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NYT on Warhammer
Spoooon wrote in to mention a New York Times story on Warhammer, old skool table-top wargaming favorite. (registration required) From the article: "In a culture dominated by virtual diversions and mass marketing, Warhammer has acquired an ardent following by being tactile and mysterious, using no advertising at all. Games Workshop, the British company that makes it, has licensed two video-game versions, but it is usually played with three-dimensional figures by opponents who face each other across a real-life table." In related news, registration for GenCon Indy 2005 opened on Monday. Best four days of gaming, and all that.
It's a shame Warhammer Online never got finished. The screenshots etc they released looked very close to my image of the world.
It's 19:11:42. Do You Know Where Your Meat Body Is?
It is amazing how a company can build a following for something that seems so silly to a lot of people. I mean really for me at least (I no longer game, but I used to game a little bit, Rifts mostly and a bit of D&D) gaming was more of a social pastime than a competitive activity. However when I got involved my friends had already spent copious amounts of money on the games. These things have come to represent part of who people are today in this world. Any activity that connects people can provide someone with much needed identity. This must be how the warhammer people have made so much money. Find a market where you can get into someone's life and stay. Those are the best customers.
Ah, yet another example of the fine standards of journalism employed by the modern press.
Tactile? Mysterious? No advertising???
Just because GW never ran a television commercial doesn't mean they havn't spent the last 20 years advertising out the wazoo. I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant 'no advertising that I've ever seen'.
I've seen the way GW operates, both at a retail and corporate level. They're one of the scummiest companies in the gaming industry. If the reporter had dug into that a bit more he may have had a decent story. Instead he gave them a nice fluff piece that almost qualifies as advertising by itself.
Riiiight. So Games Workshop's business plan is to make the market for their product disappear. How cunning! Something tells me you can't show any evidence to back this up. Oh wait, let me guess. You either you "heard it from someone whose brother's cousin's best-friend's sister-in-law knew a guy who owned a store like that" or you just made it up entirely.
Next time you feel like fabricating claims against a company, at least summon enough imagination to invent something that sounds plausible.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
I thought that article was fairly informative and objective. Most of the articles one reads about this type of activity tends to regard the participants as weird dorks who are socially inept, or it condemns such activities as being bad for children.
It was refreshing to read an article that treats it like a normal hobby.
Like I said, it's always "My fourth cousin's flatmate's uncle's wife knows someone who heard it from a friend."
When asked for proof you gave this link. Yes. Games Workshop has tried to put restrictions on online discount sales. The reason for doing so is to prevent undercutting of brick and mortar stores. Where is the evidence that Games Workshop is trying to put poor Mom and Pop out of business? Oh, right. They're not. They're protecting the business interests of those shops by keeping store-less Internet ops from dumping product on the market at 5% markup (far below what a real store can compete with).
So the point stands. Stop making phony claims about Games Workshop's business practices.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
I played Warhammer for several years and a number of their other games (Dungeon Quest, Warhammer Quest, Talisman (multiple editions), Space Hulk) for even longer. Like any company Games Workshop (GW) is a bit of mixed bag, but it was the attitude that irritated me the most.
I think GW's attitude is best summarized by how their in-house magazine (White Dwarf) describes the hobby. It's not the "wargaming hobby" or perhaps the "gaming hobby". No, it's "the Games Workshop hobby". Feh. Tabletop gaming is a small market. Wargaming (which is most of what GW does these days) is a subset of that. The hobby as a whole has had a rough decade. What the hobby needs is unity, to grow the hobby as a whole, to not be selfish pricks about it. Sure, I wouldn't expect GW to advertise for other products, but to try and control the language to deny the broader hobby is wrong.
Beyond that, it's a series of minor missteps that irritated me. Sure, release new editions of your games every few years. Release new models to go with them. But to declare that models from previous editions are not allowed in tournaments is bogus. Demanding that the models be genuine Citadel miniatures (Citadel being Games Workshop) is awfully selfish. Building a miniature army is expensive. Expecting customers to exclusively use your product and to buy (and paint!) an entire new army every few years is the wrong attitude. This is the sort of thing that turns many people off to wargaming as a whole.
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