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.

Comments

Warhammer Online

[SteelLynx]

It's a shame Warhammer Online never got finished. The screenshots etc they released looked very close to my image of the world.

Games Workshop doesn't care about the hobby

[ChaosDiscord]

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.