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Games Workshop At 40: How They Brought D&D To Britain
An anonymous reader writes: Following on the fortieth anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons last year, another formative influence on modern gaming is celebrating its fortieth birthday: Games Workshop. Playing at the World covers the story of how the founders, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (not the other Steve Jackson), started out as subscribers to the 1960s British gaming zine Albion playing Diplomacy by mail and (in Ian's case) publishing silly cartoons. When Albion folded at the beginning of 1975, Livingstone and Jackson formed Games Workshop with its own zine Owl & Weasel as a way to bring "progressive games" (as in "progressive rock") to the UK. Shortly thereafter, when they discovered Dungeons & Dragons, fantasy and role-playing games became their focus. After Owl & Weasel grew up into White Dwarf in 1977, its famous "Fiend Factory" column ended up populating the D&D Fiend Folio. And in the 1980s, of course, they brought us Warhammer and their retail stories brought stylish miniatures to many a needful gamer. Happy birthday to Games Workshop!
Or after a decade of neglect, releasing Space Hulk 3rd edition, only to release 4th edition 5 years later, but making the sets incompatible, and offering no way for people who supported them with the 3rd edition to upgrade, making it orphaned to expansions.
Fuck them to the bowels of hell. Such arrogance to their customers.
Don't even get me started with what they did with Blood Bowl.
Ugh!
At $750 if you want any type of starting army, then two bucks a point if you are not a very fine painter (which means $4000 if you are going for a 2000 point army), as well as the rulebooks, spell cards, army builders, printouts to give to the opponent explaining what you have, Warhammer is pretty pricy.
To boot, if you want to do any tournaments, your painting style and color matching of units can cost you a win, since it is factored in.
Then there are the scenery, and tables... again, not cheap.
Nothing wrong with it, but Games Workshop stuff definitely isn't exactly cheap entertainment. IMHO, they are the Apple of the gaming ecosystem -- they can charge whatever they want, and people will still beat down their doors for new and updated rules (such as the new wood/dark/high elf redo for example.)
And now they say their business model is collectible models, not games, as an excuse for putting out low-quality rules in order to sell their over-priced models.
Yes, I love and play the games (WHFB a lot, 40K a bit) but Games Workshop stopped being a company worthy of their customers respect more than a decade ago. Sure they were obnoxious years before that as well, but 2004 was when they lost all grasp on the reality of who and what they are.
Looking at GW's current business model and practices, it is clear that they are at the brink of collapse. Not because they aren't making money, but because their business model is, well, models. The ever increasing prices for their models and rulebooks is spiraling out of control, meaning that the barriers to attracting new players are increasingly steep. Add to this the rapid decrease in costs of 3D printing technology and soon people won't need to buy their products at all. They are slowly attempting to become an intellectual property-based company, and are using the same kind of ham-fisted, strongarm tactics that traditional media companies use that discourage fan collaboration and community. Right now, there is no one in their leadership with any clue or plan to adapt to the changing market and disruptive technologies. Their time is limited. People will still play their game, but their revenue streams will dry up.
When I used to play D&D I only bought the rule books and monster manuals.
Scenery and dungeons were created with things from the garden & plaster of paris / plasticine for the important quest stuff (like monuments / statues)
Almost all my vehicles, boats / wagons etc were made out of wood
The most fun, however, was creating the characters and monsters with cheap plastic army / farm figures and a soldering iron. It was painstaking, but meant each was subtly different physically and I could even tack-on extra items, such as weapons, backpacks, shields and such.
For me at aged 8 to 13, it was about bringing the world to life and becoming fully immersed in a beautifully rendered environment and a painstakingly planned quest / story - whilst following the rules laid out.
Although this wouldn't work for massive combat like 40k - I never did understand why people would buy rows and rows of overpriced, cheap (And they got cheaper and cheaper quality) 'models' and line them up in crappy sub-hornby-style environments.
For me, they brought only a loose world for my imagination to sculpt and I loved it. I was hooked on their writing from Deathtrap Dungeon FF days - but even as a young child never subscribed, nor could afford, the model side of their business.
Fiend Folio was the dumbest. Some of the monsters were really lame, and the nicer ones were mostly inclusions by TSR US, such as the Nycadaemon which had already appeared in D3 (Vault of the Drow). I have a close to 30 year continuity on my 1ed campaign and I rarely touch the Fiend Folio.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I firmly attribute the success of world of warcraft also to games workshop.
Because they were too stupid and greedy.
Gw has always been rapacious in terms of pricing, but when they were presented with these developers who (really out of line for the ip) had created this "real time strategy" computer game using orcs (sorry, orks - for a company so tyrannical about their ip, they've been astonishingly casual about others'...) they reacted badly, insisting on a tyrannical level of creative control and ruinous charges for the ip. Their demands were so ridiculous, in fact, that these developers (who really already had the core of the game done) had to reluctantly walk away from the rapacious Brits and set out on their own...and thus was born warcraft.
In exactly the same sense that I think Lego controlling minecraft would have strangled that baby in its cradle, GW controlling warcraft would have certainly prevented warcraft (and ultimately wow - and the mmo renaissance it spurred).
Their greed compelled blizzard to strike out themselves.
-Styopa
GW lost all my love when they went all patent troll (copyright troll?) over the phrase 'Space Marine.' Not Adeptus Astares, mind you, but Space Marine.