The big problem with WFB was that GW was focused on selling models, which created two problems: 1. What models do you sell to someone who has a "complete" army? 2. How mych stuff a new player needs to buy to get started. People keep talking about models getting more expensive, but two things are often overlooked - in 4th edition, players would start with a 1000 point army, then add more units until they had a "full" 2000 point army. Beyond that, one might add more stuff up to 2500, or 3000 points, to play the occasional "big game", but when most games were 1500-2000 points, having 2500-3000 points available allowed for some variation - maybe you want to field more cavalry this time, or a bigger unit of witch elves, etcetera. All the while - 1000 points was fairly accessible for new players to get started, and for veterans, it allowed for branching out into a second army, or dipping their toes into 40k, or speciallist games like Necromunda, later Mordheim, etc. But then GW started pushing for bigger games. The White Dwarf batle reports went from being 1500-2000 points, to 3000 points. Right off the bat, new players entering the hobby were pressured to make a 2000 point army, and then get to 3k asap. But that wasn't all. With the 6th edition, the points cost for units dropped sharply. Corsairs used to be 12 points + 1 for extra hand weapons +3 for optional crossbows in 4/5e, now they were 10 points, and gone was the crossbow option. Dark riders were now 18 points down from 27 (25 for the rider +2 for spear), though the option for crossbows remained at 6 points per model. And this was happening across the board, along with significantly reducing the cost of characters, and magic items they could carry. As a result, a 2000 poing army from 4th edition, might be worth a mere 1400 in 6th edition. Combined with the pressure to play bigger games, players suddenly needed twice as many models, essentially forcing them to commit to one army instead of branching out, and focusing on making better terrain, etc. So WFB ended up with the problem of bloated armies that kept raising the entry bar to the point of becoming inaccessible to new players. And instead of revamping the game to go back to the old 3-4 regiments on the table, GW acted with the finesse of a sledgehammer, and nuked the setting to make it more like 40k. And 40k got hit as well - from playing a few squads and a vehicle, or two, to spamming tanks like they were on sale.
How to save Warhammer fantasy. Do not stop it before the release of Total War Warhammer. That gane pretty much made a LOT of people (also me) discover Warhammer
When I started WHFB in 2004 it was 2000 points or bust. If you wanted to get your toes wet there was nothing. Sure the rules would allow for 500 point games and the kits were supposed to be geared for somewhere around that (supposedly). But the reality was you weren't doing jack unless you had a 2k list. 40k was much the same but the system was simpler and geared more for smaller battles, in a way. 40k was built for the 1200-1500 mark, but WHFB was built for 2k+. Anything below 2k was wildly imbalanced and could result in either hilarious matchups of overpowered lunatics or a devastating defeat cause you didn't stack magic users to the 9's. However, I would say there's a bit more to it. Overall I feel, it was that reduction in choices, take meta or bust, combined with the lowered point costs and the huge armies required that I think really killed the setting. Limited choices combined with huge cost of entry vs 40k's relatively freer variety of choice, lower cost of entry, and more balanced setting around an intermediate points level, gave the setting a huge blow it never truly recovered from.
@@8-7-styx94 4/5e wfb was known as herohammer for a reason. But atill - at around 1500 points your choices were a lot more meaningful - do you take another unit of dark riders, or add some corsairs - stuff like that. In bigger games, you won't be agonizing so much over every 100 points. Now, recently, I picked up Legions Imperialis. The game is advertised at 3000 points, and the starter set comes with 400 points of Astartes, and 500 points of Auxilia. On top of that, you get two warhound titans, at 330 points each, that you can't use in a 1000 point game, because allied contingents are capped at 30% of your total point value. Granted, between the starter, and the batle group box, you'll have a 2k point army, but otherwise you need to add 4 boxes to the starter set just to get to 1500...
It gets even worse in the 8th ed with introduction of the hordes rule where you were incentivized to run 10 wide and at least 3/4 ranks deep units. Not so spectacular if it's goblins, but wow is it big when it is chaos warriors or saurus in question. Suddenly, units that worked well in sizes of 15, 16, 20, 25 models, went respectively to 30, 40 and 50. I started playing around 2002 and when 8th edition hit, I didn't have enough models to play a regular 2000 point game.
Me. I’m the guy who played brettonians as a teenager not realising the undertaking that painting the regalia was on my undeveloped art skills and the investment that buying individual knight models was, luckily I saved money by not having to buy a new army book… ever
I bought Chaos Dwarfs. I have never had to, or been able to, buy anything for them ever again. (OK, expensive forge World stuff and stuff from Russian Alternative and then other 3D printers but no money went to GW after the initial outlay)
I recall the problem with 8th edition Warhammer Fantasy was they introduced horde sized units and emphasized the use of big armies. The average game size went from 2,000 pts to 3,000 pts meaning you had to buy more models for all your existing units. This wasn't so bad for regular players but for new players looking to get into the game, it made collecting an army far more expensive, especially when GW sold plastic kits based not on how much plastic was in them but how good they were in game. For example, 10 Empire state troopers would cost 17 euros at the time whilst 10 Empire Greatswords cost 42 euros and 50 cents. To me, nothing seemed to further alienate potential new players for the game than increasing the price tag significantly
They were trying to actually sell models, instead of the game being "my big monster hero that I bought 5 years ago and a few of his mates that I bought 7 years ago".
As a FLGS retailer, I would like to thank you for this video and how well you put the woes of fantasy and the death spiral into words. I work at store that has been around for 30 years and have this conversation about once or twice a week with old and new customers. I will forever recommend this video when someone complains about the death of warhammer fantasy. Excellent video sir.
Regardless of their justification and excuses they’re never going to be forgiven by a lot of the fans. I don’t care if they were loosing money they could’ve cancelled WFB to save their dying mother and it still wouldn’t be enough.
I found the section on the game value death spiral so interesting! I work in a boardgame shop in central London that's been open for 37 years and still run by the same people, and at this point they just have this laser accurate intuition for when games are going to start tumbling. They've never predicted wrong!
@@OldenDemon This whole time I've been keeping an eye out for a small dog but now I know who to look out for in the future! The Orcs Nest sends it love, though it has been many a moon since we stocked GW aha
@@MrHughtube99 Man Orcs Nest, damn legendary shop in London, I can remember going in some 20 odd years ago and seeing their truly staggering TTRPG section full of all sorts of weird and wonderful obscure or indie TTRPGs. Bought my copy of Little Fears 1st edition from there.
In 2009, South Africa, a Pigeon carried a 4gb harddrive, from one office to another, 50 miles away, in 68minutes. At the same time the computers had only transferred 4% data, because SA internet sux that bad, and thus a pigeon transfered a mere 4gb data Faster than the South African Internet could. This result, of course, caused alot of sour faces and finger pointing in high places, because they didn't like being exposed for being worthless. Today, 2024, SA have electricity for up to 6hours a day (yea, it's worse now, you can see documentaries here on YT about it).
Going to ruin the joke sorry but for Americans reading this it was actually a reference to the pool skit in The Day Today which you should watch because it's very funny, like all time best British comedy
Somehow this is also the old GW paradox. "It's so expensive! Only the 7 richest kings of Europe can afford an army!!" "Why isn't their a new release for my army ever week!?"
I'll let you in on a little secret: The Average 40K player doesn't care about factions they don't play. At least, they haven't since 10th began. The Average 40K player wants their faction to be 9th Edition deep, with dozens of Warlord traits and relics, a hundred stratagems for any niche flavorful situation, and so on. But they don't want *other* people to have that because it would be just too confusing to play against. Therefore, *their* faction should have a 200 page Codex, but everyone else's should have a 20 page codex at most.
@@dratesdragetes777 Because he described two different people and pretended they were one. No doubt there will be examples of this cross over but lets not pretend like its predominant.
I mean, I don't care about new releases, if it's so expensive, why bother in the first place? You can go buy a Dreadnaught sized gundam for 16-20 euro, slap some 40k bits on it and be happy.
I think the wargamer spectrum should be more of a triangle than a line. For example i find myself right in between historical and casual but have never gone to a tournament
The Poorhammer guys generally apply the Timmy/Johnny/Spike trifecta directly to Warhammer and it translates quite well, as well as the Vorthos and Mel binary that Mark Rosewater added on in 2007
I think instead of "historical" you could replace that with "narrative." My reasoning being historical generally follows known events, with tons of references for heraldry, unit markings etc. Narrative is similar, in that you collect a "story based" army, even if that army is based on a story you yourself made. What makes this different from lets say casual or tournament, is that while tournament players collect and paint for power, and casual wargamers generally collect and paint for "vibes" (aka, this unit looks/sounds awesome or seems fun to use), narrative wargamers collect based on what they think fits the army or scenario the best. (aka, these reivers are a bad unit, but logically my raven guard should have some, and I can give them this squad marking etc etc).
@heraissilly That's a perfect description of exactly where I am. For me, Warhammer is at its most fun when I can think up all the stories- canon, fan made, or my personal unit fluff- that the armies and battles represent, and I'm more excited by a variety of options visually and thematically to bring that narrative to life on the table more than minmaxed efficiency or raw cool factor. My best friend and perennial opponent, on the other hand, is total Casual Christoph who just wants to collect cool looking Orks and have em krump some oomiez (No judgement, I'm just glad he enjoys himself). If anything, I'd say GW's big failing I see currently is that they've spun away from both of us toward the brutal efficiency, win-at-all-costs tournament crowd, possibly because that sector of the market buys more stuff than both of us combined in order to stay current and competitive in the meta. Edit: This is regarding 40k 10th edition. I haven't played AoS yet, though I have been very tempted lately.
I just wanted to say that since the dissapearance of the AI dog, and the arrival of a talking head, your charisma and humour comes across much more! Really good video, your note about Stormcast being the 'engine' of AoS is really on point, cant wait for the next one!
You left out one of the biggest issue for the killing of Fantasy. GW didn't owned a fuck ton of their armies IP, this is why they renamed everything in 40k and killed Fantasy for it was full of generic fantasy stuff they couldn't own. Example: Fantasy Dark Elf King Malekith became Malerion in AoS then in the new fantasy he stayed Malerion.
In the new Old World there is no Malekith either, now there is the Dread King Malerion. GW very unwisely took Malekith from Marvel 10 years after the creation of this character. Perhaps this was Disney's requirement now.
@@Vasily_Kotickovitch It’s very unlikely Marvel/Disney would bother directly reaching out, but GW probably chose to change the name anyway as a “just in case” measure if they ever got into films or television (as they’d been hoping to do for a while) so they wouldn’t have to worry about hyper-litigious Disney lawyers banging on the door about this Dark Elf King Malekith fellow.
He left out a lot of other factors too, like how GW at the time did Bomb releases so every faction had little "new" stuff to buy across years, or the lack of rules support meaning fantasy was a clusterfuck to actually play due to GW's "Forge the Narrative" issue. All of these were conveniently solved in AoS 2nd edition and 40k 8th edition, which is where they started to get "good" again. There's so much more that was left out that someone can make a whole other video detailing it.
Entirely untrue. Copyright applies within the context of the thing it is made for. The Slaughterhouse lawsuit you're referencing specified that GW couldn't claim copyright on models someone else made as stand-ins for units they wrote rules for, but didn't produce any models themselves (the main point of contention was the Tyranid Drop Pod of the 5th edition codex) . It lead to the curbing of anything that didn't have a model (including a number of awesome characters). Warhammer High Elves, just as an example, were and are protected under the Warhammer Fantasy Battles IP to this day. Each box and book you buy that contains rules by GW reminds you of that. The renaming of characters was done to boost brand-recognition, nothing else. Sigmar as a name sticks around to this day, but is a fairly generic, if somewhat old-fashioned, first name in Germany. One of our Ministers for the Economy was called Sigmar Gabriel. Malekith was probably renamed because it's weird to have such an on-the-nose real-world reference (Malekith is a kind-of satanic figure Nordic myths) in a setting that wasn't already exactly known for subtlety.
Malekith was renamed because they couldn't figure out exactly who owned the copyright on that name (Marvel having released their Dark-Elf King Malekith roughly in the same time as GW, I think the difference was a mere few days apart) and they didn't want to slug it out with Marvel. And it's the Chapterhouse Lawsuit, not Slaughterhouse. Elves, Dwarves, and other such things weren't touched, but GW tried to claim trademark on "Space Marines" during that time and even tried to claim they created the concept from wholecloth. One reference to Starship Trooper later the Judge told them they neither invented nor popularized the concept and just because they put a fat "C" next to the name didn't actually mean they owned the copyright to it. Chapterhouse ultimately was found guilty of using GW's own imagery (as in photos, logos and stuff, which were copyrightable and trademarkable) in their promotional pictures, which was why they didn't win the lawsuit. The judge found both of them to be wildly misrepresenting the law and told them both to pay their own legal fees. This was enough to sink Chapterhouse as they didn't have much funds to begin with, but it's also why we no longer have an Imperial Guard Codex, only an Astra Militarum one. As for the renaming in AoS, it's in part due to this and in part due to them wanting to distance themselves from the LotR license, which at the time (due to lack of promotion and sales) people suspected they wanted to drop. Then the Hobbits happened.
I think there are two big fantasy tabletop wargames that people mentally gloss over when thinking about the downward sales history of Warhammer Fantasy: The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game and Warmachine/Hordes. The former was made by Games Workshop itself, the latter by Privateer Press. LOTR almost sold more than Warhammer 40k at points, while there's a fairly plausible timeline where Privateer Press overtook Games Workshop. (But of course, GW started to really improve itself leading up to Age of Sigmar 2nd edition and the run up to launching 40k 8th edition, while PP made some very, very bad decisions about what directions to go.) LOTR took up all the visual design language mental headspace of realistic low-fantasy models. Warmachine had big success with much more competitive focused rules and balancing, which GW started to really lean in with 40k 8th edition, and it shouldn't be a surprise that the Imperial Knights have a big resemblance to the warjack models. GW could make a hard plastic version of this model while PP could only do it in metal or resin. Yeah, it really is this fascinating topic to look at. Warhammer+ has back issues of White Dwarf issues going back to like 2003 or a bit earlier, but NOT the WD issues from when it went weekly. I'd really love to see how the magazine tried to sell The End Times and the launch of Age of Sigmar in it. Also, it is kind of heartbreaking and so interesting to read online discussions from The End Times and see reactions to it, what people thought the future of Warhammer Fantasy would be. It's like reading diary logs about the apocalypse from one of the Fallout games, these people were mostly blindsided.
I played Warmahordes in Mark II. What drew me to the game was the smaller sizes, the more straightforward rules set, and the fact that every faction and unit felt strong in its own way, while the Assassination victory condition meant that even a player that had mostly been tabled could take a shot at snatching victory from the jaws of defeat with an all-in attack run on the opposing caster/lock. In addition, this was the era in which GW would release datasheets for models they didn't make and army stats took up an entire binder instead of a small deck of cards. It was also the Matt Ward era of lore writing, where the most powerful army was the latest one that released. I tried a few times to get into the game: one idea I'd had was to create a Grey Knights army. Then they were released as a full faction, were overpowered, and Kaldor Draigo.
hey, not everyone can be. and despite our bad comedians on stage, some people can do it. i am not a comedian, but i would say I am at times that funny. alas, i no longer live there xD
There are many rumors about the appearance of a new army in Warhammer Age of Sigmar soon. We can even say the name of the army has been announced: THE HAMMERS OF HASHUT. A squad of human slave cultists of Hashut were also released for the Warcry.
A Direct quote from the new AoS rule book, under the descriptions for the members of the chaos pantheon, "IN THE DEEPER DARKNESS RING THE HAMMERS OF HASHUT"
I still play it, though not much. I've a bunch of packs in my trunk to play with some friends. I want to have a tournament night sometime with my friends, since I doubt folks nearby are down to play some old packs
It’s funny, after being very unhappy with the end times I walked away from warhammer, my Britonnians sitting on the self, me gallantly guarding them from my wife selling them at a garage sale when I am not looking. Now I am getting back into Old World, trying to get my Brettonians back into shape. And everything I want to buy is out of stock from GW. I’ve spent $500 this month mostly on old models on eBay because GW is always out of stock.
How to save Warhammer fantasy. Do not stop it before the release of Total War Warhammer. That gane pretty much made a LOT of people (also me) discover Warhammer
@@StefanoUrsella Even if Total War Warhammer made people discover Warhammer took a _good_ while for ito build up mega-hype even if it was very successful - and Games Workshop's financial issues at the time were immediate and dire. Supposedly, at one point they were _weeks_ from bankruptcy. If GW had waited a year or two for Total War Warhammer's launch the company might not even be around anymore.
@@Culexus101 Hey! Are you sure you've held at least one White Dwarf in your hands over the past 10 years? There was a lot of arts on the cover, just look at the 500th issue, White Dwarf himself was drawn specifically for the cover. And I don’t see much advertising in the magazine at all. A lot of cool lore and game materials.
@Basil_Ghothickovitch 500 was an exception. It has been models on the cover for the last 6 months before 500, and now 501 is back to models on the cover. I have every WD since they brought it back because I could never bring myself to cancel my subscription. I also have damn near every WD after about 127 thanks mostly myself starting around 212, a donation from a coworker years ago, and various charity shop finds over the years.
@divingMOBIUS I was commenting on the trend I had noticed within the last 6 months that had left me worried. When GW cancelled WD back in the 2010s and replaced it with the godawful Warhammer Visions and the very mid Warhammer Weekly it had been preceded by them switching to model pics on WD covers instead of the wonderful art that had been the staple for decades. It was a bad sign then and I'm worried it could be a bad sign now.
In 2014 I was working for a now defunct E-store for gaming stuff (The War Store if you were wondering) and we had the GW reps swing by. They painted a grim picture for WFB as it was being out sold by tools and paints so in reality GW had nothing to lose in blowing up the Old World.
One may say that also “old” 40K is already dead and the “new” 40K took its place, but at a slow pace that we don’t notice it, with Primaris slowingly took over
Old 40k even still has its own game though - it's just called "Horus Heresy" :D Complete with old-school rules. I do wonder if you can still use the 7th ed codexes for Xenos armies in HH though... :D
No there are a few very clear evolution points in the development of 40k, the last one being the change from 7th to 8th edition, 7th being an ill fated attempt to fix the absolutely insane bloat of 6th edition, before 8th edition came in to for better or worse streamline and simplify the game.
Even as far back as the early 2000's, Warhammer Fantasy was in huge trouble. In my college years and shortly after I actually was roommates with a GW retail manager. By extension I met several of the regional sales reps, etc. Even in say 2004-2005, Warhammer Fantasy was rarely selling at all in the proper GW retail store. In 40K the only thing equivalent was Sisters of Battle (which is why they disappeared as a faction for so long --- they went nearly a year without selling a single SoB kit). Even then at their bi-annual(?) big sales meetings (amusingly held in Vegas), the retail philosophy being pushed was similar to what it is today: get the kid with parents who'll dump $300+ in a single purchase and ignore the long-time gamers as they only buy a pot of paint, a brush, or a single blister every month. They're not wrong. The Warhammer Fantasy consumer base has always been older, more financially stable, more likely to actually fully paint and employ an army...and they don't jump ship every 2-3 weeks for a new project. They are much more 'historical' wargamers as you've stated. In that time, my buddy's GW store sold more paint/brushes/hobby stuff than Warhammer Fantasy by the dollar. That's not sustainable in any product form. Today the dream consumer is two-fold...the 23 year old redditor who got his first IT job and blows $1,000 a month on GW kits he'll never paint...or the 46 year old married IT guy who has kids out of the house and has a strong enough income to not bat an eye buying a trio of $120 tanks for his army. GW is definitely playing to the lowest common denominator. That means the games are crap, but the model releases are constant and they keep their rabid fanbase engaged and purchasing. They lose plenty of customers every time they shift or cancel or relaunch a game, but they're gaining more new people who'll gladly blow $300-400 on something they'll ditch in a year or two.
I will say, as an Imperial Fists player in 40k, and Stormcast in Sigmar, I find those "Boring" factions rather interesting, mostly because of how simple they are. I find that the simplicity of the factions allows me to enjoy the characters and stories that they are involved in more.
Actually a very nice view on the whole thing. I never burned my army (kept it in a box) but do enjoy the Old World. Never did got into AoS but like that you explained how things went there. Keep up the good work!
Not sure if the logic behind how the "High elf superfan" had years of "nothing new to buy" really works. That is, you could make the same argument for Eldar players in 40k. Most of their sculpts are still 20+ years old. Space marine players are kind of the only ones that really get new releases on a regular basis.
And there is a reason that selling space marine models is GWs biggest and most reliable source of income. They're essentially the subscription faction which always offers the customer something new to buy and no reason to consider their army to be completed. They rely on that constant stream of income from space marine sales and it's also why space marines do constantly get new models while eldar might get a few new things here and there, but still have to play with some models which are older than 20 years.
Something almost nobody talks about with Fantasy is how byzantian and complex the rules were, I often got in long rules disagreements there werent easily accessible erratas for
Very true. The rules were often way too complex because they had been revised over and over when it would have been more sensible to just rip some of them out and replace them with a different system rather than plaster over the cracks of a flawed foundation. Like Weapon Skill. Just knowing what to roll to hit as a new player was like being back in math class. If your model has X WS and the opposing model has Y WS, that means that since the difference between the two values is more than A but less than B, with A and B being derived from X - aaaaand I'm sure we can all agree that's already way too much pointless faff to reach the one number that actually matters: Which results on the die is a success so you know how many of them you get to bring over to the next step. (Which was almost the same thing again but calculated differently, so new players sometimes got them mixed up, adding to that completely unnecessary complexity when playing.) It's not that surprising that they replaced it with just a flat value in AoS. Way less stops to double check rules every time my dudes crash into your dudes. As an amusing side note, the most hilariously obtuse rule I've ever seen in a GW book was an old warhammer 40K rule about tanks going hull down, essentially the vehicle equivalence of gaining a "cover bonus" for being behind terrain. The rules text clearly explained how that affected the interaction between the shooter and the vehicle in question, but they forgot one rather important detail: The text didn't mention *when the rule actually applied*. So the only explanation in that book for when a vehicle could claim the hull down bonus was a top-down image of a tank near a piece of terrain, with part of the tank covered in a shaded area that extended from said terrain and a line of text stating "this vehicle is hull down". The image was obviously meant to be a visual aid to elaborate on the explanation that, unfortunately, wasn't actually there. In hindsight, it was most likely a misprint and I'm sure they fixed it with an errata and later reprintings probably incuded the full text, but it still caused quite a few discussions around the FLGS tables at the time.
The 8th edition rulebook PRIDED itself on how big it was, how many pages were devoted to rules. Reading that now is like reading old news articles about people investing in Enron, just the wrong choices. The core rules of AoS fitting onto only 2 pages was waaaaaaaaaaay too big a cut, but big brave choices like that is what was needed.
To paraphrase some guy in a series.. “The point is that you are under a misconception that we are a gaming company. We are not. What we are, really, is a miniature company. And the lore is not our most valuable asset. That would be our miniatures”. Which is why the GW business model is the way it is.. They have to tread a very fine line between generating income and not alienating their players. Now I’d say the lore plays a bigger role (the books are good etc) but they do change that in order to sell more minutes. Mentioning magic is funny as I also stopped playing that as I saw it just becoming a blackhole for my money - much more than Warhammer.
a few 3D print company in europe (read : a guy in his garage with 20 printers) are becoming million dollar company fast and employing more people than forgeworld did in the 00's. GW will be forced into turning itself in a IP company like lucasfilm, with merch and video, because I can already print and cure skavens and space marines at will. In maybe 10 years, the tech will be just too good to pass up.
22:49 I still think that Warhammer Fantasy may have been 'saved' - or at least rescued from that particular moment - if Games Workshop had waited another year. Barely a year after the End Times, Total War: Warhammer and Vermintide 1 would be released to critical acclaim; with many young people being introduced to the Fantasy setting, only to find Age of Sigmar in its stead. Btw, great video. I enjoyed it very much.
It also needed to step away from the design choices that ruined 8th edition (massive blobs of troops and countering superspells). I think there's a reason why The Old World is largely a combination of 6th Edition and Warhammer Ancient Battles.
I got into warhammer through those games, like many other people, and id rather hang myself than buy, paint and play a Skaven army in WHFB. Age of Shitmar already had a steep barrier to entry with how low points games are wildly unbalanced, at least now they made Spearhead as an easy way to learn the basics, try out the game and start collecting an army.
Eh, at that time GW policy with licensing their IP for games was "sell it to anything that moves" so I doubt they were expecting such a huge succes. Also a HUGE problem of WFB was the cost of entry, boxes had less and less models, and points were lower. A lot of people would eye the game, run the math of how much an army would cost and turn back or simply go into second hand and recasts. The cost of entry also affected WFB players, as Olden demon has said, once players had a full army they might buy a few special version of their minis and maybe a couple units to change their lists with the edition of for variety's sake, but getting more armies was the exception. ( Also just look at Primaris, GW saw how people were buying less marines because everyone had their armies and second hand market and now Primaris are the big hot thing) With AoS GW wanted a game people could play almost right out of the box with minimal problems at a cheap, people have 2-3 armies that play and thanks to starter boxes and Xmas deals getting a new one is always a temptation
Great context. Still made about how GW handled the transition to Sigmar. Will likely still be complaining about that to the staff of my nursing home in 30 years.
This is the first of your videos I've seen. I really enjoy your style and the way information is presented. This space is starved for well-researched content. Keep up the good work.
This popped up and the humour had me subbing inside 2 minutes! Played my first bit of warhammer on the weekend, now have aos Skaventide on the way! V excited!
I like the video, but your timeline for a High Elf superfan could be easily put on to pretty much any 40k army that's not Space Marines as well, just look at armies like Eldar, Imperial Guard or Orks. They've gone whole editions with no new minis. I have found it's rare to find a player that only has one army or sticks to one system, and even going back to high elves, my mate back in the day who had a High Elf army spent a good portion of the late 90s getting the stuff so he could run a cavalry only list this was after already having more than 2k of stuff to field.
Extremely true. It’s bizarre that there’s a double standard running through the entire video, and the ultimate point is “well fantasy space marines sell well so every other faction gets a pass”. Like… what? No? If the other factions weren’t selling well they’d discontinue them, but that’s not what happened.
True, and being an Eldar fan I kind of like the fact that a 2nd edition army will likely be valid until the end of time lol. (If not optimal). But 40k does have Space Marines (and a couple of other more frequently updated things) - so it counteracts that, allowing these more static armies to exist - and now AOS has Stormcast. So I don't think it's a double standard as this is mentioned at the end of the video, maybe just not explained super clearly. Also, I do think the lack of army updates across the board in 40k is a problem too, so it's also worthy of criticism.
Isn't that the point though? There wasn't a Space Marines to subsidize the rest of the factions. With Age of Sigmar they added storm cast that fill the role.
@@pie4dessert And now they've started cannibalizing their own range within AoS to ensure that people are always buying new stuff. Doesn't seem like Stormcast were that important at keeping the entire game alive at all. Just the stuff that allows them to say 'we be growthing, stockholders'.
I just want to say, resculpts are fine. People buy them to have nice and new looking armies. Fantasy got into trouble as each edition, especially 8th made you have to buy more and more models for an army. So anyone new would need to buy all the stock in a store just to be able to play a game
Clicked expecting interesting second monitor content to fill the void. Left enjoying the funny content and editing that I wasn't expecting! Great job man!
The primary reason you gave, that once you own the models then you don't need to buy again, holds true for pretty much every miniature wargame out there, though.
It's also not a bad thing. People need to be able to finish their army or team of miniatures to be able to play the game they are based on. Buying miniatures for a game you can't play because you are constantly bombarded with new miniatures and rules is nothing short of a scam. Tabletop wargaming is a time intensive hobby and people actually want that time investment rewarded, they also want to play the damn games and not just constantly painting and glueing plastic together like a 3rd world sweat shop worker.
Correct, and that's why almost every miniature game out there doesn't sell like GW. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. GW is not in the business of making good games (their games, almost as a rule, are terrible) they're in the business of making heaps of money. So cool looking models, at ridiculous prices with an 18-24 month product cycle for everything and a new major release every 3-4 months keeps the diehard fans pumping out money. I have several friends I would say are "the perfect GW consumer". They buy into the new game every 3-4 months...blow $500-600...never finish painting the models, play 2-3 games while complaining about the rules...and by that time the next release is out and they move on. It's retail genius if you have those kinds of consumers. That's not me, but I applaud how well GW works that market. They know their consumer base very well. There are LOADS of superbly written, wonderful wargames out there with great models and rules...and they'll never be 5% the size of GW, and for that we should be thankful. Look at any majorly successful produc that leads a market...it's almost never the "best" in the market. D&D sucks as a role-playing game, but it's the most successful, very much for the same reasons as 40K. Products being pumped out and a rabid fanbase who'll consume it all without hesitation.
The difference is that other games have new releases. Almost every single 40k army have recieved at least two entire new units in the last 7ish years. Even smaller games like SW Legion get new stuff to buy. A Republic superfan can buy the new unit that comes out every year or so, and that's money in the pockets of the company. Hence the example of how WHFB gave our elf fan very little actually new to buy, leading to no revenue and thus the death of WHFB.
GW at the time of Warhammer's death I think was more short sighted than modern GW, they just wanted to sink money into Space Marines as that's what was selling the most, and they weren't investing in diversifying with things like Necromunda, Epic, Mordheim, Adeptus Titanicus. I think a big thing that killed WHFB is the lack of range churn, they were holding on to everything which was great on the one hand, but meant you needed 15 square metres of shelf space to carry the whole range, a lot of which was old. They did need to do a bit of a slate-wiping to clear that old range and start a fresh one, but they didn't need to kill the entire world and swap to a completely different game.
Yeah, instead of fully nuking the setting, GW could rethink Warhammer fantasy, basically to need less models without sacrificing "realism" numbers, the main problem is that people got an army to tournament legal size, with a few extra units for variety and stopped buying. While interested people ran the mental math of how much it would cost and ran away, or look into second hand or recasting. GW short sightness and idiotic CEO at the time made 1st ed AOS horrible, even tho it had some decent ideas (stormcast as a starter faction, the realms to make space for homebrew, narrative and make anyone fight anyone else) that made AoS sell a lot better (and the high fantasy miniatures where a lot harder to find alternatives for
@@ismael9914 If GW did that, it would have torn apart the WarFan community into pieces, no different to when AoS was made; the difference being that GW would have a lot of baggage to deal with instead of the clean slate they had with AoS. No, objectively speaking, GW could either double down on WHFB or replace it. This video even showed how much money they invested into the game and setting; 30 years of books, games, novels, and models. At best, GW could have had AoS as an alternate universe where WHFB did not survive, but keep WHFB in stasis for a few years to figure out what to do with it.
@@stephenjenkins7971 All these ideas of "alternate timelines" are very childish. Let's make the Horus Heresy last forever, and 40k will be in an alternate reality. Anyone will say that this is absurd.
They tried that in the 2000s with games like Battlefleet Gothic, the Space Hulk reruns, Inquisitor and, well, Necromunda and it nearly sunk the company. Necromunda wasn't heard from at all until suddenly GW revived it in the 2010s, to quite a lot of surprised faces.
@@Donnerbalken28 Those games are hardly what almost sunk GW in the 2000s, those were the days of the LOTR boom and subsequent LOTR bubble bursting after the hype from the last movie died down.
I watched listened Warhammer 40000 lore for 2 years and i recently bought and painted my first 40k mini. i started to it with just a kreigsman meme short video. im gonna listen this video now. if im gonna be a age of sigmar guy maybe after 2 years later , this video is the starting point for me. please remind me thiz video 2 years later. my thanks in advance
biggest shooting yourself in the foot GW ever did. It wasn't until after total war 3 was old that the old world was released. So many potential new players missed in that 10 year period.
A video game audience isn’t the same as one for an expensive, niche, time-consuming hobby. Especially for a product range that had to be, fairly recently, completely rebooted because it failed
@@logiebear911 And yet, clearly the property had value, because as soon as they "killed" it it became super popular in another medium. That's a failure of GW's strategy, and a failure of those who analyze its failure to account for the potential that the setting clearly had.
How to save Warhammer fantasy. Do not stop it before the release of Total War Warhammer. That gane pretty much made a LOT of people (also me) discover Warhammer
Yeah, but people massively over estimate the funnel of video game fans to table top players. It'd be negligible compared to what AoS brought in. Pc gamers aren't tabletop players by default, they're video game fans
@@AllRoundGlandHound i know but it still made a LOT of them aware of it so even if just a small percentage of them actually did the "transaction" It would still be an important number of people
I also wonder how the decline of LOTR played into this because it was basically the second main game system for most of the 00s and i guess as it started to wind down a bit it put more pressure on WHFB to be more successful, which it couldn't ever really live up to in terms of mass appeal.
This. When my 12-year-old brain lost interest in the LOTR game (because nobody ever played it with me) what did i pick up? Those weird looking aztec-dinosaur thingies? No, i bought myself a Space Marine Battle Squad with 5 Marines for 17,50€. And here i am, 16 years later, still being invested in this world. Partly because Warhammer has a tone that nothing else out there really matches, but also because it was the only space my abusive parents *didn't* invade.
Hey Man, your content and background music is awesome! Also the through out explanation and lessons about consumer markets are really interesting and helpful I guess. Cheers and kudos! I subbed for more content and of course, to support you and no way out of fear you would one day make somebody pay if you don’t get a RUclips badge. Anyway, Cheers and greetings from Germany
The hardest pill to swallow as a Historical Henry is that you're vastly outnumbered by Casual Christoph, and the things you like will never be widely played or supported. "Yes, you measure the range after you declare targets, it represents the uncertainty of war." "I'm going to go play something else, this is confusing " Casual Christoph isn't interested in a simulationist game. He wants something abstract and digestible that can be set-up and played within the same hour he decided to play.
Premeasuring is superior lmao, as someone who played warhammer fantasy it was always just an annoying "haha gotcha, you wasted an entire turn doing nothing because your notion of 18" was wrong" and its just obnoxiously bad.
I think you're 100% right. But I also think that good (truly outstanding) game design allows a casual gamer to engage in small amount of time and Henry to go deep if they want to .
Biggest L take ever. Represents the uncertainty of war except on real battlefield arrow would go much farther than 30", and crossbow than 24" (or their equivalent irl distance scaled up), so range was not an issue. ALso, you can clearly see how many cavalry you should allocate to take a flank because there's no fog of war and you see your opponent setup.
You're 14. You have no idea what an inch is because they are not used in your country. The rules state you must guess how many inches are between two models. I do like the artillery scatter though.
"Without cannibalising each other's playerbase" While on the whole this is fairly true, Games Workshop's own shortcomings kind of forced this to still happen to two subsets of players: Beasts of Chaos and Bonesplittaz. Because of GW's backwards-headed inter-department competition policies, they felt it more prudent to be able to keep track of which department was getting more sales for these kits than to maintain goodwill with their playerbase. If that lack of integrity prevails in a situation where two poorly-selling factions are regarded, they most certainly will do the same when it comes to real cash cow factions, which only portents even worse.
I had your closing thought the other day. My realization is how few classic kits are running around out there for the big three factions in my area. These are Marines, Guard, and Orks. My little plastic army man brain goes, "Well if they were gunna Sigmar me 11th edition is likely the time to do it. Soon my tac squads, rhinos and devs will be gone and there won't be anything to remember."
Great video, though the idea that the succession of the End Time followed by Age of Sigmar as a grand plan seemed like to me an overestimation of the acumen of the honchos at GW. But I agree that GW seemed to have done a good job with AoS since its release. Regarding the number of factions of 40k at the end of the video, I think that it's alleviated by how many are space-marine adjacent
Generally concise and well explained, however, I've heard the "Fantasy Battle is a closed system so the lack of new options is what killed it" point a few times now and I really can't agree or see the logic to it. The Empire, for one, was repeatedly stated as having massive variations in its people and forces such that a Nuln army book, a Stir army book and an Averland army book could easily be as varied as a separate book for different Space Marine chapters, which was clearly an acceptable choice. Storm of Chaos showed how it could be done quite easily with the alternate Empire list in that. Also, Demons, for one, are exactly as open or closed a list in 40k as they are in the Old World, or for that matter Age of Sigmar, and yet they seem to have an acceptable level of support in those other systems. For that matter, GW have at various points clearly stated that Space Marines have rigid organizations and lack any sort of new tech, and they've also repeatedly retconned that to allow new elements and units in, while the Old World's viewpoint, Empire, are supposed to be in a state of constant invention, even moreso, for Fantasy Battle they've instead retconned the Old World being in the same universe as 40k and so able to have new tech fall through to it so we had Chaos Champions hefting Shuriken pistols to turn it into a closed world when it wasn't before. Honestly, having spent a long time playing Fantasy Battle alongside historical Henry 40k players, there's really not that much variation in how many units you do or don't have to buy as a long term player, if you choose, in either system. My main theory at the moment is far more along the lines that GW have, for whatever reason, never quite got their arms around an introductory version of Fantasy Battle. Border Princes and Warhammer Skirmish, even Battle Masters could all have gotten over that point where a player confronts the fact that to engage with one half of the store in any way shape or form means buying and painting a hundred models while the other allows you some level of engagement with five. GW is a funnel business, its very much focused on new players, and Fantasy Battle is a brick wall to new players. Even for long term committed players, you could have sold that High Elf player a different force over the time you mentioned, very few people are so hardcore committed to a single force as to be utterly unwilling to branch out, if not for the fact that considering even a secondary force in Fantasy Battle was an exhausting prospect for most people. One of the best things for Age of Sigmar is the fact that Warhammer Underworlds gets you some way towards playing it, in AoS first edition actually all the way towards playing it. 40k has variations that let you play with 5, 50 or 500 minis, Fantasy Battle has the option for 0 or 500, no other state. Its so irritating because Battle Masters, dumb as it maybe was, showed, as the book slightly to your left of your left earlobe has shown, that its totally possible to disconnect numbers of troops from numbers of minis, that you can play big rank and flank games with as many or as few minis as you like, so long as the unit sizes remain. I'm not sure if it was lack of vision or just being more willing to shoot the game through the head than admit you could play it with zero minis if you really wanted, but either way, that's what I think made it unsalvageable.
Not entirely correct. The main difference - and thus the advantage of Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar - over the Old World and the Horus Heresy is that it is an open sandbox infinite universe settings for adding YOUR DUDES. Inventing unique colour scemes, crazy conversions and write your own homemade hombrew lore, In 40k you can create your own Space Marine Chapter, Tyranid Hive Fleet, Necron Tomb, and so on - and all this will be natural and organic in the endless Galaxy of Madness. GW may even see your creation and include it in the official canon. This is also how the Mortal Realms were created: you can create your own unique Stormhost of stone, lava, vampiric, Bretonnian Stormcasts - and it will all be legal. It is also very good to give your army the fleor of one of the Eigth Winds of Magic, such as Egyptian-style Sun Worshiping Vampires. In both cases, the community will applaud you for coming up with such cool idea and work. But if you dare paint the Nuln State Troops in purple or the Emperor's Children Legion in green because you like those colors better... you'll find a wall of blank misunderstanding at best. And this is partly fair: you won’t paint the British colonial soldiers blue instead of red in a historical wargame, will you? Or a tiger tank in pink, right?
I also remember very well how in the 8th Edition FB community reacted negatively to the new added units such as Demigryph Knights, Elven Flying Boats, Stonehorn, Tundertusk and so on. The complaint was that it ruins the solid historical setting and turns it into a childish fantasy. In other words community hates two things the most: the current state and changes.
@@Basil_GhothickovitchI disagree. I have a WHFB undead army which is an entire undead circus with a mumakil as an undead performing elephant for its Vargeist, a dancing bear for its Dire wolves and a whole unit of Shakespearean skeletons. My Empire are a mix of Pistoliers dismounted and staging a ragged defense with improvised weapons after being caught on a scouting mission and the sisters of Sigmar who came to rescue them. My High Elves are all glam rockers and my Ogres either lava or frost infused. The Old World is full of empty spaces that absolutely allow homebrew lore, it has un-investigated Dwarven holds that could hold any secret you picture, sea elves and undead pirates. You can proxy Cathy for Dark Elves or Tileans for Empire. You can do all those things in Fantasy Battle if you have the imagination to do so, GW bought out alternative lists, many times based off of fan creations, throughout the history of Fantasy Battle from the all Gnoblar list to the alternative Hill Goblins. Maybe you can't paint Nuln State Troops purple, but you can't pain Ultramarines yellow and have them still be Ultramarines, but you can paint the Empire troops of a cannon obsessed border prince purple quite happily. I don't really see the difference.
@@Basil_Ghothickovitch I don't think its entirely fair to take one chunk of a community and paint the whole with that same brush. I've seen plenty of reactions from the 40k community over the idea that there could, for example, be female space marines, that makes any reaction to the WHFB new units pale. The WHFB community I knew of embraced things like the new Storm of Chaos lists or the Throne of Tamurkhan whole heartedly. The toad dragon and landship remain additions spoken of with great love whenever I hear them engaged with.
I feel point 2 is a bit disingenuous. Not only can you apply that to almost any army in any game system, 40k included, but not a lot of people buy a whole army in one year, owning every character, unit, and monster in its year of release. Most people spread out their army building over years due to cost and time to paint. Second, not a lot of people only buy one army. By the time our High Elf player has finally finished his army, he will have most likely gotten into the lore and models of another faction like Chaos or Dark Elves. Warhammer is just that addicting. It’s plastic crack for a reason. And finally, people will upgrade their old models. As someone who started in 2nd edition 40K, you’d better believe I got all the new 3rd edition Space Marines when they came out, despite already owning Tactical, Assault, Devastator, and Death Company Marines. No one in our hobby is ever content with what they have.
The main point that should be taken away is that Warhammer Fantasy battles was not selling in the retail space. I ran a FLGS for decades before I retired in '22. Fantasy Battles had been our least selling GW product for years. From 2004 till 2015 it was a downhill slide. In all honesty Lord of the Rings killed Fantasy Battle more than anything. You have limited space in retail and Lord of the Rings sold like hot cakes, so it ate up most of the Fantasy Battle area. The thing I like about this video is that it was the local Warhammer historical players that were the main Warhammer Fantasy battle players. And historical war-game players spend the least amount in retail, they are the hardest to please, and the most gatekeeping of all the hobby space. These are just observations of peoples behavior over decades as customers.
@@mogwaiman6048 Oh trust me, I know 40K massively outsold Fantasy. However, Fantasy was set up to fail, especially in 8th edition. When the rules and meta say "You need a horde of 40 elite troops", that unit is easily going to run you between $100-160. For one unit. For 40 near identical models you need to paint. Never mind once you get into actual horde armies like Skaven or Goblins. They could have scaled down to AoS style battles without blowing up the existing world. Gutting the entire IP reeks of them being traumatized by the Chapterhouse Studio lawsuit, and them not being able to copyright the term "Space Marine". So they decided all the stuff they plagiarized from other IPs needed to go, and to reinvent the wheel with a bunch of "we have elves/dwarfs at home" factions.
@@Pojko you didn't need to create horde lists to play whfb though. We know the IP struggled well before 8th edition. People chose other games as well outside of 40k. I think the new Aelf and Duardin factions are more creative than their generic counterparts.
@@mogwaiman6048 The IP didn't 'struggle', it just wasn't able to paper over the massive losses happening after LotR dropped off and couldn't support GW's corporate drive for growth. It wasn't losing a ton of money, it just wasn't making enough to justify its continued existence.
People really don't understand how less frequent new models from GW were back in the days of metal minis. Most armies got new units once every few years. The good stuff was in horribly expensive Forge World resin. Some things got unit stats but no actual model - you had to kitbash it yourself (yes, they expected you to kitbash stuff for yourself, which I actually recommend to people, its quite liberating). There was no planning to release schedules, you'd see three Space Marines with different guns one month, and the next it would be squats in power armor. In other words, they acted like a small group of people just making whatever cool stuff they wanted to make and worried about retail afterwards. That said, I think this video paints Historical Henry in a bad light. Sure, he was finished his High Elf army and didn't have anything more to buy for years, but HH would generally be buying and painting new armies as he went along. It was just that it takes a certain kind of mindset to paint ranked up units of 30 spearmen versus a loose unit of Space Marine tactical squaddies. 40k was much quicker gratification than WHFBs could provide.
I contend with the idea that it's good to have stormcast in every starter box like they do with space marines, hell, I even contend with the idea that it's good with space marines. Whilst you sell the idea that it was about replacing the old stormcast with a new look, that part is sort of true, but people were more split about the new design than you give it credit for. The fly in the ointment though is that the Dominion box set did not sell well, at all. A big issue was because it was stormcast again, and kruleboyz just didn't have the appeal of warhammer orcs. The big issue as well is it's unsustainable, you need to constantly cull the range otherwise it ends up absurdly bloated where stormcast have triple the amount of units of other factions, and that's even after a culling. Having a different set of armies in every box helps sell the range of different factions, and nowadays with spearhead and combat patrol boxes, there's always an easy way in if you don't like the two factions in the starter set.
The problem with what you've said is that Dominion _did_ sell. It sold _very_ well according to GW's own financial reports. The problem with Dominion was that it was hilariously overproduced, probably as a reaction to the mess that was the Indomitus launch.
@@joshwenn989 A lot of dominion sets did sell but not to consumers, they went to hobby stores where they died on the shelf before going down to 50% markdowns. The fact that you could still pick up Dominion for cheap by the end of the edition wasn't just because of overproduction, it was because no one wanted them. Your argument doesn't make any sense, if GW said that it sold well then it wouldn't have been overproduced, you're claiming two different arguments as one. Either it did sell well, or it didn't because it was overproduced, it can't be both because if the latter is true the former isn't. GW would never in a million years claim it sold well if it didn't hit its sale targets. Also "overproduced" is just another way of saying supply exceeded demand.
It's interesting that GW already kinda "solved" this issue with Space Marines having both Chapters, Chaos Space Marines and eventually things like Grey Knights and Deathwatch. But it was a gradual thing and the lore support for it was worked out along the way too. The old Marine design was just perfect for customization through simple coloring or markings, not so sure the Stormcast are quite that good (on account of being metallic-colored, if not always golden).
Small Army rules, put out rules for small armies say 500 pts and 1K points with Commanders less than major hero generals, that way you can have three or four armies that you can lone out to other players and new players, also new players don't get overwhelmed with trying to build a 2K pt army first go. that's how you could have saved WHFB
Also, one benefit to starting from scratch with AOS is that they established early on that the narrative can and will advance. This means that AOS (hopefully) won't be caught in the status quo purgatory the 40k and Fantasy settings are/were. This is compounded by the fact that with 8 whole realms, there is room to have something disastrous or miraculous occur in one of the realms and not have to worry about the cascading effects of this as much because there are still 7 other realms. This pleases an unmentioned minor archetype, Narrative Nicholas, who is giddy with the chance to update his 15-page lore document on his custom subfaction on how they are reacting to this change in the narrative every time it occurs. This is of course, countered by the lack of fluff lore that Old Fantasy was rife with, but I can see AOS being filled out eventually as the editions roll on and the different realms are focused on.
Patient Pete wasn't mentioned either. He only enjoys incredibly specific things about the game/lore/setting and won't spend a dime until those things are for a sale. Sometimes those things are more abstract than a book or model. Sometimes it is a single awful, terrible, rule that Patient Pete is waiting to be abolished before he invests any interest. *Cough* double turn *Cough*
As I see it, a company driven narrative only hampers player made lore as heroes, factions and units dies, gets destroyed or dramatically changes often for the simple reason to make way for new models. A fixed setting allows for more player freedom to expand your own story through battles and homebrew, new models can still be made but they aren't bound to a single event like it is with a active narrative.
In some ways 40k had it's own mini end times in the gathering storm and the changes from 7th edition to 8th, it's just that the new sits alongside the old until the old is phased out. you can interpret the Ynnari as an attempt to consolidate eldar into a single faction, but given that list of factions you showed at the end probably had them under the 'minor factions', that plan (if it was one) failed.
Sadly the whole Ynnari thing is basically a dropped GW plotline that sort of goes nowhere in the end. It definitely felt like it was an attempt by someone to merge all the Eldar factions (Dark Eldar, Craftworld Eldar and Harlequins) into one faction and thus they could produce a Codex: Aeldari and cover all three in one book. Which is interesting because we've had Chaos Space Marines go the *other* way, where the four Chaos God Specific marines have been split off into their own armies with their own model ranges and a generic 'mix and match' sort of left behind. I wouldn't be surprised if, come 11th edition, the Ynnari are stuffed into legends and then 12th has them fully shelved with some lore retcon/written out of the lore by being wiped out or something.
@@luketfer Very likely. Knowing GW, they can put anything into the Legend trash can, and they are also not obligated to support the Legend rules indefinitely. (I expect even the worst: in the next edition, everything that is now in the Horus Heresy, such as Contemptors, Leviathan Dreadnoughts, will not even receive legend rules).
This is partly why people run more than one army, because not all the armies are getting updated often enough to just keep adding more to them, it would also get a bit too bloated if that happened anyway.
When I was ~13 I got WHFB 5th ed when it released, even bought the Lizardmen Codex but my friends and I ended up playing Necromunda instead. I never even played a real game of WHFB but we had lots of Necromunda campaigns. We all had at least two gangs each plus random extras like Arbites and Bounty Hunters and Muties and so on. To this day I wish I had bought my own box of Necromunda instead of WHFB
Newcomer to the channel here. I'm mostly a filthy meme fan of 40K with no interests in minis, and this video was amazingly engaging and funny. I would still sub if the whole channel was just WHFantasy/modeling focused like this. Keep up the fantastic work!
Rank and Flank as a term is new, rank and file being the historically correct phrasing. Did it start with AoS or Kings of War? As a Historical Henry, I wonder about it.
I do wonder if 40k would benefit from standardising at least in so far as having "Imperium" and "Chaos" as umbrella factions. Things get weird with Xenos as while you could have Eldar and Nids everyone else is hard to argue would make sense on the same force. I think having the option to have say space marines, sisters and guardsmen all in one force isn't a bad thing though - there's a lot of room for flavor and a broader feeling world.
The point in the video is kinda misleading since AoS does have specific factions, that's not something that needs to change. They dropped the idea of grand alliances being a buffet of options in 2nd edition and introduced a sort of alliance matrix that gradually got more restrictive over 3rd and is now totally gone in 4th. The issue with melding factions is it too easily allows the strength of one to cover the weaknesses of another to the point that you can't balance them as individual factions without penalizing people who just play them as individual factions.
I mean Old world exsists because of video games, because people became way more interested in the setting with Vermintide and the Warhammer totwl war games. Like the reason why im into Warhammer is because of those games, now i have no interest in Old world because they still murdered one cool setting replaced it with a marketeble one and now are trying to crawl back to the old one.
AoS is objectively cooler than fantasy bro, there’s hot snake ladies, thunder people in a smart car worth of armor and steampunk dwarves, don’t know how that could be beat by some not-French guys on horses
@@Cooltatsfede Warhammer fantasy has "hot snake ladies" and "Steampunk dwarfs" ontop of early Steampunk humans in the Empire, Evil Industrial babylonian Dwarfs. And so much more, as AoS was designed to be compantible with Fantasy models. Only thing AoS has over Fantasy is Space Marines... i mean Stormcast.
Best thing they could have done for Fantasy was to have Total War: Warrhammer earlier. I 100% believe that game made more fans of Fantasy then anything else GW did with the IP
@@jorgemontero6384 Every once in a while I see a Stormcast Eternals army with headswaps, and I wonder why the hell those death-mask helms are still a thing.
How to save Warhammer fantasy. Do not stop it before the release of Total War Warhammer. That gane pretty much made a LOT of people (also me) discover Warhammer
I'm not sure how WHF could have been saved, maybe the Video games others have mentioned would have saved it, but still, I think the high model count, rank and flank, 90% of new releases for your faction being books and resculpts, and the "none of our faction names are trademarkable" problems I suppose the other option would be to only lightly damage the WHF setting, rather than kill it off entirely, killl of the game rather than the setting, no more rank and flank All this being said, much as I think parts of the AOS setting are super cool, I'm never going to be a fan of the sigmarines, they are boring, not that I'll really touch anything GW with a bargepole these days, I turned around one day and found that a squad of 5 wraithguard cost £40, no thanks It's funny that Warhammer fantasy started as a way to use your dnd minis in wargaming, I'd think something more skirmishy or at least in the 40k/AOS format would be better for that purpose, I suppose rank and flank historical wargaming was more in fashion in the late 70s
If this were done, then the “Square Base Suprematists” would still be in hysterics. Also, the Kings of Lore really did not like new knowledge, any that needed to be learned.
GW took so much time to put out new kits for the imperial guard and orks that i started to look elsewhere. Then i stopped buying from GW at all because i'm not playing anymore and found out small studios care more about their customers.
The alignment system sounds like a huge piece of the “revival” of warhammer fantasy - how cool to be able to see new,diverse armies and models over time and be able to field them alongside your existing armies?!
There's no way you just skimmed over those apocalyptic trash end times books. People hated the end of warhammer because the people that actually cared were insulted by some of the worst writing that series ever had.
He skimmed over a lot more than just that. The fact that "Forge the Narrative" never got a mention nor how early AoS dwarves got a bonus for the *player* getting shitfaced in real life would make Casual Christoph look kind of dickish.
Love your content, would love for you to continue with the 40k 2nd edition phases and interesting units, need more 2nd edition content across the board it gets no love. Keep up the great work
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
This is the most intelligent take I've heard on AoS, and honestly, GW as a whole so far.
The big problem with WFB was that GW was focused on selling models, which created two problems:
1. What models do you sell to someone who has a "complete" army?
2. How mych stuff a new player needs to buy to get started.
People keep talking about models getting more expensive, but two things are often overlooked - in 4th edition, players would start with a 1000 point army, then add more units until they had a "full" 2000 point army. Beyond that, one might add more stuff up to 2500, or 3000 points, to play the occasional "big game", but when most games were 1500-2000 points, having 2500-3000 points available allowed for some variation - maybe you want to field more cavalry this time, or a bigger unit of witch elves, etcetera.
All the while - 1000 points was fairly accessible for new players to get started, and for veterans, it allowed for branching out into a second army, or dipping their toes into 40k, or speciallist games like Necromunda, later Mordheim, etc.
But then GW started pushing for bigger games. The White Dwarf batle reports went from being 1500-2000 points, to 3000 points. Right off the bat, new players entering the hobby were pressured to make a 2000 point army, and then get to 3k asap.
But that wasn't all. With the 6th edition, the points cost for units dropped sharply. Corsairs used to be 12 points + 1 for extra hand weapons +3 for optional crossbows in 4/5e, now they were 10 points, and gone was the crossbow option. Dark riders were now 18 points down from 27 (25 for the rider +2 for spear), though the option for crossbows remained at 6 points per model. And this was happening across the board, along with significantly reducing the cost of characters, and magic items they could carry. As a result, a 2000 poing army from 4th edition, might be worth a mere 1400 in 6th edition. Combined with the pressure to play bigger games, players suddenly needed twice as many models, essentially forcing them to commit to one army instead of branching out, and focusing on making better terrain, etc.
So WFB ended up with the problem of bloated armies that kept raising the entry bar to the point of becoming inaccessible to new players. And instead of revamping the game to go back to the old 3-4 regiments on the table, GW acted with the finesse of a sledgehammer, and nuked the setting to make it more like 40k. And 40k got hit as well - from playing a few squads and a vehicle, or two, to spamming tanks like they were on sale.
How to save Warhammer fantasy.
Do not stop it before the release of Total War Warhammer. That gane pretty much made a LOT of people (also me) discover Warhammer
When I started WHFB in 2004 it was 2000 points or bust. If you wanted to get your toes wet there was nothing. Sure the rules would allow for 500 point games and the kits were supposed to be geared for somewhere around that (supposedly). But the reality was you weren't doing jack unless you had a 2k list. 40k was much the same but the system was simpler and geared more for smaller battles, in a way.
40k was built for the 1200-1500 mark, but WHFB was built for 2k+. Anything below 2k was wildly imbalanced and could result in either hilarious matchups of overpowered lunatics or a devastating defeat cause you didn't stack magic users to the 9's.
However, I would say there's a bit more to it. Overall I feel, it was that reduction in choices, take meta or bust, combined with the lowered point costs and the huge armies required that I think really killed the setting. Limited choices combined with huge cost of entry vs 40k's relatively freer variety of choice, lower cost of entry, and more balanced setting around an intermediate points level, gave the setting a huge blow it never truly recovered from.
@@8-7-styx94 4/5e wfb was known as herohammer for a reason. But atill - at around 1500 points your choices were a lot more meaningful - do you take another unit of dark riders, or add some corsairs - stuff like that. In bigger games, you won't be agonizing so much over every 100 points.
Now, recently, I picked up Legions Imperialis. The game is advertised at 3000 points, and the starter set comes with 400 points of Astartes, and 500 points of Auxilia. On top of that, you get two warhound titans, at 330 points each, that you can't use in a 1000 point game, because allied contingents are capped at 30% of your total point value.
Granted, between the starter, and the batle group box, you'll have a 2k point army, but otherwise you need to add 4 boxes to the starter set just to get to 1500...
It gets even worse in the 8th ed with introduction of the hordes rule where you were incentivized to run 10 wide and at least 3/4 ranks deep units. Not so spectacular if it's goblins, but wow is it big when it is chaos warriors or saurus in question.
Suddenly, units that worked well in sizes of 15, 16, 20, 25 models, went respectively to 30, 40 and 50.
I started playing around 2002 and when 8th edition hit, I didn't have enough models to play a regular 2000 point game.
This is actually happening right now WH40k. Gee, I do sure hope we're not going to get a nuke on the Golden Throne soon...
Me. I’m the guy who played brettonians as a teenager not realising the undertaking that painting the regalia was on my undeveloped art skills and the investment that buying individual knight models was, luckily I saved money by not having to buy a new army book… ever
I bought Chaos Dwarfs. I have never had to, or been able to, buy anything for them ever again. (OK, expensive forge World stuff and stuff from Russian Alternative and then other 3D printers but no money went to GW after the initial outlay)
don't worry the artwork for that Brettonian book was fuckn priceless, gorgeous product.
I recall the problem with 8th edition Warhammer Fantasy was they introduced horde sized units and emphasized the use of big armies. The average game size went from 2,000 pts to 3,000 pts meaning you had to buy more models for all your existing units. This wasn't so bad for regular players but for new players looking to get into the game, it made collecting an army far more expensive, especially when GW sold plastic kits based not on how much plastic was in them but how good they were in game. For example, 10 Empire state troopers would cost 17 euros at the time whilst 10 Empire Greatswords cost 42 euros and 50 cents. To me, nothing seemed to further alienate potential new players for the game than increasing the price tag significantly
They were trying to actually sell models, instead of the game being "my big monster hero that I bought 5 years ago and a few of his mates that I bought 7 years ago".
As a FLGS retailer, I would like to thank you for this video and how well you put the woes of fantasy and the death spiral into words. I work at store that has been around for 30 years and have this conversation about once or twice a week with old and new customers. I will forever recommend this video when someone complains about the death of warhammer fantasy. Excellent video sir.
Regardless of their justification and excuses they’re never going to be forgiven by a lot of the fans. I don’t care if they were loosing money they could’ve cancelled WFB to save their dying mother and it still wouldn’t be enough.
I found the section on the game value death spiral so interesting! I work in a boardgame shop in central London that's been open for 37 years and still run by the same people, and at this point they just have this laser accurate intuition for when games are going to start tumbling. They've never predicted wrong!
Leisure Games?
@@OldenDemon Close! Leisure Games are great friends of ours, but I hail from the Orcs Nest 🙏🙏🙏
@@MrHughtube99 I love Orcs Nest, excellent array of games and titles
@@OldenDemon This whole time I've been keeping an eye out for a small dog but now I know who to look out for in the future! The Orcs Nest sends it love, though it has been many a moon since we stocked GW aha
@@MrHughtube99 Man Orcs Nest, damn legendary shop in London, I can remember going in some 20 odd years ago and seeing their truly staggering TTRPG section full of all sorts of weird and wonderful obscure or indie TTRPGs. Bought my copy of Little Fears 1st edition from there.
In 2009, South Africa, a Pigeon carried a 4gb harddrive, from one office to another, 50 miles away, in 68minutes. At the same time the computers had only transferred 4% data, because SA internet sux that bad, and thus a pigeon transfered a mere 4gb data Faster than the South African Internet could. This result, of course, caused alot of sour faces and finger pointing in high places, because they didn't like being exposed for being worthless. Today, 2024, SA have electricity for up to 6hours a day (yea, it's worse now, you can see documentaries here on YT about it).
pigeon was hauling ass jfc
Thanks!
Ok but who died?
Going to ruin the joke sorry but for Americans reading this it was actually a reference to the pool skit in The Day Today which you should watch because it's very funny, like all time best British comedy
lulz
"My faction isn't supported..."
*chuckles sadly as I stare at my 5th edition Chaos Dwarfs*
Thankfully, Mantic Games makes "Abyssal Dwarves"
Somehow this is also the old GW paradox.
"It's so expensive! Only the 7 richest kings of Europe can afford an army!!"
"Why isn't their a new release for my army ever week!?"
Never did understand this
You mean "every week" I guess
I'll let you in on a little secret: The Average 40K player doesn't care about factions they don't play. At least, they haven't since 10th began.
The Average 40K player wants their faction to be 9th Edition deep, with dozens of Warlord traits and relics, a hundred stratagems for any niche flavorful situation, and so on. But they don't want *other* people to have that because it would be just too confusing to play against. Therefore, *their* faction should have a 200 page Codex, but everyone else's should have a 20 page codex at most.
@@dratesdragetes777 Because he described two different people and pretended they were one. No doubt there will be examples of this cross over but lets not pretend like its predominant.
I mean, I don't care about new releases, if it's so expensive, why bother in the first place?
You can go buy a Dreadnaught sized gundam for 16-20 euro, slap some 40k bits on it and be happy.
I think the wargamer spectrum should be more of a triangle than a line. For example i find myself right in between historical and casual but have never gone to a tournament
@@GodOfGunz I should have animated Tournament Terry flying around in space but I was lazy
Yeah it is comparable well enough to the Timmy/Johnny/Spike triangle mentioned before. Also as with that one: never take it too serious!
The Poorhammer guys generally apply the Timmy/Johnny/Spike trifecta directly to Warhammer and it translates quite well, as well as the Vorthos and Mel binary that Mark Rosewater added on in 2007
I think instead of "historical" you could replace that with "narrative." My reasoning being historical generally follows known events, with tons of references for heraldry, unit markings etc. Narrative is similar, in that you collect a "story based" army, even if that army is based on a story you yourself made. What makes this different from lets say casual or tournament, is that while tournament players collect and paint for power, and casual wargamers generally collect and paint for "vibes" (aka, this unit looks/sounds awesome or seems fun to use), narrative wargamers collect based on what they think fits the army or scenario the best. (aka, these reivers are a bad unit, but logically my raven guard should have some, and I can give them this squad marking etc etc).
@heraissilly That's a perfect description of exactly where I am. For me, Warhammer is at its most fun when I can think up all the stories- canon, fan made, or my personal unit fluff- that the armies and battles represent, and I'm more excited by a variety of options visually and thematically to bring that narrative to life on the table more than minmaxed efficiency or raw cool factor. My best friend and perennial opponent, on the other hand, is total Casual Christoph who just wants to collect cool looking Orks and have em krump some oomiez (No judgement, I'm just glad he enjoys himself). If anything, I'd say GW's big failing I see currently is that they've spun away from both of us toward the brutal efficiency, win-at-all-costs tournament crowd, possibly because that sector of the market buys more stuff than both of us combined in order to stay current and competitive in the meta.
Edit: This is regarding 40k 10th edition. I haven't played AoS yet, though I have been very tempted lately.
I just wanted to say that since the dissapearance of the AI dog, and the arrival of a talking head, your charisma and humour comes across much more! Really good video, your note about Stormcast being the 'engine' of AoS is really on point, cant wait for the next one!
You left out one of the biggest issue for the killing of Fantasy. GW didn't owned a fuck ton of their armies IP, this is why they renamed everything in 40k and killed Fantasy for it was full of generic fantasy stuff they couldn't own. Example: Fantasy Dark Elf King Malekith became Malerion in AoS then in the new fantasy he stayed Malerion.
In the new Old World there is no Malekith either, now there is the Dread King Malerion.
GW very unwisely took Malekith from Marvel 10 years after the creation of this character. Perhaps this was Disney's requirement now.
@@Vasily_Kotickovitch It’s very unlikely Marvel/Disney would bother directly reaching out, but GW probably chose to change the name anyway as a “just in case” measure if they ever got into films or television (as they’d been hoping to do for a while) so they wouldn’t have to worry about hyper-litigious Disney lawyers banging on the door about this Dark Elf King Malekith fellow.
He left out a lot of other factors too, like how GW at the time did Bomb releases so every faction had little "new" stuff to buy across years, or the lack of rules support meaning fantasy was a clusterfuck to actually play due to GW's "Forge the Narrative" issue. All of these were conveniently solved in AoS 2nd edition and 40k 8th edition, which is where they started to get "good" again.
There's so much more that was left out that someone can make a whole other video detailing it.
Entirely untrue. Copyright applies within the context of the thing it is made for. The Slaughterhouse lawsuit you're referencing specified that GW couldn't claim copyright on models someone else made as stand-ins for units they wrote rules for, but didn't produce any models themselves (the main point of contention was the Tyranid Drop Pod of the 5th edition codex) . It lead to the curbing of anything that didn't have a model (including a number of awesome characters). Warhammer High Elves, just as an example, were and are protected under the Warhammer Fantasy Battles IP to this day. Each box and book you buy that contains rules by GW reminds you of that.
The renaming of characters was done to boost brand-recognition, nothing else. Sigmar as a name sticks around to this day, but is a fairly generic, if somewhat old-fashioned, first name in Germany. One of our Ministers for the Economy was called Sigmar Gabriel. Malekith was probably renamed because it's weird to have such an on-the-nose real-world reference (Malekith is a kind-of satanic figure Nordic myths) in a setting that wasn't already exactly known for subtlety.
Malekith was renamed because they couldn't figure out exactly who owned the copyright on that name (Marvel having released their Dark-Elf King Malekith roughly in the same time as GW, I think the difference was a mere few days apart) and they didn't want to slug it out with Marvel. And it's the Chapterhouse Lawsuit, not Slaughterhouse. Elves, Dwarves, and other such things weren't touched, but GW tried to claim trademark on "Space Marines" during that time and even tried to claim they created the concept from wholecloth. One reference to Starship Trooper later the Judge told them they neither invented nor popularized the concept and just because they put a fat "C" next to the name didn't actually mean they owned the copyright to it.
Chapterhouse ultimately was found guilty of using GW's own imagery (as in photos, logos and stuff, which were copyrightable and trademarkable) in their promotional pictures, which was why they didn't win the lawsuit. The judge found both of them to be wildly misrepresenting the law and told them both to pay their own legal fees. This was enough to sink Chapterhouse as they didn't have much funds to begin with, but it's also why we no longer have an Imperial Guard Codex, only an Astra Militarum one.
As for the renaming in AoS, it's in part due to this and in part due to them wanting to distance themselves from the LotR license, which at the time (due to lack of promotion and sales) people suspected they wanted to drop. Then the Hobbits happened.
I think there are two big fantasy tabletop wargames that people mentally gloss over when thinking about the downward sales history of Warhammer Fantasy: The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game and Warmachine/Hordes. The former was made by Games Workshop itself, the latter by Privateer Press.
LOTR almost sold more than Warhammer 40k at points, while there's a fairly plausible timeline where Privateer Press overtook Games Workshop. (But of course, GW started to really improve itself leading up to Age of Sigmar 2nd edition and the run up to launching 40k 8th edition, while PP made some very, very bad decisions about what directions to go.)
LOTR took up all the visual design language mental headspace of realistic low-fantasy models. Warmachine had big success with much more competitive focused rules and balancing, which GW started to really lean in with 40k 8th edition, and it shouldn't be a surprise that the Imperial Knights have a big resemblance to the warjack models. GW could make a hard plastic version of this model while PP could only do it in metal or resin.
Yeah, it really is this fascinating topic to look at. Warhammer+ has back issues of White Dwarf issues going back to like 2003 or a bit earlier, but NOT the WD issues from when it went weekly. I'd really love to see how the magazine tried to sell The End Times and the launch of Age of Sigmar in it.
Also, it is kind of heartbreaking and so interesting to read online discussions from The End Times and see reactions to it, what people thought the future of Warhammer Fantasy would be. It's like reading diary logs about the apocalypse from one of the Fallout games, these people were mostly blindsided.
I played Warmahordes in Mark II. What drew me to the game was the smaller sizes, the more straightforward rules set, and the fact that every faction and unit felt strong in its own way, while the Assassination victory condition meant that even a player that had mostly been tabled could take a shot at snatching victory from the jaws of defeat with an all-in attack run on the opposing caster/lock.
In addition, this was the era in which GW would release datasheets for models they didn't make and army stats took up an entire binder instead of a small deck of cards. It was also the Matt Ward era of lore writing, where the most powerful army was the latest one that released. I tried a few times to get into the game: one idea I'd had was to create a Grey Knights army. Then they were released as a full faction, were overpowered, and Kaldor Draigo.
I love this humor. I wish I could be that funny - but unfortunately - I am from Germany.
Literally the funniest joke a German will ever type
😂😂😂
I'm sure you're efficiently funny though.
@@elfmastercool4734 so efficiently, ve get ze joke in our heads and zen don't even have to smile.
hey, not everyone can be. and despite our bad comedians on stage, some people can do it. i am not a comedian, but i would say I am at times that funny. alas, i no longer live there xD
I picked Chaos Dwarves, yeah, not the best pick back in the day.... Awesome hats though.
they are coming in aos 4. hashut has been name dropped
There are many rumors about the appearance of a new army in Warhammer Age of Sigmar soon. We can even say the name of the army has been announced: THE HAMMERS OF HASHUT.
A squad of human slave cultists of Hashut were also released for the Warcry.
Don't listen to the others aos is crap, chaos dwarves are in Old World and the game is fantastic.
@@cidahl7005 aos isn't crap. we are getting chaos dwarfs too
A Direct quote from the new AoS rule book, under the descriptions for the members of the chaos pantheon, "IN THE DEEPER DARKNESS RING THE HAMMERS OF HASHUT"
This is one of the best explanations of the history of age of sigmar I think I’ve ever listened to. Fantastic lesson.
Thanks for the Keyforge shutout. Me and the 10 polish people that still play really appreciate it.
Keyforge represent
I still play it, though not much. I've a bunch of packs in my trunk to play with some friends. I want to have a tournament night sometime with my friends, since I doubt folks nearby are down to play some old packs
'Temporarily out of stock'
It’s funny, after being very unhappy with the end times I walked away from warhammer, my Britonnians sitting on the self, me gallantly guarding them from my wife selling them at a garage sale when I am not looking.
Now I am getting back into Old World, trying to get my Brettonians back into shape. And everything I want to buy is out of stock from GW. I’ve spent $500 this month mostly on old models on eBay because GW is always out of stock.
How to save Warhammer fantasy.
Do not stop it before the release of Total War Warhammer. That gane pretty much made a LOT of people (also me) discover Warhammer
@@StefanoUrsellawarhammer 3 total war is where i found I loved chaos dwarfs
@@StefanoUrsella Even if Total War Warhammer made people discover Warhammer took a _good_ while for ito build up mega-hype even if it was very successful - and Games Workshop's financial issues at the time were immediate and dire. Supposedly, at one point they were _weeks_ from bankruptcy. If GW had waited a year or two for Total War Warhammer's launch the company might not even be around anymore.
"I know subscriptions are a vanity metric-but I'm a vain man. And if I don't get one of those RUclips plaques... someone's gonna pay." 🤣🤣🤣
White Dwarf devolved into a monthly showcase of the latest 40k space marine release, every.single.month.
And they aren't even putting art on the cover anymore. I remember that happened not long before they discontinued the magazine the first time...
@@Culexus101 Hey! Are you sure you've held at least one White Dwarf in your hands over the past 10 years? There was a lot of arts on the cover, just look at the 500th issue, White Dwarf himself was drawn specifically for the cover.
And I don’t see much advertising in the magazine at all. A lot of cool lore and game materials.
@Basil_Ghothickovitch 500 was an exception. It has been models on the cover for the last 6 months before 500, and now 501 is back to models on the cover. I have every WD since they brought it back because I could never bring myself to cancel my subscription. I also have damn near every WD after about 127 thanks mostly myself starting around 212, a donation from a coworker years ago, and various charity shop finds over the years.
@@Culexus101 WD502 also have art on cover.
@divingMOBIUS I was commenting on the trend I had noticed within the last 6 months that had left me worried. When GW cancelled WD back in the 2010s and replaced it with the godawful Warhammer Visions and the very mid Warhammer Weekly it had been preceded by them switching to model pics on WD covers instead of the wonderful art that had been the staple for decades. It was a bad sign then and I'm worried it could be a bad sign now.
In 2014 I was working for a now defunct E-store for gaming stuff (The War Store if you were wondering) and we had the GW reps swing by. They painted a grim picture for WFB as it was being out sold by tools and paints so in reality GW had nothing to lose in blowing up the Old World.
I hope you weren't one of the "bad guys" who worked there :(
@@abatter define bad guys?
@@Yithmaster if memory serves correct, there were some ex-cons employed by The War Store who stole a ton of product.
@abatter oh well no not an ex con and technically I worked for the sub company know as e-figures
@@Yithmaster Cool. Neal sounded like a great guy and it broke my heart to hear he tried to help folks and they took advantage of him.
One may say that also “old” 40K is already dead and the “new” 40K took its place, but at a slow pace that we don’t notice it, with Primaris slowingly took over
Old 40k even still has its own game though - it's just called "Horus Heresy" :D Complete with old-school rules. I do wonder if you can still use the 7th ed codexes for Xenos armies in HH though... :D
@Winchester1979 it would require a fair bit of work to make 7th ed codices work in HH, there's a lot of pretty fundamental changes
@@Winchester1979 You can't without effort I'm afraid. There are new special rules, but it's definitely doable if you were to put some effort into it.
anyone who didn't see this coming the second they introduced primaris should look very carefully at society right now.
No there are a few very clear evolution points in the development of 40k, the last one being the change from 7th to 8th edition, 7th being an ill fated attempt to fix the absolutely insane bloat of 6th edition, before 8th edition came in to for better or worse streamline and simplify the game.
Even as far back as the early 2000's, Warhammer Fantasy was in huge trouble. In my college years and shortly after I actually was roommates with a GW retail manager. By extension I met several of the regional sales reps, etc.
Even in say 2004-2005, Warhammer Fantasy was rarely selling at all in the proper GW retail store. In 40K the only thing equivalent was Sisters of Battle (which is why they disappeared as a faction for so long --- they went nearly a year without selling a single SoB kit).
Even then at their bi-annual(?) big sales meetings (amusingly held in Vegas), the retail philosophy being pushed was similar to what it is today: get the kid with parents who'll dump $300+ in a single purchase and ignore the long-time gamers as they only buy a pot of paint, a brush, or a single blister every month. They're not wrong. The Warhammer Fantasy consumer base has always been older, more financially stable, more likely to actually fully paint and employ an army...and they don't jump ship every 2-3 weeks for a new project. They are much more 'historical' wargamers as you've stated.
In that time, my buddy's GW store sold more paint/brushes/hobby stuff than Warhammer Fantasy by the dollar. That's not sustainable in any product form.
Today the dream consumer is two-fold...the 23 year old redditor who got his first IT job and blows $1,000 a month on GW kits he'll never paint...or the 46 year old married IT guy who has kids out of the house and has a strong enough income to not bat an eye buying a trio of $120 tanks for his army.
GW is definitely playing to the lowest common denominator. That means the games are crap, but the model releases are constant and they keep their rabid fanbase engaged and purchasing. They lose plenty of customers every time they shift or cancel or relaunch a game, but they're gaining more new people who'll gladly blow $300-400 on something they'll ditch in a year or two.
I will say, as an Imperial Fists player in 40k, and Stormcast in Sigmar, I find those "Boring" factions rather interesting, mostly because of how simple they are. I find that the simplicity of the factions allows me to enjoy the characters and stories that they are involved in more.
Actually a very nice view on the whole thing. I never burned my army (kept it in a box) but do enjoy the Old World. Never did got into AoS but like that you explained how things went there. Keep up the good work!
Not sure if the logic behind how the "High elf superfan" had years of "nothing new to buy" really works. That is, you could make the same argument for Eldar players in 40k. Most of their sculpts are still 20+ years old. Space marine players are kind of the only ones that really get new releases on a regular basis.
And there is a reason that selling space marine models is GWs biggest and most reliable source of income. They're essentially the subscription faction which always offers the customer something new to buy and no reason to consider their army to be completed. They rely on that constant stream of income from space marine sales and it's also why space marines do constantly get new models while eldar might get a few new things here and there, but still have to play with some models which are older than 20 years.
Something almost nobody talks about with Fantasy is how byzantian and complex the rules were, I often got in long rules disagreements there werent easily accessible erratas for
Very true. The rules were often way too complex because they had been revised over and over when it would have been more sensible to just rip some of them out and replace them with a different system rather than plaster over the cracks of a flawed foundation.
Like Weapon Skill.
Just knowing what to roll to hit as a new player was like being back in math class.
If your model has X WS and the opposing model has Y WS, that means that since the difference between the two values is more than A but less than B, with A and B being derived from X - aaaaand I'm sure we can all agree that's already way too much pointless faff to reach the one number that actually matters: Which results on the die is a success so you know how many of them you get to bring over to the next step. (Which was almost the same thing again but calculated differently, so new players sometimes got them mixed up, adding to that completely unnecessary complexity when playing.)
It's not that surprising that they replaced it with just a flat value in AoS. Way less stops to double check rules every time my dudes crash into your dudes.
As an amusing side note, the most hilariously obtuse rule I've ever seen in a GW book was an old warhammer 40K rule about tanks going hull down, essentially the vehicle equivalence of gaining a "cover bonus" for being behind terrain. The rules text clearly explained how that affected the interaction between the shooter and the vehicle in question, but they forgot one rather important detail:
The text didn't mention *when the rule actually applied*.
So the only explanation in that book for when a vehicle could claim the hull down bonus was a top-down image of a tank near a piece of terrain, with part of the tank covered in a shaded area that extended from said terrain and a line of text stating "this vehicle is hull down". The image was obviously meant to be a visual aid to elaborate on the explanation that, unfortunately, wasn't actually there.
In hindsight, it was most likely a misprint and I'm sure they fixed it with an errata and later reprintings probably incuded the full text, but it still caused quite a few discussions around the FLGS tables at the time.
The 8th edition rulebook PRIDED itself on how big it was, how many pages were devoted to rules. Reading that now is like reading old news articles about people investing in Enron, just the wrong choices. The core rules of AoS fitting onto only 2 pages was waaaaaaaaaaay too big a cut, but big brave choices like that is what was needed.
I would argue with the most GW products ive seen in the Bargin Bin are AoS products like dominion.
To paraphrase some guy in a series..
“The point is that you are under a misconception that we are a gaming company. We are not. What we are, really, is a miniature company. And the lore is not our most valuable asset. That would be our miniatures”.
Which is why the GW business model is the way it is.. They have to tread a very fine line between generating income and not alienating their players.
Now I’d say the lore plays a bigger role (the books are good etc) but they do change that in order to sell more minutes.
Mentioning magic is funny as I also stopped playing that as I saw it just becoming a blackhole for my money - much more than Warhammer.
a few 3D print company in europe (read : a guy in his garage with 20 printers) are becoming million dollar company fast and employing more people than forgeworld did in the 00's. GW will be forced into turning itself in a IP company like lucasfilm, with merch and video, because I can already print and cure skavens and space marines at will. In maybe 10 years, the tech will be just too good to pass up.
This was an exceptionally well thought out video, and I just wanted to say I appreciate ditching the AI doggo art so much! Thank you
The Fantasy setting went from a unique thing to the testing ground for 40k rules.
The witch elf thumb got my click. ;-)
You so frequently out do yourself in showing that this is one of the best GW channels on RUclips! Kudos!
Even though I saw your face when we collabed, I still think of you as a small doggie
This “human” is AI generated. Do not believe what you see.
Yeah, I kinda missed his dog ai images. But I do find his appearance neat.
He's spitting image of my mate kev diggity 🤣🤣🤣
22:49 I still think that Warhammer Fantasy may have been 'saved' - or at least rescued from that particular moment - if Games Workshop had waited another year.
Barely a year after the End Times, Total War: Warhammer and Vermintide 1 would be released to critical acclaim; with many young people being introduced to the Fantasy setting, only to find Age of Sigmar in its stead.
Btw, great video. I enjoyed it very much.
This. So much this.
It also needed to step away from the design choices that ruined 8th edition (massive blobs of troops and countering superspells).
I think there's a reason why The Old World is largely a combination of 6th Edition and Warhammer Ancient Battles.
I got into warhammer through those games, like many other people, and id rather hang myself than buy, paint and play a Skaven army in WHFB. Age of Shitmar already had a steep barrier to entry with how low points games are wildly unbalanced, at least now they made Spearhead as an easy way to learn the basics, try out the game and start collecting an army.
(🤔) Agreed.....and Age of Sigmar really does kinda Fv*king *_Suck:_* (mostly) amazing Models notwithstanding.
Eh, at that time GW policy with licensing their IP for games was "sell it to anything that moves" so I doubt they were expecting such a huge succes.
Also a HUGE problem of WFB was the cost of entry, boxes had less and less models, and points were lower. A lot of people would eye the game, run the math of how much an army would cost and turn back or simply go into second hand and recasts.
The cost of entry also affected WFB players, as Olden demon has said, once players had a full army they might buy a few special version of their minis and maybe a couple units to change their lists with the edition of for variety's sake, but getting more armies was the exception. ( Also just look at Primaris, GW saw how people were buying less marines because everyone had their armies and second hand market and now Primaris are the big hot thing)
With AoS GW wanted a game people could play almost right out of the box with minimal problems at a cheap, people have 2-3 armies that play and thanks to starter boxes and Xmas deals getting a new one is always a temptation
As an Eldar player, all those years with resculps instead of new units sound kind of awesome actually.
be careful what you wish for
@@scatterthewinds3126 *Looks at bloated Space Marine product line* Oh, I have no regrets
Honestly this is why space marine chapters are such a brilliant idea. Instead of having to create a new edition they just revamp or add a new chapter
Great context. Still made about how GW handled the transition to Sigmar. Will likely still be complaining about that to the staff of my nursing home in 30 years.
This is the first of your videos I've seen. I really enjoy your style and the way information is presented. This space is starved for well-researched content. Keep up the good work.
Great stuff mate, enjoyed this a lot!
This popped up and the humour had me subbing inside 2 minutes! Played my first bit of warhammer on the weekend, now have aos Skaventide on the way! V excited!
As long as we can all agree that Fantasy was murdered in its sleep, it's a little easier to listen to the different theories of why.
Medieval fantasy miniatures simply look better neatly ranked on their squared bases. Great video, nicely paced, no annoying padding.
I like the video, but your timeline for a High Elf superfan could be easily put on to pretty much any 40k army that's not Space Marines as well, just look at armies like Eldar, Imperial Guard or Orks. They've gone whole editions with no new minis.
I have found it's rare to find a player that only has one army or sticks to one system, and even going back to high elves, my mate back in the day who had a High Elf army spent a good portion of the late 90s getting the stuff so he could run a cavalry only list this was after already having more than 2k of stuff to field.
indeed, lets look at eldar's release schedule xD
Extremely true. It’s bizarre that there’s a double standard running through the entire video, and the ultimate point is “well fantasy space marines sell well so every other faction gets a pass”. Like… what? No? If the other factions weren’t selling well they’d discontinue them, but that’s not what happened.
True, and being an Eldar fan I kind of like the fact that a 2nd edition army will likely be valid until the end of time lol. (If not optimal).
But 40k does have Space Marines (and a couple of other more frequently updated things) - so it counteracts that, allowing these more static armies to exist - and now AOS has Stormcast. So I don't think it's a double standard as this is mentioned at the end of the video, maybe just not explained super clearly.
Also, I do think the lack of army updates across the board in 40k is a problem too, so it's also worthy of criticism.
Isn't that the point though? There wasn't a Space Marines to subsidize the rest of the factions. With Age of Sigmar they added storm cast that fill the role.
@@pie4dessert And now they've started cannibalizing their own range within AoS to ensure that people are always buying new stuff. Doesn't seem like Stormcast were that important at keeping the entire game alive at all. Just the stuff that allows them to say 'we be growthing, stockholders'.
Came for the information. Stayed for the presentation. EXTREMELY entertaining!
I just want to say, resculpts are fine. People buy them to have nice and new looking armies.
Fantasy got into trouble as each edition, especially 8th made you have to buy more and more models for an army. So anyone new would need to buy all the stock in a store just to be able to play a game
Clicked expecting interesting second monitor content to fill the void.
Left enjoying the funny content and editing that I wasn't expecting! Great job man!
The primary reason you gave, that once you own the models then you don't need to buy again, holds true for pretty much every miniature wargame out there, though.
It's also not a bad thing. People need to be able to finish their army or team of miniatures to be able to play the game they are based on. Buying miniatures for a game you can't play because you are constantly bombarded with new miniatures and rules is nothing short of a scam. Tabletop wargaming is a time intensive hobby and people actually want that time investment rewarded, they also want to play the damn games and not just constantly painting and glueing plastic together like a 3rd world sweat shop worker.
Correct, and that's why almost every miniature game out there doesn't sell like GW. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. GW is not in the business of making good games (their games, almost as a rule, are terrible) they're in the business of making heaps of money. So cool looking models, at ridiculous prices with an 18-24 month product cycle for everything and a new major release every 3-4 months keeps the diehard fans pumping out money.
I have several friends I would say are "the perfect GW consumer". They buy into the new game every 3-4 months...blow $500-600...never finish painting the models, play 2-3 games while complaining about the rules...and by that time the next release is out and they move on. It's retail genius if you have those kinds of consumers. That's not me, but I applaud how well GW works that market. They know their consumer base very well.
There are LOADS of superbly written, wonderful wargames out there with great models and rules...and they'll never be 5% the size of GW, and for that we should be thankful. Look at any majorly successful produc that leads a market...it's almost never the "best" in the market. D&D sucks as a role-playing game, but it's the most successful, very much for the same reasons as 40K. Products being pumped out and a rabid fanbase who'll consume it all without hesitation.
The difference is that other games have new releases. Almost every single 40k army have recieved at least two entire new units in the last 7ish years. Even smaller games like SW Legion get new stuff to buy. A Republic superfan can buy the new unit that comes out every year or so, and that's money in the pockets of the company. Hence the example of how WHFB gave our elf fan very little actually new to buy, leading to no revenue and thus the death of WHFB.
I am so happy to have found this channel! This was a blast!
8:35 the new unit you show when saying new units, was an alternate build for the Shadow Warriors you mentioned earlier.
Leaving out the Vorthos archetype especially on a warhammer video is absolutely criminally
GW at the time of Warhammer's death I think was more short sighted than modern GW, they just wanted to sink money into Space Marines as that's what was selling the most, and they weren't investing in diversifying with things like Necromunda, Epic, Mordheim, Adeptus Titanicus. I think a big thing that killed WHFB is the lack of range churn, they were holding on to everything which was great on the one hand, but meant you needed 15 square metres of shelf space to carry the whole range, a lot of which was old. They did need to do a bit of a slate-wiping to clear that old range and start a fresh one, but they didn't need to kill the entire world and swap to a completely different game.
Yeah, instead of fully nuking the setting, GW could rethink Warhammer fantasy, basically to need less models without sacrificing "realism" numbers, the main problem is that people got an army to tournament legal size, with a few extra units for variety and stopped buying. While interested people ran the mental math of how much it would cost and ran away, or look into second hand or recasting.
GW short sightness and idiotic CEO at the time made 1st ed AOS horrible, even tho it had some decent ideas (stormcast as a starter faction, the realms to make space for homebrew, narrative and make anyone fight anyone else) that made AoS sell a lot better (and the high fantasy miniatures where a lot harder to find alternatives for
@@ismael9914 If GW did that, it would have torn apart the WarFan community into pieces, no different to when AoS was made; the difference being that GW would have a lot of baggage to deal with instead of the clean slate they had with AoS. No, objectively speaking, GW could either double down on WHFB or replace it. This video even showed how much money they invested into the game and setting; 30 years of books, games, novels, and models.
At best, GW could have had AoS as an alternate universe where WHFB did not survive, but keep WHFB in stasis for a few years to figure out what to do with it.
@@stephenjenkins7971 All these ideas of "alternate timelines" are very childish. Let's make the Horus Heresy last forever, and 40k will be in an alternate reality. Anyone will say that this is absurd.
They tried that in the 2000s with games like Battlefleet Gothic, the Space Hulk reruns, Inquisitor and, well, Necromunda and it nearly sunk the company. Necromunda wasn't heard from at all until suddenly GW revived it in the 2010s, to quite a lot of surprised faces.
@@Donnerbalken28 Those games are hardly what almost sunk GW in the 2000s, those were the days of the LOTR boom and subsequent LOTR bubble bursting after the hype from the last movie died down.
A brilliant video that deserves millions of views.
Incident with a pigeon? I was living out in the wilderness with no internet then so i think i missed this... Love the video btw
The Day to today...
🙃
I watched listened Warhammer 40000 lore for 2 years and i recently bought and painted my first 40k mini. i started to it with just a kreigsman meme short video. im gonna listen this video now. if im gonna be a age of sigmar guy maybe after 2 years later , this video is the starting point for me. please remind me thiz video 2 years later. my thanks in advance
Misses the success of Total War after the Old World was blown up.
biggest shooting yourself in the foot GW ever did. It wasn't until after total war 3 was old that the old world was released. So many potential new players missed in that 10 year period.
A video game audience isn’t the same as one for an expensive, niche, time-consuming hobby. Especially for a product range that had to be, fairly recently, completely rebooted because it failed
@@logiebear911 And yet, clearly the property had value, because as soon as they "killed" it it became super popular in another medium. That's a failure of GW's strategy, and a failure of those who analyze its failure to account for the potential that the setting clearly had.
How to save Warhammer fantasy.
Do not stop it before the release of Total War Warhammer.
It isn't same. But at same time nyself and few of my friends bought WH 40k minis after playing Dawn of War.
Not all of them but some people.
How to save Warhammer fantasy.
Do not stop it before the release of Total War Warhammer. That gane pretty much made a LOT of people (also me) discover Warhammer
Yeah, but people massively over estimate the funnel of video game fans to table top players.
It'd be negligible compared to what AoS brought in.
Pc gamers aren't tabletop players by default, they're video game fans
@@AllRoundGlandHound i know but it still made a LOT of them aware of it so even if just a small percentage of them actually did the "transaction" It would still be an important number of people
I also wonder how the decline of LOTR played into this because it was basically the second main game system for most of the 00s and i guess as it started to wind down a bit it put more pressure on WHFB to be more successful, which it couldn't ever really live up to in terms of mass appeal.
This. When my 12-year-old brain lost interest in the LOTR game (because nobody ever played it with me) what did i pick up? Those weird looking aztec-dinosaur thingies? No, i bought myself a Space Marine Battle Squad with 5 Marines for 17,50€. And here i am, 16 years later, still being invested in this world. Partly because Warhammer has a tone that nothing else out there really matches, but also because it was the only space my abusive parents *didn't* invade.
Hey Man, your content and background music is awesome!
Also the through out explanation and lessons about consumer markets are really interesting and helpful I guess.
Cheers and kudos!
I subbed for more content and of course, to support you and no way out of fear you would one day make somebody pay if you don’t get a RUclips badge.
Anyway,
Cheers and greetings from Germany
The hardest pill to swallow as a Historical Henry is that you're vastly outnumbered by Casual Christoph, and the things you like will never be widely played or supported.
"Yes, you measure the range after you declare targets, it represents the uncertainty of war."
"I'm going to go play something else, this is confusing "
Casual Christoph isn't interested in a simulationist game. He wants something abstract and digestible that can be set-up and played within the same hour he decided to play.
Premeasuring is superior lmao, as someone who played warhammer fantasy it was always just an annoying "haha gotcha, you wasted an entire turn doing nothing because your notion of 18" was wrong" and its just obnoxiously bad.
I think you're 100% right. But I also think that good (truly outstanding) game design allows a casual gamer to engage in small amount of time and Henry to go deep if they want to .
Biggest L take ever. Represents the uncertainty of war except on real battlefield arrow would go much farther than 30", and crossbow than 24" (or their equivalent irl distance scaled up), so range was not an issue. ALso, you can clearly see how many cavalry you should allocate to take a flank because there's no fog of war and you see your opponent setup.
I don't believe it, Casual Christoph is less like to spend so much money on this, Historical Henry are more likely to be a whale.
You're 14. You have no idea what an inch is because they are not used in your country. The rules state you must guess how many inches are between two models.
I do like the artillery scatter though.
"Without cannibalising each other's playerbase"
While on the whole this is fairly true, Games Workshop's own shortcomings kind of forced this to still happen to two subsets of players: Beasts of Chaos and Bonesplittaz. Because of GW's backwards-headed inter-department competition policies, they felt it more prudent to be able to keep track of which department was getting more sales for these kits than to maintain goodwill with their playerbase. If that lack of integrity prevails in a situation where two poorly-selling factions are regarded, they most certainly will do the same when it comes to real cash cow factions, which only portents even worse.
I would maybe like GW a lot more better if they actually stocked their online store properly and didnt have horrible predatory practices.
Their online store is truly a joke. Even when not considering stock the entire website looks like it was built by a 16 year old a decade ago.
Absolutely loving this channel
I had your closing thought the other day. My realization is how few classic kits are running around out there for the big three factions in my area. These are Marines, Guard, and Orks. My little plastic army man brain goes, "Well if they were gunna Sigmar me 11th edition is likely the time to do it. Soon my tac squads, rhinos and devs will be gone and there won't be anything to remember."
This might be your best video yet. Explained everything so well.
I was thinking oh no he's turning into the pool manager from The Day Today and then you dropped the pigeon reference
Thank you for making this video. It gave me closure that I didn't know I needed on Warhammer Fantasy and the End Times
Great video, though the idea that the succession of the End Time followed by Age of Sigmar as a grand plan seemed like to me an overestimation of the acumen of the honchos at GW. But I agree that GW seemed to have done a good job with AoS since its release.
Regarding the number of factions of 40k at the end of the video, I think that it's alleviated by how many are space-marine adjacent
This is the first video of yours which I have watched and you’re like the David Mitchell of the tabletop hobby. Not bad at all mate, subscribed!
Generally concise and well explained, however, I've heard the "Fantasy Battle is a closed system so the lack of new options is what killed it" point a few times now and I really can't agree or see the logic to it. The Empire, for one, was repeatedly stated as having massive variations in its people and forces such that a Nuln army book, a Stir army book and an Averland army book could easily be as varied as a separate book for different Space Marine chapters, which was clearly an acceptable choice. Storm of Chaos showed how it could be done quite easily with the alternate Empire list in that. Also, Demons, for one, are exactly as open or closed a list in 40k as they are in the Old World, or for that matter Age of Sigmar, and yet they seem to have an acceptable level of support in those other systems. For that matter, GW have at various points clearly stated that Space Marines have rigid organizations and lack any sort of new tech, and they've also repeatedly retconned that to allow new elements and units in, while the Old World's viewpoint, Empire, are supposed to be in a state of constant invention, even moreso, for Fantasy Battle they've instead retconned the Old World being in the same universe as 40k and so able to have new tech fall through to it so we had Chaos Champions hefting Shuriken pistols to turn it into a closed world when it wasn't before. Honestly, having spent a long time playing Fantasy Battle alongside historical Henry 40k players, there's really not that much variation in how many units you do or don't have to buy as a long term player, if you choose, in either system.
My main theory at the moment is far more along the lines that GW have, for whatever reason, never quite got their arms around an introductory version of Fantasy Battle. Border Princes and Warhammer Skirmish, even Battle Masters could all have gotten over that point where a player confronts the fact that to engage with one half of the store in any way shape or form means buying and painting a hundred models while the other allows you some level of engagement with five. GW is a funnel business, its very much focused on new players, and Fantasy Battle is a brick wall to new players. Even for long term committed players, you could have sold that High Elf player a different force over the time you mentioned, very few people are so hardcore committed to a single force as to be utterly unwilling to branch out, if not for the fact that considering even a secondary force in Fantasy Battle was an exhausting prospect for most people. One of the best things for Age of Sigmar is the fact that Warhammer Underworlds gets you some way towards playing it, in AoS first edition actually all the way towards playing it. 40k has variations that let you play with 5, 50 or 500 minis, Fantasy Battle has the option for 0 or 500, no other state. Its so irritating because Battle Masters, dumb as it maybe was, showed, as the book slightly to your left of your left earlobe has shown, that its totally possible to disconnect numbers of troops from numbers of minis, that you can play big rank and flank games with as many or as few minis as you like, so long as the unit sizes remain. I'm not sure if it was lack of vision or just being more willing to shoot the game through the head than admit you could play it with zero minis if you really wanted, but either way, that's what I think made it unsalvageable.
Not entirely correct. The main difference - and thus the advantage of Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar - over the Old World and the Horus Heresy is that it is an open sandbox infinite universe settings for adding YOUR DUDES. Inventing unique colour scemes, crazy conversions and write your own homemade hombrew lore,
In 40k you can create your own Space Marine Chapter, Tyranid Hive Fleet, Necron Tomb, and so on - and all this will be natural and organic in the endless Galaxy of Madness. GW may even see your creation and include it in the official canon.
This is also how the Mortal Realms were created: you can create your own unique Stormhost of stone, lava, vampiric, Bretonnian Stormcasts - and it will all be legal. It is also very good to give your army the fleor of one of the Eigth Winds of Magic, such as Egyptian-style Sun Worshiping Vampires.
In both cases, the community will applaud you for coming up with such cool idea and work.
But if you dare paint the Nuln State Troops in purple or the Emperor's Children Legion in green because you like those colors better... you'll find a wall of blank misunderstanding at best.
And this is partly fair: you won’t paint the British colonial soldiers blue instead of red in a historical wargame, will you? Or a tiger tank in pink, right?
I also remember very well how in the 8th Edition FB community reacted negatively to the new added units such as Demigryph Knights, Elven Flying Boats, Stonehorn, Tundertusk and so on.
The complaint was that it ruins the solid historical setting and turns it into a childish fantasy.
In other words community hates two things the most: the current state and changes.
@@Basil_GhothickovitchI disagree. I have a WHFB undead army which is an entire undead circus with a mumakil as an undead performing elephant for its Vargeist, a dancing bear for its Dire wolves and a whole unit of Shakespearean skeletons. My Empire are a mix of Pistoliers dismounted and staging a ragged defense with improvised weapons after being caught on a scouting mission and the sisters of Sigmar who came to rescue them. My High Elves are all glam rockers and my Ogres either lava or frost infused. The Old World is full of empty spaces that absolutely allow homebrew lore, it has un-investigated Dwarven holds that could hold any secret you picture, sea elves and undead pirates. You can proxy Cathy for Dark Elves or Tileans for Empire. You can do all those things in Fantasy Battle if you have the imagination to do so, GW bought out alternative lists, many times based off of fan creations, throughout the history of Fantasy Battle from the all Gnoblar list to the alternative Hill Goblins. Maybe you can't paint Nuln State Troops purple, but you can't pain Ultramarines yellow and have them still be Ultramarines, but you can paint the Empire troops of a cannon obsessed border prince purple quite happily. I don't really see the difference.
@@Basil_Ghothickovitch I don't think its entirely fair to take one chunk of a community and paint the whole with that same brush. I've seen plenty of reactions from the 40k community over the idea that there could, for example, be female space marines, that makes any reaction to the WHFB new units pale. The WHFB community I knew of embraced things like the new Storm of Chaos lists or the Throne of Tamurkhan whole heartedly. The toad dragon and landship remain additions spoken of with great love whenever I hear them engaged with.
@@RuleofCarnage Ultramarines can be painted yellow and they will still be Ultramarines if it is sand camouflage for a desert planet.
This is an excellent analysis of AOS and GW. Engaging and entertaining. Well done!
I feel point 2 is a bit disingenuous. Not only can you apply that to almost any army in any game system, 40k included, but not a lot of people buy a whole army in one year, owning every character, unit, and monster in its year of release. Most people spread out their army building over years due to cost and time to paint.
Second, not a lot of people only buy one army. By the time our High Elf player has finally finished his army, he will have most likely gotten into the lore and models of another faction like Chaos or Dark Elves. Warhammer is just that addicting. It’s plastic crack for a reason.
And finally, people will upgrade their old models. As someone who started in 2nd edition 40K, you’d better believe I got all the new 3rd edition Space Marines when they came out, despite already owning Tactical, Assault, Devastator, and Death Company Marines. No one in our hobby is ever content with what they have.
The main point that should be taken away is that Warhammer Fantasy battles was not selling in the retail space. I ran a FLGS for decades before I retired in '22. Fantasy Battles had been our least selling GW product for years. From 2004 till 2015 it was a downhill slide. In all honesty Lord of the Rings killed Fantasy Battle more than anything. You have limited space in retail and Lord of the Rings sold like hot cakes, so it ate up most of the Fantasy Battle area. The thing I like about this video is that it was the local Warhammer historical players that were the main Warhammer Fantasy battle players. And historical war-game players spend the least amount in retail, they are the hardest to please, and the most gatekeeping of all the hobby space. These are just observations of peoples behavior over decades as customers.
The difference is 40k sold.
@@mogwaiman6048 Oh trust me, I know 40K massively outsold Fantasy. However, Fantasy was set up to fail, especially in 8th edition. When the rules and meta say "You need a horde of 40 elite troops", that unit is easily going to run you between $100-160. For one unit. For 40 near identical models you need to paint. Never mind once you get into actual horde armies like Skaven or Goblins.
They could have scaled down to AoS style battles without blowing up the existing world. Gutting the entire IP reeks of them being traumatized by the Chapterhouse Studio lawsuit, and them not being able to copyright the term "Space Marine". So they decided all the stuff they plagiarized from other IPs needed to go, and to reinvent the wheel with a bunch of "we have elves/dwarfs at home" factions.
@@Pojko you didn't need to create horde lists to play whfb though. We know the IP struggled well before 8th edition. People chose other games as well outside of 40k. I think the new Aelf and Duardin factions are more creative than their generic counterparts.
@@mogwaiman6048 The IP didn't 'struggle', it just wasn't able to paper over the massive losses happening after LotR dropped off and couldn't support GW's corporate drive for growth. It wasn't losing a ton of money, it just wasn't making enough to justify its continued existence.
People really don't understand how less frequent new models from GW were back in the days of metal minis. Most armies got new units once every few years. The good stuff was in horribly expensive Forge World resin. Some things got unit stats but no actual model - you had to kitbash it yourself (yes, they expected you to kitbash stuff for yourself, which I actually recommend to people, its quite liberating).
There was no planning to release schedules, you'd see three Space Marines with different guns one month, and the next it would be squats in power armor. In other words, they acted like a small group of people just making whatever cool stuff they wanted to make and worried about retail afterwards.
That said, I think this video paints Historical Henry in a bad light. Sure, he was finished his High Elf army and didn't have anything more to buy for years, but HH would generally be buying and painting new armies as he went along. It was just that it takes a certain kind of mindset to paint ranked up units of 30 spearmen versus a loose unit of Space Marine tactical squaddies. 40k was much quicker gratification than WHFBs could provide.
I contend with the idea that it's good to have stormcast in every starter box like they do with space marines, hell, I even contend with the idea that it's good with space marines. Whilst you sell the idea that it was about replacing the old stormcast with a new look, that part is sort of true, but people were more split about the new design than you give it credit for. The fly in the ointment though is that the Dominion box set did not sell well, at all. A big issue was because it was stormcast again, and kruleboyz just didn't have the appeal of warhammer orcs. The big issue as well is it's unsustainable, you need to constantly cull the range otherwise it ends up absurdly bloated where stormcast have triple the amount of units of other factions, and that's even after a culling. Having a different set of armies in every box helps sell the range of different factions, and nowadays with spearhead and combat patrol boxes, there's always an easy way in if you don't like the two factions in the starter set.
The problem with what you've said is that Dominion _did_ sell. It sold _very_ well according to GW's own financial reports. The problem with Dominion was that it was hilariously overproduced, probably as a reaction to the mess that was the Indomitus launch.
@@joshwenn989 A lot of dominion sets did sell but not to consumers, they went to hobby stores where they died on the shelf before going down to 50% markdowns. The fact that you could still pick up Dominion for cheap by the end of the edition wasn't just because of overproduction, it was because no one wanted them. Your argument doesn't make any sense, if GW said that it sold well then it wouldn't have been overproduced, you're claiming two different arguments as one. Either it did sell well, or it didn't because it was overproduced, it can't be both because if the latter is true the former isn't. GW would never in a million years claim it sold well if it didn't hit its sale targets. Also "overproduced" is just another way of saying supply exceeded demand.
It's interesting that GW already kinda "solved" this issue with Space Marines having both Chapters, Chaos Space Marines and eventually things like Grey Knights and Deathwatch. But it was a gradual thing and the lore support for it was worked out along the way too.
The old Marine design was just perfect for customization through simple coloring or markings, not so sure the Stormcast are quite that good (on account of being metallic-colored, if not always golden).
Small Army rules, put out rules for small armies say 500 pts and 1K points with Commanders less than major hero generals, that way you can have three or four armies that you can lone out to other players and new players, also new players don't get overwhelmed with trying to build a 2K pt army first go.
that's how you could have saved WHFB
Also, one benefit to starting from scratch with AOS is that they established early on that the narrative can and will advance. This means that AOS (hopefully) won't be caught in the status quo purgatory the 40k and Fantasy settings are/were. This is compounded by the fact that with 8 whole realms, there is room to have something disastrous or miraculous occur in one of the realms and not have to worry about the cascading effects of this as much because there are still 7 other realms. This pleases an unmentioned minor archetype, Narrative Nicholas, who is giddy with the chance to update his 15-page lore document on his custom subfaction on how they are reacting to this change in the narrative every time it occurs.
This is of course, countered by the lack of fluff lore that Old Fantasy was rife with, but I can see AOS being filled out eventually as the editions roll on and the different realms are focused on.
Narrative is such BS though...it's a setting, not a story. Tell your own stories!
Patient Pete wasn't mentioned either. He only enjoys incredibly specific things about the game/lore/setting and won't spend a dime until those things are for a sale. Sometimes those things are more abstract than a book or model. Sometimes it is a single awful, terrible, rule that Patient Pete is waiting to be abolished before he invests any interest.
*Cough* double turn *Cough*
4 editions in and there's nothing.
@@tonlito22 8 editions in, and there's nothing.
As I see it, a company driven narrative only hampers player made lore as heroes, factions and units dies, gets destroyed or dramatically changes often for the simple reason to make way for new models.
A fixed setting allows for more player freedom to expand your own story through battles and homebrew, new models can still be made but they aren't bound to a single event like it is with a active narrative.
In some ways 40k had it's own mini end times in the gathering storm and the changes from 7th edition to 8th, it's just that the new sits alongside the old until the old is phased out. you can interpret the Ynnari as an attempt to consolidate eldar into a single faction, but given that list of factions you showed at the end probably had them under the 'minor factions', that plan (if it was one) failed.
Sadly the whole Ynnari thing is basically a dropped GW plotline that sort of goes nowhere in the end. It definitely felt like it was an attempt by someone to merge all the Eldar factions (Dark Eldar, Craftworld Eldar and Harlequins) into one faction and thus they could produce a Codex: Aeldari and cover all three in one book. Which is interesting because we've had Chaos Space Marines go the *other* way, where the four Chaos God Specific marines have been split off into their own armies with their own model ranges and a generic 'mix and match' sort of left behind.
I wouldn't be surprised if, come 11th edition, the Ynnari are stuffed into legends and then 12th has them fully shelved with some lore retcon/written out of the lore by being wiped out or something.
@@luketfer Very likely. Knowing GW, they can put anything into the Legend trash can, and they are also not obligated to support the Legend rules indefinitely.
(I expect even the worst: in the next edition, everything that is now in the Horus Heresy, such as Contemptors, Leviathan Dreadnoughts, will not even receive legend rules).
This is partly why people run more than one army, because not all the armies are getting updated often enough to just keep adding more to them, it would also get a bit too bloated if that happened anyway.
Probably a sales tactic. Since they have and still do the same with all their lines.
When I was ~13 I got WHFB 5th ed when it released, even bought the Lizardmen Codex but my friends and I ended up playing Necromunda instead. I never even played a real game of WHFB but we had lots of Necromunda campaigns. We all had at least two gangs each plus random extras like Arbites and Bounty Hunters and Muties and so on. To this day I wish I had bought my own box of Necromunda instead of WHFB
Newcomer to the channel here. I'm mostly a filthy meme fan of 40K with no interests in minis, and this video was amazingly engaging and funny. I would still sub if the whole channel was just WHFantasy/modeling focused like this. Keep up the fantastic work!
Rank and Flank as a term is new, rank and file being the historically correct phrasing. Did it start with AoS or Kings of War? As a Historical Henry, I wonder about it.
you got yourself a new subscriber. Loved this video
The only thing I don't like about this channels is the slow frequency of uploads!
If things continue at this rate I will just produce a single live action feature film length video a year
@@OldenDemon ;(
Dude, this was funny and entertaining, loved it!
I do wonder if 40k would benefit from standardising at least in so far as having "Imperium" and "Chaos" as umbrella factions. Things get weird with Xenos as while you could have Eldar and Nids everyone else is hard to argue would make sense on the same force. I think having the option to have say space marines, sisters and guardsmen all in one force isn't a bad thing though - there's a lot of room for flavor and a broader feeling world.
We had that in 8th edition. I think it was too difficult to balance, so they moved away from it. Shame, it's very appropriate feeling.
The point in the video is kinda misleading since AoS does have specific factions, that's not something that needs to change. They dropped the idea of grand alliances being a buffet of options in 2nd edition and introduced a sort of alliance matrix that gradually got more restrictive over 3rd and is now totally gone in 4th. The issue with melding factions is it too easily allows the strength of one to cover the weaknesses of another to the point that you can't balance them as individual factions without penalizing people who just play them as individual factions.
1. Olden Demon is such a fun channel name
2. Entertanining
3. Subbed
I mean Old world exsists because of video games, because people became way more interested in the setting with Vermintide and the Warhammer totwl war games. Like the reason why im into Warhammer is because of those games, now i have no interest in Old world because they still murdered one cool setting replaced it with a marketeble one and now are trying to crawl back to the old one.
AoS is objectively cooler than fantasy bro, there’s hot snake ladies, thunder people in a smart car worth of armor and steampunk dwarves, don’t know how that could be beat by some not-French guys on horses
@@Cooltatsfede Warhammer fantasy has "hot snake ladies" and "Steampunk dwarfs" ontop of early Steampunk humans in the Empire, Evil Industrial babylonian Dwarfs. And so much more, as AoS was designed to be compantible with Fantasy models.
Only thing AoS has over Fantasy is Space Marines... i mean Stormcast.
Best thing they could have done for Fantasy was to have Total War: Warrhammer earlier. I 100% believe that game made more fans of Fantasy then anything else GW did with the IP
I didn't realise that they had already Primaris'd the Stormcast Eternals...
And yet the not-so-nice helmets, obviously the weakest part of the design, remain the same.
@@jorgemontero6384 Every once in a while I see a Stormcast Eternals army with headswaps, and I wonder why the hell those death-mask helms are still a thing.
Absolutely superb. The hottest of takes.
If you like Warhammer, you always have a lot of things you would buy, no matter how many updates your army has.
I fall into that trap, "Hmm, nothing i need to buy for my army..... Guess i'll start a new one"
But these people are, and will always be, a minority.
How to save Warhammer fantasy.
Do not stop it before the release of Total War Warhammer. That gane pretty much made a LOT of people (also me) discover Warhammer
WFRP only dies the moment you stop playing with your mates. Same with Warmaster, Necromunda etc.
I'm not sure how WHF could have been saved, maybe the Video games others have mentioned would have saved it, but still, I think the high model count, rank and flank, 90% of new releases for your faction being books and resculpts, and the "none of our faction names are trademarkable" problems
I suppose the other option would be to only lightly damage the WHF setting, rather than kill it off entirely, killl of the game rather than the setting, no more rank and flank
All this being said, much as I think parts of the AOS setting are super cool, I'm never going to be a fan of the sigmarines, they are boring, not that I'll really touch anything GW with a bargepole these days, I turned around one day and found that a squad of 5 wraithguard cost £40, no thanks
It's funny that Warhammer fantasy started as a way to use your dnd minis in wargaming, I'd think something more skirmishy or at least in the 40k/AOS format would be better for that purpose, I suppose rank and flank historical wargaming was more in fashion in the late 70s
thats the neat thing, you dont need to be a fan of Sigmarines to enjoy AOS just like you dont need to be a fan of space marines to enjoy 40k!
If this were done, then the “Square Base Suprematists” would still be in hysterics. Also, the Kings of Lore really did not like new knowledge, any that needed to be learned.
casual kristoff watching age of sigmar come out : that looks like a nice kitbash for my drukhari🗿
Who buys just one army?
I’m just getting back into the hobby after 20+ years and this video is so perfectly timed. Thank you!
GW took so much time to put out new kits for the imperial guard and orks that i started to look elsewhere.
Then i stopped buying from GW at all because i'm not playing anymore and found out small studios care more about their customers.
The alignment system sounds like a huge piece of the “revival” of warhammer fantasy - how cool to be able to see new,diverse armies and models over time and be able to field them alongside your existing armies?!
There's no way you just skimmed over those apocalyptic trash end times books. People hated the end of warhammer because the people that actually cared were insulted by some of the worst writing that series ever had.
He skimmed over a lot more than just that. The fact that "Forge the Narrative" never got a mention nor how early AoS dwarves got a bonus for the *player* getting shitfaced in real life would make Casual Christoph look kind of dickish.
This channel scratches a particular itch for knowledge that I've been looking for foreverrrr
Love your content, would love for you to continue with the 40k 2nd edition phases and interesting units, need more 2nd edition content across the board it gets no love.
Keep up the great work