Games Workshop Is Learning the Wrong Lessons From the Game Industry
Part 1 - It's Not Competitive Play
This one has been crawling around my head for some time now, and I decided tonight I'd try to finally get it out. I'd originally intended to do this as a series of video essays . . . but then YouTube decided to up the AI ante and I didn't want to make any video content. So I then decided I'd just do some blog posts . . . then GW sued GHAMAK and I didn't want to make any GW content.
But those events didn't stop my brain from chewing on this. So I've been wanting to see if I can do this without praising GW or even giving them undo promotion. And, since this is nearly all about GW picking up some pretty awful habits, I feel I can talk about this without being a fanboy.
There will be praise in here, but that praise will be for the Warhammer Competitive Community. And praise is something they've earned on their own merits without much help from GW.
In short, if you think you know what GW has been up to and why, and your answer isn't them copying the Game Industry, I think you've been missing what's really going on.
How It Started
So AOS4 had a very rough release. It was easily worse than the release of 40K 10th, which is saying something, and even had people comparing it to 1st Edition. And with so much wrong with AOS4, people were wondering how it had happened.
Then this year, we had the same thing happen with Horus Heresy.
And anytime the internet is upset about something, you can bet there will be a lot of content creators ready to rage bait some clicks!
But even among people I thought were sensible content creators, people I felt knew GW and the industry well, a narrative formed. It was and old and well worn narrative that pops up every now and then in various online communities. A narrative that's easy to propagate, easy to drum up support for, and almost always wrong.
It's that damn, dirty, WAAC, Competitive Communities fault!
So let's start here, with seeing if we can accept this alternate hypothesis - the Competitive Play Hypothesis.
And the quick answer is no. Games Workshop is not pandering to Competitive Players.
The Competitive Community
If you've been to a store-run or local event, you've likely run into . . . him . . .
That Guy . . .
He goes by many names. Sometimes he's just an obnoxious, smug, and superior sounding asshole. Sometimes he's a Win At All Cost or WAAC player. Sometimes he's just a filthy cheater.
And if you've played in other competitive scenes, such as Magic, or heard stories from olden days of yore, you probably think that describes any Competitive Warhammer player. When many people, especially on the internet, picture a Competitive 40K player they imagine some fat, arrogant, neckbeard that hastily pushes their miniatures around the table while quickly rolling 6s you never see and screaming bloody murder if you don't individually measure every Boy in your horde or if you pick up a single dice before they've examined it Sherlock style with a magnifying glass.
And to be fair, you will find those people at events. They sometimes even dare to show up to big ones. If it's your first event, and you get stuck on the bottom tables, you might even have to deal with a few.
Because any real Competitive Player will laugh That Guy off the table without breaking a sweat.
The difference between That Guy and a Competitive Player is that That Guy just wants to win games.
Competitive players want to be the best players in the game. And to be the best, you need to be more than just someone that can win.
And to be further fair to some of the sensible and older commentators I follow, I can understand why they might think that the Competitive scene is full of That Guy. Because there was a time when it was.
You can find plenty of stories out there of the dark days of GW, the 3rd-7th Edition Parade and all the shenanigans that happened. I myself went to a small, store run tournament where I met That Guy. He challenged every single line of sight I claimed, demanding we rolled off for it. Eventually I called over a TO, who reminded him how LOS worked. But the game had already dragged on at that point, so he put his guys on the objectives and slow played out the end of the round.
Back then, Magic was kind of the model for tabletop tournaments. And just as you need to know the timing and interactions of every card in the meta, 40K players thought that was how the game should play. Many in the scene thought that winning should be determined by knowledge of the rules and knowing what the broken combos and interactions are.
But there's one huge difference between Warhammer and Magic.
A standard tournament round for MtG is 15 minutes. A standard tournament round for Warhammer is 3 hours.
And nobody wants to play for 3 hours with That Guy.
Over the course of The Edition Parade, the competitive scene slowly started to die out. It didn't help that 6th and 7th were just . . . fucking awful. But the fact that Tom Kirby was running Games Workshop into the ground (I don't know how the narrative got out that somehow he saved GW) didn't stop fans who loved the game wanting better for it.
Tournament players and organizers began working together to try and make the best of a bad game. They began introducing their own rules into their events. Judges and TOs started taking more active rolls. Cash prizes were replaced with kits and hobby supplies. Awards were given out for sportsmanship and best overall player. Eventually the ITC, UTC, and WTC were born.
Slowly some of the worst players were weeded out. Then as That Guy tried to keep up with the changing landscape, the best minds in the game began patching out every attempt he made to stay relevant.
By the time 8th Edition brought about a new wave of interest and fresh blood into 40K, That Guy's days were already numbered.
Meanwhile At the Halls of Sigmar
But everything I just said only applies to 40K. Many of the rants were about Age of Sigmar. And do you know what really sucks there?
Age of Sigmar never had this problem.
When Age of Sigmar first came out, it was widely panned. 40K players often accused it of pandering to them and brushed it off. Fantasy players hated it with a fiery passion and blamed it for the death of their game. Its rules, or lack there of, certainly didn't help. It got accused of being a commercial released playtest, and there is definitely truth to that.
But while many sneered it, a handful of players looked at Age of Sigmar and found a chaotic beauty. Here was a fantasy setting that was taking the Tolkien tropes and trying to do something new. While it called back to The World That Was, it didn't seem to have any obligation to play by its rules. And while people kept comparing it to 40K, it seemed completely uncaring about what 40K players thought or what theories or continuity existed in the verse.
And the game itself, with its crazy chaotic rules and random turns drew a special kind of player to it. These player saw the opportunity to guide and develop a new grand tabletop experiment, and took ownership of the game like never before. Together with the designers, they'd help make AoS the next great tabletop game.
And that game sure as hell wasn't going to end up like 7th Edition 40K or 8th Edition Fantasy.
The REAL Competitive Community
As I said above, the Competitive 40K and AoS mindset isn't about winning games. It's about being the best player. Winning is just one metric to determining your progress on that goal. And at the end of the day, the real goal of the game is to spend a few hours having fun with a friend.
The Competitive Community that formed around 8th Edition 40K and AoS has kept that in mind. Do you know what's better than winning a tournament? Spending two to three days playing lots of fun games with fun people and then winning a tournament. This is the atmosphere that the competitive scene has been working hard to cultivate.
In Magic, all the rules are extremely explicit and, at least before WotC fucked it up, all the rules you need to understand how a card works are on the card. Card position and information are clear. If you try to obfuscate those things, you can get carded. All the tools are there if you want to play an extremely technically skilled game.
But in 40K, models move free form around a table. Positioning is only as precise as your ability to work a tape measure over a 4'X6' table. Line of sight is determined by finding a "models eye view" and determining what can be seen. Rules draw imaginary lines over the battlefield. And all of this abstraction is before you take into account that models and terrain can shift around the table very easily as you move, measure, and roll dice.
Combine this with the fact that information is supposed to be out in the open, with equal access to all rules and stats and the ability to pre-measure, and a new form of play quickly began to take shape around these two games.
Usually called "Playing By Intent", Competitive 40K and AoS turn the game into an open conversation with your opponent. Rather than staying silent as you carefully measure models into exacting positions that won't last the next dice throw, players state what they're trying to do and their opponents discuss whether and how it can be done. Measurements are made, test models or bases are placed, options and ideas are offered back and forth. If the movement would trigger rules, the players make sure they both know them. In the end an agreed upon board state is reached, and both players understand it. No arguments, no gotchas, no um actually's.
And the best part? Fifteen minutes of carefully measuring a single units movement has been replaced by one minute of talking, measuring, and shoving the unit into rough position.
It's such a much better way to play the game. Since both players are actively talking through the game, you can easily give take backs and missed timings. "Remember if you move within 9" I can make a reactive move. Okay let's measure out 9" really quick, and we'll say your unit is standing just outside. Oh you forgot to disembark your unit before moving your transport? Well you said you were planning a charge on my hormagaunts, and we were pretty sure you'd need a six, so just place the unit about 6" out roughly where your transport was."
The game becomes about whose battle-plan survives contact with the enemy (and the dice . . . same thing actually) the best, instead of who know the most rules or tricks.
And that's without even mentioning Teams and how good this environment becomes when you're playing with your friends instead of just against them.
But I know what you're all thinking!
Games Workshop and Competitive Play
"Alright! Sheesh! We get it! Competitive players aren't sweaty try-hards! They're the sweetest players you'll ever meet, and in between pushing models and rolling dice they're feeding the poor and helping old ladies across the street!"
"But that's not what this is about!"
But I really do think a lot of this is. Because the Competitive Play Hypothesis doesn't hold a lot of water.
As I said in my post about the GHAMAK situation, Warhammer is still a really niche hobby. While Magic: The Gathering has easily broken a billion dollars every year since 2022 and only gotten bigger, all of Games Workshop - 40K, AoS, Middle Earth, books, Warhammer+, and licensing - made just shy of 830 million dollars last year.
Magic: The Gathering, just that one game, is bigger than all of Games Workshop.
And most people still consider Magic to be a pretty niche hobby.
So now imagine you're a business evaluated in the billions of dollars, and you have a duty to your investors to grow your business. You need to cross that billion dollar mark!
How do you do it?
The Warhammer fanbase consists of multiple ways to engage with the property. Ideally, you want all of those fans to be engaging on as many levels as possible. You would dearly love for every one of us to buy every single kit you release, paint them all up using Citadel Paints and tools, while listening to your audiobooks and getting tips from WH+ and White Dwarf, collecting the physical books to line our hobby dens, after spending a fun day sharing our hobby with fans at the LGS and playing Space Marine 2 and Total War: Warhammer (with Dawn of War 4 and Total War: 40K on pre-order), all before taking off our licensed clothing and retiring to a bedroom filled with licensed plushies, toys, and art.
But customers only have so much money and so much time in the day. So they engage at different levels and different ways. While some try to do it all, most will have their favorite section of the hobby. There are fans that only care about the lore and spend their time reading/listening to Black Library books or lore posts on social media. There are some that primarily collect and paint, spending hours lovingly rendering each new model. There are some that only play the video games, and never plan or desire to pick up a physical Warhammer product.
And when it comes to playing physical Warhammer games, your customers just break down further. In addition to That Guy and Competitive Players, you've got "beer and pretzels" players that get together with friends maybe once a week at most. You've got narrative players that want to intertwine the lore into the game as best they can. You've got players that play in epic Crusade/Path to Glory campaigns that go for years, and players that may play only a handful of games each edition.
And all of that is before you even get to any of the homebrew or popular internet formats like Horde.
So with all these different interests how do you grow your business?
Let's look at the Competitive Community:
Pros
Dedicated Players - Competitive Players are very invested in the game and unlikely to stop due to changes in the game/business.
Big Spenders - Competitive Players often collect large armies with lots of options and even collect multiple factions.
Online Content - Events often broadcast on the internet and are covered by fan sites. Competitive Players may even create their own content.
Friendly And Welcoming - Competitive Players eagerly welcome new players to their favorite games and formats.
All pretty good. A dedicated community that spends a lot of money and provides free promotion? "Sign me up!" you say! And that is where people that support this Competitive Play Hypothesis usually stop. But lets look at the cons.
Cons
Specialists - Competitive Players often dedicate their time to a single game and are unlikely to branch out. They may even specialize in a single faction.
Poor Outreach - While they are friendly and welcoming, Competitive Players prefer to play games with other Competitive Players. They are honing their skills while other players are at the LGS teaching little Timmy how to paint his Ultramarines.
Vocal - That social media presence has a cost! Competitive Players are the first to ring the alarm bells when you mess up a release.
Stigma - You know that the Competitive Community is great! But many people see that as sweaty try-hards.
And! Most of all!
Size
The competitive community makes up less than 10% of active players. And active players are less than 30% of your customers.
So are you really going to focus on only 3% of your active customers with those pros and cons?
Compare this to painters. They basically have all the same pros of Competitive Players, though they may be more willing to buy miniatures from other companies. But they'll buy models from multiple ranges, they often spend time at game stores sharing knowledge and passion, they don't have the stigma, and they're more likely to stay in their lane when you mess up releases or raise prices. Additionally, their content can be consumed quickly and easily, while a Competitive Game lasts hours.
So are you still going to focus hard on that 3% that has so many negatives attached, especially when your customers keep getting mad when it looks like you're focusing on them?
This is why Games Workshop has a "models first" policy. It's one of the few things that survived from the Kirby era. Focusing on models plays across multiple types of customers and, initially, provided one of the greatest draws to the business. Game systems can come and go, but that model on the shelf is always going to be there with its memories stored in chipped paint.
But before we get to game balance, there are a few more arguments that you see. Let's try and lightning round some.
Other Arguments for the Competitive Play Hypothesis
Model Releases are Aimed at Competitive Play!
Model releases are pushed! Period! GW wants to sell models, that involves making them look appealing. Competitive Players often undercut GW's talking points and push back against releases that look too strong. When a unit looks weak, they're often the first to make content about it.
GW Sends Pre-release Content to Competitive Players!
GW sends pre-release content to content creators. Lore guides, painters, and meme lord fanboys all often get free stuff if GW thinks it will help promote their products.
GW Uses The Competitive Community for Playtesting
GW has multiple playtest groups for multiple levels of play. Competitive Players who have playtested for GW often lament how much they felt ignored.
GW Has a Competitive Circuit
GW is a modern, IP based corporation. Such entities don't like leaving things that might affect their image to independent bodies they have little control over.
If you've got more, feel free to send them my way. But honestly, I think it's pretty obvious the idea that GW would pander to such a small and potentially volatile playerbase is just not good business. Their bread and butter was releasing models people wanted to collect and paint. And that has been shifting more toward licensing and finding other avenues of revenue such as Warhammer+.
But GW still makes games, and people play those games. And there's one other argument you often hear spoken as proof that GW is pandering to the Competitive Community. But since this brings up another alternate hypothesis to mine, it's going to get its own post.
In the next part, let's talk about that thorny issue of game balance!
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