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I don't see the issue, Kitchencounter Wars is a fine name and easy to remember.

I went there this morning and thought I'd accidentally gone to myminifactory.com.

 kirotheavenger wrote:

 Mallo wrote:
It feels a lot more like a company moving into wanting to make a lot more money/be their own brand and wanting to take away 'hammer' from their name to avoid being stepped on by the usual sort of attention companies get from GW when doing so, and hiding behind the sillier part of their name to make it less noticeable.

The new name feels horribly generic to the point of meaninglessness. But I'm sure they wanted to ride the popularity of their app, and they're not the first ones to rebrand from a recognisable name to such a bland one. I wonder if that's part of the point? They want to capture those googling generic things about their new hobby. Whereas the only people who would google anything close to "goonhammer" would be those already familiar with them or terminally online degenerates.

Sure, people wouldn't search for "Goonhammer", but that won't be what their traffic comes from: it's people specifically searching for, e.g., Necromunda content. Which will direct to their Necromunda articles. (I think that's how I first found them myself. And remembered them, because of the memorable name, which made me visit more often when noticing their results in other search results...) They don't need to have "Necromunda" as part of their website domain name to achieve that, and neither do they need to be called "Tabletop Battles" for people searching for, erm, "tabletop battles" I guess, to find them.

Such a lame rebrand attempt. Completely forgettable.
I had already slowed down visiting their site due to the increase of less interesting content, perfunctory model reviews, and excessive banner & popup ads.

They are barely above Spiky Bits and at the level that Bell of Lost Souls reached.
Both of which have god-awful amounts of adverts on their sites.

The adverts and monetization attempts of all have directly lead to me only frequenting Dakka, discord, and reddit for my miniatures info fix.

I barely read their warhammer coverage but their other stuff is usually pretty interesting (I thoroughly enjoy that one guy's visits to historic ships, for example), and realise that only exists at all because they make their money off warhammer coverage primarily.

In that sense, dropping the -hammer part both makes sense (they cover other stuff) but I do wonder what that does to their general recognition amongst the warhammer people that prop up the other content I like. Then again, I was recently talking to a couple people, one in their 30s and one nearing 50, about 40k and they have no problem associating New Recruit with 40k army building, even though that name doesn't suggest it either (and also supports other games, much like the site formerly known as goonhammer). So maybe we're all making a mountain out of a molehill. But man it's annoying to talk about Tabletop Battles' latest article on this or that thing (and not tabletop tactics, tabletop minions, ontabletop, etc. etc.)

Dropping the goon is what it is; dakka (an internet message board - try explaining that to your kids without a reddit reference), where many of us are older than the first rhino kit, is not a useful place to determine contemporary search term use.

I like their Codex reviews, so fewer dexes lately has meant fewer visits. One of the things that made their Dex rviews so good for me is that each dex got a general review and a review focused exclusively on the Crusade content in the dex.

These reviews tended to land before the book was widely available, so knowing the quality of the Crusade content helped me make decisions about whether or not to buy.

I will likely continue to use the site for this purpose despite the name change; I think it was a mistake to change it, and I think the new name is weak, but that doesn't really impact my decision about whether or not to visit.

I usually think of Goon in reference to Hockey, but even that is a thing of the past..... the new version of the term is indeed problematic. However, language changes as it is a living, breathing human thing.

I like what they're doing, especially since there's not much competition in properly written Codex reviews anymore. For everything you can get unbearable Youtube videos, but a nicely written Review that takes me a quarter of the time to read than listening to some bloke on youtube is rare these days. (Btw even proper reviews on youtube seem to be rare, every Video has to be titled: this codex will crush 40K!!!!111 with the corresponding useless babble instead of useful information)
The new name though? Yeah, I'm with everybody else on that one.

 skrulnik wrote:
They are barely above Spiky Bits and at the level that Bell of Lost Souls reached.

The mere mention of the Bell of Lost Souls site caused a virus warning to pop up on my computer.

RIP Goonhammer, I thought everyone knew it was named after people who used to be something awful forum goons.

Thing is they are likely thinking of newblood gamers. Younger people who are going to be a big bread-and-butter target for them as users who are going to be more interested in articles and reports and such when getting into gaming.

Those newer generations coming in who perhaps have less connection to a word that isn't really used any more and which when it is used in modern parlance has started to shift in its meaning. Or at least gain a new meaning.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
I like what they're doing, especially since there's not much competition in properly written Codex reviews anymore. For everything you can get unbearable Youtube videos, but a nicely written Review that takes me a quarter of the time to read than listening to some bloke on youtube is rare these days. (Btw even proper reviews on youtube seem to be rare, every Video has to be titled: this codex will crush 40K!!!!111 with the corresponding useless babble instead of useful information)
The new name though? Yeah, I'm with everybody else on that one.

That's essentially how I feel about them too. It's not exactly the most intellectually stimulating stuff out there, but it's a decent bit better than your average Youtube video.

It's funny, I'm pretty critical of GW but I see a lot of extremely over the top stuff on youtube all the time for the main games. And then for any side games it's either all positive or at best extremely superficial.

And I tend to find that coverage of non-GW games is almost overwhelmingly positive to the point where it's a bit suspicious. Like I know Warcrow had loads of production issues and charges an arm and a leg, but I haven't seen that mentioned in any of the videos I've seen about it.

At least Goonhammer also does articles on historicals and battletech and so on.

I'm still not the biggest fan, but it's not terrible by the standards of the modern internet.

BanjoJohn wrote:
RIP Goonhammer, I thought everyone knew it was named after people who used to be something awful forum goons.

At this point this is probably more people, and by a wide margin, that have never even heard of Something Awful than those who know a niche reference to their forums.

 Da Boss wrote:

And I tend to find that coverage of non-GW games is almost overwhelmingly positive to the point where it's a bit suspicious. Like I know Warcrow had loads of production issues and charges an arm and a leg, but I haven't seen that mentioned in any of the videos I've seen about it.

Well there's basically "no money" in fantasy/scifi content creation unless you're doing it for the really big name (ergo GW). So a lot of the time the only channels you get pushing smaller firms are basically die-hard fans of those games. They want the game to do well because they really like it so focus on the positive side. With GW its different because its the "Main brand" that the algorithm helps push; heck it does so well that negative/emotive articles are a thing which is why you've whole channels dedicated to negativity where every article is framed as a "This new game will Kill GW" and "GWs latest release a disaster" and "The End of GW is around the corner".


As for cost, honestly that feels like a dead horse that's been beaten to death so long we don't even have the bones left. People have whined about GW costing too much since the 90s; and its my observation that, at least in the UK, their prices are high yes, but other games also cost. Esp any game that requires an army - the only ones that are "super cheap" are either 3D printable only games (which have hidden costs in machine setup; problem solving failures; having to set aside a room/shed for printing etc); or super small skirmishers where you might only need one or two models to make a force. Thus are cheap purely because you're basically putting very little on the table.

 Ahtman wrote:

BanjoJohn wrote:
RIP Goonhammer, I thought everyone knew it was named after people who used to be something awful forum goons.

At this point this is probably more people, and by a wide margin, that have never even heard of Something Awful than those who know a niche reference to their forums.

Kids these days don't even know what a forum is.

Billicus wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:

BanjoJohn wrote:
RIP Goonhammer, I thought everyone knew it was named after people who used to be something awful forum goons.

At this point this is probably more people, and by a wide margin, that have never even heard of Something Awful than those who know a niche reference to their forums.

Kids these days don't even know what a forum is.

1) Ouch

and

2) Yeah

It's fascinating to see half the people in this thread saying, "Yeah, I see why they changed the name," and the other half saying, "What's the problem with the old name?" We're watching language evolve in real time!

I'm aware of the new slang meaning of 'goon' (or more accurately 'gooner' and 'gooning'), but as far as I know it's only become prevalent over the last 1-2 years. At first it seemed to be limited to certain districts of Reddit. Then I noticed it popping up in Youtube anime reviews. Then some popular influencers / Youtube celebs started using it, and now it's all over the place. Being old and decrepit I probably missed a lot of the other social media contagion vectors, but Google's AI search response knew what it meant when I typed it in.

It has an entry on the Wikipedia disambiguation page, for anyone unfamiliar with the new meaning. Generally it's used in a derogatory sense.

A line in Futurama now makes younger viewers snicker for completely unintended reasons: Bender joins the robot mafia and says "I've always wanted to break into gooning!"

Never knew the site's name was originally a Something Awful reference, though.

Zenithfleet wrote:

A line in Futurama now makes younger viewers snicker for completely unintended reasons: Bender joins the robot mafia and says "I've always wanted to break into gooning!"

It's even better when you know about a certain comic from the late 90s



Personally, I think it's a terrible trend I have no idea where the etymology lies. How does one look at a word that is meant to refer to a thug and decide that it should now mean...self-maintenance?
It doesn't make sense and just ruins a perfectly good word that had an established meaning and was used quite often in earlier media.

But then again, I suppose it's called "Brain-Rot" for a reason. How I miss mid to late 2000s meme culture...things were simpler back then. Just silly cats wanting Cheeseburgers.

Zenithfleet wrote:
It's fascinating to see half the people in this thread saying, "Yeah, I see why they changed the name," and the other half saying, "What's the problem with the old name?" We're watching language evolve in real time!

I'm aware of the new slang meaning of 'goon' (or more accurately 'gooner' and 'gooning'), but as far as I know it's only become prevalent over the last 1-2 years. At first it seemed to be limited to certain districts of Reddit. Then I noticed it popping up in Youtube anime reviews. Then some popular influencers / Youtube celebs started using it, and now it's all over the place. Being old and decrepit I probably missed a lot of the other social media contagion vectors, but Google's AI search response knew what it meant when I typed it in.

It has an entry on the Wikipedia disambiguation page, for anyone unfamiliar with the new meaning. Generally it's used in a derogatory sense.

A line in Futurama now makes younger viewers snicker for completely unintended reasons: Bender joins the robot mafia and says "I've always wanted to break into gooning!"

Never knew the site's name was originally a Something Awful reference, though.

Exactly my thoughts. watching the generation divide in real time is fascinating (no shade intended, I'm in my late 40s). I think Goon / Gooning as a sex related thing actually entered regular parlance on 4chan (like so many of the internet's less salubrious additions to the lexicon ) then followed on to Reddit, then (or at the same time) became a porn search term, then it entered the wider conciousness in the last year-ish. Probably around the time the site in question started considering a name change...

I assume Arsenal fans aren't exactly thrilled at recent linguistic developments either

That's a pretty stupid reason, since it's only specific circles who use it to refer to "perverts".

That said, it always made them sound like douchebags, so the name change is good overall.

Language does indeed change over time, and I can see why the felt it was necessary to drop the old moniker. ‘Tabletop Battles’ is about as bland as you can get though, whether it’s the name of their app, or not.

The writer and podcaster formerly known as Pimpcron eventually changed his name as well. While hilarious to a degree, it’s easy to see how the change away from a @@@ trafficking alien robot was probably a good and necessary decision.

To me it's less about moving away from goonhammer (which was completely fine, stick to your guns, but whatever) and more about the utterly generic name they ended up going with.
To use the vernacular they're going for, peak corposlop.

Changing the name makes perfect sense. It's like how the original Transformers fan site back in the early days of the internet was called 'transfans', which obviously would get different visitors these days to back then.

Yes context changes, it's interesting how less tolerating we have become and so much more radicalised we are now, its almost like Memes and social media trend tabus are running our lives...

I still think Internet Filters may be a factor.

For instance, at work I sent an email to Virgin Bank. Which was filter blocked for abusive language.

One ticket to IT later, and that was sorted. But for something with Goon in its name?

I think whilst most of us can be old and grumpy at a word changing meaning without it being "within our social circles/control" we can accept that the word has gained a new and growing meaning; even if just in online circles.


I don't think many of us take issue with wanting to move a brand away from a word evolving like that when the brand is no way near big enough to reverse that change.

It's just bafflement at them going from a very unique and easy to remember name that worked for them; to something that's so generic most of their competition will use it as titles on their videos/articles and so forth.

Crispy78 wrote:
I assume Arsenal fans aren't exactly thrilled at recent linguistic developments either

I had always assumed that that's how Goonhammer had the name in the first place, never actually checked the reality of it. There's a small part of me that's never liked it just because I don't like Arsenal turns out it's nothing to do with it.

Got to say of all the alternatives they could have come up with "Tabletop Battles" is the blandest option.

I'm sorry, I don't follow British Football, do Arsenal fans call themselves goons?

Gooners. A corruption of Gunners, I presume.