State of WFB Rundown by Harry

[MMM]

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[eldargal]

Anecdotal evidence is still anecdotal, you don't have a national trend, you have anecdotal evidence from a few sources. Stop making it out to be something it isn't. The only people who know how WFB is going in Germany with any degree of accuracy is GW.

[Mr Mystery]

Indeed. Plural of anecdote is not data, nor is it fact, or even an established trend.

Warhammer round my way is predominantly a club game.

[spaceman91]

Near me It goes in waves. We will have months of nothing but fantasy then they will all take a break and play nothing but 40k. I think its something about tournaments.

[Bigred]

There was a 1 week window in the middle of the Chapterhouse case when the data Eldargal seeks was available.

GW accidentally submitted a giant PDF of sales figures for a 2 year period (roughly 2010) for GW North America broken down by individual product SKU.

The court quickly removed the document several days later, but I got to take a look inside. (I'm still kicking myself for not downloading it).

The ratio of 40K to WFB sales from Black Library were over 5:1 in favor of 40K. The average GW Proper plastic kits ratios were 3:1, to 2:1 in favor of 40k, all up and down the list. Sources have indicated the trends continue to this day and GW has not turned it around.

Like Harry said, its not really an issue regarding existing products, as the investment is already sunk. Its the company needing to find a solution moving forward.

In any business from cars to software, if you sell 2 main product lines and one generates triple the revenue of the other, the smaller one just can't get half of the resources. In publicly traded companies, executives get fired for doing stuff like that.

So I don't think Fantasy is going anywhere. It has 15 armies, thousands of products and generates millions, but it can't continue to be developed and recieve development resources like it has been in the past. It's sales don't warrant it. In a way, I think the shift has already begun. Think about all these new crazy 2013 products from the Dataslates, to Forgeworld, to rules expansions, to supplemental codices. WFB is hardly getting any of these - they are predominantly 40K.

The Dark Millennia is already getting more of the development pie...

[Denzark]

I like what BR says about product lines getting proportionate amounts of resource. I wonder if a continued reason for WFB is that GW has some market research that states WFB players are like the uber spenders/gamers - ones who have been pulled through from the youth section (40K) to the senior section? Sort of like a junky who has gone from a bit of ganja to the Horse. Once they are hooked on WFB, they drop a load on 40K - but if you stopped doing WFB said gamers would stop altogether.

So what I mean from a business sense is that the resource taken to run WFB may be disproportionate but in return it locks in a huge amount of income for the primary - which wouldn't be there if the secondary wasn't?

Or summat I am thinking about my first beer of the day.

[Wildeybeast]

But if we work on the logic that 40k sells twice as much so gets twice as much resources devoted to it, Warhammer will die. Halving the amount of time and money spent developing it will leave it in a parlous state. They already have uncompetitive armies left languishing in the doldrums, how much worse wil that situation get if they cut the funding. What you do with your weaker line is a) invest more money into it, b) pull it completely if it isn't making money or c) get it to a stage where it just ticks along nicely. Now if they got all the armies to a stage where they all balanced and everything is plastic, it means they don't need to spend as much time and effort when an update rolls around. A new book, a couple of new units, job done. Then you can release as many 40k expansions and special edition codexes as you like.

[Mr Mystery]

I'd argue Warhammer needs less development.

The system itself is solid, and the armies all well fleshed out.

The rules themselves don't have the scenario flexibility of 40k, but then it doesn't need it if you ask me!

[Wildeybeast]

I would agree. Though it still needs some time and effort to bring all the armies up to scratch in terms of rules and models.

[Chronowraith]

As far as the Black Library sales figures that Big Red posted... that doesn't shock me one bit. The 40k Range is vast and caters to multiple interests, armies, settings, etc. Comparatively the WFB novels cover a relatively small number of interests, armies, etc. I'm a pretty hardcore WFB fan who recently cut 40k due to time constraints... but I've always found the WFB novels to be lacking compared to the 40k versions.

I'd be okay with Fantasy seeing a little less attention as long as GW keeps up the pace of releases to what they have recently. In many ways, GW is at fault for the poor performance of several of the armies. How many years have we heard rumors of an impending Bretonnian release? They started back in 7th edition. Who wants to invest in an army with a potential new army book coming out. Additionally, I don't think they can keep Fantasy a static setting like 40k. 40k has enough interesting background that people enjoy reading and could make up entire expansions (Horus Heresy is the prime example). While Fantasy has equally important events that happened in the distant past, they simply aren't as relatable as the corrupting influence of power and the betrayal of ones brothers.