So its been long enough now

I still cringe when I think about those idiots who declared it was doing better than 40k

>implying gw fanboys would let anything that says "warhammer" in the main site section and has space marines flop
It's doing meh.

I did not go well in my country, did make all the WFB drop the game though. From what people keep saying, it looks like it does fine in UK and ok in the US. But comparing to how popular WFB in the 90s, it isn't much in my country. Maybe fewer, maybe a bit more people play it then infinity or some of the historicals. Nationals had 40 or so people, and they really had to try to get those 40 people. In the 90s WFB nationals had 100+ people.

It has gotten pretty good recently. Mostly because GW has basically admitted to their customers being right about that game and presentation had flaws that needed fixing.

guess what fucknugget? the 90's were twenty years ago. time to come to the present.

So just play 40k?

>t. Brainlet millennial
You give yourself away because you volunteer your fucking moronic opinion when no one asked for it.

as do you apparently. stupid fucking millenial falling into his own pathetic trap.

He didn't present an opinion though?

Nah barrier to entry had broken the game- its easier now, for better or worse

It did better than what /wfbg/ hoped, and worse than what GW expected.
alla in all, a pretty meh placeholder that is destined to be either forgotten or replaced pretty soon, considering that traditional games is falling deeper and deeper into obscurity with the advent of vidya and nerd pop culture

Behold, the uneducated, idiotic opinion.

behold, the autistic lack of counter-arguments

When everything is stupid, all he needed to say was everything is stupid and everything would be self evident

This. With the new faction system you can also get more different kits for your army if you feel like it, so it's better for those that doesn't want to paint 200 almost looking identical figures.

GW is raking in dough and more releases are coming in. Sighs point to good.

Also have 2 armies, fun to play.

>This niche hobby that has historically been ignored by the Normies is suddenly going to start failing now because it’s being ignored by the Normies.

I think it becomes the digital vs vinyl argument.
People who dont care about music, wont care at all.
And people who do care will like vinyl but it'll become less and less popular as digital becomes cheaper and more convenient.
The same thing applies to tabletop games, people who dont care still wont.
But people that like tabletop games will slowly migrate to videogames. It will never fully kill tabletop but it will become more niche.
I can play 3ish total war battles in the time it took us to play 1 wfb game for about 10% of the price and effort.

Plus ease of access is a huge thing, its why so many people are into super heros now, because all they have to do is watch 1 movie every 6 months, compared to reading dozens of comics.
Theres probably thousands of people that will never own a 40k model, but are big into the setting because they played space marine/dawn of war

>Doing better than a game with no support and the worst edition of rules it ever had that made it so you had to drop hundreds to get a playable army.

What a shock.

Or they could have just gone back to the old 3rd, 4th, 5th edition days when you could get perfectly playable, good armies of about 30 to 50 miniatures, meaning people were encouraged to collect a lot more races.

I think all the plastic kits making units more affordable at the time changed that.

yes

It did bring me back to GW gaming after 15 years...

Depends on how you define 'flop'.

AoS is doing roughly as well as WHFB 8th Ed was doing, which is not very good. But it's not doing substantially WORSE than its predecessor game, at least as far as we can tell.

It's say it's not really a success and not really a failure. It just is.

According to people like Atia or Hastings, it's pulling around 30% sales, WFB was doing around 10-5% depending on exact year.

For the nth time, no it is not a flop. And it will continue to btfo grognards for years to come.

It's dead as shit. Here it's outclassed by nearly everything including T9A in terms of event and plauer counts.

You need to roll a 5+/4+ on 60 dice first for literally everything.
Have fun with that.

I remember WFB doing really well up until 5-10 years ago. There were often more players at WFB tournaments than at 40k tournaments around here.

I was mostly into 40k, and only barely dipped my toes into collecting an Empire army in the mid 2000's (I think it was 6th edition?). Many of my friends were heavily into WFB though,
and I think some of them still play it with older rule sets.

I'm glad the setting was preserved in Total War at least.

Here being?

It's shit.

WHFB was pulling 50% of GWs sales until the mid-00s you brainlet.

To be fair, I have seen vidya turn people away from tabletop wargames as they've grown in complexity and aesthetic beauty.

For some people, wargames aren't about having the miniatures or painting - that's just the medium for making playing cool fantasy battles with badass monsters and such. If they can get that fix without having to bother with the assembly, and painting, and huge monetary investment, they will. A lot of my older friends are like this. They like fantasy and sci-fi, and they played WHFB and 40K when that was the best way, to them, of scratching that itch. But now there are ways that appeal to them more.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I've only played AoS once and I liked it. You know what it reminded me of?
With all the rolling dice and moving soldiers around? It reminded me of Warhammer.

Continental Europe, namely Germany and France.

mid-00s was a decade ago, you know that? A decade of a major product line selling less than paints, or one KIT from another game line (tac-squad marines) is good enough reason to kill the line.

woah its almost like tabletop wargaming is a niche hobby and will forever be niche no matter how many marines (fantasy or otherwise) they force out

Yea because that was only like 15 years ago lol

>just emptily rolling dice trying for the exact same scores every time
Good thing it reminds you of 8th edition. Which was dogshit.

People keep saying it's doing well in Britain, but I don't see it. If I could find anyone that wanted to play it, or if my LGS even bothered to stock it anymore, I'd probably build a small army.

And you base that on which sales data?

This. All my buddies are nerds, all of them like the look of warhammer, they love the lore and the models. Have zero interest in starting their own armies since video games give them their wargame fix.

It did what it needed to do:

Provide an experimental basis for moving 40k forward.

That's what warhammer is my dude. Setting up soldiers, moving them around, and rolling dice. Did I miss anything?

It depends upon what you consider a flop to be. I'd consider it to be a flop if nobody played it, but due to its simplicity it has basically squeezed its way in as a side hobby for a lot of 40k players (who play at Warhammer stores, at least)

That's my standard for a flop, so as far as I'm concerned it's not.

However, I've never seen a franchise try to contort itself as harshly as this one quite so nakedly. It's one of those things that tried to please everyone and ended up pleasing nobody. Figuratively speaking. As I said, there are plenty of people playing, enough to keep it alive (I think?) and regardless of whether or not that's a success it's certainly no flop.

Personally, I found Stormcast Eternals to be uninteresting. And apparently if you don't like them, you don't like Age of Sigmar because you literally can not involve yourself in Age of Sigmar without dealing with Stormcast Eternals. Whether in game or fiction. They might as well just have changed the name to Warhammer: Stormcast Eternals with all of the over-emphasizing they've been doing. It's actually convinced me that the people who run Games Workshop don't care about their product. They're just dogmatic idiots. And it's easy to confuse a dogmatic idiot with someone who cares about something.

Having to dice to move dudes has always been relegated to a handful of special rules, or when your dudes were fleeing. When they introduced it for all charges in 8th ed it killed most of the strategy in the game.

Event data. There is near to no aos events on mainland Europe.

Warhammer was doing really well around me as well until, like you said around 2010.

Now, what happened in 2010... oh yeah.

8th edition.

In France it's actually worse : 8th ed still sees more play than AoS

>WHFB was pulling 50% of GWs sales until the mid-00s you brainlet.
So, over ten years ago
>you brainlet

On the west coast I have yet to see a game outside of GW and we don't have many of those. 40k is big and warmahordes is still around. New blood is all getting absorbed into 40k. Just asking around general opinion of the game is salty about end times even from new players who are getting dragged in from total war and vermintide.

Tell me about WFB 8th edition. I want to know more.
How and why was it so shit it made people leave?

What you said is so vague and uninformative it describes both d&d and DBA.

Yeah, I remember seeing the numbers on that. Pretty incredibly poor showing there.

I think, in general, there's something about the core aesthetic of AoS that just completely turns off the majority wargamers. This is why it only does well in the UK, where the brand loyalty to GW is at its strongest.

Massively inflated armies that made the game inaccessible to newcomers. Listbuilding that forced you to buy ugly, horribly expensive centerpiece models that no-one wanted. Many players hated the aesthetic changes to much of the model range.

Okay, so everyone now has to run armies of 40+ man units in order to be competitive since hordes are bonkers, you'd easily need 3 or 4 boxes of troops for a single unit and each would set you back some $35 if you were lucky (and you're gonna need at least 2 or three units so pay up), magic became an even more bloated mess with death everywhere.
Essentially it turned the game into large blocks of infantry clogging up the field for the whole game. Which outside of the cost is just boring as sin.

Casualized gameplay and lots and lots of blobbing. You needed a shitton of minis to play and the prices kept going up while the rules got simpler. While a cut-down was needed from 7th ed what 8th did was too much.

That wasn't game-ending though. What was really shit and made people leave was a series of supplements called End Times that were a prequel to Age of Sigmar, introducing even worse rules and more blobbing and some of the worst writing and story fluff you'll ever read.

7th ed is the last ed considered decent by a lot of folks, and 6th ed is the last ed considered very good.

>I think, in general, there's something about the core aesthetic of AoS that just completely turns off the majority wargamers.

It looks like if Dota and WoW had awkward sex while Wh40k watched.

Have you considered that the events were always domain of the ETC folk and of limited appeal to the general populace? I can tell you that I never once went to an event or tournament despite being "in the hobby" for 20 years now. So those people who mainly went to tournaments moved to KoW or 9th age.

It does!

The laziness and stupidity of the initial release really should have punished GW for hiring whatever intern they had in the beginning as it made a terrible first impression. The introduction of the Sigmarines was an even bigger turn off as the way they were brought in made them look like mary sues that couldn't die, killing any sense of struggle for Order, and from that any investment into your dudes from a story standpoint.

As much as I'd like to say yes it flopped, it's doing well enough. It's a dumb game, with vague lore, stupid naming conventions, gay dwarfs, and shitty space marine knockoffs, but the rules are simple and what lore is available is loose enough to let me field what I want.

It relieves and frustrates me that it's improving. Frustrating because there's still so much stupid shit, and relieving since it's counterbalanced by easier game mechanics making it easier to drop in and out of the hobby without needing to learn a new fucking rulebook every other year.

I thought riding dinosaurs were Lizardmen and Druchii’s schtick?

Oh look, Sanguinary guard.

Fuck... that sounds a bit like 8th ed 40k in some aspects, especially the bits about the bad aestethic changes and the horribly written fluff.

Yes!

>Massively inflated armies that made the game inaccessible to newcomers

fun fact, that was entirely self-inflicted by the tournament meta-fags who decided it's the best way to run the game. And since those tourneyfags dominated the scene, just about everyone else playing in public venues like clubs had to follow suit to have any chance.

It should be noted that in addition to this, GW just flat-out refused to update certain armies.

The prime example is Bretonnia. Bretonnia did poorly... because it hadn't had an update in over a decade, meaning every Bretonnia player already had everything, and new players didn't want to invest in grossly outdated models. Because of this, GW, the being absolutely retarded, concluded that they shouldn't update them. And so prophecy fulfills itself.

GW constantly does shit like this.

>oh look, people are mostly playing the special characters there's no model for
>shall we make models of these? no, let's just get rid of these characters and force players to buy the characters they don't want!
>wait, why aren't they buying anything now? fuck, scrap ALL the characters except the bare minimum
>that'll teach 'em, those pesky customers

Agreed. With a setting this weak, you need to have simple rules. If it didn't then I am entirely certain it would be dead right now.

Bullshit, the mechanics decide the meta. 8th Ed was designed to make people buy way more minis than any other edition.

>bretonnia is written off in a few sentences

Man, seriously. Fuck the dude(s) who wrote End Times.

As hard sales data goes, we have none reliable

GW says AoS sells more than WHFB but doesn't say how much or compared to when. Their testimony is also biased by the fact they wouldn't want to broadcast if their game was dying in infancy.
ICv2 has a comparatively poor methodology but is unbiased, and doesn't even rank AoS in the top 5 miniature lines, where infinity, warmahordes and a DnD miniature line are competing with 40k, X-Wing being leader.

Bretonnia was the love-child of Perry brothers and no one else. When they fell out of prominence in GW, there was no one who wanted to step in and continue. This usually is the case with failed GW projects. They're a corporation that acts like a mom and pop shop when it comes to design.

Personally I've just found it better to play games that are good in general, but don't change editions on a dime for dosh purposes. Infinity, Dropzone/fleet, etc.

Several things

1. Champions and special characters got fucked because rather than going Hero, 2 core, etc they made it as percentages with AT LEAST 25% having to be spent on core units. This means that you can't just grab two small core units and have lots of specialised units, you need to have a big chunk of infantry. Magical items etc also got fucked over as you need to spend those points costs and have less left over. End result? Small units that took up a lot of points weren't legal and now you need more miniatures. Lots of legal armies no longer were legal.

2. Shooting changes; first and second ranks could now shoot. This, coupled with the combat changes below meant that you could have shooting units in more ranks, which again meant that larger units would beat out the normal sized regiments.

3. Combat; they included the '2nd ranks fights' as well as fucking over the initiative/charge system. No longer did you get a bonus and hit first in combat, charging just added a bonus to your combat resolution. In addition, units that had more ranks than their enemy in a combat were steadfast and harder to break. What this meant is that the smaller units of cavalry, specialised shock troops etc were now useless. Large blobs of infantry ruled the game now. AS DID giant monsters which got an extra combat boost. They also had ALL units wounding on a six, which again, boosts the numbers game a lot.

At the time GW also shrunk box sizes and increased prices, so you had a ton of people with armies that were no longer legal or viable to play with unless they went out and bought about £100 to £200 worth of base infantry (the infantry price cost also went down in the few new army books they published in 8th, which also fucked over people like Bretonnians who were far too expensive points wise and who's small elite units were now not worth it at all).

8th made small armies non-legal or viable and made it so you needed to buy a ton more infantry and giant models.

>that was entirely self-inflicted by the tournament meta-fags
Not at all, it was even advised in the rules to field large armies. Even army books sported 40+ units in sample pics, something that wasn't done before.

That's total shit. Army composition in 8th forced you to take tons of rank-and-file core stuff.

>GW says AoS sells more than WHFB but doesn't say how much or compared to when.

Because neo GW is run by assholes who could give a shit less about their product, but long for the old glory days and try to insist that they're totally doing okay and they're selling good even though Age of Sigmar backstock is everywhere and stores can't get it off their shelves.

Warmahordes has a similar high fantasy feeling if we ignore the realms of plot device. It sold great up until recently and is still played. I don't know what demographics they are targeting with AoS, but it's chasing something new. In time it might work out because they can't back out of AoS now. Maybe in another 5 years it might be the hot shit.
People forgot how hype end times was while it was going on. GW released a lot of new models which were cool. People were happy the plot was moving along. There were a number of well received and popular video games which brought new players into the hobby. And instead of handling the transition smoothly GW just decided to just kill it right away. It has to be one of the dumbest things GW ever did. Not as a salty about AoS thing, but it legitimately tarnished their brand image which is hard to do considering how they have historically been thought of as pretty awful.
Thankfully they have been less awful recently but the moment the plot advanced in 40k everyone got worried about end times enough that GW had to step in and say they were not end timing 40k.

25% of your army HAD to be core, they lowered core point cost across the board, and they raised the core troops prince at the same time.

We've had a few investors that have been to GW meetings speak out. Not fully reliable, but all the reports I've heard - include ones from someone I've actually met - are that GW is very quiet about AoS in comparison to 40K, refusing to give out any detailed numbers.

I don't recall it being "Hype", but then again, I wasn't really paying attention around that time.

I do know that the only game to come out was Vermintide, which didn't pick up wide-appeal popularity until very recently with the sequel.

>the plot was moving along

I don't like this mindset. Plot advancement doesn't need to happen for advancement's sake. It's nice when it makes sense and is done well, two things not at all characteristic of End Times.

I'm not talking about ETC, even if those, well, don't really exist in AoS. Even little events, paintings show-off, casual narrative events. Those don't exist for AoS. In fact, playing outside a GW store, I've never seen an actual AoS game being played. Only a couple of demo games.

>Casualized gameplay and lots and lots of blobbing. You needed a shitton of minis to play and the prices kept going up while the rules got simpler. While a cut-down was needed from 7th ed what 8th did was too much.

Huh, this reminds me of another game... what was it called again? Fifty thousand battleblades?

Warhamordes is pretty different. It veers from cartoonish to industrial fantasy. You can build an army that looks like it belongs in an anime or an army that looks like it's about to fight fantasy WWII, and often from the same factions.

It's schizophrenic as fuck.

The reason plot moving along was such a big deal is because fantasy had been neglected for years. Any attention was thought of as good.

I just can't get over that games' obsession with large cartoony hands.

This really.

In fact moving the plot forward to post-Storm of Chaos would have made everyone happy IMO.

Declaring an opinion to be moronic is an opinion.

>GW was so spiteful over storm of chaos that they rewrote the whole thing and happily gave a fuck-you to the fanbase

Why did they hate their own event so much? Because the outcome wasn't what they wanted?

Pretty much. Turns out no one wanted the world to end, no one wanted Archaon 'Literally Who' to be the one to do it, and Chaos at the time was pretty fucked.