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Games Workshop To Host Studio Preview Seminar At Adepticon!
November 17, 2016 by deltagamegirl22
Just when I thought that Adepticon couldn't get any cooler, I had a look in the preview cart... Games Workshop has several hobby seminars! There's Back to Basics 40K Tactics, Advanced 40K Tactics, Age of Sigmar 'Generals'- but wait, there's more...
Games Workshop is hosting a Studio Preview Seminar! You read that right. They are going to preview the upcoming releases for Summer 2017 at Adepticon and you can hear all about it first.
It looks like they will be running this seminar twice on Wednesday night, which if you've seen the attendance in the 40K hall at Adepticon, you know these will sell out FAST - like super fast - like they're practically gone already and the cart isn't live yet.
If you've ever needed an excuse to make it to Adepticon, I doubt you could find a better one than this. We will certainly try our best to get in and film this for you (hopefully we can!) but would''t you rather see it for yourself in person?
Who will be joining us at Adepticon for these big reveals?!
"We will certainly try our best to get in and film this for you..."
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Wow
………I won’t stand by any longer … it has to be said …”WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH GW?????????????????”
one of us, one of us, one of us, one of us, one of us, one of us…………
Mmmm, hopeful news. Actual community interaction is important, especially given just how much competition there is in the hobby these days. It’s extremely useful to have information on what existing consumer want, especially as they’ve been the thing keeping GW’s profit margins afloat for the last 3+ years now (slowly declining sales volumes, higher profit margins on non-starter items). While the information and feedback from trade shows, cons etc. is extremely meaningful for attracting new, or old, blood to the catalogue.
Claiming, and at times rightfully so, to be the best the hobby has to offer means very little at the end of the day if your gaming systems are a huge pile of seemingly random rules sets for starters, community is something people have to set up themselves and it costs several mortgage payments to get a taste of the actual games.
The return of Specialist Games in particular is going to be a big, big thing on this front. Smaller, cheaper, modernized rules that both cater to those who grew up with the games and those looking for an accessible way into the hobby. Just giving people a reason to dip their toes in there is huge for both the market leader and the hobby as a whole.
The trouble is that so far the specialist games haven’t really been that. Blood Bowl is an expensive rehash of a 20 year old game system. There is no innovation and no hint that they understand how to market a product to anyone who hasn’t already drank the GW koolaid.
If you want to expand the ‘specialist range’ out to include GW’s other recent boardgames you have basically more of the same. In fact the only other game they have produced that would hold any appeal to people who aren’t already GW customers is Warhammer Quest, and even that was a poor (and expensive) re-implementation of its predecessor. It might be a more modern game system, but it’s about as compelling as the Dungeons and Dragons boardgames, and at twice the price.
The rest of their games have been a hodgepodge of boring systems with fancy minis that cost way too much for the average boardgamer to bother to look twice at them. They might be trying to appeal to a wider audience, but their efforts so far show that they are far from figuring out how to actually do that.
Shame to hear, granted most of the positive buzz I’ve heard about Bloodbowl has been from old school fans. Save for the dual pose models I was figuring it had a good chance to pull in old and new fans, there’s in fact been quite a bit of buzz about it in boardgame-centric Facebook groups. Which is kind of rare as generally the GW boxed stand-alones get a lot of, from boardgamer perspective quite reasonable, flak due to cost, assembly work and iffy rules.
Some of GW stand-along products have indeed been mechanically laughable, Lost Patrol and Dreadfleet being the prime examples for me. The first is utterly, ridiculously unbalanced while having a solid, fun core that could have worked wonderfully. While the latter destroyed stunning models and a ‘cool’ setting with a horrible ruleset so full or randomness in every phase of the game (wind, movement, even damage etc.) I doubt it would have even worked in 20-30 minute sessions. Let alone the slog the actual game became, luckily there the Song of Blades and Heroes sea variant of Galleys & Galleons (and its mythological expansion)!
I am hoping the Specialist Games gets a better, compact method of focused releases going. Stuff like Calth is cool and all, but is essentially nothing more than a pre-order, boxed expansion for the 30K/40K player, while hybrid boardgamers were confused about what it actually is trying to be. Mmmmm, kind of symbolic for GW right 😉
There’s nothing wrong, in my eyes at any rate, with the Blood Bowl rules, that have been refined over the last 20 years.
If the rules don’t appeal to you, that is fine, but I absolutely guarantee had the BB rules been changed completely, then the uproar would have been immense.
Expensive? I mean, the hobby is what it is, but I’m reasonably sure this new boxed set, from 3rd party retailers, is the same, if not cheaper than the old Blood Bowl boxed set.
Meanwhile, the big boxed set games (Battle for Carth, etc…) when you look at the price per model, is very cheap.
My point is moreso that the game is not modern, not that it’s bad. It’s probably a good thing they left it alone because their attempts at ‘modern’ rulesets so far have been pretty underwhelming.
As for the price per model fallacy, the price of the Battle for Carth or whatever boxes are only cheap when compared to other GW products. Compared to the market at large they are expensive for what you get in them and do not provide enough replay value to make the investment worth it. So if all you want is a bunch of cheap space marines then you can get a boxed game full of them, instead if you want a boardgame featuring Space Marines then you’re better off looking at something FFG has produced. Of course you won’t be able to do that soon since GW, in their infinite wisdom, decided to end their licensing deal with FFG, a company that was actually producing interesting products and expanding the visibility of the brand.
Why is “modern” relevant? If the rules work, are fun and exciting to play then they don’t really need to be changed. By all accounts, the rules are fun and exciting to play therefore “modernisation” is not required.
‘Modern’ only really come into it in the concept of ‘Does it Compete Well with Newer Games’
If it competes well (as an overall package) then obviously no change required.
If it doesn’t compete well then something in the package may need a change (not necessarily rules)
And remember this is based on large numbers of customers, as much as we may not like it, on their own ‘Our Individual Opinions’ are pretty worthless 🙂
I think I also disagree with the price comparison to the rest of the market. Games Workshop are not really the most expensive miniatures company out there – neither are Forge World. That’s not to they’re the cheapest either, they’re not. But it’s not hard to find companies selling miniatures at much higher price points. Scibor sell a huge range of I can’t Believe It’s Not Space Marines and they compare in price with Forge World. Infinity miniatures generally start at around £8 per model for basic troops. Both Infinity and scibor miniatures are high quality products though and so are Games Workshop. Then you get companies like Mantic who charge less per model but the quality of the models is also lower (slightly softer plastic, components that don’t fit properly and/or need a lot of clean up work). Games Workshop are definitely more expensive than Mantic but they’re also consistently of a much higher quality. Price Comparisons of miniatures generally aren’t helpful unless you’re also including comparisons of component quality. Games Workshop have a higher price but also a much higher component quality than cheaper brands.
Bloodbowl maintained a large active community even after it was pulled from retail and it was also widely regarded as one of the best games GW ever produced (I can’t say whether that’s true because I haven’t played it and probably never will). By keeping the rules largely the same, they are:
1) Not fixing something that isn’t broken
2) Tapping into the already significant following
My point was that the ruleset isn’t modern (and it shows), not that it’s bad.
What do you even mean by “modern” rules? To me that’s code for rules for people with zero attention span but I’m sure that’s not what you mean.
I doubt very much that Games Workshop are currently trying to appeal to board game enthusiasts. Even though many of their boxed games should be considered to be board games, they are marketed at the miniatures collector and not at the board gamer. That is why the miniatures are what they are. I have absolutely no doubt that if GW wanted to break into the board game market that it is not beyond them to do so, however I also don’t believe that that is what they are looking to do.
The fact that they’ve sent out advanced copies of Blood Bowl to some prominent boardgame reviewers seems to suggest otherwise.
I don’t think it does. Places like Boardgame Geek and Shut Up and Sit Down tend to stray into miniatures games from time to time. I don’t think it’s an indication that they’re trying to make serious in roads into boardgames. If they start publishing Talisman I might change my mind.
Forge World have been doing this for a long time at their events, looks like GW management have cottoned on to this being a good thing after all
Wow, offering seminars at third party events, what next engaging with media they dont control ? 😉
All I have to say to this is it’s about time GW joined other companies as part of third party event.
sounds like the times are a changing.
I wonder if we’ll see them at Salute next year