You are not the only one. I met the GW guy early 80s in London and we had a blast. Alas, the company is now a corporate entity and all of the early creative insanity seems gone in favor of investors pleasing strategies. Granted, the miniatures are still exceptionally beautiful and the product quality overall top notch, yet the prices are stratospheric and one must admit, besides a gem such as Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game, the 40K and AOS rules have not aged well and continue to  embrace antiquated mechanisms. Finally, the constant modification of ‘lists’, leading to the antiquation of armies, is likely to drive away players. I ahve left GW behind and never intend to come back, save for their resuscitation of Battle Fleet Gothic and Space Hulk (maybe)… THere are far better rules out there in which you can put your old GW miniatures to good use.

My GW story is a longer… but briefer… if that makes sense.

I used to play WHFB 2nd edition. Loved the old world. Still have 2nd edition and Ravening Hordes.

Got out of touch with wargames for decades. Next purchase was Age of Sigmar Soul Wars. Never played it. Hate 40k universe for wargaming. Everyone is a fascist and/or evil.

Went nuts buying small games like Necromunda, Kill Team, Warcry, Speedfreeks. Hardly played them (some not at all). Bought more factions because I liked the sculpts.

Bought Blackstone Fortress (played once) and Cursed City (assembled, primed… that’s it.)

In short… I bought loads of stuff I don’t need and may never use except for RPG’s.

Also bought Middle Earth three times (I must be crazy): Escape From Goblin Town, Pelennor Fields, Osgilliath. I have plans to to use those in One Ring RPG.

May finally have got my buying under control.

Hi Amachan,

Firstly when its been a big love of your life even though it was entirely yours, there’s an almost relationship ex-effect. Some folks are much more vitrolic about there former abusive GW partner.

Secondly, GW are trying to act like microsoft and the corporate dream, how can I sell you something making a nice profit, and then do it again. Which in the long run hits there player retention. They might have been able to get away with 15 years ago, when it was like a dozen books over 4 years, folks didn’t notice so much. But since they ramped it up to an industrial scale it does lose them players.

They only card they’ve got is nostalgia, there’s more talk about the old systems coming back Epic Horus v Age of Darkness, Warhammer v AoS. But there’s only so much to re-release and if the new version is crap is going to hinder them and not help. There’s a very Oldhammer movement too.

15 years ago they could have gotten away with it as the main game in town. But now, there’s the Perrys, Warlord, Wargame Atlantic, Northstar Minis with Stargrave, Frotgrave and Oathmark, Conquest Games, Gripping Beast, the Osprey Wargames and TooFatLardies.

Many of those are better games, metal and plastic mini makers etc, etc, and thats a far from exhaustive list of popular games or metal or plastic mini ranges, and not even mentioning Disney based games.

I wonder if in a few decades time we will talk about GW the way we talk about some Mini producers from the 70s…

I, for one, am glad that GW is as good as it is at getting people into the hobby and as bad as it is at retaining them.

If the latter were not the case, there would be way less room for competitors to operate in and people looking for their products.

Thanks for sharing @amachan.

I consider myself now an ex-GW gamer for very similar reasons.

I began with GW in 1986 with Blood Bowl first edition but quickly got drawn into WHFB 3rd edition and 40k Rogue trader.  Teenage me loved the almost unending and grindy games of 40k 2nd edition where I played Imperial Guard and Squats.

Obviously I didn’t have long to wait for half of my model collection to be rendered unusable with the elimination of the Squats from the game.

At Uni I switched to mainly RPGs as money was too tight to keep up with the miniatures hobby so I dropped out and stayed out due to work and family restrictions until 6th edition when I got back into miniatures in a big way.

Like you I discovered Beasts of War around this time too and to be honest that was probably the beginning of the end as now I realised that although the only games played locally were GW that this was not due to lack of choice.

I built a shiny new Necron army for 7th and then watched as all the models were made sub par and obsolete by the raft of new models for 9th edition (which I refused to buy). I tried AoS but found it sterile and tedious.

My first non GW games as I recall were first edition Deadzone, first edition Batman miniatures game both of which rekindled my enjoyment for mini wargaming after the trauma inflicted by my GW experiences, and thank God they did.

I still own 40k minis and AoS minis and as a favour will engage with guys at our club who need an opponent and won’t play a good game, but I don’t play any modern GW game out of choice any more.

I still get to use my 40k model collections using the One Page Rules Grimdark Future system which is great.

Thanks for sharing @amachan and others.

I’ve been recently reorganising my hobby storage and unavoidably ran into bunch of my old 40k and WHFB armies. And man, does nostalgia hit hard at times. It’s the fond memories of the gaming and the gaming groups years (welp, decades!) ago. The time of my life when I would fall as sleep thinking about Warhammer and when all of my friends were wargamers or if they weren’t we would make them.

And I would actually have the option to back to gaming with the old miniatures and rules. There’s people at my club who do play 5th and 6th edition Warhammer and if I called my old friends they would probably be happy to come over for some games of 2nd edition 40k.

But I won’t. As I know the games would be disappointing. It won’t be like driving a classic car or listening to an old record. It will be just kind of shite. The modern games are just so much more fun and easier to play, and there’s many that work fine with those old models.

Speaking of old models, what I should do, is get painting some of them in old hammer style. And better yet, phone some of those old gaming pals and invite them over for some beverages and painting. That would be epic!

On the topic of loathing GW… While I’m not interested in their current games and if it was me, I would have taken them to different direction, I cannot say I loathe them.  Companies have to change and reinvent themselves or they will die. The competition for the time of the GW customer gets tighter every year, with people spending more time online, various forms of content and digital games. They’ve been in fact doing surprisingly well under all this change, despite holding on to the core tenets of building, painting and gaming which all take comparatively lot of time for a hobby. And hey, if the new direction isn’t for me, then I’m out, no hard feelings.

It does sound as though you have been particularly unlucky with your miniature choices and what GW then decided to kill off.

If I can give a different perspective, I’m a 50+ year old gamer who first played Rogue Trader in the 80s and have played GW games on and off since. It has opened the door to me for a whole world of games and although I havent liked some editions (9th had far too many rules in different books, bloated command point/strategy card options and I couldn’t really be bothered to play it) 10th edition is really good fun to play. GW, I would dare to say contrary to the hate, listened to the community and brought out the 40k game that the public had been asking for. GW are not perfect, and some decisions made are very frustrating (I have always been an Old World fan and cant get into AoS) but they have given me a lot of happiness in the last 4 decades.