Ruminations on the rerelease of Guildball and of The Old World

[osbad 4277xp 0]

Good on Steamforged for biting the bullet and releasing Guildball. I’m not particularly interested in the game myself as its not really my thing, but I do like the way that they have recognised STL files are a way of keeping a game that is “past its prime” available and alive so that new players can join in, old players stay interested, and the manufacturer keeping enough revenue coming in to be worth the time and effort, where there isn’t enough support to justify full on production of actual metal, resin or plastic models.

I hope this is a success, and that other companies follow suit.

It seems to me as well that GW are doing something similar with ToW, not STLs of course, but in their case resurrecting 20+ year-old plastic models to support an updated rules release.  Clearly it is unlikely that ToW will ever support loads and loads of brand new models every month in the way AoS and 40k do (otherwise they’d never have axed WFB in the first place – it was shitcanned because of tanking sales, purely and simply, and of course “rank and flank” games are a little bit out of fashion given the current preference for round-based skirmish style games), so making something that still makes the game available to fans and new players, but doesn’t require a huge up-front speculative investment makes sense.

Looking at a long-term, slow-burn, sustainable release and production plan for a game in this way seems to me a much better thing for consumers and customers than the mass, hyped-up, cycle-new-rules-every-three-years kind of mechanism that the big companies seem to need in order to generate income levels high enough to please their investors.  And if its good for consumers, then it is still good in the long-term for producers too just not in the short term of course.

Personally, as someone who collects and plays lots of different games, I much prefer games which will stick around for the long haul as it’s a lot easier to stay interested in a game that is “alive” than one which has ceased production, even if it is still being kept on life-support by fans.  And as I am not a tournament player at all, the idea of “balance” is irrelevant to me as I don’t really ever play any individual game enough to experience so-called imbalance, and other gamey-type exploits – and so it frustrates me when I go back to a game I last played quite happily a couple of years ago to find its been revised (again) and I will have to buy the rulebook(s) all over again just to be able to get a game.  One of the (many) reasons I generally invest these days in generic models of whatever genre and rules that are “agnostic”,  rather than ones heavily tied to a specific IP.

Now, I just hope CMoN do something like this with Wrath of Kings (a game I had re-purposed some of my Rackham Wulfen for ironically, only to find that its easier to get a game of Confrontation again nowadays than WoK!) and then I’d be a really happy bunny!

[pagan8thParticipant 9858xp 0]

cmon don’t seem to care about wrath of kings, or anything that doesn’t include the word zombicide… because people buy zombicide… despite it being such a simplistic dice fest.

That is a shame as I picked up a couple of starter boxes for wrath of kings a few years ago. Only rules I could find were a pdf online at cmon website and they do have the cards there.

[limburger 21591xp 1]

I kind of hope other companies don’t follow this trend.

Or rather … that they think about why they are resurrecting a game that was commercially declared dead.

I suspect most will follow GW’s direction and sell old crap at inflated prices, because it is ‘easy money’ and any effort will lower the profit margins.

Turning a game into a pure digital product still adds a barrier to new players who don’t have access to such machinery, but it does make it more accessible than pure fan support with the associated fleabay hunt for parts.

Having access to the rules as released (or at least a specific version of the rules) is something that also is something that appears to be forgotten (or a lost feature) as games become more dependent on digital version of rules.
(I wonder if Mantic releasing Twilight Kin 2023 as a separate list was a happy coincidence or done on purpose … )

It’s a shame that the need to make a short term profit tends to make long term planning a thing that the stakeholders in companies aren’t fond of. The hobby and associated communities would definitely be better if we could rely on things to exist for more than a single production run.

Historical gamers are at an advantage here though.
Fictional games are forever doomed to survive at the whim of the IP owners. Here today, gone tomorrow.
Mantic’s Walking Dead  is probably the only IP based game to ever be resurrected …

 

[redscopeParticipant 2708xp 0]

The old world I can understand. The demand of people still playing fantasy, the video games have created a new fan base for that setting. You have a lot of people who played it the first time around getting to that point where they have money to spend. You can see the demand in place at this point in time. GW have been smart to take the original system but update the rules and concept to fit into a 2024 game.

Guildball is a curious one that I did not see coming back. It was really popular at one point had a lot of backing by the people playing a great community support. However the company at the end stopped supporting long before its death, the game was unbalance, it was not a lot of fun to play. It killed the community off long before it finally ended. You can look at the massive following blood bowl has at the moment and think it could do well. However you dont see much demand for it from the old fans on social media.

I do wonder if the demand is really for guildball or if this is really just selling STL’s files for people who want use them in bloodbowl?

Mantic’s Walking Dead is a complete puzzle to me. The game only died in March 2023 with a massive fire sales on the game and models to get rid before the IP license expired. They have brought it back to life in less than a year. I struggle to understand how the conditions for that game has changed that the demand that did not exist 9 months ago is now back ?

I can only assume Mantic either the got a msaaive discount to take the License again or maybe the model has changed now they are doing STL’s. Maybe the thought is digital route and creating models for it monthly to add to the growing porfilio is the new business model ?

It is interesting you have 3 different games coming back in various different states and business positions how they will all fair once we are 6 months down the track with each game.

[limburger 21591xp 0]

I’d say TWD may be different because IP licenses tend to have a limited lifespan. We don’t know what the exact options were for Mantic near the end of their initial license agreement and how those options have changed. I hope they simply got a better deal out of it that makes it more profitable for them as the core game is solid.

Guildball teams would not fit Bloodbowl, because the average team is character based as opposed to role-based. At best you’d get a few leader type models out of it, but even then the theme is different from BB. Going digital does have the advantage of not having to use valuable physical storage space.

The timing of the GW announcement at the same time as KoW launched can’t have been a coincidence.
It is weird to see how they hinted at a different set of factions back then compared to what was released now.
And it’s not the classic old world that the RTS games are set it … so there is no direct link to that either which doesn’t make sense if they wanted to take advantage of that (then again … GW didn’t appear to take advantage of Dawn of War back in the day either).

As such the reasons are probably : money, more money and even more money 😉

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