What was the reason of the decline of Warhammer Fantasy? Even long before Age of Sigmar was clear that things were not going well.
>>46055759
WoW
Every fantasy player who had an army didn't need any more. So gw decided to change the system to favor larger armies to get the existing player base to need to buy more.
Fast forward and combined with alternative games on the market and a game that isn't easy for new players to get into ( due to needing to make such a large investment to get started) the game began to decline rapidly.
The switch to bigger armies and the start of the decline happened around 6th edition, I think.
>>46055759
There's very little manuever in Fantasy. Place units, hope your opponent doesn't place his better. Smash them together. 4x4 and 4x6 just aren't big enough.
A friend plays Bretonians. The knights would trot forward, charge one and that was it. They couldn't change direction fast enough to get a second charge in and his opponents couldn't turn around to counter attack.
>>46057344
I would think the solution would then be smaller, not larger armies.
>>46058042
Not when you are trying to get your fanbase to buy more models.
The real ironic part is that Fantasy really did it's best to appeal to it's core constituents, but the core consumer wasn't enough to make it successful.
It's being repeatedly in a lot of other industries: your die hard customers will not keep you afloat anymore.
>>46055759
Needing an absolute fuckton of models to really play the game at all is my best guess. The fluff and the gameplay was really good, in my opinion (people complain about magic and WoC and High Elves and all sorts of crap but the balance is waaaaay better than 40k), and the models were cool, but you did need many, many little men. My Vampires have about 300 infantry models; not to bring in one game, sure, but the smallest Fantasy games I play with the army still start at about 150 models.
>>46055759
It started of as a skirmish game, then small force, then small army, then big army.
Warhammer Fantasy Battles, moreso than 40K, was reliant both on abandoned alternate rule systems (Mordheim, Skirmish, Warbands) for smaller-scale gaming and larger model-count packages (16-20+ individuals in the average plastic infantry box, 8-10 in the average plastic cavalry box) for larger-scale games.
GW scrapped the alternate rule systems entirely by 8th Edition (I think Mordheim was even off their Website by then, or at least not long afterwards) and significantly downsized most of their boxes (now 10 for the average plastic infantry box, 5 the average cavalry). Which wouldn't have been too bothersome… if prices didn't then increase another 33-50%+ (ex: Orc boxes going from $30 / 19 when I started to $25 / 10 when I left).
Did this kill the game on its own? No. It's much more complex than that and relates to various things everywhere from changes in their business model and hobby shop environment to how they tried drumming up support for new releases to increasing pendulum swing-like Army Book releases to changes in fluff and acceptable models sometimes being the straw that broke someone's back and [insert many more things here].
However, at the very most basic, the WHFB hobby - whether engaged in to model, casually play, run the tournament scene, or so-on - was quickly moving beyond people's acceptable price range. I started at a time someone could purchase a "full" army (2500 points) for somewhere between $200 and $350, depending on just how much pewter was in your army list. Now, contrastingly, just one variety of core unit I have (~60 Orc Boyz) would run the average player $150 on its very lonesome. And at the same time GW's prices were going up both per-model and per-point, alternate suppliers and war-games were increasingly saturating the market.
>>46058543
[Cont'd]
A smattering, few, or even bunch of issues can keep someone in a hobby for a long time if they don't have any real alternatives or the costs aren't that high (ex: I have a lot of issues with Warframe, but it's free to play and - with 50% / 75% discounts - I rarely spend more than maybe $50 / year on its premium currency). But Warhammer's issues continued to pile up, and as they did so its price range increasingly was not defined as acceptable to those who played it.
Hell, let me just make another price comparison: I got TKings right after the army was squatted, from official suppliers (see: A GW itself). Two battalions, some skeletons, and a few other units. Total price? Almost $500. When I started WHFB, the exact same models and model count would have cost me less than $250. I bought them because I liked the models, had the money to spare, and saw how things were developing on eBay (I could probably push the models for $100-$200 profit now), but for the average gamer? Who's going to put down $500 for barely 2000pts of unoptimized list?
>>46058095
They weren't even die hard customers, they were die hard fans
Die hard customers Mighr be able to keep a game afloat but fans do nothing on less they cough up
>>46058543
I don't think it is fair to say the reason for fantasy's downfall is the price of the kits, because 40k was receiving the same pricing treatments and it is still going strong.
The problem was a static fan and playerbase that kept increasing the size of their armies due to ncessity, and some slowly started to peter out as alternative games were discovered and lack of new blood coming into the hobby that became extremely difficult and discouraging to get started in.
>>46055759
>Amazingly fun fluff
>extremely boring gameplay.
It plagiarized blizzard
>>46058095
Jeremy Corbyn take note . . .
>>46055759
This is anecdotal but based on my personal experiences
7th and 8th were a major departure from 6th, and were not very well received. Prices became absolutely prohibitive as model quality declined. GW's generally cuntery and refusal to support fantasy in any real way. The rise in army size as well the pushing of the silly BIG SHIT kits was irksome to many old guard and made it harder for newbies to get into the game.
The fact that it's a lot lot easier for 3rd parties to make better and cheaper fairly generic fantasy models than it is for them to make the fairly specific things 40k has, pic related is only one euro a model, but there aren't exactly any fitting cheap space marine alternatives are there? As it becomes easier for the little guy to make minis that hurts fantasy way more than 40k for gw.
The death of warband, skirmish and mordheim made it very difficult for new players to get into the game coupled with the prohibitive prices. Every new player who did end up joining us in the 8th age ended up either buying a small force to play these smaller game modes that no longer had support or shelling out obscene sums of money for a 2000 point army.
It wasn't any one thing, but now Kings of war, 9th age, and 3rd party miniature makers are here to pick up the slack. Fantasy battles seems to be entering into an era of multiple companies and the community's collaborative effort, rather than a single companies rulership and that's a very interesting thing, kinda similar to 3.5 in a way, with reaper making minis, paizo and every other person making rules, however many people making dungeon tiles. I wonder how that will shake out with a wargame. Remember that the game is only as dead as your local scene. The lore lives on in the hundreds of novels, the old books, and the zeitgeist.
>>46061953
>I don't think it is fair
Sure it is.
The FB gaming base weighed the price per tiny plastic model vs their movement trays full of identical sculpts and became jaded, while the 40k modeling customers embraced their skirmish [round] based units as better suited to individuality and thus more worthy of investment.
Both games ended up a patchwork of legacy rules and band-aids bodged together by people with only a passing familiarity with maths, but FB hit the Too Much wall first because it appeared 'samey' on the TT even under the most favourable of conditions.
GW played the Whatever the Market will Bear game to its bitter conclusion and then lost the thread - They were suppposed to lower their RRP closer to street value when they hit that wall so they could continue to make fat profits with minimal overheads, but Tommy K decided that hubris was the better part of economics such that nothing was better than slightly less. Then he could tell investors that he was only PRETENDING to be retarded.
>>46062379
>Remember that the game is only as dead as your local scene.
This, hell if youre really hurting for your fantasy wargaming fix you could organize a game on tabletop sim with your average /tg/ neckbeard
>>46055759
Not enough edge, rape and pauldrons
>>46062110
