this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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Okay, I gotta ask, since it's been bugging me for years. I don't really understand the Warhammer franchise.
I never ran into products in the franchise in the 1980s and 1990s in the US. Dungeons & Dragons yes, Warhammer no.
But I kept crashing into people who talk about it online, and tons of products in the franchise. However, it seems to be a large number of not-that-wildly-successful products.
I can think of products that have had lots of derived products in the franchise, like Star Wars. But there there was one very successful initial trilogy of movies, and those spawned follow-on products.
Or Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Like Warhammer, that's a UK-originating franchise, but like Star Wars, there was an enormously successful initial product.
Those drew people into the franchise, made the fanbase what it is.
But I'm not really aware of an equivalent for Warhammer. There are some that are pretty good within their niche, like the Total War games. But those didn't start the franchise.
Is the scene driven by Brits who fell in love with the physical board game? Or what was it that gets people enthusiastic about the series? Like, what is it that is getting people into it?
I don't hate it, but most of the games I've seen don't really blow me away (even in genres that I'd normally tend to like, like the Battlefleet Gothic: Armada games).
Absolutely absurd profit ratios on the figures, and that's before they start selling you rule books and paints. The novels are cheap to produce as well.
Warhammer is a tabletop wargame franchise. Everything else is an ad for the ~~toys~~ war game miniatures.
Let me put it like this:
A popular console game might cost $70 now, take hundreds of thousands of man-hours to make, and still might flop and be terrible.
They sell boxes of Imperial Guard squads, little plastic army men, for $40. You need like, ten of them for the screening units of a low-point army.
True, the profit margins in the plastic stuff is obscene. Which is why they'll never allow a computer version of the table top game.
Okay, so thanks to you and @[email protected] for the explanation, but follow up question:
Okay, so is the Warhammer boardgame (well, okay, tabletop game, not sure if boardgame is the right term) mostly the province of the groknard crowd, people who are really into specifically wargaming? Or is it more that people like the painting aspect of it, kind of like assembling models, and just that Warhammer lets you can play a game with your models when you're done decorating them?
My general impression is that hex wargaming has generally been on a decline over about the past thirty years or so. I think that some of that might be just that computers permit for simulations that don't require simplified models and that may have eaten some of the market. But point is, if there was a big crowd that really liked tabletop wargaming and was gung-ho on having stylized, turn-based gaming, I'd think that places like, oh, Matrix Games that sell a bunch of computer turn-based strategy wargames would be selling competing wargame products like hotcakes; competitors wouldn't have to worry about cannibalizing a market. But there's no comparable franchise that I'm really aware of.
You don't HAVE to buy the plastic models. You can use anything to represent the units.
But a LOT of players love painting.
I remember discovering Warhammer when I was a teenager and thinking how cool it all looked. And then I saw how much it would cost and I until this day have the same dilemma some 20+ years later.
Oh, and all that said:
Total War Warhammer and Boltgun (a Doom clone) are actually pretty great.
I think the computer games are what really helped get the franchise going internationally. I remember my first contact with the franchise was the first Dawn of War, which I really enjoyed, but I think it was only around the time of Dark Crusade that I got to know more about the actual tabletop/miniature game. Being a filthy south american, the official miniatures were and still are completely out of my monetary reach.
I put a lot of emphasis on that aspect of the computer games driving interest because Warhammer Fantasy never had anything as successful as Dawn of War or Space Marine, at least not before the Total War games (which arrived after Fantasy was ditched). Also, for a number of years, 40k grognards will tell you all about the shitty rules of Xth edition (6, 7, 8, 9, whichever), times during which some competitors started showing up. Two notorious competitors to 40k proper, in being sci-fi, are Infinity and Warpath. Within the niche of board/wargames and miniature skirmishes, they're known, but you'll be hard pressed to find anyone outside that niche to have ever heard of either. Neither has a videogame which "normies" can play and get to know about the respective universes.
1D4chan has a lot of info on GW, including early history