Just reading forums and /tg/ and seeing a lot of 'finecast is a moneygrab'. This is true. Harkening back to an earlier post I made on the subject; the reason it is a moneygrab is because the market is saturated with readily available models. At a discount.
So now people are saying that the switch to resin will just promote the piracy effect of casting your own models.
Wakey wakey this is what they want to happen because it's easy to sue people and generate money from fines than it is to peddle metal/plastic/resin to a tight market. Lawyers get it good because it's like finance. They don't actually have to produce any kind of good that gets sold. The pen truly is mightier than the sword.. by perception.
I think that we're about to see GW downsizing its model production immensely. The fact that their products are at an unsustainably high price over their production levels is no secret, what is a secret is that it doesn't matter because all you do is close stores, shift the product to independant retailers and reduce the size and number of your production facilities. In a sense, GW could have and maybe should have opened localised production factories in its major centres. Especially now since they've switched to resin.
NZ has oilfields. It can supply the very minimal amounts of resin/plastics needed to GW plants. The US? Detroit hello? Large population of impovershed ex-factory workers in a society that celebrates the implied slavery of 'working for what you're worth' and 'the invisible hand of the market' even though most historical evidence suggests that conditions will never improve for the larger population unless they murder their social superiors. The US could very easily manufacture, locally, the required levels of product-X and pay fuck all to the employees there as well. The UK? Forgeworld already exists. Expand it. Problem solved. Greater Europe? I imagine Serbia wouldn't mind the work.
Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about and if that's true its most likely legal issues rather than ones of purely production/markets/sales.
Showing posts with label GW. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GW. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
5e Necrons and GW game design
So I'm browsing /tg/ and reading up on 40k rumours through the webs.
There's a couple of comments being made across the world that don't make the greatest sense..
Try dodging or parrying a blade that can phase through anything, it'll be hard as shit, especiall when Pariah were NOT slow asshat robots and were semi-human.
But yeah, you guys think it's fine when why not have EVERY closecombat weapon be something thats a power weapon that adds +2 strength.
Because A warscythe. a Klaive and an Honourblade are all practically the same thing right?
In fact, lets hope Gauss weapons are bolters exactly, with no anti-tank or rending rules because hell! it makes sense too right? It shoots at people, and it hurts! So it must be equal to the mighty bolter!
Well that's just fascinating really. A very simple way to look at 5th edition and the inevitable 6th edition is: simplify, streamline, better core rules, fewer core rules.
So in that sense you have races which relied on oodles of special rules have throughout the editions received fewer perks over the big 3 (Chaos, SM and Orks). Some races still have special rules in their 5th edition format (IG for example) but the general format of the game as a whole is moving towards, summarily: convergence.
It is held that evolution converges on certain designs as needs see fit. Horses and Zebra? Buffalo and Cow. Lynx and Tiger. Yes they share genetic ancestors but so do Humans and Apes and yet we developed cities and they are at the mercy of their environment. Certain physiological designs gain prominence and stay on top while poor or overspecialised trends die out. It's nothing to fear really.
The same concepts can be applied to game rules. Rules which are poorly designed or overspecialised will be scorned and un-used while the cheesiest will be abused and find their way in to every list. So we are observing convergence on the game rules here; what specifically is happening?
The base unit attribute set is still the s3/t3/5+. Necrons specifically are converging toward contemporary space-marine stat-lines (albeit now with a 4+ save however they have their technical 5+ secondary save and are cheaper) and their weapons are being diversified at the expense of their special rules. So now Necrons quite truly have Lascannons and Assault Cannons and probably Melta Guns and in the case of Pariahs specifically; they are rumoured to being removed from the game entirely. Perhaps they are.
So they are converging to the 5th/6th edition standard of codex and greater game design. As said elsewhere by people with longer gazes than I. From my perspective we're seeing the game shifting to being a matter of having 3 templates that the armies are based off and deviation from the armies themselves is simply a matter of applying unique abilities to that army as a whole rather than trying to balance 9 different sets of stats AND their weapons/special rules.
Where does that leave the other armies then? I think CSM will stay much as they are. Their unique problems are more that they are overshadowed by contemporary SM's and not so much that they as an army are outright terrible. They need to be updated and have the things which gimped their army removed. I'm not saying to give them back Daemons in the bloodletter/GUO sense but certainly make the overall effect of taking a themed Lord have more impact, eg, Lord of Khorne opens up bloodletters but restricts Tzeentch units. Whether or not the Daemons themselves become worth the purchase is a different question altogether.
Tau? BS3 firewarriors. At the very minimum. Heavy weapons options on more squads. Whether those take the form of railguns, missile launchers or meltabomb-kroot I don't know but that's the theory.
Craftworld Eldar? Now there's a good question. Were it up to me, banshees would be dropped and there'd be slight decreases in price on our tanks and heavy weapons. As far as infantry are concerned? DarkReapers with access to EML on each unit member (really, 35pts a piece, 55 for exarch with EML. Most expensive HS infantry ever?) CWEldar are a tough cookie because they are only just sub-par right now so any sweeping changes to them would probably put them in the easymodo catagory.
The theme as always is convergence.. but when the race in question is the one who sets the standard if you screw it up you screw over all the others that are based on it.
Fundamentally the 3 templates are CWE, SM and Nids. Tell me I'm wrong.
CWE = DE, Tau, IG
SM = CSM
Necrons = Tyranids, Daemons
There's a couple of comments being made across the world that don't make the greatest sense..
Try dodging or parrying a blade that can phase through anything, it'll be hard as shit, especiall when Pariah were NOT slow asshat robots and were semi-human.
But yeah, you guys think it's fine when why not have EVERY closecombat weapon be something thats a power weapon that adds +2 strength.
Because A warscythe. a Klaive and an Honourblade are all practically the same thing right?
In fact, lets hope Gauss weapons are bolters exactly, with no anti-tank or rending rules because hell! it makes sense too right? It shoots at people, and it hurts! So it must be equal to the mighty bolter!
Well that's just fascinating really. A very simple way to look at 5th edition and the inevitable 6th edition is: simplify, streamline, better core rules, fewer core rules.
So in that sense you have races which relied on oodles of special rules have throughout the editions received fewer perks over the big 3 (Chaos, SM and Orks). Some races still have special rules in their 5th edition format (IG for example) but the general format of the game as a whole is moving towards, summarily: convergence.
It is held that evolution converges on certain designs as needs see fit. Horses and Zebra? Buffalo and Cow. Lynx and Tiger. Yes they share genetic ancestors but so do Humans and Apes and yet we developed cities and they are at the mercy of their environment. Certain physiological designs gain prominence and stay on top while poor or overspecialised trends die out. It's nothing to fear really.
The same concepts can be applied to game rules. Rules which are poorly designed or overspecialised will be scorned and un-used while the cheesiest will be abused and find their way in to every list. So we are observing convergence on the game rules here; what specifically is happening?
The base unit attribute set is still the s3/t3/5+. Necrons specifically are converging toward contemporary space-marine stat-lines (albeit now with a 4+ save however they have their technical 5+ secondary save and are cheaper) and their weapons are being diversified at the expense of their special rules. So now Necrons quite truly have Lascannons and Assault Cannons and probably Melta Guns and in the case of Pariahs specifically; they are rumoured to being removed from the game entirely. Perhaps they are.
So they are converging to the 5th/6th edition standard of codex and greater game design. As said elsewhere by people with longer gazes than I. From my perspective we're seeing the game shifting to being a matter of having 3 templates that the armies are based off and deviation from the armies themselves is simply a matter of applying unique abilities to that army as a whole rather than trying to balance 9 different sets of stats AND their weapons/special rules.
Where does that leave the other armies then? I think CSM will stay much as they are. Their unique problems are more that they are overshadowed by contemporary SM's and not so much that they as an army are outright terrible. They need to be updated and have the things which gimped their army removed. I'm not saying to give them back Daemons in the bloodletter/GUO sense but certainly make the overall effect of taking a themed Lord have more impact, eg, Lord of Khorne opens up bloodletters but restricts Tzeentch units. Whether or not the Daemons themselves become worth the purchase is a different question altogether.
Tau? BS3 firewarriors. At the very minimum. Heavy weapons options on more squads. Whether those take the form of railguns, missile launchers or meltabomb-kroot I don't know but that's the theory.
Craftworld Eldar? Now there's a good question. Were it up to me, banshees would be dropped and there'd be slight decreases in price on our tanks and heavy weapons. As far as infantry are concerned? DarkReapers with access to EML on each unit member (really, 35pts a piece, 55 for exarch with EML. Most expensive HS infantry ever?) CWEldar are a tough cookie because they are only just sub-par right now so any sweeping changes to them would probably put them in the easymodo catagory.
The theme as always is convergence.. but when the race in question is the one who sets the standard if you screw it up you screw over all the others that are based on it.
Fundamentally the 3 templates are CWE, SM and Nids. Tell me I'm wrong.
CWE = DE, Tau, IG
SM = CSM
Necrons = Tyranids, Daemons
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
A quick thought on GW
Nothing amazing in this post. Just a general observation about GW's practices lately.
Ok what first needs to be established is that this company is not stupid. Think about it. For the last 6 years they have reported lower sales figures and are compensating for this by increasing efficiency in both production and their stores. This overall process is probably not sustainable and will eventually implode but not before 2 key things occur, for 3 key reasons.
Key reason 1; There is only so much you can raise prices to offset lower sales. People have finite spending money for toys. This limit is commonly accepted as having been reached already.
2; They, as a company, have been introducing policies that aren't working. They've been doing this for years. These policies are far reaching in effect and wide in scope and have culminated in job losses, store closures and decreased performance from the stores that remain. A brilliant compendium on this can be found here (about 4/5ths down, no hotlink directly there)
3; Market saturation. By this I'm referring to the process of there not being a large enough incentive to buy from the manufacturer (ie GW) because online retailers and auctions (like ebay or amazon) sell them for much cheaper. MUCH cheaper. Plenty of posts I see refer to "veterans" picking up models en masse for cheap from what seems like mostly teenagers who may have bought models when they were 12/13 and then dropped the game later due to lack of interest. The fact is, at some point GW will see itself trying to push models in an environment where so much second hand stock already exists that nobody will feel any need to "buy new". The same problem exists in the car market in NZ, for the record. I don't know a single person who owns a 'new car'. Everything is second hand. Everything. Selling new cars to NZers is like trying to sell homemade chocolate to a supermarket, you just simply cannot hope to do it.
So with that being said, what are the 2 key things that will occur during the death throes of this current incarnation of GW.
1; Vigorous defence of 'intellectual property'. The suing of people who attempt to copy or emulate a GW game system (which might fail, given what happened to d20 and WOTC) or a GW iconographic "thing". CHS recently got plugged with a court date because they used the terms "space wolves" and other stuff like that to describe his products. Since the term "space marine" cannot be copyrighted or trademarked to GW on the basis of the fact they didn't invent the term, it was the very specific matters of "Space wolves" and "Blood angels" and "eldar farseer" and other things like that used in direct reference to what are clearly plagiaristic uses of another company's iconography.
What's amusing for me is that this new trend of big companies suing EVERYONE who dares use some term that's tangentially related to a product of theirs was predicted in the 2005 citigroup "plutonomy" memo. Apparently fatcats have no imagination and all follow the same rules. As set by a corrupt mega-bank that bribes politicians. Ha ha ha.
2; A switch over to the production of books and computer games. Simply put this is the future of GW. They will continue to produce new models, using forgeworld as an initial launch platform to test for market interest, however the company GW itself will run much lower production sizes on models and instead switch over to lucrative royalty schemes involving computer games. Dawn of war in 2004 saw a peak in sales and income for the company that has not been met or exceeded at any point within the last 10 years. Then there's things to consider like WAR (which was EA's fault for flopping), DoW2, the already planned DoW3 and now an MMO based on the 40k universe. Books will also begin to surface more regularly as we've seen with the HH novel series which in 23years of 40k has only just started relatively recently to appear in official novels rather than passing mention in other fiction, not to forget that they have that trio of eldar books and for all we know soon enough there'll be one about Tau as well.
GW will switch over to products which carry no need for retail space beyond a middlemans shelves, it will continue to introduce policies that lower the throughput of retail stores for their models and forgeworld will see an increase in activity as the experimental skunkwerks of GW, launching untested products to the masses and then trawling the internet for feedback before officially introducing them to the main game either by making IA books 'canon' or by directly ripping the unit into a new codex.
In the death throes of the old GW, having failed to grasp the attention of longtime purchasers from auctions and making the barrier to entry too high for newcomers, it will be reborn from the ashes like a phoenix, bright and strong and ready to rape a new medium with the same cold, ineffective callousness that saw TCS get bought by Hasbro, only that this time GW has a pre-established computer market to maliciously exploit to the continued detriment of everyone involved. While GW will still produce pewter/resin/plastic miniatures, it will be in far smaller volumes than today and will act mostly as a supplement and as the "plastic crack" that the new generation of video gamers will buy without having fully understood the roots of the company, or why such cool little models aren't more popular. And probably without realising that there's thousands of online auctions everyday for the same shit at atleast 50% off.
Ok what first needs to be established is that this company is not stupid. Think about it. For the last 6 years they have reported lower sales figures and are compensating for this by increasing efficiency in both production and their stores. This overall process is probably not sustainable and will eventually implode but not before 2 key things occur, for 3 key reasons.
Key reason 1; There is only so much you can raise prices to offset lower sales. People have finite spending money for toys. This limit is commonly accepted as having been reached already.
2; They, as a company, have been introducing policies that aren't working. They've been doing this for years. These policies are far reaching in effect and wide in scope and have culminated in job losses, store closures and decreased performance from the stores that remain. A brilliant compendium on this can be found here (about 4/5ths down, no hotlink directly there)
3; Market saturation. By this I'm referring to the process of there not being a large enough incentive to buy from the manufacturer (ie GW) because online retailers and auctions (like ebay or amazon) sell them for much cheaper. MUCH cheaper. Plenty of posts I see refer to "veterans" picking up models en masse for cheap from what seems like mostly teenagers who may have bought models when they were 12/13 and then dropped the game later due to lack of interest. The fact is, at some point GW will see itself trying to push models in an environment where so much second hand stock already exists that nobody will feel any need to "buy new". The same problem exists in the car market in NZ, for the record. I don't know a single person who owns a 'new car'. Everything is second hand. Everything. Selling new cars to NZers is like trying to sell homemade chocolate to a supermarket, you just simply cannot hope to do it.
So with that being said, what are the 2 key things that will occur during the death throes of this current incarnation of GW.
1; Vigorous defence of 'intellectual property'. The suing of people who attempt to copy or emulate a GW game system (which might fail, given what happened to d20 and WOTC) or a GW iconographic "thing". CHS recently got plugged with a court date because they used the terms "space wolves" and other stuff like that to describe his products. Since the term "space marine" cannot be copyrighted or trademarked to GW on the basis of the fact they didn't invent the term, it was the very specific matters of "Space wolves" and "Blood angels" and "eldar farseer" and other things like that used in direct reference to what are clearly plagiaristic uses of another company's iconography.
What's amusing for me is that this new trend of big companies suing EVERYONE who dares use some term that's tangentially related to a product of theirs was predicted in the 2005 citigroup "plutonomy" memo. Apparently fatcats have no imagination and all follow the same rules. As set by a corrupt mega-bank that bribes politicians. Ha ha ha.
2; A switch over to the production of books and computer games. Simply put this is the future of GW. They will continue to produce new models, using forgeworld as an initial launch platform to test for market interest, however the company GW itself will run much lower production sizes on models and instead switch over to lucrative royalty schemes involving computer games. Dawn of war in 2004 saw a peak in sales and income for the company that has not been met or exceeded at any point within the last 10 years. Then there's things to consider like WAR (which was EA's fault for flopping), DoW2, the already planned DoW3 and now an MMO based on the 40k universe. Books will also begin to surface more regularly as we've seen with the HH novel series which in 23years of 40k has only just started relatively recently to appear in official novels rather than passing mention in other fiction, not to forget that they have that trio of eldar books and for all we know soon enough there'll be one about Tau as well.
GW will switch over to products which carry no need for retail space beyond a middlemans shelves, it will continue to introduce policies that lower the throughput of retail stores for their models and forgeworld will see an increase in activity as the experimental skunkwerks of GW, launching untested products to the masses and then trawling the internet for feedback before officially introducing them to the main game either by making IA books 'canon' or by directly ripping the unit into a new codex.
In the death throes of the old GW, having failed to grasp the attention of longtime purchasers from auctions and making the barrier to entry too high for newcomers, it will be reborn from the ashes like a phoenix, bright and strong and ready to rape a new medium with the same cold, ineffective callousness that saw TCS get bought by Hasbro, only that this time GW has a pre-established computer market to maliciously exploit to the continued detriment of everyone involved. While GW will still produce pewter/resin/plastic miniatures, it will be in far smaller volumes than today and will act mostly as a supplement and as the "plastic crack" that the new generation of video gamers will buy without having fully understood the roots of the company, or why such cool little models aren't more popular. And probably without realising that there's thousands of online auctions everyday for the same shit at atleast 50% off.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Musing on 5e and GW
Below is a direct copy of a post on librarium online made this day;
---------------
All the blogs I am reading.. everything is pointing to a dramatic shift in GW policy regarding the handling of the 'game' part of 40k. Things are getting updated more often, previously abandoned sections of the game are now getting their updates and we may start to see a return of necromunda (which I believe kill teams was a 5e pilot for).
And this shift in policy is good. Previously the game survived on the theory of exclusivity, 40k was a reclusive thing for nerds that got played in the corner of a comic-book store. Now we have movies and big-budget vidya gaems being made for the universe and that has proven at least one thing to the corporate; accessability sells. So where previously you saw.. what.. 12 codeces on a shelf and anyone nearby could tell you that only 4 of them are objectively 'good' with 2 more being 'alright' and the rest being 'crap' and/or 'useless' now you have 12 codeces with some 6 being good, another 2 or 3 in the pipeline for updates and the remainder on the backburner.
So how does that translate to the rules for a nightspinner being posted for download? Well first off it means all those people who bought a nightspinner after june 2010 will now actually be able to use them. Always good to keep those people happy. Secondly it means that GW is now embracing the increased number of players DoW 1/2 have brought in, and let's be honest here, since the release of DoW the population of 40k players has probably at least doubled. Before those videogames were made the only people I saw playing 40k were late 20-somethings, typically of the grognard variety. Now you have a whole pile of wheezing 15-18year olds with skin problems but whatever at least there's more variety.
Let's also compare a couple of things before this drags into tl;dr territory. Within the last year we've seen; BA officially launched, DE (12 years) updated, Necrons (9 years?) rumoured, GK (9-12 years?) confirmed, DA/BT (9 years?) modernised via FAQ, FAQs for the BRB (finally), FAQ for DE (bizarrely fast) and 3 new models for eldar via FW with another aspect still coming not to mention the nightspinner being a codex approved model now via WD 365.
What has been the driving factor for all this? Dark eldar. These guys have sold a metric shitton of models. People are sick of marines and corporate GW has noticed.
[edit] not to mention that if you have 6 marine codeces what's to stop someone from just calling their army whatever the FOTM force? A generic SM player has 6 different flavours to pick. DEldar actually required people to buy new models. Hurrr GW exists to sell products right.. so more marine codeces means only a book gets sold in comparison to several dozen plastic mans..
-----------
I will return to this topic eventually.
---------------
All the blogs I am reading.. everything is pointing to a dramatic shift in GW policy regarding the handling of the 'game' part of 40k. Things are getting updated more often, previously abandoned sections of the game are now getting their updates and we may start to see a return of necromunda (which I believe kill teams was a 5e pilot for).
And this shift in policy is good. Previously the game survived on the theory of exclusivity, 40k was a reclusive thing for nerds that got played in the corner of a comic-book store. Now we have movies and big-budget vidya gaems being made for the universe and that has proven at least one thing to the corporate; accessability sells. So where previously you saw.. what.. 12 codeces on a shelf and anyone nearby could tell you that only 4 of them are objectively 'good' with 2 more being 'alright' and the rest being 'crap' and/or 'useless' now you have 12 codeces with some 6 being good, another 2 or 3 in the pipeline for updates and the remainder on the backburner.
So how does that translate to the rules for a nightspinner being posted for download? Well first off it means all those people who bought a nightspinner after june 2010 will now actually be able to use them. Always good to keep those people happy. Secondly it means that GW is now embracing the increased number of players DoW 1/2 have brought in, and let's be honest here, since the release of DoW the population of 40k players has probably at least doubled. Before those videogames were made the only people I saw playing 40k were late 20-somethings, typically of the grognard variety. Now you have a whole pile of wheezing 15-18year olds with skin problems but whatever at least there's more variety.
Let's also compare a couple of things before this drags into tl;dr territory. Within the last year we've seen; BA officially launched, DE (12 years) updated, Necrons (9 years?) rumoured, GK (9-12 years?) confirmed, DA/BT (9 years?) modernised via FAQ, FAQs for the BRB (finally), FAQ for DE (bizarrely fast) and 3 new models for eldar via FW with another aspect still coming not to mention the nightspinner being a codex approved model now via WD 365.
What has been the driving factor for all this? Dark eldar. These guys have sold a metric shitton of models. People are sick of marines and corporate GW has noticed.
[edit] not to mention that if you have 6 marine codeces what's to stop someone from just calling their army whatever the FOTM force? A generic SM player has 6 different flavours to pick. DEldar actually required people to buy new models. Hurrr GW exists to sell products right.. so more marine codeces means only a book gets sold in comparison to several dozen plastic mans..
-----------
I will return to this topic eventually.
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