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At the same time the Lord of the Rings market evaporated overnight when the films ended.


That said it DID bring in a lot of new gamers and whilst many never lasted and the sales of "parents lets get them one or two boxes" dried up; there were many who did stick it out and became gamers.

That's why GW is so free with their game licence; they want games made of their product. If the game does badly its forgotten about and any shame is on the developer. If it does great then its 100% free (actually GW get paid so its paid!) marketing for GW. Sure not everyone will buy armies; some might only get one model; some might get a few; some iwll get hooked.

In the end its increasing exposure; increasing awareness; increasing marketing. All what you want to help people be more aware of your brand nad game.






If anything GW doesn't do enough- they could easily start doing limited edition sculpts of models tied to video games. Dawn of War got one or two as I recall and I'm sure there's a few other big title games that GW could work that magic into (Total War, the Battlefleet games)

well the LotR market evaporated over night not only because the movies ended

but because GW halved the box content and doubled the prices (if you ever asked were his meme came from) with the problem that most of those player were LoR fanboys and not GW fanboys and they reacted not just with buying less or from others but still play the GW game
but stopped doing anything related to it and moved on to something else
(most of those players I know who started with that game during the movies are now historical wargamers and never played anything from GW)

 Sabotage! wrote:
With how unprofitable 8th edition was for GW (I’ve seen several sources claim it made less than 10% what 40k did), it is weird to see GW take another stab at it. I’ve seen a lot of people say it’s because TW has been popular, but 99% of the people that play it are computer gamers and won’t touch a miniatures game, much less an extremely expensive, time consuming (to get to table) game like WHFB.

Maybe they will just make new rules and bundle up some of the old models in bundles with an occasional FW release?

I am pretty interested to see what they do with it. I hope the game is more like 6th, which I greatly enjoyed, and less like 8th (which I hated).

40k 8th showed GW if they actually put in some effort to market themselves as giving the slightest impression they give a damn, people will generally give them a second chance and pay hand over fist for the privilege.

Plus End Times stuff sold really well. Probably made them realise to late that if you actually make models instead of letting stuff languish for a decade people will actually buy new stuff.

I can’t help wondering about the timing of this. Is this about giving Forge World a new project for when main GW take over the Horus Heresy?

This was another thing that came up in the past in this thread and is again, which is "where is the player base?"

When it was the small scale arguments it was "why would anyone play when there's AoS at 28mm" yadda yadda. It'll be smaller scale instead.

They are clearly going ahead with it so I mean it's pretty obvious the player base exists considering WHFB was massive when it was out. There is always a market for fantasy and warhammer is iconic, it's a massive trend setter. If they didn't think there was enough of a market they wouldn't be bothering their arses. That's what this long drawn out hype is about, checking the market and seeing how keen people are.

How is this difficult to grasp? I mean I get that there's people who just love to refute anything and everything no matter what GW do, but come on.

I love all these hot takes on the prospect of a game that isn't even out yet, all founded on uncited anecdotal evidence.

My grandma said wfb will have the momentum of a runaway freight train because 97.4% of gamers and 99.125% of computer gamers want a slice of hot Karl Franz.

 Arbitrator wrote:

40k 8th showed GW if they actually put in some effort to market themselves as giving the slightest impression they give a damn, people will generally give them a second chance and pay hand over fist for the privilege.

Plus End Times stuff sold really well. Probably made them realise to late that if you actually make models instead of letting stuff languish for a decade people will actually buy new stuff.

The decision to no longer insult their fans in messages from the CEO was also quite welcome.

As I mentioned this might actually be driven largely by internal enthusiasm. I imagine the studio are much greater fans of WHFB than even us and are genuinely excited to bring it back. This, more than a master plan again Mantic, may be the main driver.

Yeah I would not recommend GW launch a 3rd 28mm mass battle fantasy game (after AoS and LotR), but I can also see that love of the Olde World might overrule what seems like an obvious problem.

 Sabotage! wrote:
With how unprofitable 8th edition was for GW (I’ve seen several sources claim it made less than 10% what 40k did), it is weird to see GW take another stab at it.

Few GW games will ever sell 10% of what 40k does currently. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if for all its growth, AOS still only sells 10-20% of what 40k does. ICV2 (not the must accurate source ofc) even put AOS below Marvel Crisis Protocol and Star Wars Legion and anecdotally my experience is that the actually quite large European fanbase for Fantasy did not migrate over to AOS. In my local area that has a huge wargaming scene, AOS comes below games like Bolt Action, Armada, Saga, KoW, 9th Age, Blood Bowl, Infinity and even Epic. One LGS sold 125 Indomitus boxes last year. He was brow beaten by GW to order 30 Dominion sets and has only managed to sell 10 so far. He had an allocation of 30 boxes of Soul Wars going back to 2018 and only just managed to sell the last of them 2 months ago.

But from a lot of metrics, support and statements, we know that GW is actually pretty happy with how AOS is doing. Because the new management realises that not everything needs to be Space Marines and do 40k numbers.

It's almost as if Fantasy was mismanaged and killed off for arbitrary reasons.....

I think GW today looks for solid return on investment, but also market dominance and spread. I think GW of the Kirby era got too fixated on finding the maximum possible return, which led to them going to the same pathway over and over (marines marines marines 40K marines). Which in the end weakened their position on the market overall.

I think GW today realises that they can chase the golden goose that is Marines, but if they do that they run a high risk that the rest of the wargaming market will chase all the other geese and that, in the end, GW will only have 1 golden goose and the rest will have all the others. Leaving GW in a very vulnerable position should anything happen to that goose (eg marine players get sick of mirror-matches and move onto other games).

GW today is very much spreading itself out to support more. It's a smart move as it helps smother the competition before they can get their head up; which leaves GW in a long term safer position and not having to suddenly panic market products to regain their position. As dominant as they are, they can be dethroned very quickly if the right situatoins happen.

Heck just look how fast Warmachine fell from being second only to GW at its best.

 BlackoCatto wrote:
MD Open AoS was sad. 100+ for 40k, 2 for AoS.

Gee, I can't imagine why a specifically 40k GT event that doesn't even mention AoS on its website (at least that I could find) might have only had two people show up. Googling only finds one indication that an AoS event existed, seems to have been a small 3-round tournament from the getgo that was barely advertised outside of facebook. If thats the case, then Im really not surprised that only 2 people showed up.

 AngryAngel80 wrote:
Just to mark it down, the Q and A of this actually pleases me with GW. The fact I kept my old armies intact and just kept the dream alive is great for me. If GW do this right I will actually praise them, but so far this Old World sounds amazing to me. My longbeard self is finally at peace, for now. One less grudge will I hold if they do it right.

This might kill your buzz - if GW releases a compendium for the legacy armies, its either going to be a book full of rules for models that you mostly can't buy, or a book full of rules for models that you only can buy. Both approaches have their ups and downs. This is unless they do a large amount of Made to Order stuff, but its my understanding that GW has already dispossessed itself of a lot of the older WHFB molds so its unclear to what extent they would be able to support the missing stuff. I certainly don't expect them to reboot continuous production of any of the discontinued kits even if they have the molds for them. In any case, point is that while this might make some people happy, there will also probably be some who are pissed off by the approach as well because they either can't take their discontinued units in their army as anything other than a proxy for something else (and indeed army balance may be impacted by that), or because they can't acquire the units that they didn't purchase previously but really want.

 Just Tony wrote:
Anyone with access to the lexicon knows that Warmaster stopped receiving shelf retail support 6 months after release.

Weird, anyone with access to lexicanum, or wikipedia, or who actually played the game knows that it received 2 editions, multiple expansion books, and 3 official spinoff games (2 historicals, 1 lord of the rings) over the period of a decade. Officially, it had more support than Battlefleet Gothic did. But okay, "6 months". *eyeroll*

 lord_blackfang wrote:

Warmaster is so unpopular that sculpting 10mm fantasy minis is a day job for half a dozen 3D artists.

Indeed, my local group has been buying up those minis by the bucketload the last few months. Some are playing warmaster, others are playing "microhammer" or something (basically 7th ed whfb using centimeters instead of inches) with them. Locally there were a lot of people bummed that the game would be 28mm, it works so much better in 10mm and the minis are incredible (tons of detail, easy to paint, look great in rank and file, and you can actually build and play with massive armies like you imagined and were depicted in the artwork without any of the headache that comes with doing so in 28mm).

 Sabotage! wrote:
With how unprofitable 8th edition was for GW (I’ve seen several sources claim it made less than 10% what 40k did)

No source for it but the long-standing rumor is that Space Marines alone outsold the entirety of WHFB.

It occurred to me last night that we can estimate how relevant WHFB was to GW's finances in its final couple years of life. Observe:



So it doesn't mark when WHFB died, but it was August 2014. Because the chart is based on annual and half-year reports, theres not a good place to actually measure from that would completely or accurately capture the lost sales, but if we consider the WHFB "maximum" to be before that point at Jan 1 2014 (marked with the note pertaining to the release of 40k 7th), at which point The End Times hype cycle was in full swing, and consider the WHFB "minimum" to be Jan 1 2016 (marked with the note pertaining to the release of AoS GHB), we can very generously get a gauge of how much sales of WHFB minis and books contributed to GWs top line. So, marking the maximum with a red line, the minimum with a purple line, and marking the area we are focused on with the orange circle we get this:



Roughly speaking, it looks like WHFB was between 5-10 million GBP/year of revenue, lets call it 7.5 million, or about 5-6% of GWs total annual revenue at the time.

One key assumption made here is that WHFB was not already in a downward sales trend on Jan 1 2014 (and indeed the fact that the End Times books had started being released sometime prior to this, which was supposedly driving sales* would imply that WHFB sales would have been on an upswing at this time). Another key assumption here, which is intended to be as generous to WHFB as posslbe, is that the downward trend that continued from Jan 1 2014 onwards was 100% entirely due to the loss of WHFB and had nothing to do with 40k or the lackluster response to 7th ed 40k whatsoever. Likewise, final key assumption here is that the lowest point measured after WHFB was axed on Jan 1 2016 is due entirely to the loss of sales from WHFB and that Age of Sigmar was barely selling anything at all at this point. In essence, the idea here is that WHFB was undergoing a sales renaissance up until Jan 1 2014, and then it was killed and everyone stopped buying that product range until AoS GHB was released, and every lost dollar in that timeframe is 100% due to WHFB.

Again, the assumptions made are designed to be as generous to WHFB as humanly possible and in reality would probably indicate WHFB generated significantly more top-line revenue than it actually did. Even if we dial this up to 11 and assume the WHFB "maximum" was at Jan 1 2013 (i.e. GWs top line revenue maximum prior to the post AoS GHB peak) indicated with the yellow line/focus area in grey circle, you still only get about 20 million GBP max (in reality closer to 16-18, but Im being generous) or around ~16% of Revenue total - but for that to be true would require 40k to not have been on a sales and popularity downtrend at the time, which it was, so its hard to justify attributing that entire decline solely to WHFB.

In short, WHFB had just a fraction of 40ks popularity.

*Note that the longstanding recurring narrative among WHFB apologists is that The End Times generated some massive uptick in interest and sales for WHFB - the inferred data from this chart would seem to imply otherwise, while there may have been an increase in interest in WHFB there certainly was not a meaningful or significant change in the financial trends as a result of its release.

 Sabotage! wrote:

Maybe they will just make new rules and bundle up some of the old models in bundles with an occasional FW release?

Well, its essentially been confirmed to be a Forgeworld/Specialist game with the revelation that Andy Hoare is leading the design. Expectation is a handful of new plastic kits every 3 months or so supplemented by Resin upgrades for specialist units/weapons, etc. plus resin characters + rare units, mercs and the like. I fully expect there to be at least one entirely resin faction released for the game, and I think most of the plastic support for the first year or so will come for the 1-2 factions included in the probable launch box before they may begin releasing another faction in plastic.

Between its Specialist status and the likelihood of it using the new smaller table sizes, I don't see this being a return to WHFB of 7th or 8th ed, I think we're going to see a game skewed more towards 3rd-6th. Which is good - if I can't have my warmaster scale minis then I want this to be a game where I show up to the table with 2-3 units of 10-20 infantry, 1-2 units of 5-10 cavalry, a couple characters, and a monster/warmachine. I am nostalgic for that sort of smaller "super-skirmish" type rank and file game adn there is an opening in the market for it. I think it will work a lot better than trying to make the 7th/8th massed battle approach work.

Some may point to the impending rumored HH/30k plastic release, to those people I will point out that FW has released at least a dozen resin kits for the game in the past 6-12 months alone, spread between characters, upgrade kits, and new units, with indications being there are more in the pipeline based on the leaked SoH Praetor. Even if HH is getting more plastic support, its still going to have a whole lot of resin.

I'm bewildered that some people in this thread seem to actively want TOW to fail

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:


The decision to no longer insult their fans in messages from the CEO was also quite welcome.

I was absent from the hobby before Kevin Roundtree took over the company. What kind of insults did the previous CEO dish out?

 Graphite wrote:
I'm bewildered that some people in this thread seem to actively want TOW to fail

Sadly over the years the general "I hate GW's choice on this matter" aspect has grown to the point where there is an active element of the fanbase who are basically die hard haters of GW and anything they touch. It manifests in a really odd way in that new projects they want to fail; new ideas they want to fail; heck we have had several threads locked recently about a 3D designer who was going to work for GW who got basically hounded out by "fans" hating on them working for GW. The same also happened with some of the authors for the Warhammer Kids books, who got targeted hate.


Gamers are pretty good at being welcoming/friendly to fellow gamers (generally); however when it comes to GW there's a huge amount of hate that just mindlessly gets thrown around. It's unhealthy, but its grown over the years steadily into a subset of tolerated behaviour.

 Graphite wrote:
I'm bewildered that some people in this thread seem to actively want TOW to fail

Not really seeing anyone who does.

SamusDrake wrote:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

The decision to no longer insult their fans in messages from the CEO was also quite welcome.

I was absent from the hobby before Kevin Roundtree took over the company. What kind of insults did the previous CEO dish out?

I don't really remember any outright insults, but the previous CEOs attitude (to which he made clear verbal/written statements to) was that they were a miniatures company and that only a minority of their customers actually played their games.

 Graphite wrote:
I'm bewildered that some people in this thread seem to actively want TOW to fail

I'm not. Every new edition, every game that comes out always gets fans of whatever other game to start railing for its demise. Largely I feel because the main draw to GW games is not the bad rulesets, its the community. People play AOS simply because everyone else plays AOS. Thats the draw! Not the rules. Not the (balance lol). THe massive community followed by the great models.

AOS players dropping napalm on The Old World does not surprise me at all because no one wants their playerbase fragmenting off. There ARE a lot of AOS players that want to play the Old World, and that means less time for AOS (in some cases, people only play one game or another so thats a permanent loss for some). No matter how you slice it, its at the very least going to remove some players from the aos player pool for a time, and THAT is where a lot of the "its going to die lol" comments come from. A gatekeeping attempt to keep AOS the primary game.

Do I think The Old World will overtake AOS? Hardly. We're in the 2020s now, where game design follows what AOS is pretty closely for a reason. Its more inclusive, easier to play, it melds popular games like magic the gathering with its deckbuilding / chain comboing gameplay - and you can git gud by just being good at simple math and just keep on buying whatever the GHB makes powerful for that year.

Do I think the Old World will die? Nope. I think Kings of War, 9th age, and Conquest players right now are sweating (and are being quite vocal about it in other social media hubs) because they know that they are going to lose some players as well back to the GW mothership because a lot of WHFB players would have kept playing WHFB but only started playing KOW or 9th or whatever because their game that they loved vanished overnight.

In the end - who cares? I think its a good thing that AOS players have AOS and players that want a rank and file have a game again. That can only be a positive thing overall. Yeah - your player base is going to fragment a bit because some people prefer one over the other. But forcing EVERYONE to have to play AOS was never a good thing in my book. GW is a business, they realize they can make money from the rank and file crowd as well.

very nice chart, @chaos0xomega, yet one thing that might help here is that during those times prior GHB, 40k and WHFB shared the same costumer base, so overall sales stayed the same with the loyal fans switching systems while those left being replaced with new and the overall numbers stayed the same

chaos0xomega wrote:

I don't really remember any outright insults, but the previous CEOs attitude (to which he made clear verbal/written statements to) was that they were a miniatures company and that only a minority of their customers actually played their games.

Oh, I see. Cheers.

chaos0xomega wrote:

 Graphite wrote:
I'm bewildered that some people in this thread seem to actively want TOW to fail

Not really seeing anyone who does.

SamusDrake wrote:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

The decision to no longer insult their fans in messages from the CEO was also quite welcome.

I was absent from the hobby before Kevin Roundtree took over the company. What kind of insults did the previous CEO dish out?

I don't really remember any outright insults, but the previous CEOs attitude (to which he made clear verbal/written statements to) was that they were a miniatures company and that only a minority of their customers actually played their games.

Yeah GW really took a turn for the worse under Kirby.
Apparently the reason why we don't have nice artwork on our boxed sets anymore is because of him.

SamusDrake wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:

I don't really remember any outright insults, but the previous CEOs attitude (to which he made clear verbal/written statements to) was that they were a miniatures company and that only a minority of their customers actually played their games.

Oh, I see. Cheers.

There was that one investor report where Kirby was high on crack and said they sell to people genetically predisposed to hoard toys or some such, and also mentioned losing the Chapterhouse case because legislation was written with swine theft in mind, not IP.

 auticus wrote:


I'm not. Every new edition, every game that comes out always gets fans of whatever other game to start railing for its demise. Largely I feel because the main draw to GW games is not the bad rulesets, its the community. People play AOS simply because everyone else plays AOS. Thats the draw! Not the rules. Not the (balance lol). THe massive community followed by the great models.

Disagree. I know plenty of people who got into 40k without having a community to play with. In my case, I *WAS* the entirety of my local Age of Sigmar community through the entirety of its first edition and through a good portion of 2nd edition. I didn't play my first game of AoS until like a year ago, simply because I couldn't find anyone to play with. A massive online presence is irrelevant if you have nobody to chuck dice with.

Do I think the Old World will die? Nope. I think Kings of War, 9th age, and Conquest players right now are sweating (and are being quite vocal about it in other social media hubs) because they know that they are going to lose some players as well back to the GW mothership because a lot of WHFB players would have kept playing WHFB but only started playing KOW or 9th or whatever because their game that they loved vanished overnight.

I'm fine with KoW and 9th Age dying, they mean nothing to me, have never looked at them. But please, please spare Conquest. Sadly I think its the one most likely to go under of the three you listed - KoW has built itself a solid community of people who legitimately enjoy the game (with an increasingly large slice of people who have never played WHFB), and 9th Age has a lot of bitter hacks that will never come back to playing a GW game - it'll take a hit but it won't die. Conquest is pretty much modernized WHFB gameplay wise and lorewise is WHFB if the writers had read fiction written by people other than Moorcock and Tolkien. I know theres quite a few people playing it that never touched WHFB in the first place, but I suspect theres a lot of people who will also peel off when WHFB comes back too.

The only other game I can think of that might be impacted is ASOIF, but it appeals to such a different type of gamer its essentially a "gateway game". The community overwhelmingly has never played WHFB, quite a few are entire noobies to the miniatures hobby as a whole. I think ASOIF walks away from TOW without any harm.

 kodos wrote:
very nice chart, @chaos0xomega, yet one thing that might help here is that during those times prior GHB, 40k and WHFB shared the same costumer base, so overall sales stayed the same with the loyal fans switching systems while those left being replaced with new and the overall numbers stayed the same

ehhh. I don't know that "they spent the money they were spending on WHFB previously on 40k instead" really flies as an explanation for why there wasn't a bigger decline. Aside from the fact that 40k was *also* seeing declining sales and a declining playerbase in that same timeframe, the fact of the matter is that WHFB was itself not selling particularly well prior to this point (it fell off of icv2s top 5 rankings some years prior, etc.). If there was a contingent of WHFB players who were spending regular sums of money on WHFB and then switched over to spending that money on 40k instead, there weren't very many of them. As WHFB supporters often say "there wasn't anything for WHFB to spend their money on because the game got no support." That isn't true, of course, it had the roughly the same average number of releases per year that 40k got, but the fact that so many people can't seem to remember those releases leads me to believe that it was stuff that didn't interest them enough to warrant them opening up their wallets to actually purchase them, which further reinforces the idea that there was not a large community of people actively chucking money at WHFB who then started chucking their money at 40k instead.

Also, on top of that, logic says that 40k and AoS *also* share overwhelmingly the same customer base. We can see the sales uptrend that occurred after GHB was released. Logic dictates that if revenues stayed consistent after WHFB died because WHFB players were spending their money on 40k instead, then it would have also stayed consistent after AoS released because it would have likewise been the same pool of money coming from the same pool of people.

EDIT - I should also mention that one accusation I saw particularly bitter fans of WHFB throw around back in the day was "They made AoS to appeal to 40k players". If so, then that would imply the crossover between 40k and WHFB players was minimal (I played both as did most WHFB players I know, though I definitely know a few who only played WHFB), whereas the crossover between AoS and 40k is much larger (I don't know anyone who plays AoS but doesn't also play 40k).

We are entering a new era now where a lot of people know WHFB based on the Total War game. More people know about warhammer in general so while I have no idea how well this will be received overall. Odds are good it can be more successful then the last iteration of WHFB.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

SamusDrake wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:

I don't really remember any outright insults, but the previous CEOs attitude (to which he made clear verbal/written statements to) was that they were a miniatures company and that only a minority of their customers actually played their games.

Oh, I see. Cheers.

There was that one investor report where Kirby was high on crack and said they sell to people genetically predisposed to hoard toys or some such, and also mentioned losing the Chapterhouse case because legislation was written with swine theft in mind, not IP.

I don't recall either of those. The one about Chapterhouse isn't really an insult to the playerbase though, more towards lawyers.

Disagree. I know plenty of people who got into 40k without having a community to play with. In my case, I *WAS* the entirety of my local Age of Sigmar community through the entirety of its first edition and through a good portion of 2nd edition. I didn't play my first game of AoS until like a year ago, simply because I couldn't find anyone to play with. A massive online presence is irrelevant if you have nobody to chuck dice with.

Thats fine. For a lot of other people thats not the case though. Whenever I am in a balance conversation in a forum, facebook, discord, wherever, inevitably there will always be responses that say "I dont care about balance, I just want to hang out with my friends playing what they are playing and chucking dice."

And when you talk about other rank and file games you get "lol, I'm not playing a game that no one else is playing or where I have to build a community. AOS / 40k I can get a game whenever I want."

Pretty much every time. For years and years. Enough that I know its a massive reason why a very large number of people play GW and not other games even when they like those other games more.

 auticus wrote:

AOS players dropping napalm on The Old World does not surprise me at all because no one wants their playerbase fragmenting off. There ARE a lot of AOS players that want to play the Old World, and that means less time for AOS (in some cases, people only play one game or another so thats a permanent loss for some). No matter how you slice it, its at the very least going to remove some players from the aos player pool for a time, and THAT is where a lot of the "its going to die lol" comments come from. A gatekeeping attempt to keep AOS the primary game.

I find this quite funny because I've not seen any large number of AoS hobbyists hoping for TOW to fail or being afraid it's going to kill AoS. In fact, all I have seen is legacy WHFB people baying for the death of AoS and praising GW for returning WHFB. The TOW Facebook group is particularly toxic towards AoS and I've seen more comments on how AoS sucks and should be replaced with TOW since its announcement, that it's kind of souring the whole thing for me. I love TW:WH and the Old World has its own merits as a setting but I'm not jumping into a community that's already filled with chuds before the game has even been released.

Whenever I am in a balance conversation in a forum, facebook, discord, wherever, inevitably there will always be responses that say "I dont care about balance, I just want to hang out with my friends playing what they are playing and chucking dice."

YOU LIE MISTER!

I am very active in online communities for these games, I have literally never once seen someone say that

chaos0xomega wrote:

Whenever I am in a balance conversation in a forum, facebook, discord, wherever, inevitably there will always be responses that say "I dont care about balance, I just want to hang out with my friends playing what they are playing and chucking dice."

YOU LIE MISTER!

I am very active in online communities for these games, I have literally never once seen someone say that

lol hahaha. Its all over the dakka aos forum. Like... in dozens if not hundreds of places over the years. There was a subsection in one of the total warhammer facebooks I'm in now on why balance is secondary to community. The TGA forums ... again littered everywhere. Commonly stated. The Conquest discord we talked about that fairly regularly. Same thing.

Its literally everywhere. If you have never seen anyone say that community is what matters most and balance is not their primary reason they play, you are simply willfully blinding yourself to it being said.

 Gert wrote:

 auticus wrote:

AOS players dropping napalm on The Old World does not surprise me at all because no one wants their playerbase fragmenting off. There ARE a lot of AOS players that want to play the Old World, and that means less time for AOS (in some cases, people only play one game or another so thats a permanent loss for some). No matter how you slice it, its at the very least going to remove some players from the aos player pool for a time, and THAT is where a lot of the "its going to die lol" comments come from. A gatekeeping attempt to keep AOS the primary game.

I find this quite funny because I've not seen any large number of AoS hobbyists hoping for TOW to fail or being afraid it's going to kill AoS. In fact, all I have seen is legacy WHFB people baying for the death of AoS and praising GW for returning WHFB. The TOW Facebook group is particularly toxic towards AoS and I've seen more comments on how AoS sucks and should be replaced with TOW since its announcement, that it's kind of souring the whole thing for me. I love TW:WH and the Old World has its own merits as a setting but I'm not jumping into a community that's already filled with chuds before the game has even been released.

Indeed. I've seen plenty on facebook - and in this thread - predicting or hoping for AoS demise. Admittedly I've seen a few predicting or hoping for TOWs demise as well, but an absolute minority by comparison. The overwhelming attitude of AoS fans interested in TOW - such as myself - is basically "calm the feth down and check your expectations". EDIT - I suppose to a WHFB diehard anything short of "hail our lord and savior, the second coming of Warhammer Fantasy Battle. May it deliver us from the great Satan of Age of Sigmar!" might seem like hate or a desire for TOW to die an inglorious death, but that perspective is a "you" problem.

 Gert wrote:

 auticus wrote:

AOS players dropping napalm on The Old World does not surprise me at all because no one wants their playerbase fragmenting off. There ARE a lot of AOS players that want to play the Old World, and that means less time for AOS (in some cases, people only play one game or another so thats a permanent loss for some). No matter how you slice it, its at the very least going to remove some players from the aos player pool for a time, and THAT is where a lot of the "its going to die lol" comments come from. A gatekeeping attempt to keep AOS the primary game.

I find this quite funny because I've not seen any large number of AoS hobbyists hoping for TOW to fail or being afraid it's going to kill AoS. In fact, all I have seen is legacy WHFB people baying for the death of AoS and praising GW for returning WHFB. The TOW Facebook group is particularly toxic towards AoS and I've seen more comments on how AoS sucks and should be replaced with TOW since its announcement, that it's kind of souring the whole thing for me. I love TW:WH and the Old World has its own merits as a setting but I'm not jumping into a community that's already filled with chuds before the game has even been released.

Confirmation bias is a thing. If you are on one side, you will not see what that side says so much as you will see what the other side, the side you don't like, says. The derogatory words being tossed like "chuds" from both sides only fuels it even more. I'm told multiple times a day by an AOS fan that WHFB is garbage and the old world will die followed by some unneccesary remark. I'm sure that whfb people still slag AOS for the same reason. Its no more or less in one camp or the other.

 auticus wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:

Whenever I am in a balance conversation in a forum, facebook, discord, wherever, inevitably there will always be responses that say "I dont care about balance, I just want to hang out with my friends playing what they are playing and chucking dice."

YOU LIE MISTER!

I am very active in online communities for these games, I have literally never once seen someone say that

lol hahaha. Its all over the dakka aos forum. Like... in dozens if not hundreds of places over the years. There was a subsection in one of the total warhammer facebooks I'm in now on why balance is secondary to community. The TGA forums ... again littered everywhere. Commonly stated. The Conquest discord we talked about that fairly regularly. Same thing.

Its literally everywhere. If you have never seen anyone say that community is what matters most and balance is not their primary reason they play, you are simply willfully blinding yourself to it being said.

citation needed. extraoridnary claims require extraordinary evidence.

post screenshots/links.

chaos0xomega wrote:

 auticus wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:

Whenever I am in a balance conversation in a forum, facebook, discord, wherever, inevitably there will always be responses that say "I dont care about balance, I just want to hang out with my friends playing what they are playing and chucking dice."

YOU LIE MISTER!

I am very active in online communities for these games, I have literally never once seen someone say that

lol hahaha. Its all over the dakka aos forum. Like... in dozens if not hundreds of places over the years. There was a subsection in one of the total warhammer facebooks I'm in now on why balance is secondary to community. The TGA forums ... again littered everywhere. Commonly stated. The Conquest discord we talked about that fairly regularly. Same thing.

Its literally everywhere. If you have never seen anyone say that community is what matters most and balance is not their primary reason they play, you are simply willfully blinding yourself to it being said.

citation needed. extraoridnary claims require extraordinary evidence.

post screenshots/links.

I've played this game before on here. I think even with you. Posting screenshots / links just gets the automatic rebuttal of "well yeah that was just ONE or TWO, its not a LOT". So I'll pass on your game. Anyone who has been around the internet reading wargaming content knows exactly what I'm talking about though. I'll sleep easy at night being ok with that.