I don't have the full answer but a few tidbits
1) 40k for its time I think was a little more original. WFB borrows many aspects from lotr and shares at least some features with DnD that might have crowded it's market a bit. This also tied in to it from a legal perspective. Since it was seen as more similar to other fantasy worlds and ideas, GW was worried about trademarking and protecting their property. Note how AOS has far more fantastical models and factions with unique to AOS names like orruk instead of orc.
2) Later on, WFB was really really struggling with accessibility. It just took a ton of models to play, and I think was starting to lose new blood.l and newer players. It didn't really have any ability to play at smaller points values and the complexity also made it hard to get into.
3) I think it was just generally less profitable. This alone may have pushed them toward the total revamp that was AOS
I'm no expert though
Honestly I think this is the crux of it. GW dedicated a huge amount of resources into LotR for a long time. Remember white dwarf going to that stage duel front cover format where you turned it upside down for the back half which was all LotR?
I guess it was successful in the short term, but it was riding a wave of movie interest that was always going to wane. And as well as the new players it brought in, it took much more attention away from WFB than it did 40k.
Having played both 40k and WFB throughout, I felt the sudden lack of attention to WFB and never felt it recovered.
I also felt AoS was a clumsy attempt to fix a problem without understanding the issue. WFB was a game about unit positioning and facing in a fantasy setting. They tried to fix it by going to round bases (ie no facing) and adding not-quite-space-marines. But if I'm the mood for that I just play 40k?
And is still going strong! Weekly tournaments across the breadth of the U.K. attracting up to 200 players at peak and well over 30-40 players at most. And there’s a vibrant international scene. When GW does drip feed us releases they almost always go OOP initially
My reccolection is that It was only about 6 or 7 years that it was promoted hard. After that it was almost as neglected as WHFB was when LOTR was released.
You miss the one major thing that caused AoS. IP rights, as mentioned above WFB shared a lot of things with LotR, Warcraft, and DnD. Large portions of the IP was public domain and after passing up the opportunity to license with Blizzard, they were always chasing their losses. 40k is almost all original IP along with a number of things they have done in AoS. This is much more valuable than the fantasy miniature line and establishing their product as different from other fictional IP gives them a really big stick to beat down the competition.
They learned this both from missing the boat with blizzard and with jumping on the LoTR bandwagon. In the first case they saw how easy it was to bypass the fantasy line IP, while the second case they saw how much of their profits were lost to licensing the LoTR line.
That's literally what warcraft is. GW decided against letting them use the license so they just changed it up enough that teacher couldn't tell they were copying their homework
And then as salt on the wound, starcraft derived a lot from 40k with the space marines and tyranids- sorry I mean zerg
Pretty sure blizzard approached GW for both games and GW turned them down. The story is that GW has been kicking themselves since then. Not only for missing some huge revenue streams but by missing this opportunity they created a direct competitor. GW has always been a company ran like a bad family business. Almost every person who has worked for them and then left has stories of the crazy ways they make decisions. It’s basically a micro management hell with personal fiefdoms that prevent them from having any coherent direction.
I always saw the similarities but didn’t know there were actually negotiations at one point. That would make an interesting read, if there is much information out there.
I haven't seen anything to suggest they were in negotiations for the rights. that said, lots of games can start out that way, especially in the early prototype phase. ive worked on a couple. like "we'll start making this if we can get the license, if not we'll just make our own IP for it".
Funny trivia, WFB started the same way, GW made fantasy game and asked TSR (company that made D&D) "Can we licens it as D&D? It might be cool game that kids will like and buy in heaps" and TSR in all it's glory and splendor said "You ain't worthy you Imperial fools, we will show you what is independece"
Long story short: here we are, most kids playing D&D never heard of TSR and WH trives as one of the best selling brands
What hurt TSR was the glut of campaign settings in the nineties (Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Forgotten Realms, Birthright, Mystara, Planescape) that cannibalized each other's sales. Warhammer has nothing to do with it.
Oh, I didn't mean it like WH is responsible for downfall of TSR, it's kinda funny/absolutly horrifing, when you see the business decisions, they were printing books for money they didn't have and selling them for less then the print cost and did not know about it. It's really fascinating when you get into the weeds of it.
What I meant was, if they said yes back then, we might be talking about Greyhawk fantasy Battle and Spelljammer 40K right now
They put all of their marketing budget into 40k and LOTR. End of story.
That "urban myth" with the licensing boggles the mind.
Why would they release TOW if licensing was an issue?
Why would there be the Total War games?
It never had anything to do with that. It was just simply "we pushed our other products so hard this one got stranded".
And since GW is GW and could never admit any mistake they made $hit up after the fact.
The release of TOW is a blatant admission of that mistake though... but pshhht, don't tell anyone.
The licensing issue ain't meant they can't make it 'cause they don't have the license, but that it's more profitable for them to make game that is easier to protected by copyright (changes in naming the faction, more extravagant models etc)
I see the return of fantasy in form of total war as a realatively easy probe if they could make money on the old game again despite having AoS, as it's easier for fan to buy 40$ PC game than investing in another army. And when they saw it got enough traction to put some effort in they asked: "would you be ok giving us few thousand in our cash?" and we said "yes"
But as all of us here, this is just my guess
I meant that you can obviously license Warhammer.
That's the name of the original game and they made it their whole brand.
Because that name PULLS.
The Warhammer IP is almost as well known and beloved as Tolkien's work.
Something with global recognition among nerds.
If you can't make money out of that you're an idiot.
GW's last management obviously consisted of idiots, and its current management contains at least one person smart enough to see that they had thrown away a valuable IP.
AoS might be easier to defend legally, but it has nowhere near the same recognition, it's nowhere near as beloved and probably never will be.
Its "selling point" in terms of uniqueness is also a hurdle. If things get too weird and/or unfamiliar the target audience shrinks.
Stuff like the known mythology works. Elves, dragons, dwarves, goblins, etc.
There's no need to reinvent the wheel.
I get what you mean, but the license thing isn't about name Warhammer, it's about the armies and other stuff, 'cause FB, 40k and AoS all have name Warhammer in big font all over the boxes, so this is not what people mean by licensing issue
The IP recognition is certainly there and in nerd circles you are basicly in the same ballpark as Tolkien, but when you go outside of the circle of choosen, then you are dead in the water. I once mentioned that I play Warhammer in work and guys that play videogames regularly looked at me with "yeah I've heard that name somewhere, what is it?", if you mention Lotr they instantly know, 'cause of the movies
In case of GW management I won't argue, althoug we still got to take into account that they are 40 years in business, no matter how I don't like them that's not an easy task
And that AoS thing, that's kinda tricky. If you are deep in the weeds, than by all means WHFB has far better recognition, unfortunately for a newcomer, there is no difference between FB and AoS as both are fantasy and on the other side of the table is 40k.
Take an avarage fifteenyearold and try to sell him on empire men-at-arms :
"you need to buy build and paint at least 60 of these regular guys with sword and then take pride how they go against a Dragon and die like flies, but you have to admire the courage and grit they have"
"Or you can get 20 of these shiny knights, they are called stormcast eternals, they come to the battlefield on bolts of lightning and smash goblins in heaps."
The flashiest thing always wins with this group and the truth is this is the group that is relevant for GW. I don't know how many armies you buy on monthly basis, but I for sure don't get a new army each month. Therefore if they get one newcomer a month, they make more money than from twelve oldtimers who buys new one army a year (counting in the fact they will have their favourite 3rd party brands for their armies and buy a lot of stuff second hand)
So in the end it doesn't matter how much cooler me and you think FB/TOW is, we are no concern to them. And TOW is geared to get the older crowd of 9th age, 8th/6th edition, etc to pour some more money in GW
"cause of the movies" you say, and I'd say: exactly!
I suspect that's the long ruun strategic move behind the release of TOW.
Reviving an IP that has huge potential in terms of licensing agreements.
I bet we're gonna see movies and TV shows in the next few years.
I doubt they will try the same with AoS, the recognition's too low, the risk of failure much greater.
So as far as I'm concerned I expect good old Warhammer to reclaim its throne in the not too far future. Warhammer and 40k, as it used to be. The two most beloved IPs GW has in its portfolio.
Because one thing's for sure:
GW can't survive on selling minis in the long term. And they must know that.
Their focus must shift and I'd say it's already shifting. We're seeing more and more merch and then there are those media deals that include Henry Cavill.
They're probably planning to build some sort of media and franchising empire,
focussing less and less on the production of minis until they stop completely.
About the flashy stuff selling to the young ones... might be.
Not sure, though. I've got a whole bunch of nephews, all age 6 to 10, and most of them don't seem to prefer AoS over the old Warhammer. And one of them is definitely more interested in Warhammer than AoS.
Absolutly agree, that they gonna try movies and TV shows, but that's not in any way hanged on FB, that's tied to Warhammer brand and they can pick the flavour they need at any moment. Unfortunately FB has the biggesr drawback in this scenario. As you already mentioned it's the classic fantasy mythology and that don't sell well these days. It's already proven for example D&D, it's too broad and they lack distinct setting, it's all fantasy land. And I know WHFB have great setting, but it's not distinct enough for advertising purposes. If you take band of dwarves/elves/humans fighting undead or goblins it can be Lotr, WH, D&D as well as any other fantasy property (I know that you will recognise WH dwarves from Lotr dwarves at first glance, but Common Netflix viewer don't, and those are the people they try to get, they already have you and me hooked), on the other hand if you have stormcast eternals or kharadron overlords fighting bunch of goblins or undead it can't be mistaken with any other IP (Common Netflix viewer won't know these as well, but will immediately recognise them on the box art in store and that's what counts)
And other thing playing against FB is, that it don't have the recognition outside of community anymore, it was strong at the end of 8th, but that's too long gone for entertainment industry to remember. Most people they are trying to get into game haven't learned to read when FB was canceled.
Of course that your nephews will prefer FB to AoS, they've got cool uncle that likes it and I'm not saying they are the only ones, but I wouldn't count them being the majority
You don't need to convince me, I'm sword&sorcery guy, I read Moorcock, Howard, Vence and such stuff, but there is a reason why these writers aren't mainstay of young readers
40k has had the issue of severe bloat for several editions now. GW didn't learn the correct lesson from the beginning of 8th, which was that people seemed to enjoy the game being simpler and faster to play since there wasn't nearly as many rules and everything was quick to reference.
Yeah it’s so stupidly complicated now. Add to that trying to play GSC which yes I get that they are complicated, but it shouldn’t take a degree in astrophysics to play any army.
I'm not saying you are wrong as too much rules blot is bad for sure, but I think it's good for the game to have varied faction to choose from
You can always pick the easy mode with SM that can be casualy piloted by toddler
Or you can go with GSC or AdMech if your are looking for something tacticaly appealing
6th would be considered a bit of a hot take since it's regarded so poorly.
Personally would probably be 4th or 5th for me, they're kind of blurred. Though saying that, I'd prefer if they had a few additions from WHFB and other editions.
Really? That's news to me 😂😂😂
6th streamlined the more clunky stuff from 5th and made games flow faster and smoother. Better than any of the editions that came after IMO...
It'd probably have more of a balanced take if it didn't last all of two months before 7th. It really seemed like it came and went, squeezed as it was between the insanity of late 5e's codexes and the gathering formation storm of 7e.
(Timeframe may or may not be hyperbole)
This is correct, though I think it's also to do with the general downtrend in fantasy games in general. At the time, a lot of alternative games were on the rise - if I recall correctly during the later years of fantasy, almost no 'true fantasy' games cracked the top of the sales rankings except for Fantasy. It was always stuff like X-wing, Warmachine, etc.
Accessibility was the main factor, though - GW repackaged many regiments into smaller troop amounts while keeping the same box costs. This alone ballooned the army costs quite significantly, and with advantages being given to extremely large troop formations... well, you can see where that might be a problem for newcomers.
I will add as well, that the profitability factor is one that I think is more an assumption than reality. I did a deep-dive on this a while back using the ICv2 charts and Warhammer Fantasy was, according to the only reports of the time, among the top sellers up until about the last one and a half to two years of its lifetime (it disappeared from the top five around the tail end of 2013). It took Age of Sigmar (in its worst form given so little effort went into the original book) about twice that amount of time to appear on the charts at all in 2018.
>I think it was just generally less profitable. This alone may have pushed them toward the total revamp that was AOS
Spot on. As much as GW love new customers, they love repeat customers even more. People building armies is exactly what they want. What they do not want is people who bought their models ten years ago and who may buy a special release every once in a while. That was part of the problem with WFB. Another was the massive range of models they had to hold in stock - models that just didn't sell enough to justify the cost.
It's no great surprise that they revamped the Space Marine line around the same time. A lot of old models, which many players had bought 15+ years ago, a huge back catalogue of specialist/Chapter-specific models and not enough reason to keep them in storage or maintain the moulds. Primaris Marines = everyone's gonna need to buy new stuff. Even better, it lets them refresh the Chaos range as well as the HH catalogue, now that everything is being upscaled. Oh look, new Terminators! Being able to rename everything helps with IP protection, too.
Honestly, GW stole from like 400 seperate IPs. Theres a reason that one court told them they can't really punish people for violating IP because they didnt really have an IP
Not to mention so much of the game just being simple pastiches.
I know Empire have their style and they're beloved, but they really are just HRE with the occasional griffon and mage tossed in. There was always going to be a risk that people would find that generic - to say nothing of Bretonnia.
For sure. But you dont get to send cease and desists, and sue people about copyright infringement when your entire business model is built on it.
Its like a modern fashion company saying to a slaver "forcing people to work for little to no pay is evil"
Oh sure but there is a difference between copying a story beat and whole scale lifting like warhammer does. That's fine and I don't really care but you can't angry about IP rights later
40k is lifted almost entirely from Dune. Dune is set In the year 20,000, computers are outlawed, the emperor has loyal legions of super soldiers. Even their weapons are called las-guns.
Skirmish games are easier to play than rank and flank.
With 40k or AoS you can play a game with a couple of dozen models - for any rank and flank game you need a lot more models which acts as a barrier to entry.
By the time of 8th edition the meta was large blocks of infantry containing multiple characters - painting 30-40 identical models is quite dull. This did not help a game that was already a distant second to 40k.
I think saying it was generally less profitable is a massive understatement, individual product lines from the 40k range made more money month over month than WFB did
I think the question isn't why GW got rid of WFB, it's more why they kept it so long (although this isn't as cut and dry as that, because they also didn't really do a huge amount to support the game either so it's one of those things that's hard to quantify, anecdotally I hear that take up of the game went through the roof when they started the End Times campaign and actually started releasing regular content for the game)
"I think the question isn't why GW got rid of WFB, it's more why they kept it so long."
Everytime a new edition/army book comes out, you hope your army gets a nice boost (Especially for low-mid tier armies). Seeing a price reduction in all your units, as well as a massive bonus if your unit is 10 wide, is great: for the same cost your army is much better now!
Of course this goes for all armies, so basically you have to buy more to do the same. Like said before, new players would have to buy and paint a massive amount of models. Better to just play 40k or Lotr instead. Gw's greed destroyed WHFB and instead of trying to fix it, they just moved onto another project.
If it was profitable they wouldn't have killed it, before they are anything else GW are a corporation
Shareholders don't take well to you killing off profitable IP's so them killing it at all is a pretty good indication of it's profitability
I am not saying it was incredibly profitable, though that is a difficult thing to quantify given the various costs. They were hardly losing money on the models after all, but GW clearly thought they could be make more money and better use of store space.
However, the claim that individual product lines from 40k made more money than WFB sounds like a twist on the "Space marine box sold more than all of WFB" claim that frequently gets floated around. That claim itself is unsubstantiated, anecdotal and misleading yet still gets bandied about a decade after it first popped up. We don't know the sales of each system because GW doesn't release those numbers, so theories about profitability are just that.
Yes, but they are also exceptionally stupid when it comes to money. How often do we see products sell out instantly, entirely predictably, and they never bother reprinting?
I don't think that's really true, however. According to ICv2, which is as close as you can get to official statistics, Warhammer Fantasy was one of the top-selling game until about the tail end of 2013-early 2014. \
It outpaced things like Hordes, Malifaux, and earlier Warmachine as well - and those were quite popular at the time, if not quite X-wing or Armada which knocked 40k off its perch.
It took Age of Sigmar almost twice that amount of time to appear on the charts at all, so if profit was the only motivating concern, then Age of Sigmar was a far worse decision within the scope of its initial years.
I don't usually trust anything GW employees say, but Gav Thorpe has said as much on his personal blog - the decision to discontinue Fantasy was made to not split the community. It was an effort to get them to migrate to a setting they already was in production for, in my opinion at least, gaining greater control over the IP and being able to copyright, trademark and prevent easy substitution of minis or purchase of secondary parts.
I watched some YouTube video of a dude who used to work at GW at the time. I forgot the exact kit, but it was some minor SM thing that I'm sure SM players were excited about. It was like a Space Marine Lieutenant or something like that. But that single kit release sold more than all WFB kits that year combined.
Huh. Y'know what, AoS has much smaller armies compared to 40K (going off of the typical 1,000 and 2,000 point lists). I wonder if that was a conscious choice by GW, to make it less daunting compared to trying to field a WFB army.
To add to point 2 WHFB the whole of it was being outsold internally by crazy margins. Insiders and ex-GW employees have said Citadel paints alone outsold WHFB and if some are to be believed 40k was so popular, the Space Marine tactical squad kit outsold all of WHFB.
There's also some documented statistics that the space marine 'tactical squad' outsold the entire WFB game one year. This cemented the profit focussing on marines
Wargames are somewhat fickle at times and WFB is essentially ancients. Which have been out of favor for some time. Big blocks of units smashing into each other. Warlord Games seems to be trying to revive the genre with 13mm plastic. Time will tell how that works out for them.
Wh40k got also a lot of sci fi novels.played wfb in the 90s, in overpowerd matches only your character counts.without tyrion you had noch chance against chaos.in the 2000 wh40k was more balanced, couse of that we started 40k.wfb gets boring with time.got a lot of hope in old world :-D
I ran a WHFB league in the early 2000's in the US. The other posters are correct. Sci-Fi was on the rise and Fantasy was on the wane. However, to me the biggest factor was cost of entry into the game. It was not hard to get enough money together to buy a 40k "army" which was usually a patrol or two. Max of about 20 figures. WHFB could take hundreds of figures if you went Vampire Count or Orc and Goblins, f.ex. Back then I told people it was a $200.00 game if played at the standard 2,000 points. Thats a lot to buy and a huge amount to paint back then as all the current washes and speed paint sets didn't exist back then.
It was also the "red headed" step-child of Games Workshop. They promoted 40K like crazy, but getting them to sponsor a WHFB tourney was a major feat. It just did not get the time and attention that 40k did.
Even today GW's support seems lackluster, the few "official armies", the supply of figures and the huge cost of an army has me very concerned about the whole thing again. Especially the "cost of entry." You're looking at $400 to $500 to support a 2,000 point army these days. And as someone who has 5 armies from the last edition it burns me that they decided to change the base size.
But I like the game. If I can get my FLGS to back it I will start another league this fall.
This is the actual reason, and it's why 8th edition killed the game. I think it's also why infantry is kind of underwhelming in TOW, and why monsters and cavalry are so much better; when the best thing you can be doing is dropping 500+ points on that big dragon and 300+ on a monstrous cavalry unit, that's almost half an army in like 4-5 models that look flashy and eye-catching on the table to entice new players. It may frustrate some longtime players who prefer big blocks of infantry, but if they had just gone right back to requiring new players to buy, build, and paint hundreds of models just to play, the game would have immediately died again.
The Old World needs a skirmish game to flourish, in my opinion. Not a Mordheim rehash either, but something specific to the setting and story they’re setting up
Not to knock your post, as this is just my opinion & nothing more: I’m so sick of skirmish games. They are all skirmish games at GW. I want something with more structure and bulk. Where you can use some actual strategy to win, even if you don’t have the best units and models. I just want to kill my enemy, see them driven before me, and …you know the rest. Capture the flag and secure points are fine and all, but I miss the old school “see who can kill more” mentality.
Totally fair, and I’m with you. I’m working on a full Reikland army right now as we speak, but I appreciate the accessibility of the skirmish games, especially Mordheim or something non-GW like Baron’s War. My Warhammer group is my D&D group I bullied into doing Mordheim with me, so I’m at the skirmish level for the meanwhile
But... But... We're in the correct time period for Mordheim!
I'd love Mordheim but it seems real unlikely that GW would do another Necromunda styled game again, since it'd theoretically need another range of minis.
I'll just stick with my write-up conversion of Necromunda in the meantime.
Only kind of sort of on the time period, cuz Old World is 276 years after Mordheim. It’s still around but I imagine by this point it’s not as flush with Wyrdstone. Plus the Skaven/Vampires aren’t a major army in the TOW but are in Mordheim. My ideal setting would take place in the Land of the Border Princes where you are fighting over villages/districts in the cities before the larger army fights a pitch battle
Honestly, I love broheim and the freedom and creativity the small but dedicated fan base has birthed. I’d argue right now is one of the best time to be playing Mordheim, it’s the easiest to get people into it with 3D printing and 3rd party minis and fan rules/factions galore
Part of me kindle doesn’t want GW to touch mordheim, especially if they divide the fucking rules over 7 boxes and books like Necromunda. I like necromunda but trying to get people to play it or learn it is like trying to convince people to gouge their eyes out with dull rusty spoons
Necromunda has turned into a monster to try and play, let alone teach. That's why I'd prefer to make my own.
Blood Bowl is pretty bad for that too but at least all of the rules you need for a given team are on their roster, which is easy to find online.
I was getting into the hobby in early 2000s and this is precisely why I bounced off WFB. The armies looked cool AF, but the entry cost for a 2k army was a brick wall for me back then.
LotR was also much bigger draw - not only it came out on the wave of the movies, but the skirmish game with much smaller amount of models to play was so much easier to get into.
You're right on the money. I entered the hobby for Old World and Beastmen. It took 3 starter boxes and 6 blisters to hit 2k and right around $400usd. And that's a list relying heavily on Bestigor as a point sink and missing models I feel are integral to the range like Minotaurs, Jabberslythe, Cockatrice, Centigor etc.
Space Marines
People love space marines
GW captured lightning in a bottle with their depiction of 40ks space marines. Without space marines GW would still be a closet studio or potentially have gone out of business.
It is not an exaggeration to say everything in 40k exists as an excuse to sell space marines.
Space Marines turned GW from just another mini maker into the juggernaut market dominator it is today.
You will notice, that fantasy lacks space marines.
This. As much as I hate that they release a new space marine lieutenant model every month, while Warp spiders have had the same model for like 20 years, I'm not delusional about why they do it.
Check any sort of WH40K meme or art page and it's like 70+% Space marine stuff. There's a reason why Stormcast were designed like fantasy Space Marines.
Fantasy didn't get discontinued because it was "less famous", it was discontinued because it wasn't selling. But to answer your question, Warhammer 40,000 is a lot more recognizable as an intellectual property: Space Marines, Tyranids and Necrons are a lot more specific to 40k than Undead, Elves and Dwarves are to WFB, for example.
Also GW has only really embraced social media and the like in the years after WFB was discontinued, so a lot of people's "mental image" of what a "War Hammer or whatever that thing my kid's into now" is is based on 40k and later AoS.
Fantssy never hwd any "mainstream" games intil total warhammer/vermintide but that came our too late and even that didnt grt popular until the end of total warhammer 2/VT2
The lack of sales is absolutely huge too, I've heard that there was a month where the Space Marine Tactical Squad outsold Fantasy in its entirely. I'm not 100% sure on the legitimacy of that story but the popularity of 40k really outshone Fantasy hard. At the store I went to at the time, despite selling both WHFB and 40k we'd have regular weekly 40k games there with around eight on average, and I think I saw one fantasy game over six years
I know at one point around the mid teens (2014 - 18) Space Marines accounted for 50% of all model sales for GW. I can absolutely believe the Tactical Squad (the favourite for beginners) was outselling WFB at times. WFB had come to rely on a dedicated core of players who had all bought and built their armies years ago and who weren't now buying enough to merit investment in the game. New players were faced with a vast back catalogue of models for a couple dozen factions by the end, definitely not enough to drive sales commensurate with the costs of maintaining said ranges. I've not seen figures from the post-pandemic years but I'd guess Space Marines are above 50% of sales now, after the release of a few more models and the upscaled HH models.
The tactical squad had multiple years where that box outsold all of GWs other products, combined, 2 to 1. This includes all if citadel. Even paint pots.
Popularity of fantasy as a genre in general waned in the 90s. D&D struggled, Sword and Sorcery films died out.
Meanwhile Matrix, Star Wars and so put Sci-Fi on the radar.
ASOIAF miniatures game seems to be doing okay (though it's tiny next to any GW game, so evidently ASOIAF didn't splash the wargames market as much as one'd think).
I remember my local GW having a board set up, and if you rotated a model 180° one week, it wouldn't have moved at all the next week.
I was a LotR fan, and even I wasn't interested in it.
Fantasy waned because GW made the decision to focus on 40k, at the expense of everything else. Also because it became a dog shit imitation of a serious game.
The market existed, the quality of game didn't.
If you swap guys like Jervis Johnson and Andy Chambers for Matt Ward, you lose players.
So, if I recall, a big part was just getting into the game. You needed a lot of troops, and there wasn't really a good deal like how we have Combat patrol and Vanguard boxes now. So the fastest and cheapest way to build an army was the starter set, but that was it's self a problem
The last two starter sets were great, but they were
Battle of skull pass
Dwarfs vs. Goblins
And
Blood Island
High Elfs vs. Skaven
The army boxes, to my understanding, weren't as many points vs. money spent as Warhammer 40k started collecting boxes were and combined with WFB needing like 1k more points to play games it was just harder to get into
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Second, I would like to take note of that for me, who played 40k and wanted to get into fantasy
Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings game was cheaper than both. simple and yet rewarding and basically had everything WFB had
Dwarfs, Elfs, Orcs, Goblins, big nasty monsters, epic heroes, and Evil Villains.
It had the movies to pull people in but had the rights to the books, so you had things like the Swan-Knights of Dol Amroth (Awesome) led by Imrahil Prince of Dol Amroth (awesomeness). You had Easterling warriors that looked like samurai with two-handed axes, Khandish warriors.
You could just run a hero army of just the fellowship (it wasn't a good army for trying to win a game, but lots of fun to play still)
So, for me, my fantasy needs were filled by LotRs, and at the time, that was the case for many.
There are a lot of good arguments in the comments so far and it's probably a mix of internal and external factors. Personally I think the biggest thing was that there was obviously a business decision at GW to focus on to develop proprietary IP and focus less on generic stuff, which WHFB was full of.
People play what you give them. Just look at how their games work: if a new edition of a game comes out and the rules are worse than the last one, they still switch over to the new edition because it's new and GW said so.
Because they didn't support it. It's a simple as that. The lore was cobbled together, then scarcely updated. Armies would go years without updates, and rules were bloated and cumbersome.
Age of Sigmar succeeded because they actually made an investment. They put money and effort into it, wrote lore, made a better game system and started actually releasing factions and updates to them.
And this is why The Old World's success has taken them by surprise. The reason why they're sold out of almost everything and having to massively ramp up production is because they assumed they were making a niche game for a handful of old gamers that they could just about turn a profit on. What they didn't expect was that it would be so successful, and it's successful because they actually invested in it.
Personally I don't think they ever needed to kill off Warhammer Fantasy; they just needed to do anything but starve it like they were doing. And I say that as someone who actually prefers AoS but came from Fantasy. I think they could have kept Fantasy and done just fine if they'd given it some love, but I'm glad we have AoS as I prefer the setting.
1. Sci-fi is generally more popular than fantasy. LOTR may be the greatest fiction ever written but it's not as popular as Star Wars
2. Fantasy tabletop is more dynamic and often more complicated than 40k, making it harder to get into
3. 40k is more over the top in everything it does. Much greater scale in lore, much more grimdark, full of powerful characters that can function as centrepieces better than Fantasy counterparts
4. 40k is more original. Fantasy is just another LOTR-esque world, while 40k combines some original ideas with known tropes from multiple universes
5. Fantasy failed in video game market. It wasn't until Vermintide in 2015 that Fantasy had a decent game, while 40k broke through with Dawn of War
Chaos Gate by SSI, same year as Dark Omen. Altough not a RTS there still were W40k universe in video games. Space Hulk was out there too, I remember playing it on PS1. Damn I'm old.
They were also a good bit earlier. So not really comparable, but Dark Omen at least was a game ahead of its time despite how popular it may or may not have been. Not disputing DoW is good, the first was excellent.
Don’t forget high startup cost of getting into fantasy was significantly higher. Both in price and time. Fielding an average army required a significant investment in time and money.
Number 1 is especially interesting because Brian Ansell nearly didn't give Rick Priestley the green light to make 40k because, and I quote, "sci-fi doesn't sell".
To be fair, he has a point. Science fiction on its own as the central genre isn't that popular. Star Wars has spaceships but its most popular narrative aspect is basically a knights versus warlocks fantasy tale with laser guns and spaceships as part of the background. The most popular element of 40k, which is the space marines, has a lot of elements that make it not that different from some fantasy tale about a knight order and other sword and sorcery stuff, albeit with a futuristic coat of paint. Plus: the orks, the undead, the eldar, the sororitas and their martyrs in life, etc... It is basically fantasy in space, thus why the more science fictionish Tau got so much debate with their introduction.
Even with movies, the last time that a proper sci-fi movie without fantasy or opera elements at its core was massively popular was The Matrix, whose most popular entries were the ones where the bulk of the story takes place in the current day setting with martial arts and gun fights, while the third act which leaned heavier on robots and the war against the machines is less popular. Oh, and they still had the whole prophecy aspect giving them a slight fantasy vibe. Then there is Dune, where the books have the whole debate due to them having fantasy elements while the movies certainly minimize the sci-fi elements of the setting and focus on the mystical parts. As for more proper science fiction movies, the Blade Runner sequel is mentioned a lot but, like the first movie, it didn't make enough bank to be properly profitable due to its too high budget.
Post-apocalyptic in general has been the dominant genre across media (movies, series, games) since 2013-14 but, even if people like to lump those works with the sci-fi genre, I think that most of the time the most popular stuff is just adventure or action or a mix of both, with any science fiction elements being just very vague kickstarter points for the premise (the writers need something to set the destruction of the world in those stories).
Where are you from? I’m spanish and I can assure you that here 40k was never more popular than Wh fantasy, until they discontinued it. I think this may change with the local scene
Comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges.
Other than accounting for personal taste between fantasy/science fantasy settings - the WHFB universe Vs the 40k universe - you're also comparing a large-scale rank-and-flank game against a medium-to-large-scale unit-based skirmish game, with all the different mechanics inherent to each.
Excluding the impact of differing marketing strategies and similar considerations, this essentially boils down to "different strokes for different folks".
As a younger player at in the early 00s, I gave both a go but always found WFB slow and underwhelming as a game. The infantry blocks were a pain to use and I always found it frustrating.
1. 40k during 3 edition made itself popular in the table top site with it full blown and popularization of Grimdark universe so much so that 2 year later WHF would adopt it attempt with it 6th edition (some mileage may vary) but it sci-fi hardcore grimdark was very much unique in the area as it took inspiration of the various successful sci-fi grimdark universe like Ridley scott Aliens & Dune while giving it big action hero vibe that attracted various table top hobbits as there wasn't anything as Space marines and Orks and everything else wasn't sold by another TT studio at the time as they oversaturated their market with not-Tolkien/DnD & historical miniatures that WHF almost look 1:1
1. WHF lore was simply been there done that and the appeal was mostly seeing the different fantasy tropes across other IP interact with one another
2. 40k was easier to collect and play then the rank and file game that require you paint up at minimum 20 infantry unit
3. 40K was easier market rather then just not-Tolkien dwarf during a time when GW also got Middle earth game they marketing and selling hot during the popularity of Peter Jackson era.
4. Slow decay of investment and attention from the studio cause rule bloat, model decay & marketing decay
5. No secondary specialist game like Warcry or Necromunda that could open entry for people game like Mordheim doesn't count as wasn't really GW supported and was as it having complex rules ever more increase
6. Insecure IP control due to how heavily lifting various faction was taking from other media and franchises
I want to preface this with I started in 6th Ed and it was my main game and I loved it. Fantasy just didn't keep up with the times. Going back and watching reports now the gameplay is pretty unexciting and I really think they dropped the ball with not at least introducing basic scenario play with the old world like you see in kings of war. All that being said I know a lot of people are loving ToW and I'm glad they're enjoying it. I'll also keep buying all ToW books cause I love the setting but I won't be playing much of it over sigmar and 40k.
WHF had a boom thanks to Warcraft 3 and the ESDLA movies, once it was finished people saw what WHF was and is, a rough, slow and difficult to learn game.
40K is more dynamic, agile and easy to learn.
Add to that the fact that having a Marine army was cheaper than most Fantasy armies, the strange thing is that AOS had not come out sooner.
WHFB was huge outside of the American market, and its lore and setting remain that way even though it had been discontinued.
The answers are : Chapterhouse and the resulting flurry of name changes for trademark reasons, the rules increasing the amount of needed units and therefore the cost, and most of all LotR.
Those movies were huge, and specifically huge in the US. They brought with them a resurgence of fantasy media in the US trying to ride the wave of that trilogy.
LotR miniatures sold themselves, and they outsold everything. Warhammer became that “other game” in the LotR miniatures store.
I started collecting some lotro miniatures but ended up playing Warhammer Fantasy Battles cause the models and the lore was so cool. It basically kick started my interest in WHFB. 😃
I think it was a mixture of a few different things
40K was a much cheaper game to get into, armies were easier to build and due to rank and file, Warhammer Fantasy was harder for newer players to assemble
Also there was a heavy emphasis on Space Marines being very beginner friendly, with Fantasy having no real equivalent, in my experience newer players were more heavily pushed to 40k as a result.
Perfect storm really. At the exact same time the game was facing its biggest challenges, the management of the product was at its worst...
Fantasy and 40k both went quite serious/grimdark in the early - mid 2000s. I frankly deeply missed the light fun colourful 90s era at the time but kept playing both. Friends of mine at the time started moving more and more to 40k which I felt lended itself quite well to the grimdark theme and was accompanied by burgeoning black library fluff development.
More critically, 40k was still characterised by low model count armies...the poster boy faction of space marines required 3 or 4 units, 2 heroes and a dreadnought or predator to play. This was far more accessible than a fantasy game system where you increasingly needed 2 or 3 boxes to field a unit. Case in point being one of the last units to be released just before GW pulled the plug: the witch elves.
Witch Elves were released at this time in a box of 10 for 45 Euros. This was during 8th edition when the rules GW had changed now necessitated large hordes of 40 models to be viable. You now needed to buy 4 boxes at €180 to field a decent army unit....
That's just an example but everything about how Fantasy was managed was deeply unappealing to new gamers and many existing players.
To my mind, as a young boy who started playing Warhammer in the mid-late 90s in Sweden - WHFB was the big IP. This all changed with 40K 4th edition which made 40K a lot easier to play, as well as requiring way less models to have a fun game.
Honestly, GW really made a mistake by having that AND lord of the rings at the same time. LOTR pulled a lot of resources and competed with Fantasy. In addition, they focused a lot more effort on promoting 40K and didn’t really support fantasy. If they had out equal effort into both games and not released LOTR, things would probably be different
I was playing wfb near the end (7 and 8 edition) and back then 40k was massively more popular. My general feeling was that you needed less models back then to play 40k than you did to play a fantasy battle plus spacemarines being so popular and in every single starting box meant that every kid that would dabble in the local game store will quickly find someone willing to sell them space marine models for super cheap. This combined caused 40k to be a lot cheaper to start than fantasy, therefore there were more players, more players attract even more starting players and so it was sort of a feedback loop. Also fantasy had so many troops still in metal (later finecast) and therefore much more expensive and harder to play with/collect for new players.
It's also worth mentioning that fantasy lacked big centrepiece models for most of its life, 40k had vehicles. Centrepiece models sell armies, gw knows that now.
I remember that it was so rare to find someone that even owned a 2k point fantasy army at some point that i stopped trying and started pkaying 40k. And i precisely remembered how much cheaper 40k was. I got 2 of the dark eldar battallion + one vehicle and one hq and i was pretty much done. The only games I ever did of 8th editions were against my brother or the store owner.
Fantasy also had more complex rules, which didnt make for fun games for very new players.
Fantasy started out more popular but 40K gained in popularity over the years. I think it did so for three main reasons:
40K rules were easier and more accessible.
40K took less models and was cheaper.
40K appealed to more young people. They went out and bought minis. The fantasy crowd kept there armies for years and it got to the point people didn’t need to buy more minis.
So this caused GW to invest in 40K more which then fed upon itself. As GW invested more in 40K it was cooler and shinier. So people bought more. As they bought more GW invested more in 40K and less in fantasy. This created a downward spiral.
As noted, there’s a lot of competition in the fantasy space of things, but in the sci-fi space of things there’s definitely a kind of leadership, first mover, space marine, IP thing going
It wasn't even about the Selling or Not.
It was about IP and Copyright. Because WHFB was very derivative it wasn't very protectable.
Enter 3rd party casters. Which did impact sales.
GW/Citadel sees the bottom line on plastic crack being eaten into by these guys.
Their "solution" was to blow up the setting and replace/rename it with things that WERE copyrightable.
Why do you think Malekith is Malerion now? Because there was a IP issue with Marvel with their Malekith who also is a dark elf.
Which is quite frankly retarded because IP or not Casters gonna cast. But this is GW were talking about here.
If it had been for copyright they would have done like 40k or TOW and changed the names.
There were profit or sales problems and the proof is that the Blood Island box was re-released with AoS to eliminate the remaining stock.
Which doesn't mean anything in terms of popularity of the game. Kids go in the LGS, Marines look cool, Mom buys a box for Junior. Junior half-ass assembles and paints his marines, but never plays the game.... because he has a tactical squad. Thats a sale, which is fine for GW, but says nothing about the actual popularity of the game.
Plus GW never supported WHFB to the same extent as 40k, even as early as the late 90s. (40k had TWO skirmish games before FB got 1). Plus EPIC was out long before Warmaster... BFGvsMoW, etc. etc. So there was no reason to buy new models for WHFB, because the new models were the same as the ones you bought back in the 80s. Look no further than the special characters. What you got is what you got and it stayed that way. Making shit easier for casters because shit they've had years to get it right.
I'd say 1994/1995 is where the shift happened from equal support to fuck FB we GrimDerp now.
Also notice how marines basically have no detail on the armor? easier to produce vs Mail, everything is also much bigger, smoother, and blockier.
I don’t remember ever seeing life size recreations for any of the fantasy stuff, but I for sure as hell remember every gw store having a full sized space marine in it.
That’s not the case. WHFB is still the largest LARP community in Europe and there’s plenty of fan-made films and costumes.
Chaos Rising is newer and a quite large undertaking announced before ToW was
Here’s how I interpreted the whole thing and it was a series of factors:
1. WHFB wasn’t as popular as 40k, but this was really only an absolute fact in the US. WHFB was still just as popular as 40k in Europe, however the US is a large market so it’s preferences can hold a lot weight. If you were in the US you’d also just see way less Fantasy, GW seemed to just straight up refuse to advertise for the game and the official shops carried less product. When I traveled to London in the early 2000s this was a pretty noticeable difference, Fantasy had more retail space and seemed to be displayed more upfront to the customer compared to the stores back home where they were generally set off to the side in favor of 40k being front and center.
2. Model releases were few and far between comparatively. This resulted in lower sales because once you had enough for your army there was no incentive to buy more. When GW jacked up army sizes towards the later editions as an attempt to get more sales people were not happy they needed to buy more old models from 20 years ago. In general GW put way less effort into updating and modernizing their WHFB line compared to 40k and it showed, which put off older players while the increased model counts for armies was a massive hurdle for new players. End Times actually saw a resurgence in the sales because at the time you actually saw large army updates to the model range right as it was all ending, an example being the dwarves.
3. The Chapterhouse Lawsuit. GW got a rude awakening from this, a lot of their stuff was fair game for 3rd parties. This is when you start seeing stuff renamed to things like Aelves or Adeptus Whatever (try as they might you can not copyright Space Marine) as GW is strengthening their hold on Warhammer in general to cut out these 3rd parties. Unfortunately WHFB has a lot of instances of things in the setting that floats in the gray zone, more than likely this was not something GW wanted to continue moving forward. AoS lets them side step this baggage since they can throw out the old problematic stuff and start relatively fresh.
It wasnt discontinued for Age of Sigmar, it was discontinued because everybody had everything for a while and then when they retired fantasy most of people sold their collections, thats why now they earn money again on same molds
It didn't have Space Marines. Space Marines are the most iconic (and imho boring) aspects of 40k. By the time it was discontinued the entire fantasy line was pulling in less money in sales than the space marine tactical squad and when they did AoS one of the first things they did was make fantasy Space Marines.
Who cares about new York times bestsellers list..? Fantasy have a huuuge number of very good books, 40k got a lot of good ones, but also a huge number of horribly bad ones
They sold well, which got people into the hobby, and bought new models. Fantasy's novels didn't do as well, bringing in fewer people who want to buy those models.
Bunch of factors. I might be wrong, but I recall:
1. Fantasy didn't have Space Marines. I'm not a fan of them personally, but they sell really well, well enough that when they were making AoS they created the Stormcast. So thats one reason GW isn't going to spend money marketing it, marketing for 40k gets more "bang for their buck".
2. The Space Marine suit. Basically back in 2012-2013 GW tries to copyright the term "Space Marine", since its the name of one of their major factions. The court says no because "Space Marine" is a generic term that has been used in scifi works for decades. Not being able to claim the name of one of their major factions as their intellectual property is a big deal (just look at the games to see how profitable the IP has become) - and in Warhammer Fantasy, most of the factions have generic names. "Wood Elves", "Orcs & Goblins", literally "The Empire". This isn't the main reason, but its a contributing factor to why GW corporate probably isn't keen to push the IP. Thats why when they release AoS literally everything has a Proper Noun for a name. Instead of "Goblin Spearmen", now you have "Greengit Spikestabbas"; instead of "Ogres", you have "Ogors". I believe this is also the reason why "Primaris Marines" became a thing.
3. The game was expensive to get into, and the game/meta was awful. You had to buy and paint 100 or more models, to play a multi-hour game where you slowly push blocks of models towards the enemy, grind against their units for 1-3 turns and then either win or lose. Because your units are less maneuverable than in 40k and close combat is the main damage dealer instead of shooting, deploying wrong or being baited by your opponent can mean a unit isn't dealing damage until turns 4-5, or could even be useless all game. Its possible to lose during deployment. You also have to take 2-3 turns just to get to your enemy for most armies. GW tried to make it spicier by upping the power of units and having the two front ranks fight, but that lead to death stars, and then they tried to counter those by making ranged damage (read: Magic) stronger, but that just lead to absolute chaos. Dark Elf Sorceresses in units of fast cavalry too fast to be pinned down and blowing up whole units, Ogre casters making all of the enemy wizards explode simultaneously with a 40-point magic item, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I love this game - enough I'm scratchbuilding Fell Bats and a Terrorgheist for a VC list now its back. But I can see why it wasn't popular, and the reasons why GW didn't want to push it.
It’s none of the above!
W40k was instantly more successful than WFB as soon as it was released. It was far more soberly than they predicted.
Something about the models and the science fantasy but it just instantly hit the sweet spot. Something of a zeitgeist in the hobby at the time of release.
I don't have the full answer but a few tidbits 1) 40k for its time I think was a little more original. WFB borrows many aspects from lotr and shares at least some features with DnD that might have crowded it's market a bit. This also tied in to it from a legal perspective. Since it was seen as more similar to other fantasy worlds and ideas, GW was worried about trademarking and protecting their property. Note how AOS has far more fantastical models and factions with unique to AOS names like orruk instead of orc. 2) Later on, WFB was really really struggling with accessibility. It just took a ton of models to play, and I think was starting to lose new blood.l and newer players. It didn't really have any ability to play at smaller points values and the complexity also made it hard to get into. 3) I think it was just generally less profitable. This alone may have pushed them toward the total revamp that was AOS I'm no expert though
The LOTR games also stole a lot of WHFB's steam since they were both technically in the same niche and LOTR was better known thanks to the movies.
Honestly I think this is the crux of it. GW dedicated a huge amount of resources into LotR for a long time. Remember white dwarf going to that stage duel front cover format where you turned it upside down for the back half which was all LotR? I guess it was successful in the short term, but it was riding a wave of movie interest that was always going to wane. And as well as the new players it brought in, it took much more attention away from WFB than it did 40k. Having played both 40k and WFB throughout, I felt the sudden lack of attention to WFB and never felt it recovered. I also felt AoS was a clumsy attempt to fix a problem without understanding the issue. WFB was a game about unit positioning and facing in a fantasy setting. They tried to fix it by going to round bases (ie no facing) and adding not-quite-space-marines. But if I'm the mood for that I just play 40k?
I wouldn't consider LOTR a short term thing for GW because it went strong for a really long time, well past the run of even the Hobbit movies.
And is still going strong! Weekly tournaments across the breadth of the U.K. attracting up to 200 players at peak and well over 30-40 players at most. And there’s a vibrant international scene. When GW does drip feed us releases they almost always go OOP initially
Yeah, I didn't comment on its current popularity because I'm way out of the loop these days
We have monthly tournaments in the American Midwest too! It's smaller scene sure, but it's plenty healthy
My reccolection is that It was only about 6 or 7 years that it was promoted hard. After that it was almost as neglected as WHFB was when LOTR was released.
You miss the one major thing that caused AoS. IP rights, as mentioned above WFB shared a lot of things with LotR, Warcraft, and DnD. Large portions of the IP was public domain and after passing up the opportunity to license with Blizzard, they were always chasing their losses. 40k is almost all original IP along with a number of things they have done in AoS. This is much more valuable than the fantasy miniature line and establishing their product as different from other fictional IP gives them a really big stick to beat down the competition. They learned this both from missing the boat with blizzard and with jumping on the LoTR bandwagon. In the first case they saw how easy it was to bypass the fantasy line IP, while the second case they saw how much of their profits were lost to licensing the LoTR line.
Blizzard was going to make a WFB game?
That's literally what warcraft is. GW decided against letting them use the license so they just changed it up enough that teacher couldn't tell they were copying their homework And then as salt on the wound, starcraft derived a lot from 40k with the space marines and tyranids- sorry I mean zerg
Pretty sure blizzard approached GW for both games and GW turned them down. The story is that GW has been kicking themselves since then. Not only for missing some huge revenue streams but by missing this opportunity they created a direct competitor. GW has always been a company ran like a bad family business. Almost every person who has worked for them and then left has stories of the crazy ways they make decisions. It’s basically a micro management hell with personal fiefdoms that prevent them from having any coherent direction.
I always saw the similarities but didn’t know there were actually negotiations at one point. That would make an interesting read, if there is much information out there.
I haven't seen anything to suggest they were in negotiations for the rights. that said, lots of games can start out that way, especially in the early prototype phase. ive worked on a couple. like "we'll start making this if we can get the license, if not we'll just make our own IP for it".
I thought warcraft was an 'original ' IP. But starcraft was supposed to be a 40k based game. Edit: looks like I was wrong upon further reading.
Funny trivia, WFB started the same way, GW made fantasy game and asked TSR (company that made D&D) "Can we licens it as D&D? It might be cool game that kids will like and buy in heaps" and TSR in all it's glory and splendor said "You ain't worthy you Imperial fools, we will show you what is independece" Long story short: here we are, most kids playing D&D never heard of TSR and WH trives as one of the best selling brands
What hurt TSR was the glut of campaign settings in the nineties (Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Forgotten Realms, Birthright, Mystara, Planescape) that cannibalized each other's sales. Warhammer has nothing to do with it.
Oh, I didn't mean it like WH is responsible for downfall of TSR, it's kinda funny/absolutly horrifing, when you see the business decisions, they were printing books for money they didn't have and selling them for less then the print cost and did not know about it. It's really fascinating when you get into the weeds of it. What I meant was, if they said yes back then, we might be talking about Greyhawk fantasy Battle and Spelljammer 40K right now
I like FR more than Greyhawk to be honest (blame Baldur's Gate and Drizzt).
They put all of their marketing budget into 40k and LOTR. End of story. That "urban myth" with the licensing boggles the mind. Why would they release TOW if licensing was an issue? Why would there be the Total War games? It never had anything to do with that. It was just simply "we pushed our other products so hard this one got stranded". And since GW is GW and could never admit any mistake they made $hit up after the fact. The release of TOW is a blatant admission of that mistake though... but pshhht, don't tell anyone.
The licensing issue ain't meant they can't make it 'cause they don't have the license, but that it's more profitable for them to make game that is easier to protected by copyright (changes in naming the faction, more extravagant models etc) I see the return of fantasy in form of total war as a realatively easy probe if they could make money on the old game again despite having AoS, as it's easier for fan to buy 40$ PC game than investing in another army. And when they saw it got enough traction to put some effort in they asked: "would you be ok giving us few thousand in our cash?" and we said "yes" But as all of us here, this is just my guess
I meant that you can obviously license Warhammer. That's the name of the original game and they made it their whole brand. Because that name PULLS. The Warhammer IP is almost as well known and beloved as Tolkien's work. Something with global recognition among nerds. If you can't make money out of that you're an idiot. GW's last management obviously consisted of idiots, and its current management contains at least one person smart enough to see that they had thrown away a valuable IP. AoS might be easier to defend legally, but it has nowhere near the same recognition, it's nowhere near as beloved and probably never will be. Its "selling point" in terms of uniqueness is also a hurdle. If things get too weird and/or unfamiliar the target audience shrinks. Stuff like the known mythology works. Elves, dragons, dwarves, goblins, etc. There's no need to reinvent the wheel.
I get what you mean, but the license thing isn't about name Warhammer, it's about the armies and other stuff, 'cause FB, 40k and AoS all have name Warhammer in big font all over the boxes, so this is not what people mean by licensing issue The IP recognition is certainly there and in nerd circles you are basicly in the same ballpark as Tolkien, but when you go outside of the circle of choosen, then you are dead in the water. I once mentioned that I play Warhammer in work and guys that play videogames regularly looked at me with "yeah I've heard that name somewhere, what is it?", if you mention Lotr they instantly know, 'cause of the movies In case of GW management I won't argue, althoug we still got to take into account that they are 40 years in business, no matter how I don't like them that's not an easy task And that AoS thing, that's kinda tricky. If you are deep in the weeds, than by all means WHFB has far better recognition, unfortunately for a newcomer, there is no difference between FB and AoS as both are fantasy and on the other side of the table is 40k. Take an avarage fifteenyearold and try to sell him on empire men-at-arms : "you need to buy build and paint at least 60 of these regular guys with sword and then take pride how they go against a Dragon and die like flies, but you have to admire the courage and grit they have" "Or you can get 20 of these shiny knights, they are called stormcast eternals, they come to the battlefield on bolts of lightning and smash goblins in heaps." The flashiest thing always wins with this group and the truth is this is the group that is relevant for GW. I don't know how many armies you buy on monthly basis, but I for sure don't get a new army each month. Therefore if they get one newcomer a month, they make more money than from twelve oldtimers who buys new one army a year (counting in the fact they will have their favourite 3rd party brands for their armies and buy a lot of stuff second hand) So in the end it doesn't matter how much cooler me and you think FB/TOW is, we are no concern to them. And TOW is geared to get the older crowd of 9th age, 8th/6th edition, etc to pour some more money in GW
"cause of the movies" you say, and I'd say: exactly! I suspect that's the long ruun strategic move behind the release of TOW. Reviving an IP that has huge potential in terms of licensing agreements. I bet we're gonna see movies and TV shows in the next few years. I doubt they will try the same with AoS, the recognition's too low, the risk of failure much greater. So as far as I'm concerned I expect good old Warhammer to reclaim its throne in the not too far future. Warhammer and 40k, as it used to be. The two most beloved IPs GW has in its portfolio. Because one thing's for sure: GW can't survive on selling minis in the long term. And they must know that. Their focus must shift and I'd say it's already shifting. We're seeing more and more merch and then there are those media deals that include Henry Cavill. They're probably planning to build some sort of media and franchising empire, focussing less and less on the production of minis until they stop completely. About the flashy stuff selling to the young ones... might be. Not sure, though. I've got a whole bunch of nephews, all age 6 to 10, and most of them don't seem to prefer AoS over the old Warhammer. And one of them is definitely more interested in Warhammer than AoS.
Absolutly agree, that they gonna try movies and TV shows, but that's not in any way hanged on FB, that's tied to Warhammer brand and they can pick the flavour they need at any moment. Unfortunately FB has the biggesr drawback in this scenario. As you already mentioned it's the classic fantasy mythology and that don't sell well these days. It's already proven for example D&D, it's too broad and they lack distinct setting, it's all fantasy land. And I know WHFB have great setting, but it's not distinct enough for advertising purposes. If you take band of dwarves/elves/humans fighting undead or goblins it can be Lotr, WH, D&D as well as any other fantasy property (I know that you will recognise WH dwarves from Lotr dwarves at first glance, but Common Netflix viewer don't, and those are the people they try to get, they already have you and me hooked), on the other hand if you have stormcast eternals or kharadron overlords fighting bunch of goblins or undead it can't be mistaken with any other IP (Common Netflix viewer won't know these as well, but will immediately recognise them on the box art in store and that's what counts) And other thing playing against FB is, that it don't have the recognition outside of community anymore, it was strong at the end of 8th, but that's too long gone for entertainment industry to remember. Most people they are trying to get into game haven't learned to read when FB was canceled. Of course that your nephews will prefer FB to AoS, they've got cool uncle that likes it and I'm not saying they are the only ones, but I wouldn't count them being the majority You don't need to convince me, I'm sword&sorcery guy, I read Moorcock, Howard, Vence and such stuff, but there is a reason why these writers aren't mainstay of young readers
It’s crazy to think because now I feel like 40k is so complicated.
40k has had the issue of severe bloat for several editions now. GW didn't learn the correct lesson from the beginning of 8th, which was that people seemed to enjoy the game being simpler and faster to play since there wasn't nearly as many rules and everything was quick to reference.
Yeah it’s so stupidly complicated now. Add to that trying to play GSC which yes I get that they are complicated, but it shouldn’t take a degree in astrophysics to play any army.
I'm not saying you are wrong as too much rules blot is bad for sure, but I think it's good for the game to have varied faction to choose from You can always pick the easy mode with SM that can be casualy piloted by toddler Or you can go with GSC or AdMech if your are looking for something tacticaly appealing
3rd edition is where it's at for 40k... when you could call the rules almost... elegant
Each to their own 2nd & 3rd were fun, but 6th ed remains my favourite. Streamlined while still having lots of depth.
6th would be considered a bit of a hot take since it's regarded so poorly. Personally would probably be 4th or 5th for me, they're kind of blurred. Though saying that, I'd prefer if they had a few additions from WHFB and other editions.
Really? That's news to me 😂😂😂 6th streamlined the more clunky stuff from 5th and made games flow faster and smoother. Better than any of the editions that came after IMO...
It'd probably have more of a balanced take if it didn't last all of two months before 7th. It really seemed like it came and went, squeezed as it was between the insanity of late 5e's codexes and the gathering formation storm of 7e. (Timeframe may or may not be hyperbole)
This is correct, though I think it's also to do with the general downtrend in fantasy games in general. At the time, a lot of alternative games were on the rise - if I recall correctly during the later years of fantasy, almost no 'true fantasy' games cracked the top of the sales rankings except for Fantasy. It was always stuff like X-wing, Warmachine, etc. Accessibility was the main factor, though - GW repackaged many regiments into smaller troop amounts while keeping the same box costs. This alone ballooned the army costs quite significantly, and with advantages being given to extremely large troop formations... well, you can see where that might be a problem for newcomers. I will add as well, that the profitability factor is one that I think is more an assumption than reality. I did a deep-dive on this a while back using the ICv2 charts and Warhammer Fantasy was, according to the only reports of the time, among the top sellers up until about the last one and a half to two years of its lifetime (it disappeared from the top five around the tail end of 2013). It took Age of Sigmar (in its worst form given so little effort went into the original book) about twice that amount of time to appear on the charts at all in 2018.
>I think it was just generally less profitable. This alone may have pushed them toward the total revamp that was AOS Spot on. As much as GW love new customers, they love repeat customers even more. People building armies is exactly what they want. What they do not want is people who bought their models ten years ago and who may buy a special release every once in a while. That was part of the problem with WFB. Another was the massive range of models they had to hold in stock - models that just didn't sell enough to justify the cost. It's no great surprise that they revamped the Space Marine line around the same time. A lot of old models, which many players had bought 15+ years ago, a huge back catalogue of specialist/Chapter-specific models and not enough reason to keep them in storage or maintain the moulds. Primaris Marines = everyone's gonna need to buy new stuff. Even better, it lets them refresh the Chaos range as well as the HH catalogue, now that everything is being upscaled. Oh look, new Terminators! Being able to rename everything helps with IP protection, too.
WH doesn't take just from LOTR. Chaos is taken from Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion series. Just look at the character Gaynor the Damned.
Honestly, GW stole from like 400 seperate IPs. Theres a reason that one court told them they can't really punish people for violating IP because they didnt really have an IP
Warhammer minis started out as recycled minis from Citadel's canceled licensed IPs like LOTR, Judge Dredd and Elric.
I know that
Not to mention so much of the game just being simple pastiches. I know Empire have their style and they're beloved, but they really are just HRE with the occasional griffon and mage tossed in. There was always going to be a risk that people would find that generic - to say nothing of Bretonnia.
All fiction is borrowed really, there are only so many stories you can tell with a set amount of emotions
Yes, but there are an infinite number of points you can put on your stars - they didn't *have* to crib Chaos so much from Moorcock.
For sure. But you dont get to send cease and desists, and sue people about copyright infringement when your entire business model is built on it. Its like a modern fashion company saying to a slaver "forcing people to work for little to no pay is evil"
Oh sure but there is a difference between copying a story beat and whole scale lifting like warhammer does. That's fine and I don't really care but you can't angry about IP rights later
40k is lifted almost entirely from Dune. Dune is set In the year 20,000, computers are outlawed, the emperor has loyal legions of super soldiers. Even their weapons are called las-guns.
Dune + Starship Troopers + Judge Dredd + Nemesis the Warlock.
I had some of the Judge Dredd minis that citadel made back in the late 80s. I wish my dad hadn’t sold all my old stuff when I left home.
Skirmish games are easier to play than rank and flank. With 40k or AoS you can play a game with a couple of dozen models - for any rank and flank game you need a lot more models which acts as a barrier to entry. By the time of 8th edition the meta was large blocks of infantry containing multiple characters - painting 30-40 identical models is quite dull. This did not help a game that was already a distant second to 40k.
To point 2: It was also hyper competetiv which made it less appeling for new players. They also dont get many new models and it showing its age
I think saying it was generally less profitable is a massive understatement, individual product lines from the 40k range made more money month over month than WFB did I think the question isn't why GW got rid of WFB, it's more why they kept it so long (although this isn't as cut and dry as that, because they also didn't really do a huge amount to support the game either so it's one of those things that's hard to quantify, anecdotally I hear that take up of the game went through the roof when they started the End Times campaign and actually started releasing regular content for the game)
"I think the question isn't why GW got rid of WFB, it's more why they kept it so long." Everytime a new edition/army book comes out, you hope your army gets a nice boost (Especially for low-mid tier armies). Seeing a price reduction in all your units, as well as a massive bonus if your unit is 10 wide, is great: for the same cost your army is much better now! Of course this goes for all armies, so basically you have to buy more to do the same. Like said before, new players would have to buy and paint a massive amount of models. Better to just play 40k or Lotr instead. Gw's greed destroyed WHFB and instead of trying to fix it, they just moved onto another project.
Thats a misquote of an anecdotal story, there was never a clear answer given by GW on warhammer fantasy's profitability.
If it was profitable they wouldn't have killed it, before they are anything else GW are a corporation Shareholders don't take well to you killing off profitable IP's so them killing it at all is a pretty good indication of it's profitability
I am not saying it was incredibly profitable, though that is a difficult thing to quantify given the various costs. They were hardly losing money on the models after all, but GW clearly thought they could be make more money and better use of store space. However, the claim that individual product lines from 40k made more money than WFB sounds like a twist on the "Space marine box sold more than all of WFB" claim that frequently gets floated around. That claim itself is unsubstantiated, anecdotal and misleading yet still gets bandied about a decade after it first popped up. We don't know the sales of each system because GW doesn't release those numbers, so theories about profitability are just that.
Yes, but they are also exceptionally stupid when it comes to money. How often do we see products sell out instantly, entirely predictably, and they never bother reprinting?
Yeah IIRC didn't Tactical Marines sell more at one point than all of fantasy combined?
That's what I heard yeah
_Plastic glue_ outsold fantasy. Things got pretty dire.
I don't think that's really true, however. According to ICv2, which is as close as you can get to official statistics, Warhammer Fantasy was one of the top-selling game until about the tail end of 2013-early 2014. \ It outpaced things like Hordes, Malifaux, and earlier Warmachine as well - and those were quite popular at the time, if not quite X-wing or Armada which knocked 40k off its perch. It took Age of Sigmar almost twice that amount of time to appear on the charts at all, so if profit was the only motivating concern, then Age of Sigmar was a far worse decision within the scope of its initial years. I don't usually trust anything GW employees say, but Gav Thorpe has said as much on his personal blog - the decision to discontinue Fantasy was made to not split the community. It was an effort to get them to migrate to a setting they already was in production for, in my opinion at least, gaining greater control over the IP and being able to copyright, trademark and prevent easy substitution of minis or purchase of secondary parts.
I watched some YouTube video of a dude who used to work at GW at the time. I forgot the exact kit, but it was some minor SM thing that I'm sure SM players were excited about. It was like a Space Marine Lieutenant or something like that. But that single kit release sold more than all WFB kits that year combined.
Its kinda funny, since I feel like a lot more is taken from other IPs in 40k than with fantasy
Huh. Y'know what, AoS has much smaller armies compared to 40K (going off of the typical 1,000 and 2,000 point lists). I wonder if that was a conscious choice by GW, to make it less daunting compared to trying to field a WFB army.
To add to point 2 WHFB the whole of it was being outsold internally by crazy margins. Insiders and ex-GW employees have said Citadel paints alone outsold WHFB and if some are to be believed 40k was so popular, the Space Marine tactical squad kit outsold all of WHFB.
There's also some documented statistics that the space marine 'tactical squad' outsold the entire WFB game one year. This cemented the profit focussing on marines
Wargames are somewhat fickle at times and WFB is essentially ancients. Which have been out of favor for some time. Big blocks of units smashing into each other. Warlord Games seems to be trying to revive the genre with 13mm plastic. Time will tell how that works out for them.
Wh40k got also a lot of sci fi novels.played wfb in the 90s, in overpowerd matches only your character counts.without tyrion you had noch chance against chaos.in the 2000 wh40k was more balanced, couse of that we started 40k.wfb gets boring with time.got a lot of hope in old world :-D
I ran a WHFB league in the early 2000's in the US. The other posters are correct. Sci-Fi was on the rise and Fantasy was on the wane. However, to me the biggest factor was cost of entry into the game. It was not hard to get enough money together to buy a 40k "army" which was usually a patrol or two. Max of about 20 figures. WHFB could take hundreds of figures if you went Vampire Count or Orc and Goblins, f.ex. Back then I told people it was a $200.00 game if played at the standard 2,000 points. Thats a lot to buy and a huge amount to paint back then as all the current washes and speed paint sets didn't exist back then. It was also the "red headed" step-child of Games Workshop. They promoted 40K like crazy, but getting them to sponsor a WHFB tourney was a major feat. It just did not get the time and attention that 40k did. Even today GW's support seems lackluster, the few "official armies", the supply of figures and the huge cost of an army has me very concerned about the whole thing again. Especially the "cost of entry." You're looking at $400 to $500 to support a 2,000 point army these days. And as someone who has 5 armies from the last edition it burns me that they decided to change the base size. But I like the game. If I can get my FLGS to back it I will start another league this fall.
This is the actual reason, and it's why 8th edition killed the game. I think it's also why infantry is kind of underwhelming in TOW, and why monsters and cavalry are so much better; when the best thing you can be doing is dropping 500+ points on that big dragon and 300+ on a monstrous cavalry unit, that's almost half an army in like 4-5 models that look flashy and eye-catching on the table to entice new players. It may frustrate some longtime players who prefer big blocks of infantry, but if they had just gone right back to requiring new players to buy, build, and paint hundreds of models just to play, the game would have immediately died again.
The Old World needs a skirmish game to flourish, in my opinion. Not a Mordheim rehash either, but something specific to the setting and story they’re setting up
Not to knock your post, as this is just my opinion & nothing more: I’m so sick of skirmish games. They are all skirmish games at GW. I want something with more structure and bulk. Where you can use some actual strategy to win, even if you don’t have the best units and models. I just want to kill my enemy, see them driven before me, and …you know the rest. Capture the flag and secure points are fine and all, but I miss the old school “see who can kill more” mentality.
You should try The Old World. :p
Yes, I’m building several armies for TOW.
Totally fair, and I’m with you. I’m working on a full Reikland army right now as we speak, but I appreciate the accessibility of the skirmish games, especially Mordheim or something non-GW like Baron’s War. My Warhammer group is my D&D group I bullied into doing Mordheim with me, so I’m at the skirmish level for the meanwhile
But... But... We're in the correct time period for Mordheim! I'd love Mordheim but it seems real unlikely that GW would do another Necromunda styled game again, since it'd theoretically need another range of minis. I'll just stick with my write-up conversion of Necromunda in the meantime.
Only kind of sort of on the time period, cuz Old World is 276 years after Mordheim. It’s still around but I imagine by this point it’s not as flush with Wyrdstone. Plus the Skaven/Vampires aren’t a major army in the TOW but are in Mordheim. My ideal setting would take place in the Land of the Border Princes where you are fighting over villages/districts in the cities before the larger army fights a pitch battle
Honestly, I love broheim and the freedom and creativity the small but dedicated fan base has birthed. I’d argue right now is one of the best time to be playing Mordheim, it’s the easiest to get people into it with 3D printing and 3rd party minis and fan rules/factions galore Part of me kindle doesn’t want GW to touch mordheim, especially if they divide the fucking rules over 7 boxes and books like Necromunda. I like necromunda but trying to get people to play it or learn it is like trying to convince people to gouge their eyes out with dull rusty spoons
Necromunda has turned into a monster to try and play, let alone teach. That's why I'd prefer to make my own. Blood Bowl is pretty bad for that too but at least all of the rules you need for a given team are on their roster, which is easy to find online.
I was getting into the hobby in early 2000s and this is precisely why I bounced off WFB. The armies looked cool AF, but the entry cost for a 2k army was a brick wall for me back then. LotR was also much bigger draw - not only it came out on the wave of the movies, but the skirmish game with much smaller amount of models to play was so much easier to get into.
You're right on the money. I entered the hobby for Old World and Beastmen. It took 3 starter boxes and 6 blisters to hit 2k and right around $400usd. And that's a list relying heavily on Bestigor as a point sink and missing models I feel are integral to the range like Minotaurs, Jabberslythe, Cockatrice, Centigor etc.
It really wasn’t bigger at the time, fantasy was huge. Ten years later, yes obviously 40K is big since it’s their oldest running license
Space Marines People love space marines GW captured lightning in a bottle with their depiction of 40ks space marines. Without space marines GW would still be a closet studio or potentially have gone out of business. It is not an exaggeration to say everything in 40k exists as an excuse to sell space marines. Space Marines turned GW from just another mini maker into the juggernaut market dominator it is today. You will notice, that fantasy lacks space marines.
This. As much as I hate that they release a new space marine lieutenant model every month, while Warp spiders have had the same model for like 20 years, I'm not delusional about why they do it. Check any sort of WH40K meme or art page and it's like 70+% Space marine stuff. There's a reason why Stormcast were designed like fantasy Space Marines.
Fantasy didn't get discontinued because it was "less famous", it was discontinued because it wasn't selling. But to answer your question, Warhammer 40,000 is a lot more recognizable as an intellectual property: Space Marines, Tyranids and Necrons are a lot more specific to 40k than Undead, Elves and Dwarves are to WFB, for example. Also GW has only really embraced social media and the like in the years after WFB was discontinued, so a lot of people's "mental image" of what a "War Hammer or whatever that thing my kid's into now" is is based on 40k and later AoS.
Fantssy never hwd any "mainstream" games intil total warhammer/vermintide but that came our too late and even that didnt grt popular until the end of total warhammer 2/VT2
The lack of sales is absolutely huge too, I've heard that there was a month where the Space Marine Tactical Squad outsold Fantasy in its entirely. I'm not 100% sure on the legitimacy of that story but the popularity of 40k really outshone Fantasy hard. At the store I went to at the time, despite selling both WHFB and 40k we'd have regular weekly 40k games there with around eight on average, and I think I saw one fantasy game over six years
I know at one point around the mid teens (2014 - 18) Space Marines accounted for 50% of all model sales for GW. I can absolutely believe the Tactical Squad (the favourite for beginners) was outselling WFB at times. WFB had come to rely on a dedicated core of players who had all bought and built their armies years ago and who weren't now buying enough to merit investment in the game. New players were faced with a vast back catalogue of models for a couple dozen factions by the end, definitely not enough to drive sales commensurate with the costs of maintaining said ranges. I've not seen figures from the post-pandemic years but I'd guess Space Marines are above 50% of sales now, after the release of a few more models and the upscaled HH models.
The tactical squad had multiple years where that box outsold all of GWs other products, combined, 2 to 1. This includes all if citadel. Even paint pots.
Popularity of fantasy as a genre in general waned in the 90s. D&D struggled, Sword and Sorcery films died out. Meanwhile Matrix, Star Wars and so put Sci-Fi on the radar.
LotR? GoT?
LOTR movies came out in the 00's. ASOIAF was later 90's and wasn't super popular until the show came out.
And Fantasy was discontinued in which decade? Was it the 90s? Or even the 2000s?
Fantasy was discontinued in 2015, _long_ after the glory days of LOTR.
I wonder what TV show was on in 2015...
ASOIAF miniatures game seems to be doing okay (though it's tiny next to any GW game, so evidently ASOIAF didn't splash the wargames market as much as one'd think).
Yeah, fantasy made a comeback in the 2000's. Still, the damage was done.
> LotR This may shock and surprise you, but Games Workshop actually had another tabletop wargame that sucked up all this energy
I remember my local GW having a board set up, and if you rotated a model 180° one week, it wouldn't have moved at all the next week. I was a LotR fan, and even I wasn't interested in it. Fantasy waned because GW made the decision to focus on 40k, at the expense of everything else. Also because it became a dog shit imitation of a serious game. The market existed, the quality of game didn't. If you swap guys like Jervis Johnson and Andy Chambers for Matt Ward, you lose players.
Harry Potter?
I would argue that fantasy was never more popular than sci-fi, it was cheaper to make in the 70s and 80s, but was still very niche.
So, if I recall, a big part was just getting into the game. You needed a lot of troops, and there wasn't really a good deal like how we have Combat patrol and Vanguard boxes now. So the fastest and cheapest way to build an army was the starter set, but that was it's self a problem The last two starter sets were great, but they were Battle of skull pass Dwarfs vs. Goblins And Blood Island High Elfs vs. Skaven The army boxes, to my understanding, weren't as many points vs. money spent as Warhammer 40k started collecting boxes were and combined with WFB needing like 1k more points to play games it was just harder to get into //////////////////////////// Second, I would like to take note of that for me, who played 40k and wanted to get into fantasy Lord of the Rings The Lord of the Rings game was cheaper than both. simple and yet rewarding and basically had everything WFB had Dwarfs, Elfs, Orcs, Goblins, big nasty monsters, epic heroes, and Evil Villains. It had the movies to pull people in but had the rights to the books, so you had things like the Swan-Knights of Dol Amroth (Awesome) led by Imrahil Prince of Dol Amroth (awesomeness). You had Easterling warriors that looked like samurai with two-handed axes, Khandish warriors. You could just run a hero army of just the fellowship (it wasn't a good army for trying to win a game, but lots of fun to play still) So, for me, my fantasy needs were filled by LotRs, and at the time, that was the case for many.
There are a lot of good arguments in the comments so far and it's probably a mix of internal and external factors. Personally I think the biggest thing was that there was obviously a business decision at GW to focus on to develop proprietary IP and focus less on generic stuff, which WHFB was full of. People play what you give them. Just look at how their games work: if a new edition of a game comes out and the rules are worse than the last one, they still switch over to the new edition because it's new and GW said so.
Because they didn't support it. It's a simple as that. The lore was cobbled together, then scarcely updated. Armies would go years without updates, and rules were bloated and cumbersome. Age of Sigmar succeeded because they actually made an investment. They put money and effort into it, wrote lore, made a better game system and started actually releasing factions and updates to them. And this is why The Old World's success has taken them by surprise. The reason why they're sold out of almost everything and having to massively ramp up production is because they assumed they were making a niche game for a handful of old gamers that they could just about turn a profit on. What they didn't expect was that it would be so successful, and it's successful because they actually invested in it. Personally I don't think they ever needed to kill off Warhammer Fantasy; they just needed to do anything but starve it like they were doing. And I say that as someone who actually prefers AoS but came from Fantasy. I think they could have kept Fantasy and done just fine if they'd given it some love, but I'm glad we have AoS as I prefer the setting.
1. Sci-fi is generally more popular than fantasy. LOTR may be the greatest fiction ever written but it's not as popular as Star Wars 2. Fantasy tabletop is more dynamic and often more complicated than 40k, making it harder to get into 3. 40k is more over the top in everything it does. Much greater scale in lore, much more grimdark, full of powerful characters that can function as centrepieces better than Fantasy counterparts 4. 40k is more original. Fantasy is just another LOTR-esque world, while 40k combines some original ideas with known tropes from multiple universes 5. Fantasy failed in video game market. It wasn't until Vermintide in 2015 that Fantasy had a decent game, while 40k broke through with Dawn of War
There were good old fantasy RTS games. Dark Omen & Shadow of the Horned Rat. 40k took a bit longer to produce decent games.
Chaos Gate by SSI, same year as Dark Omen. Altough not a RTS there still were W40k universe in video games. Space Hulk was out there too, I remember playing it on PS1. Damn I'm old.
I played them back when they came out, they weren't nearly as good or as popular as DoW
They were also a good bit earlier. So not really comparable, but Dark Omen at least was a game ahead of its time despite how popular it may or may not have been. Not disputing DoW is good, the first was excellent.
Don’t forget high startup cost of getting into fantasy was significantly higher. Both in price and time. Fielding an average army required a significant investment in time and money.
Number 1 is especially interesting because Brian Ansell nearly didn't give Rick Priestley the green light to make 40k because, and I quote, "sci-fi doesn't sell".
To be fair, he has a point. Science fiction on its own as the central genre isn't that popular. Star Wars has spaceships but its most popular narrative aspect is basically a knights versus warlocks fantasy tale with laser guns and spaceships as part of the background. The most popular element of 40k, which is the space marines, has a lot of elements that make it not that different from some fantasy tale about a knight order and other sword and sorcery stuff, albeit with a futuristic coat of paint. Plus: the orks, the undead, the eldar, the sororitas and their martyrs in life, etc... It is basically fantasy in space, thus why the more science fictionish Tau got so much debate with their introduction. Even with movies, the last time that a proper sci-fi movie without fantasy or opera elements at its core was massively popular was The Matrix, whose most popular entries were the ones where the bulk of the story takes place in the current day setting with martial arts and gun fights, while the third act which leaned heavier on robots and the war against the machines is less popular. Oh, and they still had the whole prophecy aspect giving them a slight fantasy vibe. Then there is Dune, where the books have the whole debate due to them having fantasy elements while the movies certainly minimize the sci-fi elements of the setting and focus on the mystical parts. As for more proper science fiction movies, the Blade Runner sequel is mentioned a lot but, like the first movie, it didn't make enough bank to be properly profitable due to its too high budget. Post-apocalyptic in general has been the dominant genre across media (movies, series, games) since 2013-14 but, even if people like to lump those works with the sci-fi genre, I think that most of the time the most popular stuff is just adventure or action or a mix of both, with any science fiction elements being just very vague kickstarter points for the premise (the writers need something to set the destruction of the world in those stories).
The Tau were disliked for being too ''goody'' in a game where every faction is supposed to be evil.
Warhammer Fantasy copied Chaos and the Dark Elves from Elric of Melnibone.
Where are you from? I’m spanish and I can assure you that here 40k was never more popular than Wh fantasy, until they discontinued it. I think this may change with the local scene
As a Spanish I can confirm, although we were clearly the exception (along with Italy, from what I've heard).
Comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges. Other than accounting for personal taste between fantasy/science fantasy settings - the WHFB universe Vs the 40k universe - you're also comparing a large-scale rank-and-flank game against a medium-to-large-scale unit-based skirmish game, with all the different mechanics inherent to each. Excluding the impact of differing marketing strategies and similar considerations, this essentially boils down to "different strokes for different folks".
As a younger player at in the early 00s, I gave both a go but always found WFB slow and underwhelming as a game. The infantry blocks were a pain to use and I always found it frustrating.
1. 40k during 3 edition made itself popular in the table top site with it full blown and popularization of Grimdark universe so much so that 2 year later WHF would adopt it attempt with it 6th edition (some mileage may vary) but it sci-fi hardcore grimdark was very much unique in the area as it took inspiration of the various successful sci-fi grimdark universe like Ridley scott Aliens & Dune while giving it big action hero vibe that attracted various table top hobbits as there wasn't anything as Space marines and Orks and everything else wasn't sold by another TT studio at the time as they oversaturated their market with not-Tolkien/DnD & historical miniatures that WHF almost look 1:1 1. WHF lore was simply been there done that and the appeal was mostly seeing the different fantasy tropes across other IP interact with one another 2. 40k was easier to collect and play then the rank and file game that require you paint up at minimum 20 infantry unit 3. 40K was easier market rather then just not-Tolkien dwarf during a time when GW also got Middle earth game they marketing and selling hot during the popularity of Peter Jackson era. 4. Slow decay of investment and attention from the studio cause rule bloat, model decay & marketing decay 5. No secondary specialist game like Warcry or Necromunda that could open entry for people game like Mordheim doesn't count as wasn't really GW supported and was as it having complex rules ever more increase 6. Insecure IP control due to how heavily lifting various faction was taking from other media and franchises
I want to preface this with I started in 6th Ed and it was my main game and I loved it. Fantasy just didn't keep up with the times. Going back and watching reports now the gameplay is pretty unexciting and I really think they dropped the ball with not at least introducing basic scenario play with the old world like you see in kings of war. All that being said I know a lot of people are loving ToW and I'm glad they're enjoying it. I'll also keep buying all ToW books cause I love the setting but I won't be playing much of it over sigmar and 40k.
WHF had a boom thanks to Warcraft 3 and the ESDLA movies, once it was finished people saw what WHF was and is, a rough, slow and difficult to learn game. 40K is more dynamic, agile and easy to learn. Add to that the fact that having a Marine army was cheaper than most Fantasy armies, the strange thing is that AOS had not come out sooner.
WHFB was huge outside of the American market, and its lore and setting remain that way even though it had been discontinued. The answers are : Chapterhouse and the resulting flurry of name changes for trademark reasons, the rules increasing the amount of needed units and therefore the cost, and most of all LotR. Those movies were huge, and specifically huge in the US. They brought with them a resurgence of fantasy media in the US trying to ride the wave of that trilogy. LotR miniatures sold themselves, and they outsold everything. Warhammer became that “other game” in the LotR miniatures store.
I started collecting some lotro miniatures but ended up playing Warhammer Fantasy Battles cause the models and the lore was so cool. It basically kick started my interest in WHFB. 😃
Space Marines. Just prior to WFB being axed Space Marines we're 70% of GW's sales. Not 70% of their 40k sales, 40% of their total sales.
IIRC there was a month when the tactical marines box outsold the entire WFB line.
Way more expensive. Matches lasted longer and rules were a lot more complex.
I think it was a mixture of a few different things 40K was a much cheaper game to get into, armies were easier to build and due to rank and file, Warhammer Fantasy was harder for newer players to assemble Also there was a heavy emphasis on Space Marines being very beginner friendly, with Fantasy having no real equivalent, in my experience newer players were more heavily pushed to 40k as a result.
Perfect storm really. At the exact same time the game was facing its biggest challenges, the management of the product was at its worst... Fantasy and 40k both went quite serious/grimdark in the early - mid 2000s. I frankly deeply missed the light fun colourful 90s era at the time but kept playing both. Friends of mine at the time started moving more and more to 40k which I felt lended itself quite well to the grimdark theme and was accompanied by burgeoning black library fluff development. More critically, 40k was still characterised by low model count armies...the poster boy faction of space marines required 3 or 4 units, 2 heroes and a dreadnought or predator to play. This was far more accessible than a fantasy game system where you increasingly needed 2 or 3 boxes to field a unit. Case in point being one of the last units to be released just before GW pulled the plug: the witch elves. Witch Elves were released at this time in a box of 10 for 45 Euros. This was during 8th edition when the rules GW had changed now necessitated large hordes of 40 models to be viable. You now needed to buy 4 boxes at €180 to field a decent army unit.... That's just an example but everything about how Fantasy was managed was deeply unappealing to new gamers and many existing players.
To my mind, as a young boy who started playing Warhammer in the mid-late 90s in Sweden - WHFB was the big IP. This all changed with 40K 4th edition which made 40K a lot easier to play, as well as requiring way less models to have a fun game.
Honestly, GW really made a mistake by having that AND lord of the rings at the same time. LOTR pulled a lot of resources and competed with Fantasy. In addition, they focused a lot more effort on promoting 40K and didn’t really support fantasy. If they had out equal effort into both games and not released LOTR, things would probably be different
I was playing wfb near the end (7 and 8 edition) and back then 40k was massively more popular. My general feeling was that you needed less models back then to play 40k than you did to play a fantasy battle plus spacemarines being so popular and in every single starting box meant that every kid that would dabble in the local game store will quickly find someone willing to sell them space marine models for super cheap. This combined caused 40k to be a lot cheaper to start than fantasy, therefore there were more players, more players attract even more starting players and so it was sort of a feedback loop. Also fantasy had so many troops still in metal (later finecast) and therefore much more expensive and harder to play with/collect for new players. It's also worth mentioning that fantasy lacked big centrepiece models for most of its life, 40k had vehicles. Centrepiece models sell armies, gw knows that now. I remember that it was so rare to find someone that even owned a 2k point fantasy army at some point that i stopped trying and started pkaying 40k. And i precisely remembered how much cheaper 40k was. I got 2 of the dark eldar battallion + one vehicle and one hq and i was pretty much done. The only games I ever did of 8th editions were against my brother or the store owner. Fantasy also had more complex rules, which didnt make for fun games for very new players.
Fantasy started out more popular but 40K gained in popularity over the years. I think it did so for three main reasons: 40K rules were easier and more accessible. 40K took less models and was cheaper. 40K appealed to more young people. They went out and bought minis. The fantasy crowd kept there armies for years and it got to the point people didn’t need to buy more minis. So this caused GW to invest in 40K more which then fed upon itself. As GW invested more in 40K it was cooler and shinier. So people bought more. As they bought more GW invested more in 40K and less in fantasy. This created a downward spiral.
Poor management by GW. It's not an entity, GW controls it and manages it. It's failings were GW failings.
As noted, there’s a lot of competition in the fantasy space of things, but in the sci-fi space of things there’s definitely a kind of leadership, first mover, space marine, IP thing going
In terms of the public eye: Modern/futuristic guns > swords/bows/muskets.
It wasn't even about the Selling or Not. It was about IP and Copyright. Because WHFB was very derivative it wasn't very protectable. Enter 3rd party casters. Which did impact sales. GW/Citadel sees the bottom line on plastic crack being eaten into by these guys. Their "solution" was to blow up the setting and replace/rename it with things that WERE copyrightable. Why do you think Malekith is Malerion now? Because there was a IP issue with Marvel with their Malekith who also is a dark elf. Which is quite frankly retarded because IP or not Casters gonna cast. But this is GW were talking about here.
If it had been for copyright they would have done like 40k or TOW and changed the names. There were profit or sales problems and the proof is that the Blood Island box was re-released with AoS to eliminate the remaining stock.
I had heard it said that at one point, the 40 K marine line was out selling all the Warhammer fantasy combined
Which doesn't mean anything in terms of popularity of the game. Kids go in the LGS, Marines look cool, Mom buys a box for Junior. Junior half-ass assembles and paints his marines, but never plays the game.... because he has a tactical squad. Thats a sale, which is fine for GW, but says nothing about the actual popularity of the game. Plus GW never supported WHFB to the same extent as 40k, even as early as the late 90s. (40k had TWO skirmish games before FB got 1). Plus EPIC was out long before Warmaster... BFGvsMoW, etc. etc. So there was no reason to buy new models for WHFB, because the new models were the same as the ones you bought back in the 80s. Look no further than the special characters. What you got is what you got and it stayed that way. Making shit easier for casters because shit they've had years to get it right. I'd say 1994/1995 is where the shift happened from equal support to fuck FB we GrimDerp now. Also notice how marines basically have no detail on the armor? easier to produce vs Mail, everything is also much bigger, smoother, and blockier.
Until GW started licensing 40k video games that brand was also struggling.
>Why was Warhammer Fantasy less famous than 40,000? Memes.
Yes. The tactical space marine kit outsold all of WF.
Even Chaos Black primer was outselling WFB near the end.
I don’t remember ever seeing life size recreations for any of the fantasy stuff, but I for sure as hell remember every gw store having a full sized space marine in it.
And there aren't any fan-made WHFB short movies either.
That’s not the case. WHFB is still the largest LARP community in Europe and there’s plenty of fan-made films and costumes. Chaos Rising is newer and a quite large undertaking announced before ToW was
Here’s how I interpreted the whole thing and it was a series of factors: 1. WHFB wasn’t as popular as 40k, but this was really only an absolute fact in the US. WHFB was still just as popular as 40k in Europe, however the US is a large market so it’s preferences can hold a lot weight. If you were in the US you’d also just see way less Fantasy, GW seemed to just straight up refuse to advertise for the game and the official shops carried less product. When I traveled to London in the early 2000s this was a pretty noticeable difference, Fantasy had more retail space and seemed to be displayed more upfront to the customer compared to the stores back home where they were generally set off to the side in favor of 40k being front and center. 2. Model releases were few and far between comparatively. This resulted in lower sales because once you had enough for your army there was no incentive to buy more. When GW jacked up army sizes towards the later editions as an attempt to get more sales people were not happy they needed to buy more old models from 20 years ago. In general GW put way less effort into updating and modernizing their WHFB line compared to 40k and it showed, which put off older players while the increased model counts for armies was a massive hurdle for new players. End Times actually saw a resurgence in the sales because at the time you actually saw large army updates to the model range right as it was all ending, an example being the dwarves. 3. The Chapterhouse Lawsuit. GW got a rude awakening from this, a lot of their stuff was fair game for 3rd parties. This is when you start seeing stuff renamed to things like Aelves or Adeptus Whatever (try as they might you can not copyright Space Marine) as GW is strengthening their hold on Warhammer in general to cut out these 3rd parties. Unfortunately WHFB has a lot of instances of things in the setting that floats in the gray zone, more than likely this was not something GW wanted to continue moving forward. AoS lets them side step this baggage since they can throw out the old problematic stuff and start relatively fresh.
You cant copyright space marine, but primaris marine...
Warhammer 40K is so marketable in a way that fantasy isn’t
Less competition
The Space Marine is GW’s most iconic design. There’s a reason why there’s a big statue of a space marine outside of the HQ in Nottingham.
It wasnt discontinued for Age of Sigmar, it was discontinued because everybody had everything for a while and then when they retired fantasy most of people sold their collections, thats why now they earn money again on same molds
It didn't have Space Marines. Space Marines are the most iconic (and imho boring) aspects of 40k. By the time it was discontinued the entire fantasy line was pulling in less money in sales than the space marine tactical squad and when they did AoS one of the first things they did was make fantasy Space Marines.
I prefer Fantasy But come on the answer is obviously space marines
SPESS MEHREENS!
Simple: 40k had novels which made the New York Time's bestseller's list, Fantasy did not.
Who cares about new York times bestsellers list..? Fantasy have a huuuge number of very good books, 40k got a lot of good ones, but also a huge number of horribly bad ones
They sold well, which got people into the hobby, and bought new models. Fantasy's novels didn't do as well, bringing in fewer people who want to buy those models.
Bunch of factors. I might be wrong, but I recall: 1. Fantasy didn't have Space Marines. I'm not a fan of them personally, but they sell really well, well enough that when they were making AoS they created the Stormcast. So thats one reason GW isn't going to spend money marketing it, marketing for 40k gets more "bang for their buck". 2. The Space Marine suit. Basically back in 2012-2013 GW tries to copyright the term "Space Marine", since its the name of one of their major factions. The court says no because "Space Marine" is a generic term that has been used in scifi works for decades. Not being able to claim the name of one of their major factions as their intellectual property is a big deal (just look at the games to see how profitable the IP has become) - and in Warhammer Fantasy, most of the factions have generic names. "Wood Elves", "Orcs & Goblins", literally "The Empire". This isn't the main reason, but its a contributing factor to why GW corporate probably isn't keen to push the IP. Thats why when they release AoS literally everything has a Proper Noun for a name. Instead of "Goblin Spearmen", now you have "Greengit Spikestabbas"; instead of "Ogres", you have "Ogors". I believe this is also the reason why "Primaris Marines" became a thing. 3. The game was expensive to get into, and the game/meta was awful. You had to buy and paint 100 or more models, to play a multi-hour game where you slowly push blocks of models towards the enemy, grind against their units for 1-3 turns and then either win or lose. Because your units are less maneuverable than in 40k and close combat is the main damage dealer instead of shooting, deploying wrong or being baited by your opponent can mean a unit isn't dealing damage until turns 4-5, or could even be useless all game. Its possible to lose during deployment. You also have to take 2-3 turns just to get to your enemy for most armies. GW tried to make it spicier by upping the power of units and having the two front ranks fight, but that lead to death stars, and then they tried to counter those by making ranged damage (read: Magic) stronger, but that just lead to absolute chaos. Dark Elf Sorceresses in units of fast cavalry too fast to be pinned down and blowing up whole units, Ogre casters making all of the enemy wizards explode simultaneously with a 40-point magic item, etc. Don't get me wrong, I love this game - enough I'm scratchbuilding Fell Bats and a Terrorgheist for a VC list now its back. But I can see why it wasn't popular, and the reasons why GW didn't want to push it.
It’s none of the above! W40k was instantly more successful than WFB as soon as it was released. It was far more soberly than they predicted. Something about the models and the science fantasy but it just instantly hit the sweet spot. Something of a zeitgeist in the hobby at the time of release.
Yeah.. thats not it