Why I'm no longer a Games Workshop fanboy

I know I know, you're thinking "Not another nerd rage post about the pricing of Games Workshop's products." But you'd be wrong. Well OK, you'd not exactly be right. How about that? There will be some nerd rage about pricing, the difference is I am aware that the Games Workshop hobby has never been cheap. How's that for self awareness? But there's much more to my falling out of love with Games Workshop than pricing.

Yet I'll admit it, some of this is just going to be annoyed venting. When talking about Games Workshop, it's pretty much inevitable. I mean, if you've been in the hobby for long enough you'll know that Games Workshop provokes reactions across the spectrum from almost everybody involved, in the same way that an attractive but stupid member of the opposite sex provokes conflicting emotions. Yeah they're hot, but as soon as they open their mouth you just wish they'd shut up and go away. But then you remember that they're hot. But then they say something dumb again.

Admit it, Games Workshop is the game industries' version of a Big Brother contestant. Often good to look at, but prone to do stuff so stupid it makes a winter invasion of Russia look like a good idea.


So I'll begin at the beginning

This is, after all, the best place to begin. Except when you're watching one of those cool movies that begins near the end, then goes back to fill in what happened. They're good too.

Back when I first discovered Games Workshop, via the awesomely simple family game Heroquest, I fell in love with the company's products, game backgrounds, stores and staff. I thought everything about Games Workshop was the dogs bollocks. I couldn't understand why my parents thought it was expensive, but then that's because it wasn't my money at that time. You see, contrary to popular myth, this was never a cheap hobby. That's where a lot of the nerd rage directed at Games Workshop goes wrong, they assume that at some golden point in the past Games Workshop was a cheap hobby - but it never was. My first real hobby was building Airfix and Matchbox model aircraft and that was a lot cheaper at that time, back in 1989.

Anyway, I liked Games Workshop and just about everything it came out with. Back then building an army was not cheap compared to other things I could do for a hobby, but comparatively speaking it could be done a lot cheaper than it can be done now, and not just because of price increases. There was even a period between then and now where it was even more difficult, or maybe a better word would be awkward, to build your army.

Let me explain. When I first started collecting armies for first edition 40K, the now mythic Rogue Trader edition, I collected Space Marines and Eldar. Focusing on the Eldar, in-game squads consisted of 5 models for Aspect Warriors, and a £4.99 blister pack bought you 5 aspect warriors. But not long after I started collecting these squads the blisters stayed the same price but started containing only 4 models. And this is about the time my love for Games Workshop stopped being unconditional.

"Why the hell would you do that?" I thought somewhat innocently. Now in order to build a squad I have to buy two blisters instead of one, and then I have 3 useless models and a squad has gone from costing me £4.99 to costing me £9.98, and I have some models for which I have no sodding use. That raises money for a company in a far more underhanded way than simply bumping up your prices every time someone uses the word "revenue" in a board meeting. That's when I stopped collecting my Eldar army. I might have been young, but I wasn't stupid, and collecting was now using my money not the bottomless well of my parents. It wasn't just the money I would have to spend, in my own peculiar geek/anal retentive way I also didn't want to have models left over that I wasn't using. I suppose I could have used mail order, but I was 12 or 13 at this time and didn't know how to, and I also knew there was no way in hell my dad would let me use his credit card like that. And anyway, now I'd have to pay postage for one figure - still an expensive proposition. Why jump through hoops like that when last week I could have got 5 models and not 4? I was annoyed, plain and simple, and it is never a good business strategy to annoy your customer base.

Now, in the interests of fairness I should point out that currently if you buy a box of Aspect Warriors you get a full squad of 5 and an Exarch, which when I started you bought separately. However, these figures are plastic not metal (I think, it doesn't actually say on the website) and will set you back £20.50. Back in the day it would have been another £5 for the Exarch, still in the region of £12 for 6 metal figures. However, to counter that, it is definitely easier to build an army now, what with the battalion boxes and their like and going back to having whole squads in one purchase and pretending that this is a new innovation. I don't know enough to be able to say just how much of a cost increase there has been outside of inflation though.

Now, I have an unproven and unscientific feeling that a lot of Games Workshop price hikes really are to do with the rising costs of materials and 'normal' inflationary pressures just like they say - almost everything goes up in price over time, and that does not mean just the cost of the materials but also wages, delivery and shipping costs, insurance costs, running costs etc - but this was different, they were deliberately forcing you to spend more money than you needed on your army and were throwing in waste at the same time. They were ripping collectors off, plain and simple.

Of course, not long after reducing the amount you got in a blister the price of blisters started to go up. A double whammy of "Screw the customer, we want profits now." Not only could I not build a full squad of Aspect Warriors with one purchase, it was now more expensive to not build a full squad of Aspect Warriors with one purchase. Cheeky bastards.

I then started to notice this new type of inflation, lets call this new economic mystery GamesWorkshopflation (because I couldn't think of anything funnier), in my Space Marine army. I had the now legendary RTB01 boxed set of 30 mark VI marines. At the time it had cost me about £10.99 (or maybe £11.99). I saw, much to my chagrin, that a new box of just 10 mark VII marines was now the same price. By any stretch of the imagination, that is a serious rip off. From getting 30 figures to getting 10, for the same bloody price? If memory serves, and I could check this because I have every White Dwarf since issue 32 but don't want to dig through all the unopened moving boxes upstairs, these 10 marines didn't actually come with a heavy or a special weapon in the box either. Cheeky money grubbing bastards.

Oh no you di'int

Soon the second edition of Warhammer 40,000 came out, and not long after I wrote one of the only letters of complaint to a company that I've ever written. Not sure exactly how old I was, but it was somewhere around 14 or 16. It was well reasoned, clearly written, well researched and chock full of evidence like that given above, since I had all the prices from a couple of years of White Dwarf easily to hand in order to write it. What had pushed me over the edge was a change that now meant I couldn't use a significant number of my models in the game, a fact I didn't know until after I had already bought the new edition. The change was to Space Marine assault squads. The squad I had just finished converting from 10 of my RTB01 marines not long before buying the second edition. The squad loaded with power swords, axes and fists most of them were now not allowed to have. Arse. Some might say "Serves your beardy arse right." But my reasoning was from the fluff - aren't these guys supposed to have the best the Imperium can offer? So why would they have a chainsword given to Imperial Guard sergeants by the millions? Hell no, elite Space Marine assault squads have power weapons.

Sure, I could use the previous rules, but none of my friends were. Sure I could pull apart the great conversions I had done, but would you have wanted to? Bastards. This was the start of a new and now well known Games Workshop "feature". And by "feature" I mean "feature" in the sense that constant mechanical problems are a "feature" of my Jeep Grand Cherokee. This "feature" is the constant new edition related merry go round of "Model in - Model out - Model back in next time round - nope, only kidding, back out again now that you all bought the nice new shiny thing." If you don't know what I am talking about ask anyone who liked their Ork Shokk Attack gun or their Chaos Warrior and daemons combined army. Or try finding a current edition Squat codex. Or finding a Zoat in the current Tyranid army list. Or a current edition Genestealer Cult army list. Or a current Chaos Dwarf army list. I'm sure that isn't even close to being an exhaustive list.

"Yes, sorry you bought all that stuff but none of it is usable now. But hey, you could spend hundreds of pounds replacing it with something completely different you don't like as much. How's that for great customer service?"

Piss off. But that was basically the response my letter got, with the addition of, and I paraphrase but I swear this was the gist of the letter I got back when combined with the above quote, "Sorry you are upset, but our stuff is still great and we hope you and your friends keep buying it. Thank you, come again."

And right about then I stopped regularly buying new Games Workshop products for the large number of armies and game systems I owned by that time. If something new and very cool came out I would buy it, but my friends and I either built things from scratch or played with what we had from that point on, until I had graduated from university and got myself a job. Because of the way the company acted my friends and I basically stopped buying from Games Workshop for a period of about 6 years. I still bought White Dwarf religiously, but had no desire to throw myself in to the merry go round of new editions, models and units that lasted just a year or two, and the now rapidly spiraling costs.

Then I got myself all growed up

After university I settled down, got a job and got into the Specialist Games of Mordheim, Inquisitor, Warmaster and Battlefleet Gothic. Many consider this the golden age of Games Workshop and it is hard to disagree, particularly because these games were possible to play without an outlay of hundreds of pounds.

Let's face it though, that is also the reason specialist games went away.

Regardless, I loved these games and spent a lot of money - I had one of every possible warband for Mordheim, four Battlefleet Gothic fleets, two Warmaster armies. I did draw the line at the 54mm figures for Inquisitor though. Most of them were rubbish for starters (with a few notable exceptions), but why would I want to spend more money on terrain and figures on a different scale of game when I have a ready alternative in a collection of hundreds of models? No thanks, I'll play 28mm Inquisitor thank you very much. I see your game, Games Workshop. I was right too, look how quickly 54mm disappeared from Games Workshop.

It doesn't bother me so much that these games went away - they still have limited support and there are an awful lot of other companies that make products you can use in any of those games, but it was about this time Games Workshop made another "bugger the customer" move. It was the Lord of the Rings games. I remember when these first came out everyone on the old and now defunct Games Workshop forums complained about the 25mm scale for LoTR, but there was a rumour that it was because New Line had enforced the scale for licensing reasons. Then in a little remarked and largely unnoticed interview on the site, a Games Workshop designer or developer or someone whose name I can't recall admitted that it had been a decision made by Games Workshop so that people didn't think LoTR was replacing the other core games.

And my bullshit detector exploded. Yet even when I drew attention to this on the forums people didn't seem to get it.

What the scale decision was, I think we'd all agree, was an effort to make sure people couldn't use the models they had in one system to represent something they had in another system and avoid handing over their hard earned cash to Games Workshop. Bastards.

Not that I minded, the LoTR game sounded rubbish and the figures were mostly a bit naff. I avoided it then and still avoid it now, no matter how much I love those books and the movie adaptations.

Funnily enough, I regard the introduction of LoTR coverage in White Dwarf to be the time when this magazine started to very rapidly decline in quality as well. This decline has really not abated, and once my current subscription runs out I don't intend to renew it. I mean, regardless of the content have you noticed the editorial quality? It's like it is being written and edited by people with English as a third language. I'm no grammar Nazi as you'll be able to tell but you can find an error or two on pretty much every page, its awful. We do have spell and grammar checkers you know. If you can't spell your computer bloody well can, there is no excuse for this kind of error in a publication people are paying for. It is symptomatic of Games Workshop's now fairly obvious attitude to customers - no matter what, they'll keep paying.

And as for the content of White Dwarf, rehashing the same articles with different figures and editions really isn't doing it for me. How many times do we need an article telling you how to use fast cavalry in exactly the same way the previous 6 articles on the subject did? How many times does Jervis need to write that it is different now than it was then?

And another thing

Lets just explode this myth. Games Workshop used to make some of the finest models available. That is no longer the case. Some of their models are just terrible, and the latest Finecast disasters and troubles have not done them any favours, with persistent claims of extremely poor casting quality and warping models as well as poor customer service in relation to this.

Lets lay this one to rest, Games Workshop have some very stiff competition and I don't think they have noticeably upped their game in response, it's been a long time since I bought a Games Workshop figure to use in a Games Workshop game - there are plenty of manufacturers making models that fit in very nicely with 28mm Inquisitor and are much more visually stunning or dynamic, and less cartoony.

Games Workshop used to be the very best, in my opinion, but now I think that question is very much up in the air.

And even after 22 years of playing their games, I still think their vampire models are still almost universally terrible.

Ssssh, don't mention the background changes

And this one really pisses me off. I know it is their background story to mess with, but do they have to screw it up and make changes that are rubbish? Whoever let Gav Thorpe near the fluff of my beloved Dark Angels needs to be given a good thrashing (and the two weakest Horus Heresy series books are by far and away the two concerning the Dark Angels, the first was dreadful the second merely a bit crap - for the love of all that is decent let Abnett or McNeill write the third one, please. Don't make me beg).

By all means develop the story, just don't keep rewriting it.

The awful Dreadknight is the most recent spectacular example. For all of their history in the game and background the Grey Knights have been about dedicated squads working not as individuals but as a combined unit to take down the most powerful physical threats in the Galaxy, Greater Daemons and daemon princes, even sacrificing themselves if necessary. Now they have this toss manga robot suit that fits the feel of the 40K universe about as well as a story involving Scooby Doo, and represents something that completely rewrites the Grey Knight theme and feel. If you'll pardon the pun, the model and concept are dreadful and really ruins the Grey Knight background.

Someone also needs to keep Matt Ward away from codexes. Case in point being the crap that came out with the new Blood Angels codex. It's no wonder I don't play 40K anymore when that's the standard.

MonsterHammer

All of which leads me nicely to the final thing I wanted to write about Games Workshop, for now. Or at least the final thing I can remember I wanted to write about Games Workshop for now: the current trend towards MonsterHammer.

Has anyone else noticed that with each new army release recently (mostly in Warhammer, but to some extent in 40K as well) there just has to be a new monster or four included? Do Games Workshop somehow make more money off a large monster model than they do off the smaller sets? Or am I imagining it? I remember when earlier editions used to be criticized for being HeroHammer, and the new edition of Warhammer was supposed to shift focus to the foot soldiers by way of the 'horde' rule, but it seems every new release for this edition focuses more and more on what new big monster the army has and how it is integral to how that army works. Which of course means every other army has to go for the monsters. Hell, Storm of Magic is all about the big monsters and only just came out. So, if the prediction hasn't already been made I predict this edition will later be known as MonsterHammer. You (may) have heard it here first.

And there it is

So there you have it, that's why I'm not a Games Workshop fanboy. The company has done it's unintentional and intentional best to take my love and make it wither and die. Games Workshop, how could you have been so careless with my heart wallet?

Of course, none of that matters when the next cool thing comes out. Talk about a complex relationship.