So it turns out the new tau codex is actually the old tau codex with a few new units added, but it doesn't say that on the page for the new product it says it on the old codex page.

And even then the advice is don't buy the new codex buy the £45 campaign book for the new units.

Every week I'm sure I can't get more disgusted but GW keeps finding new lows.

After chatting to mates there about stuff i cant really discuss on here im amazed they are still in business and dont expect them to be for many years to come.

Stuff we chatted about earlier about the future of some games Hobojebus... well i may have to revise my beliefs now i know what they may well be doing.

I suspect GW will go under within 5 years.

As I've said before I'll truly be sad about this, I've given my reasons elsewhere - so I won't again but.. ****.

BUT

Possibility 2.

It'd go to a critical low, and be bought by someone who gives a ****, and the next decade will be a slow rebuild of the IP.

Possibility 2.5 It'll be FFG. I will convert to a religion and preach the second coming. I mean sure, I doubt FFG would keep the stores open... But at least they'd responsibly handle the IP/gaming.

I was discussing this with GW chums.

The likelihood of someone 'reviving' GW is less likely than the likelihood of it being bought by a far east 'ip farm' who will just sell off the licences to toy companies which would make far more money selling 40k action figures and the like than they would model kits.

Equally GW is fairly unique in the Uk in being a game company that owns four or five injection moulding machines (i think the perrys have one too) and if it went under they would be sold to the far east as they are worth millions each.

The death / failure of GW as a gaming company would see the death of the company in any form i think, the best we could hope for is other companies being able to afford the licence to make 40k based gaming models and rules.

But you have to remember that back in the 'share crash' days when gw shares went to a ridiculous low (im still kicking myself for selling mine far too cheaply) *everyone* thought Hasbro would buy GW out but it never happened. Most big toy companies dont understand and dont want to get involved with the wargames market.

Well after selling out the limited edition has now gone back up on the site seems people cancelled the orders once they learned it's not a new book.

The current board needs to be given the boot by the shareholders but I doubt they'll give a **** until they fail to pay a dividend.

I still haven't parted with my models there's still a part of me that hopes for a turn around but I'm not buying anything from them again in their current state.

This is the result of increasing the release cycle the devs Arnt at fault nor is the art department or sales staff, this disaster rests squarely on management.

I can't imagine anyone in the dev team was happy about recycling the codex like this, no wonder they don't put their names on anything anymore.

What torques me off about GW is how they treated Orks in the new Codex. I'd rather go back to the 4th ed. Ork book. At least then we had a shot at winning with something other than a spam list... I try to play something OTHER than a Green Tide and cant win against anyone. The only reliable list is Green Tide, so why did I buy all this other stuff? Why buy Battle Wagons or any of the vehicles for that matter when the best method is to fill your entire deployment zone with boyz, nobz, a painboy and a warlord. Eternal Waagh! from turn two on and just move, run, assault. Repeat.

Things like that often happen if there is no 'champion' for that race in games dev.

For a long time, may have changed now, whoever played that army regularly would tend to write the codex (sometimes under supervision) , in cases where no one played that army you tended to get a weak or badly thoght out codex, in cases where there was poor supervision or none you occasionally got overpowered codexs as no one was there to rain in the excess if someone senior that way.

I do remember hearing that a studio manager once told a games developer 'make orcs and goblins really good or you're sacked'

I know for a fact 6th ed dark elves had no design studio 'champion' and the initial lists were massively overcosted and underpowered, luckily i was in uk studio and playing them so playtested and suggested some changes.

They were not *great* when they came out (cold ones having been crippled by the new 'dictate' that the mount could not be tougher or harder than the rider) but they could have been so much worse.

I seem to remember cold one knights being about five points more expensive than an empire knight but being slower, less well armoured and stupid! Luckily that got fixed.

Dark elves - my favourite fantasy race. Easily. Next competitor is Brettonia. so... how screwed am I in fantasy lol.

Also... on the thought of race/codex/armybook champions. Your thoughts on Matt Ward?

The idea of far east IP farms for stuff like that is... frightening.

Part of the problem is the shareholders I suspect, profit at any cost doesn't work, they should do something about that.

I do remember hearing that a studio manager once told a games developer 'make orcs and goblins really good or you're sacked'

I never knew that but I think a lot of people always expected something like that. It's a perfect example of the problem with the overall culture at GW I think.

It's been clear for some time they just don't take the game part very seriously.

Matt gets very bad press. I worked with Matt in the last couple of years before i left GW. I think these days Matt pretty much gets told how things have to pan out , its not like hes' single handedly trying to nerf every race.

He can actually be a bit too serious. Years ago we were trying to promote the first LOTR 'fellowship' box set and it was pretty limited tbh even with the blister packs. We'd semi-jokingly done an open day game called 'elronds royal rivendell rumble' which was a 'what if' if the evil of the ring had corrupted the fellowship at the council of elrond and they fought over it.

Bascially a special character 'death match' bar room brawl. Alessio and I thought it was hilarious but Matt veto'd it as he thought we might look like we were disrespecting the licence and he was in charge of LOTR at the time.

But in general i think hes a good bloke doing a difficult job.

On the internet everyones an expert and everyone says 'oh i could write a better codex'. Ever actually tried writing a publishable wargaming supplement? I have and its bloody hard work. I've just submitted a new module to chaosium for call of Cthulhu and its 20,000 words long and took me bloody ages in rewrites

(i also did a fair bit of an 'iron knights' space marine codex while i was at GW with some guidance from Andy Chambers but I left before i finished it. Im always annoyed that i invented them then they went and changed the colour scheme! )

I think the days of writers just doing there own thing are largely over at GW. I know everyone thinks that each codex is more powerful than the last but a lot of this is that a 'new' codex surprises people and they have to adapt their plans to cover it, especially so in organised play where they have to cover a lot of bases as they don't know who they will come up against. Consequently most 'new' armies tend to win their early games.

(its the same with battle reports, people always said we fixed them so the new army won... we didnt, what we DID do was play the game three or four times and choose the most entertaining game as no one wants to read five pages of a game where nothing really happens. It just happened however that the most entertaining stuff was *new* so done by the new army and usually if they were doing it it was going well for them.)

I do remember hearing that a studio manager once told a games developer 'make orcs and goblins really good or you're sacked'

I never knew that but I think a lot of people always expected something like that. It's a perfect example of the problem with the overall culture at GW I think.

It's been clear for some time they just don't take the game part very seriously.

The writer in question wasn't actually sure if the manager was joking or not, but with that manager you never knew... he had a very 'interesting' and abrupt approach to social interaction. (some might even say they were a bit of a bully)

What will probably surprise you is that when you go for a job in the studio they are far more interested in how socially and 'nicely' you play games than your knowledge of the rules.

When i was doing my shortlist interviews, Space McQuirk and I played a game of 40k against each other where we were clearly making stuff up as we went along! They didnt actually care, they wanted to see how well you got on with people and could improvise ( a newish edition of 40k had recently came out and they knew space and i were mainly WFB players).

We also had 'short speech/presentation' task in which they gave the seven of us a set of topics and said 'sort out who is doing what and who is going first'.. Again it was more about how you took on roles, whether you accepted being given a job and how well you pitched for the topic you really wanted rather than the actual content of the presentation.

Quite a lot of people at GW with incredibly minimal knowledge of the game, less so obviously in the writing side of things but i knew no end of sales staff, sculptors, artists etc who had no interest in playing at all.

Edit: GW always used to have a 'recruitment/promotion' chart that had 'values and behavior' as the vertical axis and 'skill set/knowledge' on the horizontal.

The belief was that if the 'values and behaviour' wasnt high you were doomed. They could always teach relevant knowledge and give you experience but a git was always going to be a git.

(i'm not joking about this BTW, i came across it both in department manager 'training and recruitment' modules i had to do and also in the 'retail manager' course i chose to do to give me a better feel for what the guys on the shop floor were doing ... it was actually a pretty cool two week course and i learnt hodloads about retail, selling wargames and the business.)

Sounds like the dream job to me.

Matt Ward did introduce my favourite and indeed calling card signature unit - the Sternguard. (as a Raptors and Crimson Fist player... yeah imagine it). Still, his fluff I've always found painful. I remember 5th Ed GK too, but I accept his LOTR stuff was good.

Like I've maintained since we've been posting on GW. It'll be a crying shame to see it go, and I'd really, really like to see at least the warhammer fantasy and 40K IP's bought by someone who can handle it.

If production goes to the far east - would that not cut costs? (Surely it must, but what of quality?)

Would it add logistical issues? (the boat)

What if GW finally released pre-painted - or options? (highly divisive subject, so much that I don't know my own opinion).

Are the rules salvageable, would an overhaul be necessary? (My opinion - god yes, simplify add stats where needed, remove poorly phrased special rules as much as you can always).

This sounds ruthless, so I apologize but: Do GW need stores in this day and age? (Ruthless though I ask it, to generate interest for the game I think they still do).

There's a lot of fat that could be trimmed. In the past, with the removal of specialist games, and non-table models, have they trimmed the wrong fat?

All good questions.

GW having its own plastics production is actually massivley cheaper and means test sprues can be seen hours after they are done rather than days, so mistakes get corrected quickly (in theory)

They even moved plastics production from wisbeach in cambridgeshire to nottingham for this reason.

Far better to be in control of your own production.

Stores are what made GW the giant it is, high street presence and word of mouth. I think they need stores, maybe not the 100+ they have now though.

about a decade ago i put a proposal forwards for 'pre painted' basic sets of the most popular stuff like space marines, rhinos, orks, eldar etc.

I showed them how 'dragon' were doing excellent prepaints of die cast 1/72 tanks and making a lot of money on it.

I was shot down by alan merret and told it 'wasnt the hobby'. I tried to explain to him that for some people *gaming* is the hobby and painting is a chore but senior management at the time had it in their heads that everyone collected to paint... clearly they had never been to a wargames club and seen tons of unpainted (and some unassembled) models being used!

They could always teach relevant knowledge and give you experience but a git was always going to be a git.

That I'd agree with. But a nice guy may be a horrible person to write rules.

I remember early on in my career in IS, we got a new manager who was a nice enough guy, but knew jack about computers, networks, security, software, ect... He had a background in management of manufacturing.

He was the worst boss ever, because he couldn't even speak the same language as us, and didn't have enough understanding of systems and hardware to make proper decisions.

Mantic, Privateer Press, and Wyrd are all far east and look great.

Asmodee is an EU company in the industry and already making big bucks off the GW IP.

If GW would treat independent retailers with respect and decent terms, then offer any kind of OP, I don'r think there would be a problem.

They could always teach relevant knowledge and give you experience but a git was always going to be a git.

That I'd agree with. But a nice guy may be a horrible person to write rules.

I remember early on in my career in IS, we got a new manager who was a nice enough guy, but knew jack about computers, networks, security, software, ect... He had a background in management of manufacturing.

He was the worst boss ever, because he couldn't even speak the same language as us, and didn't have enough understanding of systems and hardware to make proper decisions.

I can see that being a massive issue.

GW annecdote....

years ago GW had a business analyst come in to work out there optimum methods and the like.

His findings were that 'black spray paint' had the best profit margins and sold the best.

So he advised that they concentrated on black spray paint. Because he had no understanding of the underlying hobby it didnt occur to him there was a *reason* people needed to buy paint that would dissapear if they no longer made models.

But you know he was a qualified proffesional, thing is he was just looking at the numbers not the culture.

Yeah GW need to kinda re-look at the hobby aspect and what it means. While there will always be people wanting to paint there own, as evidenced in X-wing's own repaint threads. Some people just want to buy and play.

Mantic, Privateer Press, and Wyrd are all far east and look great.

Asmodee is an EU company in the industry and already making big bucks off the GW IP.

If GW would treat independent retailers with respect and decent terms, then offer any kind of OP, I don'r think there would be a problem.

Yep but i'll also remind you of the time when 'warzone' sent off their 'three ups' to the far east to be put on sprues and got sprues back that were huge as miscommunication meant the manufacturer thought they were supposed to produce the minis in the 3up size

Well, I have two jobs and three kids. While I do love my Star Wars, I can tell you that having the miniatures come pre-painted, and looking good at that, was a huge factor in my decision to play. I just don't have the time to paint figures, and I certainly don't want to try and do that with my toddlers around. I will likely not have the time to paint small figures for another 10 years. I love showing up at the game store, taking out the X-Wing models, and getting right to the business of play.

For that matter, I love getting an idea, being able to purchase a model right there at the game store, opening it up and slapping it down and playing immediately.

Heck, kids aside, having to paint all those figures was probably something that kept me from buying into 40K all those years ago. Just no interest in that.

No longer having time to dedicate to paint really detailed armies... I love X-wing, and am mostly semi OK with playing IA unpainted.

GW annecdote....

years ago GW had a business analyst come in to work out there optimum methods and the like.

His findings were that 'black spray paint' had the best profit margins and sold the best.

So he advised that they concentrated on black spray paint. Because he had no understanding of the underlying hobby it didnt occur to him there was a *reason* people needed to buy paint that would dissapear if they no longer made models.

But you know he was a qualified proffesional, thing is he was just looking at the numbers not the culture.

A more perfect analogy for MathWing I could not have ever hoped to find...

Mathwing has it's place, but it is not the alpha and the omega.

Well, I have two jobs and three kids. While I do love my Star Wars, I can tell you that having the miniatures come pre-painted, and looking good at that, was a huge factor in my decision to play. I just don't have the time to paint figures, and I certainly don't want to try and do that with my toddlers around. I will likely not have the time to paint small figures for another 10 years. I love showing up at the game store, taking out the X-Wing models, and getting right to the business of play.

For that matter, I love getting an idea, being able to purchase a model right there at the game store, opening it up and slapping it down and playing immediately.

Heck, kids aside, having to paint all those figures was probably something that kept me from buying into 40K all those years ago. Just no interest in that.

Likwise, i'd had friends try and get me into warmachine, and DUST and bolt action etc but with shelves full of unpainted and part painted WWII./40k/wild west lead i just couldnt face another game where i *had* to paint stuff

When everyone got into xwing i was happy to buy into it as its not time intensive in anything like the same way as other games (both to play and to collect)

Oddly i've done a fair few repaints but that because ive wanted to , not because i had to

Oddly i've done a fair few repaints but that because ive wanted to , not because i had to

I feel this is another key part of the problem with Warhammer /40K.

After a while, it's a bit of a chore. I mean I love painting minis, every time I paint a mini i make a story up in my head - especially the more pimped up Death watch members, and space marine captains. and Fireteam Talon, and Imperial Guard vets, and my Sternguard - all my sternguard..

But.. yeah, sometimes I wish i could just say sod it and play - best example is space hulk. Shiny terminators, so many blood angels symbols that you'll never set it up to be fists, ever. Unpainted. When you go far that, may as well finish the job.

I'm sad to say that my sole interest in GW now lies in just how much I can get for my stuff on ebay.

And whether to sell it now, or keep hold of it and sell it when it's no longer available to buy...