Spartan Games Ceases Trading
August 25, 2017 by thisisazrael
Spartan Games the producers of Firestorm Armada and Dystopian Wars have issued the following statement on Friday 25th August 2017.
"Following a prolonged period of challenging trading and despite the directors’ best efforts to manage through, Rebel Publishing Ltd was unable to continue to trade and the directors have taken the difficult decision to cease. All members of staff were made redundant.
The company, which traded as Spartan Games, is a Somerset, UK based provider of tabletop miniature games which include:
Uncharted Seas, a fantasy naval combat game (now retired)
- Firestorm Armada, an exciting space combat game featuring highly detailed starship models
- Dystopian Legions, a game based in the world of Dystopian Wars using highly detailed 32mm scale figures and vehicles (now retired)
- Dystopian Wars– an exciting journey in a Victorian sci-fi world encompassing naval combat, ground warfare and aerial combat.
- Spartan Scenics – a range of detailed and easily assembled wargames terrain.
Rebel Publishing Ltd was formed in July 2002 and traded successfully for a number of years. Spartan Games was launched in 2008 and grew rapidly. However, the tabletop games market is challenging and has changed over recent years, and suppliers are predominantly a small number of large well-known names and several small, cottage industry, type businesses."
Several factors seem to have contributed to the closure; ill health of one of the directors, problems with quality control and production, development costs and timing issues are among many listed problems encountered by the company.
"Throughout the years that Spartan Games has traded, it has prided itself on the highest level of product quality and customer satisfaction. This has been delivered consistently and is evidenced through annual customer research that the company has undertaken.
We would encourage anybody who may be interested in acquiring either stock, assets or the business to make contact as soon as possible."
The company was also in the middle of a Kickstarter project which was on the cusp of attaining it's £50,000 goal however this has now been canceled.
In the statement, Spartan Games advised that customers who have made a deposit or paid for goods by credit or debit card that are not going to arrive by the due date should contact their card provider to claim a refund.
You can read the statement in full here.
It is never nice to see any company cease trading.
The BoW Team wish all the best to the staff, customers and anyone impacted by the closure.
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Wow gutted for your team hopefully you can find work in other areas of the gaming industry
Always sad to see a company go under but when I looked at their stuff it always seemed expensive especially their Halo stuff
Blimey. It seemed odd their lack of presence at this years Salute compared to the previous years. I wonder if anyone will snap up the Halo ip? I agree with comments about the prices though.
I’ve a soft spot for Spartan. Uncharted Seas was amongst the first non-GW fantasy minis games I played with any regularity. Haven’t looked at their stuff for a while, though. They always seemed to be releasing new games that fell by the wayside as even newer ones were released. Never seemed to nail that one game they could build a company around.
They had games they could have focused on but tossed them aside for what seemed like nicer IP’s. In the end I have a bad feeling that the choice to go for such IP was the killer for them. After talking with the owner of one of Canada’s largest gaming stores that he had no interest in Spartan Games content due to the slow turnaround I knew things was bad for them. He even slashed prices even in half on some things. Sad as I think if they only gave the games they started with continuous focus, people would have… Read more »
Sad to see them go–I always held out the tiniest sliver of hope that Uncharted Seas would come back some day.
Anyone else find it odd that the Halo games aren’t listed on that statement? (Unless they’re on the full statement; I haven’t been able to get their site to load).
Okay, finally got to the full statement, and all it says about the Halo properties is:
“The business also expanded to provide models for a well known video game, moving this into the tabletop games arena.”
WHOA….that one was out of the blue 🙁
The statement in full link is gone….
It is coming up now..
First off, it’s a real pity that Spartan Games are closing down, and jobs are being lost. It must be horrific for all of those involved. Personally speaking, I thought the ships and spaceships were all really good models (while their Dystopian troops reminded me of the old metal imperial guard stuff from 2nd edition); I think it’s a real shame that it’s all going to cease to be, with the gaming world all the poorer for it. Opinions and all that, but I thought the Fleet boxed sets for Dystopian Wars and Firestorm Armada were pretty reasonable in terms… Read more »
Sad to see them go, but I must say that it’s not entirely unexpected.
They seem to have spread themselves too thin, resulting in somewhat lacklustre support for their games and spotty quality control.
Its always sad to see a company go under, but looking from the outside, as i never played their games as there always seemed to be better games in the areas their games covered, plus they seemed to spread too thin.
Being an American, I assume “cease trading” means closing down the business? As “cease trading” in USA would mean no longer being part of the stock market.
Just to add, given the growth we have seen recently, I predict there will be a boom/bust cycle that will occur in the industry at some point. Even with the size of GenCon it is unclear if the industry is selling more to new consumers or existing game consumers are just purchasing more. Should there be an economic downturn in the next few years, it is going to hurt the industry if they have spread to far.
An Economic downturn is not even required, a subtle change in buying habits (fashion) will be enough…
As I understand it – I’m not an expert on economics by any means – tabletop gaming is generally considered a “luxury good” and so isn’t affect by the general moods of the marked as much as you might expect. To a point, of course. You might skip a new pair of pants to keep your gaming going, but you won’t be skipping meals… I do agree though, that we’re heading for a crash at some point in the not-too-distant future. There are simply too many games getting Kickstarted these days, resulting in a fractured marked with plenty of games… Read more »
I think wargaming is already in a bit of an expanding bubble due to kickstarter, and there have already been some notable casualties. Crowdfunding allows many new startups to get the cash injection they need to setup shop and deliver a product, which gamers have been lapping up pledging on big kickstarters and receiving big boxes of stuff for which they don’t yet have established local communities. As time goes on, those new games need t have found and retained an audience in competition with older more established names and the even newer shiny games that followed them. In the… Read more »
Literally is no longer trading. Usually happens when a company goes insolvent, as is the case here.
That is a massive shame – always had a soft spot for their stuff – great sculpts and interesting settings, but in a very busy market there’s gonna be a few casualties. Hopefully everyone at Spartan can bounce into another job/project. Sad times.
Nooooo! My Halo collections aren’t complete yet!
Literally WTF?? I thought they had been hacked when i got their email.They were tweeting on Tuesday 22nd about new designs on the FA Kickstarter! I did back last years Dystopian Wars Kickstarter and have not yet received my goodies…Arrgghh! Totally miffed by this.
That’s the problem with borrowing from finance companies, you’ve got to keep sounding positive and upbeat because the moment you stop they’ll call the loan in and you’ll be out of business
(and you only borrow the money in the first place if it’s crucial for the business)
so you carry on smiling and taking about your new projects right up to the moment you admit to yourself it’s over and call in the recievers
Also the progress on their current kickstarter might have been the final nail. It could be that they were relying on a successful and large cash injection from that project to keep the lights on for awhile longer. If the project wasn’t hitting the numbers they needed then that may have been the end.
It’s not that strange.
In fact it is practically standard behaviour for all businesses.
If you admit that you’re having problems then people will stop buying your product.
Depending on the amount of lost confidence this will hasten the death spiral..
If you don’t say that there are problems then you get situations like this.
It sucks, but it’s a situation where honesty can be fatal.
Damned if you do,
Damned if you don’t.
Suck. It is hard to lose a business, and this industry can be unforgiving for small businesses. I used to work for a couple of independent stores just outside D.C. and they have both closed their doors. I hope the employees can quickly find other work, and the customers who are waiting on orders or previous Kickstarter pledges are able to receive them or resolve payment issues.
Sad stuff for everyone involved. I suspect two things hurt them the most, the first is the Halo license was likely expensive, and the game never really took off in the way you would expect a big expensive license to do. Second, and I don’t play their games enough to know for sure, but from an outsiders perspective it seems they never really stuck with anything. One game would see a new version, and after 6 months that would be it, support would basically stop while something else got revamped and so on and so on. I would think if… Read more »
Unfortunately we have been seeing more of this. I think we are seeing the back end of the industry and it being so diluted.
Wow that`s like a limb being cut off…i mean more like a squid, you still got more, but you don`t want to lose any really…
Never brought into the systems, but liked the space ships…. Maybe Halo was a bad choice..Big IP`s can weigh you down. Thanks Spartan for being on the team……
Ouch! Spartan made some very nice products and both of their Halo games had a lot of promise, so this is very sad news for the company and employees, as well as the fans of Spartan’s own IPs.
Totally conflicted today. My Dystopian Wars KS pledge arrived this morning, so it must have literally been one of the last few they mailed out. I was ecstatic and ready to start looking at DW again after months of ‘meh’ . . . . and then I get the email and read this. So sad to see them go, I enjoyed my time as a Beta DW playtester for them. I will miss them.
Best of luck to their employees.
Just read Tor Gaming is gone too! Hopefully this isn’t a trend!
Sadly, I think it might be.
interestingly, both companies mentions Kickstarter in their final statements. Now, I’m not going told-you-so just yet, but still…
As I’ve said before, Kickstarter is both the best and the worst thing to happen to our hobby. It’s allowed the marked to explode with all kinds of games – both good and bad – but while these games saturate the marked, they don’t provide a firm grounding for the companies and the sheer number of them makes it extremely difficult to break through and establish a solid player base.
Kickstarter is a red herring in both of these instances.
It’s certainly not the main issue that forced these companies to shut down, no.
It would probably be more fair to say that it added to the troubles of already troubled companies.
If you read the statement from Tor Gaming, I think it’s bang on the money. Shelve space is valuable, and with all these new games getting released – many aided by crowdfunding – it’s getting harder and harder to get your game into retail. And inevitably, companies will fold as they can no longer keep their products in the limelight, so to speak.
It’s not true that shelf space is getting crowded because of crowdfunding. It’s getting crowded because of retail releases. Here’s the Esdevium new releases catalogue for next week – https://www.esdeviumgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/1735-__-28-08-2017-__-WEB.pdf
How much of that is direct to retail releases compared to crowdfunding releases?
Shelf space is getting scarcer, but crowdfunding isn’t causing that. It gives a platform for games to survive that aren’t suited to retail. It just seems that in Gavin’s case, he personally doesn’t want to keep Relics alive by making it primarily a KS product.
For Spartan, all of those things are a red herring.
Kickstarter should never be used to keep a game alive. It’s a platform to launch new ideas, it isn’t a webshop. Which, of course, it has now become… As I said above, Kickstarter isn’t the main issue, it’s simply making a bad situation worse. Too many games getting released means too little spotlight on them all. A few – the biggest – can survive. The smaller can’t. Anyway, I agree that it’s not the reason for Spartan Games going under. They had plenty of other issues to fight with, it seems. I will argue though, that heading to Kickstarter was… Read more »
You misunderstand. Crowdfunding is a business model that works for products that don’t suit retail. It’s not that it keeps games alive, it’s that it’s better suited to be the business model for certain types of games. The innovation and new products thing is not inherent to crowdfunding at all. It’s just how KS choose to market their crowdfunding platform, and not even they think that’s what it’s for.
And I don’t agree KS is making a bad situation worse, barring the most technical sense. If 50 new products are released in a week, and one was crowdfunded, then yes, there’d be 49 without it. But the crowdfunded product is not causing the overcrowded shelves, the retail releases are. If you’re releasing products to market now, you need to understand this.
Crowdfunding in general doesn’t suit this kind of business for the simple reason that you need your games in retail so people can buy them and continue to support them. That’s the main issue I see with Kickstarter. Many good games are Kickstarted, only to die a slow death once the campaign is over. There’s no long term retail support, and the only players actually supporting the game are those who pledge for it during the campaign. In effect, it’s simply the company accepting pre-orders, taking the money up-front and then delivering a product. And then what? To continue developing… Read more »
I think you may be forgetting the 30-35% discount asked by most retailers when buying stock which allows them to make a profit while giving a shelf discount. With a lot of small companies this loss stacked with the production costs and the stock replenish costs leaves little profit or funds to invest in product development and range growth.
That’s a good point. But there’s still a difference.
Once a Kickstarter campaign has been fulfilled, that’s it. There are very few assets left, few boxes left to sell and likely little money left to order more.
If you produce your game in a more traditional way, once you have the boxes, you have plenty of stuff to sell and every sale brings in more money that you can use to order more boxes.
Of course, that assumes that you have enough money to start the process in the first place. Which is where, I suspect, many games die.
I don’t believe Kickstarter is causing companies to go out of business. Competition is what’s causing us to start to see companies going out of business. I think the market is now saturated and probably isn’t big enough to support the number of companies currently making games and miniatures. And there’s some really big hitters on the scene now besides just Games Workshop. CMON and FFG, while still not quite the size of GW have some fairly significant financial clout which helps them pay for marketing, distribution and logistics which help get large volumes of products to market with high… Read more »
I strongly doubt it. Companies with solid foundations have nothing to fear as there is currently a consistent and dedicated fanbase in regards to both tabletop and wargames.
Our monthly revenue is higher than ever and that’s without even considering in how our next Kickstarter could bump things even higher.
Do things slowly, patiently and methodically and you’re bound to be successful, even if there are (inevitably) a few bumps on the road.
Best of luck to the employees of both Spartan and Tor, always sad to see a company close its’ doors.
@cassaralla: May I ask you what was your pledge level? I pledged “fleet admiral” and I am still waiting for it…
I was only at Ensign and then added things in the Backerkit afterwards. I did have a conversation with Spartan Neil on the SG forum about my pledge which may have expedited things.
I see, thank you
Oh no this is terrible. I was just painting my
Halo 15mm army. I was waiting for the Flyers to come out but that won’t happen now. 🙁
They still look great but without the flyers it’s only half a game.
I was afraid something like this might eventually happen when they announced the Halo license, but with DW KS rewards arriving and the FSA KS ongoing I thought they would last until next year at least. I had an email from Lizzie in despatch literally two days ago saying my Captain rewards were going out soon, and now instead of commanding a new fleet I’m sailing the seas of frustration.