F

>one sells worse/barely at all
What do? GW simply overextended the amount of fully fleshed out factions.
A lot of people (especially normies) like vampires. They, elves, dorfs and orks are probably the most normie friendly factions. A lot of people like lizies, hence why they were the first to get an AoS battletome. Skaven have a lot of normie friendly things that can be expanded upon: cute rats, ninjas/assasins, steam punk and also plagues which always sells for some reason (see nurgle).
Tomb Kings are just egyptian skeletons. VC also have skeletons, so TK only have 'egyptian', which leaves you with mummies, sphinxes and ushabti. Nobody cares for that kind of stuff anymore, especially not in popculture

Fuck, I forgot my first line:
>2 undead factions
>one sells worse (or barely at all)

If they ever made an accurate digital facsimile of the tabletop game and monetized it they could turn the company around with loot boxes within a year. Nobody buys WHFB models and It wouldn’t even affect their 40k sales.

There is a difference in 'buying a dlc' and 'committing 2-3 years and 200-300 euros' into an army that is probaly not your favorite one. It's the same problem that whfb had. And don't get me wrong, I love whfb and TK, the problems were obvious though.

Tabletop companies have always been slow to accept digital, and have mixed success when they do. Although there is some interesting things happening, like Fantasy Flight opening their own digital games studio.

Replied to the wrong post.

>loot boxes
Oh god please no, I am sick of loot boxes. Christ almighty, they've managed to turn video gaming into a virtual casino.

>haha, your IG army need a Leeman Russ? Well you have a .55 percent chance of getting one in a Gold Army Pack (TM), why not buy ten for the low low price of $5.00 USD?
>what's that? Didn't get your Russ? What a shame, why not try again?

The worst part is I can totally see them doing this.

Hopefully legislation will just kill that whole business model. It's already progressing in Europe.

NAGASH IS GREATEST

Their marketing team sucks and they can't design games for shit. They never figured out the scale issue, which is that having to drop $300+ in to models and then having them suck it up isn't fun. They never figured out how to make a bunch of smaller games so you could buy a $50 faction and just have some fun with it, like pushing a Tomb Kings chariot racing game or a not-egyptian themed dungeon crawl. Warhammer was never at the point you could buy just one box and have fun with it.

Nagash is trash

As an amerifat I'm finding myself on Europe's side with this one

Hawaii was pushing it too. People taking action against predatory business models is global.

That god, this shit has been going on way too long

That's honestly a really good idea. Use the same model range for a large number of games on different scales, with army boxes acting as a self contained game of some sort that you can enjoy. The classic large battles, smaller conflicts or squad based skirmish stuff, along with more gimmicky things like racing games, sports games or wizard/hero duels. That feels like it would make a lot of sense.

You realize you don't have to participate, right? If you need the gubbermint to step in and "protect" you from a completely voluntary and completely stupid transaction, it says far more about you than about the business. Namely, it says you're a retard. I can't really fault companies that deal in microtransactions - I agree they're stupid and not worth the money, but people are idiotic enough to buy games that have them anyway.

Literally the only thing you have to do to avoid being "exploited" is not spend the money in the first place. Get your shit together and realize you can run your own life.

This is probably bait, but you could probably learn a lot if you did some basic reading into human psychology, particularly how addiction works. There's a reason drugs and subliminal advertising are banned. Human beings are not perfect rational operators, and our minds are depressingly easy to manipulate. Believing you're above that just means you lack the self-awareness to know when it's being done to you.

Go back to you filthy redditor.

They were too god damn baller for normies to handle

> What do you mean having sex slaves is wrong!? They signed a contract and everything!

For the common good, you need to protect retards from the assholes that feed on on them.
It’s called empathy and trying to maintain a civilized society...

How the fuck can someone be retarded enough to consider vampire counts not normie friendly?

GW has always been eager to slash support for under-selling armies rather than rehabilitate them.

Because the rules were garbo compared to daemons/elfs/vampires
You make a great monster model and then it dies to one cannonball because it has no ward saves or regen.

>plagues which always sells for some reason
It's an easy to grasp concept. Some normies and newcomers might dislike "ugly" factions, but ALL normies and most newcomers hate too much initial complexity. An army that has easy to get themes will always be succesful.

A few years ago I started work on a game that was like that. The idea was you buy a squad box of plastics and maybe a blister pack or two of bits to customize with and use that to assemble your band of apocalypse survivors. Rules development stalled when I tried to work in stealth mechanics, then life and finances got in the way. The game actually had 26 separate 'factions'. Nine factions with 2-4 sub-faction options each. Say you want to play the zombies. There's three different types of zombies, so you buy the generic zombie squad box, then the appropriate blister pack if you want (fungus zombies, alien bug zombies, mutated virus zombies) which is usually just alternate heads or arms. Your buddy wants to play human survivors, so he buys a box of generic humans, then spices it up with the Redneck blister pack (baseball caps, beer coolers, and hunting rifles). Done. Both players spend about $40 bucks, $55 if they want the full-color illustrated rulebook, plus the cost of glue and paint, and they're ready to play.

>m-muh NAP

...

Problem with Tomb Kings was that nobody purchased their models because their army sucked balls.

Because you can't copyright the words "mummy" "skeleton" or "Tomb King"

Except the issue is, I have never spent a single dollar on micortransactions in my entire life. Yet bit by bit, the whole gaming industry is being taken over by it. So eventually, the choice will not be buy the loot boxes or don't buy the loot boxes, it will be buy loot boxes or don't play any games.

>le epic hellicopter meme

And that's even ignoring cases like Shadow of War or Battlefront II, where even if you didn't buy lootboxes the entire game was crippled and undermined by being designed around them. A problem you cannot just ignore by not buying them.

That shit pisses me off so much.

At least the market is waking up to how garbage it is though, and the upcoming legislation should be the final nail in its coffin.

>muh voluntary association
>unethical business practices are just fine we don't need antitrust law
>BUT PINOCHET'S EBIC HELICOPTER EXECUTIONS
pick one you utterly moronic cunt, and this is coming from a business co-owner
_Donald

Skaven were weirdly popular right from the start, given that they were basically just a Beastmen army with shittier troops and eventually ninjas and snipers.

But the difference that Skaven have over Beastmen (which were never that popular either), Brettonians, Lizardmen and Tomb Kings is that they aren't just copy-past real world factions/popular concepts of factions with a magic gimmick. They're not just shitty old grail legends and the reality of the feudal system played for grimderp laughs; they're not ur mum fuked ur doggo; they're not Qztlqqzzxxlelels; they're not BLATANTLY EGYPT.

They've got their own thing, even if it's basically the same thing as Tyranids in The Other Game.

Factions that sell best in Warhammer games are the ones that you either can't find anywhere else or can put your own spin on without having to become an expert on history.

>What is The Empire.

>Unique, original factions are the most popular
>40k Completely dominated by Not!Catholic crusaders in space

It's original unless you have read its 80's British inspiration.

Honestly Total War was the best thing that could have happened to WFB.

GW doesn't care about it anymore and the lore is effectively set in stone, so they can expand in whatever direction that they like with the lore and making new units (ie Norsca).

Plus you get to play with all of the factions that I could have only dreamed about buying when 8e was at its height. With YouTubers like AngryJoe shilling for the franchise every year and rather good reception and advertising in games news outlets, pre-shitmar WFB has gotten a second life.

Yeah and you can make them anything you fuckin want to. You want to make little girl marines? Who's going to stop you, the fuckin marines?

Or am I laughing this hard because you actually think the space nuns are the most popular?

The Empire didn't sell. That's why WHFB got shitcanned and the Empire died to make way for Stormcast Eternals and their smaller, weaker, human friends you don't care about.

I was directly referring to the Space Marines. Because that's what they are. They've become iconic in their own right, but the idea of holy warriors in full plate going on a great crusade for their religious beliefs is pretty fucking unsubtle at its core themes.

Digital Conversions won't work for a few reasons.

1. Companies don't want to do it because the digital version will inevitably out compete their physical version into the ground.

2. Grogs won't like the lack of complete freedom in customization that comes from tweaking and painting your own models, and will furthermore complain about the loss of muh dice feel and muh LGS feel; just as grogs complain about playing D&D online and not on the table today

3. Normies won't like the TT rules, which would need to be modified to not be dogshit stupid in the digital version (and in general, depending on your opinion). Modifying rules will, again, piss off Grogs.

4. You can do without the Grogs because hey, digital has a lower entry barrier! Just get new players with the lower prices and streamlined rules! But that takes you back to 1.

No matter what you do, someone will be mad. And even if you succeed, congrats, you've played yourself and devalued your physical game which, if the industry is any indication, you are greatly overcharging for because it's a luxury product for enthusiasts! Stock value plummets.

>inspiration

Yeah remember how two-thirds of 40k is a boring time travel story, and it's full of Space Dwarves, Space Orks, and Space Elves?

Have you even read RT?
Or a book on European history?

That's not why they sold, though. They sold as well as they do now (proportionate to total sales) long before there were even distinct chapters or a solid backstory to the Imperium.

The sell because they look cool and you can make them your own. Even now when they've got all this crusader shit attached to them, you can still have your own personal chapter of touchy-feely marines if you want to, and that's deliberate.

Of course most people don't have the imagination for that, but that's why they also make pre-pack chapters.

Also, were you not aware that the Space Marines, almost universally, don't crusade because of their religious beliefs? Sure they do it because they're space-racists, but in the setting, so is every other faction. Space Marines generally don't believe in the Emperor as a god.

Empire didn't sell cause they didn't know what the fuck to do with it, same as Brettonia. Plus their shitty rules from the era of "WE MAKE MODELS NOT GAMES LMAO"

Basically, WHFB fell to the same plight many old school TT properties do: toy executives took over. Toy executives know how to sell toys and maybe board-games. They don't know dog shit about anything else, but it's the closest analogue industry people have.

At the end they were trying to make the Empire both super steam punk and also super religious fanatic, ala 40k, because hey copying 40k works great.

What they could have/should have done from the beginning was copy the Holy Roman Empire more, and given the Empire foot grenadiers, mounted dragoons, and cohesion mechanics; because Human Soldiers were never the greatest or most disciplined, but they were the best at acting in tandem and in formation.

Instead we got robot horses

I am aware of the nuances. That doesn't stop it being a contradiction of your core point that the Warhammer factions that do best are the ones that don't have real world analogues. Because Space Marines do. It might have gotten less significant over the years and they developed detailed backstories, as you say (although many of them directly based on more real world historical cultures), but it fundamentally goes against what you were trying to argue, which is why I brought it up.

It continually amuses me that, per canon, Space Marines actually tend to be the most level headed and non-dogmatic, barring outliers and specific niggles (like the Ultramarines and their book)

Yeah, main reason they didn't sell had nothing to do with the models though.
They were extremely weak.

Also minis games are the dregs of game design and there's no real reason to want to port them to the PC other than for the IPs, and in that case why not make a better game?

Play some non Games Workshop games. They're (sometimes) good.

Like, you could never sell a board game with the amount of holes in the rulebook that almost every minis game has.

I'm honestly not sure what you're talking about at that point, unless you have very limited experience of tabletop miniatures games. There are bad ones, sure, a lot of them coming from GW in various forms, but there are also really tight, interesting games.

Hell, while I like Infinity I honestly think it'd work better as a vidya, given how fiddly some of the stuff they try to do is.

I've played a lot of minis games, actually, a couple of them are pretty tight but calling infinity 'tight' is eh... it's better than GW but that's a low bar.

If you want to see tight, go play FFG's X-wing.

funny how it's the tight games that also make Grogs screech about proprietary dice and lack of customization

I really don't get GW and their copyright fetish. Can someone explain why copyrighted Not!Elves and whatnot benefits them?

So they can sue when people use them without permission.

Its about protecting their intellectual property.

>1. Companies don't want to do it because the digital version will inevitably out compete their physical version into the ground.

WHFB models sales gotta be beyond shit at this point, especially after Age of Sigmar. Why not digitize the fantasy line and leave 40k alone?

Cause age of sigmar is actually selling decently well

While they were graphically different from the Vampire count line of undead. As such they were relegated to history. Maybe with Malign Portents we will seem some visage of them return, maybe not. They held the only ranged attack units in death after all.

sure they are
>send AoS Flyers in total war game boxes telling people to buy models for the game you own.
>"haha guys AoS Sells so fucking well."

>Haha. This company is actually advertising something in a tie in product, they must be desperate for sales

The real question is why anyone would even have a physical copy of the game.

>haha, this company is advertising for their products in a completely different IP, they must be doing great with their BLOODESECRATORS

I can't wait to see the flyers for the third game.
>Buy the BLOODEXCRETER BLOODBEARER BLOODDAEMONS OF KHORNE
>game has khorne flavoured marauders

the drinking horn in the first game was made of pewter

Well it's getting semi-regular new releases, and the most recent nurgle release was distinctly AoS slanted

Doesn't pewter have lead in it?

and they will be selling it to people who buy the third game.
>Friend wants to buy Azhag on a wyvern because he is orcy Lich King
>"Hey, what is this Orruk Warboss on Wyvern"

not always

Any other sales data that is cool to share or novel?
For Fantasy/AoS/40k whatever

>Doesn't pewter have lead in it?
Sometimes, but only ever in a tiny amount in a tin metal alloy. Perfectly safe to eat/drink from.

Formerly, yes. Modern Pewter is lead free, for obvious reasons
Still doesn't change the fact that AoS is selling well enough to keep around, get regular new releases, and get major tournaments

>Perfectly safe to eat/drink from.
What? I was of the understanding that the only amount of lead that was safe for anything involving humans was zero.

>its doing well guys
>believe me

Because pewter does not have a single chemical composition and you can easily remove lead from it?

>It's doing bad guys.
>The fact they're advertising it proves it

Ideally that is the case.

Realistically it is legitimately (if you're healthy) very hard to be poisoned by the small amount of lead, it also explains why it took so long for lead to be phased out of domestic products as it was mainly the elderly, young, poor and sick who felt it's effects. Almost all modern pewter is lead free and the few places you'll encounter it pose very little risk of harm.

>Discontinue WHFB support in favor of NEW and exciting Age of Sigmar!
>Roll all army lines into a couple of factions cus they’re selling so well!
>NEW simplified rules to invite new players!!
>we’ve closed all our retail stores so you can buy easily and conveniently online!

As I understand it, British copyright law is pretty obtuse, especially regarding defending your IP.

based on the /twg/ people are hyped

Meanwhile Tomb King pack in Total War 2 has outsold some of the mainline total War Expansions by orders of magnitude.

Can you show the data on that? I looked, but I couldn't find DLC sales figures.

Rogue Trader's adventure seeds were stuff like Abdul Goldberg cheating you or the Doctor appearing to cause a mess in some Imperial world. The Imperium was of course a blantant Termight ripoff since they didn't have much of modern-day developments or even Horus Heresy there..

GW trying to c&d some random book with Space Marine in the title goes way beyond British copyright law since Space Marine is not something they can claim any ownership for. That's why they dropped the idea when it went public. Dickish companies do trademark bullying all the time without a legal case.

eff.org/deeplinks/2013/02/trademark-bully-thwarted-spots-space-marine-back-online

8e TK were pretty bad m8

Can't say I have raw data (different user) but I definitely saw it repeatedly on the top sellers list over the last 2-3 weeks. Not in the top 3 mind you, but consistently between 7th and 5th place.

For preorders of a DLC, especially over sale season, that's pretty damn good.

Sauce?

How many Elves, Delves, and Ogres do you need?

As others have said the main problem was the weak rules, especially when the other Undead faction, Vampire Counts, at the time were one of the most powerful in the game.

I was never really a fan of the basic skeleton kit in use at this time to start with. Vampires had more variation for core units though with zombies, ghouls, bats, wolves and so on, while all the basic TK stuff was skeleton kit based.

Then came the Vampire Counts update, lots of new miniatures, including new plastic kits, most of which were rather well done.

This left TKs suffering the double hit of poor rules AND poorer looking core units (personally I loved the TK metal stuff).

Not enough sales, no new rules, no new models which means no new sales which means...and the downward spiral just got faster.