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I'd doubt that, there's certainly been a no tabletop minis clause for their GW lines,

but they were running as a publisher for dust without issues

I think it's much more likely that their GW stuff just wasn't bringing in enough revenue for the amount of effort/cost compared to the starwars stuff (which has blown up over the last few years)

so they've decided to switch from their GW line being the banker now that the know the new star wars movies have been well received

and runewars is going to be overall easier for them to deal with as they get to make all the choices/descisions without having to get stuff singed off by GW

 Gamgee wrote:
Armada and X Wing are cool. Their other stuff is less well done and thought out. I have a rebel fleet sitting up on the wall. Guess what. No one wants to play me since I won too much. Seems to be a pretty common theme with me.

Anyways I feel Saga Edition is the penultimate star wars rpg.

I'd suggest that's down to the player and not the game system.

Damn this explains why I have had such a tough time getting hold of the Witch Hunter and Troll Slayer expansions for their WHQ adventure card game :/

 Gamgee wrote:
I can't wait to see what new company gets the rpg line.

None. No company's going to pick it up, because no company other than a huge player like FFG could afford the license, and RPGs are deader than a deady dead thing that's dead. Even the best-selling RPGs today are shipping numbers that you would not believe - in a bad way. The pen and paper RPG industry today is a niche industry in a niche market appealing to niche gamers. It's *dead*. Bereft of life, it's ceased to be. Kickstarter is about the only place left for anything non-Pathfinder. Yes we loved our FFG warhammer books. They were top notch in design and production values, I loved them, you loved them, but they sold terribly. The choice for FFG between a Star Wars license and a 40K license is no choice at all...

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
I'd doubt that, there's certainly been a no tabletop minis clause for their GW lines,

but they were running as a publisher for dust without issues

I think it's much more likely that their GW stuff just wasn't bringing in enough revenue for the amount of effort/cost compared to the starwars stuff (which has blown up over the last few years)

so they've decided to switch from their GW line being the banker now that the know the new star wars movies have been well received

and runewars is going to be overall easier for them to deal with as they get to make all the choices/descisions without having to get stuff singed off by GW

The LOTR LCG is very popular with people I know, who otherwise wouldn't be into card games, but because it's LOTR, they were interested. I suspect the same is true with Star Wars stuff.

As has been said many a time, this isn't the 1990s anymore - GW aren't the only game in town.

Yeah, no real surprise there with X-Wing and 40K becoming competitors. With Disney's blueprint for Star Wars oversaturation, X-Wing is going to be a money printing machine for around the next decade or so. Pure gold for a tabletop gaming company these days, and more then enough reason to part ways with GW and a one-off 40K product (not being the core game).

It was also reported back in June by several sources that GW attended the Licensing Expo in Vegas and was shopping for licensing agreements for just about every product line it has. This is probably a piece in a larger change in strategy for their development and marketing.

http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2016/06/breaking-gw-licencing-in-vegas.html

I remember seeing that and thinking "naw...it's for video games and stuff...no way would GW give up FFG's amazing quality and built-in consumers"

but then the rumors that there was no more playtesting of the 40K LCG and the lack of announcements at Gencon.

ah well...the FFG RPGs are still amazing sources of lore and great games as is.

Herzlos wrote:
I'm pretty sure that even if the license expires, they can still sell stuff they've already produced. I suspect that FFG doesn't need it anymore and GW were starting to be difficult, so they've probably just dropped it, which is a shame. Not for FFG though, they've got much more of their own stuff to produce

 MrFlutterPie wrote:

Now if only FFG would make a proper 28mm scale Star Wars game

What do you want from a Star Wars game that you can't do using Imperial Assault with the included skirmish rules?

Basically what I am looking for is 40K 3ed sized games of Star Wars with vehicles and full squads.

I would have already bought some IA stuff if they weren't so expensive and the basic soldiers (rebel Fleet troopers ect) came in only a single pose.

Welp, time to raid the LFGS to grab that copy of Enemies Beyond to finish the collection.

Let's not forget though that Games Workshop originally did their RPG's themselves. With specialist games returning, they could be having a crack at the same thing here rather than licensing it out.

On one hand, I'll miss the 40k sourcebooks. They were fun.

On the other, feth FFG for what they did to WFRP.

Soooo, kinda of a wash as far as I'm concerned.

What I do find interesting is that GW is looking for WFB license buyers. Perhaps WFRP is not as dead as I thought it would be. I can still dream about a proper 1st edition re-release.

My patient waiting for Into the Storm and Battlefleet Koronus to have a reprint run appears to have failed.

Considering the semi-shoddy job they did with DH2 I can understand why they weren't selling as well

Not to mention they never did finish the next set of prestige classes for Only War.. They seemed to get more and more sloppy with their RPG lines and I honestly hope that GW does SOMETHING with it, the lore and fun some of these were just amazing and I'd miss it so.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
Considering the semi-shoddy job they did with DH2 I can understand why they weren't selling as well

Not to mention they never did finish the next set of prestige classes for Only War.. They seemed to get more and more sloppy with their RPG lines and I honestly hope that GW does SOMETHING with it, the lore and fun some of these were just amazing and I'd miss it so.

I noticed they started wavering around the time the Star Wars RPGs came out.

Considering they print money like nobody's business it's not surprising, if a shame.

dang it, none of my cool FFG board games will ever get an expansion again!

Literally, no one will play forbidden stars for the lack of choice in factions.... and i own conquest, relic, etc.

It just goes to show you not to invest in licensed stuff, aside from Star Wars which seems to have a great combo of being a cheap license/lucrative license. I might as well stick to Cthulhu games... hey theres one IP that's free for everyone to use....

Well, lets just pretend it is a bump in the road and they are re-negotiating to let FFG do an armada-esque version of battlefleet gothic...

Caliginous wrote:

 Gamgee wrote:
I can't wait to see what new company gets the rpg line.

None. No company's going to pick it up, because no company other than a huge player like FFG could afford the license, and RPGs are deader than a deady dead thing that's dead. Even the best-selling RPGs today are shipping numbers that you would not believe - in a bad way. The pen and paper RPG industry today is a niche industry in a niche market appealing to niche gamers. It's *dead*. Bereft of life, it's ceased to be. Kickstarter is about the only place left for anything non-Pathfinder. Yes we loved our FFG warhammer books. They were top notch in design and production values, I loved them, you loved them, but they sold terribly. The choice for FFG between a Star Wars license and a 40K license is no choice at all...

For me, the indicator that the 40K rpgs were not very successful was when I saw the various books appearing in my local Half Price Books stores. For those not lucky enough to have one, HPB is a large chain of used book stores that has the buying power to scoop up unsold books from publishers and distributors to resell in their own stores. HPB having new copies of the books usually means they weren't selling enough at the distributor level, so the distributor was willing to take a much smaller profit just to move them.

These days, board games are taking over the market from RPGs. Pathfinder and DnD will still chug along, being the biggest names around, but even they have board games and card games.

The best thing about the shift in RPGs is that things have gone so much more "by gamers for gamers." The amount of content on the net for free (or as low price PDFs) is probably a thousand times what you could hope to play in a life time. The spread of tablets with good screens has also made searchable documents very desirable compared to physical books. There are still a dwindling number of collectors who love physical books, but I think other than D&D and Pathfinder, most games now sell more copies via the eBook route and if they offer physical books at all, it's via print on demand.

The other thing that happens with time is that people invest in a given game or edition and buy a ton of stuff for it and then just don't switch to other games or new editions. There are loads of people still happily running their 3.5E D&D games that will bring players into the hobby through word of mouth recruiting but will likely never generate a bit of revenue for any publisher in the foreseeable future.

I'm actually surprised FFG kept up with the 40k RPG books as long as they did.

A large chunk of the FFG 40k RPG staff were either former GW staff / writers or the odd ascended fanboy.

If this is true, that would kinda suck. I've really enjoyed FFG's boardgame/CCG adaptations of the 40k and WHF universes.

An indication that GW is further doubling-down on their only successful cash crop, licensing. If not for licensing, the last financial report would have looked terrible instead of the lukewarm mediocre it was.

 BrookM wrote:
the odd ascended fanboy.

That's a terrible way to talk about HBMC...

 His Master's Voice wrote:
On one hand, I'll miss the 40k sourcebooks. They were fun.

On the other, feth FFG for what they did to WFRP.

What did they do to WFRP?

If it's the latest edition he's referring to, some sort of dice game that didn't really take off as well as the original one first done by Black Industries.

 BrookM wrote:
If it's the latest edition he's referring to, some sort of dice game that didn't really take off as well as the original one first done by Black Industries.

yeah it was the first attempt at what the Star Wars rules are...it was alittle too extreme a change for the player base though.

Funny, my RPG group was commenting just last session that if FFG redid the 40K RPGs to get away from the clunky system and more like their Star Wars system, we'd pick it back up in a heartbeat...but we weren't going to go back to the current system.

As for WFRP3, I don't think it was so much the dice system as the cards and widgets and counters for keeping track of everything. It was too much like a boardless boardgame. The Star Wars system is much sleeker and easier to both play and run. I'd love to see a modified version of it for 40K.

I guess we'll have to see what happens to the license. I hope it doesn't go in-house. GW isn't exactly inspiring confidence in their rules-writing chops these days.

tpryan01 wrote:

 BrookM wrote:
If it's the latest edition he's referring to, some sort of dice game that didn't really take off as well as the original one first done by Black Industries.

yeah it was the first attempt at what the Star Wars rules are...it was alittle too extreme a change for the player base though.

Not just 'too extreme' - the new system lacked a certain degree of flexibility on one hand, and was a bit too random on the other.

The old games were based on 3rd edition WHFB - and felt like it.

The new game... was kind of its own, very odd, puppy.

Me, I just felt that it was change for change's sake, and treated it the same way I did 4e D&D and Windows 8....

The Auld Grump

I'm guessing FFG notified GW they were not renewing the license a long time ago, like right before the Specialist Studio announcement.

We don't know what GW have in the pipeline, since everything they release is usually finished a year ahead of time.

They could have had the studio working on an RPG for release 2 years from now, we'll see.

FFG and GW aren't that different as companies, FFG is pretty much the US version of GW. the main difference is how the fans preceive them, not how they treat fans, which is pretty much the same. FFG can do no wrong in the eyes of fans and GW can do no right in the eyes of fans.

FFG lives off of aquired IPS. Most of Its in house stuff never does as well ad the IP stuff. Right now they have Starwars, which eclipses any other IP, so why pay for a niche license like Warhammer when they can go all in with Star Wars. So it probably wasn't GW that pulled he license, but FFG dropping it.

That is why Rune Wars is such a weird decision for FFG. They have had pretty bad luck with miniatures games other than the Star Wars license (Anima Tactics, Dust Tactics, both lines were dropped by FFG).

 Digclaw wrote:
I
That is why Rune Wars is such a weird decision for FFG. They have had pretty bad luck with miniatures games other than the Star Wars license (Anima Tactics, Dust Tactics, both lines were dropped by FFG).

It's not that weird. They've expanded their ability to design miniatures considerably, support two popular mini games (X-Wing, Armada), and saw an opportunity when GW dropped WHFB. FFG won't have the Star Wars license forever. LucasFilm dropped Decipher's SW license in the middle of a planned SW:CCG expansion, and Disney is even more temperamental (and likely to start their own competition internally).

The question is whether RuneWars is the reason for FFG/GW's split, or if it was a result of it. It sticks out like a sore thumb, either representing a parting FU to GW or a consolation prize for an amicable split.

 Sqorgar wrote:

 Digclaw wrote:
I
That is why Rune Wars is such a weird decision for FFG. They have had pretty bad luck with miniatures games other than the Star Wars license (Anima Tactics, Dust Tactics, both lines were dropped by FFG).

It's not that weird. They've expanded their ability to design miniatures considerably, support two popular mini games (X-Wing, Armada), and saw an opportunity when GW dropped WHFB. FFG won't have the Star Wars license forever. LucasFilm dropped Decipher's SW license in the middle of a planned SW:CCG expansion, and Disney is even more temperamental (and likely to start their own competition internally).

The question is whether RuneWars is the reason for FFG/GW's split, or if it was a result of it. It sticks out like a sore thumb, either representing a parting FU to GW or a consolation prize for an amicable split.

To be fair, Star Wars miniatures design themselves, since they are existing designs from the Star Wars Universe. The Rune Bound/ Assention universe on the other hand has designs that leave alot to be desired. I do aplaude them for trying to push their own IP into the Miniatures Gaming Market, but With an already oversaturated market of miniatures games, time will tell how successful it will be.

 Digclaw wrote:

To be fair, Star Wars miniatures design themselves, since they are existing designs from the Star Wars Universe. The Rune Bound/ Assention universe on the other hand has designs that leave alot to be desired. I do aplaude them for trying to push their own IP into the Miniatures Gaming Market, but With an already oversaturated market of miniatures games, time will tell how successful it will be.

There's a certain amount of saturation that FFG can handle, which they've reached with board games and card games - and the Star Wars license. They simply can not wring more blood from the stone than they already are. Imperial Assault is their Star Wars miniatures game. They would not be able to make a second one and expect people to buy another Luke and Darth Vader at the same scale. And how many more X-Wing models can they make before the game starts to feel stale? It makes sense that they are expanding into new areas, both in terms of the types of games they make and licenses they use.

I think people are underestimating the Terrinoth IP. It doesn't do much for folks outside of the FFG ecosystem, but for people that play Descent and Runebound, the thought of existing heroes and villains being in the game is kind of exciting. I don't know if you'll be able to play Red Scorpion against Lady Eliza Farrow, but the prospect would is enticing. The world is boring and the basic troops aren't that exciting (in general), but FFG has a lot of well designed, and familiar, named characters to use.

Imperial Assault is their Star Wars miniatures game. They would not be able to make a second one and expect people to buy another Luke and Darth Vader at the same scale.

That's making the assumption that a mass battle game was in the same scale.

Given the nature of some of the units (AT-ATs especially) and the scope of the battles we see when they happen, I've long been an advocate of a 10mm or smaller scale SW game.