Weekender XLBS: Have Game Companies Lost Their Focus?
October 14, 2018 by lloyd
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Happy Sunday and FIRST BABY
Happy Sunday mate!
Go on ye good thing ye
Love the design of “Ben’s Gaming Table” tm ….please VLOG it as if it turns out as I imagine it I may have crack at it myself
An interesting discussion again gents. One of my concerns with companies is when the develop games for a third party IP often at the expense of their own. A few points; Spartan games had strong IPs but it started with the HALO IP threw a lot of money at it .. withdrew from some of there classics .. they over capitalised wentb under and their creditors couldn’t even sell their HALO stuff to pay the bills because it was someone elses IP. With Mantic (a company I love and support) I like the Mantica and Warpath IPs but they have… Read more »
Oh come on!!!… is no one else in the world awake … I can’t be the omly person on herev … sigh …. decides to come back later for community reactions …. *goes to make a coffee*
love how you only waited two minutes there haha. it’ll take most people longer than two minutes to read, digest and then respond to your post. The thing I have with companies with many games (for me Mantic and FFG) is that I don’t get invested in all of them (thank god!) and then find myself losing interest in them. The walking dead for example is one of the finest story telling games for a small band of figures I’ve played in years, ripe for house rules and mucking around with. sadly however I haven’t played enough of it because… Read more »
Just by way of explanation, I’m not quite that impatient 😉 … I finished watching the video … typing up my coment as I went … posted it …. It was now about an hour and a half since the xlbs went live … and I thought .. I know , I’ll go and read other people’s reactions, happy sundays etc. and there was nothing (aside from Warren’s cheery greeting) … just me posting 3 times….I felt a bit alone *lip quivers* …. I honestly wan’t expecting a reaction to my post in 2 minutes .. honest… 🙂
I think any company needs to develop and maintain their own IP as a baseline to securing their own future. Going into licenced ip’s can be lucrative but fickle. GW did great with LOTR until the trilogy ran out then sales slumped hard. But they had 40k/WFB underpinning the company.
Knight Models on the other hand are a company built on licencing and would very likely go broke in a few months if they ever lost their DC licence. I don’t see them ever going into plastics for this very reason.
I think prodos saw the bright lights of a Hollywood IP and went in on AvP, granted they messed it up, but Warzone suffered a great deal from them turning their attention to AvP and now they lost the license and are starting from scratch with a wholly original IP.
So I wonder what YouTube’s algorithms would have made of this week’s “vien” of humour , eh @brennon 😉
The would have shafted us mate 😉
Don’t say shaft. That makes it worse 🙂
Happy Sunday!!
Have Game Companies Lost Their Focus? No, I don’t believe they have. Their focus is to get as much money from our wallets, as quickly as they can, for the least amount of outlay. Quite frankly @warzan nothing is going to compete with 40K. The company has such a head start over its competition, having existed for longer than most, employee count is probably higher, etc. 40k’s history covers more time than humans have existed. There are more Black Library books than I can count – I included the Horus Heresy here. There are more YouTube channels dedicated, or at… Read more »
Happy Sunday, I´ve to say I don´t like this Shotgun design from companies. If they couldn´t focus on one IP, how could we? You can´t build a communitie without a good IP wich keeps you interessted in the game.
That’s an interesting thought – are gaming communities built around a single game?
In my experience perhaps initially yes, but they soon magpie (“oooh look shinney”) to the next hot thing when interest wanes.
Not everyone migrates to the same thing.
I know one person that has stuck with playing a particular edition of the WRG Napoleonic rules at 1/72nd scale, but the number of opponents he has has greatly reduced over the years.
Beast of War initially seemed to come together over GW products, but look at where they are now…
“If they couldn’t focus on one IP, how could we?”
From the companies’ POV they could be looking at the players lack of attention-span (shiny syndrome) and say, ” If you can’t focus on one IP, why should we?”
Yeah, as long as there are people like me who will go all out on the latest Kickstarter before I’ve even opened the one I backed 2 years ago and just received last week, it’s in their best interest to come out with new things. Wild West Exodus, for example, have come out with a lot of great new centerpieces, the likes of which Warren is talking about, but I haven’t gotten them since I haven’t actually played the game yet.
Lloyd is back.Le grande fromage returns
I think the “shotgun” effect is partly due to Kickstarters (where you basically design a small self contained game and release ALL the miniatures in the one push), after you’ve done that one….where do you go? This in itself however these days can turn players away. For example Mantic did Mars Attacks, but a year later it was pretty much dropped and all that was left was the leavings on the warehouse shelves. Walking Dead sounds like it been more of a permanent product, but remember each “wave” is usually only about a dozen new sculpts. Companies that don’t use… Read more »
Picture of the round towers. Ok Gerry you win I’m convinced
Can’t argue with solid evidence like that. 🙂
I’m pretty sure you can buy all sorts of embossed wallpaper from model railway companies
@lloyd@avernos I salute your ingenuity
@torros yeah you can but not in the mass quantity that wallpaper provides 🙂 and the scales are a bit small with the most popular scales being HO and OO.
Happy Sunday people… I am loving the wallpaper idea, so versatile… It would make some awesome Bridges…?
Bridges are a brilliant option.
Happy Sunday! A lot of the time companies release schedules are so rapid that games have come and gone before I can even buy them. I see something I’m interested in, think about it, do a bit of research, think some more, then decide to get into it and find the game has gone and is no longer supported. Even the venerable GW has been guilty with Shadow War and now Shadespire moving to a new iteration. However, because they are tied to their main IP gamers can always recycle the models back into the core armies. There are a… Read more »
I’ve backed many games on Kickstarter to serve as a replacement for 40K. This was back when GW was doing a lot of things wrong in my opinion. Now, many of those games are dead, and GW is doing a lot better than they were. There are other games that scratch an itch 40K just can’t, but I keep coming back to 40K in some form or another.
I totally lost it when Lloyd said “You make sure your flap is big enough to go over the girth”
Lime squash coming out your nose hurts
It definitely helps.
Happy Sunday!
I would have expected Star Wars Legion to have made a bigger impact by now and be seriously challenging Warhammer 40k. The IP is the best possible and the game mechanics good, but it is heavily lacking on the collectability front. The sculpts and the production quality is nowhere near GW and to be honest, there is maybe only one truly collectable piece in the range now, the AT-ST. They especially have dropped the ball on the biggest asset of the Star Wars IP, the heroes. All the hero sculpts are mediocre at best.
This is a tough question. When I saw your coverage of Dark Age I absolutely love it.. (Wild West Exodus as well). I cannot find anyone who plays anything non GW or Card games anywhere near me, unless it’s X-Wing (no Armada either). I think companies using the Shotgun method have a good reason to try new stuff they have to create buzz and hope Johnny Consumer sees the new shiney and tries to expand into their other stuff. Another thing is “Old Habits” I have a ton of 40k stuff,so if i’m going to play something it’s probably going… Read more »
Happy Sunday! How about some of the board game team return for the next one. On to the topic at hand, it is a little strange to see how 40k has been a massive force in the miniature community. I honestly thought that Infinity would have carved out more of the star chart by this point. I have never played Infinity and know only minor elements to the fluff, but the clean designs and tech angle of it has made it at times more appealing to me. I wonder if the scatter approach is only in result of the cosmos… Read more »
I think Infinity has a number of things going against it, for me the major drawback is they are not plastic figures.
You can get bits and pieces from model railway suppliers
https://www.modelscenerysupplies.co.uk/scratch-build/building-paper-card-sheets
But I don’t think you can beat the stuff that Mr Knowles(Assistant manager of creation and design,Lavatory Department East Acton division) of the now bankrupt Wizzo Wallpapers produced.
What have I done?
Cheers guys I just spat coffee over my IPad, Biffin’s Bridge indeed!
Bad Andrew, Bad. see what happens. Alcohol is bad
Happy Sunday! Always nice to see Gerry on the show 🙂
Give me back my sock!
no!
Is it because you’re wearing it as a mask?
Ben and Gerry? Happy Sundae!
I see what you did there
I’m a funny man, me. At least my mum says so
This is a topic it would be interesting to hear from a game company on. In fact many of the topics require inside insight I think to form a balanced view. I can only really think as a consumer. I wonder if, having raised a topic, discussed it on screen, and got community feedback, it would be feasible to have a Part 2 follow up to some of the topics with one of your industry buddies to get their take on it? I’m sure Alessio, Chris Birch or Hawk Dave would have some very interesting views on this! Heck even… Read more »
Happy Sunday! How do you guys stay so deadpan whilst Ben is so giggled up onscreen?
I’d say practice…. lots and lots of practice.
Ben is an innocent soul and we’re slut merchants… or we’re all innocent and Ben has a dirty mind. Pick your favourite ^^
Maybe there isn’t a big player like 40K because the companies don’t have a change to grow to that scale. It takes time to grow to a scale like 40k, they didn’t start as a mass battle game like they are now. You have to know that your game is popular and it is being bought enough to take the steps to go bigger and maybe you have to make rules adjustments to go to scale like that and keep supporting the game with releases that every player has something. There are rules sets out there that allow that and… Read more »
I imagine very few game companies have the built revenue to just knock stuff out as regularly as people wish them too. Kickstarter has allowed a number of companies to use it as a pre-order platform and that will no doubt continue. I think GW as a business has so many facets to it that it would be virtually impossible for any other company to catch. Even with IPs such as Star Wars Legion. I think the best chance a company has of becoming GW’s market competitor would be from one of the large plastic kit companies from the scale… Read more »
I think Asomdee may have surpassed GW in terms of capitalisation, with all of the companies it merge with or bought up.
I seem to remember that the investment firm that created that behemoth were trying to sell it for $1.5 billion, or some such….Don’t think they’ve had a buyer yet.