What makes 40k as a setting so popular

>>Septs
>>Craftworlds
>>Hive Fleets
>>Klans
>>Four separate fucking Chaos Gods, traitor legions and warbands, Daemonkin
And all of them had the same units.
Not to mention Craftworlds and Chaos are united now

Marketing. You don't see many Privateer Press stores when you're out on the town do you? You don't see too many Dropfleet video games on the shelf at EB. I don't know what originally made 40k popular, but the thing that KEEPS it popular is the fact that it's in your face all the god damned time.

I don't buy the thing about it just being huge.

40k is special. 40k is a disease.

People who play 40k immediately lose the ability to think or talk about anything else.

One day your friend is a normal dude, then he plays some 40k and he changes all his online usernames to Commander Tarkus and uses Krieger avatars and never ever ever shuts the fuck up about 40k for the rest of his life.

I am convinced that 40k is actually a memetic parasite from another dimension that multiplies itself in your mind and then broadcasts its offspring through your mouth.

For me its the silly and over the top fluff. I love 40k's setting. I even read the books although most of them suck ass.

Prefer fantasy models though. They are much more charming.

>he thinks Space Wolves and GKs have the same units as vanilla marines
>he thinks Imperial Guard are the same unit as Space Marines

>Not to mention Craftworlds and Chaos are united now

So's the Imperium after Castellans of the Imperium, YOU FUCKING FAGGOT

As a mono slaanesh player that made me laugh.

HE KNOWS! GET HIM!

>Nurgle has the same units as Tzeentch
>Thousand Sons have the same units as Khorne Daemonkin

Fucking kill yourself.

I've been exposed to 40k both in small quantities near daily and in large doses in the span of several days and it hasn't taken yet in nearly twenty years. There is something making me immune and I can't figure it out. My immune system is fighting the GWbots with everything it has.

In my blood there is the secret, the cure. We have to go deeper.

But with those barebone lore ideas you can do You're perfectly right mechanics-wise, but to a newcomer the lore is the first thing they see and they can get overexcited very quickly.
> Tau'n is the first colony? Bet they're pretty chuffed with themselves or have wicked sick military backing.
> Wow Saim-Hann, I thought the Eldar were all fops but these guys are fur-barbarian craftworlders or something.
> So this one hive fleet adapts tactics within hours?
>Goffs are the toughest Orks, they're the melee race of a melee race With I2!

Never mind that none of these ideas are supported in the products, they've already bought three boxes, and it's all downhill from there.

I have a friend with 2 codexes that he bought cheaply simply for love of the lore, and that's what got him to fork for three of their specialist games. I'd wager even downloading multiple PDF rulebooks is still good business for them.

As the other's have said, there's something for everyone. There's an 80s metal album cover happening alongside a fucking mecha anime.

It's success is that it's both grim dark and silly, structured and open ended.. that is, when talentless hacks don't write everything into oblivion.

Because they have Ultramarines. Honestly no other game or in fact any work of fiction in history has had such a cool and intriguing faction.

MY SPIRITUAL LEIGE

Leandros is right.

Others have mentioned that there's something for everyone, but I'd also say that there are common themes across the setting ( mostly GRIMDARK) that make it a cohesive whole, which is aesthetically appealing.

I'd also point out that despite being quite deep, the setting is (was) also very easy to get into. Just hearing names like 'Space Marines', 'Imperial Guard', 'Eldar', 'Orks', along with their pictures and a couple of sentences about the galaxy as a whole is enough to let you know roughly what's going on, and enough so you can tell all your little friends about it and get them interested too. By contrast, I look at things like Warmahordes & Infinity and all the factions are called things like 'the Zvarri Conglomerisation'; it's difficult to get the first idea what's going on, and I certainly won't remember all the names by the next day. This is one of the reasons I'm so opposed to 'Astra Militarum' & 'Aeldari' & so on: everyone still thinks 'Aeldari' are space elves so the setting doesn't seem more original, but it's far more difficult to get that impression as a new player, let alone pronounce the damn thing, & I think a lot of people will be turned off from that.

Is it?
Outside of the community in certain parts of America, the tabletop wargame is unheard of, outside of its video games incarnations.
In comparison, Yugi-Oh and Pokemon TCG are more widely known and played.

Tcgs are gambling for children and a literal cancer. Of course theyre more prevelant than wargames, you moron.

Yes, it is dumbass. Compare it to any other miniatures wargame, you know the same fucking products in its niche.

That's like your dumb ass saying Honda isn't a big car company because more people drink water than own a Honda.

It's a petridish setting where it's perfectly canon to insert your favorite culture/civilization/era into the lore.

Want knights in shining armour fighting dinosaurs and zombies? = Feudal World with saurian fauna and Warp-induced Nurgle-fiends.

Want scantily clad barbarian cavemen wrestling with lovecraftian horrors? = Death World with Tyranid-infested fiends or alternatively Chaotic mutants.

Want super-shiny chrome mechas battling sorcerous interdimensional gladiators? = Tau vs Dark Eldar incubi or Chaos space marines.

etc. et.c ad infinitium...

I think its a really good mix of inspiration (ripping off) from real world history of all ages, classical literature (Dante, the Greeks etc), Lovecraftian horror, modern sci-fi and classic sci-fi.

Where else mixes ecclesiastic Europe history with WW1 and Invasion of the Body Snatcher?

Its this Goldilocks zone where its not magic powered shitposting all the time but it could be if you want it to

They have plagerised every popular setting (judge Dredd, alien, dune) and made it so it has something that can potentially appeal to everyone.

It's called ''being a faggot'', user. Possibly it's mutation called ''contrarian''.

It's the closest we have to a generic Tolkein-esque sci-fi setting.
You have space humans, space elves, space orks, space dragons, space wizards, space everything. 40k is what you'd expect D&D in space to be.
Settings like Star Wars aren't grandesque and are too low-fantasy to fill the gap. 40k's really the only thing that does it.

Does DNA degradate in 40k?

Simply put, 40k appeals to the lowest common denominator of gamer. GW is the EA or the Blizzard of tabletop wargames, they pump out well polished AAA titles because they have achieved huge market domination, and the playerbase doesn't know any better. It's just the shit they've always been fed so they keep on eating it up. There isn't any depth to the game, just flashiness and special effects. To add more analogies, it's the Transformers films of tabletop wargames. What you see is all you will ever get.

If they're told it's good they'll think it's good, if their friends play it of course they'll follow. There is plenty of grimdark "silliness" (is it really silly anymore once the majority of players are too dumb to see the irony anymore and mistake it for sincerity?) to grab up the modern breed of gamer who was raised on Halo or Star Wars. "Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe they're in good company" and all that.

Couple it all with the malicious pricing schemes GW has cooked up and you have trapped players who are eternally stuck in the sunk cost fallacy and you've also created some particularly rabid fanboys.

I have to stock this shit at the game store that I own because it along with MtG pays for the upkeep and allows me to put actual good games on the shelves. It is without a doubt the worst fanbase to exist within the realm of Veeky Forums related stuff, even MtG players are a couple of steps above 40k players.

You misunderstand. People aren't discussing the lore so much as they're arguing about the decades of minutae, inconsistencies, and contradictions inside of it, along with arguing over rules interpretations and frustrations. This is due to GW having no consistent vision for 40K other than 'space gothic,' and letting every hack author and game designer run roughshod over their intellectual property as the few competent people in the company just crank out cool miniatures.

Dawn of War, and the fact that it's been around for so long and the GW is the largest miniatures games company in the world. It's popular through sheer brand recognition, the McDonalds of minatures games.