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So in the Kirby thread, he’s taking a pretty well earned shellacking.
Under Rountree, GW seems to be listening to market feedback on many things except for pricing.
But there’s also some discontent with 9th, necromunda and the advent of the $300 boxed set.
What grade do you think he’s earned?

C, maybe a C+. He's at least doing the absolute bare minimum required for a business in 2022 by having a basic social media presence and he gets some credit for diversifying the product lines instead of abandoning entire market segments to rival companies. But he's doing a poor HR job and allowing incompetent game designers to stay around for too long (perhaps out of inappropriate loyalty to friends?) and drive the core product line into the ground, raising some serious questions about the sustainability of the current plan. I suspend judgement on his handling of the Brexit debacle and global supply chain issues because I don't have enough inside information to divide blame for GW's issues between GW's own poor decisions and unavoidable circumstances beyond their control. Overall he's probably doing an adequate job of keeping the CEO chair warm, but I'm not at all convinced that he's doing anything to justify his salary compared to a cheaper replacement.

New boss slowly becoming same as the old boss.

 privateer4hire wrote:

What grade do you think he’s earned?

A+.

GW pumps out so much content, I can't keep up. Literally. Something new every week. I remember, for decades, you'd be lucky to get something new every few months, and HOPE it wasn't a new Marine kit. Eldar just got updated after what, 25 years? As a ex Dark Eldar player who had to wait 12 years for a new codex, you kids don't know how good you have it.

Not only Squats, but League of Voltann? So Squats literally came back in Necromunda, and their fluff was justified through a new "squat" army in 40k fluff?

Bro, pinch me. I must be dreaming.

I'm drowning in wonderful plastic crack!

CadianSgtBob wrote:

But he's doing a poor HR job and allowing incompetent game designers to stay around for too long (perhaps out of inappropriate loyalty to friends?) and drive the core product line into the ground, raising some serious questions about the sustainability of the current plan.

This whole idea of "incompetent game designers" is a myth and needs to be put to bed.

Mistakes do get made, actual mistakes, sure. A system as complex as the 40K ruleset is always going to throw a few bugs and typographical errors will happen.

But people that seem to think the designers are incompetent are simply misidentifying the objective.

GW does not want 40K to become balanced. While perfect balance isn't really anything but a theoretical construct, much like the horizon it's possible to continually journey towards it without actually reaching it. But unlike the horizon, it's, again, theoretically, a fixed point which it's possible to get closer to.

However, as one gets closer and closer to the point of balance, the need for changes becomes less and the scale of change smaller.

GW does not want this.

GW need their games, especially 40K as the cash cow, to be in a constant state of flux. Release rules, sell models, "fix" rules, sell different models, change rules, sell models, update rules, sell more models.

GW design studio is operating precisely as intended.

From my limited perspective Kirby was all about streamlining and mercilessly killing products which didn’t meet sales expectations, for example Warhammer Fantasy. Since he stepped down we’ve seen the return of Necromunda, Adeptus Titanicus, Aeronautica Imperialis, as well as numerous other launches. Not forgetting the planned return of Warhammer Fantasy. For this at least I applaud him for giving us what we want.

Of course it doesn’t take a genius to choke down some ‘member berries and give consumers what they want (hello Squats). Still it was something that Kirby was unwilling to do, and actively fought against.

There are certainly flaws in the way the core games are going, most notably 9th edition 40K. Despite much belly aching 8th certainly seemed to be taking the game in an interesting direction, a lot of the goodwill generated from that has gone now, with no sign that 10th edition will change things for the better.

People have been complaining about GW succeeding in spite of itself for time immemorial, many of the complaints are justified of course. Still I’m not sure how much of the current issues are down to Rountree himself. He’s only one man after all, he needs to rely on his managers to do their jobs too. Having worked for large companies myself (larger than GW, so my perspective may not be very relevant) I know how difficult it is to trickle down a change in mindset and company culture.

I also don’t think we can criticise Rountree for continuing to increase prices. With demand often outstripping supply it would be almost irresponsible for him not to allow regular price increases.

 Azreal13 wrote:
GW does not want 40K to become balanced.

Balance is only a small part of the incompetence I'm talking about. IGOUGO, rules bloat, abandoning entire factions for years at a time, inability to figure out what scale 40k is supposed to be, etc. All of those are issues regardless of the state of tournament balance.

GW need their games, especially 40K as the cash cow, to be in a constant state of flux. Release rules, sell models, "fix" rules, sell different models, change rules, sell models, update rules, sell more models.

Sorry, but this kind of design is the last resort of incompetent designers who lack the ability to make a compelling game without marketing gimmicks.

No, it's your reaction to a product that isn't designed to the specification you want.

IGOUGO, rules bloat, abandoning entire factions for years at a time, inability to figure out what scale 40k is supposed to be, etc

With rare moments when editions have been reset and codexes haven't begun to restart the process, these are defining characteristics of 40K and GW and have been for almost as long as both have existed.


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El Torro wrote:
we’ve seen the return of Necromunda, Adeptus Titanicus, Aeronautica Imperialis, as well as numerous other launches. Not forgetting the planned return of Warhammer Fantasy. For this at least I applaud him for giving us what we want.

Of course it doesn’t take a genius to choke down some ‘member berries and give consumers what they want (hello Squats). Still it was something that Kirby was unwilling to do, and actively fought against.

Don't forget that Alan Merrett stood down at almost the same time as Kirby, and a fairly steady stream of anecdotes about him over the years (it was him that testified in court that GW customers' hobby was "buying GW products") and a large percentage of this sort of thing probably belongs at his feet. He allegedly fought against the first Imperial Knight kit being released, for instance.

And against Genestealer Cults being part of the game.

 Azreal13 wrote:
No, it's your reaction to a product that isn't designed to the specification you want.

No, it's objectively bad game design.

With rare moments when editions have been reset and codexes haven't begun to restart the process, these are defining characteristics of 40K and GW and have been for almost as long as both have existed.

I agree. A more competent and engaged CEO would have fired and replaced GW's design staff after seeing that long record of failing to fix the game's problems. Either Rountree is a disengaged CEO with little hands-on knowledge of his company's major products or he's unwilling to fire his buddies no matter how much poor quality work they're doing. And in the first case it doesn't remove the blame entirely, it just shifts it to whatever lower-level manager is failing to fix the problem.

CadianSgtBob wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
No, it's your reaction to a product that isn't designed to the specification you want.

No, it's objectively bad game design.

Once again, no, it's design with an objective that is different to what you think it should be. The rules are a vehicle to sell models and new books. They're objectively good at that as a simple glance at their financial report or share price at any time over the last decade (or longer quite honestly, occasional blips aside.)

 Azreal13 wrote:
They're objectively good at that as a simple glance at their financial report or share price at any time over the last decade (or longer quite honestly, occasional blips aside.)

That's a very bad argument because we don't have a control group to compare to. Maybe GW would be making more money if they stopped resorting to marketing gimmicks, hired competent game designers, and made a high quality game that sells itself without needing gimmicks.

And how far does "sales is all that matters" go? Would it still be good design if GW went full F2P cash shop mobile trash with loot boxes, day one DLC everywhere, etc, and the handful of whales still bought enough to keep GW profitable?

Ok, you're moving the goalposts, and still not making your argument.

Nothing says the game designers are incompetent.

Like all designers they'll be working to a brief. Two designers given a brief to make a set of bookshelves, one for a mass market, low budget, flat pack product and one for a high spec, low volume premium brand will obviously not design the same product. The two bookcases will be very different, and the cheap one will likely not be even slightly comparable in terms of most metrics of quality.

That doesn't make the designer of the cheap bookcase incompetent. What would make the designer of the cheap bookcase incompetent was making a product that couldn't possibly be manufactured for the cost needed for the chosen price point to be profitable.

If you want to engage in baseless speculation on how a better game would sell more, go ahead, I won't be drawn on it. All I'll say is GW has more access to infinitely more detailed information over decades than we ever will, and I've played plenty of games that are massively better than 40K, and, with the brief exception of X Wing for a few months, not one of them has ever gotten close to the numbers 40K does.

CadianSgtBob wrote:
That's a very bad argument because we don't have a control group to compare to. Maybe GW would be making more money if they stopped resorting to marketing gimmicks, hired competent game designers, and made a high quality game that sells itself without needing gimmicks.

We kind of do have a 'control group' though... despite the existence of better written rulesets over the last 20 years, GW remains the market leader.

And how far does "sales is all that matters" go? Would it still be good design if GW went full F2P cash shop mobile trash with loot boxes, day one DLC everywhere, etc, and the handful of whales still bought enough to keep GW profitable?

To the 'whales' who were still buying and enjoying the product? Sure. Because quality is subjective.

 insaniak wrote:
We kind of do have a 'control group' though... despite the existence of better written rulesets over the last 20 years, GW remains the market leader.

That's a poor control group because it isn't accounting for GW's advantages that are unrelated to rule quality: the critical mass factor of being the market leader, the wide range of miniatures, and the dedicated retail chain. At most you can show that having a better ruleset isn't enough to overcome not having those other things, it doesn't provide evidence that GW's current approach to game design is correct.

To the 'whales' who were still buying and enjoying the product? Sure. Because quality is subjective.

I'm not really sure how we can have a productive discussion on game design if successfully exploiting gambling addiction counts as "good design".


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 Azreal13 wrote:
Like all designers they'll be working to a brief.

And who sets the brief in the context of game design? The game designer leading the team. Non-design management is not coming down to the team and insisting that we need 15 different slight bolter versions for primaris marines, or to add more AP everywhere, etc. Or, if they are, GW has a massive problem with micromanaging and needs to fire a different set of people.

Two designers given a brief to make a set of bookshelves, one for a mass market, low budget, flat pack product and one for a high spec, low volume premium brand will obviously not design the same product.

That's not a good analogy. There is no coherent and reasonable design brief that gets current-edition 40k as its result given a competent design team. 40k is not a great ruleset for accomplishing a goal that happens to be something other than what I enjoy, it's a badly designed ruleset all around and all of its flaws could be fixed without making any sacrifices to GW's business model.

CadianSgtBob wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
Like all designers they'll be working to a brief.

And who sets the brief in the context of game design? The game designer leading the team. Non-design management is not coming down to the team and insisting that we need 15 different slight bolter versions for primaris marines, or to add more AP everywhere, etc. Or, if they are, GW has a massive problem with micromanaging and needs to fire a different set of people.

Of course the lead designer will be working within a set of criteria handed to him from non-creative departments. Giving your creative departments carte blanche is really not normally thought of as a good idea.

I'm also pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that that lots of data is something that their core market (teenage boys) finds appealing, so, it's distinctly possible that including many variations of Bolter is also working to a brief.

Two designers given a brief to make a set of bookshelves, one for a mass market, low budget, flat pack product and one for a high spec, low volume premium brand will obviously not design the same product.

That's not a good analogy.

That's good, because it isn't one. It's an attempt to explain to you how design works in a corporate environment, and that a poor quality product isn't the result of poor design if the intent from the beginning was not to make a high quality product.

it's a badly designed ruleset all around and all of its flaws could be fixed without making any sacrifices to GW's business model.

They could be fixed with the application of man hours you mean?

GW's gross income was £353m

They spent £202m on running the business. (Generating a gross profit of £151m FWIW.)

£87m of that £202m was wages and salaries. Approaching half of what GW costs to run is people's wages.

People are expensive things when you're a business, spending those people's time on things that you don't need to ("fixing" the game) is a literal waste of an asset.

But, once more I find myself pointing out that your definition of poor design is clearly not the same as GW's.

 Azreal13 wrote:
Of course the lead designer will be working within a set of criteria handed to him from non-creative departments. Giving your creative departments carte blanche is really not normally thought of as a good idea.

That set of criteria from non-creative departments will contain things like "three releases per quarter, at least one for the core product range (space marines)". In a sensibly run company it's not going to include micromanaging stuff like "basic weapons need at least AP -1".

I'm also pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that that lots of data is something that their core market (teenage boys) finds appealing, so, it's distinctly possible that including many variations of Bolter is also working to a brief.

It could be, although this represents a major design failure given GW's current primary target of adults with disposable income. In recent years there's been a clear shift away from that "sell space marines to 14 year olds" business strategy and towards something more like lego's "sell $1000 spaceships to 30 year old software developers" strategy.

That's good, because it isn't one. It's an attempt to explain to you how design works in a corporate environment, and that a poor quality product isn't the result of poor design if the intent from the beginning was not to make a high quality product.

I know how design works in a corporate environment and nobody is deliberately saying "make a bad product". They may say things like "make the best product for $X manufacturing cost" but no sane company is saying "make sure the shelves on that bookshelf aren't level and strip the threads on 10% of the screws so those customers can't even assemble it". Pretty much all of 40k's design problems could be fixed within the scope of any reasonable set of constraints that the design team is working under.

£87m of that £202m was wages and salaries. Approaching half of what GW costs to run is people's wages.

And virtually none of that goes to the design team. Remember, we had a recent report from a former GW employee about their salaries, for £1m you could buy an entire design team at their current rates and even a slight increase in sales would be more than enough to pay that off.

But, once more I find myself pointing out that your definition of poor design is clearly not the same as GW's.

Correct, and that's the problem. GW is either horribly incompetent at game design and unable to recognize it or suffers from prioritizing loyalty to management's friends over the success of the business.

Being pointedly aware of the definition of insanity, at this point I can't see any reason to keep this conversation going.

 Azreal13 wrote:
Being pointedly aware of the definition of insanity, at this point I can't see any reason to keep this conversation going.

Being pointedly aware of the definition of "passive aggressive", I'll take my victory on this subject.

You don't get to claim anything, those reading will make their minds up.

CadianSgtBob wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
Being pointedly aware of the definition of insanity, at this point I can't see any reason to keep this conversation going.

Being pointedly aware of the definition of "passive aggressive", I'll take my victory on this subject.

Yet you objectively lost.

Any rule set that catered to gamers like you would cost GW $$Privateer Press money$$. All the games with the most highly-regarded rule sets by serious gamers are dead or dying. Games with an emotional boom-bust cycle that get gamers off balance keep spenders engaged.

Not defending GW. Just pointing out how insidious their marketing and sales tactics are. They permeate every aspect of the GW hobby.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Yet you objectively lost.

Lolwut. Passive-aggressively refusing to continue the discussion is not winning.

Any rule set that catered to gamers like you would cost GW $$Privateer Press money$$. All the games with the most highly-regarded rule sets by serious gamers are dead or dying. Games with an emotional boom-bust cycle that get gamers off balance keep spenders engaged.

You're repeating the same mistake now: ignoring all of the non-rules advantages GW has. Lots of highly-regarded rulesets die because they don't have GW's critical mass advantage, GW's retail chain to get people into the GW Hobby with no competing products visible, etc. And even then with many of these games we can identify the moment where they began to die because they tried a GW-style cycle of balance and rule changes. WM/H died in large part because it did an unpopular edition change instead of continuing to refine the previous edition. X-Wing is bleeding players because AMG keeps trying to change stuff and botching the changes. Both of those games would probably be in much better shape if they'd stayed with what was working instead of trying to shake up the meta.

The reality is that the boom/bust cycle gets a handful of meta-chasing whales to keep spending but we've seen plenty of survey data that only a tiny percentage of the 40k customer base engages in competitive play. Most people aren't buying new armies to chase the best new rules, they're primarily committing to a single army and if it is no longer fun to play they stop playing and stop buying.

And, like I said, competitive balance is only a small part of my complaints about 40k. You can argue that the balance problems are justified by targeting meta-chasing whales, you can't tell me that IGOUGO and spending 30+ minutes disengaged from the game while your opponent takes their turn is good design and serving some important goal.

And you still can't provide any proof. Just your baseless assumptions.

tneva82 wrote:
And you still can't provide any proof. Just your baseless assumptions.

I've already explained multiple times why nobody has definitive proof for their claims here and can't have any such proof.

CadianSgtBob wrote:
And how far does "sales is all that matters" go? Would it still be good design if GW went full F2P cash shop mobile trash with loot boxes, day one DLC everywhere, etc, and the handful of whales still bought enough to keep GW profitable?

Some would argue this has already happened.


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 Azreal13 wrote:
You don't get to claim anything, those reading will make their minds up.

A plague on both your houses, says I, taking the guise of the vox.pop. in this regard.

CadianSgtBob wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Yet you objectively lost.

Lolwut. Passive-aggressively refusing to continue the discussion is not winning.

Just for the record, this isn't what I did. I wasn't in the least bit passive aggressive. I was, if you really want to label it, simply aggressive. I repeatedly told you why your point was wrong, and yet you just kept restating the same point. It was getting insane, and I said as much.

Why on earth would I continue with such a discussion? A decision not to continue to engage is not an admission of defeat, although you seem desperate to claim it as such.

"I have no wish to play chess with a pigeon, all they do is knock the pieces over, gak on the board and then strut around like they've won." Said someone once, maybe they were famous, but someone definitely said it.

 Azreal13 wrote:
I repeatedly told you why your point was wrong

You repeatedly told me that you don't understand game design and think that "GW makes money" proves everything they're doing correct. Sorry, but you completely failed in making your case and now you've decided to substitute aggressive complaining for any actual argument.

Ok buddy, that's exactly what's happening.

 Azreal13 wrote:

CadianSgtBob wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
No, it's your reaction to a product that isn't designed to the specification you want.

No, it's objectively bad game design.

Once again, no, it's design with an objective that is different to what you think it should be. The rules are a vehicle to sell models and new books. They're objectively good at that as a simple glance at their financial report or share price at any time over the last decade (or longer quite honestly, occasional blips aside.)

Yeah there's some wisdom to 'can't argue with success' and yeah I'm stull buying stupid amounts of GW stuff.

But I'm not buying their games, their rules. Or playing them.

I just played Warhammer Underworlds for the first time, first GW game in ages, and it was... not fun. Decks and models and counters and crap. And 40k... I don't even know where to start.

If I wanted to introduce a friend to this hobby I enjoy I'd tell them to read BL novels, some of the comics, video games, but not try the table top game. And if they did... I'd say use the models for Star Grave or 1-Page rules or something else.

GW books are not worth $50+, the rules are too bloated and sit on sand that shifts too often. You can't even buy a book and go any more because of point updates (which at least are free no?). I don't think $100 rulebooks and $50 codexes is a good way forward. I don't even have any desire to read those.

Maybe the army building app will fix that problem, but in that case it needs to have the rules integrated, rather than buy a book, subscribe to an app and enter a code for one army. But for now someone would really, really have to want to play 40k to even get the rules.

So this is a serious issue Rountree has to address.

I definitely echo the praise about expanding GW's offerings, I'm spent more on Necromunda models than 40k lately (another game I have no desire to try and play due to rules issues) so that's money they would not have gotten but for the expansion.

So B maybe?

40k is a bad designed game for the very simple reason that no one there actually plays the game

you always get such a mess if you never come back to stuff you write and just continue writing

you get the same with people who never read their own texts but just keep on adding new lines when they come to their mind
they just need to read it once to clean up 90% of the mess

the devs would just need to play it once, by the actual rules and not what they think the rules are, to find the problems and clean it up (similar problems with MMO devs who keep up adding stuff and "improving" things but just on paper and never actually play so fail to understand the problems of the community because on paper it looks fine)

it is not impossible or expensive, GW manage it to do with less people for HH or LotR, and there you actually have more different factions (and I mean different factions not just the same one with different colours and relics), with a much more complex rule system than 40k

this does not mean the Devs are bad at their job, it just means that they don't play their game


to answer the question:
Rountree gets an A+, keeping up the stuff that Kirby started but making the necessary changes to sell it
Warhammer Fantasy would have never died with the current marketing and community interaction, no matter how bad the rules are