The Accelerated Release Cycle

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**Arachnofiend**

A Town Called Malus wrote:
Ordana wrote:

But GW is a business. and edition churn makes more money.

If that was the case, then every RPG would have way more editions than they currently have. DnD has been around since 1974 and it is on its 5th edition. DnD also dwarfs any game made by GW in terms of market. 40K has been around since 1987 and is on it's 9th edition.

D&D is a pretty poor counter example, given that you could use the sheer weight of supplements JUST for 3.5 to bury a man alive.

**macluvin**

Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
Klickor wrote:
The amount of money the veterans at my club spend on 40k still after playing for over 30years make me wonder how many kids there have to be to equal them in spending. These are grown men with 1 hobby and don't spend much on anything else. You would probably need a bunch of kids for each veteran to keep up in spending. And these guys have been doing this for longer than I have been alive. Each of them should be worth at least the same as 40 kids being burned and churned.

A single veteran is probably worth a handful of kids at a time but will keep on for decades. Probably a bad idea to not cater to them enough and focus too much on the kids. Probably harder and harder to get the kids now a days as well when you have phones,iPads and way cooler video games than 20-30 years ago to compete with. Way cheaper as well.

I think it's much wiser to focus on the kids.

Relying on a cadre of old guard who've been playing for a long time is entirely unsustainable. They will all reach a point where they won't be spending any more money, either because they have all the things, are dead/no longer interested, or don't have the money and time to spend courtesy of having kids and the likes. When that happens, if you don't have new blood, you'll collapse.
Short term vs. long term. In the short term, you can get more by appealing to your long-time supporters, but if you want to do well in the long term, you want to bring in new supporters [at a higher rate].
Any hobby requires new people to last, and GW should absolutely be taking measures to make the hobby easier to get into.

They did take measures to make the hobby easier to get into by making kill teams and other skirmish scale games. Rules however are a vehicle to move models, as is the game as a whole. I really don’t understand what they are doing there and I absolutely refuse to invest my money in that, but somebody has to be because they keep doing it.
Seeing orkz get new kit and overhauls of old ones, and xenos get some sort of model release is nice though. Not to mention that as a chaos space marine player I was happy with my model line being overhauled as well. Rules could conceivably be fixed in local communities but wargaming communities are not anything at all like table top role playing communities. You could houserule anything you felt like as a ttrpg group and getting 5-8 people you play with every day to agree or at least be willing to try it. It is significantly easier than trying to with ten to twenty people you cycle through randomly for pickup games.

**Sim-Life**

AnomanderRake wrote:
Sim-Life wrote:
AnomanderRake wrote:
Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
...I think it's much wiser to focus on the kids...

I don't like that this has become mutually exclusive. As one of the old guard I resent that "focus on the kids" has come to mean "tell me to feth off", and "support the veterans" has become "get no new blood and therefore die as a game," the trade-off seems to always end with telling me to feth off.

If GW cared about veterans we'd have resculpted Aspect Warriors, resculpted Cadians etc. But veterans all own these already and they won't buy them as much as new players, so there's not as much profit in it as sculpting a new units that the vets also have to buy.

I don't think this is true. I think GW thinks it's true, yeah, but that's why they always seem to overproduce things like Stormcast and Primaris Marines, and underproduce things like Sisters and the new Vampire release that sell out immediately because veterans are going to jump headfirst into fancier sculpts for stuff they already have and like in addition to all the new people who pop up and think that looked cool. New players are easier to appeal to than old players. New players will buy resculpts because they're new and shiny, old players will buy resculpts because they liked the model already and now they get a fancier plastic version with newer and better rules. Sure, you'll always get holdouts who growl and say "gr, my metal Aspect Warriors that are now wildly out of scale with the rest of the game hanging off their lovingly-converted 25mm bases are fine, I'm not going to buy into the blatant cash grab!", but you weren't going to get them anyway. Also by resculpting WHFB stuff for Sigmar they capture people who played Total War (and don't appreciate being told all their cool stuff is OOP metal with terrible rules or doesn't exist anymore) and all the people who kept their WHFB armies to play 9th Age/KoW/oldhammer, neither of whom give a flying feth about fish-elves or Stormcast.

TL;DR: I don't think you lose new people by making cool new sculpts for old models, but you definitely lose old people by never updating old models.

Just speaking for myself but I haven't replaced any of my old metal Sisters with the new plastic ones, nor have I seen an increase in people selling them. If this were the case I would have expected a lot of people clearing out their old collections. Either that or they don't care about scale differences.

**Da Boss**

Arachnofiend wrote:
A Town Called Malus wrote:
Ordana wrote:

But GW is a business. and edition churn makes more money.

If that was the case, then every RPG would have way more editions than they currently have. DnD has been around since 1974 and it is on its 5th edition. DnD also dwarfs any game made by GW in terms of market. 40K has been around since 1987 and is on it's 9th edition.

D&D is a pretty poor counter example, given that you could use the sheer weight of supplements JUST for 3.5 to bury a man alive.

Nah, I disagree with that. Supplements are fine, it's changing the core rules that's the problem.

**Arachnofiend**

Well if that's your concern then you should consider that every numbered edition of D&D has been completely incompatible with the one before it; 4e was so incompatible with 3e that a lot of people got very mad, so mad that Paizo rose up to out-compete D&D for a time. 8e->9e doesn't even count as an edition change by d20 standards.

**Galas**

People is much more open to supplement material for RPG because those aren't competitive in nature.

If you lack some books or expansions but you are not interested in those clases, subclases, races, etc... whatever. But if your army has competitive rules in a supplement, not many people is confortable with the idea of missing out on that stuff.

**Grimskul**

Galas wrote:
People is much more open to supplement material for RPG because those aren't competitive in nature.

If you lack some books or expansions but you are not interested in those clases, subclases, races, etc... whatever. But if your army has competitive rules in a supplement, not many people is confortable with the idea of missing out on that stuff.

Yeah, there's definitely a bigger element of FOMO that makes them feel mandatory, especially if they're key to a central competitive build.

**Tyel**

I'd consider myself an old(ish) person and I'm far more interested in new stuff than getting new sculpts for models I already own.

Its like if you want to buy Fire Dragons, go buy some Fire Dragons. Sure finecast sucks, but the models are fine. The idea that a new plastic kit is going to somehow set the unit alight (assuming a 1:1 replacement) is lost on me.

Its like if GW finally *FINALLY* found the time to do some new DE stuff. And they went "yeah, plastic Court of the Archon and Plastic Beasts". Cue dramatic music.

But If I wanted to run those models, I've already sorted it out - and its very hard to see how those models would encourage someone to start a new DE army. (See similar thoughts on Incubi, who are at least now good enough that everyone probably wants to own a couple of squads and maybe didn't buy multiple finecast kits.) I'd much rather have something completely new and interesting that I can add to my army.

Then you have the issue of things like Necron flayed ones which I think are cool minis that have always been a cool concept (see Maynarkh etc) but have been priced such that the idea of running a flayer-heavy force is just financially ludicrous.

**Eldarsif**

Galas wrote:
People is much more open to supplement material for RPG because those aren't competitive in nature.

If you lack some books or expansions but you are not interested in those clases, subclases, races, etc... whatever. But if your army has competitive rules in a supplement, not many people is confortable with the idea of missing out on that stuff.

I am personally of the opinion that campaign books should be narrative only, especially in the light of GW being unable to balance them or playtest in any way.

**The Red Hobbit**

Arachnofiend wrote:
Well if that's your concern then you should consider that every numbered edition of D&D has been completely incompatible with the one before it; 4e was so incompatible with 3e that a lot of people got very mad, so mad that Paizo rose up to out-compete D&D for a time. 8e->9e doesn't even count as an edition change by d20 standards.

Not quite. I can use the 1st Ed books I inherited (and adventure modules) with the 2nd ed books I bought just fine. 8th -> 9th 40k is a lot like 3.0 -> 3.5 in D&D which despite the numbering was still an edition change, and had quite a bit of gnashing of teeth to go with it.

Tyel wrote:
I'd consider myself an old(ish) person and I'm far more interested in new stuff than getting new sculpts for models I already own.

Its like if you want to buy Fire Dragons, go buy some Fire Dragons. Sure finecast sucks, but the models are fine. The idea that a new plastic kit is going to somehow set the unit alight (assuming a 1:1 replacement) is lost on me.

Hard disagree on this. I like my fire dragons but I would gladly replace them with plastic rather than ever work with fine cast again. The only Aspects I don't plan on replacing are my Striking Scorpions since I prefer the look of the older style.

I've known a great many people who liked Eldar after seeing them in games like Dawn of War but would never in any way consider starting an army considering how old and poorly made the line is. Perceived value matters a lot to a customer and the Eldar line looks like a clearance item about to be discontinued. Making plastic models of a factions most iconic units will sell and it will sell well. Sisters are living proof of that after year and years of nay-sayers saying GW would never make plastic sisters because they won't get enough sales and they won't turn a profit on them.