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doctor_zoidburg wrote:
I'd like to add my 2 cents, as both and ex GW employee (from the early 00's glory days) and now a retail business owner.

Firstly, retail has changed. I've worked as in retail for half my life and my entire working life and dynamism drives companies forward, it's steadied well thought out business models who thrive on service (John Lewis for all you brits) and killed off those unwilling to change or too blinkered to see change until it is too late (Blockbuster). People's buying habits have changed but GW's is a business that cannot adapt in a way others have. It relies on customer facing retail in order to drive customer stimulation but due to the low internet-only overheads it cannot rely solely on retail stores to compete. I personally see GW essentially normalising.

LOTR was a blip, a good blip but a blip nonetheless, it was always going to be a short-ish term project, a true "make hay whilst the sun shines" scenario with a limited shelf life, and if it wasn't viewed as such by management and investors then there truly is no hope! GW's overall failing with LOTR was not converting enough players onto their other games in my eyes.

I would imagine a significantly larger proportion of GW's sales are through independent retailers, a number who will have no bricks and mortar outlets, purely online, where price is the biggest overriding factor. This is fine, it keeps cashflow steady but it reduces margin. Obviously GW would rather you buy through their stores but as long as people are buying product and they can operate within those margins, fine. The only way to increase that revenue is either to cut wholesale margin (which will just make stocking GW product not viable) or increasing prices. Option 2 has clearly been taken; but there will come a point where the product will become prohibitively expensive.

GW cannot close too many of it's retail stores because that truly will destroy the brand and my recent experience has been that they have probably trimmed their customer facing expenditure to the bone.

In my eyes, a true reflection would be to know the volume of units GW moves but that info is almost certainly unavailable to a very select few.

I truly do not see GW going completely, it's ripe for someone with clearly greater business acumen to repair it, but it does want to be run more like a business than a hobby.

As another former employee who also has 10 yrs management experience (not with gw), I completely agree with all of that.

A major problem is that I believe that GW far over values their IP.

It happens - WotC was utterly convinced that the value of D&D was entirely in the trademarked name - that entirely changing the game would not much matter, and folks would continue to buy more D&D than any other role playing game.

Only to find out, after Pathfinder claimed the #1 spot, that, no, it wasn't. People like being able to update their games - and do not like being told to just start over.

I believe that somebody in WotC's marketing department even said 'what are they going to do? Buy something else?' (And it turned out that, yes, they would go and buy something else.)

Blackberry, likewise, thought that their name was enough.

The Auld Grump

Perhaps, but it is understandable when it is all they really have. I suppose it comes down to whether they value it because they truly believe in its real worth, or if it is blind hope that if they push the value hard enough everything will work out. It's probably somewhere in the middle.

Their name is categorically not all GW have.

They are the largest wargaming manufacturer by an order of magnitude, in fact, by several orders of magnitude.

There is no way on God's Earth, given their market dominance, economies of scale and income that they should have gotten to the position they have.

They have it within their power to undercut the competition, or do it better, or buy it out or poach the staff.

They have created spaces in the market place by ending the specialist games range, they have persistently withdrawn from communicating with the player base, which, in turn, has driven people to games from companies who are run by normal people.

All of this set against a background of increasing rules volume, but decreasing quality, an ever increasingly disillusioned collection of players, production of miniatures priced as collectors items produced in a medium best suited to mass volume.

It is really, really hard to find tangible value in GW miniatures when compared to their competition, sure, supporters will talk about the fluff and how "nothing else scratches the itch" and more power to them, but when you take the emotional component out of the equation it's really hard to see GW prices as anything other than a necessity to cover the huge overhead they've saddled themselves with which utterly eviscerates their ability to react to changes in the market.

My humble opinion - the kits will (nay, already have) leave the reach of the typical entertainment budget. The fluff is fun, the models are great, but when it costs 1000 bucks to collect, paint, and play an army, you will miss out on customers. You see it on dakka all the time - "no money, wrong hobby" and varients.

Fewer customers = less business = price hike, repeat.

How high does the margin go on stamp models until it is too high?

But then again, I know nothing of GW financial status. Maybe they are doing better than ever on the business side. Feels like the good faith bank has dipped though.

JamesY wrote:Perhaps, but it is understandable when it is all they really have. I suppose it comes down to whether they value it because they truly believe in its real worth, or if it is blind hope that if they push the value hard enough everything will work out. It's probably somewhere in the middle.

I'm one to believe that the truth is firmly in the middle.

I think GW will muddle their way through little ups and little downs. If they're lucky, at some point they'll get a real hit or do something really right that will have potential customers re-evaluate them. What they have going against them is the large companies have a tougher time changing gears; on the other hand, what they have going for them is that as a larger company with a fairly reliable revenue stream, even a bad year better than the best year of a lot of competitors, so they have the staying power to tough it through mistakes.

Plus, as they shed customers, the ones remaining are progressively the ones that largely spend more and are less sensitive to price -- and as evidenced by LE codex releases gone in the blink of an eye, there are still an awful lot of those.

TheAuldGrump wrote:Blackberry, likewise, thought that their name was enough.

I think that's way oversimplifying Blackberry. Research in Motion thought that they genuinely had an awesome product, and that companies valued bulletproof security and keyboard productivity over Angry Birds, touch screens, and fart apps.

They were totally wrong -- the world wanted Angry Birds, touch screens, and fart apps, and didn't really care about security at all. At least, if not if it meant there were fewer free fart apps.

Research in Motion is also a terrible comparison with Games Workshop, because RIM was doing just fine until 3 competitors that were a thousand times bigger (Apple, Google, and Microsoft) decided they wanted in on the fun and dump more money into development and marketing in one year than RIM could ever dream of.

There is no company on Earth that would decide to invest $500 million into wargaming to show Games Workshop and launch overnight with more of everything than GW's catalogue, stunning them with a grand opening where a thousand kits and a thousand stores just sprouted from the ground.

If for no other reason than that there's absolutely no way doing so would make wargaming anything more than the niche hobby that it is... meaning that relative to the investiment, there's no money in it Even if the whole wargaming industry were worth $1B a year (and I'd find that pretty shocking), that's not even the gross on the next (or last) Marvel film. Really, a company has better odds making a profit by a nice spot up north in Canada hauling out that shovel and digging for oil, gold, silver, or natural gas.

Yeah I think people forget just how tiny a market wargaming really is, and, as hobbies go, it isn't that expensive.

@zgort I completely disagree, I think the issue is the amount of time people are prepared to collect for before having an army. You can buy dark vengeance and a couple of boxes over the course of three months and have a perfectly gameable army, then build a new one as you can afford. If you start fishing, you don't go out fully equipped until you have been doing it a while and built up a collection of equipment. If you bake you don't buy everything you will ever need on day one, you build up your tools and appliances over time. It does feel good to be able to buy an army in one blast, but I enjoy that because I remember being a collector with very little money and having to build an army for two years before it was big enough for a game.

If GW are to create a major new hit, what is it going to be?

All the signs of the past few years are that they see the future as more fiddling with 40K and WHFB, not anything really new.

Even if Sigmar Returns is a completely revised and much improved WHFB rules that I might like to play, the price of the supporting codexes and models will be prohibitive. It might sell a lot of rulebooks to lapsed established fantasy players, I suppose.

My optimism for a GW plc turn around to engage with customers and grow GW sales volumes is jaded by the fact,
In 2007 Tom Kirby openly stated in the share holder pre amble that GW plc had grown fat and lazy on the back of the easy successes the LoTR had brought them.
And then they have proceeded to conduct business in the same way for 8 more years.(Increase retail prices to adjust for falling sales volumes..)

ANY competent C.E.O. would look to proper market research to find out why sales volumes are falling and establish who exactly GW are making stuff for.

I suppose the only reason GW plc is still going is that there are some people who have a similar high valuation of GW IP as Tom Kirby does.
Either because of total engagement in the background and art.
Or the sheer desperation of ''I have spent so much on GW stuff, I HAVE to keep trying to make it work buy buying new stuff when it comes out.''

It is obvious from the financial report the last few 'loyal fans' are not going to be able to sustain GW plc long term.

I find it VERY worrying a company that had near total market domination, is now relying on selling 'high cost limited release publications ' to prop up sales.

When lots of their competition gives away FREE rules and army lists , and they are growing their company size and customer base.

JamesY wrote:Yeah I think people forget just how tiny a market wargaming really is, and, as hobbies go, it isn't that expensive.

@zgort I completely disagree, I think the issue is the amount of time people are prepared to collect for before having an army. You can buy dark vengeance and a couple of boxes over the course of three months and have a perfectly gameable army, then build a new one as you can afford. If you start fishing, you don't go out fully equipped until you have been doing it a while and built up a collection of equipment. If you bake you don't buy everything you will ever need on day one, you build up your tools and appliances over time. It does feel good to be able to buy an army in one blast, but I enjoy that because I remember being a collector with very little money and having to build an army for two years before it was big enough for a game.

I think that a part of the issue is that there is a subgroup of wargamers (perhaps significant in number; I don't know) who treat wargames like video games. They expect that after reading the Internet for a few hours, they can prepare their battleforce in a short time, and then when they play their first game, they'll have an ideal army, and that this army should have a good win ratio against someone who's played for decades.

In any case, this is the group that (correctly) states that, if you're starting out 40k and want to win competitive events, your best bet is to figure out exactly what models you want, skip all the Dark Vengeance and stepping stone stuff, and just buy it all in one go, put it together in a weekend, and paint it the next week. Hence the thousand dollar price tag.

It's a form of impatience that maximizes efficiency for a computer game, and I think is totally counterproductive if one is to enjoy 40k -- or most larger scale miniature wargames in general.

However, reality is what it is, and I think that GW should try to appeal to these folks in some way. The solution, I think, the smaller scale game that uses the same models, rather than trying to figure out a way for someone to pay for, build, and paint an army to fit a 6x4 table in a short amount of time and with a limited budget.

Kilkrazy wrote:If GW are to create a major new hit, what is it going to be?

All the signs of the past few years are that they see the future as more fiddling with 40K and WHFB, not anything really new.

Even if Sigmar Returns is a completely revised and much improved WHFB rules that I might like to play, the price of the supporting codexes and models will be prohibitive. It might sell a lot of rulebooks to lapsed established fantasy players, I suppose.

If the rumors are to be believed, the box contains everything you need to play, including stats for all models in the game, so no other rulebooks at all. And it's supposed to be playable from a relatively low model count to a high model count, so that's good, right?

The question from the legacy perspective is whether this will appeal to the traditional WHFB player. In a sense, I suppose it doesn't matter to GW as they see 8e Fantasy as flogging a dead horse. I know in my hobby shops, the sales ratio is something silly, like 20 or 30 to 1.

Which actually brings me to a system that I would FAR prefer to see for 40k (prices would be inflation-adjusted, of course):

1. An annual armies book set that's USD$100, containing stats for every army. No fluff, and only sparse pictures. Don't need descriptions of items, here just what it does. Includes every formation from every official source.

2. Regular Errata/Clarifications, published for free online and printed right into the rule book annually; you can have a new copy every year for $60 if you want. Or just download the FAQ file.

3. Every 3 years or 4 years, a major rule book revision that's $60, the current BRB (without the 2 fluff books); also available bundled with a starter box for free in mini form.

4. A full set of fluff books, each of which gets updated whenever GW feels like, about USD $25 for softcover or USD $50 for hardcover. No rules, just the fluff and artwork. No gaming purpose to buy.

So, to get into the game, you'd need to spend $100 on the army book, $60 on the rule book, and *probably* your own fluff book. And maybe another fluff book. Then, every year, they'd get $100 out of you for the armies book; plus a lot of people will just buy the annual rulebook. And they can limited edition everything for a bazillion dollars.

 Talys wrote:
[
In any case, this is the group that (correctly) states that, if you're starting out 40k and want to win competitive events, your best bet is to figure out exactly what models you want, skip all the Dark Vengeance and stepping stone stuff, and just buy it all in one go, put it together in a weekend, and paint it the next week. Hence the thousand dollar price tag.

It's a form of impatience that maximizes efficiency for a computer game, and I think is totally counterproductive if one is to enjoy 40k -- or most larger scale miniature wargames in general.

However, reality is what it is, and I think that GW should try to appeal to these folks in some way. The solution, I think, the smaller scale game that uses the same models, rather than trying to figure out a way for someone to pay for, build, and paint an army to fit a 6x4 table in a short amount of time and with a limited budget.

I agree with some of what you are saying. I don't think it is the right attitude though to say that if someone who is just entering the hobby and wants to be competitive straight away should be accommodated differently to anyone else. If you want to be competitive at something and be successful, it takes time and experience. You need to play lots and lots of games, be prepared to go through the stepping stones to learn the finer points of the rules, and have time to develop a playing style and build an army that you know backwards and enjoy using. One of the big problems is that people want to win, so they look for net lists rather than doing the ground work, and see how much that army costs in one go. Often they buy it, but because they aren't actually very good at the game, they loose with it, can't understand why because they haven't thought about the tactics the army requires or how to adapt it to different opponents, and so blame the game, newer codices etc. Then they look for another net list, see the price, remember the money they have spent previously and suddenly feel ripped off. It's completely the wrong approach, although, admittedly, one that paid my rent for a while.

 JamesY wrote:
I agree with some of what you are saying. I don't think it is the right attitude though to say that if someone who is just entering the hobby and wants to be competitive straight away should be accommodated differently to anyone else. If you want to be competitive at something and be successful, it takes time and experience. You need to play lots and lots of games, be prepared to go through the stepping stones to learn the finer points of the rules, and have time to develop a playing style and build an army that you know backwards and enjoy using. One of the big problems is that people want to win, so they look for net lists rather than doing the ground work, and see how much that army costs in one go. Often they buy it, but because they aren't actually very good at the game, they loose with it, can't understand why because they haven't thought about the tactics the army requires or how to adapt it to different opponents, and so blame the game, newer codices etc. Then they look for another net list, see the price, remember the money they have spent previously and suddenly feel ripped off. It's completely the wrong approach, although, admittedly, one that paid my rent for a while.

Well, frankly, I don't think it's possible for someone with this attitude to jump into 40k as it exists today and be happy, and I'm not changing the fundamentals of my game to accommodate them either, so I hear what you're saying.

On the other hand, there are people who feel this way who have lots of fun with other games. Typically, they're much lower model count, have more straight-forward (or at least fewer) rules, the games run quicker (so a loss isn't as big a deal), and are less dependent on list-building -- or rather, you can't screw yourself as badly by reading bad advice somewhere and investing hundreds of dollars on an army that has a playstyle totally incompatible with your own.

Instead, I think GW should make/promote (or integrate into the main game) something much like Kill Team: the models and stats and rules are essentially the same, but they're 200 point games with many restrictions on what may/must be taken and some of the core and special rules are simplified. It gets people into the 40k world and playing competitively with a chance to win, and perhaps entice them into larger games.

XdeadpoolX wrote:

 Crevab wrote:

MarsNZ wrote:
GW is the only company that actually tries to introduce people into wargaming,.

Care to explain? Because that sounds ridiculous

Thats an easy one. How many GW stores have an intro table where the staff member will play a fun and friendly game with you and explain the rules and phases? Every single one of them!

Now tell me where you can go to learn any other system of gaming where you can just walk in and get a intro game that isn't a local gaming group bringing a friend into the fold. Yes i am sure you could think of a few but GW has that market cornered.

Umm... Clubs...? Indy stores...?

Here's the thing: most of us don't have a Games Workshop store anywhere near us. I've been into this for over two decades and have yet to set foot in an official store. All my gaming is done in clubs or at someones home.

The stores have allowed Games Workshop to have a stanglehold on their home marked. But the rest of the world could hardly care less. For us, clubs and indies are what's driving the hobby.

riburn3 wrote:People hear declining profits and automatically assume GW is losing money and in the red. I've had discussions with my local group about this and there is so much misperception about this.

Although GW isn't making as much money these days, they are still making money. So to easily answer the OP, the reason GW isn't tanking, is because they are still turning out a profit.

They're still making money, but only barely.

And considering that they've all but gutted themselves in order to remain profitable, one has to wonder what's going to happen in a few years time when they go into the red?

Nothing left to cut... No plan to turn things around...

Games Workshop has backed themselves into a corner. They desperately need to cut prices, but doing so would send them into the red immediately. So they keep on increasing them, even though it's slowly killing them.

Azreal13 wrote:Their name is categorically not all GW have.

They are the largest wargaming manufacturer by an order of magnitude, in fact, by several orders of magnitude.

There is no way on God's Earth, given their market dominance, economies of scale and income that they should have gotten to the position they have.

They have it within their power to undercut the competition, or do it better, or buy it out or poach the staff.

They have created spaces in the market place by ending the specialist games range, they have persistently withdrawn from communicating with the player base, which, in turn, has driven people to games from companies who are run by normal people.

All of this set against a background of increasing rules volume, but decreasing quality, an ever increasingly disillusioned collection of players, production of miniatures priced as collectors items produced in a medium best suited to mass volume.

It is really, really hard to find tangible value in GW miniatures when compared to their competition, sure, supporters will talk about the fluff and how "nothing else scratches the itch" and more power to them, but when you take the emotional component out of the equation it's really hard to see GW prices as anything other than a necessity to cover the huge overhead they've saddled themselves with which utterly eviscerates their ability to react to changes in the market.

That's the irony of the thing: they've dug their own grave.

They should use their size and their in-house design and manufacturing capabilities to undercut their competitors at every level. But instead of flooding the marked with cheap models, they've set up a crazy situation where they're selling a mass-combat system at skirmish-level prices. And that just doesn't work.


So to answer the original question, they very much are tanking. Not as fast as some of us predicted, but tanking nonetheless. And even worse, they have no real way of getting out of the mess they've gotten themselves into. They refuse to engage with their customers on social medias. They don't do surveys. They need to cut prices but they can't. They need to reinvigorate the community, but they've burned all the bridges behind them.

@ Talys I agree with you there, and think an intro level game (like space hulk) should always be on the shelf.

People do tend to blame gw though for not being able to afford an army, when there is absolutely no reason why you can't play 200-500 point games and keep the size small. As you've said, kill team rules are brilliant for this, so is it the fault of customers for choosing to ignore this option (or being ignorant to it because they haven't researched what they can do with the game), or the company for not actively promoting a rule set they have made (which could inhibit short term sales, but possibly maybe lead to more long term sales?

 JamesY wrote:
I agree with you there, and think an intro level game (like space hulk) should always be on the shelf.

People do tend to blame gw though for not being able to afford an army, when there is absolutely no reason why you can't play 200-500 point games and keep the size small. As you've said, kill team rules are brilliant for this, so is it the fault of customers for choosing to ignore this option (or being ignorant to it because they haven't researched what they can do with the game), or the company for not actively promoting a rule set they have made (which could inhibit short term sales, but possibly maybe lead to more long term sales?

The problem with Kill Team is that it really highlights how badly designed the game is.

Quite simply, the rules break down completely at those levels, requiring a lot of fiddling and gentlemen's agreements to get it to work. I think the Heralds of Ruin did a great job with their version, but that's really something that Games Workshop should have done themselves.

And honestly, if you want to play skirmish games there are much better rules out there.

EDIT:

A point I forgot...

There's also the pressure from the players themselves. Many players that I have talked to want to play at 1500+ points so they can have all the goodies in their army. And after all the time and money needed to collect a sizeable army, I can't really blame them. So when a newb comes along and wants to play a Kill Team game, not only does he have to content with a lot of house rules, he also has to find someone who'll actually bother to play such a small game.

I think most clubs, players are willing to play the occasional small game to help new players out. But that is the essence of the hobby, collecting more toy soldiers. My original point was that many people don't seem to accept that they might have to build the army they want over time if they aren't in a position to afford that army in a single purchase.

JamesY wrote:Yeah I think people forget just how tiny a market wargaming really is, and, as hobbies go, it isn't that expensive.

If you start talking about ferraris and golf clubs I'm going to reach through the screen and do bad things.

Wargaming, as a whole, is not as expensive as other hobbies. That doesn't mean that it can't be expensive at all, or that the expense is worth the value, and GW is the poster child for that. The two main reasons people give for quitting, that I keep seeing, are rules churn and the fact that it just costs too much.

Lanrak wrote:
I suppose the only reason GW plc is still going is that there are some people who have a similar high valuation of GW IP as Tom Kirby does.
Either because of total engagement in the background and art.
Or the sheer desperation of ''I have spent so much on GW stuff, I HAVE to keep trying to make it work buy buying new stuff when it comes out.''

Ha! And those are two of the main reasons for sticking, that I keep seeing. That engagement with the story somehow requires masses of little plastic ornaments, and the sunk cost fallacy. (Not a lot that the game itself is much good, tho)

 JamesY wrote:
I think most clubs, players are willing to play the occasional small game to help new players out. But that is the essence of the hobby, collecting more toy soldiers. My original point was that many people don't seem to accept that they might have to build the army they want over time if they aren't in a position to afford that army in a single purchase.

The issue here is that all the costs are front loaded. You need to spend a lot to get to a 'standard' sized game. Even with incremental purchases, and scaling up from 500-750-1000pt games, you won't really get to that sweet spot where you can have proper sized armies. The problem with those smaller games is the game very easily breaks down at that level. So are you going to build up slowly, whilst all the time having an unsatisfactory experience, or not play because you're not at where the game wants to be? This isn't the full story, but I think it is probably a contributory factor.

Compared to warmachine which can be quite pricey as well - you don't feel as if you are being gouged. Those costs aren't entirely front loaded. You can easily but a new unit, caster etc every month and building up to having a sizeable 'sideboard'. Those incremental purchases can radically change how everything else in your army operates. Thing is - you will also be playing proper sized games from the get go. That's a crucial point for me, and seemingly a lot of other people.

I think gw needs to have a dedicated smaller scale game, or rules set. But they won't go there as thry seemingly view these smaller games as cannibalising on sales of their main games. Whereas they should be seen as a jumping off point.

Yes I completely agree with that. I'd love to see an intro level game that deliberately leads onto the full game. That's what the boxed games are meant to do, but the gap between there and your chosen 1k army is a large one.

 JamesY wrote:
My original point was that many people don't seem to accept that they might have to build the army they want over time if they aren't in a position to afford that army in a single purchase.

I respect what you are trying to say - you will not be top dog instantly. There is a pretty significant barrier to step one, basic entry though. The BRB costs $80, your army codex is $60, by the time you throw in ONE model, let's be generous at $40, and some paints, glue, and brushes - you are looking at over $200 before anything is even on the table.

If I can't get some decent fishing/baking stuff for $200 I have done something wrong.

I get that there are sets like the DV, but what if you don't want space marines? Just seems like a poor way to attract new customers is all. Don't get me wrong, I love playing Warhammer, but it is easy to see why the hobby is not 10x more popular than it is - price.

Is Kill Team still in the £55 main rule book that apparently is out of print at the moment, or do you have to buy a £30 supplement of some kind to get the rules?

I don't think there's currently any official rules available.

Heralds Of Ruin has a fairly nice set of rules, complete with army lists, missions, and a campaign system.

Kilkrazy wrote:Is Kill Team still in the £55 main rule book that apparently is out of print at the moment, or do you have to buy a £30 supplement of some kind to get the rules?

f2k wrote:I don't think there's currently any official rules available.
Heralds Of Ruin has a fairly nice set of rules, complete with army lists, missions, and a campaign system.

If you look on the GW site, you will find Kill Team It's only $10 USD/ $12 CAD.

http://www.games-workshop.com/en-CA/Warhammer-40-000-Kill-Team-Interactive-iBook-Edition

Well, I'll be damned...

I guess that just goes to show how long it's been since I visited their site. :-)

f2k wrote:
The problem with Kill Team is that it really highlights how badly designed the game is.

Quite simply, the rules break down completely at those levels, requiring a lot of fiddling and gentlemen's agreements to get it to work. I think the Heralds of Ruin did a great job with their version, but that's really something that Games Workshop should have done themselves.

And honestly, if you want to play skirmish games there are much better rules out there.

EDIT:

A point I forgot...

There's also the pressure from the players themselves. Many players that I have talked to want to play at 1500+ points so they can have all the goodies in their army. And after all the time and money needed to collect a sizeable army, I can't really blame them. So when a newb comes along and wants to play a Kill Team game, not only does he have to content with a lot of house rules, he also has to find someone who'll actually bother to play such a small game.

I'm not sure if you've ever played Kill Team. And you obviously don't like 40k very much.

40k is optimized around a 6x4 or 8x8 (or larger) table with a lot of terrain and the largest miniature army that a person can practically transport. At it's best, the turns are about half an hour long, and a game is about 3-4 hours, plus some time for setup. This is what the rules are written for - a big game that takes the maximum length of time that the median player is able to play a game for.

Kill team is a subset of the rules where every model moves independently, and although taken as squads, are treated as independent units for all other purposes. You can take 0-2 troops, 0-1 FA, 0-1 Elites, and there are severe restrictions (such as no 2+ save models, no combined armor > 33, no W3+ models, minimum infantry, et cetera). The stated point level is 200 points, though of course, some people choose to increase this. Kill team is played on, and optimized for, a 4x4 table. Each turn takes about 5 minutes.

One game is not superior to the other. They are different There is a group of players at my FLGS who have moved to playing 75% of their games as Kill Team, even though most of them own 20,000+ points of models between their various armies, because these people don't have as much time, and many pop in for just an hour to play a single game. Once in a while, they'll still play standard 40k games, though -- basically, if they happen to have more time.

What I'm saying is, a veteran player doesn't have to play KT as a favor to a person with fewer models. It's a fun game unto itself, and you can play it with exactly the same models you use in standard 40k (ie the only thing you pack in addition is a sheet of paper with your KT list).

I'm not going to engage in "this skirmish game is better than that" because I don't think they're mutually exclusive, and at the end of the day, it's just all preference. But I will mention that if you buy WMH, it is NOT suitable to play on a 6x4 or 8x8 table with an army that fills out the table. The rules would be terrible (unplayable), and anyways, once you kill off the warcaster, the game's effectively over.

I lost interest when you said 40K was optimised.

Deadnight wrote:

 JamesY wrote:
I think most clubs, players are willing to play the occasional small game to help new players out. But that is the essence of the hobby, collecting more toy soldiers. My original point was that many people don't seem to accept that they might have to build the army they want over time if they aren't in a position to afford that army in a single purchase.

The issue here is that all the costs are front loaded. You need to spend a lot to get to a 'standard' sized game. Even with incremental purchases, and scaling up from 500-750-1000pt games, you won't really get to that sweet spot where you can have proper sized armies. The problem with those smaller games is the game very easily breaks down at that level. So are you going to build up slowly, whilst all the time having an unsatisfactory experience, or not play because you're not at where the game wants to be? This isn't the full story, but I think it is probably a contributory factor.

Compared to warmachine which can be quite pricey as well - you don't feel as if you are being gouged. Those costs aren't entirely front loaded. You can easily but a new unit, caster etc every month and building up to having a sizeable 'sideboard'. Those incremental purchases can radically change how everything else in your army operates. Thing is - you will also be playing proper sized games from the get go. That's a crucial point for me, and seemingly a lot of other people.

I think gw needs to have a dedicated smaller scale game, or rules set. But they won't go there as thry seemingly view these smaller games as cannibalising on sales of their main games. Whereas they should be seen as a jumping off point.

I hear your point of view, Deadnight, but miniature companies, wargaming companies and local hobby shops are in trouble if a wargame can't have an entry price of at least as much as a video game console and a title or two, with the same type of ongoing costs for content.

The problem with a game that costs $80 and nothing to keep playing is that how does a company make a business of it? Considering how tiny the gaming population is, if this is the true market, hobby shops are doomed. Especially since people expect to have a place to go and play for hours on end. I mean, who in their right mind would open up a hobby shop instead of sell consoles, $70 titles, accessories, and used games?

If anything, I think that a miniature wargame should be priced at slightly higher than an XB1/PS4 as a starting point. You get a lot of physical "stuff", and much more importantly, it's an infinitely smaller niche.

To satisfy the the one-time-purchase-and-play-forever, there are board games (Space Hulk, Bloodbowl are 2 of my favorites, Talisman too, though that has no models). The thing with board games, with the exception of a few like Talisman and Supremacy, is that once you buy it, that's more or less it. Other than the odd expansion here or there, you can't buy and customize what you play.

Historical wargamers are used to preparing entire armies before playing games. But I think we tend to be the older dudes who probably started when it took longer to load a computer game off cassette that it took to play one.

 Azreal13 wrote:
I lost interest when you said 40K was optimised.

Should read it to the end of the sentence at least. Apparently you have to bring those massive models to play the game properly.

 Talys wrote:

Deadnight wrote:

 JamesY wrote:
I think most clubs, players are willing to play the occasional small game to help new players out. But that is the essence of the hobby, collecting more toy soldiers. My original point was that many people don't seem to accept that they might have to build the army they want over time if they aren't in a position to afford that army in a single purchase.

The issue here is that all the costs are front loaded. You need to spend a lot to get to a 'standard' sized game. Even with incremental purchases, and scaling up from 500-750-1000pt games, you won't really get to that sweet spot where you can have proper sized armies. The problem with those smaller games is the game very easily breaks down at that level. So are you going to build up slowly, whilst all the time having an unsatisfactory experience, or not play because you're not at where the game wants to be? This isn't the full story, but I think it is probably a contributory factor.

Compared to warmachine which can be quite pricey as well - you don't feel as if you are being gouged. Those costs aren't entirely front loaded. You can easily but a new unit, caster etc every month and building up to having a sizeable 'sideboard'. Those incremental purchases can radically change how everything else in your army operates. Thing is - you will also be playing proper sized games from the get go. That's a crucial point for me, and seemingly a lot of other people.

I think gw needs to have a dedicated smaller scale game, or rules set. But they won't go there as thry seemingly view these smaller games as cannibalising on sales of their main games. Whereas they should be seen as a jumping off point.

I hear your point of view, Deadnight, but miniature companies, wargaming companies and local hobby shops are in trouble if a wargame can't have an entry price of at least as much as a video game console and a title or two, with the same type of ongoing costs for content.

The problem with a game that costs $80 and nothing to keep playing is that how does a company make a business of it? Considering how tiny the gaming population is, if this is the true market, hobby shops are doomed. Especially since people expect to have a place to go and play for hours on end. I mean, who in their right mind would open up a hobby shop instead of sell consoles, $70 titles, accessories, and used games?

If anything, I think that a miniature wargame should be priced at slightly higher than an XB1/PS4 as a starting point. You get a lot of physical "stuff", and much more importantly, it's an infinitely smaller niche.

To satisfy the the one-time-purchase-and-play-forever, there are board games (Space Hulk, Bloodbowl are 2 of my favorites, Talisman too, though that has no models). The thing with board games, with the exception of a few like Talisman and Supremacy, is that once you buy it, that's more or less it. Other than the odd expansion here or there, you can't buy and customize what you play.

In this day and age, a miniature wargame is kind of a hard sell compared to consoles...for most people. The problem is, the entry cost. Most wargames are indeed very expensive, but have a lot lower bar for entrance than 40k. So if someone comes in and is curious but sees a price tag of $140 just for rules, he's going to keep walking. He's not going to think "But it costs less than a game console." Game consoles are established, probably all his friends have them, he knows them. What he doesn't know is this new form of hobby. That's why it has to be cheaper. It's a harder sell due to not being as popular, easy and as widespread.
To compete, there has to be a low bar for entrance. To pretend otherwise is unrealistic.
Now, once they've bought in, then the company can have it so they keep buying. New models, cheaper ways to start new factions, expansions, etc. Thus keeping the company and local game stores in business.
That is how you get new players and keep them. As opposed to keeping new players away and pushing out veterans. (not a good business model)