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What's the real story behind the launch of Age of Sigmar?


Ken

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5 hours ago, Sleboda said:

Not to defend him, but that's what any CEO of a public company should do. Responsibilities #1, #2, and #3 are to increase shareholder value.

If the path to that is customer happiness, that's nice, but not a requirement.

To do 1/2/3 responsibly though is to ensure customer happiness however. What Kirby was doing is fairly risky.  It had no stability and was all about extremes which is not how good markets work.

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1 hour ago, Jetengine said:

To do 1/2/3 responsibly though is to ensure customer happiness however. What Kirby was doing is fairly risky.  It had no stability and was all about extremes which is not how good markets work.

Agreed, of course Kirby has to aim to increase profits and the share return. However I think its clear that his approach was continually looking for low investment and cutting "weaker" investment lines. The problem there was that each time GW cut products and released short term games they kept dwindling their market not growing it. The short term games might get a little growth, but because wargames take hours to build and paint there's a lag-time for most between launch and play (not to mention those who are on budget and thus can't get into a new product for a while). Plus because the customer makes that serious investment they feel that they want the company to support their product for longer; so when GW was constantly cycling it unnerved gamers. Why start a game that's going to be ignored and dead within a year. 

Honestly I wonder if he was taking market advice and lessons from markets like music and DVD's and even things like tie-in movie toys - product likes that shift very fast and are exactly what he was aiming GW toward - short term investments that pay off fast and then vanish quickly. Heck this works (a little slower) in electronics and a lot of other modern consumer goods. Thing is it works in those lines because the customer isn't making that same investment in the product. They aren't spending hours building and painting and modelling. They aren't looking for a product that will last them a near lifetime nor even a decade whilst in wargames a decade would probably be the least amount of time many would hope their army would remain viable. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for the nature of rules I have no problem with the jovial rules that GW released at AoS launch as a fun, silly way to have some entertainment. No problem at all.

My problem was that they were the only rules they released. There was no other option, no points, no balance attempt and no serious rules to play with. In fact I remember at launch many were basically trying to use the new fun rules with the previous editions points as a base line. I think that releasing them separate also caused a divide and started to really create this casual VS tournament split that has been going on as of late in chatter. Partly because we did get an influx of gamers into AoS early on who came for those jovial rules. 

GW could easily release their own "unhinged" style rules set as a complimentary system alongside their serious rules. In fact jovial rules built off the back of a solid serious set (which is exactly what MTG's Unhinged system is) are ideal and great fun.

 

To my mind a good rules set forms the backbone of the rest. If you've got a fairly balanced points system you can then choose to use or ignore it and if you ignore it or ignore bits of if you can understand what is likely to happen. You know if you take 200 points and your opponent takes 400 that you are going to have a challenge. Nothing stops you doing that, but it makes you aware of what's likely to happen before you do it. Strip out the points and you've got almost no idea which can mean two people can come to a game with such vastly different approaches that they can't have fun. Someone brings 70 archers because they want to defend a wall whislt the opponent brings 10 dragons because dragons attacking a wall is cool - and teh result is the dragon player wins every time because the variation in power is just too drastic. Of course for some there is fun there in fathoming out the balance, but its messy and whilst it can work its not ideal for a game that can take hours to play out each time. 

 

 

I think GW has the right attitude now, but they honestly need to do more to make Open and Narrative play stand out on their own. Honestly I find Narrative is basically just "matched play with some story/connected games". I think if GW polishes up Matched they can then focus on expanding Narrative and Open more so. 

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I think one thing to bear in mind is that the only people who truly know the reasons for what was done aren't going to make it fully public - just odd snippets.

Regardless of how "rocky" it was, AoS suddenly opened up being the fantasy side of things to the masses.  Gone were the days of needing to spend months worth of wages just to purchase an army.  Finally there was an accessible game that you could play without having to sell a liver without a set of rules that resembled a encyclopedia*.

It's also allowed us to build a much more friendly community around the new game.  My own experience of WHFB** was that it was very elitist, it was expected that you'd be running certain lists with certain models and wanted to play tournaments - something that very much put me off getting an army built.  I've not experienced that within AoS, despite matched play getting "more screentime", there are still loads of people playing much more casual games.  I can't speak for other people, but I genuinely feel immersed in AoS's overall atmosphere.

* the paper version of wikipedia for younger folk
** your own mileage may vary

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As @RuneBrush says perfectly. I was very much into the ole world (had 6 complete armies as well as 6 40K armies) tourneys and 3 generations of rules for both  and my experience with WHFB (although I wouldn’t change it) and AoS is totally different. The first was all hands on with people and it was awesome, the AoS has been almost entirely digital except the building/ painting and a few games at home (I just don’t have the time committent to go out as before)  and I find AoS far more flexible to engage with than before. 

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54 minutes ago, RuneBrush said:

Regardless of how "rocky" it was, AoS suddenly opened up being the fantasy side of things to the masses.  Gone were the days of needing to spend months worth of wages just to purchase an army.  Finally there was an accessible game that you could play without having to sell a liver without a set of rules that resembled a encyclopedia*.

Well, unless you wanted to play Fyreslayers, which are hugely overpriced even for a GW army.  I'll never understand GWs intention with pricing some of the new AoS stuff, if they were going to make fantasy accessible to the masses.

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Fyreslayers and Daughters of Khaine both suffer from the fact that they are new armies made from the elite of older armies. So the high price on the basic troops is because GW hasn't revised prices on them. They are priced at elite limited troop prices back when a player might only buy and field a couple of boxes of them at most. Now they are core troops, but don't reflect that in their pricing. 

It's a pain, but considering that DoK are selling strongly it suggests that GW might get away with it for a time; at least until they can properly revise the lines though such revisions might not come until new sculpts and that could be 5 or 10 years away for some current age plastics. 

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10 minutes ago, Aegisgrimm said:

Well, unless you wanted to play Fyreslayers, which are hugely overpriced even for a GW army.  I'll never understand GWs intention with pricing some of the new AoS stuff, if they were going to make fantasy accessible to the masses.

I believe that some of the issue actually belongs to us, with the way we (as the community) are directing the game.  There's been a general demand for bigger games with more models.  When Fyreslayers first came out we were still in the unpointed era where you'd likely just field a unit of 10 or 20.  Bigger games with points has shoved that to putting 3 units of 30 on the table - a completely different proposition to where we started.

As @Overread says, GW's pricing policy is that they don't drop the prices of released models.  The only way they are able to do this is by including them in collection boxes or releasing a larger box of them (e.g. going from 3 per box to 6).  So far they've never doubled up the quantity of a box from 10 to 20 - even Skeletons you can only buy in boxes of 10.

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A lot of factors went into ditching Fantasy for AoS. 

One was sales and lack of new blood in fantasy. The high price to just get into the game at the time and the stagnation of little to no chance of new factions and models.

Fantasy was in a place of 30 seconds to midnight on the doomsday clock and the world was pretty much filled out with little place to introduce anything newer into the lore. Not without either dropping something new with no backstory or doing a major retcon of any new factions. The lore had been sitting on this edge for almost the entire time of the games lifespan and moving the lore forward you could only extend doomsday so far.

Which is one reason I’m happy they made sigmar I didn’t start playing until just before second edition came out. The lack of appealing factions and balance from early first edition was a bit of a turnoff for me. Think this new stuff is unbalanced you should go back and look at some of the old rules for death and several other factions. (Vampire knights 5 wounds each you had to wipe off the table or they all rezzed back in the field with a 2+ rerollable save back when rend 1 was kind of best you could find. Guild gunners who could infinitely over watch infinite grots charging theoretically. We’re planning on summer having meetups bringing 1st ed lists and rules to fight the 2nd ed tournament winner lists to see how unbalanced they are.)

Now we have a newer world that  has more open possibilities without the threat of everything going to die next Wednesday if some elder god sneezes wrong and unleashed chaos.

The slap in the face for fantasy players certainly didn’t help any for the first year of sigmar. Ending the game and not giving any information about what would happen next. To other games that be like Wizards of the Coast just up and ending the Magic:TGC franchise and then starting up Majickk the Summoning a week later without any of the base rules of the game in place. Got three red lands and you want to play a white? Sure go ahead and use those reds instead who cares about proper mana cards anymore.

 

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Tom Kirby owns 4.8% of GW shares and was the acting CEO at the time of the AoS release but was only covering the role while a suitable replacement was found (about 18 months). He was chairman of the board of directors for quite a few years before this but was not in operational control of the company  at that time and certainly not for the years it would have taken for the AoS lines to be produced.   I don’t know the internet fascination with the bloke but it never seems to mesh with the facts. 

Whatever the truth of the AoS the preparation for it happened over a much longer timeframe than most give credit. Jes Goodwin stated on WHTV that it takes up 5 years for a new race to be fully realised from concept to release.  Given that Stormcast were released with AoS the work on it must have been in the pipeline for a while 

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No-one knows! The only thing I'll say is that there is an argument that AOS was released at a time when GW only considered itself a minis company but that the failure of AOS at launch meant that GW had to rethink it's approach and focus more on it's games systems etc. 

That hasn't happened.

GW is overwhelmingly about making models and makes more models than ever. It has slightly improved on its capacity to create games which are easier and more streamlined to play and "get models on the table", but it's commitment to rules, balance, errata etc compared to to it's commitment to making toy soldiers and resources to supplement that-paints, tutorials, scenery and such-is almost imperceptible in comparison. GW remains far more invested in enhancing  the flavour and character of it's armies than in making fair or balanced games. That's precisely what makes them who they are though and why they are so successful. There's no shortage of excellently balanced mini wargames rule-sets for those who want that. GW always has been, and reamains, character and narrative driven in it's output. 

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7 hours ago, Overread said:

Partly because we did get an influx of gamers into AoS early on who came for those jovial rules

I'll go out on a limb and say that nobody, and I mean nobody, came to AoS for any rule that gave a benefit in-game for having a mustache.

Those rules were a slap in the face.

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I think that a lot of the early days of AoS was an experiment in games design. They took out every single thing that complicated the game to try and make it as fun as possible.

 

The decisions on the model ranges, I feel, were entirely seperate thoughts and far more to do with the similar, ongoing process to chuck slow selling models to help improve warehouse space and production capacity.

 

The GHB concept was, from what I recall, a project that came from the work of TGA's very own Ben Curry, who'd written a set of points to be used in the tournaments he organised and which had become the defacto approach to "tournament" play. Once GW saw the concept of multiple gaming modes worked, they embraced it and went with it, cumulating in the 2nd edition

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5 hours ago, Ollie Grimwood said:

Tom Kirby owns 4.8% of GW shares and was the acting CEO at the time of the AoS release but was only covering the role while a suitable replacement was found (about 18 months). He was chairman of the board of directors for quite a few years before this but was not in operational control of the company  at that time and certainly not for the years it would have taken for the AoS lines to be produced.   I don’t know the internet fascination with the bloke but it never seems to mesh with the facts. 

Whatever the truth of the AoS the preparation for it happened over a much longer timeframe than most give credit. Jes Goodwin stated on WHTV that it takes up 5 years for a new race to be fully realised from concept to release.  Given that Stormcast were released with AoS the work on it must have been in the pipeline for a while 

Yup gav thorpe said in an interview aos was in the works since 7th edition.

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I always kind of thought AoS should have been about the Old World "ending" with the Chaos war actually and finally taking over the entire Empire, and then instead of all the realms it would be about the Stormcast leading the charge by Order to reclaim the Old World after all the free peoples were driven to it's far edges.

Or maybe the war triggered a vast cataclysm where the continents themselves of the Warhammer World were rearranged, and so remnants of the World that Was could be fought over in all sorts of strange locations in a single world (allowing for only one new world to be better fluffed out by GW rather than many with less fluff), thus tying things to familiar places (like for instance Karak Khadrin ending up surrounded by Lizardman infested jungles.  Essentially situations that can be had with the new Realms, but with a little more familiarity in the fluff)

GW could have done a better job marrying the two settings together for a smoother transition, rather than suddenly saying "Here guys.  Stop playing Warhammer and start playing Warhammer: Planescape".

 

Things are getting better, but man was the launch a mess.

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1 hour ago, Aegisgrimm said:

I always kind of thought AoS should have been about the Old World "ending" with the Chaos war actually and finally taking over the entire Empire, and then instead of all the realms it would be about the Stormcast leading the charge by Order to reclaim the Old World after all the free peoples were driven to it's far edges.

Or maybe the war triggered a vast cataclysm where the continents themselves of the Warhammer World were rearranged, and so remnants of the World that Was could be fought over in all sorts of strange locations in a single world (allowing for only one new world to be better fluffed out by GW rather than many with less fluff), thus tying things to familiar places (like for instance Karak Khadrin ending up surrounded by Lizardman infested jungles.  Essentially situations that can be had with the new Realms, but with a little more familiarity in the fluff)

GW could have done a better job marrying the two settings together for a smoother transition, rather than suddenly saying "Here guys.  Stop playing Warhammer and start playing Warhammer: Planescape".

 

Things are getting better, but man was the launch a mess.

Agreed. When I first started AoS I initially assumed that the "Age of Myth" was the stuff before the end times. I was quite confused to learn that there was so much history between the formation of the mortal realms and the current Age of Sigmar. It would have been far neater if the survivors of the Empire/Elves/Dwarves etc had fled into the Planes/Winds of Magic, while the rest of the world was drawn completely into the Realm of Chaos, and then gone straight to the Realmgate wars, with the stormcast reclaiming what was lost.

As it stands it feels like there is a lot of history which doesn't really add much to the lore, but it is getting better. I suspect that as the setting comes into its own and more factions like the Idoneth emerge it will feel more and more coherent, until its obvious to even a causal observer that the three ages are needed!

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1 hour ago, Aegisgrimm said:

Or maybe the war triggered a vast cataclysm where the continents themselves of the Warhammer World were rearranged, and so remnants of the World that Was could be fought over in all sorts of strange locations in a single world (allowing for only one new world to be better fluffed out by GW rather than many with less fluff), thus tying things to familiar places (like for instance Karak Khadrin ending up surrounded by Lizardman infested jungles.  Essentially situations that can be had with the new Realms, but with a little more familiarity in the fluff)

I think there were rumours about similar setting back when things were unclear during/after ET, such as SCE being creations of Gelt and Sigmar to take back a ravaged Empire in a post-apocalyptic Old World. The amount of devastation and winds of magic flowing freely certainly would allow for all the Mortal Realms crazyness mixed in the old setting. At least it would have blended both sides... and everyone being happy! Or at least allow a smooth transition if it was to happen, instead of the rocky beginning....

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I don't think that the lack of points was the real problem behind the launch of AOS, but the destruction of the Old World and the feelings that this engendered amongst the established community. Yes the game is in a far better state now, with points a big factor in this, but there were always going to be people burning their models, regardless of how smooth the launch had gone.

People loved the Old World, as you can see from the comments above and from the topics where people ask 'What new factions would you like to see in AOS?' and to which people invariably answer Tomb Kings and Bretonnia. To newer players, myself included, this was somewhat of a barrier to entry and clearly the geographical limits of the world were felt to be holding it back. The new setting allows for far more creative freedom and arguably the stripped back version of the game, without pages of rules, points, etc. has allowed the community to shape the game and GW have been clever in adopting these innovations to help create the game that we want, rather than attempting to dictate this to us. Examples of this can be seen with: the current points system, which is basically Mo Comp; Skirmish, which is essentially Hinterlands but simpler; and Warscroll Builder, which began life as an independent website, before being brought into the fold.

GW could probably have used their knowledge to make the roll out of Age of Sigmar smoother, but that they released the game with very few restrictions, or support systems, has allowed it to flourish and grow into what we have today. There is still some way to go and you cannot please all of the people all of the time, but when you look at how the company is performing in the stock market and the corresponding health of it's games, then it's hard to call the launch a failure, even if it is the events that followed it and the perceived change of company attitude that have been the catalyst in this success.

I'm not suggesting that this was some sort of Machivellian  scheme hatched by GW to get 'us' to do the work for them, but they have been clever in listening to the community and adopting it's ideas and although things like points seem obvious now, there's no telling what kind of system they might have introduced at inception and what effect this might have had on the evolution of the game. GW deserve a reasonable amount of credit for taking the brave decision to destroy their Old World, a decision that was definitely going to alienate their core fan base and, whether by happy accident or design, creating a game that is far more popular and financially viable than it's predecessor.

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The other thing worth noting is that Warhammer’s Old World has itself been reborn in its realisation in things like the Total War games and other such media which has allowed for a far greater capacity to “play” in the Old World than the tabletop game ever permitted.I would bank on either a film or Netflix series as such being not too far down the pipeline as well.

It’s essence was obviously realised in the Hobby but it’s developed such a vitality and depth as a place over the past few decades that in my opinion is now better expressed in these areas than in some staid, convoluted and fairly tedious wargame system. AOS does lack the Old World’s character but it is very clearly intended as a more abstract fiction whose sole purpose is to allow you to put more or less anything on the table while maintaining some narrative coherency. The game and the setting are not at odds with each other. Whereas with Warhammer the game was vastly inferior to the world it supposedly simulated.

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4 hours ago, EccentricCircle said:

Its worth pointing out that the thing about people burning their armies is also blown out of proportion.

As I recall there was one guy who set fire to some dark elves, but even the most diehard of WHFB fans largely thought that was an overreaction.

But it certainly became a meme of sorts.

Yes and especially considering the biggest proponents of AoS from the beginning, Ben and Dan Heelan for example were the same people doing the same for WFB.  I did a little bit of detective work at the time and it was interesting to see how many of those in Internet forums damning AoS and all who played it hadn’t posted in the WFB sections before its demise. 

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