lose the advantage that keeps people like AllSeeingSkink playing, they may see regional revenue tumble as the critical mass is lost and the advantage of the network effect fades away. If this happens in enough places at a sufficiently rapid pace, GW may see the revenue shock that Wayshuba has been predicting.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

weeble1000 wrote:
FFG found the best of both worlds with a wargame that is terribly simple, has a low barrier to entry, is cheap enough to easily collect enough product to support multiple players, is eminently portable, can be played on most commonly-available surfaces, is built on a widely mainstream IP, and requires little investment of time but also provides room for hobby nuts to do some hobbying. A lot of those characteristics help to make a plentiful opponent pool.

I also noticed a trend in the local X-Wing community. Outside of organized play events with prizes, people don't seem to expect the opponent to show up with the other half of the game contents. I know very, very few players that don't have, at a minimum, a full 100 points of each faction, even if they are more aggressively collecting one over the other. They also seem to have more than enough dice and templates for everyone as well.

And yeah, the hobby nuts can do their thing. My friend just sent me pictures of a deathstar trench he built complete with turbolaser towers. A google image search shows he's not alone, whether it's papercraft, resin miniatures, plasticard textures, etc.,: https://www.google.ca/search?q=x-wing+miniatures+death+star+trench&tbm=isch&sa=X

The game is ideally positioned to weather the competition in a diverse market where "buy half the game and expect someone else to supply the other half" games are hitting a wall in terms of expanding local player bases. Or even where they are succeeding, but because multiple games succeed, you have so many people with incompatible collections because of the variety available. I know locally any given non-GW gamer might be into Dystopian Wars, or Infinity, or FoW, or WM/H or whatever, but there's no ubiquity to any of them, and no longer for GW games either. When you are dependent on another person bringing the rest of the game supplies so you can play, you need the critical mass point of the network effect to be reached. X-Wing, like the self contained "miniatures forward" board games you mentioned, gets past the problem by being far closer to a traditional approach of not relying on other people to complete the game supplies so you can play.


.

 frozenwastes wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
If the network effects do not mostly (80%?) involve GW shops, then the customer experience person will not collect accurate information about why people play (or stop playing ) GW.

That's a very good point.

And it gets the heart of the problem with the customer experience position in the first place. They're ignoring one of the central tenants of customer experience management-- that a product is a bundle of experiences. Instead, they're only concentrating on the customer experience of "purchasing our wonderful miniatures" (not kidding about the quote) and never even look at how the experience of the product itself is working out.

And if its true that the majority of the people who actually play (or played) GW games don't do so in a GW store, they'll be getting a skewed sampling of what's going on.

The point of this person's job though, is to figure out what works best for selling GW product to people in GW stores. Any talk about the actual product or what their customers do with it (or don't do with it) will be quite "otiose."

Actually, if one considered the miniatures end only, GW's pricing would be cheap, and the quality and variety quite good. It's a perfect system for people who primarily wish to collect endless scifi fantasy models.

The real issue for GW isn't that it isn't faithful to its mission statement, or even that there aren't people who fit thru bill. It's the size of population that enjoy and can afford to be model collectors. I think this population is small (people who want to spend hundreds or thousands a year on hobby), and for a lot of people, other games are simply a better value as a game.

Personally, I've quite enjoyed many other games, but I lose interest after a short time because the hobby aspect and new releases are too shallow.

 frozenwastes wrote:
I think I can call it an abberation within the context of the history of modern miniature wargaming. From the 1950s to now.

Except, again, 20-30 years is not an "aberration". Calling it an aberration implies that it's a brief and unusual event that is quickly forgotten. But that's not what we've seen here. Instead we have 20-30 years of the 40-50 years in your "modern era", with no sign that it's going to stop. That's not an aberration, that's a long-term change in how the industry works.

It may not show signs of "ending" but I think it's showing signs of failing or having a negative effect on people getting in games of what they want to play.

Really? What signs of failure do you see in a market where virtually every non-historical game and some major historical games use the "bring your own army" model? This isn't just a GW thing, everyone in the industry is doing it and nobody has shown even hints of moving away from it with their future releases.

Larger model count games simply don't get eliminated when you have to buy, assemble and paint for 2+ people. It's still going strong in historical gaming with much, much higher model counts than in most fantasy or sci-fi gaming. This idea that you can either buy both sides and have tiny games or buy half a game and expect the opponent to supply the other half is a false dichotomy.

Spoiler:

Err, lol? You do realize that the picture you just posted is the equivalent of the guy with 10,000 points of five different 40k armies, right? Most people are not going to buy/build/paint 2+ armies with that many models. So you have two choices: embrace the "bring your own army" approach, or accept that your game will only be played by a tiny number of people centered around a few rich collectors with tons of free time.

I really think the problem that people are having is that they are trying to sell people already in the hobby on trying their pet game. This basically involves an implied un-selling of what they are already doing. That's really, really difficult. I would never consider it easy, much less overestimate how easy it would be to accomplish.

So then who are you trying to get as your players? People who don't play games at all?

I also noticed a trend in the local X-Wing community. Outside of organized play events with prizes, people don't seem to expect the opponent to show up with the other half of the game contents. I know very, very few players that don't have, at a minimum, a full 100 points of each faction, even if they are more aggressively collecting one over the other. They also seem to have more than enough dice and templates for everyone as well.

And I've noticed the exact opposite in my local community: everyone brings their own stuff. People will occasionally borrow a card or model to try a new list, but the default assumption is that you bring everything you need for your half of the game.

And this just highlights the point I made about scale: X-Wing only allows one player to supply everything to play the game because it's a small-scale game with few models on the table. When you only need 3-5 ships for each player and they're all pre-painted it's very easy to accumulate enough stuff to loan a squadron to a new player. If X-Wing was a 40k-scale game this would not happen, and you'd almost always have to buy and bring your own half of the game if you ever want to play.

X-Wing, like the self contained "miniatures forward" board games you mentioned, gets past the problem by being far closer to a traditional approach of not relying on other people to complete the game supplies so you can play.

Sure, but only at the cost of market diversity. I really don't see how this is better than a market dominated by a small number of companies.

I do not believe the historical model of army building is for one person to build both armies for a game and hawk them around friends. Not for major areas of interest, at any rate.

In my experience, which is largely club based UK, there are major genres such as Napoleonics and Ancients, which have been well established for decades, and there is no shortage of opponents. If you want to play Ancients, you build an army in a scale that suits what your friends already have (i.e. 25mm or 15mm) and off you go.

DBA proposed that players built matched pairs of armies for playing campaigns, but in DBA the armies are so small compared to normal mass battle Ancients, that it was easier to make a pair of armies than to make one army for say WRG Ancients. As well, many DBA players already owned Ancients armies for larger games, that could be split down to several DBA sized armies.

The times you would want to provide both sides and all the associated clobber where if you had a particular interest in a more unusual genre, say 6mm, or naval, that wasn't already well established.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

In my experience, which is largely club based UK, there are major genres such as Napoleonics and Ancients, which have been well established for decades, and there is no shortage of opponents. If you want to play Ancients, you build an army in a scale that suits what your friends already have (i.e. 25mm or 15mm) and off you go.

On that note, and the topic of persuading others to play your 'pet game' and wasting resources on multiple armies etc... Historicals have an added advantage that periods are not bound to any specific set of rules. Minis and armies can be used across a range of game rules, and a lot of newer ancients/medieval rulesets even use compatible basing or are 'basing neutral' to accommodate this, and to reduce any reluctance to give it a go when you don't have to rebase everything. There I'd say the wastage is mostly on rulebooks, which IMO fit on a shelf (or a drive) with a little less distress.

Not that it's an advantage exclusive to historical gaming. It could be applied to SF/F too, though maybe a little less so as producers tailor special rules to go with specific, tailored models. Although personally, I see a lot of that practise as another aberration brought about by GW and carried on, to some extent, by new 'games in a box'. (I may be using a slightly different definition of that term, tho) Which I think contributes to that bit of apprehension AllSeeingSkink and others feel. The general perception that if the game doesn't please, the whole is wasted; not many seem to want to strip the rules out and slot in an alternative set. I think the one notable exception is the prevalence of gamers using their Warhammer armies for KoW, or vice-versa.

I keep going on about it, but it surprises me to keep reading discussions going on about the reason: the partitioning of rule sets and the reliance on special rules and characters. (It irritates me to see people declare rule sets 'flavourless' because they don't have clunky cheese or codex churn creating some kind of black hole gravity well in the meta) But drawing back and looking at the wider picture, specific rules and minis recede, themes and genres start to stand out more, and there are generic, compatible rule sets for most if not all of them. There are sci-fi settings of a few differing degrees of hardness (I hear gothic space-opera has a bit of a following), though all the highly personalised, unique elements in various settings tend to boil down to modern squads with guns in the rules, with the occasional tank, robot or psychic power. Similarly with fantasy battles: ancient/medieval warfare with added wizards and monsters. Even steampunk, VSF and horror: there are alternative rules for them all. They just aren't hyped up to fever pitch on Beasts of War or Kickstarter...

I have found from personal experience, nothing gets a fire going for gaming than a rules update / scale of gaming change.

Friends and I were playing 40k a fair bit and putting together and painting large armies.
Alphastrike came out for Battletech and the boys got all excited on doing large scale warfare with their existing models.
Now they are getting prettied up and the list building has begun.

I found myself in the position of "Do I really want to drop everything and get my old models going again?".
To play with the other guys for the time-being I may have to.
The evil thing going on is one of the other guys has been buying into X-wing so I am sure he will reach a point where he will want a game in for that.

My Robotech kickstarter stuff I have been putting energy into where this is probably the game where I MUST provide both factions fully done.

I think the people not playing GW stuff at the moment are still keeping an eye on them hoping at some point they will create a winning rule-set and it becomes the new hotness and the armies of 40k get dusted off and the other games get cast aside. So-far GW has not produced anything shiny enough to give-up anything yet.

frozenwastes wrote:
I'd like to expand on this but it's too off topic--let's just say that I think recruiting opponents who are already active miniature gamers who regularly paint and play is a horrible idea and I think that's where people are finding their difficulties multiply when they introduce a new game. The issues are only going to become more widespread as GW's market share fades and it becomes more and more of a fight for people's time and attention in this "buy half a game and the opponent buys the other half" approach. Those who have seen a local scene devolve into a fortress mentality where every other game than the one they play is seen as a threat to the future of the gaming community know what I'm talking about.

I know I'm asking people to rethink how they look at their hobby and question some things they might not have given much thought in the past, but with greater and greater numbers of different games and miniature lines becoming more available as GW declines, this is going to be more and more of an issue for people. Also more of an issue for GW as when they lose the advantage that keeps people like AllSeeingSkink playing, they may see regional revenue tumble as the critical mass is lost and the advantage of the network effect fades away. If this happens in enough places at a sufficiently rapid pace, GW may see the revenue shock that Wayshuba has been predicting.

This is completely true. I see it well when I try to show other game systems - you can't expect people who already have a big army in another game to invest a lot of money in that as well, and playing both. There is simply not enough free time for that, let alone the money needed to "keep in line" with the news and all.

That's why "smaller games" needing less models, having more simple rules and costing less are more acceptable, especially for people who already have a big collection.

Recently, I gave up the "buy the other half so that I can play" approach and always take up at least two factions - so that I can bring the whole thing and just have to look after another player so that I can enjoy one of my favorite games. That means a lot of work from me, but it's much much easier and I manage to play a game I like.

If I was to try to do the same with 40k or Battle, it would be more difficult because these games ask for a huge number of models that are very pricey and ask a lot of work to be ready on the table. So yes, I agree with Frozenwastes that if GW keeps going on shrinking their own network and clubs having enough with their destructive way of handling their games....it won't be long before GW games become harder to just find players.

In my city, that already happens for Warhammer Battle. Their "End of Time" campaign doesn't really brings new players, rather give old gamers an opportunity to use their big collection before...the end.

It was really interesting to read, Frozenwaste. Thanks for that!

Peregrine wrote:
Really? What signs of failure do you see in a market where virtually every non-historical game and some major historical games use the "bring your own army" model? This isn't just a GW thing, everyone in the industry is doing it and nobody has shown even hints of moving away from it with their future releases.

Prices for historical games are completely different while the work and time needed are basically the same.

This means historical games only have half the problem of GW. In that time of gaming opportunities, that's just another disadvantage - as if they really needed it.

Err, lol? You do realize that the picture you just posted is the equivalent of the guy with 10,000 points of five different 40k armies, right? Most people are not going to buy/build/paint 2+ armies with that many models. So you have two choices: embrace the "bring your own army" approach, or accept that your game will only be played by a tiny number of people centered around a few rich collectors with tons of free time.

Which is exactly why GW's model can't keep on if they don't bring something "smaller" to introduce. Nowadays, gamers don't have enough free time to play everything. A 40k or Battle game takes a lot of time because of wacky rules and lot of models on the table. The fact it's expensive is just another thorn in the feet.

So yeah, only rich people with load of free time can really do that. It doesn't apply to a lot of gamers, meaning it isn't possible to keep on the long term for a society living on that only.

That's why there are so many "true skirmish" or board games - it's more easy to bring new players if you show them it takes less time and less money to have something you can play with that.

So then who are you trying to get as your players? People who don't play games at all?

Honestly, since I'm trying to show other miniature games in my club, I find it easier to convince people who aren't active in another "time consuming" game. When I try to talk to "veteran gamers", they usually already struggle with their IRL to find suitable time to play a "good game" with their collection. Sure, they already know a lot of mecanisms and all, but they are much more "careful" when presented with another game on the "buy half of the game and expect the other to bring the other half" model.

Because they usually are afraid not to find that other half. It has been a problem even with Warhammer Battle: there are less and less games of that in my club recently. I wouldn't be surprised it stops completely if GW does something really stupid with the rumored V9 (if it exists at all...). "End of Times" books nearly managed to actually kill it with their sillyness about products already "unavailable" after 10 minutes on the pre-command web store...

So yeah, it can happen. Closing our eyes won't be preventing it, for sure.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 frozenwastes wrote:
This approach of expecting each participant to build and bring their own army is kind of strange when you think of it.

Maybe.... but it's an appealing one which I think draws in a lot of people.

I've never had all that much luck hosting games with my own models. Maybe I'm not enthusiastic enough about it or maybe my friends just aren't in to it, but for the most part I spend hundreds of hours building armies for the sake of a couple of nights worth of gameplay. I'd sooner just play cards or board games

Not that I don't enjoy constructing armies... that's why I'm doing 15mm WW2 forces full well knowing that they'll probably never see more than a couple of games... but when it actually comes to playing a game, 40k has the appeal of just being able to pick up my army go to a club or FLGS and play a game.

Not that I think diversity is bad, I think diversity in wargaming is good, I'm just offering a counter point to the idea that GW's demise and 40k not being top dog would be best where in reality for the most part I just see me and many others playing even less wargames than I do now. If 40k disappeared tomorrow, around this area Warmahordes would be the new top dog, if Warmahordes disappeared I imagine it would be very hard to arrange any sort of game the same way it is currently hard to organise any game that isn't 40k or Warmahordes.

Interesting -- For me, modeling the army is both 95% of the fun and time. When I want to 'game' in a serious, non social way, the computer I find is just so superior. It takes no setup tome, you can abandon a game if necessary, and there are no balance/fairness constraints.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Sarouan wrote:

Err, lol? You do realize that the picture you just posted is the equivalent of the guy with 10,000 points of five different 40k armies, right? Most people are not going to buy/build/paint 2+ armies with that many models. So you have two choices: embrace the "bring your own army" approach, or accept that your game will only be played by a tiny number of people centered around a few rich collectors with tons of free time.

Which is exactly why GW's model can't keep on if they don't bring something "smaller" to introduce. Nowadays, gamers don't have enough free time to play everything. A 40k or Battle game takes a lot of time because of wacky rules and lot of models on the table. The fact it's expensive is just another thorn in the feet.

So yeah, only rich people with load of free time can really do that. It doesn't apply to a lot of gamers, meaning it isn't possible to keep on the long term for a society living on that only.

That's why there are so many "true skirmish" or board games - it's more easy to bring new players if you show them it takes less time and less money to have something you can play with that.

This is very true. I agree completely.

On the other hand, GW can't exist in its current size as a manufacturer of skirmish games, because there just isn't enough revenue. My FLGS (all of them) make way more money on 40k than WMH regardless of what people are playing, because a typical 40k player/collector spends many times what a game-in-a-box or WMH customer spends. My stores generally dislike GW for its trade practices, but there are not other companies that produce releases at the cadence their collector type customers are happy with, and those customers are very spendy.

"On the other hand, GW can't exist in its current size as a manufacturer of skirmish games, because there just isn't enough revenue. My FLGS (all of them) make way more money on 40k than WMH regardless of what people are playing, because a typical 40k player/collector spends many times what a game-in-a-box or WMH customer spends. My stores generally dislike GW for its trade practices, but there are not other companies that produce releases at the cadence their collector type customers are happy with, and those customers are very spendy."

Well to be honest that is GWs fault for creating a game scale that is out of wack with the miniature scale they use, perhaps if they kept with a smaller scale for their larger scale games it would be much more affordable and then they could have kept their 28mm games more to the size of necromunda and Mordhiem instead of the current ghastly scale of combat they are at. Skirmish scale games do fine and just as well in profit as any other game. You have less money needed to invest to start your miniatures line and game, and it is easy to expand and support, so money needed to make back to break even is a lot less than the larger scale games ( let alone the cost of plastic molds which can reach insane levels of cost that cost more than many miniature sculpts combined) Infinity is doing great and thriving, as well as other skirmish games. GW would just have to downsize, and we all know already they have made more than their money back with their insane prices on their product.

They would simply have to begin treating their customers well and acknowledging that they have competition, but I am rather fine with how they are going as this gives the rest of us a real chance of entering the market and growing our own games and companies. My local gaming club makes most of its money from Card games and Board games, along with Reaper miniatures ( large DnD crowd) and warmachine / hordes having just as large of a section as the GW's games combined. For the most part my local clubs bread and butter are their Card Games and Board games, as they are the largest part of the market place. Wargaming can catch up but it needs to continue with diversity and ease of entry, Skirmish games allow us to produce a game at a reasonable investment cost and produce a game that meets the current market demand which is a game that does not take the entire day to play but a game that can be played several times in one day.

Peregrine wrote: "aberration" ... aberration ... aberration,

I might be talking with someone who gets hung up on terms. Please replace "aberration" with departure, shift or whatever other term you need to make it work for you. I happen to think that the norm of the hobby going back to its origins is one where a person spearheads a complete game experience rather than relying on other people to supply opposing forces. And that the majority of game play that goes on is not publicly at stores, clubs or conventions, but at home, among friends. Furthermore it's also a departure from the norm for games in general, which tend to not expect people to rely on others to have a functional set of gaming pieces. It's been persistent tanks to GW taking advantage of the demographics of the 90s and those who have decided to imitate how they market and sell miniatures, but I suspect the majority of manufacturers sell miniatures to people who never show up in a public place needing other people to supply the other half of the game. Instead they paint and play quietly at home with friends. Unseen by the those who play at clubs and stores.

Maybe GW's numbers show them the same thing? That even during the height of store gaming the number of people playing there relative to the sales overall was quite small. Maybe they falsely believe that people aren't primarily interested in the game at all because they only saw such a small percent of their customers show up with any regularity?

Another thing to bear in mind is that a hosting model to running games as a social event never prevents anyone from starting their own army or collection. If someone is sufficiently interested, then that's awesome. I'm definitely not advocating for an approach where one person provides everything and no one else can. People making their own armies after trying the game and me having two are not mutually exclusive. I don't know how many people got the starter set for Battletech (or a lance of individual miniatures) after coming over for some mech gaming over the years. And the newest starter is the best starter in BT's history. Great miniatures, nice board game quality hex boards. Lol, you'll probably tell me that Battletech is the same game as Infinity because they both use the same number of miniatures.

What signs of failure do you see in a market where virtually every non-historical game and some major historical games use the "bring your own army" model?

The only failure I'm talking about (which I expanded on in the rest of that paragraph) is the failure to reliably find opponents once the local community is no longer dominated by a single option (or a few options with larger player pools). I'm talking about the situation where there are a few 40k players, a few WFB players, a few Infinity players, a few WM/H players, a few Dystopian Wars players, etc., and no single game has the numbers to reach the critical mass point of the network effect that makes being able to rely on other people to be into the same game as you a reason to choose any game over another-- specially GW games as this is a thread about their business prospects and people often site the ability to find opponents as one of their comparative advantages.

You do realize that the picture you just posted is the equivalent of the guy with 10,000 points of five different 40k armies, right?

It was just an example picture of a game with a large model count where the person hosting it owned all the miniatures. It is just an example showing that in the absence of the single dominant option for "buy half the game approach" the only thing in the market will be 5 model skirmish games is a wrong headed idea.

So you have two choices: embrace the "bring your own army" approach, or accept that your game will only be played by a tiny number of people centered around a few rich collectors with tons of free time.

This has been an issue with the hobby from the beginnings of it. In the 1950s we see the arrival of plastic inch tall miniatures and the beginnings of an industry of mail order metal toy soldiers that begins to make it accessible to more people. There are a huge variety of ways people have made gaming more and less accessible over the years. High cost of entry and high cost of a full sized game is one area that GW is currently struggling with. Though I think their concentration on people who could afford the prices allowed them to weather the credit crisis of 2008 better than many independent game shops did.

So then who are you trying to get as your players? People who don't play games at all?

I'm really struggling to find a way to answer this while staying on topic. I live in a rural area in Canada about an hour from a city, so if I can find enough people that I get to play whatever miniature game I want on a monthly basis without only looking for people who are currently interested in another miniature wargame already, I'm sure people living in large urban centres or regions with much higher population density can do even better. I guess I'm not a "sub culture" kind of guy and don't see miniature wargaming as something you do with people who are already into it.

To try to reattach this to the topic, I'd say that I find opponents in the exact same way that GW tries to. Only I provide zero barriers to entry. GW manages to stay profitable and sell to new people with a very high up front cost. Compared to that, finding other social animals willing to hang out and check out a friend or acquaintance's past time is easy. And if they like it, I take the same approach as GW and offer free painting lessons, guidance etc.,.

This is one area that I think GW figured out really well and I think part of their problem is their lessened retail hours and lessened opportunities for new player recruitment. Kirby said as much in the report before last and people blew off the reduced revenue from switching to single employee stores as an excuse, but I think he was telling the truth. I've been told by multiple sources that the revenue from a store drop by about 40% when GW switches from a fully staffed location to a single employee location. I doubt they'll share how many of their stores are still fully staffed in the upcoming report, but they did 6 months ago and if they shift those to a single employee store, that will cause a 12-16 million decline in their gross revenue with a commensurate reduction in costs (which is the point of the plan to transition them to single employee locations)

Vermis wrote:On that note, and the topic of persuading others to play your 'pet game' and wasting resources on multiple armies etc... Historicals have an added advantage that periods are not bound to any specific set of rules.

There are often huge savings to the end user when you don't go for a complete package approach. GW's segmentation of their market place and providing of everything has allowed them to sell glue and paint at a much, much higher cost per milliliter than the products that try to compete in the open market place outside of a complete package. The problem is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to maintain an ignorant and segmented customer base in the age of the internet.

Although personally, I see a lot of that practise as another aberration brought about by GW and carried on, to some extent, by new 'games in a box'. (I may be using a slightly different definition of that term, tho) Which I think contributes to that bit of apprehension AllSeeingSkink and others feel. The general perception that if the game doesn't please, the whole is wasted; not many seem to want to strip the rules out and slot in an alternative set. I think the one notable exception is the prevalence of gamers using their Warhammer armies for KoW, or vice-versa.

GW really has done their best to make their stuff as non-generic as possible. Even the armies that started as historical armies + magic and monsters in the Old World have been stylized and changed to the point that GW believes they are legally distinct IP. They've carried out a similar plan with 40k. To a large degree I think it's worked. It seems most people never make the leap to seeing the miniatures and the rules as separate elements. Privateer does the same thing-- I think their steam powered fantasy look is often more about reducing miniature compatibility and keeping things exclusive than being a purely artistic element. I use tons of non-PP miniatures in my WM/H armies though. My Idrians, for example, are 7 Years War Iroquois with muskets.

I agree though and think neither GW nor PP is really distinguishing things enough to matter to a gamer with an open mind. Some things are very niche and unique though, so there are exceptions.

But drawing back and looking at the wider picture, specific rules and minis recede, themes and genres start to stand out more, and there are generic, compatible rule sets for most if not all of them. There are sci-fi settings of a few differing degrees of hardness (I hear gothic space-opera has a bit of a following), though all the highly personalised, unique elements in various settings tend to boil down to modern squads with guns in the rules, with the occasional tank, robot or psychic power.

People have always had a hard time breaking out of mindsets caused by inertia. And it's in GW's best interests if the people only ever see their stuff as a connected package. I know so many people who have tons of painted 40k and WFB that never play them because they don't enjoy the current game and it never crosses their mind to use other rules (like the previous edition they did enjoy and own all the books for!). I had to host a game once for a friend who was lamenting about how his nicely painted Inquisitorial 40k army and his Lost & The Damned combined chaos force just sits on the shelf. He brought the miniatures, I supplied the rules, terrain, etc.,. It just didn't occur to him that if there was a portion of his hobby that wasn't working, he could change just that part. Though it does require taking ownership of one's hobby and not remaining dependent on what the local community wants to play.

Similarly with fantasy battles: ancient/medieval warfare with added wizards and monsters. Even steampunk, VSF and horror: there are alternative rules for them all. They just aren't hyped up to fever pitch on Beasts of War or Kickstarter...

Marketing is the fine art of getting people to act in your interests rather than their own. There really are tons of options for everyone's taste in terms of rules. The only problem again, is opponents. When you expect to supply only half the game, then not only do you need to find people with a compatible miniature collection, now you need to find people with a compatible notion of what the rules should be like. And unfortunately for GW, they caused fractures within their own community of players. Just recently I saw a post on a local gaming group on FB where the person was looking for an opponent. They had to spell out they didn't want unbound, they didn't want units that create other units, regular force org with no funny detachments, and so on.

It used to be the case that GW's rules united people with a common vision. Now there seems to be divergent expectations of what the other half of the game the opponent is supposed to supply is even supposed to look like. Not good for the comparative advantage of always being able to find opponents. I know locally there are two small groups of 40k players that have such different ideas about the game that they are effectively no longer a pool of available opponents for each other.

Sarouan wrote:Recently, I gave up the "buy the other half so that I can play" approach and always take up at least two factions - so that I can bring the whole thing and just have to look after another player so that I can enjoy one of my favorite games. That means a lot of work from me, but it's much much easier and I manage to play a game I like.

I find that once you have enough painted miniatures for a simple game for both sides, you start having this rolling momentum where you can do more in each future game. It seems daunting at first to paint up two armies, make the terrain, play aids etc., at first, but many gamers already own two armies for their favorite game universe already.

GW would love it if more people did this sort of thing with their games. Word of mouth is what they are hoping for. Unfortunately they've gone with a premium pricing model that makes it impractical.

If I was to try to do the same with 40k or Battle, it would be more difficult because these games ask for a huge number of models that are very pricey and ask a lot of work to be ready on the table. So yes, I agree with Frozenwastes that if GW keeps going on shrinking their own network and clubs having enough with their destructive way of handling their games....it won't be long before GW games become harder to just find players.

It's happening at different rates in different places. GW is actually growing in many areas, just not as fast as they are shrinking in others. In my area, they are no larger than the next option and getting two 40k players to agree on what's legit to play has further divided things.

It was really interesting to read, Frozenwaste. Thanks for that!

Thanks! I really think GW has lost sight of games being the central focus and has taken their eye off the social nature of the hobby with their intentional shrinking of their volume and customer base in order to protect their margins and maximize dividend payments through cost cutting and higher prices.

This means historical games only have half the problem of GW. In that time of gaming opportunities, that's just another disadvantage - as if they really needed it.

There's definitely a disconnect between the game size and premium pricing scheme. It goes into the core of their business though as well. They are producing injection moulded plastic. That means they have a high up front cost and a low cost per each sprue they make. It's the perfect example of a technology of mass production. Where volume drives down the average cost and maximizes profit. GW has decided to go with a low volume price and retail strategy and paired it up with a mass production method geared towards high volumes.

Sure, they already know a lot of mecanisms and all, but they are much more "careful" when presented with another game on the "buy half of the game and expect the other to bring the other half" model.

Because they usually are afraid not to find that other half. It has been a problem even with Warhammer Battle: there are less and less games of that in my club recently. I wouldn't be surprised it stops completely if GW does something really stupid with the rumored V9 (if it exists at all...). "End of Times" books nearly managed to actually kill it with their sillyness about products already "unavailable" after 10 minutes on the pre-command web store...

So yeah, it can happen. Closing our eyes won't be preventing it, for sure.

Just be happy your club didn't decide to fight about it. At one club meeting, a guy not happy about not finding regular 40k opponents brought up the fact that the club did start as a 40k club and he thought it should go back to its roots and other games should be banned. I think I actually laughed out loud. He had entered a mindset where every other game played was a threat to his opponent pool. "They usually are afraid to not find the other half" is right.

People want to have opponents easily available to them. This is best served by a game with a low barrier to entry and not too high of a cost for whatever is considered a full sized game locally. GW on the other hand, wants to reduce the number of models sold so they can save on things like shipping and production and staff, but they want to charge a higher price for it so they make more money than if they sold multiple (that's the plan anyway). GW's interests are at odds with the interests of the portion of their customers that actually care about the game.

 frozenwastes wrote:
I see I'm talking with someone who gets hung up on terms. Please replace "aberration" with departure, shift or whatever other term you need to make it work for you.

It's not "getting hung up on terms" when the two terms mean completely different things. You're presenting this as something weird that GW has done, which implies that it isn't the "normal" state of the industry and if GW goes away things will go back to "normal". But that's not what it is at all. GW may have been responsible for some changes 20-30 years ago, but those changes have spread to the entire industry and caused "bring your own army" to become the normal state. And, again, there's no sign at all that this will change in the foreseeable future, even if GW dies.

It was just an example picture of a game with a large model count where the person hosting it owned all the miniatures. It is just an example showing that in the absence of the single dominant option for "buy half the game approach" the only thing in the market will be 5 model skirmish games is a wrong headed idea.

Sigh. You missed the key point of what I said: people that will collect entire army-scale games exist, but they're incredibly rare. The tiny number of people who have both the money and free time* to collect multiple complete armies for a game are not enough to support a commercially-viable product line. A viable game needs to get sales from the people who don't have that level of time and money available, and that means either adopting the "bring your own army" approach, or keeping model counts low enough that most people can afford several armies.

Compared to that, finding other social animals willing to hang out and check out a friend or acquaintance's past time is easy.

Yes, finding people willing to try a game once is easy. But if I'm going to invest heavily in a game I expect to be able to play it frequently, not just once every few months after spending a lot of work trying to convince someone to give it a try. And that's a lot easier when you have a local community available to play with, instead of trying to convince random people to come have a kitchen table game with you.

GW's segmentation of their market place and providing of everything has allowed them to sell glue and paint at a much, much higher cost per milliliter than the products that try to compete in the open market place outside of a complete package.

This has very little to do with GW's segmentation of the market and a lot to do with GW's targeting of younger customers who aren't aware of the full range of products available and non-gamer family members who know even less.

It seems most people never make the leap to seeing the miniatures and the rules as separate elements.

But why should these things be separate? Keeping the models and rules separate only works in historical games, where everything is defined by how the real-world armies worked. You don't have to worry about what the rules say about what firing arc a real-world tank has, or how many machine guns an infantry squad should be equipped with. You just produce models based on the real tank and infantry squad, and you can be confident that they will be a good match for rules that are based on the same real tank and infantry squad. But that doesn't work for a scifi game like 40k. How many guns should your jet pack shooting infantry carry? How many guns should go on your tank, and what arcs should they have? Should your infantry squad get machine guns or missile launchers or some weird alien thing that hardly even looks like a gun for their upgrade weapons, and how many should they have per squad? What shape should all of these things be to work well with LOS/footprint issues? You can't answer any of these model design questions without picking a specific set of rules to follow. So if you want to keep miniatures and rules separate you have two choices:

1) Generic models that can fit most rules if you try hard enough, but never do anything ambitious. No vehicles, no fancy units (bikes, crisis suits, etc), just a ton of different 10-man infantry squads with laser rifles.

or

2) Generic rules that can accommodate any models. For example, infantry squads don't have different gun types, you just say "10-man squad with rifles" so that no matter what your models look like there's no WYSIWYG issue.

I don't really think that either of these options is an appealing one.

Though it does require taking ownership of one's hobby and not remaining dependent on what the local community wants to play.

And this is the problem. Most people don't have the free time or dedication required to design their own rules, playtest and refine them until they're actually fun to play, and then convince other people to join them. For most of us if we can't just show up at the local store/club and play our games we'll just find something else to do.

When you expect to supply only half the game, then not only do you need to find people with a compatible miniature collection, now you need to find people with a compatible notion of what the rules should be like.

This is a problem with bad games, not "bring your own army" games. This problem of finding people with compatible ideas about how the game should work only exists because GW publishes garbage and leaves the work of fixing it to the players. Better games don't need this compatibility search, you just say "hey, let's play a game of X" and start playing the game. And bringing both sides of the game yourself doesn't fix the problem of player compatibility. Even if someone doesn't have their own models they still have ideas about what they want to get out of the game, and offering to loan them models isn't going to change those expectations.