Reply To: If you were in charge of GW now

[angelicdespot 4700xp 0]

I think they made an almighty mess of the destruction of Warhammer and the launching of AoS – a product with virtually no setting and not enough rules to create – for many people – a satisfying game.

But they bet so much on its success, and were a big enough company to ride the storm, and with a change of leadership were able to change course.   They now have a game that still won’t suit plenty of players, but is now enough of a game to ensure a much larger group of players have fun playing it, and a rapidly developing world and setting which is constantly giving more and more people reason to invest emotionally as well as financially in it.

I agree with most of the reasons given by others as to why GW wouldn’t license out the Warhammer massed battle game to a competitor or relaunch it in some form themselves.   What would be interesting to think about though is whether they could have relaunched warhammer as a skirmish game with much simpler and more accessible rules.   Would the familiar and much-loved setting have been more of an asset than the almost unlimited opportunities offered by the AoS blank slate?

Now that they seem to have found their groove with AoS it looks more and more like the right decision for them to have made.   In part because I think one of the problems the old Warhammer had was that being a lower fantasy setting it was more jarring introducing all sorts or large and amazing models into the game.   AoS is designed from the start for almost any model to be viable, meaning their designers have free reign to produce the most amazing (again, not to everyone’s taste, but technically amazing) products.

I could perhaps see a future for miniatures in a Warhammer setting via an in-house GW release of a Mordheim like game.   A game of fairly limited scope that would give people an opportunity to buy and play with models designed with reference to the Old World aesthetic but which wouldn’t be marketed or seen as a competitor to AoS as their larger scale skirmish battle game.