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I actually don't think Hasbro is that involved in directly managing the D&D brand. I mean, I'm sure Wizards breaks down their revenues and expenditures by brand, but I've never heard anything along the lines of Hasbro taking an active hand in directing Wizards to do x or y or z with Magic, or D&D, or any of Wizards' other properties. Also, just a reminder: Hasbro owns Milton Bradley, too.
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May 7, 2015 23:27
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Bucnasti posted:The Transformers brand reinvents itself every couple of years with new toys, new cartoons and a whole new batch of 8 year olds to sell to. This is the type of lesson WotC has figured out for Magic (appealing to and bringing in new generations of players) but not for D&D.
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May 7, 2015 23:37
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Leperflesh posted:I actually don't think Hasbro is that involved in directly managing the D&D brand. I mean, I'm sure Wizards breaks down their revenues and expenditures by brand, but I've never heard anything along the lines of Hasbro taking an active hand in directing Wizards to do x or y or z with Magic, or D&D, or any of Wizards' other properties. From what I understand that is absolutely true, they're on opposite sides of the country and WotC makes so much money from Magic that Hasbro doesn't want to gently caress with it any more than they have to. I think WotC (or at least D&D) would be better off with more input from Hasbro though. One of the problems WotC has is that they're in the rear end end of Seattle, there is no prestige associated with working there and they pay for poo poo, so it's hard for them to attract talented people to run the company. The really good people they find (like Lisa Stevens) tend to move up to bigger gigs or go off and do their own thing leaving the people behind to rise to mediocrity. If their association with Hasbro was closer they could probably attract more high quality management personnel. WotC has employed a lot of very forward thinking people over the years, but they have all inevitably left and been replaced with people who think they can continue to do business like it's 1990.
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May 7, 2015 23:50
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Bucnasti posted:Bringing this back to RPGs... Yeah, it's kind of interesting just how far D&D made it into the general public consciousness. There was a whole big shelf of their books in K-Mart, of all places, when I was a kid. I didn't play but my six-year old self loved reading through the Monster Manual. Also popular at the time were gamebooks like the Choose Your Own Adventure series or Lone Wolf.
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May 8, 2015 00:01
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Littlefinger posted:You can try hunting down the two 'Wizards Presents' booklets they published before 4e's release on ebay or something. They contain a lot of info about its development and the thought processes that went into some of the changes. 4e was a continuation of 3e's development somuchso that they literally backtracked from planned drastic changes so it would still feeeel like D&D, but alas nerds. The Wizards Presents books are great for providing a sense of the various design ideas that went into 4e. 3e's Rules Compendium also has interesting discussions and anecdotes about what into the rules for 3e. Between the late-game 3e stuff (Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic, Complete Mage, Complete Scoundrel, Complete Champion, Incarnum) and the Wizards Presents stuff, I wasn't super surprised by most things in 4e.
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May 8, 2015 01:15
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NGDBSS posted:On what basis was he hired, his design work or his Plague of Hats posted:See ya later, Pathfinder! ProfessorCirno posted:His "I hate this so it will be weak / I like this so it will be strong" bent comes out basically nonstop. He hated the idea of monster PCs, and what do you know, Savage Species is a terrible book. He hated the fluff for one of the cleric ideas he had in PF so he bragged about making it weak on the message boards, then immediately stated right after that balance is an ~*~illusion~*~ and is impossible to track. He's the very definition of "I have one specific playstyle I want to encourage, and anything outside of that must be punished." Fsmhunk posted:Okay, so basically they never knew what they were doing, has D&D ever been handled by a competent business? Leperflesh posted:TSR at the height of redbox basic D&D was doing pretty drat good. Those red boxes were sold at Toys R Us and Sears, they sold multiple millions of copies, and introduced D&D to a generation. I know that D&D designers acting like the most obnoxious sort of fan is not a new thing. At the dawn of the company there was Rob Kuntz, who in his tremendous arrogance decided that the fanbase could be divided into "creatives" and "dependents." Long story short, if you wanted D&D books to clearly communicate the intended playstyle, Rob wrote you off as a "dependent" who wanted to be spoonfed inferior products. (Rob was virtually Gary's adopted son and learned D&D from him, so lack of clarity wasn't his problem.) And this lovely attitude eventually led to, among other things, Basic D&D being jettisoned despite being an extremely profitable game, and years later, Rob Heinsoo having to fight with the rest of the 4th edition dev team to make a game that wasn't deliberately unbalanced in favour of some developers' personal tastes. I know it's not news to anyone who posts regularly in this thread that Mearls, Reynolds, Buhlman, etc. are not good designers. What I wanted to point out is a pattern indicating that their only apparent job skill is touting a company dogma. To paraphrase Mark Twain, you tell me where a man gets his paycheck, and I'll tell you where he gets his opinions. I don't have knowledge of the office politics at WotC or Paizo, so I don't know how people get these developer positions and speculation would be pointless. (I also don't know what they call work. In all seriousness, with such apparently poor design skills, I don't know how Mike Mearls fills a workday supposedly designing games.) But apparently they keep them by staying "on-message" while saying what they think the base wants to hear, like any politician. I think Dancey was the first one that got figured out. When he was head of WotC during the D20 boom, he proclaimed that system was everything and D20 was "reducing the demand for other systems to zero." When he left WotC, he claimed the business was dying. When he worked for CCP, RPGs were still dying but if you were going to make one, story was vital. When he worked for Paizo, it had always been his goal to make D&D an eternally living game that belonged to the people through the OGL. Now I believe he's finally reached the point where any fan who's aware of him is also aware of his reputation for saying whatever buzzwords shore up the patch of ground he's standing on. I'm not sure what Reynolds does besides badmouth D&D 4th edition. He at least learned how to do so a little more tactfully than calling 4e cosmology "retarded," but as soon as he was out of Paizo he wrote a blog post in which he said that actually, it's okay if a fantasy world isn't a physics engine and fighters get to do things. Mearls has said so many different conflicting things during his time at WotC that at one point I spent hours tracking how his presented viewpoint twisted and turned over the course of 4th and the development of 5th. Remember how much people who hated D&D 4th hated Mearls? Then he reached a point where he was repeating those fans' memes back at them to score points, and more-or-less openly deferring to people like Pundit and Zak S. I don't expect any developer to be in love with every single design decision, or to badmouth their own products or company. I also expect them to focus more on the stuff they personally like; it's creative work you're supposed to be passionate about, and an inescapable bias. But you can't ascribe this behaviour to professionalism when you see all the other totally unprofessional poo poo they do. I guess this is part of a vicious circle where developers who are more fanboy than designer put too much stock in memes that crop up in discussion, repeat them back to the fanbase, and try to harness them. That's in addition to running their own product lines into the ground because they can't see beyond their own personal tastes. Getting back to Mearls and WotC, I also used to track who was on the D&D development team, too. I'm not surprised that they're outsourcing development now; the core dev team has shrunk to a very small number of people. But what's most alarming is not the lack of staff but the lack of experience. To my knowledge, no one on the team has much experience developing, let alone designing, anything outside the D&D/D20 family of games. I'm amazed they even still have Crawford, who did Blue Rose. That lack of breadth has been a problem for the team for a long time, but at least for awhile there they had someone who had worked on Magic and some people who had been around for a long loving time. But for awhile there toward the end of 4e's lifecycle, I think the team was Mearls and a few guys who only had a handful of credits of any kind to their names. D&D design must be a weird, insular little world. I have no idea how it operates or how it can possibly operate. WotC and Paizo must be some of the only companies who can provide what I assume is a living wage. But the result appears to be a situation wherein developing D&D is a job that a few fanboys somehow luck or wheedle their way into, then hope nobody figures out that they're just another loving fanboy. The lunatics are running the asylum. If somebody has the inside track, please explain to me how the gently caress this happened.
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May 8, 2015 07:05
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FMguru posted:Another company who is (was?) really good at this: Games Workshop. Rebooting and reissuing their game lines, new models, new sculpts, new fluff, always going after new players and new markets with a marked lack of concern for old-timers and continuity. This is actually not even remotely true. Their licensees reinvent things and continuously bring in new customers, but GW itself is so tied to it's horrible game model that it actively forces new players out of the hobby, and their corporate policy is to ignore the old timers who are the only people willing to keep along with the game, mostly out of Stockholm Syndrome.
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May 8, 2015 07:30
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Games Workshop thinks it killed Pokemon. It was in one of their annual reports. I cannot make this up. They also hate and fear computers. It took them forever to accept that video games weren't a fad, and even then they have often acted as if their video games are competition.
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May 8, 2015 07:35
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Mors Rattus posted:Games Workshop thinks it killed Pokemon. It was in one of their annual reports. No lie, they actually killed their line of Blood Bowl miniatures and stopped supporting the game in large part because of the success of Cyanide's video game release. Games Workshop has no idea that the people who buy the video game and enjoy it are liable to turn around and by the cool board game version. In 2009, the video game came out, and the same year GW completely dropped the Living Rulebook and stopped supporting the minis line entirely. It's the weirdest thing.
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May 8, 2015 07:44
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There's a kernel of truth to what FMguru is saying or at least there was. Games Workshop has generally never been concerned about pandering to the hardcore "diehard fanbase" the way that D&D is currently doing with Next, they've always been more interested in courting Little Timmy the 12 year old who sees a window display of space marines with chainsaw swords and pesters mom and dad to drop hundreds of dollars so he can have his own army of chainsawmen (and also official Citadel paints and official Citadel brushes and official Citadel etceteras). Of course when Little Timmy turns 18 he may pack away all his half-painted miniatures in a box to gather dust in the attic, but by then there's a new crop of 12 year olds to enthrall. On the one hand, it's a good and sensible thing to not get too wrapped up in catering to your hardcore fans (or "fans") to the exclusion of new, fresh-faced customers. New blood is a good thing, and a lot of tradgame folks (including some publishers and designers) spend a lot of time chasing potential new players and customers away from the clubhouse, so for a company to go "no we want new people, please come and buy our game" seems like a smart move on their part. The problem is that it's essentially GW's only smart move, and it's been completely undermined by all the other dumb, counterproductive poo poo they seem determined to do. Thanks to repeated price hikes GW has priced themselves out of Little Timmy's parents' pockets...for the cost of getting into 40K you could buy little Timmy a brand new video game console, or a shitload of video and/or board games, or a bunch of X-Wing miniatures (which don't need paints and assembly to play), etc. They've also gone out of their way to slash and burn any sort of community that's developed around their games...Games Day has no actual games being played at it, they have no social media presence to speak of, no official forums, they hold no official tournaments, etc. Compare this to Magic, or X-Wing, or even D&D and Pathfinder which at least have Living/Organized Play events. And while GW has always positioned themselves as king of the hill due to the quality of their miniatures, frankly there are like a half dozen other tabletop games out there turning out work at least as good, if not better, than the stuff you'll find in 40K these days. I also think that there's a slight but important distinction to make between actively courting new players and markets, which successful games like Magic do, and simply not giving a poo poo about your older fans which is what GW does. GW attracting fresh faced kids eager to spend mom and dad's money on space marines wasn't really a thing they aggressively made inroads towards so much as a happy side-effect of kids liking power armored space knights with chainswords that they were willing to capitalize on.
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May 8, 2015 08:05
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Halloween Jack posted:D&D design must be a weird, insular little world. I have no idea how it operates or how it can possibly operate. WotC and Paizo must be some of the only companies who can provide what I assume is a living wage. But the result appears to be a situation wherein developing D&D is a job that a few fanboys somehow luck or wheedle their way into, then hope nobody figures out that they're just another loving fanboy. The lunatics are running the asylum. If somebody has the inside track, please explain to me how the gently caress this happened. I personally know a lot of former WotC designers, only few from D&D and none of those very well, but the impression I've gotten is, if you're a good designer at WotC, you get recruited by a video game company who pays a whole lot better and you move on. This leaves behind the zealots, the inexperienced and the consistently mediocre. The thing is to me, I don't even care if the design of D&D is very good or not, as long as it's not regressive. What I consider WotC's unforgivable sin is squandering of the brand. To the majority of the world D&D=Roleplaying, as hard as companies like Piazo might try to change it, the hobby and D&D are intertwined and probably always will be. Instead of using this position to lead the hobby forward and build it up by appealing to younger newer players they continue to go after an aging and shrinking demographic of people who already have a game they are happy with. I wouldn't' even be that upset about it if I thought it was just ignorance on their part, but WotC has demonstrated that they can do it with Magic, where they bring in new waves of players all the time. They keep doing things to keep Magic fresh and relevant without regards to maintaining tradition or placating their older players, but D&D they seem to think needs to stay true to tradition or some bullshit. 4E was far from perfect but it at least was a movement in the right direction and with some iteration it could have been the game they needed, something fast paced, easy to pick up and emulated the types of fantasy fiction people are exposed to today instead of pulp novels written 65 years ago. I have the same complaint about Games Workshop, they dominate a hobby, and instead of using that position to grow it, build a bigger player-base for everyone, they slowly slide backwards and the only people willing to follow them are the shitlords. At least in the case of GW I can blame it on the company being run by legitimate lunatics, WotC doesn't have this excuse.
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May 8, 2015 08:06
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Kai Tave posted:Games Day has no actual games being played at it Soooooo what exactly do they DO at this "Games Day"? e: Do I understand correctly that Paizo has pretty much eaten WotC's lunch with Pathfinder?
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May 8, 2015 08:07
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Pope Guilty posted:Soooooo what exactly do they DO at this "Games Day"? Sell things.
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May 8, 2015 08:08
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Mors Rattus posted:Sell things. Okay, but how does this differ from every other day?
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May 8, 2015 08:10
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Pope Guilty posted:Okay, but how does this differ from every other day? It doesn't. Yes it is very stupid.
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May 8, 2015 08:12
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Pope Guilty posted:Soooooo what exactly do they DO at this "Games Day"? It's essentially a giant Games Workshop store in a convention hall that you have to pay an entry fee to get into, and there aren't even any discounts. I'm not even joking, you can probably Google "Games Workshop Games Day" and find numerous articles that cover the subject better than I could. quote:e: Do I understand correctly that Paizo has pretty much eaten WotC's lunch with Pathfinder? Without having any numbers or sales figures it's impossible to say for sure but if I had to wildly guess I would say no. Paizo certainly tries very, very hard to position themselves as the True Heirs to D&D's Legacy, and I'm sure that WotC is absolutely not thrilled that they were, essentially, dumb enough to give away their work to be repackaged and resold as a direct competitor, but I would wager that as mediocre as most people here find Next that it's still sold quite well by elfgame standards (hell, the Next thread here is full of people going "man this game looks boring...I'd better buy it anyway and see if that's true") and try as they might I doubt that Pathfinder has the same brand cachet that Dungeons & Dragons does.
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May 8, 2015 08:14
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Games Day used to be an actual community event with like, contests for how well you'd painted your minis, games being played, and the like, right? Games Workshop actively cut that stuff?
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May 8, 2015 08:41
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Technically there was only one Games Day With No Games, Just Selling. They changed the name after that. Responsive to feedback!
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May 8, 2015 08:43
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Evil Mastermind posted:Also Kickstarters and Patreons nowadays. There's the one for the anti-Anita Sarkeesian documentary where the two people involved got utterly pissed at each other but that exploded instead of just vanishing with the money.
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May 8, 2015 14:01
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Kai Tave posted:There's a kernel of truth to what FMguru is saying or at least there was. Games Workshop has generally never been concerned about pandering to the hardcore "diehard fanbase" the way that D&D is currently doing with Next, they've always been more interested in courting Little Timmy the 12 year old who sees a window display of space marines with chainsaw swords and pesters mom and dad to drop hundreds of dollars so he can have his own army of chainsawmen (and also official Citadel paints and official Citadel brushes and official Citadel etceteras). Of course when Little Timmy turns 18 he may pack away all his half-painted miniatures in a box to gather dust in the attic, but by then there's a new crop of 12 year olds to enthrall. And I thought GW had done a decent job pushing their IP into new areas - they had a great run of computer games for a while (especially Dawn of War) and the rate at which they crank out those novelizations means someone is buying them. Also, licensing off to FFG for RPG support and premium boardgames (Chaos in the New World, Horus Heresy, etc.) They make a lot of bad decisions, and recent moves by the company have been utterly bewildering, but they had a pretty good run for a long time following a strategy of focusing on selling things to new players and to hell with grognards, and they profited massively as a result.
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May 8, 2015 14:07
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FMguru posted:Also, licensing off to FFG for RPG support and premium boardgames (Chaos in the New World, Horus Heresy, etc.) wasn't it that FFG bought the rpg rights because GW burnt down the company section that made the rpg after it sold out on preorders
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May 8, 2015 14:17
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Toph Bei Fong posted:They might could pull if off, if they ever get the movie rights untangled. Hasbro certainly wants them badly, that's for sure. Oh man, could you imagine if they got the Leverage guy who did Fell's Five for this?  Any true D&D film shouldn't be some epic fantasy adventure, it should be a simple dungeon heist gone horribly, horribly, horribly wrong.
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May 8, 2015 14:21
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TheTatteredKing posted:wasn't it that FFG bought the rpg rights because GW burnt down the company section that made the rpg after it sold out on preorders WH40K RPGs released 1987-2008: none (uh, maybe Inquisitor if you squint really hard) 2008-2015: Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, Deathwatch, BlacK Crusade, Only War, DH 2E Looks like a company expanding its market and reaching customers in new ways to me.
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May 8, 2015 14:23
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ElegantFugue posted:Oh man, could you imagine if they got the Leverage guy who did Fell's Five for this?
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May 8, 2015 14:25
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FMguru posted:I always thought D&D would make a good TV series. Party of adventurers, go out on missions/dungeon clearings every week, guest stars, recurring villains, long term plot developments every few episodes...what's not to love? I have this big rant I could go into about how there is so much goddamn synergy they could mine out of a D&D tv show/cartoon! Especially if they'd get their heads out of their asses and market the loving thing to new people.
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May 8, 2015 14:28
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FMguru posted:And I thought GW had done a decent job pushing their IP into new areas - they had a great run of computer games for a while (especially Dawn of War) and the rate at which they crank out those novelizations means someone is buying them. Also, licensing off to FFG for RPG support and premium boardgames (Chaos in the New World, Horus Heresy, etc.) They literally view it as giving up. When they get a game, they stop trying in the model/tabletop area for that stuff. It took years for Blood Angels to become a thing in tabletop after Dawn of War. Look above in the thread for Blood Bowl information. Games Workshop hates and fears competition from its own video games. It's amazing.
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May 8, 2015 14:30
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Mors Rattus posted:They literally view it as giving up. When they get a game, they stop trying in the model/tabletop area for that stuff. It took years for Blood Angels to become a thing in tabletop after Dawn of War. Look above in the thread for Blood Bowl information. Games Workshop hates and fears competition from its own video games. It's amazing. But why the hell is that? Doesn't the money still go to them?
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May 8, 2015 15:06
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paradoxGentleman posted:But why the hell is that? Because their entire management is really loving stupid.
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May 8, 2015 15:09
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Bucnasti posted:Model cars were huge in the 60's and into the 70's here in America. Big Daddy Roth made a fortune licensing his crazy car designs and monster hot rods to model companies. It was still fairly popular here in Canada through the mid-Eighties, but at the same time I think it was being supplanted by more specialized building toys like Zoids and Starriors, or Robotix and Capsela. Standalone toy stores usually had a good supply of midrange models.
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May 8, 2015 15:15
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Mors Rattus posted:They literally view it as giving up. When they get a game, they stop trying in the model/tabletop area for that stuff. It took years for Blood Angels to become a thing in tabletop after Dawn of War. Look above in the thread for Blood Bowl information. Games Workshop hates and fears competition from its own video games. It's amazing. This blows my mind. "Our new video game includes a new Space Marine chapter who are super-badass! Instead of selling people who played the game and want to get into the minis game an army that is the exact army they just spent several hours being introduced to as super-cool, let's just assume that the video game fulfills their 40K needs and people who play it won't want to consume any other 40K products!"
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May 8, 2015 15:18
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Bucnasti posted:I personally know a lot of former WotC designers, only few from D&D and none of those very well, but the impression I've gotten is, if you're a good designer at WotC, you get recruited by a video game company who pays a whole lot better and you move on. This leaves behind the zealots, the inexperienced and the consistently mediocre. quote:I wouldn't' even be that upset about it if I thought it was just ignorance on their part, but WotC has demonstrated that they can do it with Magic, where they bring in new waves of players all the time. They keep doing things to keep Magic fresh and relevant without regards to maintaining tradition or placating their older players, but D&D they seem to think needs to stay true to tradition or some bullshit. Total speculation on my part, but it's also possible that WotC has sent the message that innovation wouldn't be rewarded. I have no evidence to suggest that D&D isn't profitable, but even if it weren't, I think WotC would let the brand keep doing what it's doing--put out a new edition corebook and the bare minimum supplements every few years, with a very small team and anything else contracted out. WotC/Hasbro can afford to just sit on the brand until the next profitable license comes along. Kai Tave posted:There's a kernel of truth to what FMguru is saying or at least there was. Games Workshop has generally never been concerned about pandering to the hardcore "diehard fanbase" the way that D&D is currently doing with Next, they've always been more interested in courting Little Timmy the 12 year old who sees a window display of space marines with chainsaw swords and pesters mom and dad to drop hundreds of dollars so he can have his own army of chainsawmen (and also official Citadel paints and official Citadel brushes and official Citadel etceteras). Of course when Little Timmy turns 18 he may pack away all his half-painted miniatures in a box to gather dust in the attic, but by then there's a new crop of 12 year olds to enthrall.
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May 8, 2015 15:45
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Pope Guilty posted:e: Do I understand correctly that Paizo has pretty much eaten WotC's lunch with Pathfinder? They work very hard to give this impression. Online sales figures I've seen posted around had 4e beating Pathfinder, but anecdotally, the local game shop that opened about a year and a half ago never managed to sell a single 4e book despite stocking quite a few, so the owner is convinced that D&D 4e was a huge mistake, and that Paizo has them by the balls and 5e is the way to go. When I pointed out that WotC hadn't put out any 4e books for a year before he opened and had done no marketing for the old game because they were prepping for the 5e launch, he didn't have a response. It's all perception. I think this is what a lot of folks mean when they say they want a game that is "supported". You don't want to dump $50+ into a game that no one is playing. Compare and contrast with how folks reacted (and still act) about the split between old and new WoD. ElegantFugue posted:Oh man, could you imagine if they got the Leverage guy who did Fell's Five for this? 
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May 8, 2015 15:52
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In GMS news, he sent out an email to the Buckaroo Banzai preorder folks (like myself) saying that once Far West comes out this month, he's going to laser-focus on the Buckaroo Banzai game. He also said this: quote:When I went into the hospital (late January 2014), we were still waiting on response from the licensor on the last round of changes they had requested. Since coming out of the hospital in May 2014, to be honest, I’ve been so busy with finishing up another project that was also delayed (FAR WEST) that I haven’t really been pestering them about it — not only was I trying to get the earlier project finished, I was also really hesitant to “rock the boat”, for fear of causing trouble in the approval process, but at this point I think we’ve been more than patient.
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May 8, 2015 15:57
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ElegantFugue posted:Oh man, could you imagine if they got the Leverage guy who did Fell's Five for this? I'm not a fan of comics at all but those comics were perfect in every way. Even friends who aren't into tabletop loved them.
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May 8, 2015 16:19
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Toph Bei Fong posted:They work very hard to give this impression. The figures I've seen had 4e beating Pathfinder right up until essentials was released. At which point they immediately dropped in sales and Pathfinder or some Fantasy Flight system was top dog every quarter. Terrible Opinions fucked around with this message at 16:35 on May 8, 2015 |
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May 8, 2015 16:24
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It's almost as if a product line doesn't do well when its lead developer deliberately screws it up because he doesn't like it.
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May 8, 2015 16:27
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Fenarisk posted:I'm not a fan of comics at all but those comics were perfect in every way. Even friends who aren't into tabletop loved them. John Rogers is gamist swine. He wrote the Crimeworld section for FATE, Fiasco stuff, and even backed Spirit of '77. That should tell you all you need to know. 
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May 8, 2015 16:42
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He also ran a long-running Alternity/D20 Modern campaign that he posted about on ENWorld, of all places, and was never driven off with torches and pitchforks somehow so obviously he's not -too- swine-y.
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May 8, 2015 16:50
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FMguru posted:They even keep a couple of arms of the company around specifically to sell to old-timers - the mail-order Specialist games line and the super-expensive Citadel resin mail-order line. I've also been struck by the way they refresh their game's physical presentation to keep up with the times, particularly the late 2000s switch from their traditional chaotic, grey-screen, squiggly margin-art look to a clean white layout across their books. Specialist Games is all but gone. Games Workshop has three games: Warhammer, Warhammer 40k, and Lord of the Rings. They occasionally (very occasionally) make a limited-time boardgame: the last four were Space Hulk, and then Dreadfleet, and then... Space Hulk again... and now this dumb Assassins game that is the most thinly-veiled way to get people to pay $30 each for assassin models that aren't otherwise available possible. That's it, and that covers the span from 2009 to last month. Since each release was limited, for most of that time, there's been no game to buy from GW other than the three main lines. (Of course there is the FFG license, which includes lots of games, some of which are quite good, and GW sees a modest flow of license money from them. But they're not very involved in how those games are designed, marketed, or sold, and it shows. Because they're reasonably priced, and many of them are actually good games.) What GW has actually done is move a ton of character and unique-per-army models to resin, because the molds were for metal that they don't want to do any more, but they figured sales volumes wouldn't be high enough to support new plastic kits on those models. So instead you get to "special order" a single mini made in resin if you want to buy one of the named characters for your army. This really, really isn't some kind of branch of the company dedicated to supporting the really hardcore miniature model hobby fans. It's just a grudging acceptance that they can't completely eliminate all these models that are built in to the army books of their games, but a refusal to re-jigger their games to make those models either more common (so they could sell sprues of them), or just eliminate them. Except... maybe that's part of what they've done with the whole End Times thing for Warhammer Fantasy. They just blew up the whole setting, which is (according only to rumors, because GW does not talk about the future, ever, in any way) due for a reboot very soon, possibly focused more on a skirmish game. That would be an opportunity to eliminate the entire Finecast resin line of models for Fantasy, focusing completely on the plastic kits that sell well. We talk about GW a lot in the GW Death Pool 2014-2015: End Times Appreciation Station thread. If you decide to join in, just scroll past the first few pages where people are guessing when GW is going to die... after a few pages there's actual discussion about the company, and it's a fascinating discussion to wade through. Games Workshop is more or less unique in the trad games industry in that it is a standalone public company, which means we have access to detailed financial reports. We don't have to rely on whatever sales figures various companies decide to release voluntarily; we can see the hard numbers. And the hard numbers for GW over the last couple of years have not looked good. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 17:26 on May 8, 2015 |
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May 8, 2015 17:23
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 06:31 |
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John Rogers is a pretty cool guy. Fel's Five, Blue Beetle, Leverage, I love all that poo poo. As the guy himself will point out, he's also got the head writer credits for The Core and Catwoman. So.
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May 8, 2015 17:31
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