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 Platuan4th wrote:
The studio also wrote the rules for Necromunda, Blood Bowl, and pretty much every other Specialist Game out currently. Having a team in the studio doesn't mean it's a main game anymore.

Erm, no they didn't. The Specialist Games Studio wrote the rules for the specialist games, funnily enough. When someone at GW talks about "the Studio" though, they mean the main GW Studio.

If they go the warmaster route for this new project, than the only reason why I would pick them up would be to use them in a map based campaign similar to what you see in the old Generals Compendium. This is basically what I do with what little warmaster miniatures that I scrounged around to find.

It's the only way I'd drop cash on it, personally.

I've got goblins a plenty, and having a current/widely played rulebook is a non issue for me. But if they dropped a plastic 6mm fantasy game I'd likely buy in heavy.

 Orlanth wrote:


5. All GW need to sell are a rulebook, army books and square bases. The outlay is relatively small.

You just torpedoed your own argument. GW is in the business of making money by selling miniatures. They aren't going to create a charity game where everyone buys a couple rulebooks and calls it a day. They are absolutely going to find a way to make sure that you buy an entire new set of minis, and chances are that will mean a scale change.

A three year load time will give GW a perfect opportujity to release all the books ofr 9th edition playtested and balanced. Meanwhile they can import ideas from fan continuations such as T9A and 8.5, as they are based on WHFB anyway GW can 'steal them back' without any recourse.

I will point out that GW at no point ever said anything about a ninth edition, or even a new edition of WHFB in general. They said they are giving us a game set in the Old World that uses square bases. Theres a lot of margin in those statements to release something that *isnt* a new edition of an old game.

Plus, the majority of the old models are plastic, and that's just a case of digging out the moulds and getting them ready to go once again.

Not quite. Molds take up a lot of real estate and its rare for most manufacturers to hold onto molds for product lines that are no longer being produced, especially since steel molds *do* in fact age and wear, and most plastics manufacturers don't have the equipment or training needed to repair and refurbish them themselves. Chances are your old Brettonian molds were melted down and are now being used to pump out Stormcast. Besides that, GW isn't going to spend 2-3 years working on a new game and not have a brand new range of models to sell you. Last thing GW wants is to lose potential sales to the secondary market or peoples attic collections.

us Nerds are chomping at the bit and dusting off existing armies.

Prematurely.

Some might even be planning updating some of their models in preparation.

Which simply isn't a smart thing to do without knowing some basics like how many models you need, what factions will be available to play, relevant wargear options, basing standards, etc.

Seriously guys, temper your expectations a bit here.

Eww, no. For one thing, I want to actually use my old warhammer models and while Forgeworld could undouptfully make new warhammer models they would probably sell a lot more if they were using the same scale as they always have. Trying to do it in epic scale would be a market flop.

I would kill for a proper 10-15mm warhammer fantasy set. Normally I would say its impossible that GW would depart from 28, but Titanicus and AI have proven me wrong there.

Whatever it is, old world stuff will always be welcome, even if just for the models to add to existing collections.

If "Warhammer: The Old World" and Titanicus are the same scale - 8mm - terrain would be cross compatible.

Except for being, you know, entirely the wrong aesthetic?

IF/When it comes in it's going to be a Mordheim release first I imagine. It's the easiest one to do and they already have a working model on how to sell it.

A single starter box, two plastic warbands a Rulebook and terrain.

After that we shall see what they decide to do but of all the games GW could release it's the one that makes the most sense. Especially since of all GW OOP games I imagine it is the one that people play the most.

Restarting WHFB again in a smaller scale would basically kill enthusiasm for it. I imagine most people would still very much like to use their old armies again. If that is removed as an option then this whole project will fail.

What if this is the most drawn out and cruel of their April Fools jokes and it's just Dreadfleet?

I just keep coming back to the square base thing.

Why would they store up so much trouble for themselves by teasing the product with the classic square base if they were planning to do Mordheim(which they could have done on rounds easily enough), or Warmaster(which uses an entirely different style of base)?

 Yodhrin wrote:

Why would they store up so much trouble for themselves by teasing the product with the classic square base if they were planning to do Mordheim(which they could have done on rounds easily enough), or Warmaster(which uses an entirely different style of base)?

Where is the square base teaser?

The very first announcement we got for this was a GW Facebook post that had a pic of a square infantry base, non-slotted, with the text "Everything comes round again. Even squares."

You know all this talk of square and round bases I think GW is going to do something unique! Trapezium bases! Forget squares or circles or even hexagons - Trapeziums are the future of Wargaming!

chaos0xomega wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:


5. All GW need to sell are a rulebook, army books and square bases. The outlay is relatively small.

You just torpedoed your own argument. GW is in the business of making money by selling miniatures. They aren't going to create a charity game where everyone buys a couple rulebooks and calls it a day. They are absolutely going to find a way to make sure that you buy an entire new set of minis, and chances are that will mean a scale change.

No I haven't torpedoes my argument. Reread. I mentioned outlay, not profits. Ouytlay means things GW needs to themselves pay for. The miniatures they have already got. So therei s no outlay for masking an Empire army, the design work, sculpts, tooling etc is already done.

chaos0xomega wrote:

A three year load time will give GW a perfect opportujity to release all the books ofr 9th edition playtested and balanced. Meanwhile they can import ideas from fan continuations such as T9A and 8.5, as they are based on WHFB anyway GW can 'steal them back' without any recourse.

I will point out that GW at no point ever said anything about a ninth edition, or even a new edition of WHFB in general. They said they are giving us a game set in the Old World that uses square bases. Theres a lot of margin in those statements to release something that *isnt* a new edition of an old game.

Yes they might do an AoS ruleset, but why use square bases for it?

chaos0xomega wrote:

Plus, the majority of the old models are plastic, and that's just a case of digging out the moulds and getting them ready to go once again.

Not quite. Molds take up a lot of real estate and its rare for most manufacturers to hold onto molds for product lines that are no longer being produced, especially since steel molds *do* in fact age and wear, and most plastics manufacturers don't have the equipment or training needed to repair and refurbish them themselves. Chances are your old Brettonian molds were melted down and are now being used to pump out Stormcast. Besides that, GW isn't going to spend 2-3 years working on a new game and not have a brand new range of models to sell you. Last thing GW wants is to lose potential sales to the secondary market or peoples attic collections.

Nope. GW keeps its tools until they are too worn, for plastic molding tools this covers a lot of uses but they can and do wear. For resin and metal tools the wear is faster but GW keeps masters. We know this is true because every now and then they do a limited production ruin of an old miniature for two weeks and sell them on their online store.



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 Just Tony wrote:
The very first announcement we got for this was a GW Facebook post that had a pic of a square infantry base, non-slotted, with the text "Everything comes round again. Even squares."

Thanks for that.

I imagine most people would still very much like to use their old armies again. If that is removed as an option then this whole project will fail.

If they were creating a project that essentially let people not buy product and just buy a book and keep playing with old models, that would be a financial flop for the company.

So I'm in the I don't think thats going to happen boat.

 auticus wrote:

I imagine most people would still very much like to use their old armies again. If that is removed as an option then this whole project will fail.

If they were creating a project that essentially let people not buy product and just buy a book and keep playing with old models, that would be a financial flop for the company.

So I'm in the I don't think thats going to happen boat.

Perhaps they are capable of grasping the idea that people will buy the new products if they're good and have an appropriate price. Perhaps they realise that they can make a system like WHFB profitable in the way it was around 5th/6th with a combination of new people buying an army from scratch and existing people buying additional armies, since they were of reasonable size at the time, rather than the 7th/8th game-killing method of trying to force players into continually expanding one army.

People don't like to feel they're being forced to spend money, but they're perfectly willing to spend it if the appeal is there, even for things they don't need.

 auticus wrote:

I imagine most people would still very much like to use their old armies again. If that is removed as an option then this whole project will fail.

If they were creating a project that essentially let people not buy product and just buy a book and keep playing with old models, that would be a financial flop for the company.

So I'm in the I don't think thats going to happen boat.

You sure, some manufacturers make most of their money on the books and not the models. Battletech is 90% reading material 10% miniatures, the miniatures are also outsourced and always have been.

This is only half the issue though, Not only would GW get a slew of money from sales of books, they will also get to sell armies, for lines that are already existent. Lets take a faction at random. While more people may be tempted into playing AoS because of the loweer entry requirement a lot of the income comes from whales, and miniatures whales are not merely interested in an army of a dozen AoS Ogors, they want sixty WHFB Ogres instead/aswell.

Thirdly this will help kill off or reduce a competition industry revolving around alternate mass battle fantasy games.

Bottom line is I really cant see how you get the idea that just because GW's only necessary outlay is on new edition books, (though they will of course do more) that books will be all that is sold.


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 Yodhrin wrote:

 auticus wrote:

I imagine most people would still very much like to use their old armies again. If that is removed as an option then this whole project will fail.

If they were creating a project that essentially let people not buy product and just buy a book and keep playing with old models, that would be a financial flop for the company.

So I'm in the I don't think thats going to happen boat.

Perhaps they are capable of grasping the idea that people will buy the new products if they're good and have an appropriate price. Perhaps they realise that they can make a system like WHFB profitable in the way it was around 5th/6th with a combination of new people buying an army from scratch and existing people buying additional armies, since they were of reasonable size at the time, rather than the 7th/8th game-killing method of trying to force players into continually expanding one army.

People don't like to feel they're being forced to spend money, but they're perfectly willing to spend it if the appeal is there, even for things they don't need.

I think a return to 6th would be a mistake. 6th was the natural evolution from 5th which was a compounded edition going back to 3rd. 8th is to a large extent based on 6th just expanded in the same way 5th was. There needs to be a moving forward.
9th needs to fix mistakes, and launch with factions scalable and balanced. Yes you want the feel of 6th but you also want the feel of 8th and 8th is bigger and thus more of an investment. GW can solve the pros and cons of both simply by making the game scalable properly. Rather than have Army and Grand army there should be a table of availability at each 500pts level, so a 1500pt battle is balanced for 1500pts and a 200pt battle is balanced for 2000pts.
This would fix all the issues. Simply make it impossible to make an 8th scale deathstar in a list too small to handle it, however don't prevent the ramp up for those who have content to match. The game got progressively bigger over time, I remember when in 4th a unit of 20 Empire infantry was large.

If the Old World is small scale, I'll probably send them a nice and lovely letter full of lovely french canadian swear words.

 Eldarain wrote:
What if this is the most drawn out and cruel of their April Fools jokes and it's just Dreadfleet?

LOL. Not even a new print run of Dreadfleet. Just some spares they found buried in the warehouse marketed as limited edition.

Orlanth wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
The very first announcement we got for this was a GW Facebook post that had a pic of a square infantry base, non-slotted, with the text "Everything comes round again. Even squares."

Thanks for that.

You're welcome.

Orlanth wrote:I think a return to 6th would be a mistake. 6th was the natural evolution from 5th which was a compounded edition going back to 3rd. 8th is to a large extent based on 6th just expanded in the same way 5th was. There needs to be a moving forward.
9th needs to fix mistakes, and launch with factions scalable and balanced. Yes you want the feel of 6th but you also want the feel of 8th and 8th is bigger and thus more of an investment. GW can solve the pros and cons of both simply by making the game scalable properly. Rather than have Army and Grand army there should be a table of availability at each 500pts level, so a 1500pt battle is balanced for 1500pts and a 200pt battle is balanced for 2000pts.
This would fix all the issues. Simply make it impossible to make an 8th scale deathstar in a list too small to handle it, however don't prevent the ramp up for those who have content to match. The game got progressively bigger over time, I remember when in 4th a unit of 20 Empire infantry was large.

First, 6th ia universally hailed by everyone, even people that HATE the ruleset, as the most balanced edition in existence before AB Creep detonated the scales. Why WOULDN'T they go back to that? It'd take minimal work to fine tune it, and I'm pretty sure there's probably some pdfs laying around from that time so all they'd have to do is edit.

Second, you could scale down with 6th easily enough. Our games were just as viable at 500 as they were at 5,000. The internal balances kept everything tidy, and the only real issues were later down the line when we started to get some truly pants on head army books in regards to the rest from that edition.


I realize everyone has their favorite edition, but to me it looks like unless they plan on reinventing the ruleset from the ground up, this'd be the best place to start.

I think they should start with 9th.

The benefit of 6th is that it started from scratch, Tuomas Pirinen was given a carte blanche to redesign the ruleset. They are looking at a three year development cycle for this new game, this implies pretesting and development.

Going back to 6th is going back, 7th and 8th are extensions of 6th so they are also going back. 9th should be based on itself, but should have 8th as some sort of reference point as the most recent edition, but that need go no further than a start point for any review of "what's changed?"

 Strombones wrote:

 Eldarain wrote:
What if this is the most drawn out and cruel of their April Fools jokes and it's just Dreadfleet?

LOL. Not even a new print run of Dreadfleet. Just some spares they found buried in the warehouse marketed as limited edition.

You joke but I can go to all 3 Local Stores near my house and each one still has a box on the shelf so...

Also WHFB, when it returns, will not at all be like it was before. Similarities? Yes, absolutely. But the design team had really dug themselves into a rules hole with 8th and a few years away from the game and a redesign from the top down is definitely in order.

 Orlanth wrote:


No I haven't torpedoes my argument. Reread. I mentioned outlay, not profits. Ouytlay means things GW needs to themselves pay for. The miniatures they have already got. So therei s no outlay for masking an Empire army, the design work, sculpts, tooling etc is already done.

Fair enough, I misunderstood - BUT this is still a faulty argument. The existing minis are old, many of them are discontinued permanently (more on this later). If the plan is to do more than a couple of factions than they will need to do entirely new miniatures ranges, and even those mini ranges that haven't been discontinued are for the most part fairly incomplete which means new sculpts will be needed. The "outlay" will be pretty significant.

Yes they might do an AoS ruleset, but why use square bases for it?

I didn't say anything about them using AoS ruleset. They could do something new entirely, or revisit an older ruleset... like, say, warmaster.

Nope. GW keeps its tools until they are too worn, for plastic molding tools this covers a lot of uses but they can and do wear. For resin and metal tools the wear is faster but GW keeps masters. We know this is true because every now and then they do a limited production ruin of an old miniature for two weeks and sell them on their online store.

I know for a fact that this is not the case. Everything that has gone on "last chance to buy" is exactly that - a last chance to buy. They destroy and recycle the molds after they are gone, this includes the masters for resin/metal kits, as well as the steel production molds for plastic injection kits. The lack of space available for mold storage was one of the motivating factors in both their decision to begin discontinuing products through "last chance to buy" sales and to construct the annex onto their facility, as they were running out of space for molds for kits that are in active production, let alone the outdated kits that they kept in storage.

Battletech is 90% reading material 10% miniatures, the miniatures are also outsourced and always have been.

Battletech is a terrible example to use to support your argument - theres a reason why the property has bounced around from company to company for the last 30+ years, in large part due to the lack of profitability that resulted from the outsourced model range. Theres a reason why Catalyst has only within the past couple years (finally) started to give the game more love after a decade of neglect, and it has everything to do with them finally being able to produce the minis "in-house" (which itself was a challenge as they had to figure out ways to get around the legal chokehold that the licensing agreements had placed on their ability to produce and sell the minis directly).

In general, almost every "book only" game out there is a small mom and pop garage operation that does it for the love of the hobby and struggles to make money in the process, not a publicly traded corporation with hundreds of millions in annual revenue.

While more people may be tempted into playing AoS because of the loweer entry requirement a lot of the income comes from whales, and miniatures whales are not merely interested in an army of a dozen AoS Ogors, they want sixty WHFB Ogres instead/aswell.

The whales already have 60+ WHFB Ogres. i know this because I am a whale myself, and likewise already own 60+ Ogres (actually more than double that, but whos counting). They aren't going to sell existing minis to people that already have them in droves, thats silly. if they want to capture money from the whales they will need to sell them new minis.

Thirdly this will help kill off or reduce a competition industry revolving around alternate mass battle fantasy games.

That competition is virtually non-existent anyway and no longer in direct competition with GW as a result of the transition to Age of Sigmar. ASOIF might be growing in popularity, but I'd hardly describe it as a mass battle game and it appeals to a different audience and market than WHFB anyway. Kings of War is a less-than-popular game with meh-level minis that most people don't use because they'd rather convert old GW minis anyway (i.e. Kings of War has been helping drive GWs own sales for years now). They have nothing to gain by quashing competition in this market.

In any case, be realistic. The warcom post gave them a 3 year MINIMUM to get a new game to market. It does not take 3 years for GW to produce a couple rulebooks (especially not if they were revamping an existing game system ala 9th edition WHFB) and square bases for release. Its pretty clear to me that the timespan to release is indicative of something a bit more involved than what you propose, which likely will involee a significant amount of time in both rules and miiniatures development. It only takes about 12 to 18 months for GW to write a new edition to an existing game (as we have been told in past Q&As and seminars etc at various events), so that all but rules out the likelihood of it being a new edition of WHFB - and in any case, the fact that the game is branded "Warhammer The Old World" as opposed to "Warhammer Fantasy Battles" seems to me to be a pretty clear indication as to the direction things are going in. GW wouldn't create a new trademark for an old game - no company would, it completely runs against all logic and established best practices for branding and marketing to do so.

chaos0xomega wrote:

That competition is virtually non-existent anyway and no longer in direct competition with GW as a result of the transition to Age of Sigmar. ASOIF might be growing in popularity, but I'd hardly describe it as a mass battle game and it appeals to a different audience and market than WHFB anyway. Kings of War is a less-than-popular game with meh-level minis that most people don't use because they'd rather convert old GW minis anyway (i.e. Kings of War has been helping drive GWs own sales for years now). They have nothing to gain by quashing competition in this market.

This is exactly the thinking that led Kirby & Co to limit support for and eventually squat all the Specialist Games. It was wrong then(as evidenced by the company's total volte face), and it's wrong in this instance as well.

The reason GW would and should want to squash competition in any subsector of the market is simple - every person who is buying/playing outside of the GW ecosystem is a person who's continually at risk of slipping away from GW entirely, and is also potentially an evangelist that's converting customers presently fully within the GW ecosystem into more people like them.

It's not as much about the profitability of a given system, or whether competitors in a given subsector are a genuine economic threat to GW's main product lines, it's about creating a situation where typical GW customers never feel the need to look outside of the company's own offerings, which ensures none of their competitors will ever become a genuine economic threat to their main product lines. If they can offer a product that caters to a niche-within-the-niche market, then providing it would be at least a break-even proposition(both in relation to it's own R&D and in terms of any "cannibalisation" effect from the main lines) it's always going to be better to do that than to allow potential future rivals a space where they can begin constructing their own brand and customer base in relative safety and then be waiting there in the wings to pounce if GW make a miscalculation or experience some misfortune.

For those of you still beating that Warmaster drum: don't. They showed either a 20 or 25mm infantry base, not a Warmaster stand. I realize that for the 7 of you that play it, Warmaster is a big deal. For all the people who GW are trying to entice back, changing the scale AND the play system is a non-starter.

 Just Tony wrote:
For those of you still beating that Warmaster drum: don't. They showed either a 20 or 25mm infantry base, not a Warmaster stand. I realize that for the 7 of you that play it, Warmaster is a big deal. For all the people who GW are trying to entice back, changing the scale AND the play system is a non-starter.

So... Im guessing you've never played anything other than a GW game? Usually smaller scale games use 20-25mm sized bases with multiple figures to a base. The dimensions of the base are wholly irrelevant to the scale of the model that gets put on them.

Also, I've never played warmaster - I just can't see GW releasing a game that is both going to compete with Age of Sigmar and also not going to generate any additional sales by allowing people to use their existing miniature collections with it.

chaos0xomega wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
For those of you still beating that Warmaster drum: don't. They showed either a 20 or 25mm infantry base, not a Warmaster stand. I realize that for the 7 of you that play it, Warmaster is a big deal. For all the people who GW are trying to entice back, changing the scale AND the play system is a non-starter.

So... Im guessing you've never played anything other than a GW game? Usually smaller scale games use 20-25mm sized bases with multiple figures to a base. The dimensions of the base are wholly irrelevant to the scale of the model that gets put on them.

Also, I've never played warmaster - I just can't see GW releasing a game that is both going to compete with Age of Sigmar and also not going to generate any additional sales by allowing people to use their existing miniature collections with it.

First, playing other games is irrelevant. GW showed a base that it's famous for using with it's WFB system, while it has an existing base system for its Epic and Warmaster ranges should it choose to go that route.

Second, why would GW essentially release Warmaster without calling it Warmaster? They would generate far less good will with a bait and switch on that level.

Third, who's to say that WOW will compete with AOS? Obviously you have two drastically different markets, two drastically different thematic and aesthetic universes, and two drastically different modes of play.

Fourth, who says they aren't going to do this in such a way to convince/persuade/entice people to get new models? Why would you also assume that someone wouldn't, say, buy a second, third, or fourth army? People do it in 40K all the time, and it wasn't unheard of before 8th in WFB either.


I just think people are connecting dots that don't connect solely based on vested interests rather than what GW appears to be doing.