this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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I had a friend who paid $100 apiece for 2 "Collectors" versions of the Warhammer MMO 15 years ago. We were both in the beta. I knew it sucked. He had delusions of being a guild leader.
I think one of the great things about the WAR collectors edition was that you got some excellent merch with it. You got a metal figure (worth around £40 these days), a really good art book, a mousepad (I used mine for many years) and a graphic novel. Sure the MMO was a failure largely in part because EA acquired Mythic and forced the game out the door, but the collectors edition was well worth its price for people that love Warhammer.
The cost Blizzard are charging for a game with digital assets that cost nothing to duplicate is genuinely awful.
Okay, I gotta ask, since it's been bugging me for years. I don't really understand the Warhammer franchise.
I never ran into products in the franchise in the 1980s and 1990s in the US. Dungeons & Dragons yes, Warhammer no.
But I kept crashing into people who talk about it online, and tons of products in the franchise. However, it seems to be a large number of not-that-wildly-successful products.
I can think of products that have had lots of derived products in the franchise, like Star Wars. But there there was one very successful initial trilogy of movies, and those spawned follow-on products.
Or Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Like Warhammer, that's a UK-originating franchise, but like Star Wars, there was an enormously successful initial product.
Those drew people into the franchise, made the fanbase what it is.
But I'm not really aware of an equivalent for Warhammer. There are some that are pretty good within their niche, like the Total War games. But those didn't start the franchise.
Is the scene driven by Brits who fell in love with the physical board game? Or what was it that gets people enthusiastic about the series? Like, what is it that is getting people into it?
I don't hate it, but most of the games I've seen don't really blow me away (even in genres that I'd normally tend to like, like the Battlefleet Gothic: Armada games).
Absolutely absurd profit ratios on the figures, and that's before they start selling you rule books and paints. The novels are cheap to produce as well.
Warhammer is a tabletop wargame franchise. Everything else is an ad for the ~~toys~~ war game miniatures.
Let me put it like this:
A popular console game might cost $70 now, take hundreds of thousands of man-hours to make, and still might flop and be terrible.
They sell boxes of Imperial Guard squads, little plastic army men, for $40. You need like, ten of them for the screening units of a low-point army.
I remember discovering Warhammer when I was a teenager and thinking how cool it all looked. And then I saw how much it would cost and I until this day have the same dilemma some 20+ years later.
Oh, and all that said:
Total War Warhammer and Boltgun (a Doom clone) are actually pretty great.
I think the computer games are what really helped get the franchise going internationally. I remember my first contact with the franchise was the first Dawn of War, which I really enjoyed, but I think it was only around the time of Dark Crusade that I got to know more about the actual tabletop/miniature game. Being a filthy south american, the official miniatures were and still are completely out of my monetary reach.
I put a lot of emphasis on that aspect of the computer games driving interest because Warhammer Fantasy never had anything as successful as Dawn of War or Space Marine, at least not before the Total War games (which arrived after Fantasy was ditched). Also, for a number of years, 40k grognards will tell you all about the shitty rules of Xth edition (6, 7, 8, 9, whichever), times during which some competitors started showing up. Two notorious competitors to 40k proper, in being sci-fi, are Infinity and Warpath. Within the niche of board/wargames and miniature skirmishes, they're known, but you'll be hard pressed to find anyone outside that niche to have ever heard of either. Neither has a videogame which "normies" can play and get to know about the respective universes.
1D4chan has a lot of info on GW, including early history