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I really like and got some of their models and it guts me to see yet another company closing its doors.
This industry works with small profit margins and the slight of changes can be the final nail on a fragile structure.

Puzzles me this kickstarter avalanche and the money some board games make, I do wonder how much it drains wargames.

Best of luck to the owners and thank for 7 years of fun miniatures.

Since it was mentioned a couple of times in this thread, Maelstrom's Edge is still healthy and strong, we've just been building up a big product backlog so that we can release stuff consistently. A whole new faction is out next month:



all plastic, rag-tag sci-fi survivors with a good mixture of human and aliens. The faction coming out after that will be even more impressive and still multi part plastic.

I think the miniature range is only part of the issue.

So many games competing for attention these days and IMHO it's the rule that make a game stand out from the crowd.

Steamforged seem to be developing nicely having launched with a very clever game in Guild Ball and must have money in the bank following Dark Souls and now Resident Evil 2 to come.

Hopefully this will enable them to develop their IP a bit more. Really looking forward to their proposed high fantasy game rumoured for launch next year.

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
Well it isn't just a UK thing.

I guess On The Lamb Games is closing down too. https://www.facebook.com/OnTheLambGames/?hc_ref=ARQaL-Uu5XnPHm7vs8n-ok7wApJR1HKgGyI0PW7Jejr-zXno9bKvEpsO4YOin19rk1A&fref=nf

Ten years ago we started On The Lamb. It was an excuse to make the games we wanted to play, and share them with the world. In those ten years we released three games, multiple books, and over a hundred miniatures. We're proud of our games and we're thankful for our family, friends, and fans for supporting us for the last decade.
Unfortunately, this is our goodbye. On The Lamb is closing down, the webstore will be shut off at the end of the year.

gakky week.

That saddens me as it puts a personal face (or avatar) to a closure unlike with Spartan (despite knowing about Neil, I never personally interacted with him beyond an email about replacements for damaged parts).

Was there an announcement on dakka about it? I took a peek at N&R and there isn't anything I could see on page 1-2 from a quick glance.

 warboss wrote:

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
Well it isn't just a UK thing.

I guess On The Lamb Games is closing down too. https://www.facebook.com/OnTheLambGames/?hc_ref=ARQaL-Uu5XnPHm7vs8n-ok7wApJR1HKgGyI0PW7Jejr-zXno9bKvEpsO4YOin19rk1A&fref=nf

Ten years ago we started On The Lamb. It was an excuse to make the games we wanted to play, and share them with the world. In those ten years we released three games, multiple books, and over a hundred miniatures. We're proud of our games and we're thankful for our family, friends, and fans for supporting us for the last decade.
Unfortunately, this is our goodbye. On The Lamb is closing down, the webstore will be shut off at the end of the year.

gakky week.

That saddens me as it puts a personal face (or avatar) to a closure unlike with Spartan (despite knowing about Neil, I never personally interacted with him beyond an email about replacements for damaged parts).

Was there an announcement on dakka about it? I took a peek at N&R and there isn't anything I could see on page 1-2 from a quick glance.

I was surprised about this too, and no, I didn't see an announcement on Dakka, either. Found out from a friend and then checked OTLG's FB page for information. I only ordered from them once but it was a positive experience and they seemed like awesome people, so I am sad to see the company go.

Spartan Games
Tor Gaming
On the Lamb
Geek Chic (Made those awesome 6x4' gaming table)

Damn. Anyone else?

 ChargerIIC wrote:
Spartan Games
Tor Gaming
On the Lamb
Geek Chic (Made those awesome 6x4' gaming table)

Damn. Anyone else?

Wait Geek Chic is gone too? i mean it was pretty way way way out of my price range but i always loved checking them out at pax.

 Desubot wrote:

 ChargerIIC wrote:
Spartan Games
Tor Gaming
On the Lamb
Geek Chic (Made those awesome 6x4' gaming table)

Damn. Anyone else?

Wait Geek Chic is gone too? I mean it was pretty way way way out of my price range but I always loved checking them out at pax.

Yeah Geek Chic went under quite a few months ago. They completely vanished overnight. Unfortunately, there are many people with lost money that they had with them as deposits. As far as I know from those that I know that did, their money is basically gone.

GW stopped sucking. A lot of gamers formerly motivated to look elsewhere went back to GW.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
GW stopped sucking. A lot of gamers formerly motivated to look elsewhere went back to GW.

I think this really does play a large part in it... it gives me mixed feelings as it's awesome to see GW being responsive again, but it really, Really sucks to see these cool alternate game companies closing down

Maybe we'll see a resurgence in companies focusing on "counts-as" for use in GW games again? A company like Spartan that made such cool models gearing them for use in GW games could be interesting... and honestly, although I buy a ton of 3rd party models, this is usually how I intend to use them (i.e. justify the purchase ).

Crazy thing is, this is the least interested I've been in GW in years, aside from potentially Necromunda.

But then again, I'm a "story" guy, and the story well off the rails and did that thing Robert Downey Jr told Ben Stiller to never do.

On the lamb, Spartan and now tor. 3 companies clothing it's doors in 1 week.

O___o

GW getting better is a big part also I think KS like KDM getting over 12 mill must also put a hit into many a modeler spending (it did mine)

Add in the fact many people hate risk so try to buy from known games to not risk "wasting" cash (no one in my area will try any new games do to this KoW has stopped selling thanks to new GW so hase GATES OF ANTARES )

I just hope PP is doing well the worst thing that can happen to the hobby is if GW becomes the only game again

Yeah, I commented on this being more of a kickstarter effect IMO rather than GW's playing relatively nice again (though still not fully nice). I've seen (both IRL and online) seemingly more folks ok with dropping $200+ on a new game that is being crowdfunded years ahead of time if they get a discount than I ever have in an FLGS with instant gratification but at full price or close to it.

 warboss wrote:
Yeah, I commented on this being more of a kickstarter effect IMO rather than GW's playing relatively nice again (though still not fully nice). I've seen (both IRL and online) seemingly more folks ok with dropping $200+ on a new game that is being crowdfunded years ahead of time if they get a discount than I ever have in an FLGS with instant gratification but at full price or close to it.

I only have backed 3 KS in my life (I hate risk) so far I been lucky I got my game mat my sleeve are supposed to be shipped soon.
But I backed kingdom death monster for $600 mostly as I missed the 1st printing of the game (that was $400 before the new stuff)
And the discounts are so good it's tempting to add more and more but it killed my budget this year more so with 8th 40k and all the books

I still support my FLAG but I can't get any fun to paint models or games unless I NEED it I wonder how many are in the same boat

Man that sucks, i really liked those Spartan Space Ships, hope i can find an online supplier who has them

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
Well it isn't just a UK thing.

I guess On The Lamb Games is closing down too. https://www.facebook.com/OnTheLambGames/?hc_ref=ARQaL-Uu5XnPHm7vs8n-ok7wApJR1HKgGyI0PW7Jejr-zXno9bKvEpsO4YOin19rk1A&fref=nf

Ten years ago we started On The Lamb. It was an excuse to make the games we wanted to play, and share them with the world. In those ten years we released three games, multiple books, and over a hundred miniatures. We're proud of our games and we're thankful for our family, friends, and fans for supporting us for the last decade.
Unfortunately, this is our goodbye. On The Lamb is closing down, the webstore will be shut off at the end of the year.

gakky week.

Ouch, this is a bruising year for the small guy. Heck even the big guys. Cool Mini Or Not reported a massive dive in miniature sales for 2016-2017. Down 2/3rds from the previous year and they have unique and interesting lines that should differentiate them.

But if ICV2 is to be believed, sale of miniatures are up 20%, at least in North America. The money is going somewhere.

*edit* For those saying material costs don't matter. When you company is treading water or growing just with inflation, material costs going from 2% to 4% can ruin you.

 silent25 wrote:

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
Well it isn't just a UK thing.

I guess On The Lamb Games is closing down too. https://www.facebook.com/OnTheLambGames/?hc_ref=ARQaL-Uu5XnPHm7vs8n-ok7wApJR1HKgGyI0PW7Jejr-zXno9bKvEpsO4YOin19rk1A&fref=nf

Ten years ago we started On The Lamb. It was an excuse to make the games we wanted to play, and share them with the world. In those ten years we released three games, multiple books, and over a hundred miniatures. We're proud of our games and we're thankful for our family, friends, and fans for supporting us for the last decade.
Unfortunately, this is our goodbye. On The Lamb is closing down, the webstore will be shut off at the end of the year.

gakky week.

Ouch, this is a bruising year for the small guy. Heck even the big guys. Cool Mini Or Not reported a massive dive in miniature sales for 2016-2017. Down 2/3rds from the previous year and they have unique and interesting lines that should differentiate them.

But if ICV2 is to be believed, sale of miniatures are up 20%, at least in North America. The money is going somewhere.

*edit* For those saying material costs don't matter. When you company is treading water or growing just with inflation, material costs going from 2% to 4% can ruin you.

On the Lamb never was able to get their ranges picked up by a proper distributor as far as I'm aware, so for them it's felt like a slow march into oblivion that they fought tooth and nail to stop.

Not being able to get a distributor to get your game into FLGS's is a death sentence in the long run.

 judgedoug wrote:

 ChargerIIC wrote:
Spartan Games just released a closure notice as well. It's not been a good year for anyone outside of GW.

It's not been a good year for anyone who doesn't know how to run a business

"industry has become very crowded in the last few years for a number of reasons"

Spartan games said this same lame thing. It's code word for "we don't know how to differentiate our product enough to make it stand out and sell."

I wouldn't say that. A fair bit of Spartan's stuff was different from what is out there now (even if they started with a Man'o'War-alike). Their big problem was they had the attention span of gnats, and jumped randomly from project to project, abandoning older ones and not even giving the newer ones the support they needed.

I also think it's pretty interesting that they've been pushing hard on the firestorm kickstarter, pre-orders for dystopian wars something or other, even Halo stuff. They had to know what the state of their company was, but if the state of my inbox is any indication, were pushing really hard in the face of reality.

silent25 wrote:Cool Mini Or Not reported a massive dive in miniature sales for 2016-2017. Down 2/3rds from the previous year and they have unique and interesting lines that should differentiate them.

Not sure bondage vampires, bondage werewolves and bondage asian stereotypes really qualify as unique, interesting or differentiating. The pigmen were a little weird, but PP has stepped into that hotly contested arena (for reasons that remain unclear).

 silent25 wrote:

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
Well it isn't just a UK thing.

I guess On The Lamb Games is closing down too. https://www.facebook.com/OnTheLambGames/?hc_ref=ARQaL-Uu5XnPHm7vs8n-ok7wApJR1HKgGyI0PW7Jejr-zXno9bKvEpsO4YOin19rk1A&fref=nf

Ten years ago we started On The Lamb. It was an excuse to make the games we wanted to play, and share them with the world. In those ten years we released three games, multiple books, and over a hundred miniatures. We're proud of our games and we're thankful for our family, friends, and fans for supporting us for the last decade.
Unfortunately, this is our goodbye. On The Lamb is closing down, the webstore will be shut off at the end of the year.

gakky week.

Ouch, this is a bruising year for the small guy. Heck even the big guys. Cool Mini Or Not reported a massive dive in miniature sales for 2016-2017. Down 2/3rds from the previous year and they have unique and interesting lines that should differentiate them.

But if ICV2 is to be believed, sale of miniatures are up 20%, at least in North America. The money is going somewhere.

*edit* For those saying material costs don't matter. When you company is treading water or growing just with inflation, material costs going from 2% to 4% can ruin you.

where was cmon's dive in minis sales reported? I'm assuming this is strictly miniature games (dark age and WoK) and not their board games.

 legoburner wrote:
Since it was mentioned a couple of times in this thread, Maelstrom's Edge is still healthy and strong, we've just been building up a big product backlog so that we can release stuff consistently. A whole new faction is out next month:



all plastic, rag-tag sci-fi survivors with a good mixture of human and aliens. The faction coming out after that will be even more impressive and still multi part plastic.

I'm relieved to hear that you're still in it with ME. I have been keeping an eye on it and following your progress. Seems like you have a solid foundation to rely on. Wish the same could be said of those other companies.

 Jon Garrett wrote:
I'd guess Brexit has caused problems with their supplies. It seems to to be the main problem business' over here are having - the dollar and Euro are both strong to the pound, so unless you source locally...

But it's OK guys! We've totally taken our borders back! Sure, immigration is down mostly because immigrants no longer see it as worth coming and we could have put those super important laws in without crippling our economy and throwing away our voice in global politics. But we totally did it!

Unfortunately, we'll probably continue to see this trend. UK companies are gonna take a hammering over Brexit and an uncertain pound. Games Workshop does enough business in America that, unless trade talks go badly (always possible with the Great Orange One in power) they should be fine, but smaller companies are gonna take a spanking.

Erm how about nope?

Firstly UK companies coined it by selling goods overseas post brexit, with many running specific ads targeting non UK buyers.

Secondly, Tor reduced their range last year so that all their units were in bigger more expensive boxes, so all of a sudden you had no option to buy minimum units and had to buy max units. They also doubled their starter box costs and just added tokens no one asked for. The owner pretty much put down any negative comments on their Facebook page and insisted on strict rules for entry into the new Relics rules test, not to mention the near impossible to fulfill for little reward ranger scheme. Releasing a new version of the rules within a year of the old ones probably didn't help things.

Spartan, where do you start? They paid a load to get Halo then drive the space combat version into the ground with high prices and a shoehorned ruleset, then repeated the problem with ground command but added crazy insane pricing as well, followed by a super botched launch where a lot of uk retailers didn't get the game on time, leading to cancelled orders, hence dropping the range. In general Spartan's starters were GW priced without the quality/quantity and they were focused on the ne t shiny new game within months of releasing the last one. Plus invested in idiocy like £75 resin halo flyers that replaced templates and made forgeworld look cheap. Like Tor, they were resistant to negative feedback and so were a rabid core of the fan base who enjoyed rolling 40 dice to resolve a combat. If the rest of Spartans demo team were like the two I met then no wonder they didn't grow their hobby because these two basically just set the game up instore and played each other without making any attempt to involve anyone else.

Many good uk companies thrive eg Infamy, Bad Squiddo, Ttcombat. They make good products and listen.

3 within a week...

Something might be starting.

In relation to Brexit, assuming Tor (and Spartan) did not import anything in to make the models then the value of the pound should have helped. However, if Brexit has influenced this (and I say if whilst recognising multiple factors are likely responsible) it could be a combination of things. Such as potential buyers seeing prices rise for other things including more important (!) stuff than wargaming, meanwhile realworld incomes are (as I understand it but apparently the figures are controversial) climbing higher slower inflation, finally whatever ability a company like Tor gaming had to survive on becomes more difficult as their very small profits need be stretched further as prices in other sectors of the economy go up.

Assuming some posters are correct that Spartan and Tor had some bad business practices, this only explains why they rather than their competitors went out of business. It would not explain any trend of wargames manufacturers going of business around about now (not that I am assuming there is any such trend, let us see what the future holds).

Honestly I'm not surprised.

I rather liked the minis and the world they were creating, but not only was it an extremely niche aesthetic, they kept ploughing money into random projects.

Off the top of my head, there was the fantasy football version of their game (that they only made one team for), their own version of Kickstarter (which disappeared after they did one campaign on it) and their own version of Ebay/Amazon Marketplace (I don't actually know what happened to this).

And all the while, the various Relics factions were still waiting for units listed in the first rulebook.

Both of these companies were mismanaged and it was but a matter of time before they sank, so let's not jump to any conclusions regarding the health of the wargamebiz.

 legoburner wrote:
Since it was mentioned a couple of times in this thread, Maelstrom's Edge is still healthy and strong, we've just been building up a big product backlog so that we can release stuff consistently. A whole new faction is out next month:



all plastic, rag-tag sci-fi survivors with a good mixture of human and aliens. The faction coming out after that will be even more impressive and still multi part plastic.

Yay!

While I'm sad to see companies shut down like this, I think people here may be over-reacting just a tad.

Keep in mind a lot of small time companies like this consist of 2-3 people, maybe 10-12 at the most - producing, arguably, a tiny amount of product.

I think if we look back at miniatures ranges and genuine gaming companies you'll see the closure rate is probably near that of restaurants (something like 85-90% of restaurants fail within a year or two o flaunching).

My personal feeling is that a lot of companies try too hard to create a brand new game and unique IP where in reality they should have started with cool miniatures/terrain, etc. You see a ton of small time miniatures companies still in business because they simply sell minis - their fate is not tied to a game or an IP. This reduces the workload a ton as well.

Sci-fi and fantasy are tough sells because you're creating something "you" think is cool, and you're hoping other people think that as well. That's a big ask. It's way easier to simply produce historical gaming miniatures which a large market can pick up and use for the game of their choice --- this is why you see some really sub-par historical miniature lines still in business.

I think outside of historicals, your IP has to be exceptionally cool, OR your minis have to be superb --- hopefully both. Taking one glance at Relics from Tor --- you can see that while artfully designed, this was never going to be a hugely popular game capable of supporting the people who run a company. Not in a million years. Far too niche. That very specific scale/range/style should have been kept as a "I cast minis at night after I come home from my real job" approach.

I applaud the courage of small companies to take a big swing at stuff like this, but I just think it's a big ask.

I like the look of those lizard dudes.

Shame to see companies go down - I hope their figures are still available somewhere.

Not to sure about the "mismanagement" comments, I mean the fact that we may disagree with their policies both these companies have been trading for some years now, Tor IIRC was 7 and Spartan 10?
Small companies that are mismanaged do not survive that long trading and usually fold in their first 2 or 3 years so something changed.

I tend to believe that the big change these past years is the saturation of boardgames kick-starters they are sucking sooo much hobby money its not funny. Brexit? Well still early days since we are still In the EU the really big kick in the nuts will be coming very soon so brace yourselves.