Fantasy Flight Games Concludes Business With Games Workshop
September 9, 2016 by brennon
The time has come for a parting of the ways between Fantasy Flight Games and Games Workshop. As of February 28th 2017 they will no longer sell any of their affiliated products.
Games leaving the shelves will be the likes of Chaos In The Old World, Forbidden Stars, Conquest (Their LCG) and more. It's a shame that we're unlikely to see any more from them on the Warhammer Quest front!
Organised Play will also come to an end for Conquest with 2016 being the final year you will be able to compete in tournaments.
This seems like it was an inevitable move from both companies but they have created some epic games together.
What do you think of the news?
"This seems like it was an inevitable move from both companies but they have created some epic games together..."
And that should put an end to the speculations by conspiracy theorists that evil empire of GW ended the licence agreement due to the fact that FFG is about to produce their own miniature game.
Why? It sounds like FFG was expecting to renew the license since they solicited for organized play past its ending. There was obviously SOME reason why that didn’t happen.
FF had minis games before (during the license. I can see two scenarios here: 2008 GW- Hey, someone wants to give us free money for all those defunct games that aren’t worth anything? Awesome 2016 GW- These games are really worth a lot and we’re only making royalties on that huge pile of money. Or- 2008 FF- Ooh, we get to make games in GW’s settings. They’ve got such a huge following. So starstruck! 2016 FF: Well, yeah… we have the Star Wars license. Who are you guys again? Or both. Both companies can succeed without one another. But it… Read more »
It’s not so much miniatures games as it is miniature wargames. Previously FFG have made boardgames that use miniatures but haven’t done what could be classed as a wargame; until now
It’s an important distinction. FFG never had a license to make minis boardgames from GW, only ones that didn’t include minis. GW retained the right to make minis boardgames (obviously). That’s because minis, and particularly hobby minis (needing assembling and painting) is GW’s territory. They consider pre-paints toys and don’t see them as competition. FFG pushed it as far as they could with Imperial Assault, and GW pushed back, and that was not GW-licensed product. Note that FFG never show the IA minis painted, and only the larger minis need any assembly. It’s not necessarily the case that RuneWars is… Read more »
I think your point sums it up nicely. I think that times have changed in the marketplace,at each company, etc. and their continued partnership doesn’t make as much sense as it once did. I agree that it seems as though FFG has more business than they can handle with the SW licensed stuff alone, I’d bet that a big part of their decision involved meeting production, maintaining quality on their more important lines and in the own in house stuff (which has better margins as they aren’t shelling out licensing/royalties). GW didn’t have that problem, and as everyone is pointing… Read more »
The in-house stuff is interesting. FFG have been a company which heavily relies on licensed products to drive sales, so it’s noticeable that their entry into hobby miniatures (as opposed to just distributing as they have in the past) has been with their own IP, and not with Star Wars, or Game of Thrones (assuming they have a license that would extend to the latter). I think the release of L5R will mark the first ever LCG they’ve done that isn’t licensed. They own the Android setting, but license the Netrunner game. They’re also doing more with the Android IP… Read more »
*wouldn’t continue to rely heavily on licenses
It’s seemed like it’s coming for a while, with GW moving back into board games.
The 40k RPG line (Rogue Trader especially) was my gateway drug back into gaming after being out for 15 years, so it’ll be sad if there is no officially supported RPG line in the works anymore. Unless GW are looking to license a new line elsewhere of course (or bring it back in house, but that still feels a bit unlikely just now)
I consider Deathwatch one of the WORST rpg game systems ever wrote…..
I agree, all of the FFG versions of GW RPGs were pretty poor. I played and managed to enjoy 2nd ed WHFRP, I had more than one fun Dark Heresy game (but we basically house ruled the game so heavily we were using the stuff as source material only).
Glad I already have my copy of Chaos in the Old World! It’s excellent.
To bad I really like some of these games.
A baffling move. Could be a combination of things, but I am uncertain how this is a helpful move for either company.
I think lordofexcess summed up for me earlier in this thread.
Hm not much time left, should buy some of those games.
Is Conquest and the WHQ card game any good?
Conquest is meant to be quite good aye. The Warhammer Quest Card Game is a nice standalone game which has some big tough quests in it that feel very rewarding once you’ve beaten them.
Really good cooperative adventure evoking the feel of the old Warhammer Quest.
I love the Card Game. Game would have really benefitted from a quest expansion with new villains and such. The 4 actions mechanic was super slick. I like playing it in part because it seems so brilliantly done.
Warhammer Invasion is the best ever!!!
Hardly a surprise considering FFG is now part of Asmodee an entity far bigger than GW and far less willing to bend on demands (for example no wargames) to keep a licence.
GW themselves are starting to set up their own boardgames division probably both to keep a tighter control on their IP and to supply the demand this split will create and to make sure miniatures provided for such boardgames will be theirs.
I believe FFG will get stronger from such a split, not sure about GW.
Asmodee isn’t anywhere near as big as GW. They are majority owned by Eurazeo, a venture capital firm, who are definitely bigger than GW. Asmodée alone aren’t necessarily that big.
Asmodee’s revenue is greater than GW’s.
Are you thinking of just FFG? They aren’t as big as GW (not that they exist as a separate company anymore), but Asmodee made quite a bit more in revenue than GW this year. They have a lot more debt, especially as GW have none, but I would consider them as a bigger company now.
What I liked about the FFG books was they actually went into the obscure alien races in 40k, and actually gave them decent chunks of backround and some really nice artwork to boot. The Slaugth were especially awesome, made out of sentient maggots and had asymmetrical floating biomechanical constructs and stuff (yeah, It’s like they designed a faction just for me lol). They even went into Enslavers and had artwork based on the old jes goodwin sketch and showed what their living portals looked like. I can’t see GW picking that up, allthough I’d love them too…I’d really really love… Read more »
Can’t say I’m surprised. Towards the end, some of the 40K RPGs became really shoddy… Black Crusade and Only War lacked internal balance and options, making character designs very cookie cutter.
Ironically, the best 40K RPG related thing they ever put out was the original Dark Heresy… and most of that was started by Black Industries…
GW is back in the Specialist / Boardgames area. FFG is about to enter the miniature game area…
Sure this doesn’t help good partnership.
And neither company is so small they are reliant on the other
I can understand them not creating new content for these games.
But it really sucks that the products themselves will dissappear as a result as well.
It sucks that we as consumers have to suffer from the effects of such a breakup.
Indeed it does suck but I guess that’s the nature of the Beast that is IP Licensing. It could happen to any license any time
it may be the nature of IP licensing, but it sucks.
The best we can hope for is for GW to continue producing and supprting these things.
That won’t happen, GW doesn’t own the rights to any of the work GW produced, on the IP it was based on. To continue to support those games they’d have to reproduce everything from scratch, and even then I don’t know if it would even be legal for them to do so.
Besides, I wouldn’t trust them to be able to produce rules to the same level of quality as FFG could.
It all depends on the kind of licensing deal they had.
So I guess best advice now is to buy it as soon as you can if you want any of these things.
I’d be very surprised if FFG continued to offer any GW-licensed products for sale after February. Stores will have existing stock, but that’ll be it.
Good lord we need an edit button on comments. I have no idea what was going on up there, it looks like I had some kind of stroke while I was typing. What I meant to say was “GW doesn’t own the rights to any of the work FFG produced, only the IP it was based on.” They can’t continue to support these games because they don’t own the artwork, miniatures or text produced by FFG for them. Since you can’t technically copyright game mechanics they could, in theory, recreate the games in question, although there might be some weird… Read more »
GW only own the rights to the IP, not the games themselves. If I had to speculate, the only games GW are likely to produce themselves in the future would be Talisman and maybe it’s 40k equivalent because those games are themselves based on old GW games. However I think that the chances of this are still quite low. I can see them granting a license to another 3rd party to produce new RPGs for Fantasy and maybe 40k but I could also see them insisting that any new RPG be set in the Age of Sigmar timeline rather than… Read more »
Thankfully there are enough WFRP ‘2bd books out there that players can carry on using them
I wonder if FFG knew this was coming, if you look at Only War and particularly Dark Heresy 2nd ed the lines died off before they really got going. I mean why go the the aggro of writing a 2nd ed, you only release 5 books for it to be canned.
And on their website FFG have stuff for some of their 40k games listed as “at the printers” which means they were clearly developing those lines quite recently
I suspect they knew far enough out to halt production on certain things, like an expansion for Warhammer Quest the Adventure Card Game. The two character classes we got as POD expansions could easily have originally been part of a larger expansion slated to be revealed at Gencon, not to mention the fact that we’ve seen no hint of an expansion for Forbidden Stars, and one of the developers of it has been let go. I suspect they were negotiating though, and couldn’t come to an agreement with GW whose demands were likely kinda ridiculous (like ‘dump all your miniatures… Read more »
I don’t think GW’s demands were likely to be ridiculous. GW can’t be seen to be allowing a competitor to be making money off their own IP – that wouldn’t sit well with investors. So as soon as FFG announced their fantasy miniatures game the Licensing deal was always going to get cancelled and in order to keep it the costs associated with doing so were likely to escalate to an unreasonable level if GW were even negotiating on it at all. It may seem unreasonable to us but it’s not an unreasonable move for a bus.
*business
It’s apparently been a number of months since any Conquest cards were given to playtesters, which is where the speculation originally started. I also find it difficult to believe that RuneWars was put into production in the belief that FFG were retaining the license.
Justin can hand his crystal ball to Warren.
Not at all surprising, and the release does nothing to identify if this was mutual or one party was the driving force. A shame as chaos in the old world was a stunning board game, conquest looked ok. Never been a huge fan of the rpgs – even the black industries originals bar wfrp and FFG direction on that wasn’t one I took too. Although that is probably as much about my comfort with 2nd ed as anything inherent in 3rd. Out of the two though I think FFG moving into table top gaming would be more worrying for GW,… Read more »
I don’t know. The initial pictures of the FFG miniatures game didn’t inspire me to be honest. Obviously I’ll wait until I’ve seen more before I judge but it looked very “busy” with all the counters and measuring sticks etc and the miniatures didn’t look like anything to write home about (although again I’d want to see better images of them before I criticise them).
Rules look better to me, I am not shy of minis, and its mass combat which gw no longer does. I am not sold as I think the release modelay not appeal. I do however, think they have a better chance of taking market share than gw do with their board games
I don’t think GW are trying to capture boardgame market share. Their boardgames are still aimed at miniatures collectors and are aimed at giving people scope to re-use existing miniatures in other games or excuses to buy something new. If they were trying to break into the boardgame market I think the pieces would be lower quality, less complex and the games would be marketed very differently.
Agreed. GW do hobby minis, the games are just a vehicle through which to sell them. They don’t target the boardgame market.
not suprised at all. GW cant have competition that do better games than they do in their own realm of 40k
I doubt very much that FFG’s 40k products were generating better profits for FFG than 40k itself was for GW
FFG’s GW games were a mixed bag. They had some top notch ones like Chaos in the Old World and Conquest, but they had a few duds as well. Deathwing has to have the worst written rulebook I’ve ever come across. Blood Bowl Team Manager was forgettable and Warhammer: Discwars never went anywhere.
Dracula’s Fury is on the list.
We finally got to see a re-issue/new version of a game that was out-of-print for decades.
And now that might be gone too.
Time to locate a copy, wrap it in foil and hope someone will offer lots of $$$ for a mint condition box of the game in the near future.
😉
That sounds like a good plan.
I can’t help but consider the recent financial statement from GW- where they would be reporting a large loss vs. last year, except that their Royalty income had gone way up.
Seems like a bad move to me- getting rid of the parts of your business strategy that are working.
Perhaps GW are hoping to cash into the success that FFG has had, by continuing/rereleasing those lines.
FFG licensing is only a small part of that royalties money; the overwhelming majority of it in 2015/16 was from videogames.
That is really shame because FFG has some great 40k related games in they selection. I was considering starting Conquest but seems like there is no longer point because it won’t be supported anymore in 2017.
This feels like Games Workshops loss. 🙁
Fantasy Flight Games injected sorely needed vitality into GW IP’s with creative and innovative game mechanics and I just wonder if GW will be able to step out of the box and do something new, for they seem forever focused on recreating past glories.
I’m not 100% I agree with this. The Licensing deal with FFG hasn’t seen an increase in GW’s sales so while it may have generated interest in their fantasy worlds that hasn’t translated in to increased sales. The only money GW is losing out on is the FFG licensing money.
It may not have increased GW’s sales but it increased awareness of their IP and saved cost in design and production which could be invested in 40k, AoS, and The Hobbit. Seems like a win/win scenario but maybe it wasn’t…
GW is moving towards the boardgame market, where FFG is direct competitor. good move i think
I hope GW does it justice, FFG have set the bar.
Now it’s a mad scramble to buy the stuff you want before they go, I managed to get the warhammer quest troll slayer and witch hunter from 2 different places. One in the UK and the other Germany, Amazon UK had them but it was at a stupid price.
is GW going to keep the games going or are fans going to have to scour the net for parts to keep spares for games?
GW won’t be keeping the games going.
shame some were good I have been told.
Yes, yes they are/were.
Whilst I’m feeling very sympathetic toward current players of these titles I think it is a good thing that there are going to be a few less games floating around. Personally I can’t keep pace with how many different games there are within some of the big IPs I’m interested in. Having the list reduced is a bonus as I can start to see the wood for the trees a bit more easily.