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A local store of mine is going out of business after 20 years of service. They had a huge sale with an increasing 25% off every week until they close their doors.
The store had a HUGE miniatures community with literally every miniature game played there. There was even another gaming shop about a county away that had a huge miniatures group, so to say they had people every night was pretty awesome! Tons of fantasy, tons of 40k, and plenty of specialist games.
After the bombshell of AoS, the fantasy players disappeared and only the 9th age players remained. Went from an average 35 every week to 5.
Right now everything is 55% off and the store looks like has been robbed. Every board game is off the shelf and even some games that are 30 years old (not joking) are gone.
The only left.... and I gak you not..... is every single warhammer fantasy box (blisters are gone due to the RPG players)
What the hell happened?
How could a game with so much potential die so quickly?
Not even robotech had this bad... (all the old robotech sold as well in the first week)

Also, saw people grabbing huge hand fulls of 40k to sell on ebay. WTF

(pics coming soon)

 Generalian wrote:


Also, saw people grabbing huge hand fulls of 40k to sell on ebay. WTF

(pics coming soon)

If you have money you can always make money....

Man, Age of Sigmar is doing so poorly, it's even killing the game stores.

 Sqorgar wrote:
Man, Age of Sigmar is doing so poorly, it's even killing the game stores.

Not sure about that. If "every miniature game" was being played, not sure how losing 30 regular players of one of them would affect overall - especially if they had regular exposure to alternatives with an active community.
Sad to see a business closing, but I very much doubt that AoS was the sole reason.

Aye, 'huge' mini scene with every mini game being played, 30 WFB fantasy players don't like AOS and store closes. Doesn't compute. Sounds like it might have been a factor, but not the main one.

55% off, I'd be buying the fantasy boxes for a couple of armies in bulk at that discount. There are other games, like KOW, for which GW minis are perfect. By the sounds of it no one at the store played KOW, despite the thriving scene.

 Sqorgar wrote:
Man, Age of Sigmar is doing so poorly, it's even killing the game stores.

The post was more about "There is a huge 95% off everything. FB boxes weren't selling. How did it come to this and is it such a bad game?"

RoperPG wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
Man, Age of Sigmar is doing so poorly, it's even killing the game stores.

Not sure about that. If "every miniature game" was being played, not sure how losing 30 regular players of one of them would affect overall - especially if they had regular exposure to alternatives with an active community.
Sad to see a business closing, but I very much doubt that AoS was the sole reason.

I have to agree, small business going bust does suck especially if they're friendly etc. But one game changing wouldn't be the cause of them closing otherwise Gw would be in financial hardship themselves.
Again sorry to hear you've lost your flgs, AoS may have been just another nail in the coffin.

What about the AoS boxes?

I'm sorry for your loss and the owners but i don't understand. There isn't a law that says you can't play OOP games, so why is treated as so?

 eskimo wrote:
I'm sorry for your loss and the owners but i don't understand. There isn't a law that says you can't play OOP games, so why is treated as so?

My experience is that there's no more exposure, so no new players. Even if someone wanted to play, it's hard to find models and rules if you didn't have them before the company went belly up. You can play OOP games if you have a game group that still plays, but its just not what happens. Trust me, I'd love to get in a game of confrontation, VOR, or Chronopia, But its not going to happen any year soon. In addition, people like new rules and models. Knowing that no more are coming just causes stagnation, especially with other companies stepping up and looking to fill that gap.

If there is enough fans of a game it can live, like most of the GW specialist ranges or battletech. Many companies produce both rules and models for BB, but I haven't seen support for other games that were once huge ten years ago and are now dead.

Good point about the models. But does seem strange how it goes from loads of players to none. But more likely the truth was it wasn't loads of players?

The core problem with the store-based model of game-playing is that for obvious reasons the shop manager only wants people to play games that are currently in print, enabling him to sell more stuff to people.

Clearly then, once the publisher dumps a game, store managers will also try to clear their remaining stock and get something new instead.

The point of the situation here is not that WHFB has failed, but that AoS hasn't succeeded in picking up the fantasy side of the business. After all, the legacy armies are fully playable in AoS so you ought to hope that veterans would transfer and new players would come on board.

However I should not read too much into one shop going bust. For all we know, their lease came to an end and the landlord put the rate up 50% and made the business untenable, with or without any particular game.

In the club-based model, people play what most members like, including stuff that is OOP and home-brew rules. Therefore you are insulated from the vagaries of individual companies.

I'm guessing the owner realized he could put up those Fantasy boxes on Ebay and still get decent dosh for them, right?

OP, per your location there is a GW store nearby. I guarantee you most AoS and Fantasy players are gaming there. A GW store moved out of my area and fantasy died as the local game store support 40k or other games. Its a more complicated game. Its chess to 40k checkers. It really needs a staff member that can be dedicated to showing/helping the rules and playing demo games. Most independent stores just cannot do that.

Hargus56 wrote:
OP, per your location there is a GW store nearby. I guarantee you most AoS and Fantasy players are gaming there. A GW store moved out of my area and fantasy died as the local game store support 40k or other games. Its a more complicated game. Its chess to 40k checkers. It really needs a staff member that can be dedicated to showing/helping the rules and playing demo games. Most independent stores just cannot do that.

If it's a GW store, then they probably won't let them play WHFB as it's no longer seen a "current" by the company. And it's probably got a couple of small tables for demo games instead of play space.

And it really doesn't need either of those. If that was the case, most game wouldn't survive without a dedicated store and staff member available to determine rules and show games. Can't the players do that themselves?

I would have been picking up a ton of Stormcast Eternals for like 75% off. That would have been awesome! I probably would have bought some 40K stuff as well, but I'm actually more focused on Stormcast Eternals right now as time prohibits me from games lasting more than about an hour during the week (don't have my own table at home yet). AoS can be played with so few models that I should be able to get through a game in about an hour or less (including unpacking and packing time).

It's a shame that any FLGS has to go out of business, though :(

SG


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 infinite_array wrote:
If it's a GW store, then they probably won't let them play WHFB as it's no longer seen a "current" by the company. And it's probably got a couple of small tables for demo games instead of play space.

QFT. My local GW store (where I go to buy, build, paint, play, etc.) will no longer allow 8th Edition WHFB at all. Supposedly there will be throwback nights, but right now, if you want to play Fantasy, it's AoS.

That said, my local GW has three 4' x 6' play areas. They are of course set up to show off tables and terrain, but you can play on them anytime you want as well.

SG


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The core problem with the store-based model of game-playing is that for obvious reasons the shop manager only wants people to play games that are currently in print, enabling him to sell more stuff to people.

I'm not sure that's 100% true. I play at a local GW store, and I think the manager there would let us play anything Games Workshop branded (WHFB included) if it was up to him completely. But, his regional manager does not like it at all that any games that are not currently supported by GW are being played in a GW store. So, that's why he has to "law down the law" per se that Fantasy can only be played by AoS rules.

SG

I think the reason why people stop playing unsupported games is that eventually you run out of new things to talk about. You spend all week talking about other games, looking up rumors, seeing people's paint jobs, getting hyped up, flipping through White Dwarf - only to play a different game on your game night?

For me, personally, I just forget they exist. I've got a few boxes of Monsterpocalypse stuff - love the game, but it eventually just became background noise on my shelf. That is, until I saw Miniature Market doing a PP sale and having Monpoc stuff for cheap. I remembered that I had it. Good times were had. Then when I put it on my shelf, it was next to some boxes of Dust Tactics...

Same thing happens with video games. I own several thousand video games, but most of them are in the closet. But then I'll see some people talk about Earthbound or Chrono Trigger, and suddenly, my SNES is unpacked and hooked up.

I think supported games succeed largely by keeping mindshare - reminding players that it exists. I think actively supported games, but which go a few months without updates, tend to drop in popularity quickly.

Mindshare can exist on a local level, though. A moderately club can keep an unsupported game going for a long time. Worldwide, games like DBA have been kept going for decades with almost no new material at all released.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Mindshare can exist on a local level, though. A moderately club can keep an unsupported game going for a long time. Worldwide, games like DBA have been kept going for decades with almost no new material at all released.

Same with games like Blood Bowl. The NAF has kept the game going with a worldwide presence while GW ignored it.

A game doesn't need the backing of a company to keep it going - it needs enthusiasm from the community. A company can pump out a dozen releases a week, but if the community doesn't care, then the game doesn't get played. Alternatively, a game can have a release once a decade, and if the community is enthused enough to keep playing it, it'll stick around.

RoperPG wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
Man, Age of Sigmar is doing so poorly, it's even killing the game stores.

Not sure about that. If "every miniature game" was being played, not sure how losing 30 regular players of one of them would affect overall - especially if they had regular exposure to alternatives with an active community.
Sad to see a business closing, but I very much doubt that AoS was the sole reason.

This, especially when you consider the sales of fantasy compared to 40k. GW shipped more space marines than the entirety of their fantasy spread every month. The store closing shop due to a percentage of AoS quitting is more an indictment against the store, amirite?

It also reflects negatively on the attitudes of your gaming store. A good community would continue to show loyalty to the store than has hosted them for 20 years by shifting over to other games. I feel true sympathy for the store owner. I guess he found out who his friends were.

 Generalian wrote:
A local store of mine is going out of business after 20 years of service. They had a huge sale with an increasing 25% off every week until they close their doors.
The store had a HUGE miniatures community with literally every miniature game played there. There was even another gaming shop about a county away that had a huge miniatures group, so to say they had people every night was pretty awesome! Tons of fantasy, tons of 40k, and plenty of specialist games.
After the bombshell of AoS, the fantasy players disappeared and only the 9th age players remained. Went from an average 35 every week to 5.
Right now everything is 55% off and the store looks like has been robbed. Every board game is off the shelf and even some games that are 30 years old (not joking) are gone.
The only left.... and I gak you not..... is every single warhammer fantasy box (blisters are gone due to the RPG players)
What the hell happened?
How could a game with so much potential die so quickly?
Not even robotech had this bad... (all the old robotech sold as well in the first week)

Also, saw people grabbing huge hand fulls of 40k to sell on ebay. WTF

(pics coming soon)

If you PM me the name of the store then I can make some of those oh so unfortunate sales disappear.

 SolidOakie wrote:

RoperPG wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
Man, Age of Sigmar is doing so poorly, it's even killing the game stores.

Not sure about that. If "every miniature game" was being played, not sure how losing 30 regular players of one of them would affect overall - especially if they had regular exposure to alternatives with an active community.
Sad to see a business closing, but I very much doubt that AoS was the sole reason.

This, especially when you consider the sales of fantasy compared to 40k. GW shipped more space marines than the entirety of their fantasy spread every month. The store closing shop due to a percentage of AoS quitting is more an indictment against the store, amirite?

It also reflects negatively on the attitudes of your gaming store. A good community would continue to show loyalty to the store than has hosted them for 20 years by shifting over to other games. I feel true sympathy for the store owner. I guess he found out who his friends were.

Sorry, but that's not how that works. The store is a business, not a pals club. It's not the customer's responsibility to keep the operation afloat if product is no longer desirable.

 CoreCommander wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
Man, Age of Sigmar is doing so poorly, it's even killing the game stores.

The post was more about "There is a huge 95% off everything. FB boxes weren't selling. How did it come to this and is it such a bad game?"

I think this main point was lost somewhere in the minutia.

It was a joke, guys.

 Generalian wrote:
A local store of mine is going out of business after 20 years of service. They had a huge sale with an increasing 25% off every week until they close their doors.
The store had a HUGE miniatures community with literally every miniature game played there. There was even another gaming shop about a county away that had a huge miniatures group, so to say they had people every night was pretty awesome! Tons of fantasy, tons of 40k, and plenty of specialist games.
After the bombshell of AoS, the fantasy players disappeared and only the 9th age players remained. Went from an average 35 every week to 5.
Right now everything is 55% off and the store looks like has been robbed. Every board game is off the shelf and even some games that are 30 years old (not joking) are gone.
The only left.... and I gak you not..... is every single warhammer fantasy box (blisters are gone due to the RPG players)
What the hell happened?
How could a game with so much potential die so quickly?
Not even robotech had this bad... (all the old robotech sold as well in the first week)

Also, saw people grabbing huge hand fulls of 40k to sell on ebay. WTF

(pics coming soon)

It lost its potential thats why GW revamped it. Just because it was popular in your town, doesnt mean it was like that everywhere. Fantasy wasn't very popular, costed way to much to start a army before AoS came out.

 Snoopdeville3 wrote:
It lost its potential thats why GW revamped it. Just because it was popular in your town, doesnt mean it was like that everywhere. Fantasy wasn't very popular, costed way to much to start a army before AoS came out.

It funneled gamers into the limited view that a game and it's factions have to be constantly remade so that you buy it all over again (so that it's tweaked and improved? Pfyeah right.) and that you buy more and more each time. Eventually it became trapped in it's own snare, and couldn't (or decided not to) break the cycle of differently-shonky rules and forced buying until it reached critical point and too many gamers had enough.

It still had some potential. At the minute there's a big hoo-hah about GW bringing back Specialist Games, because they still own them and can do that; but with little mention of Warmaster. If they had done this a couple of years ago when the cracks were showing in 7th/8th ed, they could have brought Warmaster back as a revamped, 28mm-ified version. Especially since that's what it's author Rick Priestly did when he brought it and Warmaster Ancients to Warlord Games with no small measure of success, and with the hindsight that a big chunk of WFB players made the exodus to the somewhat similar KoW (similar unit elements, at least) thanks to 8th and AoS. 9th ed Warhammer could have scaled back to 4th/5th ed sizes - even to 3rd ed, given the Oldhammer revival - which could have satisfied the character-based, pew-pew, hack'n'slash style of gaming. Then in a few years, when your armies have grown big enough and your plums have dropped, the accompanying Warmaster 2 would be ready and waiting for something a bit more tactical and thinky. Kind of like Warhammer Apocalypse, but good.

'Course, hindsight is 20/20. GW didn't realise that many Warhammer players wouldn't just go along with a complete wipe of their old setting and a double-down on wonky rules and buy-to-win (smaller starting sizes are almost beside the point) to the point where they had to bring back SGs, to claw back a few customers. (Makes old-world SGs a bit tricky, maybe) Just because it's popular in your town, doesn't mean it's like that everywhere.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 SolidOakie wrote:

RoperPG wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
Man, Age of Sigmar is doing so poorly, it's even killing the game stores.

Not sure about that. If "every miniature game" was being played, not sure how losing 30 regular players of one of them would affect overall - especially if they had regular exposure to alternatives with an active community.
Sad to see a business closing, but I very much doubt that AoS was the sole reason.

This, especially when you consider the sales of fantasy compared to 40k. GW shipped more space marines than the entirety of their fantasy spread every month. The store closing shop due to a percentage of AoS quitting is more an indictment against the store, amirite?

It also reflects negatively on the attitudes of your gaming store. A good community would continue to show loyalty to the store than has hosted them for 20 years by shifting over to other games. I feel true sympathy for the store owner. I guess he found out who his friends were.

Sorry, but that's not how that works. The store is a business, not a pals club. It's not the customer's responsibility to keep the operation afloat if product is no longer desirable.

It depends on the customer. I go to my local store and have them order my stuff for me, when I could just as easily order it directly to my door and cut out the middle man. Hell, I have bought things at the store that were selling on Ebay for a fraction of the cost. When you've been going somewhere for TWENTY years, the business model changes a bit. It isn't their responsibility to carry the store but it's just ashame some didn't go to KoW like everyone else to support their store

What store is this? Do they have a website?

Got the pics yet?

Edit: After using the abilities granted me by my 2 semesters of Criminal Justice courses, I've deduced the location based on OPs previous posting history and location listed under his avatar:

GameParlor in Chantilly, Virginia.

It is indeed going out of business, after Thanksgiving, and now tomorrow I'll call and try to help clear out their fantasy stock!

Edit2: Called them and they told me told that thers only a tiny bit left, like a tomb kings batallion and some chaos stuff. Nothing I really need or could make some money off of by quickly flipping it on ebay.

Yes, it was directly because of AoS. Lololol how silly and stupid. This hobby is extremely niche. Just openeing a store with all warhammer stuff at its prime would still leave you with a closing store. 40k has been there bread and butter for the last 10 years. Im surprised fantasy lasted as long as it did.

 nels1031 wrote:


GameParlor in Chantilly, Virginia.

A shame.

I think I only went there twice. But the staff was very nice and they had a big gaming area.

I'm surprised it's closing though, I thought they had a big WM/Hordes scene.