Voss wrote:I'm honestly convinced that had they done the AoS rules with a few tweaks (and... points, because honestly, the fuck?) and kept the old setting, it would have done fine. But instead Sigmarines warred for a year over infinite planes with no people, places or thing to care about except the gates to the next infinite plane over. There is nothing to lose or gain, just infinitely replaceable goons killing infinitely replaceable goons with spikes and no shirts.
Reducing Warhammer Fantasy down to a skirmish-level game with the freedom to mix and match armies was certainly not a bad idea. Mordheim (the computer game) is not a very well implemented game from a ruleset perspective but it's being played because there is a love for mis-mashing together your own band of rogues.
The problem is exactly as you said - they blew up the whole fucking universe for the sake of adding Space Marines. Worse nobody even likes the damn Sigmarines. The Total Warhammer game doesn't have them. The local store doesn't even carry them.
Had they instead re-focused Warhammer Fantasy into a specific area - say a No Man's Land created by the last big Chaos invasion where various small forces operate independently - then they could have gotten away with the change in rule set without alienating the old base. And then maybe they could have slipped in the Space Marines to see if they sold well or not.
But no, as with all GW "business strategy" their fallback to any slump in sales is "SPACE MARINES". That's why we're getting all the shit Space Marine video games and shit Space Marine Black Library novels.
Yet until the Horus Heresy their bestselling novel series was on the
Imperial Guard (Gaunt's Ghosts); and even the Horus Heresy largely depicted Marines as being so mortal and fallible that they may as well be Guardsmen. Meanwhile the best-selling video game series on 40K is
Dawn of War, which was all about adding the different races and peaked around the time they added the
Tau into the line-up. Heck, the Battlefleet Gothic video game on its own sold over 200,000 copies and has probably earned more than the Sigmarines models.
In short, they literally don't understand that while the Space Marines may be their biggest seller on the 40K
tabletop (and I would argue it's because of cost reasons rather than people really liking Marines that much), it's actually one of their
weaker IPs everywhere else. Indeed, you could throw the Marines out of many of their best-remembered games and replace them with Guardsmen or some other faction (e.g. Space Hulk) and it would be pretty much the same or even better game.
Certainly there would be fewer jokes about how the supposedly best military force in the Galaxy decided that they should deploy huge lumbering Terminator-armored troops in one of the tightest battlefields imaginable despite the said armor being easily sliced to pieces like wet tissue paper by the Genestealers opposing them.