it's completely insane they are still selling rules. they could have gotten back so much good will by modernizing how they distribute rules if they're going to be so insistent on changing them constantly. we have to rely on the wahapedia guy to even play the game now. if anything happens to him or that site, it's gonna suck big time.
@@Bobamelius It's so wild man, selling physical rulebooks in 2024, rules which they change every few months, its unbelievable. At this point I think GW should just suck it up, stop making profits on codexes and implement a way of distributing rules more up to date to the current year.
>Games Workshop >Free My brother in Christ, Games Workshop would charge admission to funerals if they thought they could get away with it and had the infrastructure to support the endeavor. And people would still buy the tickets, too- even if they had no idea who was in the casket. It's hilarious that a game like Infinity has free rules online. Oh, not only are they online and can be referenced directly through their free list-building app- but the rules are updated for balance periodically and new units are added as they release. It's a mechanically more balanced game than anything GW has ever made.
I still detest the Emperor's TTS because of the ignorant hitpiece they did on Ian Watson, which in turn inspired a depressing amount of pearl-clutching from the more nerdy and virginal parts of the fanbase, which continutes right up to the present.
The two year rule set release is absolutely idiotic. It took me 2 years to build my DG army!!!! wtf?! They are trying to turn table top wargaming into a seasonal cod money grab. It’s not feasible. These fools try to monetize EVERYTHING
Of course they do, its about the money and not about the Hobby or Worldbuilding. The Hobby is in things like Mass Brutatlity, The IX. Age, OPR etc. I still love the background except AOS, but giving them money for the current state of the game is not justifiable.
@@4of122 to be 100% fair, if they're a business it IS all about the money. That's kinda the whole purpose, especially for a publicly-traded company. Hobby and world-building is only important when it brings in money. They're not your friends, we're not a "community", and they have an obligation to their investors. If you were one of those investors you'd want your money to pay out. The problem is: No matter how bad GW is, the only reason they keep doing this is because fanboys keep paying. If people cut their GW spending in half for a year, it'd change- but most Warhammer players can't do that. They'd sell their own children to buy a new shiny Warhammer toy.
Especially when they can't be bothered to finish making the damn codexes before starting a new cycle so you go through most of that cycle without an updated codex for your faction only to have it release and be outdated in 3 months
@@simonkeith7687 No more was this true than with Contrast Paints. According to insiders GW was literally weeks away from bankrupcy but when the Contrast paints came out and the massive 'Slapchop' hype that youtuber painters made, it caused the sales of the paints to skyrocket and was just enough to stablize and save the company. This was after years of the company being mismanaged by the likes of Alan Merritt (they guy who infamously canned Warhammer Fantasy without even thinking about trying to save it for his Age of Sigmar pet project and tried to make the IP more 'family friendly' by trying to remove Slaanesh etc.) and other higher ups who departed in 2016. If it hadn't been for contrast paints, I have no idea where Games Workshop would be now, probably just bought out by a big chinese company no doubt. So even if the original Games Workshop had tanked, I doubt we'd be in any different place than we are now...
People have allowed themselves to be taken out of their own hobby. The game belongs to those that have bought it, The word of the day is Oldhammer. Start a third edition or first edition or any edition club that is your favourite. A miniature that is 40 years old is worth more to its owner than anything that they could buy to day, because of the fun memories that are cherished.
I agree. The only way we play warhammer these days is older editions. The quirky RPGness of rogue trader, the tight and concise 3rd edition, and my personal favorite with the most flare is 5th edition. By the end it was a completely realized game that they went and broke apart for profits.
Doesn't work that way unfortunately. See wht will happen, is you will ask if they wanna play, they will see how "complicated the old editions are" and then never wanst to play it.... I don't know why you new fans think people will just play the old rules, because it was basically cut to bits and turned in to TRASH in order to get you and THOSE people in to playing :/ So when you say that? You are just saying "lets go back and play the edition we used to bully you for when you were young, then got changed to appease our 10 minute attention spans!"........... There is no hobby, it was sacrificed so people who DIDN'T like warhammer could play it -_-.
The problem is many local play groups are infested with tourists that refuse to play anything but the newest most current rulings, even if they don't enjoy them.
Its also how GW treats their customers and fans. So many fan projects where halted and abandoned simply because there was a threat of GW sueing them out of existance. Then their attempt at copyrighting words like "Space marine" or "Warhammer"... over the years GW has turned from a hobby brand that actually loved their own product.... to an IP managment corporation that actively seems to disdain its own customer base and at best sees them as walking wallets.
Well said. Planned obsolescence is one of the most infuriating strategies that a company could possibly use. I've learned that the rules change far faster than my desire or ability to keep up with, so I'm out of the whole ecosystem now. The flood of new models is nice for painters though, from time to time something catches my eye
What you describe is literally GW business strategy. They aren't interested in long-term players. It is long known that the only metric that counts for their stores is the number of starter packs sold. They want things to constantly feel "fresh" by releasing new editions - so it appears more welcoming and a good time to start for newcomers. The average player sticks around for 4 years. (Don't quote me on this, but the number is definitely somewhere in their boardrooms). That means that they'll likely stick around for two editions and spend plenty of cash on exorbitantly overpriced plastic in that honeymoon time. Those who are truly invested will stick around for longer and spend even more as individuals, which is great but more of a nice bonus to them. The only thing that matters is the appearance of constant growth. Business wise, it seems to be a very prudent strategy. And maybe it is their winning formula since they do have a ton of brand recognition - but I wholeheartedly agree that WH has lost a lot of soul and in turn me many years ago because of their beancounter leadership.
I suspect only a tiny fraction of kits/games/box sets etc sold make it to the table top. Some players/collectors/painters seem to have a stacks of unopened kits sat on their shelfs at home, from FOMO and the relatable compulsion they feel to buy cool looking new stuff. I got in to Warhamer in 1988 aged 8 and obsessed with it until aged 14. I left in 2nd edition, then returned in 2018 or 2019. I've not played a game of 40k or any Warhammer game since the mid 90s other than Advanced Heroquest which went OOP in 1992 lol. There's quite a lot of love for that system which has been growing in recent years with loads of fan made content, modernised rules etc. It's one of the only games that ever came with Solo-play rules I can think of other than Spacehulk and can be really good fun. Collecting all the vintage Oldhammer minis it and the expansion feature is a hobby in its self. I do enjoy building and painting things. I casually collect and paint Imperial Guard, and must have 10,000 points worth of stuff now. Id guess 60% of that being unopened kits, 20% assembled and primed and only 20% painted to ant level I'd call complete. I still feel an unexplainable urge to but new releases, but have managed to resist for about 6 months. Im fairly old fashioned and do enjoy browsing through old codexes, rule sets Ive bought in recent years rather than looking at a screen. Im not realy a fan of sci-fi or fantasy in general, but do have a lot of fondness for Warhammer. Id love to know the proportion of people who buy GW stuff purely to collect and paint compared to those who play tabletop. I live in UK and work as a domestic electrician. I visit quite lot of homes containing Warhammer collections and hobby desks/rooms. Very few people when I ask about their connection to it have played or even intend to play tabletop games. The hobby/painting side of it sems far larger than the intended full-on gaming experience side of it.
@@Super-Marauder-Girl doesn't matter, they've made more than enough. Spending time worried about some sweaty grognard isn't worth the time it takes to listen to them. They'll make more money if they just keep driving forward as they do. People keep paying. GW keeps making money. As much as I hate what they do, it's successful.
The fact you so uncritically submit to the idea that it’s just the way it is and it’s acceptable, okay, or even good for them to do this is the problem. As soon as people stop accepting that a business exists to make money at the expense of everything else and instead should provide a service at an expense we will see an improvement. Don’t give in to capitalism
I thought 3d printers becoming a serious threat were still a ways away. Resin is messy and hazardous, and FDM prints usually looked…like garbage. Then I started seeing some really incredible vehicles and monsters using Bambu printers, and I learned they were only a couple hundred dollars and required little tinkering. I got one with fairly low expectations…but I’m printing infantry sized models I’d be proud to show off with a decent paint job. Bigger models should look even better. AND I subscribed to OPR’s STL tier, so I’ve started accidentally accumulating armies. I didn’t think I was all that interested in Guard-like armies, especially at full wargame sizes instead of skirmish. But now I’ve got models for a bunch of tanks and guard-like models I can print for pennies, that cost me all of $20 so far, and I’m thinking “Tanks are cool. Maybe I want to play HDF…” And I get access to all of their game systems and rules for every army in every system. And they have a great free army builder. When I look at GW’s counter offer (hundreds of dollars for models and hundreds more for books, and the more you buy the more it costs to maintain) it’s almost laughable at this point…
Well I can tell you FDM has gotten shockingly good over the last year. The new printing methods, combined with the .02 nozzle and heated or st least heat retaining booths/housing... The prints are way better than you would think and yes a good resin printer still dunks on my bamboo. That said... on the table top most people don't realize they are fdm prints until they pick them up and look at them. When it comes to terrain the fdm printer is perfectly fine. If fdm printer hardware and software continue to progress as they have over the past year... it could be as short as two or three years and we could see fdm printers being widely adopted by Jhon/Jane Q public. I cannot see it ever being better than resin for details. but it has come along way.
@@watchwooddepending on what you mean by “fine details,” if you haven’t already I’d strongly recommend checking out the FDM Miniatures subreddit and looking for posts from the user HOHansen. They list all of their settings and the results I’ve gotten with an A1 Mini using those have blown me away. The sacrifice is it’s extremely slow (think 5-6 hours per infantry sized model). But it prints faster than I normally paint, so I’m really happy with it. It’s still not resin, but for anything short of competition/display painting and some specific minis that FDM just doesn’t handle well, it’s great. You do need a 0.2 nozzle if you don’t already have one, they’re like $12.
I have an FDM printer since January (Bambu A1 was out of stock so I bought a CR-10 SE instead. It's decent.) FDM's are great for bases and terrain, but I've had also had an SLA for over five years, and that's where my modelling lives. I get what you guys are saying about messiness. The fact is you need a rather large and permanent work area for cleaning and curing, and that area is going to get wrecked by liquid resin residue all over. Plus, ventilation is a must. It's a lot to take on for some, and downright impossible for other people's living situation. Compare that to the 'cleaning' I need to do with FDM: trashcan, old rag, bottle of 91% IPA, done. While fumes are still a thing, there is a solution for the big messy-area problem on the horizon for home SLA. Today, you can buy a commercial grade printer combination unit, that prints, slides the print to the back of the unit, drops it into a solvent vat to run the rinse. Then lifts to dry. Sensors tell you the how clean your solvent is. It's going to be a game changer, but today Formlabs sells that unit for ~$15k. I was going to say give it 5 years, but since we still seem to be in a glorious printer manufacture arms race, maybe only three? This won't solve all the SLA problems, but it will make SLA 75% more approachable by getting the toxic messiness out of the equation.
One of the things I have mentioned to my gaming buddies is that I no longer feel like studying the rules and army books. I don't want to have to spend years learning an edition only to have those books invalidated in faqs and point changes. I don't play compeditively but that is what pushes these changes constantly. Well that, and the cash grab fomo. I've been playing 40k since 1992 and they started loosing when they went to the 3 year cycle. The only game of theirs I still play is LotR. Yes they discontinued some models, but I also like collecting them.
@lordbloodthehungry Actualy no. Say I only play once a month, buy the new rules and there is a FAQ immediately, rules changes, army book and a FAQ, and then a FAQ to the main rules, then point changes come. This cycles continuously through the product edition now. So keeping up with the rules now is a chore. My day job is keeping up with changing requirements and acceptance criteria. I prefer a less bloated more stable platform that create fun games. I stepped away from 40k at the end of 7th and started playing games like Pulp Alley and Fist Full of Lead. Great game play, stable rules very little bloat.
You missed the parts where they never talked to, or listened to players, at all. Basically up to 7th edition, maybe 8th, their was very little fan interaction, and we had editions with armies that just didn't work, or broke the game totally.
They released new models which could dominate the battlefield so people wanting to win would have to buy them. That was the point and they likely wrote out of the rules models that didn't sell that well.
Regarding the loss of trust - story time. After starting in 3e I left warhammer at the arse-end of 7th due to the complete random idiocy the game has become. Vowing never to return, unless GW somehow brings back the army I always wanted - the space dwarfs. 9e rolls around and the april fools video is released. There I bloody was - hyped. Again. I was eager to jump in, me brass balls deep, into warhammer again, with my favorite army! I bought in, I printed the rest. I played. And I got burned. In a succession of crappy choice after crappy decision GW has: 1. released a completely broken Votann dex in 9e 2. which was nerfed to hell and back BEFORE ITS RELEASE 3. then GW proceeded to forget the army ever existed, in almost 3 years releasing NOTHING for the army apart from some kill teams and one bloody lore book 4. which doesnt even add any cool new lore for the Leagues. And now 5. Leagues are staring down 2025 without their dex, still being forgotten by GW 6. with their grotmas detachment clearly showing that they will be reworked YET AGAIN because none of the detachment rules even interact with the main mechanic - judgment tokens. Shame on you GW. Fool me once, shame on you. But I've now been fooled twice.
I started in 1991. I had a squat army in rogue trader. I also had a 'shooty' ork army. Both of these were practically destroyed in 1998 with the release of 3rd edition. I have not trusted gw for a very long time. P.s. I still play 2nd and 1st edition.
I started playing 40K during the Rogue Trader era 34 years ago while I was in college. I built and painted five monstrously large armies for the game. I gave up on 40K shortly after the release of 8th Edition in 2017; the endless rules bloat, FAQs, strategems, formations, supplements, points rises/drops, and the ever increasing cost was simply too much. I lost all joy in the game, and bid a fond farewell to GW. These days, my GW models have found new life in miniatures-agnostic games such as Grimdark Future, Stargrave, and Space Weirdos.
Definitely not alone, started at end of second edition and stopped during 8th, fantasy I stopped with age of sigmar, only really play mordheim and blood bowl these days. with the advent of so many other game systems its a shame as warhammer is close to my heart
Similar... I have been a collector and casual player since 4th edition, and when 6th came out then quickly turned into 7th plus supplements and such, when we hadn't even been able to get the codex books for all of our armies yet, I was upset and stopped buying into the revolving door of GW books... since then I have bought novels and played them, video games, etc... When Kill Team came out as a boxed game in 2018, with some nice terrain, etc... I picked that up and really enjoyed it. I used models from my existing armies and collection to make up rosters, and added about 10 more rosters of models to my collection specifically for kill team.... Then the next edition of Kill Team made almost every one of my models unplayable, not just nerfed but not even usable at all... out of more than a Dozen rosters, and 5 entire 40k armies, I could field 2 or 3 legal kill teams in that new rule set... I again just stepped away... I started playing solo once in a while in winter and still painting some, but even lost interest in finishing the models in my collection for the most part... After that last version of Kill Team came out, and during the last 2 or so years, I have become more and more interested in OPR Firefight and their other games... and I HAVE been debating buying the new $100 starter set that recently came out for Kill Team but I'm very hesitant to buy into anything GW again unless it's some minis that I REALY want to build and paint up, amd for now I still have plenty of those on a shelf both primed and still on sprees, as well as some partially painted but not "done" ... Not a fan of GWs release schedules at all, editions being near the end of a too short lifespan and codex books finally coming out for certain armies... and many models being eliminated from their games after so much had been invested into those models... no thanks... OPR it is for me, for the foreseeable future...
Started collecting in 1992, became serious about playing 2000, played regularly through 3rd & 4th edition. Then I straight up quit during 5th with the joint blows of the Robin Crudance codex ripping up the Doctrine system as it was a straight downgrade (and in 5th a 3.5 Doctrine army could of eviserated a 5 Orders Codex army no issue, extra tanks or not) and the stealth 100% price hike by halving all the plastic box contents, that twin hit had me done for a good 10 years. Only in the last 2 or 3 did I start collecting again as I saw a Harakoni Warhawk fan art and gave me an urge to do an army, I sourced as many of the parts as I could from other companise and only the bare minimum from GW, mainly paints as I really don't want to give them money. Looked through the Guard codex of the time, skimmed the parade of identical looking meta armies on line and decided, sod that, based the entire thing off the 3.5 codex and started adding things for fun, las-lmg's, Rapier Laser Destroyers, K9 units. Lot more fun than a basic army with the same special characters I see all over the place. (BTW if anyone knows if there's a revamped version of 4th that's widely played let me know, I'd love to try the force out and there is no way it's playable in any later edition)
- monopose characters are terrible - upgrade bits are getting rarer, with old DA you had tons of bits that everyone says scfi gothic - the invention of primaris and new gear has taken the charm out of forgotten tech - space marine armor shouldn't be antigrav, it should be chains - cawl did heresy according to the old definition of technology when he reinvented things - constructing everything around the theme of detachment feels wrong - limiting which hero can join which squad, especially as a first born player, feels wrong - squad size 3 feels wrong - the possibility to individualize cool is no longer given - the individuality (deathwing commando squad, talonmaster, bikes with techmarine or psyker) has been removed - the army is mostly only differentiated by heroes, color and detachment - crazy things like the warp field grenade, templates were cool - the fixation on the W6 is unfavorable, in the past the mutlimelter had 2W20 to penetrate an armored unit -a sometimes very poor rules language - the inability to balance the game - books are nice, but extremely impractical and no longer state of the art, at least not for playing - cards or app please - the game doesn't feel powerful anymore, in very old editions you had a lot of damage, big bam everything was strong, now everything is way too boring, each time I do one more damage, or don't hit one more ... -> so many things that are bad............... and yes, as a first born player i think it's terrible that everything is being phased out, it feels like trash bin
@@stefanovettor6507 we'll talk again in 5 years when the next phase out wave comes and the first primaris are pulled out, just like they did with AoS stormcast
@ the first stormcast were pulled out due to a scale issue. The models were not great and looked like oversized dwarves. GW wanted to cleanup the line with better models. With the primaris they did a better job and even older models are well scaled. Also, thx to books and revised codex shenanigans it is difficult to replace existing units (an intercession is still the basic battle line unit). Ofc eventually some units might go to legends and in general nothing last forever. Nothing prevents me to still play with my models… I play with friends. New primaris intercession come out and mine are obsolete? I still play them as new intercessors (and the will look equally cool since they are now true scale)
Even the f*cking so called dynamic pose models look like garbage, or whatever you would call the "new" daemonettes of slaanesh, I bought them when they came out, yet the previous actual "one poses" looked phenomenal compared to them
Gw are ever creeping to that make or break point. Pricing is out of control and im looking at alternatives. No way kids now can afford to even buy in. Their stock is increasing due to selling the IP.
Since less people are having kids, you’ll notice a shift by many companies from children to adults. Look at Lego, more adults buy legos for themselves than for their children now.
@@Toiletlord This is the main thing, Hasbro is basically entirely kept afloat by Wizards of the Coast as their toy and boardgame market have fucking nosedived in the last decade as less and less kids are buying traditional toys. Hence why they're pushing MtG as hard as they can at the moment because whilst it only generates like 10% of the revenue it's an absurd 85% of the profit the company makes is from MtG and D&D alone. If it wasn't for Hasbro owning WotC they would have gone out of business in the last 5 years.
I agree, the only way I even got a starting army was due to a family friend who was a manager at GW over a decade ago giving away some marines, the pricing in most areas is definitely an issue, I am just glad my local shop has ok pricing compared to other places. 30 quid for a few heavy intercessors is still way too much.
All new edition codices should be released at the same time as their main rulebook. Miniature ranges can still be updated randomly without that limit, but their rules should either be already in their codex, or free and easily accessible online as an addition to their codex, whether just a new wargear option or an entirely new unit.
This. All of this. I'm a Custodes, Death Guard, Imperial Guard and Votann player and I am still waiting for the codexes of the last three to come out. I have the same problem with Cities of Sigmar for AOS. Army books should come out at least within 2-3 months of a new edition not wait for almost two years.
I stayed with it through 4e and into 5e, but then hung it up. I got tired of GW invalidating almost every build that I had made for my armies. Basically when Rick Priestly, Gav Thorpe, Andy Chambers, and Jervis Johnson were either no longer involved in the creation of 40K, or not at GW, I lost interest in their newer products. I ONLY got interested in Kill Team because it has allowed me to kitbash my old OOP RT-4e metal and plastic Citadel models to play in a new skirmish game.
But I definitely think the Vehicle Design Rules (VDR) released in 2001 for WH40K 3e (1998-2004) is IMNSHO the pinnacle of 40K as a creative gamer hobby. It was after this that most of the above mentioned people left GW and the company became more corporatized.
@@cavemanbum My favorite VDR design was for a modified pair of 1/48 scale M2 Bradley IFV models that I kitbashed for my IG Arcturan Regiment (think old metal Cadians with Mordian officers) that had a turret-mounted auto-cannon w/ co-axial stormbolter, 2x H/K missiles, track covers, and an extra point of armor on the left & right sides compared to a Chimera. They were still amphibious, but could only carry 6-troops, so were not usable by regular infantry squads, armored fists, or ogryn squads. They were reserved for Company or Platoon HQ squads, 6-man assault or stormtrooper/grenadier squads, or 6-man hardened vet squads only, and were (obviously) a little more expensive than the standard STC Chimera model. But when combined as strengtheners to normal mechanized infantry units with Chimera (and supported by scout and armored sentinels with a variety of weapons), they really showed that IG was not ALWAYS mass swarms of foot sloggers, and could actually capture objectives.
I didn't loose faith in GW. I just got tiered of having to learn new rules, every few years. That and the cost of the game. $80 for the rule book, $70 for the codex, $50 for the supplement and of course if I want the new units that are coming out it is $50 for 5 marines. I started playing One Page Rules games. And I'm having fun playing again.
They are the only reason GW is still around. Before 7th edition and GWs pivot Warhammer was getting stagnant and dying with no new lore and books coming out at larger intervals than now Warhammer was dying. The change is what saved Warhammer and you don't realise you are defending what was a sinking ship.
@ releasing space marines so everyone would buy them over again saved gw not primaris themselves. all the best lore and books were being released in 2006 with HH
I was defending a perfectly elegant finely hand crafted and well loved schooner. GW had two minor years of loss until 8th. Does anyone think that true scale would not have sold as well? Primaris were made with copyrighting and a modern audience rebrand in mind. You see narrative choices with Pmarines you would never see firstborn doing
@@alphaomega938 it wasn't primaris it was guilliman. 40k was stagnant for years you had occasionally books as I said but for 40k not much. People weren't buying and playing as much as before and they needed to do something and so they change up 40k, primaris are nothing but the icing on the cake it was returning the primarchs and pushing the overall narrative past the 13th black crusade. Since then Warhammer has been in a boom hit or miss to old fans but brought Warhammer back from being stagnant.
@@williambowes-xt2sm there's a segment in a WD or something somewhere that describes Nigel Stillman's "rules" for collecting and painting an army. Essentially you collect a 2000 point army, paint it up, spray a couple coats of varnish on the army, then never touch it with a paintbrush again. Then, always play the army as-is even if your opponent brings 3k points to the table. I cant share images on YT but if you google Still-Mania you may find the full list. It's a bit of cheek but the vibe is definitely hobby first, gaming second and especially gaming for fun not for winning
This is what GW has always wanted. I worked for them for 5 years and, every meeting talked about getting the old players out and, getting fresh blood in.
And they are right, the old players are so annoying and weird with the people that want to start playing. They are impossible with the rules and make it unbearable to play. They are a wall against the new people.
They felt that older players already did their big purchases. They wanted new players buying starter sets, followed by books and, Battle force boxes. For veteran players, we were supposed to tell them about whatever was new, get a preorder and send them on their way.
@@wingtyrant If they weren't such douches they would have used the older players to bulk out the community and done leagues for veterans. These are often the people with the flash armies which are different to studio/shop armies. I get the age difference, a lot of younger players don't want to play with older people and that is probably the real hurdle here that gw was wanting to overcome. A young guy comes in, sees mostly middle aged men and thinks this isn't for him.
Yes, all of this. Everything you’ve said is true. The problem is that GW is a publicly traded company, not a private company that can do what it likes. There’s a board of non game players who are only allowed by law to look at how to maximise profits from the business, which means they can’t take a step back to a time that was less profitable. Added into that is that GW a long time ago identified their core demographic as being 14 year old boys, and they know from their market research that most of them lose interest after three years, so they base their renewal cycle on that (not 2 as you said, but your points still stand). There’s a fresh batch of teenage boys ready to buy books and figures, and the company genuinely doesn’t care about anything other than selling to that fresh batch. That’s Main Games anyway-the Specialist Games department acts slightly differently, which is why you get fan service games like Blood Bowl and HH.
I feel like it's worth noting a few things: - Firstly the edition cycles are three years, not two, which makes your points a little more diffuse. (Edit: I’m really sorry if that sounded snarky, it wasn’t meant to) - Secondly the core-rules are now largely free. As a kid in 2001, I had immense trouble saving up for the WHFB 6th Edition rulebook because it was $65 AUD which was a massive barrier to play - Thirdly, regarding the release of Codices and stuff, I have the 1996 Wood Elf Army Book, which saw minimal support in 2000 with Ravening Hordes, but they didn't have proper rules until late 2005 with WHFB 7th edition being released less than a year later. I'm not saying it excuses how it is now, but it's never really been "good". A lot of people look at the late 90's and early 00's as a really glorious time for the hobby, and it was - but not because problems that exist now didn't exist then, it was more the cultural approach and the DIY nature and community (which is sorely lacking now).
The games also encouraged that DIY behavior though. Nowadays everything has a set loadout, everything is mono-pose, no rules for models that GW doesn't produce, no meaningful wargear options (would you like to gain a CP on a 5+ if you target this shitty battleline unit or have their s4 ap0 guns ignore cover?), etc. They've done everything they can to take conversions away from being something fun to do for the game and made it entirely divorced from 40k/AoS. Conversions are now a "Well, if you want to." rather than a "Wow, that's a really cool way to make Elysians I would never have thought about before!!" The hobby used to feed into the game, which fed into the hobby. Now, the hobby seems to be more just a barrier of entry to the game that people want to play. That's why more and more people are just moving to 3d printing and not engaging with the hobby aspect outside of painting.
@ Those are really great points about the meaningfulness of conversions and choice. I guess that I’m very lucky within my group that it still means things and does get the “wow” reaction it used to.
The biggest issue is that GW release schedule doesn't accomodate the time required to build and paint the models. You cant build an entire wargame based on having 30/40/50/100 models and then release minis every month and a new books every 2 years, it's imposible to keep up because IF you are finally done... here's the new edition lmao. GW is an endless ouroboros of "start new and then who cares... sell everything and start again... and sell everything and start again". Always starting projects but never finish them is their ideal customer.
It would be possible if the miniatures were cheap enough to be affordable for people that are unemployed. Problem is, unless you are working full time, you wont be able to afford them. But if you are working full time, then you can only have 40k as your hobby or you don't have enough time.
...100 models should not be a two-year project. I know I'm on the upper end of productivity, but I chew through 10 models a week. Multiple factors go into that; I choose deliberately simple color schemes, I've focused heavily on learning speed-painting techniques, and I'm pretty good about sitting down to paint every day even if I only have time to put a single color on a single model. None of that is any kind of secret tech, it was just asking myself whether I wanted to enter painting contests or whether I wanted a finished army and aligning my efforts appropriately. And the funny thing is that I still get a lot of compliments on the quality of individual models, and I think it's because I've executed any given scheme or technique so many times that quantity has acquired a quality all it's own.
@@zacnewman7140 It depends. I paint a lot so it's not an issue for me, but when I'm talking to other players all I see is a wave of grey plastic or horribly painted minis because they are always in FOMO mode for something.
@seileen1234 I've never heard someone claim their army is unpainted because they just bought it to have something competitive, it's always one of the following three things: 1) I tried painting, and I just don't enjoy it. 2) I tried painting, and bare plastic looks better than anything I ever produced. 3) I'm working on it but I paint very slow. 1 and 2 are _far_ more common than 3.
@seileen1234 don't bash people for having Grey minis or badly painted ones. Maybe they're legit not rushing themselves OR they just don't enjoy painting. It's unfair to assume people who play with Grey models are chasing fomo. I think if you are dropping hobby time into painting an army just to paint it because you're afraid of judgemental people like yourself, you're seriously going about your own hobby through the perspective of being a slave to games workshops release schedule
@@LetsTalkTabletop I agree with "Gorgeous". I would like to see more about OPR. I also like Conquest - the minis are cool - but it doesn't seem to get much traction from RUclips.
My problem with conquest is that every time I'm interested in looking into it, the miniatures are just as expensive as games workshop. It has deterred me from ever looking into it.
You can also play Warhammer without giving GW a dime. Download rules online, print proxy minis, use paints from Vallejo, AK etc. Give them a giant middle finger.
@@LetsTalkTabletop When I first bought into Conquest, the cost was a big positive for me. Then I realized that building an army isn't really any cheaper than AOS or W40k. The rules and app being free, is now the only benefit. The models I bought a few months ago were $50 for a unit (on par with GW), and the big models are on par with GW costs, but don't count for a big chunk of your army, which makes building even more expensive. I was hoping Conquest would have brought GW prices down if it got popular, instead, conquest has just gotten more expensive. When they offered 2000pt armies to buy, my army was over $600. I questioned it and one of their reps said that an AOS or 40K army could cost more than that. I responded with the fact that they could also cost a lot less than that. My NH 2k army if bought full price, is less than $500. That's buying everything separate with no deals. Buying a 2000 pt army all at once, should offer deals of some sort.
I spent my entire childhood wanting to play Warhammer 40k, I did a ton of research on the lore and setting for literally a decade or so, before finally walking into my local GW store and buying a Stormcast eternals starter box (at this point ironically AoS appeals to me more) only to discover over the next few weeks that all of the things I was excited about in this hobby, like building my own terrain and kitbashing etc is not even allowed in their stores. I switched to Battletech and will probably play other wargames I buy from independent stores for far less money and more fun.
@@DrunkPlaylistsmight be the trend of fixed warhesr options and static points values on units, instead of having lots of customisation options for troopers and characters youd need to kitbash to make instead all the options tend to come in each unit box as part of a monopose figure
GW is pivoting to a different audience. most of my friend group are MTG players, extremely analytical people who love to optimize, and they are liking 40k more and more as it goes in the competitive direction. i'm very much the opposite; i don't mind things not being perfectly balanced if you get more flavorful rules, and i don't mind relying on my opponent to just not be a dick and to restrain himself from spamming the things that are plainly overpowered.
I came back to the hobby about a year or so ago after a decade long break and this was akin to full on culture shock to me. Competitive 40k has always been a bit of a silly concept, imho. It's just too imprecise to be taken that seriously and that was, imho, one of its strengths. Coming back to find that it's not just common to play it that way now, but that GW's whole business model relies on it is definitely taking some getting used to.
@@Hudstonplease don't get used to comp 40k. It's a joke, a scam, and an unethical take on their mediocre tabletop game. Chess can be competitive, but 40k and AoS will never have the trappings to be a real competitive game. Out of GW's currently marketed games, only killteam could come close to being a true competitive and balanced game, if only it didn't have any faction flavor whatsoever. There is a reason that MTG players can play competitive 40k as an extra past-time. Compared to MTG the balance for GW games is an absolute scam.
@@Hudston Unfortunately this happened when Jervis Johnson left the company. According to some insiders he was literally the last person fighting for 'casual play first' idea of design and was constantly fighting the rules design team who were highly competitive focused former tournament players, so when he left everything became about focusing on 'competitive play first' and casual play as a second (like the Crusade stuff that barely anybody seems to play).
They pivoted to a different audience when the old guard weren't keeping them afloat. Alot people don't remember that for a long time 40k and Warhammer in general were stagnate and was not getting better they were starting to loose money and risk going under like many times before. Only reason they changed and are still around is because of the pivot to a different audience and advancing the story. Many of the old guard hate the new approach but don't realise they were defending a sinking ship.
You are 100% right. The LOTR SBG community is going through its own throes, having a trivial edition update but a lot of the range has just been relegated to the bin. Whole armies, like monsters of Mirkwood, gone. Supposedly the new licensing agreement precludes anything that isn’t exactly as it appears in the movies. So giving Celeborn a shield or armor because he fought in the 2nd age isn’t possible. He just wore pajamas in the movie, so that is exactly as he must appear on the tabletop.
OMG. That sounds terrible. Yeah I did know about the killing of a lot of The Lord of the rings miniatures, I forgot to mention it in the video. But I definitely feel for your community.
GW used to have a bunch of hobby stuff on their site like templates you could print out for ruins and advice for the best materials to use to make them. Cities of death had a decent section on how to make dence urban boards etc. This was all while selling their own terrain. They used to explicitly talk in their publications about how to make the hobby work for different kinds of people but it's all gone now. When they stopped crediting artists, that was a seriously ill omen.
When I was a kid I used to read lexicanum articles, look at dakka dakka forums, watch the early warhammer 40k batreps, and look online at the models dreaming of one day owning an army. 13 years later at the start of 8th edition I finally got my first army. By the end of 9th I owned 7 factions, 2 horus heresy armies, and 3 AOS armies. As of now I am selling down to just owning my Heresy legions and AOS models because they are fun to play in OPR. Started into Gundam and watched my local wargaming scene die with just me and one guy left rotating wargames based on what we want to play. I was once called an ambassador of warhammer in my area for the sheer amount of lore, hobby know-how, and ability to mentor players of all skills and now? Viva La OPR, Ravaged Star, Trench Crusade, and Gundam cause GW has utterly shattered my trust and love of their universe and games. The worst part is that I see this kind of story in ever comment section, hobby discord, or online forum these days. People just crushed that they have been so easily and completely betrayed and abused for just wanting to have a hobby.
I dunno. I have a 3d printer and have developed a real taste for making my own models. Even if GW models were free at this point, they still have a product I don't really want for a game that doesn't have good rules. Also I effing hate them.
At the very least, they'd get their Australian & Canadian customers back. Even when sold at a 3rd party discount, their products are out of reach for many up north & down under.
@@Chunkypumpkinheadhonestly speaking 3d printing won't be a competition. People like to speak as if it is but in reality it really isn't and won't be. There are a ton of reasons covered by other people why it won't sink GW from most people still preferring to buy GW plastic and not wanting the inconvenience of having to learn a new skill set to 3d print an army, cure the models and more like having the space. People will never choose the niche thing that requires effort when they can just go to the shop and buy some. The only thing that's going to sink GW or give them a reality check is the pricing.
Named creators, named artists, Rick Priestly, Andy Chambers, Jervis, Alan Merret [IP protector]. From serious weekly games in 2001 to now, so many people have quit 'playing the game' around me. They still do model building though.
I've spent in 2024 aprox 10% of what I've spent in 2023 regarding GW products, and I don't plan spending more than that in 2025. Precisesly for the reasons you laid out in this video.
I haven't been able to play 40k in years; but if I was to play again, I would find a group of friends willing to play 4th or 5th edition. I think finding 1 edition that you like and sticking with it is the wise move for friends groups.
This is what I see mostly anyway. I know someone who plays only 9th, because list building still existed. That, and the app is bad and better 3rd party apps were designed for 9th edition but haven't updated for 10th. Honestly, the only one who wanted 10th edition was games workshop because they realized that 3rd party digital support for 9th edition was better than anything their dinosaur of a company could ever produce.
I basically gave up after spending months building and painting kill team lists learning all the rules i brought and painted prinexus all during covid, to have it all just made out of date before i even got to use it. I did buy the new edition because I loved the new models and terrain, but my enthusiasm had died for it. So I bought the warcry catacombs box and loved it, so have basically been playing warcry and have refused to buy any new rules, we just use the original rules and data cards. Also the Warhammer stores are so expensive now, I always try and buy from 3rd party retailers or 2nd hand off eBay / market places. There just isn't any point trying to stay current anymore.
I collected and occasionally played 40K in the early 90’s. I got the 2nd edition box set for Christmas when I was 12. Recently my son discovered the game and I thought it would be fun to dip my toe in the water again so we could have a shared hobby. I have to say, I was flabbergasted that we got all the way to 10th edition already. Just this month I splashed out on a couple of codexes only to discover that GW released a “balancing dataslate”. I despair at the thought that I’ve sunk hard-earned cash into an ultimate starter set and a bunch of books that are already potentially redundant. Really puts a sour taste in my mouth when I am trying to share the joy this game brought me in my youth with my son.
40k needs to adopt 2 formats of play; Competetive and Codex. Competetive could be what we have now. Constantly updating rules, hyper focus on balance. Etc. Designed for balanced and tournament play. Codex would be the book is final. Whatever your book for that edition says is the way it goes. It could focus more on army themes, skewed play aimed at less balance and more just good fun. As it stands both of these ways of play are trying to coexist and are being forced to mix in a way that just doesnt work and takes away from both. And it's doing more to push people away than anything; and once that happens; people try other games and never come back.
Did everyone just forget that open play exists? What happens when someone else's army is broken and unplayable right on release? What happens when your army is OP and un-fun to play against on release? Ho hum, just gotta deal with it. Suck it up like Tyranids players did from 4th through 9th edition.
@@BloodDX2 I'd be ok with this on the condition that they fine-tune the codex releases more to reflect that. One of my armies is Custodes and our codex this edition was a borderline insult in how slapdash it was at time of print, likely partially due to the expectation that they could FAQ and errata it into a better state afterwards. Even with fixes, we're stuck with only two real detachment options this edition because of the rush job, three if you count the new one in the Grotsmas detachments. If they tamp down their quality control at GW and produce codexes that have enough variety and are enjoyable to play, then I could see codex mode working, but it would require making codexes that were substantial and flavorful enough to be worth committing to for an entire edition as is.
@@theshamurai32dude. Just mash together various faction rules from previous editions. If you're friends have a problem with it, get new friends. Are you all here to play an edition, or are you here to play your armies and characters? Homebrew. Homebrew. Homebrew. Actually make a word document and print it out. Combine all the effort you have ever put into commenting on youtube and instead put that next wave of Commenting energy into making succinct rules that you and your friends can play. Take the best of what GW has produced in the last 30 years and implement it into your version of 40k. The game is obviously in the wrong hands. Zorpazorp plays his own rules-overlay to make 40k more like the video game Dawn of War 1. He has stated that he enjoys his own format more than the GW one. Personally, this solution fits me best as there aren't a lot of people where I'm from who play 40k, and if they do, they're playing in friend groups at houses. There are casual tournament goers, and crusade campaigners for the local shops. From what I've seen, most who play the "10th edition events" don't actually know 10th edition rules, or they heard some whisperings of a change to how control ranges work. None of these tournaments seem to be very impacted by the official rules, as most people don't even care to follow them. At the last tournament I saw I heard this phrase joking spoken a lot that day, "I cheated at Ursa Major and all I got was this shitty t-shirt." 0.000001% of gw's market base plays the full rules as they come out. 80% of GW's market base still have unopened boxes. GW will NEVER feel the difference their rules make in their sales. EVER.
I think you hit the nail on the head. I'm reluctant to buy kill team boxes or say Votann because I don't know if they'll be around in a few years. And Space Marines are in a very strange place model-wise. Will land raiders continue to be a thing? Centurions?
This is the benefit of players like myself who are willing to use third party rules and/or do lots of RPG play and just want really cool miniatures. :) I think rules are the biggest thing that is broken in warhammer. Eliminate those and 80% of the problems go away.
@@defdaz I think people tend to forget that the game is owned by the players, it's only the IP that is owned by the company. If we don't like a version of the game they put out, then whatever. We can play our own game instead. 3rd edition? 8th? OPR? We the players get to decide. GW isn't making us play the game as they see it. I think players forget that a lot.
I stopped buying books when I realized I hadn't even opened some of them before they were out of date. And I was just buying books for the 40k models I had...
You hit the nail on the head. @8:30 This was the tipping point of AoS to me, ridding the earlier Stormcasts that were in some cases less than 5 years old and making extinct the Beasts of Chaos and Bonesplitters from the game showed me how quickly GW will churn and burn through model ranges. I’m focusing on completing my collections for 40K and Fantasy (now Old World) and do what I can do with Middle Earth.
The fact that the whole AoS/Old World and 40k/Heresy split is entirely driven by spreadsheets is so fucking stupid. Oh well you can play Beasts of Chaos in the Old World? Yeah they're not allowed to exist in AoS now because that would mean we don't know which department is generating sales if they're available in both! Despite the fact that it's all for the same company and it shouldn't matter what system you bought a unit for, the company is still making money but they want to make sure the right department is making money so they can balance individual profit and loss balance sheets.
@@luketferIt’s funny with Beasts of Chaos being removed from AoS as they featured pretty prominently in the earlier sourcebooks and even some of the more recent novels and stuff. It does highlight the messy transition between Fantasy to AoS and even more so the weird obsession GW has now to delineate Old World with AoS while Warriors of Chaos are somehow still allowed to exist in the Fantasy revival.
It may be that hardcopy rules publication, especially in hardcover, is simply not a tenable business model in the age of the Internet. A bunch of hobbyists can slap together a new set of rules, play test them to death over the course of a few weekends, and then publish them as a monetized series of RUclips videos. GW will eventually find itself as the purveyor of miniatures and the owner of the IP for the lore; and they will have to price the miniatures so that they are price-competitive with 3D printing.
I basically stopped playing. I still buy minis when I think they're cool, but I don't think I've played a single game of 10e and I haven't gotten through the 3e AoS starter booklet yet. And it's for the same reasons you mentioned; I'm too busy and playing a game takes all afternoon. I don't think I played 9th either... and the funny thing is they don't have to do this at all. They want to release a new edition every year because then they can sell a big box that everyone will buy so the profit numbers look good for the summer. But they could do that without changing the rules. Every 3 years you release a new starter set with different armies, a campaign supplement and the rulebook update with the faq's since last year's book. But it's all still compatible with the old rules, so if you don't care about these armies, you can just skip one and be fine.
i really started to see the decline back around 2010. i worked for GW in 08 and back then it was all about catering to the niche market they knew we served and helping new hobbyists who joined in. after i left the company, i went back to the store a couple years later and the staff there had a whole different approach. i'm a die hard guard player with (at that time the end of 5th edition) 10k points of guard and they tried selling me things like new space marines and tau stuff. i was lugging around my entire army and a staffer started pushing me on stuff i had zero interest in. i knew then it was on its way down. seeing the new rules (both fantasy and 40k) showed me they were dumbing things down to reach a wider market. i lost interest in GW after that and havent bought a thing from them since. i have a collection of most of the codecies and the 4th and 5th ed rule books and i play with those when i can. gonna be getting into 3d printing to make more models and build more armies. i'll probably even start to try out new game rulesets! also, the paints became garbage. i honestly think gw switched pots to ones that dried out faster on purpose to force players and painters to buy more over priced paint. i switched to vellejo, army painter, and p3. alright, nerd rant over lol.
I like 40k lore video and painting minis. I play quite a lot of board games. It is bizarre to me that so many people are happy playing a war-game where the whole of one side goes before the other! Alternating activation should have been in the official rules long ago!
I was a regular buyer from my local GW store in Australia until they said no painting in the store and no gaming in there either. It was only for purchasing Warhammer and then get the heck out of here. That felt like a kick in the balls to a long time fan and customer. I don’t have a 3D printer but I buy 3D proxy minis from Etsy now when I can.
In reference to the suprising disaster that was fallout 76. Alot of people were suprised at this being the direction and decisions Bethesda were going with. But i think the way someone summed that situation up is very similar to whats happening in GWs monopoly of wargaming. He saud that they made New Vegas for the RPG fans and Fallout 3 for the Action adventure fans, Fallout 4 was an obligatory sequel to a popular game rhat added a bunch of additional features. Theres no where else to go with the setting. So Fallout 76 was Bethesday cashing in on the good will that had been acrued" Games workshop in my mind is unfortunately not just ignoring their relationship with their target audience. They are actively and conciously turning it in for a reward and a subscription service. At this point im priced out of most of their games. And the way they are obsessed with forcing specific use of models, game systems, and armies that are constantly flucuating behind a paywall means ill never play 40k, AoS, or anything else again. I do like The Old World. But i dont think ill expect positive improvements past 3 years. Im just enjoying it a bit while i can.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on this video. I lost faith in games workshop when I bought a tomb kings starter set and then they removed the whole army before I could even clip them from the sprue. The codex issue has also been a major problem for me too as I used to have an Imperial Guard army. Can’t afford that now!
I agree with you Scott. GW has turned away from the "guys having some beers and rolling dice" audience and went to the "competitive hyper balanced" audience. I agree with your point this will kill them in the end. With how successful stuff like Trench Crusade Fundraising ($4.5 million) or Turnip 28 whent it shows there is a real desire to move away from Warhammer (but still want that grim dark vibe). Plus all the models and armies they put into 'legions'. They keep squeezing and people are sick and tired of their prices. I'm looking for other games to play and look forward to playing your Mass Brutality. People's wallets are really tight of late and GW's view is "let them eat cake" well my 3d printer will keep going BRRRRRR in defiance! viva la revolution!
@@Ducos_ Yeh, and Hasbro said the same thing about DnD/ADnD ......... How's that going for yer Hasbro? 🤪 ........ and if that even looks like that model might work, micro-transactions and all, GW will be up that drainpipe quicker than a rat on speed!
first off, Trench Crusade is never beating 40k for market share. While the setting and the vibe are awesome, the models they sell are just NEVER going to hit regular store shelves across the US, much less the rest of the world; other countries have varying degrees of censorship laws and cultures, with a lot being much less open to gore and violence compared to US. Also, $4.5 million is a lot for a fundraiser but is nothing in the enterprise sphere. Assuming Trench Crusade grows in popularity and the creators found a company that is 10x times their fundraising number, GW is a $5.5 billion market cap company; that is $5,500 million by the way. You would need over 1 thousand Trench Crusade fundraisers to even come close to being at the level GW is at...
@@TaylorX-g4b, Wrong. Look at the dominance, Disney once had, and the rest in our laurels and they are not the Giants that they used to be. Kings of war is increasing in popularity, and I’ve been told by friends in parts of England, and there are parts in Dayton, Ohio, and other places that King’s war is giving stiff competition to GW. Everybody thinks at the giant can’t fall, but here’s the thing the bigger they are the harder they fall.
Thank you for this video dude - it helps me understand so much. My 2 year 40k journey has been terrible. My local store suggested I start with Kill Team and they sold me the Pariah Nexus box. I painted the Flayed Ones Necron team entirely before I learned that whole box was deprecated by 6 months and nothing in there was usable in current rules. They never should have let me buy that as a new player. I went back and bought the Chalnath box, all the new tac ops cards, and the book to build compendium teams. After a few months of painting I finally got into the groove of playing and not long after KT 2024 came out. All the books and cards I had are now useless - I literally threw them away. Had to go back and buy equipment packs, new token sheets, new dice, download a new app, and learn a 3rd set of rules all in under 2 years. I don't understand how any new player could make sense of how to get started even in something that should be as simple as Kill Team.
when they completely nuked the stormcast range recently, something changed for me. there was always a sort of unwritten contract between GW and the customers that if you buy "the latest models" theyll generally be usable for a very long time. when they decided to remove the entire 2nd edition stormcast range of aos, which was only 5-6 years old, i realised that ANY new army is potentially a liability to own.
Ive been working on creating a version of Warhammer's rules that blends fun and fluffy rules based on 9th edition and older editions, with the simplicity of list building that 10th has. Im still working on one faction at a time, but once its done im hoping to release it somewhere for free.
I bought a couple of the really nice army sets for AOS during 3rd edition. The ones that come with a couple of core units, a commander, the battle tome, warscroll cards. Less than a year later, a new edition is released, the book and cards are obsolete. Add to which, they’ve pulled another stunt where the more recent army sets are *almost* a spearhead under the new rules. But you still have to buy a different unit or commander to use your army with that system. All a cynical cash grab and taking their fans for granted.
My faith started crumbling when AoS killed Fantasy and it wasn’t because I didn’t like and play AoS, it’s because weeks before it was announced, I had bought a ton of dwarves which basically disappeared once Sigmar hit.
Oh no! I do remember the death of fantasy being very sudden. That sucks. A similar thing happened with my friend who just painted his final unit of beasts of chaos like 2 months before they just made the announcement they were going to be discontinued.
@@LetsTalkTabletopI am praying to Grandfather Nurgle that this doesn't happen to Daemons as a standalone army soon. Started to hear rumors that Daemons is going to get the Harlequin treatment and used exclusively as allies, separated and rolled into each deity's traitor legion, or outright squatted. Given I've spent most of this edition building a standard sized Daemons army (and having a blast doing it), it would be enough for me to get a 3d printer, find other sources like Wahapedia for rules, stick to my local independent game shops, and abandon any interaction with GW altogether.
Thank you for putting to words that feeling that has been gnawing since they switched to 32mm bases. I started in 3rd edition and I had enjoyed being able to use the same miniatures I had invested hours and hours of hobby time.
From the video.. "Lost my trust in GW" is very true, in fact a lot of people online may not just be able to express that in the correct way. War Machine did the competitive crowd thing... didnt go well.
3D printing means companies can make competing rulesets without needing to have their own miniature lines, and there's enough variety online for people to pick and choose from. What GW has had going for them is being the market leader, and having an inspiring lore (Inspiring in the sense that you have a lot of inspiration to go on when making your army). That's something that lacks in for instance One Page Rules. But, the lore of 40k feels like it's been going the corporate path of sanitization. It's no longer the Grim Dark. And the models too feel a lot more generic than in the past with many different factions sharing design features too. The Primaris powerpacks having that round part, that looks like a Tau drone thing. Or the Leagues of not-Squats having helmets with features you can find similarly on those Gravis jump Primaris guys. And the creativity aspect is being diminished by the previously almost endlessly modular Space Marine kits now having Primaris, Horus Heresy and Chaos Space Marines no longer sharing the same template or sizes.
Essentially what you said. I had a bretonnian army, a tomb king army, a mixed gods daemon army with mortal allies and a combined Eldar/dark eldar army that I had painted to match in aesthetics. Suddenly I had two redundant armies, a bunch of units I couldn't feasibly use, and my eldar army had to go back to being pure eldar or dark eldar and was completely unbalanced. I would show up for battles using my Dark Eldar and take one look at the guys army before he set up and I'd just shake his hand and say you win. They would look almost confused or alarmed and want to know why and I'd be like. I have 4 dark lances, and you have an entirely mechanised army. GG mate. You win. I got absolutely sick of the meta chasing. The attitudes of players totally changed too. Made the game far too competitive and the players seemed really salty.
I had a 'kitchen sink' Chaos army with daemons, beastmen and Chaos Warriors. (all Tzeentch/Undivided but still). I ended up with 3 small, separate armies that didn't work on their own. I sold up. just a comment to say I share your pain, really.
@@aedwynn6474 Wow. You had the beastmen too? 🥺 Yup. You know the story. 😅 When it happened, my cuz made a mock sympathy face and said "All part of the plan I guess" LOL 😆 (Tzeentch was mine too)
@@larryargent503 I had Wood Elves before that. Before Wood Elves I had generic Undead led by a Liche. After the Chaos debacle I left Warhammer behind for good. It was a cursed game for me, seemingly.
@@aedwynn6474 Ouch. Wood elves were so pricey and rare to see, they disappeared for an age too. I left after the end times, moved to 40K and got the same treatment with my thousand sons/daemon allies and the mixed gods and mixed eldar. (Foolishly bought forgeworld models) I really loved the game but ended up with a wardrobe of garbage. Still...managed to sell it all on ebay. 😆 I make do with Battle sector now. Sure it's glitchy asf and constantly crashes but at least I only paid a few quid for the armies and don't need to break my back carting it all about or break my brain to work out ever changing rules. (😮💨 wow - turns out you're my GW survivor therapist lmao)
What they just did to lord of the rings hurts bad. Lord of the rings for 20 years has actively encouraged converting and hobbying. Giving wargear options everywhere across the board. No they say if there is no model with the wargear, then you can no longer bring them legally in the game. I have multiple completely converted armies that have been make 95% illegal. This is a big insult to long time players and not to mention will screw up the balance of the game tremendously. I have friends that simply have too mich faith in GW and it feels bad being proven right😢
Completely agree. I'm 32 and have a wife and baby. Changing the rules and points every 30 seconds is great for people who play every week but I can't keep up.
This applies to GW's paint range as well. Changes to the trifecta (nuln oil, aggrax, seraphim seppia), removal of certain citadel sprays (looking at you averland sunset), removal of glazes. What GW has done, which I presume was to encourage people to use their contrast range, has encouraged me to buy vallejo rather than have to invent ways to continue my color schemes when GW goes on a 3 week bender and decides to change the pallette. *edit for a spelling mistake*
Not reformulating their white and off-white paints to not go on like liquid chalk is the main thing that's pushed me away, honestly. They discontinued Ceramite White, but the other whites and offwhites are still rough enough to ruin a good paint job if you aren't lucky. If Pro Acryl, AK, and Two Thin Coats have solved this issue, so can they. Changing the Shades to stain the raised areas less actually made me want to use them, but I get why it annoyed people who used the old ones a lot.
You know Vallejo is a slum lord right? They won't even fix their leaky roof for their employees. It's like buying Nikes, you're supporting a shit system
This video explains a lot of reasons why I haven’t branched out to playing any edition of 40k or even combat patrol. Kill team has been made so easily accessible rule wise and has a fairly decent amount of variety in terms of what I want to play and all for what used to be 60 dollars. Unfortunately they did raise prices on the single team boxes so they’ll be getting less of my money.
@@alexgonzalez7218 I love Kill Team so much, I honestly have started preferring it to 40k and pointing new people interested there first as an entry point. Not only is it cheaper, simpler to pick up, and more convenient to play casually, but I feel like I get more "flair" out of it. Kill Team has that narrative focus that really drives me in games (I'm an RPG player first, wargamer second), whereas in 10th edition 40k I often feel like a match is just a scrimmage with all the style and panache of running a finance sheet in excel. Since it's only one squad of a handful of models, I feel like I can really flex the hobbying muscles by painting each model with thorough personalized details and consider things like their backstories and the broader narrative between games, which is an exercise in futility with a big army. Plus it's a bit of a personal bias. I am a soldier in my working life, so leading a squad of a handful of troops clearing buildings, finding vantage points, and engaging in a firefight is a lot more grounded to what I'm used to than commanding an army of dozens of models in varying sizes, stats, and battlefield roles.
I understand your sentiment, but I still believe it is a future reality. I am not a 3D printer bro per se, but I think it's inevitable. And of course we should keep the logic of stock traders and remember that past results are no indicator of future gain. Just because the past was a certain way doesn't mean the future will be.
Are you sure it doesnt hurt them and by extension their customers, because the price gouging gets worse? And a lot of the things they do, sure feels like its meant to just cause you to buy more stuff. Deleting armies for example or having a new meta in an allegedly competitive game where you shell out a few hundred bucks for your tools to play it.
I 100% think it hurts the prices further. 3D printing lowers games workshops sales, and in turn they raise the price which just makes more people go to 3D printing. I actually think they are trying to grab as much money as possible because they see the end is near in the next decade or so. I don't mean they will cease to exist, they will probably have slumping sales and be bought out by a bigger company such as Hasbro. But selling miniatures may not be their prime money maker anymore.
This happened to me more or less all the way in third edition. I got into the game with the start of third edition. I bought the core rules, and I started collecting Tyranids. The game worked beautifully with the way the armies were set up in the core rulebook. It was clean, it was simple, it was fun, there was nothing that really stood out as broken. I had a lot of the old plastic genestealers and the OG hive tyrant, a lictor and a zoanthrope (when they still had legs) all in metal. It wasn't a great army, but I was proud of it, had it painted up decently and everything. It was pretty successful when playing against my friends with similar hodgepodge armies. Then they released the new Codex and model line for Tyranids, and I was absolutely over the moon with all the new miniatures. They looked amazing, especially the new warriors. So I spent what was at the time a huge amount of money for me buying my dream army. Loads of the new plastic warriors, gaunts, zoanthropes, biovores, raveners... I basically bought it by what it looked like, because the way the game worked in the core rules there was nothing wrong with just collecting a wide variety of miniatures and making army lists on the fly. I started building and painting. But anyone who remembers third edition Tyranids knows that this codex was fundamentally broken. It introduced a rule called "Shoot the big ones" that made it impossible to screen your valuable units with swarms of gaunts since enemies were allowed to target any of your units anywhere on the table. Ironically this mainly made genestealers worthless because they were very expensive point wise but very fragile, so without a screen of gaunts they would just get gunned down before they could so much as pilfer a single measly chromosome. It also had a rule for mutated creatures where you would divide the number of total wounds a squad had by the number of unit types in your army and that was how many of the tyranids in the unit could receive a mutation. That meant if your army only had 4 types of units in it you could mutate your hive tyrants and carnifexes. So about half way into building this new army it starts to dawn on me through playing my old army by the new rules, discussions with friends and reading online that this new army I've bought isn't going to work at all. None of the tactics that worked for Tyranids the way they worked in the core rulebook still applied. This was also during a time when your codex came full of unit options that weren't on the sprue. It would just say you can give a hive tyrant wings for +45 points or whatever, but you had to figure out how to put wings on the model yourself. So this basically left me with a heap of units I wouldn't be able to use, and if I wanted the ability to field a very powerful Tyranid list I would have to build mutated flying hive tyrants from scratch, and then they wouldn't be usable for anything other than those hyper specialized army lists. It just kind of crushed my perception of Warhammer miniatures as an investment. I knew that Tyranids weren't going to be fun again until they write another codex for them, but I also realized that if I wanted to have a strong army in the meanwhile I had to chop up my miniatures and turn them into custom jobs that were the exact thing I wished that new codex wouldn't include again. The entire thing basically just soured me on 40k for years, because I felt completely betrayed by that codex.
As someone who is into Warhammer for the lore and narrative rather than the tabletop game... GW is doing the same thing with their stories. They introduce a character, storyline, faction or some other cool idea, and either abandon it midway or don't do anything with it ever (Ynnari, Leagues of Votann, Eldar Exodites, etc), throw it into the garbage bin, introduce the next cool thing (sometimes in tremendously lazy or downright lorebreaking ways), rince and repeat. GW has had no idea what to do with Warhammer for a WHILE now, other than squeeze every penny they can out of it. Warhammer is a hollow shell of its former self, the people behind it have no passion or care for it, money is all they think about.
Thanks! It's from Amazon and it's a Funko Pop display case. When I bought mine they were like $45 but now they're like $75 or something like that. But they're still well worth it. They have a size that's still around $45 but it holds less miniatures obviously.
Unfortunately, for every Warhammer player that has hit their maximum spending limit there are 10 ultra competitive Warhammer GigaChad’s ready to replace us. I don’t even play the game anymore, man I get it.
I got back into Warhammer during COVID like many people, and I still like to collect and paint the models. I haven't played a game since 1997 though. I bought a 3D printer a couple of years ago and had great fun printing WH-adjacent models - but honestly when you factor in all the faffing about and cost of printing supplies and equipment, as well as the finicky nature of resin printers, it works out cheaper to just buy the models from a FLGS - although i have a couple of really cool printed 40k Chaos Knight proxies that look absolutely amazing. I might play a game again at some stage.
I don't mean any offense, but how the hell could printing come out as similar or more expensive in cost than buying first party? Even if you have several bad batches, you're still talking a fraction of a fraction of the cost per unit. Where I live in the states, your average battleline troop unit is going to run you at least $50, and that's building in the discount on a provider like Amazon rather than the MSRP plus game store markup turning it closer to $60 or $70. For the same cost in resin and supplies, you could print several different units. And that's just comparing one standard battleline, the basic unit of an army. It gets even worse when you start hunting for specialty units that can often be far more expensive and difficult to find in stock or a singular character for $30-$40.
I had a 10,000 point iron warriors army that I had spent thousands of dollars on, and GW decided to remove all the forgeworld rules and then the iron warriors themselves. Its like you said, they lost my trust, and my faith. Now im moving onto Battletech, which has great model prices, and all its rules online I can just...access for free. Its great, and it has massive amounts of content and lore.
Scott, there’s always room for you to come join me and Jordan with Star Wars legion lol. Amg is not the evil greedy empire that gw is, but… maybe inching closer. But with legion there’s no codex’s, or index’s to buy ever, and with that you can look up any unit for any army whenever you want.
8th Edtion Indexes were actually a brilliant idea. Sure units were more "generic" but at least every army got an update at the same time, and you could purchase something like three books and have the rules for every army out at the time.
Piracy being a service problem yet again. People who used to buy product now obtain it via secret techniques, because they no longer agree that the value matches the price tag.
People who think 3d printers are not a threat for GW do not own a 3d printer. Buying a printer, cleaning station, uv-table, resin, cleaning products and stl-files is still cheaper than buying one army. After that, the price difference is just insane. I can print an entire 2000 points army for $20. I do not own a top of the line printer, and I can tell you: the detail of my mini's is as good as if not better than GW models.
Only danger for GW is market crisis. Now, as was more than 10 years ago with board games we have influx of players, new projects gains a lot of support on kickstarter. That was time of CoolMiniOrNot , big boxes with great miniatures and graphics which, as I was told, were more important than actual gameplay. If 3D printers would posed a danger, than GW would have financial problems now, but they are more and more successful in financial terms. Only what can kill GW is selling it to something bigger. Few big mishaps, which will eventually come, and something like Amazon will cease its functioning. But, like with BattleTech or D&D, it will be low chance it will be end for Warhammer. Warhammer is something bigger than a game. GW can die but not a Warhammer.
100% agree with you on this. I haven't supported them since they ruined 75% of my stormcast army. I'm not getting 4th ed AoS and won't because of this.
Mass brutality was not on my schedule to be released for another 2 years but I was so enraged by the cancellation of my beasts of chaos army and half of my stormcast army that I pushed that to be the next project I released. Now I am converting my local gaming club to Mass brutality.
On top of all the things you mentioned, the way GW treats their lore these days made me stop buying from them. The whole femstodes reveal and the way they treated the community pushback was the last straw for me.
I hear you, brother. Back in the day, I used to spend more on buying models (and I bought a lot) rather than worrying about rules that are constantly changing. I lost faith over time and switched to 3D printing, which I’ve been doing for years now. The details are way better, and the cost is so much lower. I also miss how creative things used to be. One of my core childhood memories is going to a store on late-night shopping nights and turning scraps into amazing terrain-fly screens turned into fences, foam transformed into city buildings, and dollar store finds used for all kinds of projects. I think part of the problem is Kevin Rountree as CEO. He’s an accountant, not a customer, and seems to lack a real understanding of the product he has. To him, it’s all just numbers, and he often says the wildest things-like when they mess with the lore, charging us more in a cost of living crisis, or overproduce certain armies. It’s frustrating.
They are an investor ran company and are rapidly pricing themselves out of existence,which is fine with them as they will just move on to another company and ravage that one, rinse repeat.
You would think but people have been saying that for years and it hasn't happened yet. They are climbing the British stock market and with GW getting income from the Black Library, video games, and other I.P.'s, it's not going to happen :(
I left when Primaris dropped. I had units in my Space Marine army that I got way back in 1989 and was still using. Primaris was an effort to force grognards like me to stop using our old armies and buy the new crap. Can still use the older marines, but they're nowhere near as good. Add to that the newer model kits only go together one way, and the variety and flexibility of the models are gone. I finally sold off my beloved Black Templars this year to fund a car restoration project and I haven't looked back.
The newer kits are so conversion unfriendly, single most frustrating model project I ever did was integrating Anvil bodies and kegs with Scion kits, the end result looked great but it was so much more hassle than it should of been
Thank you for putting a good argument up while not naming their insane prices as a reason. We all know GW overcharges for everything, so it's good to just skip it. I agree with plenty of your points. The game was MUCH better back when there was a 4 year version cycle in 4-5-6 edition. Beyond that, the rules back then were just more solid overall. It was towards the end of this time when we saw codex creep become the codex pole vault where the newest book was almost always significantly better than it's predecessors. Buying an army book that has a 4-5 year lifespan was ok...now there are times where you could buy a new codex and it will expire before the milk in your fridge will. The other issue with the newer versions is that GW somehow managed to make their game over-simplified and over-complicated at the same time. They took away war gear, which eliminated 60% of the game's strategy in one shot. At the same time they make so many mechanics rely on strategems. It was good in the most recent version that they cut back on the number of strategems significantly, which is good but there are so many things that used to just be what units could do that now for no reason became strategems that cost cp. Want your rhino to pop smoke? Well now you need to pay for it for no logical reason. The rules have just gotten so bad that this was the first time since macragge that I didn't even bother buying the new starter kit...and I mean the real one that used to be available for the whole version of the game but is now just a splash release because GW basically built their entire business plan on FOMO, which is the last of my reasons why I'm done with GW. Plain and simple, there are other games out there now that are cheaper, better and made by companies that treat their customers much better and I've moved on to those. I miss 40k, but that's because it doesn't exist anymore as a fun and engaging hobby, not because I stopped playing it
I was never really a big fan of GW games, but I was willing to make an effort to play with my friends. But when I saw that every time they finally had a playable army, the rules and army books changed, I understood how this business worked. I preferred to play other rules and let them play GW games on their own.
As someone who's relatively new to warhammer ,2020 ,I struggled with learning the rules and just felt overwhelmed with keeping up on updates, new editions, and datasheets I lost interest in actually playing 40k, and tabletop wargaming in general, because I thought I HAD to keep up and know the newest rules, and I just didn't have the time or money. I appreciate the video
Thanks for watching! I have the same frustrations with Games Workshop and that's why I made my games. I never disqualify people's purchases, and I never undo what has been done in the past as far as rules. There are new things added to my games but they are not better than the old things, they are just different and they are more options. I would never want anybody to think that they had to buy my new product to keep up.
@LetsTalkTabletop yeah, they certainly continued in the way they always had been. I ducked out when everything got very red and cartoony, it felt too money grubbing then. And I've seen people saying the same things for decades now. And they keep getting bigger and more that way. It's crazy but what can you do? I occasionally buy some of their minis, keep up with the lore, but I just couldn't keep up with their churn, and I'm not a huge fan of their rulesets.
I still have to give them credit for being some of the highest quality miniatures in the market still. But resin printing is quickly catching up with them. There are some truly stunning 3D artists out there nowadays. And the miniatures are something around 20% of gw's price.
Absolutely! *IF* GW was ever aware of "who they were", that had gone by the late 80s IMO. I would make a strong argument that it was moving that way from the moment Bryan Ansell took over - although I realise that he might be seen as some sort of saint in the eyes of many, trust me when I say that you're looking back on things with rose-tinted spectacles. the reality was, that however many "real games" being designed by and for "real gamers", GW was all about the money from the point where Ansell took over from SJ and IL. The constant churn of FAQs and list updates is simply the latest chapter; previously we had a constant churn of Codexes, editions, and even games. Has *anything* really had a longer lifespan than 18months to 2 years? Because I cannot think of one, and I've bought games from GW since the early 80s, when they were merely purveyors of games imported from the US.
@@ViscountCharles aye, Ansell definitely was very orientated around making cash, also seemed very keen on gaming, he's the start and contradiction of what GW kind of always has been. It's clearly very successful, mind, that's for certain. They've just floated on the FTSE100 and are currently worth more than Greggs, and three times that of Aston Martin, which seems insane from what they were when I started (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay had just been released). Not my thing, although I enjoy the lore and their minis, their rules I've not enjoyed since I found many others I click with more. It's pretty amazing that you can have such a bohemoth and still a good market outside it.
I started collecting Space Marine as a kid and didn't get very far by the time they canceled it. Years later, they released Epic and did the same rug pull. Then they pulled the same stunt with fantasy and their Warmaster game. So welcome to my world, lol.
This is so true. Thanks. I got into 40K during Covid, just painting some models at first. Then a Warhammer game store opened near me and everything went strange. I started playing - which was fun, up to a point - but I constantly felt I was playing into an intrinsically losing situation. I was playing Space Marines in 9th when the power creep started to really kick in. Rick Priestly wrote that wargames need to skew towards melee, because overpowered shooting is just not fun. So in 10th edition, GW skewed towards shooting by allowing overwatch by anything at any time. Go figure. I feel that I am being constantly "gamed" by GW marketing, for all the reasons you state. I can't build and paint an army before nerfs and point changes make my list unplayable and illegal. I woke up the other day and realized that I no longer want to be part of this. Sorry. Don't care any more.
I'm sorry to hear it, but I feel the exact same way. Eventually you just get tired of the rat race. And I'm not even a competitive player that keeps up with the latest meta. Luckily, there are many alternatives where you can still use your miniatures! Mass Brutality and One Page rules allow you to use your miniatures from warhammer.
Luckly for me i only want 40k stuff to use for my DnD games and not inheritly to use in 40k. Personally i never felt interested in running the treadmill as it is so fake and.. what do i get out of it? The most inportant thing i learnt is to find the people that arent choas warpspawn that "need" the offical rules to breathe.. then have fun messing around. I rather play 20 jank games over 1 "polished" but boring game of 40k
@@catherinedalzell3183 there's lots of other games and rules out there, you can even use gw minis and lore and other rulesets. Keep gaming, enjoying painting if you do, GW may be the giant monster but there's a whole load of smaller monsters out there too.
No list is useless or unplayable… man… I play a lot of terminators and 1st company strike force detachment. Everyone tells me it sucks and I should play something else. I don’t care… I like terminators and I have a blast. I also win because good units are good in the hands of good players… and most people are not.
Rules should just be free if they're going to be so volatile.
it's completely insane they are still selling rules. they could have gotten back so much good will by modernizing how they distribute rules if they're going to be so insistent on changing them constantly.
we have to rely on the wahapedia guy to even play the game now. if anything happens to him or that site, it's gonna suck big time.
The rules should be free, period. Rules are advertising for the models, giving them away is the cheapest advertising they could have.
Especially considering rules and codexes get errated and updated to hell because of mistakes and balancing.
@@Bobamelius It's so wild man, selling physical rulebooks in 2024, rules which they change every few months, its unbelievable. At this point I think GW should just suck it up, stop making profits on codexes and implement a way of distributing rules more up to date to the current year.
>Games Workshop
>Free
My brother in Christ, Games Workshop would charge admission to funerals if they thought they could get away with it and had the infrastructure to support the endeavor.
And people would still buy the tickets, too- even if they had no idea who was in the casket.
It's hilarious that a game like Infinity has free rules online.
Oh, not only are they online and can be referenced directly through their free list-building app- but the rules are updated for balance periodically and new units are added as they release.
It's a mechanically more balanced game than anything GW has ever made.
Something I'm still sore about was the war GW waged on fan animations, The emperor text to speech got me into 40k.
the prices got me out
I watched astartes on yt. And went all In. But GW sucks. So im all out
I still detest the Emperor's TTS because of the ignorant hitpiece they did on Ian Watson, which in turn inspired a depressing amount of pearl-clutching from the more nerdy and virginal parts of the fanbase, which continutes right up to the present.
@@CellHeart Or, you know, maybe people just don't like really cringey writing. Much like your comment.
@CellHeart I thought it was funny.
The two year rule set release is absolutely idiotic.
It took me 2 years to build my DG army!!!! wtf?! They are trying to turn table top wargaming into a seasonal cod money grab. It’s not feasible. These fools try to monetize EVERYTHING
The answer is simple:
Stop buying stuff from them altogether. It'll hurt them.
Of course they do, its about the money and not about the Hobby or Worldbuilding. The Hobby is in things like Mass Brutatlity, The IX. Age, OPR etc. I still love the background except AOS, but giving them money for the current state of the game is not justifiable.
@@4of122 to be 100% fair, if they're a business it IS all about the money. That's kinda the whole purpose, especially for a publicly-traded company.
Hobby and world-building is only important when it brings in money. They're not your friends, we're not a "community", and they have an obligation to their investors. If you were one of those investors you'd want your money to pay out.
The problem is: No matter how bad GW is, the only reason they keep doing this is because fanboys keep paying.
If people cut their GW spending in half for a year, it'd change- but most Warhammer players can't do that. They'd sell their own children to buy a new shiny Warhammer toy.
Especially when they can't be bothered to finish making the damn codexes before starting a new cycle so you go through most of that cycle without an updated codex for your faction only to have it release and be outdated in 3 months
@@elijahherstal776 which doesn't mean stop using their models. the 2nd hand market is huuuge!
a weird combination of sunk cost fallacy and Stockholm syndrome is what keeps GW alive.
no its the lore thats all they have going for them. 5th ed was peak 40k and we still had regular warhammer ( old world)
This, so much this
GW has the unique talent of stumbling into piles of money right after they damage their IP
Same as MTG. Gotta get the new standard cards...
@@simonkeith7687 No more was this true than with Contrast Paints. According to insiders GW was literally weeks away from bankrupcy but when the Contrast paints came out and the massive 'Slapchop' hype that youtuber painters made, it caused the sales of the paints to skyrocket and was just enough to stablize and save the company.
This was after years of the company being mismanaged by the likes of Alan Merritt (they guy who infamously canned Warhammer Fantasy without even thinking about trying to save it for his Age of Sigmar pet project and tried to make the IP more 'family friendly' by trying to remove Slaanesh etc.) and other higher ups who departed in 2016.
If it hadn't been for contrast paints, I have no idea where Games Workshop would be now, probably just bought out by a big chinese company no doubt. So even if the original Games Workshop had tanked, I doubt we'd be in any different place than we are now...
People have allowed themselves to be taken out of their own hobby. The game belongs to those that have bought it, The word of the day is Oldhammer. Start a third edition or first edition or any edition club that is your favourite. A miniature that is 40 years old is worth more to its owner than anything that they could buy to day, because of the fun memories that are cherished.
That's the right attitude!
I know I've been thinking very seriously about getting the 1st ed books (RT, LatD, StD) in hardback for this very reason.
I agree. The only way we play warhammer these days is older editions. The quirky RPGness of rogue trader, the tight and concise 3rd edition, and my personal favorite with the most flare is 5th edition. By the end it was a completely realized game that they went and broke apart for profits.
Doesn't work that way unfortunately. See wht will happen, is you will ask if they wanna play, they will see how "complicated the old editions are" and then never wanst to play it.... I don't know why you new fans think people will just play the old rules, because it was basically cut to bits and turned in to TRASH in order to get you and THOSE people in to playing :/ So when you say that? You are just saying "lets go back and play the edition we used to bully you for when you were young, then got changed to appease our 10 minute attention spans!"........... There is no hobby, it was sacrificed so people who DIDN'T like warhammer could play it -_-.
The problem is many local play groups are infested with tourists that refuse to play anything but the newest most current rulings, even if they don't enjoy them.
GW's edition churn is a sneaky way of implementing a subscription model for their games.
Thaaaank you! Been saying so for years!
Yesss
You are 100% right.
Its also how GW treats their customers and fans. So many fan projects where halted and abandoned simply because there was a threat of GW sueing them out of existance. Then their attempt at copyrighting words like "Space marine" or "Warhammer"... over the years GW has turned from a hobby brand that actually loved their own product.... to an IP managment corporation that actively seems to disdain its own customer base and at best sees them as walking wallets.
Well said. Planned obsolescence is one of the most infuriating strategies that a company could possibly use. I've learned that the rules change far faster than my desire or ability to keep up with, so I'm out of the whole ecosystem now. The flood of new models is nice for painters though, from time to time something catches my eye
Hobby bravely, you might say
So many hobbies are going through this. Corporate greed is killing everything.
What you describe is literally GW business strategy.
They aren't interested in long-term players. It is long known that the only metric that counts for their stores is the number of starter packs sold. They want things to constantly feel "fresh" by releasing new editions - so it appears more welcoming and a good time to start for newcomers.
The average player sticks around for 4 years. (Don't quote me on this, but the number is definitely somewhere in their boardrooms).
That means that they'll likely stick around for two editions and spend plenty of cash on exorbitantly overpriced plastic in that honeymoon time.
Those who are truly invested will stick around for longer and spend even more as individuals, which is great but more of a nice bonus to them. The only thing that matters is the appearance of constant growth.
Business wise, it seems to be a very prudent strategy. And maybe it is their winning formula since they do have a ton of brand recognition - but I wholeheartedly agree that WH has lost a lot of soul and in turn me many years ago because of their beancounter leadership.
@Super-Marauder-Girl Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next product.
@@Jyrro oh man a pat-ism?
In the WILD!
I suspect only a tiny fraction of kits/games/box sets etc sold make it to the table top. Some players/collectors/painters seem to have a stacks of unopened kits sat on their shelfs at home, from FOMO and the relatable compulsion they feel to buy cool looking new stuff.
I got in to Warhamer in 1988 aged 8 and obsessed with it until aged 14. I left in 2nd edition, then returned in 2018 or 2019. I've not played a game of 40k or any Warhammer game since the mid 90s other than Advanced Heroquest which went OOP in 1992 lol. There's quite a lot of love for that system which has been growing in recent years with loads of fan made content, modernised rules etc. It's one of the only games that ever came with Solo-play rules I can think of other than Spacehulk and can be really good fun. Collecting all the vintage Oldhammer minis it and the expansion feature is a hobby in its self.
I do enjoy building and painting things. I casually collect and paint Imperial Guard, and must have 10,000 points worth of stuff now. Id guess 60% of that being unopened kits, 20% assembled and primed and only 20% painted to ant level I'd call complete.
I still feel an unexplainable urge to but new releases, but have managed to resist for about 6 months.
Im fairly old fashioned and do enjoy browsing through old codexes, rule sets Ive bought in recent years rather than looking at a screen.
Im not realy a fan of sci-fi or fantasy in general, but do have a lot of fondness for Warhammer.
Id love to know the proportion of people who buy GW stuff purely to collect and paint compared to those who play tabletop.
I live in UK and work as a domestic electrician. I visit quite lot of homes containing Warhammer collections and hobby desks/rooms. Very few people when I ask about their connection to it have played or even intend to play tabletop games. The hobby/painting side of it sems far larger than the intended full-on gaming experience side of it.
@@Super-Marauder-Girl doesn't matter, they've made more than enough. Spending time worried about some sweaty grognard isn't worth the time it takes to listen to them. They'll make more money if they just keep driving forward as they do.
People keep paying.
GW keeps making money.
As much as I hate what they do, it's successful.
The fact you so uncritically submit to the idea that it’s just the way it is and it’s acceptable, okay, or even good for them to do this is the problem.
As soon as people stop accepting that a business exists to make money at the expense of everything else and instead should provide a service at an expense we will see an improvement.
Don’t give in to capitalism
I thought 3d printers becoming a serious threat were still a ways away. Resin is messy and hazardous, and FDM prints usually looked…like garbage.
Then I started seeing some really incredible vehicles and monsters using Bambu printers, and I learned they were only a couple hundred dollars and required little tinkering.
I got one with fairly low expectations…but I’m printing infantry sized models I’d be proud to show off with a decent paint job. Bigger models should look even better.
AND I subscribed to OPR’s STL tier, so I’ve started accidentally accumulating armies. I didn’t think I was all that interested in Guard-like armies, especially at full wargame sizes instead of skirmish. But now I’ve got models for a bunch of tanks and guard-like models I can print for pennies, that cost me all of $20 so far, and I’m thinking “Tanks are cool. Maybe I want to play HDF…” And I get access to all of their game systems and rules for every army in every system. And they have a great free army builder.
When I look at GW’s counter offer (hundreds of dollars for models and hundreds more for books, and the more you buy the more it costs to maintain) it’s almost laughable at this point…
I have a hard time printing fine details, but overall my A1 Mini has been 100% worth it.
Well I can tell you FDM has gotten shockingly good over the last year. The new printing methods, combined with the .02 nozzle and heated or st least heat retaining booths/housing...
The prints are way better than you would think and yes a good resin printer still dunks on my bamboo.
That said... on the table top most people don't realize they are fdm prints until they pick them up and look at them. When it comes to terrain the fdm printer is perfectly fine.
If fdm printer hardware and software continue to progress as they have over the past year... it could be as short as two or three years and we could see fdm printers being widely adopted by Jhon/Jane Q public. I cannot see it ever being better than resin for details. but it has come along way.
@@watchwooddepending on what you mean by “fine details,” if you haven’t already I’d strongly recommend checking out the FDM Miniatures subreddit and looking for posts from the user HOHansen. They list all of their settings and the results I’ve gotten with an A1 Mini using those have blown me away. The sacrifice is it’s extremely slow (think 5-6 hours per infantry sized model). But it prints faster than I normally paint, so I’m really happy with it.
It’s still not resin, but for anything short of competition/display painting and some specific minis that FDM just doesn’t handle well, it’s great. You do need a 0.2 nozzle if you don’t already have one, they’re like $12.
I have an FDM printer since January (Bambu A1 was out of stock so I bought a CR-10 SE instead. It's decent.) FDM's are great for bases and terrain, but I've had also had an SLA for over five years, and that's where my modelling lives. I get what you guys are saying about messiness. The fact is you need a rather large and permanent work area for cleaning and curing, and that area is going to get wrecked by liquid resin residue all over. Plus, ventilation is a must. It's a lot to take on for some, and downright impossible for other people's living situation. Compare that to the 'cleaning' I need to do with FDM: trashcan, old rag, bottle of 91% IPA, done. While fumes are still a thing, there is a solution for the big messy-area problem on the horizon for home SLA. Today, you can buy a commercial grade printer combination unit, that prints, slides the print to the back of the unit, drops it into a solvent vat to run the rinse. Then lifts to dry. Sensors tell you the how clean your solvent is. It's going to be a game changer, but today Formlabs sells that unit for ~$15k. I was going to say give it 5 years, but since we still seem to be in a glorious printer manufacture arms race, maybe only three? This won't solve all the SLA problems, but it will make SLA 75% more approachable by getting the toxic messiness out of the equation.
@@MadMax-el2el me and my ender 3 "we printing hexes"
One of the things I have mentioned to my gaming buddies is that I no longer feel like studying the rules and army books. I don't want to have to spend years learning an edition only to have those books invalidated in faqs and point changes. I don't play compeditively but that is what pushes these changes constantly. Well that, and the cash grab fomo. I've been playing 40k since 1992 and they started loosing when they went to the 3 year cycle. The only game of theirs I still play is LotR. Yes they discontinued some models, but I also like collecting them.
Necromunda > Literally every other GW IP game
LotR does have some decent rules, too.
Agreed! I'm also old now and don't like reading tiny print and pages with big pictures! lol
You don't have time to learn an edition before there's a new rules set.
@lordbloodthehungry Actualy no. Say I only play once a month, buy the new rules and there is a FAQ immediately, rules changes, army book and a FAQ, and then a FAQ to the main rules, then point changes come. This cycles continuously through the product edition now. So keeping up with the rules now is a chore. My day job is keeping up with changing requirements and acceptance criteria. I prefer a less bloated more stable platform that create fun games. I stepped away from 40k at the end of 7th and started playing games like Pulp Alley and Fist Full of Lead. Great game play, stable rules very little bloat.
Even if it's your only hobby I don't understand how anyone keeps up
You missed the parts where they never talked to, or listened to players, at all. Basically up to 7th edition, maybe 8th, their was very little fan interaction, and we had editions with armies that just didn't work, or broke the game totally.
Well this would be something they "lost" so in fact they're better now.
I was hoping that someone mentions this. GW has also got better.
They released new models which could dominate the battlefield so people wanting to win would have to buy them. That was the point and they likely wrote out of the rules models that didn't sell that well.
@@damionkeeling3103 Sure buddy...
@@johngalt200 looking at the store he's right... but sure buddy...
Regarding the loss of trust - story time. After starting in 3e I left warhammer at the arse-end of 7th due to the complete random idiocy the game has become. Vowing never to return, unless GW somehow brings back the army I always wanted - the space dwarfs. 9e rolls around and the april fools video is released. There I bloody was - hyped. Again. I was eager to jump in, me brass balls deep, into warhammer again, with my favorite army! I bought in, I printed the rest. I played. And I got burned. In a succession of crappy choice after crappy decision GW has: 1. released a completely broken Votann dex in 9e 2. which was nerfed to hell and back BEFORE ITS RELEASE 3. then GW proceeded to forget the army ever existed, in almost 3 years releasing NOTHING for the army apart from some kill teams and one bloody lore book 4. which doesnt even add any cool new lore for the Leagues. And now 5. Leagues are staring down 2025 without their dex, still being forgotten by GW 6. with their grotmas detachment clearly showing that they will be reworked YET AGAIN because none of the detachment rules even interact with the main mechanic - judgment tokens. Shame on you GW. Fool me once, shame on you. But I've now been fooled twice.
I started in 1991. I had a squat army in rogue trader. I also had a 'shooty' ork army. Both of these were practically destroyed in 1998 with the release of 3rd edition. I have not trusted gw for a very long time. P.s. I still play 2nd and 1st edition.
My lady wanted Votann, but with the lack of releases and love I just bought her Orks. We know they won't squat Orks
@RMCbreezy well they did. A second ed ork.army was a lot of bolt guns and decent shooting ability. That changed completely.
@@madmoody100 all I was saying is Orks won't get squatted. Changing load outs is different than taking a faction away, no?
I started playing 40K during the Rogue Trader era 34 years ago while I was in college. I built and painted five monstrously large armies for the game. I gave up on 40K shortly after the release of 8th Edition in 2017; the endless rules bloat, FAQs, strategems, formations, supplements, points rises/drops, and the ever increasing cost was simply too much. I lost all joy in the game, and bid a fond farewell to GW.
These days, my GW models have found new life in miniatures-agnostic games such as Grimdark Future, Stargrave, and Space Weirdos.
You are not alone.
Same man I was a 40k guy since 1993 but had no fun with it since 7th. Recently discovered OPR and not play twice a week and have such fun.
Definitely not alone, started at end of second edition and stopped during 8th, fantasy I stopped with age of sigmar, only really play mordheim and blood bowl these days. with the advent of so many other game systems its a shame as warhammer is close to my heart
Similar... I have been a collector and casual player since 4th edition, and when 6th came out then quickly turned into 7th plus supplements and such, when we hadn't even been able to get the codex books for all of our armies yet, I was upset and stopped buying into the revolving door of GW books... since then I have bought novels and played them, video games, etc...
When Kill Team came out as a boxed game in 2018, with some nice terrain, etc... I picked that up and really enjoyed it. I used models from my existing armies and collection to make up rosters, and added about 10 more rosters of models to my collection specifically for kill team....
Then the next edition of Kill Team made almost every one of my models unplayable, not just nerfed but not even usable at all... out of more than a Dozen rosters, and 5 entire 40k armies, I could field 2 or 3 legal kill teams in that new rule set... I again just stepped away... I started playing solo once in a while in winter and still painting some, but even lost interest in finishing the models in my collection for the most part...
After that last version of Kill Team came out, and during the last 2 or so years, I have become more and more interested in OPR Firefight and their other games... and I HAVE been debating buying the new $100 starter set that recently came out for Kill Team but I'm very hesitant to buy into anything GW again unless it's some minis that I REALY want to build and paint up, amd for now I still have plenty of those on a shelf both primed and still on sprees, as well as some partially painted but not "done" ...
Not a fan of GWs release schedules at all, editions being near the end of a too short lifespan and codex books finally coming out for certain armies... and many models being eliminated from their games after so much had been invested into those models... no thanks...
OPR it is for me, for the foreseeable future...
Started collecting in 1992, became serious about playing 2000, played regularly through 3rd & 4th edition. Then I straight up quit during 5th with the joint blows of the Robin Crudance codex ripping up the Doctrine system as it was a straight downgrade (and in 5th a 3.5 Doctrine army could of eviserated a 5 Orders Codex army no issue, extra tanks or not) and the stealth 100% price hike by halving all the plastic box contents, that twin hit had me done for a good 10 years. Only in the last 2 or 3 did I start collecting again as I saw a Harakoni Warhawk fan art and gave me an urge to do an army, I sourced as many of the parts as I could from other companise and only the bare minimum from GW, mainly paints as I really don't want to give them money. Looked through the Guard codex of the time, skimmed the parade of identical looking meta armies on line and decided, sod that, based the entire thing off the 3.5 codex and started adding things for fun, las-lmg's, Rapier Laser Destroyers, K9 units.
Lot more fun than a basic army with the same special characters I see all over the place.
(BTW if anyone knows if there's a revamped version of 4th that's widely played let me know, I'd love to try the force out and there is no way it's playable in any later edition)
- monopose characters are terrible
- upgrade bits are getting rarer, with old DA you had tons of bits that everyone says scfi gothic
- the invention of primaris and new gear has taken the charm out of forgotten tech
- space marine armor shouldn't be antigrav, it should be chains
- cawl did heresy according to the old definition of technology when he reinvented things
- constructing everything around the theme of detachment feels wrong
- limiting which hero can join which squad, especially as a first born player, feels wrong
- squad size 3 feels wrong
- the possibility to individualize cool is no longer given
- the individuality (deathwing commando squad, talonmaster, bikes with techmarine or psyker) has been removed
- the army is mostly only differentiated by heroes, color and detachment
- crazy things like the warp field grenade, templates were cool
- the fixation on the W6 is unfavorable, in the past the mutlimelter had 2W20 to penetrate an armored unit
-a sometimes very poor rules language
- the inability to balance the game
- books are nice, but extremely impractical and no longer state of the art, at least not for playing - cards or app please
- the game doesn't feel powerful anymore, in very old editions you had a lot of damage, big bam everything was strong, now everything is way too boring, each time I do one more damage, or don't hit one more ...
-> so many things that are bad...............
and yes, as a first born player i think it's terrible that everything is being phased out, it feels like trash bin
It killed me that my DA are 70% firstborn and now I cant use them in my league obsessed community, they're packed up trying to be forgotten about.
I mean… this is your opinion! Plenty of the things you dislike I actually like and am happy they were introduced!
@@stefanovettor6507 we'll talk again in 5 years when the next phase out wave comes and the first primaris are pulled out, just like they did with AoS stormcast
@ the first stormcast were pulled out due to a scale issue. The models were not great and looked like oversized dwarves. GW wanted to cleanup the line with better models. With the primaris they did a better job and even older models are well scaled. Also, thx to books and revised codex shenanigans it is difficult to replace existing units (an intercession is still the basic battle line unit). Ofc eventually some units might go to legends and in general nothing last forever. Nothing prevents me to still play with my models… I play with friends. New primaris intercession come out and mine are obsolete? I still play them as new intercessors (and the will look equally cool since they are now true scale)
Even the f*cking so called dynamic pose models look like garbage, or whatever you would call the "new" daemonettes of slaanesh, I bought them when they came out, yet the previous actual "one poses" looked phenomenal compared to them
Gw are ever creeping to that make or break point. Pricing is out of control and im looking at alternatives. No way kids now can afford to even buy in.
Their stock is increasing due to selling the IP.
Since less people are having kids, you’ll notice a shift by many companies from children to adults. Look at Lego, more adults buy legos for themselves than for their children now.
why would you want kids to play warhammer
@@Toiletlord This is the main thing, Hasbro is basically entirely kept afloat by Wizards of the Coast as their toy and boardgame market have fucking nosedived in the last decade as less and less kids are buying traditional toys. Hence why they're pushing MtG as hard as they can at the moment because whilst it only generates like 10% of the revenue it's an absurd 85% of the profit the company makes is from MtG and D&D alone.
If it wasn't for Hasbro owning WotC they would have gone out of business in the last 5 years.
@@taffyadam6031Because that is how you stay afloat as a company, get new people into the hobby.
I see you are falling for the 'young = bad' idea.
I agree, the only way I even got a starting army was due to a family friend who was a manager at GW over a decade ago giving away some marines, the pricing in most areas is definitely an issue, I am just glad my local shop has ok pricing compared to other places. 30 quid for a few heavy intercessors is still way too much.
All new edition codices should be released at the same time as their main rulebook. Miniature ranges can still be updated randomly without that limit, but their rules should either be already in their codex, or free and easily accessible online as an addition to their codex, whether just a new wargear option or an entirely new unit.
This. All of this.
I'm a Custodes, Death Guard, Imperial Guard and Votann player and I am still waiting for the codexes of the last three to come out. I have the same problem with Cities of Sigmar for AOS. Army books should come out at least within 2-3 months of a new edition not wait for almost two years.
40k 2nd & 3rd editions in the 1990s/2000s - that's where it's was at!
Rites of War Soundtrack intensifies!
I stayed with it through 4e and into 5e, but then hung it up. I got tired of GW invalidating almost every build that I had made for my armies. Basically when Rick Priestly, Gav Thorpe, Andy Chambers, and Jervis Johnson were either no longer involved in the creation of 40K, or not at GW, I lost interest in their newer products. I ONLY got interested in Kill Team because it has allowed me to kitbash my old OOP RT-4e metal and plastic Citadel models to play in a new skirmish game.
But I definitely think the Vehicle Design Rules (VDR) released in 2001 for WH40K 3e (1998-2004) is IMNSHO the pinnacle of 40K as a creative gamer hobby. It was after this that most of the above mentioned people left GW and the company became more corporatized.
@@Cobalt-60 AMEN! The VDR rules were awesome.
@@cavemanbum My favorite VDR design was for a modified pair of 1/48 scale M2 Bradley IFV models that I kitbashed for my IG Arcturan Regiment (think old metal Cadians with Mordian officers) that had a turret-mounted auto-cannon w/ co-axial stormbolter, 2x H/K missiles, track covers, and an extra point of armor on the left & right sides compared to a Chimera. They were still amphibious, but could only carry 6-troops, so were not usable by regular infantry squads, armored fists, or ogryn squads. They were reserved for Company or Platoon HQ squads, 6-man assault or stormtrooper/grenadier squads, or 6-man hardened vet squads only, and were (obviously) a little more expensive than the standard STC Chimera model. But when combined as strengtheners to normal mechanized infantry units with Chimera (and supported by scout and armored sentinels with a variety of weapons), they really showed that IG was not ALWAYS mass swarms of foot sloggers, and could actually capture objectives.
I didn't loose faith in GW. I just got tiered of having to learn new rules, every few years. That and the cost of the game. $80 for the rule book, $70 for the codex, $50 for the supplement and of course if I want the new units that are coming out it is $50 for 5 marines.
I started playing One Page Rules games. And I'm having fun playing again.
Here in Canada, a 10 man guard squad is $70...
In nz youd be lucky to get a 5 man of marines for less than 100$, so that sucks
Double those prices if you live in Australia...
What are ‘one page rules’ games!
@@rowbot5555 ouch!
Primaris and the ‘modern audience’ take has poisoned GW’s soul
They are the only reason GW is still around. Before 7th edition and GWs pivot Warhammer was getting stagnant and dying with no new lore and books coming out at larger intervals than now Warhammer was dying.
The change is what saved Warhammer and you don't realise you are defending what was a sinking ship.
@ releasing space marines so everyone would buy them over again saved gw not primaris themselves.
all the best lore and books were being released in 2006 with HH
I was defending a perfectly elegant finely hand crafted and well loved schooner. GW had two minor years of loss until 8th. Does anyone think that true scale would not have sold as well? Primaris were made with copyrighting and a modern audience rebrand in mind. You see narrative choices with Pmarines you would never see firstborn doing
@@alphaomega938 it wasn't primaris it was guilliman. 40k was stagnant for years you had occasionally books as I said but for 40k not much. People weren't buying and playing as much as before and they needed to do something and so they change up 40k, primaris are nothing but the icing on the cake it was returning the primarchs and pushing the overall narrative past the 13th black crusade. Since then Warhammer has been in a boom hit or miss to old fans but brought Warhammer back from being stagnant.
In other words, GW has lost the "Stillmania" vibes (veterans likely know what I refer to!)
I started in 2000 and never heard the term "stillmania" tbh
Is that the stagnant/miniutes to midnight vibe that pre-primaris marines kinda had? That, yes?
@@williambowes-xt2sm there's a segment in a WD or something somewhere that describes Nigel Stillman's "rules" for collecting and painting an army. Essentially you collect a 2000 point army, paint it up, spray a couple coats of varnish on the army, then never touch it with a paintbrush again. Then, always play the army as-is even if your opponent brings 3k points to the table. I cant share images on YT but if you google Still-Mania you may find the full list. It's a bit of cheek but the vibe is definitely hobby first, gaming second and especially gaming for fun not for winning
Stillman should definitely be rediscovered in the hobby
This is what GW has always wanted. I worked for them for 5 years and, every meeting talked about getting the old players out and, getting fresh blood in.
And they are right, the old players are so annoying and weird with the people that want to start playing. They are impossible with the rules and make it unbearable to play. They are a wall against the new people.
Why would "getting old players out" ever be a goal/business strategy? Wouldn't retaining old players = more profits?
They felt that older players already did their big purchases. They wanted new players buying starter sets, followed by books and, Battle force boxes. For veteran players, we were supposed to tell them about whatever was new, get a preorder and send them on their way.
@@sergioaragon8759 how did the "out was the old, in with the new" strategy work for Disney and Star Wars?
@@wingtyrant If they weren't such douches they would have used the older players to bulk out the community and done leagues for veterans. These are often the people with the flash armies which are different to studio/shop armies. I get the age difference, a lot of younger players don't want to play with older people and that is probably the real hurdle here that gw was wanting to overcome. A young guy comes in, sees mostly middle aged men and thinks this isn't for him.
Yes, all of this. Everything you’ve said is true. The problem is that GW is a publicly traded company, not a private company that can do what it likes. There’s a board of non game players who are only allowed by law to look at how to maximise profits from the business, which means they can’t take a step back to a time that was less profitable. Added into that is that GW a long time ago identified their core demographic as being 14 year old boys, and they know from their market research that most of them lose interest after three years, so they base their renewal cycle on that (not 2 as you said, but your points still stand). There’s a fresh batch of teenage boys ready to buy books and figures, and the company genuinely doesn’t care about anything other than selling to that fresh batch.
That’s Main Games anyway-the Specialist Games department acts slightly differently, which is why you get fan service games like Blood Bowl and HH.
I feel like it's worth noting a few things:
- Firstly the edition cycles are three years, not two, which makes your points a little more diffuse. (Edit: I’m really sorry if that sounded snarky, it wasn’t meant to)
- Secondly the core-rules are now largely free. As a kid in 2001, I had immense trouble saving up for the WHFB 6th Edition rulebook because it was $65 AUD which was a massive barrier to play
- Thirdly, regarding the release of Codices and stuff, I have the 1996 Wood Elf Army Book, which saw minimal support in 2000 with Ravening Hordes, but they didn't have proper rules until late 2005 with WHFB 7th edition being released less than a year later. I'm not saying it excuses how it is now, but it's never really been "good".
A lot of people look at the late 90's and early 00's as a really glorious time for the hobby, and it was - but not because problems that exist now didn't exist then, it was more the cultural approach and the DIY nature and community (which is sorely lacking now).
The games also encouraged that DIY behavior though. Nowadays everything has a set loadout, everything is mono-pose, no rules for models that GW doesn't produce, no meaningful wargear options (would you like to gain a CP on a 5+ if you target this shitty battleline unit or have their s4 ap0 guns ignore cover?), etc. They've done everything they can to take conversions away from being something fun to do for the game and made it entirely divorced from 40k/AoS. Conversions are now a "Well, if you want to." rather than a "Wow, that's a really cool way to make Elysians I would never have thought about before!!"
The hobby used to feed into the game, which fed into the hobby. Now, the hobby seems to be more just a barrier of entry to the game that people want to play. That's why more and more people are just moving to 3d printing and not engaging with the hobby aspect outside of painting.
@ Those are really great points about the meaningfulness of conversions and choice. I guess that I’m very lucky within my group that it still means things and does get the “wow” reaction it used to.
Their greed will be their downfall!
3D PRINTER GO BRRRRRRR!
The biggest issue is that GW release schedule doesn't accomodate the time required to build and paint the models.
You cant build an entire wargame based on having 30/40/50/100 models and then release minis every month and a new books every 2 years, it's imposible to keep up because IF you are finally done... here's the new edition lmao.
GW is an endless ouroboros of "start new and then who cares... sell everything and start again... and sell everything and start again".
Always starting projects but never finish them is their ideal customer.
It would be possible if the miniatures were cheap enough to be affordable for people that are unemployed.
Problem is, unless you are working full time, you wont be able to afford them.
But if you are working full time, then you can only have 40k as your hobby or you don't have enough time.
...100 models should not be a two-year project.
I know I'm on the upper end of productivity, but I chew through 10 models a week. Multiple factors go into that; I choose deliberately simple color schemes, I've focused heavily on learning speed-painting techniques, and I'm pretty good about sitting down to paint every day even if I only have time to put a single color on a single model.
None of that is any kind of secret tech, it was just asking myself whether I wanted to enter painting contests or whether I wanted a finished army and aligning my efforts appropriately.
And the funny thing is that I still get a lot of compliments on the quality of individual models, and I think it's because I've executed any given scheme or technique so many times that quantity has acquired a quality all it's own.
@@zacnewman7140 It depends.
I paint a lot so it's not an issue for me, but when I'm talking to other players all I see is a wave of grey plastic or horribly painted minis because they are always in FOMO mode for something.
@seileen1234 I've never heard someone claim their army is unpainted because they just bought it to have something competitive, it's always one of the following three things:
1) I tried painting, and I just don't enjoy it.
2) I tried painting, and bare plastic looks better than anything I ever produced.
3) I'm working on it but I paint very slow.
1 and 2 are _far_ more common than 3.
@seileen1234 don't bash people for having Grey minis or badly painted ones. Maybe they're legit not rushing themselves OR they just don't enjoy painting. It's unfair to assume people who play with Grey models are chasing fomo. I think if you are dropping hobby time into painting an army just to paint it because you're afraid of judgemental people like yourself, you're seriously going about your own hobby through the perspective of being a slave to games workshops release schedule
Would you consider doing a video for newbies, who want to get into GW-free wargaming?
Absolutely! Do you mean overviews of different types of games?
@@LetsTalkTabletop I agree with "Gorgeous". I would like to see more about OPR. I also like Conquest - the minis are cool - but it doesn't seem to get much traction from RUclips.
My problem with conquest is that every time I'm interested in looking into it, the miniatures are just as expensive as games workshop. It has deterred me from ever looking into it.
You can also play Warhammer without giving GW a dime. Download rules online, print proxy minis, use paints from Vallejo, AK etc. Give them a giant middle finger.
@@LetsTalkTabletop When I first bought into Conquest, the cost was a big positive for me. Then I realized that building an army isn't really any cheaper than AOS or W40k. The rules and app being free, is now the only benefit. The models I bought a few months ago were $50 for a unit (on par with GW), and the big models are on par with GW costs, but don't count for a big chunk of your army, which makes building even more expensive.
I was hoping Conquest would have brought GW prices down if it got popular, instead, conquest has just gotten more expensive. When they offered 2000pt armies to buy, my army was over $600. I questioned it and one of their reps said that an AOS or 40K army could cost more than that. I responded with the fact that they could also cost a lot less than that. My NH 2k army if bought full price, is less than $500. That's buying everything separate with no deals. Buying a 2000 pt army all at once, should offer deals of some sort.
I spent my entire childhood wanting to play Warhammer 40k, I did a ton of research on the lore and setting for literally a decade or so, before finally walking into my local GW store and buying a Stormcast eternals starter box (at this point ironically AoS appeals to me more) only to discover over the next few weeks that all of the things I was excited about in this hobby, like building my own terrain and kitbashing etc is not even allowed in their stores. I switched to Battletech and will probably play other wargames I buy from independent stores for far less money and more fun.
Since when is kit bashing not allowed in their stores?
@@DrunkPlaylistsmight be the trend of fixed warhesr options and static points values on units, instead of having lots of customisation options for troopers and characters youd need to kitbash to make instead all the options tend to come in each unit box as part of a monopose figure
GW is pivoting to a different audience. most of my friend group are MTG players, extremely analytical people who love to optimize, and they are liking 40k more and more as it goes in the competitive direction.
i'm very much the opposite; i don't mind things not being perfectly balanced if you get more flavorful rules, and i don't mind relying on my opponent to just not be a dick and to restrain himself from spamming the things that are plainly overpowered.
3 ballistus dreadnoughts go brr
I came back to the hobby about a year or so ago after a decade long break and this was akin to full on culture shock to me.
Competitive 40k has always been a bit of a silly concept, imho. It's just too imprecise to be taken that seriously and that was, imho, one of its strengths.
Coming back to find that it's not just common to play it that way now, but that GW's whole business model relies on it is definitely taking some getting used to.
@@Hudstonplease don't get used to comp 40k. It's a joke, a scam, and an unethical take on their mediocre tabletop game. Chess can be competitive, but 40k and AoS will never have the trappings to be a real competitive game.
Out of GW's currently marketed games, only killteam could come close to being a true competitive and balanced game, if only it didn't have any faction flavor whatsoever. There is a reason that MTG players can play competitive 40k as an extra past-time. Compared to MTG the balance for GW games is an absolute scam.
@@Hudston Unfortunately this happened when Jervis Johnson left the company. According to some insiders he was literally the last person fighting for 'casual play first' idea of design and was constantly fighting the rules design team who were highly competitive focused former tournament players, so when he left everything became about focusing on 'competitive play first' and casual play as a second (like the Crusade stuff that barely anybody seems to play).
They pivoted to a different audience when the old guard weren't keeping them afloat. Alot people don't remember that for a long time 40k and Warhammer in general were stagnate and was not getting better they were starting to loose money and risk going under like many times before. Only reason they changed and are still around is because of the pivot to a different audience and advancing the story. Many of the old guard hate the new approach but don't realise they were defending a sinking ship.
If they are willing to throw away years of lore for the sake of DEI I will have zero regrets 3D printing my stuff In the future
You are 100% right. The LOTR SBG community is going through its own throes, having a trivial edition update but a lot of the range has just been relegated to the bin. Whole armies, like monsters of Mirkwood, gone. Supposedly the new licensing agreement precludes anything that isn’t exactly as it appears in the movies. So giving Celeborn a shield or armor because he fought in the 2nd age isn’t possible. He just wore pajamas in the movie, so that is exactly as he must appear on the tabletop.
OMG. That sounds terrible. Yeah I did know about the killing of a lot of The Lord of the rings miniatures, I forgot to mention it in the video. But I definitely feel for your community.
Yet gil galad actually had a sheild in the film but not allowed to take one. GW logic
@@JMACCSArmiesOfMiddleEarth He appears for maybe ten frames in the final cut, I think? Surprised he's allowed to not look like a blur.
Celeborn isn't the guy who died at Helms Deep?
@@RMCbreezy No that was Haldir..and in the books he never went there.
GW used to have a bunch of hobby stuff on their site like templates you could print out for ruins and advice for the best materials to use to make them. Cities of death had a decent section on how to make dence urban boards etc. This was all while selling their own terrain. They used to explicitly talk in their publications about how to make the hobby work for different kinds of people but it's all gone now. When they stopped crediting artists, that was a seriously ill omen.
When I was a kid I used to read lexicanum articles, look at dakka dakka forums, watch the early warhammer 40k batreps, and look online at the models dreaming of one day owning an army. 13 years later at the start of 8th edition I finally got my first army. By the end of 9th I owned 7 factions, 2 horus heresy armies, and 3 AOS armies. As of now I am selling down to just owning my Heresy legions and AOS models because they are fun to play in OPR. Started into Gundam and watched my local wargaming scene die with just me and one guy left rotating wargames based on what we want to play. I was once called an ambassador of warhammer in my area for the sheer amount of lore, hobby know-how, and ability to mentor players of all skills and now? Viva La OPR, Ravaged Star, Trench Crusade, and Gundam cause GW has utterly shattered my trust and love of their universe and games. The worst part is that I see this kind of story in ever comment section, hobby discord, or online forum these days. People just crushed that they have been so easily and completely betrayed and abused for just wanting to have a hobby.
That's sad and all too relatable.
If Games Workshop fix their prices they will always remain at the top of the mountain.
I dunno. I have a 3d printer and have developed a real taste for making my own models. Even if GW models were free at this point, they still have a product I don't really want for a game that doesn't have good rules.
Also I effing hate them.
At the very least, they'd get their Australian & Canadian customers back.
Even when sold at a 3rd party discount, their products are out of reach for many up north & down under.
@@Chunkypumpkinheadhonestly speaking 3d printing won't be a competition. People like to speak as if it is but in reality it really isn't and won't be. There are a ton of reasons covered by other people why it won't sink GW from most people still preferring to buy GW plastic and not wanting the inconvenience of having to learn a new skill set to 3d print an army, cure the models and more like having the space. People will never choose the niche thing that requires effort when they can just go to the shop and buy some.
The only thing that's going to sink GW or give them a reality check is the pricing.
Named creators, named artists, Rick Priestly, Andy Chambers, Jervis, Alan Merret [IP protector]. From serious weekly games in 2001 to now, so many people have quit 'playing the game' around me. They still do model building though.
Your gaming room is nice btw!
Thank you! And thank you for watching!
I've spent in 2024 aprox 10% of what I've spent in 2023 regarding GW products, and I don't plan spending more than that in 2025. Precisesly for the reasons you laid out in this video.
Same here. I'm switching ti ww2 miniatures and bolt action . Cheaper . Rules come free
It’s every 3 years for a new edition btw. Still too quick, but worth noting
I guess it just seems quicker because I play age of Sigmar and 40K and they have a staggered release schedule.
I haven't been able to play 40k in years; but if I was to play again, I would find a group of friends willing to play 4th or 5th edition. I think finding 1 edition that you like and sticking with it is the wise move for friends groups.
This is what I see mostly anyway. I know someone who plays only 9th, because list building still existed. That, and the app is bad and better 3rd party apps were designed for 9th edition but haven't updated for 10th. Honestly, the only one who wanted 10th edition was games workshop because they realized that 3rd party digital support for 9th edition was better than anything their dinosaur of a company could ever produce.
Me and my friends played 4th edition 40k for years because it was our favourite.
I basically gave up after spending months building and painting kill team lists learning all the rules i brought and painted prinexus all during covid, to have it all just made out of date before i even got to use it. I did buy the new edition because I loved the new models and terrain, but my enthusiasm had died for it. So I bought the warcry catacombs box and loved it, so have basically been playing warcry and have refused to buy any new rules, we just use the original rules and data cards.
Also the Warhammer stores are so expensive now, I always try and buy from 3rd party retailers or 2nd hand off eBay / market places. There just isn't any point trying to stay current anymore.
I collected and occasionally played 40K in the early 90’s. I got the 2nd edition box set for Christmas when I was 12. Recently my son discovered the game and I thought it would be fun to dip my toe in the water again so we could have a shared hobby. I have to say, I was flabbergasted that we got all the way to 10th edition already. Just this month I splashed out on a couple of codexes only to discover that GW released a “balancing dataslate”. I despair at the thought that I’ve sunk hard-earned cash into an ultimate starter set and a bunch of books that are already potentially redundant. Really puts a sour taste in my mouth when I am trying to share the joy this game brought me in my youth with my son.
40k needs to adopt 2 formats of play; Competetive and Codex. Competetive could be what we have now. Constantly updating rules, hyper focus on balance. Etc. Designed for balanced and tournament play.
Codex would be the book is final. Whatever your book for that edition says is the way it goes. It could focus more on army themes, skewed play aimed at less balance and more just good fun.
As it stands both of these ways of play are trying to coexist and are being forced to mix in a way that just doesnt work and takes away from both. And it's doing more to push people away than anything; and once that happens; people try other games and never come back.
Did everyone just forget that open play exists? What happens when someone else's army is broken and unplayable right on release? What happens when your army is OP and un-fun to play against on release? Ho hum, just gotta deal with it. Suck it up like Tyranids players did from 4th through 9th edition.
@@BloodDX2 I'd be ok with this on the condition that they fine-tune the codex releases more to reflect that. One of my armies is Custodes and our codex this edition was a borderline insult in how slapdash it was at time of print, likely partially due to the expectation that they could FAQ and errata it into a better state afterwards. Even with fixes, we're stuck with only two real detachment options this edition because of the rush job, three if you count the new one in the Grotsmas detachments. If they tamp down their quality control at GW and produce codexes that have enough variety and are enjoyable to play, then I could see codex mode working, but it would require making codexes that were substantial and flavorful enough to be worth committing to for an entire edition as is.
@@theshamurai32dude. Just mash together various faction rules from previous editions. If you're friends have a problem with it, get new friends. Are you all here to play an edition, or are you here to play your armies and characters?
Homebrew.
Homebrew.
Homebrew.
Actually make a word document and print it out. Combine all the effort you have ever put into commenting on youtube and instead put that next wave of Commenting energy into making succinct rules that you and your friends can play. Take the best of what GW has produced in the last 30 years and implement it into your version of 40k. The game is obviously in the wrong hands. Zorpazorp plays his own rules-overlay to make 40k more like the video game Dawn of War 1. He has stated that he enjoys his own format more than the GW one.
Personally, this solution fits me best as there aren't a lot of people where I'm from who play 40k, and if they do, they're playing in friend groups at houses. There are casual tournament goers, and crusade campaigners for the local shops. From what I've seen, most who play the "10th edition events" don't actually know 10th edition rules, or they heard some whisperings of a change to how control ranges work. None of these tournaments seem to be very impacted by the official rules, as most people don't even care to follow them.
At the last tournament I saw I heard this phrase joking spoken a lot that day, "I cheated at Ursa Major and all I got was this shitty t-shirt."
0.000001% of gw's market base plays the full rules as they come out.
80% of GW's market base still have unopened boxes.
GW will NEVER feel the difference their rules make in their sales. EVER.
mods, 3 years of Index: Aeldari to this guy
I'm one of the people that bought the Votann codex. Fucking hell.
😰
I think you hit the nail on the head. I'm reluctant to buy kill team boxes or say Votann because I don't know if they'll be around in a few years. And Space Marines are in a very strange place model-wise. Will land raiders continue to be a thing? Centurions?
This is the benefit of players like myself who are willing to use third party rules and/or do lots of RPG play and just want really cool miniatures. :) I think rules are the biggest thing that is broken in warhammer. Eliminate those and 80% of the problems go away.
No one forces you to use the latest rule set dude.
@@defdaz I think people tend to forget that the game is owned by the players, it's only the IP that is owned by the company. If we don't like a version of the game they put out, then whatever. We can play our own game instead. 3rd edition? 8th? OPR? We the players get to decide. GW isn't making us play the game as they see it. I think players forget that a lot.
@@defdaz This is true, but good luck finding a game for a previous edition.
What's been a revelation to me is switching to One Page Rules. I'm a wargamer again, instead of an exploited consumer.
I stopped buying books when I realized I hadn't even opened some of them before they were out of date. And I was just buying books for the 40k models I had...
You hit the nail on the head. @8:30 This was the tipping point of AoS to me, ridding the earlier Stormcasts that were in some cases less than 5 years old and making extinct the Beasts of Chaos and Bonesplitters from the game showed me how quickly GW will churn and burn through model ranges. I’m focusing on completing my collections for 40K and Fantasy (now Old World) and do what I can do with Middle Earth.
The fact that the whole AoS/Old World and 40k/Heresy split is entirely driven by spreadsheets is so fucking stupid. Oh well you can play Beasts of Chaos in the Old World? Yeah they're not allowed to exist in AoS now because that would mean we don't know which department is generating sales if they're available in both! Despite the fact that it's all for the same company and it shouldn't matter what system you bought a unit for, the company is still making money but they want to make sure the right department is making money so they can balance individual profit and loss balance sheets.
@@luketferIt’s funny with Beasts of Chaos being removed from AoS as they featured pretty prominently in the earlier sourcebooks and even some of the more recent novels and stuff. It does highlight the messy transition between Fantasy to AoS and even more so the weird obsession GW has now to delineate Old World with AoS while Warriors of Chaos are somehow still allowed to exist in the Fantasy revival.
Getting a 3d printer for christmas, seems like this is the only way I'll be able to enjoy the hobby in a financially responsible way to be honest
It may be that hardcopy rules publication, especially in hardcover, is simply not a tenable business model in the age of the Internet. A bunch of hobbyists can slap together a new set of rules, play test them to death over the course of a few weekends, and then publish them as a monetized series of RUclips videos. GW will eventually find itself as the purveyor of miniatures and the owner of the IP for the lore; and they will have to price the miniatures so that they are price-competitive with 3D printing.
I basically stopped playing. I still buy minis when I think they're cool, but I don't think I've played a single game of 10e and I haven't gotten through the 3e AoS starter booklet yet. And it's for the same reasons you mentioned; I'm too busy and playing a game takes all afternoon. I don't think I played 9th either... and the funny thing is they don't have to do this at all. They want to release a new edition every year because then they can sell a big box that everyone will buy so the profit numbers look good for the summer. But they could do that without changing the rules. Every 3 years you release a new starter set with different armies, a campaign supplement and the rulebook update with the faq's since last year's book. But it's all still compatible with the old rules, so if you don't care about these armies, you can just skip one and be fine.
i really started to see the decline back around 2010. i worked for GW in 08 and back then it was all about catering to the niche market they knew we served and helping new hobbyists who joined in. after i left the company, i went back to the store a couple years later and the staff there had a whole different approach. i'm a die hard guard player with (at that time the end of 5th edition) 10k points of guard and they tried selling me things like new space marines and tau stuff. i was lugging around my entire army and a staffer started pushing me on stuff i had zero interest in. i knew then it was on its way down. seeing the new rules (both fantasy and 40k) showed me they were dumbing things down to reach a wider market. i lost interest in GW after that and havent bought a thing from them since. i have a collection of most of the codecies and the 4th and 5th ed rule books and i play with those when i can. gonna be getting into 3d printing to make more models and build more armies. i'll probably even start to try out new game rulesets! also, the paints became garbage. i honestly think gw switched pots to ones that dried out faster on purpose to force players and painters to buy more over priced paint. i switched to vellejo, army painter, and p3. alright, nerd rant over lol.
It's all geared towards tournament players now. Thr rules read like they were written by a lawyer because of tournaments. It's ruined
My friends and I started playing a home-brew version of 5th edition with alternating activation
I like 40k lore video and painting minis. I play quite a lot of board games. It is bizarre to me that so many people are happy playing a war-game where the whole of one side goes before the other! Alternating activation should have been in the official rules long ago!
I was a regular buyer from my local GW store in Australia until they said no painting in the store and no gaming in there either. It was only for purchasing Warhammer and then get the heck out of here. That felt like a kick in the balls to a long time fan and customer. I don’t have a 3D printer but I buy 3D proxy minis from Etsy now when I can.
In reference to the suprising disaster that was fallout 76. Alot of people were suprised at this being the direction and decisions Bethesda were going with. But i think the way someone summed that situation up is very similar to whats happening in GWs monopoly of wargaming.
He saud that they made New Vegas for the RPG fans and Fallout 3 for the Action adventure fans, Fallout 4 was an obligatory sequel to a popular game rhat added a bunch of additional features. Theres no where else to go with the setting. So Fallout 76 was Bethesday cashing in on the good will that had been acrued"
Games workshop in my mind is unfortunately not just ignoring their relationship with their target audience. They are actively and conciously turning it in for a reward and a subscription service.
At this point im priced out of most of their games. And the way they are obsessed with forcing specific use of models, game systems, and armies that are constantly flucuating behind a paywall means ill never play 40k, AoS, or anything else again.
I do like The Old World. But i dont think ill expect positive improvements past 3 years. Im just enjoying it a bit while i can.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on this video. I lost faith in games workshop when I bought a tomb kings starter set and then they removed the whole army before I could even clip them from the sprue. The codex issue has also been a major problem for me too as I used to have an Imperial Guard army. Can’t afford that now!
I agree with you Scott. GW has turned away from the "guys having some beers and rolling dice" audience and went to the "competitive hyper balanced" audience. I agree with your point this will kill them in the end. With how successful stuff like Trench Crusade Fundraising ($4.5 million) or Turnip 28 whent it shows there is a real desire to move away from Warhammer (but still want that grim dark vibe). Plus all the models and armies they put into 'legions'. They keep squeezing and people are sick and tired of their prices. I'm looking for other games to play and look forward to playing your Mass Brutality. People's wallets are really tight of late and GW's view is "let them eat cake" well my 3d printer will keep going BRRRRRR in defiance! viva la revolution!
There is no way, with 40k about to become the new defacto zeitgeist space franchise this will affect them anytime soon.
@@Ducos_ Yeh, and Hasbro said the same thing about DnD/ADnD ......... How's that going for yer Hasbro? 🤪
........ and if that even looks like that model might work, micro-transactions and all, GW will be up that drainpipe quicker than a rat on speed!
first off, Trench Crusade is never beating 40k for market share. While the setting and the vibe are awesome, the models they sell are just NEVER going to hit regular store shelves across the US, much less the rest of the world; other countries have varying degrees of censorship laws and cultures, with a lot being much less open to gore and violence compared to US. Also, $4.5 million is a lot for a fundraiser but is nothing in the enterprise sphere. Assuming Trench Crusade grows in popularity and the creators found a company that is 10x times their fundraising number, GW is a $5.5 billion market cap company; that is $5,500 million by the way. You would need over 1 thousand Trench Crusade fundraisers to even come close to being at the level GW is at...
I found a telegram page with a ton of stls
@@TaylorX-g4b, Wrong. Look at the dominance, Disney once had, and the rest in our laurels and they are not the Giants that they used to be. Kings of war is increasing in popularity, and I’ve been told by friends in parts of England, and there are parts in Dayton, Ohio, and other places that King’s war is giving stiff competition to GW. Everybody thinks at the giant can’t fall, but here’s the thing the bigger they are the harder they fall.
Thank you for this video dude - it helps me understand so much. My 2 year 40k journey has been terrible. My local store suggested I start with Kill Team and they sold me the Pariah Nexus box. I painted the Flayed Ones Necron team entirely before I learned that whole box was deprecated by 6 months and nothing in there was usable in current rules. They never should have let me buy that as a new player. I went back and bought the Chalnath box, all the new tac ops cards, and the book to build compendium teams. After a few months of painting I finally got into the groove of playing and not long after KT 2024 came out. All the books and cards I had are now useless - I literally threw them away. Had to go back and buy equipment packs, new token sheets, new dice, download a new app, and learn a 3rd set of rules all in under 2 years. I don't understand how any new player could make sense of how to get started even in something that should be as simple as Kill Team.
Yeah, that's the exact problem. This is not sustainable for players at all.
to games workshop you are no longer a gamer, you arent a fan...you're a consumer.
when they completely nuked the stormcast range recently, something changed for me. there was always a sort of unwritten contract between GW and the customers that if you buy "the latest models" theyll generally be usable for a very long time. when they decided to remove the entire 2nd edition stormcast range of aos, which was only 5-6 years old, i realised that ANY new army is potentially a liability to own.
Ive been working on creating a version of Warhammer's rules that blends fun and fluffy rules based on 9th edition and older editions, with the simplicity of list building that 10th has.
Im still working on one faction at a time, but once its done im hoping to release it somewhere for free.
I bought a couple of the really nice army sets for AOS during 3rd edition. The ones that come with a couple of core units, a commander, the battle tome, warscroll cards. Less than a year later, a new edition is released, the book and cards are obsolete. Add to which, they’ve pulled another stunt where the more recent army sets are *almost* a spearhead under the new rules. But you still have to buy a different unit or commander to use your army with that system. All a cynical cash grab and taking their fans for granted.
My faith started crumbling when AoS killed Fantasy and it wasn’t because I didn’t like and play AoS, it’s because weeks before it was announced, I had bought a ton of dwarves which basically disappeared once Sigmar hit.
Oh no! I do remember the death of fantasy being very sudden. That sucks. A similar thing happened with my friend who just painted his final unit of beasts of chaos like 2 months before they just made the announcement they were going to be discontinued.
@@LetsTalkTabletopI am praying to Grandfather Nurgle that this doesn't happen to Daemons as a standalone army soon. Started to hear rumors that Daemons is going to get the Harlequin treatment and used exclusively as allies, separated and rolled into each deity's traitor legion, or outright squatted. Given I've spent most of this edition building a standard sized Daemons army (and having a blast doing it), it would be enough for me to get a 3d printer, find other sources like Wahapedia for rules, stick to my local independent game shops, and abandon any interaction with GW altogether.
Thank you for putting to words that feeling that has been gnawing since they switched to 32mm bases. I started in 3rd edition and I had enjoyed being able to use the same miniatures I had invested hours and hours of hobby time.
This is what happens when you pander to the competitive crowd. It's cool, your game gets balanced. But it loses its soul in the process.
Agreed. Competitive play has killed a lot of the fun of 40K.
From the video.. "Lost my trust in GW" is very true, in fact a lot of people online may not just be able to express that in the correct way. War Machine did the competitive crowd thing... didnt go well.
The game got balanced? since when?
@@winstonsmith8482 I'd say the game is in a fair position right now. Especially compared to launch.
3D printing means companies can make competing rulesets without needing to have their own miniature lines, and there's enough variety online for people to pick and choose from.
What GW has had going for them is being the market leader, and having an inspiring lore (Inspiring in the sense that you have a lot of inspiration to go on when making your army).
That's something that lacks in for instance One Page Rules.
But, the lore of 40k feels like it's been going the corporate path of sanitization. It's no longer the Grim Dark. And the models too feel a lot more generic than in the past with many different factions sharing design features too. The Primaris powerpacks having that round part, that looks like a Tau drone thing. Or the Leagues of not-Squats having helmets with features you can find similarly on those Gravis jump Primaris guys.
And the creativity aspect is being diminished by the previously almost endlessly modular Space Marine kits now having Primaris, Horus Heresy and Chaos Space Marines no longer sharing the same template or sizes.
Essentially what you said. I had a bretonnian army, a tomb king army, a mixed gods daemon army with mortal allies and a combined Eldar/dark eldar army that I had painted to match in aesthetics. Suddenly I had two redundant armies, a bunch of units I couldn't feasibly use, and my eldar army had to go back to being pure eldar or dark eldar and was completely unbalanced. I would show up for battles using my Dark Eldar and take one look at the guys army before he set up and I'd just shake his hand and say you win. They would look almost confused or alarmed and want to know why and I'd be like. I have 4 dark lances, and you have an entirely mechanised army. GG mate. You win. I got absolutely sick of the meta chasing. The attitudes of players totally changed too. Made the game far too competitive and the players seemed really salty.
I had a 'kitchen sink' Chaos army with daemons, beastmen and Chaos Warriors. (all Tzeentch/Undivided but still). I ended up with 3 small, separate armies that didn't work on their own. I sold up.
just a comment to say I share your pain, really.
@@aedwynn6474 Wow. You had the beastmen too? 🥺 Yup. You know the story. 😅 When it happened, my cuz made a mock sympathy face and said "All part of the plan I guess" LOL 😆 (Tzeentch was mine too)
@@larryargent503 I had Wood Elves before that. Before Wood Elves I had generic Undead led by a Liche.
After the Chaos debacle I left Warhammer behind for good. It was a cursed game for me, seemingly.
@@aedwynn6474 Ouch. Wood elves were so pricey and rare to see, they disappeared for an age too. I left after the end times, moved to 40K and got the same treatment with my thousand sons/daemon allies and the mixed gods and mixed eldar. (Foolishly bought forgeworld models) I really loved the game but ended up with a wardrobe of garbage. Still...managed to sell it all on ebay. 😆
I make do with Battle sector now. Sure it's glitchy asf and constantly crashes but at least I only paid a few quid for the armies and don't need to break my back carting it all about or break my brain to work out ever changing rules. (😮💨 wow - turns out you're my GW survivor therapist lmao)
What they just did to lord of the rings hurts bad.
Lord of the rings for 20 years has actively encouraged converting and hobbying. Giving wargear options everywhere across the board.
No they say if there is no model with the wargear, then you can no longer bring them legally in the game.
I have multiple completely converted armies that have been make 95% illegal. This is a big insult to long time players and not to mention will screw up the balance of the game tremendously.
I have friends that simply have too mich faith in GW and it feels bad being proven right😢
Completely agree. I'm 32 and have a wife and baby. Changing the rules and points every 30 seconds is great for people who play every week but I can't keep up.
I'm with you, and I've got my 3d printer tweaked enough that they are indistinguishable from the official model after paint.
This applies to GW's paint range as well. Changes to the trifecta (nuln oil, aggrax, seraphim seppia), removal of certain citadel sprays (looking at you averland sunset), removal of glazes. What GW has done, which I presume was to encourage people to use their contrast range, has encouraged me to buy vallejo rather than have to invent ways to continue my color schemes when GW goes on a 3 week bender and decides to change the pallette.
*edit for a spelling mistake*
Not reformulating their white and off-white paints to not go on like liquid chalk is the main thing that's pushed me away, honestly. They discontinued Ceramite White, but the other whites and offwhites are still rough enough to ruin a good paint job if you aren't lucky. If Pro Acryl, AK, and Two Thin Coats have solved this issue, so can they.
Changing the Shades to stain the raised areas less actually made me want to use them, but I get why it annoyed people who used the old ones a lot.
You know Vallejo is a slum lord right? They won't even fix their leaky roof for their employees. It's like buying Nikes, you're supporting a shit system
Rules used to be five years before changes
This video explains a lot of reasons why I haven’t branched out to playing any edition of 40k or even combat patrol. Kill team has been made so easily accessible rule wise and has a fairly decent amount of variety in terms of what I want to play and all for what used to be 60 dollars. Unfortunately they did raise prices on the single team boxes so they’ll be getting less of my money.
@@alexgonzalez7218 I love Kill Team so much, I honestly have started preferring it to 40k and pointing new people interested there first as an entry point. Not only is it cheaper, simpler to pick up, and more convenient to play casually, but I feel like I get more "flair" out of it. Kill Team has that narrative focus that really drives me in games (I'm an RPG player first, wargamer second), whereas in 10th edition 40k I often feel like a match is just a scrimmage with all the style and panache of running a finance sheet in excel. Since it's only one squad of a handful of models, I feel like I can really flex the hobbying muscles by painting each model with thorough personalized details and consider things like their backstories and the broader narrative between games, which is an exercise in futility with a big army. Plus it's a bit of a personal bias. I am a soldier in my working life, so leading a squad of a handful of troops clearing buildings, finding vantage points, and engaging in a firefight is a lot more grounded to what I'm used to than commanding an army of dozens of models in varying sizes, stats, and battlefield roles.
“Every change they make is designed to get you to buy new models.” - Northern Exile
people have been saying 3d printers were going to hurt GW *any year now* since 5th ed.
It like coding, how many people say you should do it.
And how many coders are normal and not guys or girls who chain up girls in their basement? 😂
I understand your sentiment, but I still believe it is a future reality. I am not a 3D printer bro per se, but I think it's inevitable. And of course we should keep the logic of stock traders and remember that past results are no indicator of future gain. Just because the past was a certain way doesn't mean the future will be.
Are you sure it doesnt hurt them and by extension their customers, because the price gouging gets worse? And a lot of the things they do, sure feels like its meant to just cause you to buy more stuff. Deleting armies for example or having a new meta in an allegedly competitive game where you shell out a few hundred bucks for your tools to play it.
I 100% think it hurts the prices further. 3D printing lowers games workshops sales, and in turn they raise the price which just makes more people go to 3D printing. I actually think they are trying to grab as much money as possible because they see the end is near in the next decade or so. I don't mean they will cease to exist, they will probably have slumping sales and be bought out by a bigger company such as Hasbro. But selling miniatures may not be their prime money maker anymore.
@@LetsTalkTabletop fair enough.
This happened to me more or less all the way in third edition. I got into the game with the start of third edition. I bought the core rules, and I started collecting Tyranids. The game worked beautifully with the way the armies were set up in the core rulebook. It was clean, it was simple, it was fun, there was nothing that really stood out as broken. I had a lot of the old plastic genestealers and the OG hive tyrant, a lictor and a zoanthrope (when they still had legs) all in metal. It wasn't a great army, but I was proud of it, had it painted up decently and everything. It was pretty successful when playing against my friends with similar hodgepodge armies.
Then they released the new Codex and model line for Tyranids, and I was absolutely over the moon with all the new miniatures. They looked amazing, especially the new warriors. So I spent what was at the time a huge amount of money for me buying my dream army. Loads of the new plastic warriors, gaunts, zoanthropes, biovores, raveners... I basically bought it by what it looked like, because the way the game worked in the core rules there was nothing wrong with just collecting a wide variety of miniatures and making army lists on the fly. I started building and painting.
But anyone who remembers third edition Tyranids knows that this codex was fundamentally broken. It introduced a rule called "Shoot the big ones" that made it impossible to screen your valuable units with swarms of gaunts since enemies were allowed to target any of your units anywhere on the table. Ironically this mainly made genestealers worthless because they were very expensive point wise but very fragile, so without a screen of gaunts they would just get gunned down before they could so much as pilfer a single measly chromosome. It also had a rule for mutated creatures where you would divide the number of total wounds a squad had by the number of unit types in your army and that was how many of the tyranids in the unit could receive a mutation. That meant if your army only had 4 types of units in it you could mutate your hive tyrants and carnifexes.
So about half way into building this new army it starts to dawn on me through playing my old army by the new rules, discussions with friends and reading online that this new army I've bought isn't going to work at all. None of the tactics that worked for Tyranids the way they worked in the core rulebook still applied. This was also during a time when your codex came full of unit options that weren't on the sprue. It would just say you can give a hive tyrant wings for +45 points or whatever, but you had to figure out how to put wings on the model yourself.
So this basically left me with a heap of units I wouldn't be able to use, and if I wanted the ability to field a very powerful Tyranid list I would have to build mutated flying hive tyrants from scratch, and then they wouldn't be usable for anything other than those hyper specialized army lists.
It just kind of crushed my perception of Warhammer miniatures as an investment. I knew that Tyranids weren't going to be fun again until they write another codex for them, but I also realized that if I wanted to have a strong army in the meanwhile I had to chop up my miniatures and turn them into custom jobs that were the exact thing I wished that new codex wouldn't include again.
The entire thing basically just soured me on 40k for years, because I felt completely betrayed by that codex.
When GW changed from promoting DIY hobbying to Only Official Stuff in mid 2000s or so they lost me.
As someone who is into Warhammer for the lore and narrative rather than the tabletop game... GW is doing the same thing with their stories. They introduce a character, storyline, faction or some other cool idea, and either abandon it midway or don't do anything with it ever (Ynnari, Leagues of Votann, Eldar Exodites, etc), throw it into the garbage bin, introduce the next cool thing (sometimes in tremendously lazy or downright lorebreaking ways), rince and repeat. GW has had no idea what to do with Warhammer for a WHILE now, other than squeeze every penny they can out of it. Warhammer is a hollow shell of its former self, the people behind it have no passion or care for it, money is all they think about.
Anyone know what that wall mounted model display is from? It looks great
Thanks! It's from Amazon and it's a Funko Pop display case. When I bought mine they were like $45 but now they're like $75 or something like that. But they're still well worth it. They have a size that's still around $45 but it holds less miniatures obviously.
Unfortunately, for every Warhammer player that has hit their maximum spending limit there are 10 ultra competitive Warhammer GigaChad’s ready to replace us. I don’t even play the game anymore, man I get it.
I got back into Warhammer during COVID like many people, and I still like to collect and paint the models. I haven't played a game since 1997 though. I bought a 3D printer a couple of years ago and had great fun printing WH-adjacent models - but honestly when you factor in all the faffing about and cost of printing supplies and equipment, as well as the finicky nature of resin printers, it works out cheaper to just buy the models from a FLGS - although i have a couple of really cool printed 40k Chaos Knight proxies that look absolutely amazing.
I might play a game again at some stage.
I mean it all depends on what printer you buy and how often shit goes sideways
I don't mean any offense, but how the hell could printing come out as similar or more expensive in cost than buying first party? Even if you have several bad batches, you're still talking a fraction of a fraction of the cost per unit. Where I live in the states, your average battleline troop unit is going to run you at least $50, and that's building in the discount on a provider like Amazon rather than the MSRP plus game store markup turning it closer to $60 or $70. For the same cost in resin and supplies, you could print several different units. And that's just comparing one standard battleline, the basic unit of an army. It gets even worse when you start hunting for specialty units that can often be far more expensive and difficult to find in stock or a singular character for $30-$40.
I had a 10,000 point iron warriors army that I had spent thousands of dollars on, and GW decided to remove all the forgeworld rules and then the iron warriors themselves. Its like you said, they lost my trust, and my faith. Now im moving onto Battletech, which has great model prices, and all its rules online I can just...access for free. Its great, and it has massive amounts of content and lore.
Scott, there’s always room for you to come join me and Jordan with Star Wars legion lol. Amg is not the evil greedy empire that gw is, but… maybe inching closer. But with legion there’s no codex’s, or index’s to buy ever, and with that you can look up any unit for any army whenever you want.
8th Edtion Indexes were actually a brilliant idea. Sure units were more "generic" but at least every army got an update at the same time, and you could purchase something like three books and have the rules for every army out at the time.
Piracy being a service problem yet again. People who used to buy product now obtain it via secret techniques, because they no longer agree that the value matches the price tag.
You are 100% correct
People who think 3d printers are not a threat for GW do not own a 3d printer. Buying a printer, cleaning station, uv-table, resin, cleaning products and stl-files is still cheaper than buying one army. After that, the price difference is just insane. I can print an entire 2000 points army for $20. I do not own a top of the line printer, and I can tell you: the detail of my mini's is as good as if not better than GW models.
I agree 💯
Only danger for GW is market crisis. Now, as was more than 10 years ago with board games we have influx of players, new projects gains a lot of support on kickstarter. That was time of CoolMiniOrNot , big boxes with great miniatures and graphics which, as I was told, were more important than actual gameplay. If 3D printers would posed a danger, than GW would have financial problems now, but they are more and more successful in financial terms. Only what can kill GW is selling it to something bigger. Few big mishaps, which will eventually come, and something like Amazon will cease its functioning. But, like with BattleTech or D&D, it will be low chance it will be end for Warhammer. Warhammer is something bigger than a game. GW can die but not a Warhammer.
Oh, Warhammer could absolutely die as physical miniature wargame.
As a media franchise, it's unsinkable.
Rules should be free and codex's should be for fluff and hobby tips and tricks.
100% agree with you on this. I haven't supported them since they ruined 75% of my stormcast army. I'm not getting 4th ed AoS and won't because of this.
Mass brutality was not on my schedule to be released for another 2 years but I was so enraged by the cancellation of my beasts of chaos army and half of my stormcast army that I pushed that to be the next project I released. Now I am converting my local gaming club to Mass brutality.
On top of all the things you mentioned, the way GW treats their lore these days made me stop buying from them.
The whole femstodes reveal and the way they treated the community pushback was the last straw for me.
I hear you, brother. Back in the day, I used to spend more on buying models (and I bought a lot) rather than worrying about rules that are constantly changing. I lost faith over time and switched to 3D printing, which I’ve been doing for years now. The details are way better, and the cost is so much lower.
I also miss how creative things used to be. One of my core childhood memories is going to a store on late-night shopping nights and turning scraps into amazing terrain-fly screens turned into fences, foam transformed into city buildings, and dollar store finds used for all kinds of projects.
I think part of the problem is Kevin Rountree as CEO. He’s an accountant, not a customer, and seems to lack a real understanding of the product he has. To him, it’s all just numbers, and he often says the wildest things-like when they mess with the lore, charging us more in a cost of living crisis, or overproduce certain armies. It’s frustrating.
They are an investor ran company and are rapidly pricing themselves out of existence,which is fine with them as they will just move on to another company and ravage that one, rinse repeat.
You would think but people have been saying that for years and it hasn't happened yet. They are climbing the British stock market and with GW getting income from the Black Library, video games, and other I.P.'s, it's not going to happen :(
I left when Primaris dropped. I had units in my Space Marine army that I got way back in 1989 and was still using. Primaris was an effort to force grognards like me to stop using our old armies and buy the new crap. Can still use the older marines, but they're nowhere near as good.
Add to that the newer model kits only go together one way, and the variety and flexibility of the models are gone.
I finally sold off my beloved Black Templars this year to fund a car restoration project and I haven't looked back.
The newer kits are so conversion unfriendly, single most frustrating model project I ever did was integrating Anvil bodies and kegs with Scion kits, the end result looked great but it was so much more hassle than it should of been
Thank you for putting a good argument up while not naming their insane prices as a reason. We all know GW overcharges for everything, so it's good to just skip it.
I agree with plenty of your points. The game was MUCH better back when there was a 4 year version cycle in 4-5-6 edition. Beyond that, the rules back then were just more solid overall. It was towards the end of this time when we saw codex creep become the codex pole vault where the newest book was almost always significantly better than it's predecessors.
Buying an army book that has a 4-5 year lifespan was ok...now there are times where you could buy a new codex and it will expire before the milk in your fridge will. The other issue with the newer versions is that GW somehow managed to make their game over-simplified and over-complicated at the same time. They took away war gear, which eliminated 60% of the game's strategy in one shot. At the same time they make so many mechanics rely on strategems. It was good in the most recent version that they cut back on the number of strategems significantly, which is good but there are so many things that used to just be what units could do that now for no reason became strategems that cost cp. Want your rhino to pop smoke? Well now you need to pay for it for no logical reason. The rules have just gotten so bad that this was the first time since macragge that I didn't even bother buying the new starter kit...and I mean the real one that used to be available for the whole version of the game but is now just a splash release because GW basically built their entire business plan on FOMO, which is the last of my reasons why I'm done with GW.
Plain and simple, there are other games out there now that are cheaper, better and made by companies that treat their customers much better and I've moved on to those. I miss 40k, but that's because it doesn't exist anymore as a fun and engaging hobby, not because I stopped playing it
A well thought out response!
I was never really a big fan of GW games, but I was willing to make an effort to play with my friends.
But when I saw that every time they finally had a playable army, the rules and army books changed, I understood how this business worked. I preferred to play other rules and let them play GW games on their own.
I'm happy to see another 40k player come to their senses. All they want is money, they couldn't care less about the game itself.
As someone who's relatively new to warhammer ,2020 ,I struggled with learning the rules and just felt overwhelmed with keeping up on updates, new editions, and datasheets
I lost interest in actually playing 40k, and tabletop wargaming in general, because I thought I HAD to keep up and know the newest rules, and I just didn't have the time or money.
I appreciate the video
Thanks for watching! I have the same frustrations with Games Workshop and that's why I made my games. I never disqualify people's purchases, and I never undo what has been done in the past as far as rules. There are new things added to my games but they are not better than the old things, they are just different and they are more options. I would never want anybody to think that they had to buy my new product to keep up.
I remember saying this kinda stuff in the mid 90s.
I think they went public around 2000 though, and I think it's gotten much worse since they've been public.
@LetsTalkTabletop yeah, they certainly continued in the way they always had been. I ducked out when everything got very red and cartoony, it felt too money grubbing then. And I've seen people saying the same things for decades now. And they keep getting bigger and more that way. It's crazy but what can you do?
I occasionally buy some of their minis, keep up with the lore, but I just couldn't keep up with their churn, and I'm not a huge fan of their rulesets.
I still have to give them credit for being some of the highest quality miniatures in the market still. But resin printing is quickly catching up with them. There are some truly stunning 3D artists out there nowadays. And the miniatures are something around 20% of gw's price.
Absolutely! *IF* GW was ever aware of "who they were", that had gone by the late 80s IMO. I would make a strong argument that it was moving that way from the moment Bryan Ansell took over - although I realise that he might be seen as some sort of saint in the eyes of many, trust me when I say that you're looking back on things with rose-tinted spectacles. the reality was, that however many "real games" being designed by and for "real gamers", GW was all about the money from the point where Ansell took over from SJ and IL.
The constant churn of FAQs and list updates is simply the latest chapter; previously we had a constant churn of Codexes, editions, and even games. Has *anything* really had a longer lifespan than 18months to 2 years? Because I cannot think of one, and I've bought games from GW since the early 80s, when they were merely purveyors of games imported from the US.
@@ViscountCharles aye, Ansell definitely was very orientated around making cash, also seemed very keen on gaming, he's the start and contradiction of what GW kind of always has been. It's clearly very successful, mind, that's for certain. They've just floated on the FTSE100 and are currently worth more than Greggs, and three times that of Aston Martin, which seems insane from what they were when I started (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay had just been released). Not my thing, although I enjoy the lore and their minis, their rules I've not enjoyed since I found many others I click with more. It's pretty amazing that you can have such a bohemoth and still a good market outside it.
I started collecting Space Marine as a kid and didn't get very far by the time they canceled it. Years later, they released Epic and did the same rug pull. Then they pulled the same stunt with fantasy and their Warmaster game. So welcome to my world, lol.
This is so true. Thanks. I got into 40K during Covid, just painting some models at first. Then a Warhammer game store opened near me and everything went strange. I started playing - which was fun, up to a point - but I constantly felt I was playing into an intrinsically losing situation. I was playing Space Marines in 9th when the power creep started to really kick in.
Rick Priestly wrote that wargames need to skew towards melee, because overpowered shooting is just not fun. So in 10th edition, GW skewed towards shooting by allowing overwatch by anything at any time. Go figure.
I feel that I am being constantly "gamed" by GW marketing, for all the reasons you state. I can't build and paint an army before nerfs and point changes make my list unplayable and illegal.
I woke up the other day and realized that I no longer want to be part of this. Sorry. Don't care any more.
I'm sorry to hear it, but I feel the exact same way. Eventually you just get tired of the rat race. And I'm not even a competitive player that keeps up with the latest meta. Luckily, there are many alternatives where you can still use your miniatures! Mass Brutality and One Page rules allow you to use your miniatures from warhammer.
Luckly for me i only want 40k stuff to use for my DnD games and not inheritly to use in 40k.
Personally i never felt interested in running the treadmill as it is so fake and.. what do i get out of it?
The most inportant thing i learnt is to find the people that arent choas warpspawn that "need" the offical rules to breathe.. then have fun messing around.
I rather play 20 jank games over 1 "polished" but boring game of 40k
@@catherinedalzell3183 there's lots of other games and rules out there, you can even use gw minis and lore and other rulesets. Keep gaming, enjoying painting if you do, GW may be the giant monster but there's a whole load of smaller monsters out there too.
Solid criticism other than the overwatch. You can't if you're engaged in combat or a monster/vehicle. This shows your lack of knowledge
No list is useless or unplayable… man… I play a lot of terminators and 1st company strike force detachment. Everyone tells me it sucks and I should play something else. I don’t care… I like terminators and I have a blast. I also win because good units are good in the hands of good players… and most people are not.