The other day I threatened to share my thoughts on Games Workshop's ongoing pivot away from all-new, all-different Primaris Marine units like Aggressors, Inceptors and Suppressors (oh, my!) towards Primarisized versions of classic Space Marine units like Scouts, Terminators and Assault Marines, and since time is a construct and a deep dive into a product released almost a decade ago is as pertinent now as it was in 2018, we're going to talk about it. Put on your long pants, we're going deep into the weeds.
Before we can talk about Primaris, though, we need to talk about the things that lead to Primaris - and as is so frequently the case, it's no one thing. There were all kinds of considerations ranging from macroeconomic factors like the lasting impact of the 2008 financial crisis to more intimate stories of hubris like the self-inflicted collateral damage of Games Workshop Limited v. Chapterhouse Studios LLC completely upending GW's practice of releasing rules without models and opening the floodgates to third party bits manufacturers that had already become emboldened by the increasing accessibility of 3d printing - but the largest single factor was probably the maturity of the Space Marine product range.
By the 2010s, almost all of the miniatures in the Space Marine range were plastic, with the only remaining holdouts being individual models for which the economy of scale made the value proposition of injection mold tooling more limited; and even then, an increasing number of generic characters were getting plastic clampacks so that it was only named characters and certain underperforming specialists like Techmarines with Thunderfire Cannon, which many collectors might not even have one of.
The core Space Marine range had been basically unchanged since 1998 when III Edition introduced the multipart plastic Tactical Squad, and with the subsequent releases of multipart plastic Assault Marines and Devastators employing the same interchangeable template, along with chapter-specific variants and upgrades for Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Space Wolves, and Black Templar (to say nothing of Chaos Space Marines), the range had basically achieved maturity. There wasn't really anything "new" to sell Space Marine collectors.
That was until the Stormraven Gunship for Blood Angels and Grey Knights arrived on February 5th, 2011, and all of a sudden Space Marine collectors were falling all over themselves to add it to their armies, even if it wasn't a legal unit at that time. Whether Games Workshop took that to be a sign that Space Marine players were ready for new models and fast-tracked a gaggle of new kits for VI Edition, or if VI Edition's glut of toyetic new units were already in the pipeline is now only a matter of conjecture but more than that, it was time to force everyone to buy new Tactical Squads.
The sixth edition of Warhammer 40,000 launched in the summer of 2012 and along with it, the execrable phenomenon of grav spam; a new and exciting weapon system for a new edition of the game that basically invalidated every Space Marine army that didn't include them. The brand new Centurions were rocking three(!) grav cannon, and both Tactical and Devastator Squads were updated and repackaged to include lesser grav weapons of their own.
Whether this was a successful sales ploy or not is hard to say, because Games Workshop's financial performance during the time was not great. VI Edition was superseded by VII in less than two years, at that time the shortest turnaround for an edition since the 1970s. No doubt some competitive players were induced to chase the meta of grav spam while it was in ascendance, but the competitive scene alone can't drive sales. Given that the contemporaneously released Hunter/Stalker anti-aircraft tank performed so poorly that it's just plain been discontinued, today, I think it's probably fair to say that VI Space Marines didn't meet expectations. This is borne out by Games Workshop's own regulatory reporting because by the first half of fiscal 2015, their year-over-year sales were down by more than six and a half percent.
Meanwhile, a number of other consequential products were already in the production pipeline. Warhammer Fantasy Battles had been on a generational slump following the release of Island of Blood in 2010 and the decision to axe the brand had been made well before this point - we know from primary sources that Age of Sigmar was deep in double secret development as of 2014. The summer 2015 rollout of AoS would go on to be disastrously mismanaged by a marketing team with, at that time, no social media presence; and when it was finally revealed, GW sought to heap insult upon injury by replacing the iconic '90s Space Marine in the Warhammer World parking lot with a Stormcast Liberator, doubling down on the core conceit that Sigmarines were to be the face of the brand going forward.
It's not much of a leap to infer that the introduction of Stormcast would be the inception of Primaris Marines, although I personally doubt that Gathering Storm was ever intended to be the same kind of universe-ending debacle as End Times. Nonetheless, Age of Sigmar did sell, outperforming WFB's sales in the year prior to its launch, and a lot of the same impulses that drove the development of AoS are observable in Dark Imperium; including the desire to move the story forward from the pseudohistorical stasis the setting had existed in since Eye of Terror in 2003 - so no wonder that they would go back to that event for a do-over in order to advance the clock.
At the same time, the scale of Space Marines was already creeping in the form of 2016's Deathwatch: Overkill and the multipart Deathwatch Kill Team kit to follow, and the initially Japan-exclusive Space Marine Heroes.
These taller, better proportioned models still broadly adhered to the template first laid down in 1998 and provide a brief glimpse into a future that might have been if not for AoS - but as we'll discuss shortly, they would have been too far along their respective development cycles to simply shelve, even if the Space Marine range was about to take a hard turn which would render them redundant; and at least Space Marine Heroes would go on to be repurposed in a series of Target and Barnes & Noble exclusives.
(We won't be discussing Betrayal at Calth or Burning of Prospero, because while those models were great, Forge World and boxed games were different business units at that time and weren't really representative of the broader arc of 40k as a brand)
Now, that's a lot of prologue (and we're not done, yet), but it's necessary to contextualize what's about to happen; because between the underperformance of VII's new Space Marines and the success of Stormcast Eternals, it was inevitable that Games Workshop would try to catch that lightning again. If redesigning Space Marines for fantasy could spike fantasy's sales, imagine what it could do for 40k where they were already popular!
But lessons had been learned and simply replacing the old models wouldn't do. Grav spam had already demonstrated that nobody's going to rush out and buy replacements for their old models, these were to be new Space Marines. You can have both! And, in fact, you should. Intercessors were explicitly not Tactical Squads, nor were Inceptors analogous to Assault Squads or Aggressors to Terminators. The Repulsor would not replace the Land Raider, nor the Redemptor Dreadnought replace its diminutive Castraferrum predecessor.
They were just better Space Marines. Bigger and more impressive than the retroactively renamed Firstborn Space Marines, both on the tabletop and in the meta but don't worry, the messaging was keen to communicate, nothing's going anywhere! Your Firstborn are safe, they're just mechanically inferior.
This promotional sleight of hand was unambiguously intended to avoid a repeat of the spectacular crashouts that accompanied WFB's discontinuation and enable GW to continue double-dipping on Firstborn while Primaris were expanded out with additional kits over the course of the edition - and initially, it worked. The reception wasn't bad. Generally positive, even.
Inceptors traded extremely heavily on their resemblance to Rogue Trader artwork of Space Marines with jump packs and Aggressors were celebrated as what Centurions should have been in the first place. There were few complaints, if any, about Intercessors or Hellblasters. Reivers were there, too. The gambit had worked, and while there would be a few leftovers from the previous generation of Space Marines to make their way to market in the form of commemorative series models and collectibles, Primaris were the future of the Space Marine range from 2017, on, and there were plenty of new kits in the pipeline.
Which, finally, brings us to Shadowspear. I know, it's been a journey.
As I observed at the time, the additional Phobos Armour "Vanguard" Marines added some much-needed variety to what had been a fairly uneventful first two years of the Primaris range. Unsurprising, perhaps, because the new edition had necessitated completely rewriting every single published Codex, although it's entirely possible that GW had been hedging on the relaunch's success and only moved into production with additional Primaris kits once Dark Imperium was well received.
Unfortunately, they took precisely the wrong lesson from VIII's success and doubled down on weird and toyetic designs for the big second wave. Unlike the Gravis Armour Inceptors with which they shared a battlefield role, the Phobos Armour Suppressors were totally unprecedented and couldn't claim to represent a cohesive vision of the Space Marine range with a pedigree stretching back to Rogue Trader. They just looked goofy, flying around on their moon shoes and anti-gravity fins.
To this day, these models have still not received a multipart kit, and in fact are currently unavailable in any form which leads me to believe that someone in a position of responsibility probably recognized that they weren't likely to be well received. Eliminators didn't get held back, for instance.
And while the Suppressors likely weren't solely responsible for it (an uncompetitive price point may also have been a factor), Shadowspear wound up sitting on the shelves at Warhammer stores long enough that its unsold copies would eventually end up in as overstock and returned to distribution. This would be a problem because the rest of the year was to be supporting releases of various Vanguard-adjacent models including the equally ridiculous Invictor Warsuit. By December, it's clear a decision had been made to open up some narrative distance from the release because this image was "leaked" for Christmas.
Don't misunderstand, leaks do happen from time to time - Primaris Marines had been leaked, in fact, when one of Games Workshop's contract painters posted a picture of the Dark Imperium Sergeant months before the new edition was announced. Potato cam photos can emerge from manufacturing partners, as happened with Speed Freeks, or influencer program participants can break their NDAs, as was the case with the Nightbringer, and occasionally something juicy gets discarded in a very publicly accessible waste bin, but in most cases, GW is generally pretty able to keep a secret.
This was not that. This was a carefully cropped and intentionally mosaiced portion of a larger image, not an out-of-focus photograph of someone's screen, prominently featuring a miniature that wouldn't be officially announced for another nine months.
More than that, for all its artfully intentional obfuscation there was no missing the fact that it depicted updated bikes and speeders - classic Space Marine kits, not the all-new, all-different Primaris vehicles released up to that point.
These undoubtedly would have already been well at the end of their development cycle when Shadowspear dropped, but were among half a dozen other new kits due to arrive with VIII Edition the following year. Teasing these, specifically - rather than, say, the Invader ATV and Firestrike Servo-Turret - seems very much like it was intended to put updates to those Firstborn models front of mind and move the conversation away from the second wave release.
And so we arrive, finally, at my theory. I think that the reception of Shadowspear and the second wave of Primaris Space Marines was so poor that it forced Games Workshop to completely change direction going into Indomitus, delaying and de-prioritizing risky new kits like Desolators and accelerating the development of updates to the classic range kits like Scouts and Terminators to headline the subsequent edition. Where it was too late to pull the plug, no additional effort would be spent to bring a kit to market and if that meant they'd remain as push-fit starter set models like the Primaris Outriders did, so be it.
I should stress, none of this is informed by any inside information. It may be completely off base; I'm not personally acquainted with anyone in a decision-making position at Games Workshop and I sincerely doubt they'd disclose anything significant to me if I was - but I'm confident in my analysis and I hope that by spelling it out in autistic detail, you can see how it makes sense given what has occurred to date.
There are still things that irk me about the Primaris range and I expect that they always will, but Games Workshop has at least demonstrated that it can follow sales trends even if they would rather not hear from their loudest and most obnoxious customers directly. I doubt very much that Gravis or Phobos Armour are going anywhere, but at this point they really don't need to; the pivot away from Primaris seems by all accounts to have been a great success and I'm generally happy with what we've gotten from it.
