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 Talizvar wrote:
I suspect you may have not been able to put up a good argument so using ignore in self defense appears to be the answer.

Ofcourse you'd say that because reasons, however I already stated why and there's no more to it really. You are free to continue suspecting otherwise. To me continually negative individuals provide nothing, and I therefore have no interest in their opinions. They are free to discuss them with someone who cares. I sure don't.

 Talizvar wrote:
They obviously care so if trolling makes you feel like the big man... let us just say you should try something more positive as you had mentioned.

Nah, teaching someone a lesson is just sometimes just purely enjoyable and fun. Especially if the other option is a neverending spiral of debating something on the internet, with no ones opinion changing in the end anyway. I'm already doing the best thing you can with compulsively venomous individuals; ignoring them completely.

 Talizvar wrote:
I would also like to know what events you would include as 40k based ones.

Perhaps "based one" isn't a good choice of words, but doesn't anything involving 40K count as 40K activity, and if not, then what does?

 Talizvar wrote:
I would need to do a few searches of past events and see if they keep an entry list and see if those had shrunk at all as a start.

If I'm not mistaken, LVO is bigger than ever in 2016, starting with the amount of players.

At 284 players this will be our largest competitive 40k yet and if I am remembering correctly will be the largest competitive 40k event in North America (citation may be needed).

https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2015/09/03/lvo-2016-championships-a-full-house/

 Talizvar wrote:
So contribute, save your trolling for torturing small animals or something...

Perhaps you misread, but the trolling took place over a year ago. Must say, them bringing it up for the 3rd time this year tells me it hit home. Haven't trolled anyone now, just stated a few things just the way they are. I also wonder why it's such a big deal, people are being trolled/flamebaited here on a daily basis. Since I simply do not, absolutely and utterly, care if someone isn't fine with inflammatory individuals getting trolled, it leaves one wondering what a person commenting about it is thinking he will achieve. Save your breath I'd say.

If you have further interests in offtopic subjects please shoot me a PM instead since this hasn't really got much to do with "40K dying."

You're not capable of introspection are you?

marke wrote:
Honest question, simply because I don't know anything about these things; do you guys have an idea how big part of the sale decline is caused by healthy competition vs. dissatisfaction of GW product?

These can probably overlap as people perhaps are getting dissatisfied with the product because of more appealing alternatives, but either way there is quite a bit competition in the miniature market these days.

The thing is, that mini war gaming requires a huge financial and time investment to get into, so most people once in won't completely leave a game for another game, unless it becomes bad enough. It's the same reason WoW has been the biggest, despite potentially better MMOs being released, the players had just sunk too much time into it, to swap over to a slightly better version and start over again.

It's only now that we're seeing the effects of how bad something can get, with WoW losing 5 million subscribers because of this expansion alone. So we finally found the potential WoW killer and that's WoW itself, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same went for GW.

While the high price point of 40K is keeping it doing well in sales charts, I'm not sure it's the most played wargame right now. X-Wing is doing really well.

Runic wrote:However, 40K isn't dying, but thriving instead as proven by the vast amount of events around the world that continue year after year. In 40K General it's pretty apocalyptic always, luckily it doesn't translate to other big sites as they lack the few special snowflake users making it seem so.

Still the most played wargame on a global level I believe.

This list from 2013 begs to differ
As does this one
And this one
Don't forget this one
Need I go on? I do believe my point that 40k isn't even among the top ten most played tabletop games anymore has been made.

Look, you are allowed to have your own opinion, you're allowed to disagree with people, you're even allowed to hate people. However, when you start directly insulting people for no reason other than them disagreeing with you, it is immature and rude. That kind of behavior is what I would expect from a seven-year-old boy, not an adult.

EDIT: Fixed link and grammatical error

 Runic wrote:

 Talizvar wrote:
I suspect you may have not been able to put up a good argument so using ignore in self defense appears to be the answer.

Ofcourse you'd say that because reasons, however I already stated why and there's no more to it really. You are free to continue suspecting otherwise. To me continually negative individuals provide nothing, and I therefore have no interest in their opinions. They are free to discuss them with someone who cares. I sure don't.

 Talizvar wrote:
They obviously care so if trolling makes you feel like the big man... let us just say you should try something more positive as you had mentioned.

Nah, teaching someone a lesson is just sometimes just purely enjoyable and fun. Especially if the other option is a neverending spiral of debating something on the internet, with no ones opinion changing in the end anyway. I'm already doing the best thing you can with compulsively venomous individuals; ignoring them completely.

 Talizvar wrote:
I would also like to know what events you would include as 40k based ones.

Perhaps "based one" isn't a good choice of words, but doesn't anything involving 40K count as 40K activity, and if not, then what does?

 Talizvar wrote:
I would need to do a few searches of past events and see if they keep an entry list and see if those had shrunk at all as a start.

If I'm not mistaken, LVO is bigger than ever in 2016, starting with the amount of players.

At 284 players this will be our largest competitive 40k yet and if I am remembering correctly will be the largest competitive 40k event in North America (citation may be needed).

https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2015/09/03/lvo-2016-championships-a-full-house/

 Talizvar wrote:
So contribute, save your trolling for torturing small animals or something...

Perhaps you misread, but the trolling took place over a year ago. Must say, them bringing it up for the 3rd time this year tells me it hit home. Haven't trolled anyone now, just stated a few things just the way they are. I also wonder why it's such a big deal, people are being trolled/flamebaited here on a daily basis. Since I simply do not, absolutely and utterly, care if someone isn't fine with inflammatory individuals getting trolled, it leaves one wondering what a person commenting about it is thinking he will achieve. Save your breath I'd say.

If you have further interests in offtopic subjects please shoot me a PM instead since this hasn't really got much to do with "40K dying."

The best part of course, is you yourself have provided nothing to this discussion, other than insulting people, but whatever floats your boat.

I think the latest announcement by GW stating that there will be another decline in revenue is telling.
Even after AOS and other releases, they are still showing a decline. It lends credence to the stories that AOS sales dropped off to nothing after the first month.

 MWHistorian wrote:
I think the latest announcement by GW stating that there will be another decline in revenue is telling.

Oh? I'd not heard this one.

Do you have a link for that?

Cheers!

Deadnight wrote:

 MWHistorian wrote:
I think the latest announcement by GW stating that there will be another decline in revenue is telling.

Oh? I'd not heard this one.

Do you have a link for that?

Cheers!

Here you go. There's also a long discussion in Dakka Discussions.
http://investor.games-workshop.com/2015/12/07/trading-update-2/#more-%27

Looks like 12 January will have a tale to tell.

 Tinkrr wrote:

The thing is, that mini war gaming requires a huge financial and time investment to get into, so most people once in won't completely leave a game for another game, unless it becomes bad enough. It's the same reason WoW has been the biggest, despite potentially better MMOs being released, the players had just sunk too much time into it, to swap over to a slightly better version and start over again.

It's only now that we're seeing the effects of how bad something can get, with WoW losing 5 million subscribers because of this expansion alone. So we finally found the potential WoW killer and that's WoW itself, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same went for GW.

Good analogy I mostly agree.

I didn't mention this in my earlier post, but I'm thinking other stuff besides miniatures, too. GW has to compete not only with companies like PP, but also with companies like Riot and Blizzard in some ways. Computer games are highly addictive and competitive these days, as well as many other modern hobbies. There have been computer games before, but not to this extent as how much attenttion they require. Combine that with the modern society's hurried lifestyle, and people will choose the easier hobby.. current trend in consumerism also suggests that commitment might be a smaller issue than you imply. People have money.. what they lack is time.

I'm not saying this or that, but I still feel that people aren't generally dissatisifed with GW product. They might be, but declining sales doesn't prove this. It only proves sales are declining, and I feel this is because of many factors - not only because of GW supposedly making what the customers don't want.

PS. I think League of Legends killed WoW, instead of another MMORPG. Of course this is exaggerated a bit, but partly true as well.. which is why I think the same might happen with GW. I'm thinking the quality of product is still "top notch" for a large portion of customers, but without market research, we can only have hunches - if even those.

Yes 40k is dying :( And the government caused 9/11, vaccines cause autism and Elvis is running my super market.

 mondo80 wrote:
Yes 40k is dying :( And the government caused 9/11, vaccines cause autism and Elvis is running my super market.

So you're going to use any evidence to backup why 40k isn't dying then? Or are we just on a flyby of comparing looking at the finance reports that GW publishes to conspiracy and nonsense?

It's strange how some of the people who think 40k is doing great, can't actually come up with an argument that doesn't have to resort in insults or odd things like the quoted, but again, whatever floats their collective sinking boat it's the naysayers that make these threads like they are

Also could someone explain to me how you get growth, but the strong pound somehow creates a small loss of sales.

Having no knowledge ( The closest I've been was accidentally walking into an economics open day seminar thing, when I was looking for the marine zoology one , was good though, and the guy nearly sold me on economics), I would assume that a strong pound has no impact at all on reported sales, and if you have sales growth, you would also have reported sales growth, or are those things linked/ not linked in ways my not economically trained brain cannot understand?

It's basically because the main measurement of sales is money.

If my £50 item sells for $80 in year one, but in year two the pound strengthens so the same 80$ is now worth £45. That's a 10% drop in revenue, but one could sell more units in year two, just not enough to offset the drop in actual cash income.

Therefore you'd experience unit growth but your actual revenue would shrink.

It's a fair assumption to believe that if they were still shifting similar, or greater, quantities of product then they'd mention it, but as unit sales is something they'd don't share (frustratingly) and it fundamentally doesn't affect the bottom line (other than perhaps offer an excuse to stop people dumping stock) there's more to lose by reporting it in all likelihood.

The end of the day, if they're going to pay a dividend, there's little to be gained by protesting too much, blame the strong pound and STFU.

Are people still buying the models, paints and books? Do people meet up and play games with each other? I play in a league with at least 16 people in a place that has 17 tables that run tournaments. So I don't think it's dying. This year saw a lot of stuff release and the new formations setup have given players reasons to use models that would've been sitting in a closest. If I sounded like I was preaching I'm sorry but it takes something very specific to turn me off on a game, it varies and it's never the same thing.

Sure, people are still buying, but more or less than 2 years ago? 5? All those new releases are no guarantee that they're making as much money as other releases used to. There's a quote somewhere from one of the big GW alumni along the lines of "if GW do Heresy, they've broken the glass in case of emergency."

I can counter your anecdote about people still playing with another one about how it's all but died out completely in my club, but neither mean much without a broader view.

That broader view comes in the form of GW financial reports, which have indicated that people have been giving GW less money than before for, when the next report comes out next month, 2 straight years.

One can argue about the rate of decline, and one can speculate that there may be a hard floor that the game will reach and not drop further, but it's difficult to make a compelling case that the game isn't in trouble in a holistic sense.

 mondo80 wrote:
Are people still buying the models, paints and books? Do people meet up and play games with each other? I play in a league with at least 16 people in a place that has 17 tables that run tournaments. So I don't think it's dying. This year saw a lot of stuff release and the new formations setup have given players reasons to use models that would've been sitting in a closest. If I sounded like I was preaching I'm sorry but it takes something very specific to turn me off on a game, it varies and it's never the same thing.

The point of this thread, I believe, is that a league with 16 people is good and fine, but 40k used to be the kind of game that would have drawn 30.

I said at least, meaning that was the lowest number of people I've seen there. On average we get about 22 -24 on Friday night's. The portal ran a 50 player tournament with a 1k cash prize several months ago with another running soon. I had my first apocalypse battle there that went from 11pm to 6am. There's 3 game stores around me that sell GW stuff so that's why I don't think it's dying. People here seem obsessed with how gw is doing and whether or not if it's time to abandon the ship and switch to a different game.

Again, all these things are meaningless unless framed in a context of past performance.

"People are still playing and stores have stuff on the shelf (which is not the same as selling it BTW)" is not an answer to "is 40K dying?"

No more personal attacks in this thread

(Thanks to the posters who have gotten it back on track - warnings have been given where needed so let's move the thread on now, please)

Cheers all

The BoC box set has surprised me a bit.
With this box GW has flooded the market with Marines, Termies, and special weapons to some extent.
In this way they ruined their own market. Who buys the regular Tactical marine box? Same for Sternguard and Devastators.

Some people still play 40k here but the number of people are down. None of the shops in my area hold 40k tournaments anymore because of the lack of intrest in the game. One store is nothing but power gamers, I had a good laugh the other day when one guy brought a IK in a 750 pt game to teach a new guy how to play. Let's just say the new guy didn't learn much. I personally don't go to the stores to play anymore just because it full of power gamers. My group about 15 of us who meet every Friday night to play at a buddies house all quit. Most of us have been playing since the 80's and just got burnt out. Nobody spammed the most broken stuff or anything like that but when we compared it to other games like x wing, bolt action, or WMH, GW games are just overpriced crap. Sure some models are pretty cool but I'm not a model collector I'm a gamer.

 jonolikespie wrote:

 mondo80 wrote:
Are people still buying the models, paints and books? Do people meet up and play games with each other? I play in a league with at least 16 people in a place that has 17 tables that run tournaments. So I don't think it's dying. This year saw a lot of stuff release and the new formations setup have given players reasons to use models that would've been sitting in a closest. If I sounded like I was preaching I'm sorry but it takes something very specific to turn me off on a game, it varies and it's never the same thing.

The point of this thread, I believe, is that a league with 16 people is good and fine, but 40k used to be the kind of game that would have drawn 30.

The first christmans w40k bash I took part in, being a total noob, had over 100 people on day one. The one from this year had 31, and only because 4 people were beged to take part in it. At the same time xwing grew from nothing to 60+people, Warmahodes had 60+people and still has 60+people. There was also a 20+ sized group of people playing infinity and some people playing and runing demos for skirmish systems. I don't know if this means that GW games are dead, well ok AoS/WFB is dead, but they sure did get a lot smaller. No new players and shop closing doesn't help either.

 mondo80 wrote:
I said at least, meaning that was the lowest number of people I've seen there. On average we get about 22 -24 on Friday night's. The portal ran a 50 player tournament with a 1k cash prize several months ago with another running soon. I had my first apocalypse battle there that went from 11pm to 6am. There's 3 game stores around me that sell GW stuff so that's why I don't think it's dying. People here seem obsessed with how gw is doing and whether or not if it's time to abandon the ship and switch to a different game.

It would be better to point that a major tournament once drew hundreds of players and thousands of spectators, but now draws dozens of players and scores of spectators.

I've recently returned to the game after a few years hiatus (I start/stop, start/stop once every few years) but that's because the secondary market on models has been good to me - buying huge lots off Ebay, Kijiji, Craigslist, etc, really helps with the pricing. Is the game dying? Impossible to say without numbers from GW to back up, but I do still notice a fair amount of players at my FLGS, and I have a co-worker who regularly buys models from GW. The game itself will likely never "die", even if GW goes under, but secondary prices would certainly soar if production of models stopped.

Well the only numbers we have from GW say sales are down...

Is it just that their sales of models are down? The have licensed their IP to other companies to make games. If this is the case then it doesn't matter how many bad models or rule books they sell, gw would still have other sources of income to keep going. Look at Sega, they used to be focused on their own console systems and games, now they are a software company that makes games for all systems and own the rights to make GW games since THQ bit it.

Not sure if 40k is being played less but for my small group its not been played in about 3months or so but that could just be a lul till we get back into it but not sure to be honest.

We have been playing flames of war recently but I don't know when we will go back to 40k but will probably have a game in a couple of months I think.

Anecdotal - I got a few emails from games companies today. Out of them, 3 of the emails (such as Warlord Games) said a simple 'Merry Christmas' or 'Happy Holidays'.

The GW email said 'now you have your Christmas money, why not spend it on these' with a link to an imperial knight, archon on that flying beast and some dragon (smaug I think?) - some of their most expensive models.

Needless to say the difference in attitude between the smaller companies and GW was plain to see. It doesn't help with people's negative perception of GW.

 mondo80 wrote:
Is it just that their sales of models are down? The have licensed their IP to other companies to make games. If this is the case then it doesn't matter how many bad models or rule books they sell, gw would still have other sources of income to keep going. Look at Sega, they used to be focused on their own console systems and games, now they are a software company that makes games for all systems and own the rights to make GW games since THQ bit it.

Last year, royalties from licensing were equal to ~1.5% of turnover.

That's not enough to hang the business that is GW on, and not enough to sustain the game, so this approach would result in the death of 40K.

Next year's report may see an increase, as the amount of shovelware they've licenced, along with a handful of apparently slightly higher quality releases in the pipeline, has noticeably increased. Sega already made games, they just stopped selling hardware. GW don't make video games, they just have a B list intellectual property they let others use.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

10penceman wrote:
Not sure if 40k is being played less but for my small group its not been played in about 3months or so but that could just be a lul till we get back into it but not sure to be honest.

We have been playing flames of war recently but I don't know when we will go back to 40k but will probably have a game in a couple of months I think.

I think this is the crux of things. Anecdotal this may be, but I rarely see someone saying "a couple of years ago, nobody played 40K, now it's near impossible to get a game of anything else!"

It's always the reverse, and it doesn't seem to matter where in the world you game.