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 ChargerIIC wrote:


You probably don't want to use AOS as your example - sales stats show it outperforming WHFB in it's prime

Yup.

Seems like the exact opposite. AoS would be the first and best example on how to turn a failing, stale, beyond its prime carcass circled only by some super-nostalgic hobby-flies into a blockbuster success, despite (or, arguably, because) breaking some eggs to make that particular omelette.

Not to mention that "lessons learned from AoS" arguably ALSO saved 40K (and thus ultimately the company) from the 2014 to 2016 or so slump and new-player-unfriendly bloat. There's rightly been lots of praise for GW Nu-CEO turning a corner on company policy, etc.. , but it would've been a mute effort without both main games themselves turning a corner on the AoS watershed under GW old-CEO and thereby opening the path to the new GW golden age.

 doktor_g wrote:
BattleTech was a shambles by the minis, IP infringement, and splitting of the company. IMO. EDIT: BT was my first (when FASA owned it) and I still love it.

Another tragedy was Hawks DropZone Commander. Such a tight game. Single designer. Sad. It needed some mechanics tweaks but that's it.

What happened to Dropzone?

 ChargerIIC wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
I find that games tend to have a gradual tapering off, then a heavy dropoff based on a single bad decision.

Generally, that decision is one of the following:

1) ALL NEW EDITION with changed stats (MK) changed scale (Axis n Allies minis) or something similar that requires a hell of a heavy reinvestment.

2) YOUR MODELS DONT WORK NO MO (malifaux, AOS initial release) where existing collections are invalidated

3) NEW HOTNESS MEANING YOUR STUFF AINT NEVER GETTING AN UPDATE (again AOS, monsterpocalypse, etc. And I get it with these - you can only add new stuff to existing factions so long. But in a failing game, it can be the catalyst for a fall.)

You probably don't want to use AOS as your example - sales stats show it outperforming WHFB in it's prime

Um, no. Instead of blindly defending AoS read the specific examples. He's correct. AoS on release was a lame duck and it wasn't until the GHB that it picked up steam. This is a fine example for #2. You cannot seriously think the absolute shakeup it caused and the Balkanisation of communities was GW's plan for the release of this.

Point 3- AoS is walking a fine line with this right now. Sure, it's doing (relatively) well, but barely a week goes by when people ask about the gakky state some existing factions are in due to GW focusing on new stuff (maybe they're on the path to remedying this with BoC, but time will tell) to the detriment of updating other things.

That doesn't seem to be harming it, though.

Point 2 is absolutely false for AoS, though - there were no models that couldn't be used in AoS when it was released. Some of them are no longer useable in matched play now, though (at least, as the same character they were released as; the miniatures are absolutely still useable)

So all the people that left in droves to start the Ninth Age, stick with 8th or play KoW never happened?

Right.

What's your point? Age of Sigmar is doing pretty well by all accounts, so the lack of updates for Highborn, Free Peoples, whatever, isn't doing it much harm. The people who went to play other games mostly did so when all the rules for all the models available in 8th edition were freely available. It wasn't lack of updates or their existing armies being made redundant that drove them away.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
What's your point? Age of Sigmar is doing pretty well by all accounts, so the lack of updates for Highborn, Free Peoples, whatever, isn't doing it much harm. The people who went to play other games mostly did so when all the rules for all the models available in 8th edition were freely available. It wasn't lack of updates or their existing armies being made redundant that drove them away.

And we're back to the usual "Someone said something bad about AoS. Defend the keep!" instead of reading what I posted...

I'm not denying it's doing good now (though locally you wouldn't think it, but the same can be said for most games round here so that's not a great barometer.), but on release it cause such a gakstorm amongst the community (and don't deny it. AoS's release was not a bed of roses and revisionist history won't change that) that communities were split into 4+ factions that I mentioned above and the ones that sided with AoS were actively atangonising the others over the death of the Old World.

Enough people decided to pack up their gak and move on on release that GW had to change tract on AoS with completely different styles of army books and the GHB being a thing. It was only through pure dumb luck, sheer determination on the part of GW or a combination of the two that AoS weathered the storm and didn't fall into category 2.

As for what I'm going on about on category 3- Have you read the forums lately? It's like almost a weekly occurrence with GW's practically impossible to navigate site for anything that's not established as an army book (some sub factions only have one or two models to their name right now) and ex-players wanting to dip their toes in only to discover their faction's been chopped up into little pieces and wondering how the feth to put it back together into something resembling what it once was for the time being.

I never said GW are falling into this. I said they're "walking a fine line". They're teetering between the two right now. The new factions vastly outweigh the updates and unification of existing ones. Beasts of Chaos could be the first step to remedying this. Time will tell.

Are they walking a fine line? It appears that Age of Sigmar is doing very well, so it looks like their path of just leaving the old factions to slowly wither away is working for them.

I'm not denying anything about the release. However, the point made that you're arguing with is specifically that "YOUR MODELS DONT WORK NO MO (malifaux, AOS initial release) where existing collections are invalidated " which was not the case with AoS. The reason people didn't buy in to it was nothing to do with old models being made redundant. They did it because they didn't like the core rules of Age of Sigmar, which is not one of the_scotsman's three points.

The can argue the minutiae of this forever, but enough people believe that their models have been "invalidated" (whether this is *technically* true or not is different story) for them to not even give the game a look in.

Same goes for 40k. How many times have we seen people say their units are "invalidated" and "unusable" (Centurions, anyone?) and go off in a huff despite this not strictly being factually correct?

the-Scotsman's point was that there are three decisions made by a game publisher that can cause a new edition to fail. So now we've moved from saying that AoS was an example of two of those decisions, to saying that a proportion of the player base are ignorant and stupid. Not quite the same argument, really.

I think AOS is a prime example of a game that had a dramatic decline in player base over a short period of time. Whether or not the game is doing well now is not the point. I personally saw tons of people leave when GW axed fantasy. The other online comments also suggest such an exodus. The new edition was certainly the cause. The rules were nothing like the old ones, and people did not like it, and thus left.

Again, all of this is not to say that AOS is doing poorly now. By some accounts it is selling well, and has many players.

The point is, WFB was dead and not making money (and there's a different discussion on why, certainly a lot of it was self-inflicted by GW).

AoS was an admittedly extreme and for many old time fans painful measure to turn the death spiral around, but it succeeded at that.

Lots of actually dead games like Ex Illis or Dust or whatever would wish they could've pull an AoS-style recovery out of their hat.

Sunny Side Up wrote:
Seems like the exact opposite. AoS would be the first and best example on how to turn a failing, stale, beyond its prime carcass circled only by some super-nostalgic hobby-flies into a blockbuster success, despite (or, arguably, because) breaking some eggs to make that particular omelette.

Not to mention that "lessons learned from AoS" arguably ALSO saved 40K (and thus ultimately the company) from the 2014 to 2016 or so slump and new-player-unfriendly bloat. There's rightly been lots of praise for GW Nu-CEO turning a corner on company policy, etc.. , but it would've been a mute effort without both main games themselves turning a corner on the AoS watershed under GW old-CEO and thereby opening the path to the new GW golden age.

AoS is a fundamentally different game than WHFB (on just about every level). For that matter, 40k 8th edition is a fundamentally different game from 40k 7th edition - it shares models and fluff, but for the most part, it is a 40k 7th edition-like game rather than the same game. For that matter, X-Wing 2nd edition is an X-Wing-like game, Malifaux 3rd edition is a Malifaux-like game, and Necromunda: Underhive is a Necromunda-like game. How many editions of 40k have there been, and how much, really, have they had in common?

And that's the real lesson to take from this. All of these games eventually die. People get tired of them, angry at them, or confused by them, and they move on. The companies that keep them going don't keep the GAMES going, but instead keep the IDEA going. Since the models are really the most expensive part, and the fluff is the most involved part, keeping those two things can convince you that a new edition is actually not a new game, but a new version of an old game.

I'd argue that it is possible to keep the same game going for decades, but it needs to be something that is relatively light on rules - preferring universal generic rules of specific ones - where the ongoing expansions add more to the fluff than the technicalities. Competitive gaming can't keep a game going for very long because the imbalances become exaggerated and part of the game strategy - it's why a stale meta kills a competitive game and people are constantly searching for a "perfectly balanced" game. When a game becomes "solved", the number of valid strategies is reduce to a handful and the game drops all pretenses of personalization, choice, or variety.

But something like Dungeons and Dragons can have editions that span decades. Imbalances are less threatening because there is a game master in each group that can compensate for them. They can release a dozen character class tomes without the game being bogged down by it because things only affect the current game you are playing. The game is never solved. There is no meta (or at least, the individual group choices are more important).

That's why something like Necromunda can be still played after 20 years. It's more like D&D than Chess. The game mechanics aren't there to give you a semblance of fairness, but to create narrative moments that are funny, weird, or tragic. It a game where you personalize the units and adventure. People don't generally remember the dice they rolled. The remember the stories they experienced, and Necromunda is a story generating game.

Sunny Side Up wrote:
The point is, WFB was dead and not making money (and there's a different discussion on why, certainly a lot of it was self-inflicted by GW).

AoS was an admittedly extreme and for many old time fans painful measure to turn the death spiral around, but it succeeded at that.

Lots of actually dead games like Ex Illis or Dust or whatever would wish they could've pull an AoS-style recovery out of their hat.

^This. I was amazed when AOS managed to succeed. Kings of War had all but finished eating WHFB's lunch and looked poised to draw all the hardcore players away by allowing them to play an improved WHFB instead of a scary new rules system no one trusted and made some pretty big mistakes out the starting gate. By the nromal black and white gamer's logic it should have died within 6 months. Instead GW picked themselves off, brushed themselves off from their internet trampling and seemed to make exactly the right decisions to resuce the product. Allt his while the grognards continued a grassroots campaign to keep it off the tables. Mantic didn't even do anything wrong to lose the momentum - KoW is still the great WHFB ruleset is was at first and you can still wield your entire WHFB collection in that game. Instead Age of Sigmar made sacrifices to its original 'casual pla'y vision and incorporated what the player's wanted. Then it went from from the bottom to back in the top 10 and outselling KoW. As a Mantic fan it was pretty shocking.

I guess there is a lesson in that. We've listed a lot of reasons why successful games decline, but if someone is still willing to put their dollars into something it can always come back. In the end, people are willing to put dollars into Age of Sigmar and not into Star Fleet Battles, Battletech, Robotech Tactics, etc.

I also find Battletech an interesting example - the board game is pretty dead except for a couple small metas that won't play with each other but the fiction community is now it's own thing; with a subscription service, purchasable (new) fiction, novel reprints, etc. It's even had successful video game launches (MWO, Battletech the video game) but the baord game isn't the center of the universe anymore.

People play what other people are playing. Thats really the bottom line.

AOS and GW have a cycle that feeds itself simply off of the headcount.

The worst game in the world will do fine if players continue to play it because other people are playing it. Its a self feeding cycle.

auticus wrote:
People play what other people are playing. Thats really the bottom line.

AOS and GW have a cycle that feeds itself simply off of the headcount.

The worst game in the world will do fine if players continue to play it because other people are playing it. Its a self feeding cycle.

If that were true, WFB wouldn't have ever been in trouble and GW's LoTR would still be the world's most popular wargame by a significant margin.

WHFB didn't fail because no one was playing it.

WHFB failed because no one was buying new GW models for it and they werne't making any money off of it.

We had a VERY active WHFB community with leagues that had 30-50 people in it every season, and yet for the past decade very very few people in that very active community bought ANYTHING new from GW.

They bought their armies on Ebay or second hand locally or subbed in proxies from cheaper companies.

You say "had". If no-one was buying in to GW's new products, why did you stop?

auticus wrote:
WHFB didn't fail because no one was playing it.

WHFB failed because no one was buying new GW models for it and they werne't making any money off of it.

We had a VERY active WHFB community with leagues that had 30-50 people in it every season, and yet for the past decade very very few people in that very active community bought ANYTHING new from GW.

They bought their armies on Ebay or second hand locally or subbed in proxies from cheaper companies.

That's still failing from the company side of the equation, though I can say your experience is not matched on my side of the pond.

WFB was very dead and the tight-nit groups of WFB old timers (and now 9th Age players) was (is) both approaching retirement age, shrinking and basically impenetrable to new players.

And, to be honest, those kind of pockets exist for any game. The gaming club I went to when studying had some 50 active players for SAGA, usually outnumbering all GW, Mantic, FFG and more games played there combined. Doesn't mean that's representative. Just that there's a local hot spot of fans around some active community leaders.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
You say "had". If no-one was buying in to GW's new products, why did you stop?

Once the game was no longer officially supported, people walked away from it. A lot moved to AOS. AOS was not as dead as people like to claim, though its release was in fact a dumpster fire of epic proportions until they put points into the game.

though I can say your experience is not matched on my side of the pond.

Thats not surprising. There are places where I'm told 9th age is mammoth sized professional sports over there, but you couldn't find a game of 9th age going on within 500 miles of me unless you dug really hard to look for it in someone's garage or basement.

We had regional tournaments for whfb still happening all the way up until the end and they had decent turnout and attendance. And the stories of no one buying new gw models for whfb but buying plenty of second hand was a common story regionally as well, so I know it wasn't just my area that was big into that to make it an isolated pocket incidence.

auticus wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
You say "had". If no-one was buying in to GW's new products, why did you stop?

Once the game was no longer officially supported, people walked away from it. A lot moved to AOS. AOS was not as dead as people like to claim, though its release was in fact a dumpster fire of epic proportions until they put points into the game.

though I can say your experience is not matched on my side of the pond.

Thats not surprising. There are places where I'm told 9th age is mammoth sized professional sports over there, but you couldn't find a game of 9th age going on within 500 miles of me unless you dug really hard to look for it in someone's garage or basement.

We had regional tournaments for whfb still happening all the way up until the end and they had decent turnout and attendance. And the stories of no one buying new gw models for whfb but buying plenty of second hand was a common story regionally as well, so I know it wasn't just my area that was big into that to make it an isolated pocket incidence.

Nah. 9th Age isn't more mammoth sized than most other niche game rule-sets without actual miniature production behind it. In the category of post-release-hype Gaslands maybe. Certainly not even remotely 1% of AoS, which is now easily 40% or so the size of the (new and massively 8th-edition-attendance-boosted) 40K.

Really. I am personally no fan of Stormcasts or Eel-riders or whatever, but not to acknowledge that AoS is a massive success, both compared to late WFB and even more so compared to the "average" new and/or re-imagined wargame out there outside of the top 3 or so is just stupid.

auticus wrote:
WHFB didn't fail because no one was playing it.

WHFB failed because no one was buying new GW models for it and they werne't making any money off of it.

We had a VERY active WHFB community with leagues that had 30-50 people in it every season, and yet for the past decade very very few people in that very active community bought ANYTHING new from GW.

They bought their armies on Ebay or second hand locally or subbed in proxies from cheaper companies.

AOS is successful because it introduced new factions with new minis. So, it really was a shame then that WHFB never introduced Araby or Cathay or any of the other factions they teased in the fluff. I sure hope all the fans who shouted down adding new factions in favor of "getting the current ones right" feel like Lenny with a squished rabbit between their hands now. Thanks, WHFB players for killing the Old World.

AoS also scales better, and has better co-ordination with board games and skirmish games to act as funnels for people onboarding into the Hobby.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

Thanks, WHFB players for killing the Old World.

Sure, blame the victims.

 Stormonu wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

Thanks, WHFB players for killing the Old World.

Sure, blame the victims.

I'm not blaming all. Just the ones who were so vehement against adding new factions or doing anything new or exciting with the Old World that they choked the possibilities out of the setting. They were very vocal any time there was even a hint of fresh air coming into the model range.

I think the biggest problem there was simply that the GW balance skew was just as bad in 8th and people wanted to see them make a balanced game first before adding in new stuff which would also be unbalanced.

But thats been one of GW's biggest flaws as game developers since before there was an internet.

auticus wrote:
I think the biggest problem there was simply that the GW balance skew was just as bad in 8th and people wanted to see them make a balanced game first before adding in new stuff which would also be unbalanced.

But thats been one of GW's biggest flaws as game developers since before there was an internet.

Yes, that is what players demanded for edition after edition, even though it was never going to happen. What WHFB needed were sales, and exciting new product clearly works for that (as it does for AOS). Now there will never be perfectly balanced rules because the entire game and setting are gone for good.

auticus wrote:
I think the biggest problem there was simply that the GW balance skew was just as bad in 8th and people wanted to see them make a balanced game first before adding in new stuff which would also be unbalanced.

It is literally impossible to balance a game like 40k. The only balanced miniature games are the new ones, because there haven't been enough games played yet to identify where they are imbalanced.

 Sqorgar wrote:

auticus wrote:
I think the biggest problem there was simply that the GW balance skew was just as bad in 8th and people wanted to see them make a balanced game first before adding in new stuff which would also be unbalanced.

It is literally impossible to balance a game like 40k. The only balanced miniature games are the new ones, because there haven't been enough games played yet to identify where they are imbalanced.

It’s not impossible, but would take resources that GW simply isn’t interested in putting towards the game.

Its most definitely not impossible. Unless we want to get pedantic and start talking about perfect balance. For clarity I am not talking about perfect balance.

However the game, both 40k and whfb and now AOS all have the small handfuls of models and armies that you wn't get rolled if you play and the rest you will get squashed if you play them. You have about a 10% of the game that can give you a good game and 90% of the game that you collect because you like how they look. Thats awful.

The balance in GW games has always been dumpster-fire bad.