The End of Free Warscrolls

[yukishiro1]

That's not a "problem" for GW, it's an opportunity. If people want to use GW's rules to play with old or second-hand minis GW loves that (or at least, should love it if they have any sense), it feeds right into creating a GW-centric hobby. Sure, they'd rather you buy new in box from their webstore where they get the highest profits, but they're not dumb enough to think it's anything but a good thing to get more people involved in GW games no matter how that happens. It's a very rare player of GW games who doesn't end up spending money that makes its way back to GW sooner or later. 

This is a big part of why it's such a short-sighted decision on GW's part. The cost of maintaining and providing free warscrolls is miniscule compared to the benefit of getting people into GW's product universe more easily.

I mean, it's not a coincidence that the free warscrolls were on GW's webstore. The whole point was to get customers to go to GW's store every time they wanted to read a scroll.  Suppose you're an old WHFB player who wants to use some old minis in AOS and the first thing you do is look up their warscrolls in AOS and it takes you conveniently to the GW webstore...well, that's a win for GW. Whatever small cost is associated with listing those scrolls is surely worth it just to get that person to the webstore. 

 

Edited October 26, 2021 by yukishiro1

[Noserenda]

Exactly that, ill usually plan out an army as the second step in seriously considering it and if GW does not want to support that it just means ill spend less money with them, its much easier to spur on  spending on the GW website rather than wahapedia after all.

[Neverchosen]

1 hour ago, yukishiro1 said:

That's not a "problem" for GW, it's an opportunity. If people want to use GW's rules to play with old or second-hand minis GW loves that (or at least, should love it if they have any sense), it feeds right into creating a GW-centric hobby. Sure, they'd rather you buy new in box from their webstore where they get the highest profits, but they're not dumb enough to think it's anything but a good thing to get more people involved in GW games no matter how that happens. It's a very rare player of GW games who doesn't end up spending money that makes its way back to GW sooner or later. 

This is a big part of why it's such a short-sighted decision on GW's part. The cost of maintaining and providing free warscrolls is miniscule compared to the benefit of getting people into GW's product universe more easily.

I mean, it's not a coincidence that the free warscrolls were on GW's webstore. The whole point was to get customers to go to GW's store every time they wanted to read a scroll.  Suppose you're an old WHFB player who wants to use some old minis in AOS and the first thing you do is look up their warscrolls in AOS and it takes you conveniently to the GW webstore...well, that's a win for GW. Whatever small cost is associated with listing those scrolls is surely worth it just to get that person to the webstore. 

 

I think that this is a terrific point and it also goes into a number of other places that GW seems to be rather guarded about that could net them more profit and community support. Like someone on Youtube mentioned that they could sell files for older outdated but fan favourite models to be 3d printed to combat piracy. For example someone might buy the file to print off WHFB Achaon and then build an army of varanguard around that model but are not interested in the current model for Archaon. Also let people print Bretonnian helmets for their stormcast and you will see that army get played more than space marines.

Having free warscrolls really helped me invest in this game and hobby and I always ended up getting the battletome, but I could start out buy purchasing models and having low point games. But the most important part of the free warscrolls for me was just the idea that maybe GW was changing but clearly I was wrong. I think the other thing is that the expectations are also much higher. If they gave me a free Slaves to Darkness book and it lost every match I would be less angry than paying a premium for the same results. So it would help satisfaction and create more enthusiastic fans. I think the bare minimum for me would be if they had a delay on releasing warscrolls to encourage people to buy the new book but still give everyone eventual access. Like maybe the Warscrolls are provided after the first FAQs that way if they need to change anything cough*keywords*cough they can be providing a service to those that purchased the book with the updated warscroll and still provide broader access to their game systems?

[Sarouan]

4 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

I mean, it's not a coincidence that the free warscrolls were on GW's webstore.

Which can be also a problem in itself, since it means it generates more traffic on their website mainly aimed for sales.

Moving this aspect to an app specially made for that is a choice that can be understandable, in the end. Gives also more control of their IP, which we know GW is VERY fond of.

 

I'll be honest and certainly a bit caustic here, by saying the coincidence I see is that the new battletome rules other than the warscrolls are quite lower than in previous editions. So there's even less value to buy the battletome if you have access to the warscrolls like before, if we speak purely about equal game.

[zilberfrid]

20 minutes ago, Sarouan said:

Which can be also a problem in itself, since it means it generates more traffic on their website mainly aimed for sales.

Moving this aspect to an app specially made for that is a choice that can be understandable, in the end. Gives also more control of their IP, which we know GW is VERY fond of.

 

I'll be honest and certainly a bit caustic here, by saying the coincidence I see is that the new battletome rules other than the warscrolls are quite lower than in previous editions. So there's even less value to buy the battletome if you have access to the warscrolls like before, if we speak purely about equal game.

Traffic is pennies to the marketing dollar of getting people to your webstore.

[yukishiro1]

Yeah, companies will pay dozens or hundreds of times the traffic/hosting costs to get a customer to their store through advertising. Being able to do it for only the cost of hosting some warscrolls is a major bargain.

[Noserenda]

Yeah drawing in traffic is really all upside, with the possible exception of release morning for something popular, which is relatively rare time wise. 

I mean ultimately thats all any rules are, marketing for the minis.

[Sarouan]

Free advertising ? Not really. People wanting to see the warscrolls are people who already know the game. Actually, it's more a deterrent to impulse buy miniatures : if you want to see the warscrolls, you want to be sure if it's interesting first in game.

The traffic here is more about "jamming" the sales than anything else. Which is why I said it can be a problem in the end.

Edited October 27, 2021 by Sarouan

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

3 hours ago, Sarouan said:

Free advertising ? Not really. People wanting to see the warscrolls are people who already know the game. Actually, it's more a deterrent to impulse buy miniatures : if you want to see the warscrolls, you want to be sure if it's interesting first in game.

I have told this story before in this thread, but I will mention it again:

I played a 1000 point game with a friend using only the models I have. He didn't know anything about the game beforehand and didn't have to buy anything to get started. A day after the game, he told me how fun and convenient it was that he could just look up the warscrolls in the store and get an idea of how the model would work in game.

I struggle to see how that's not at least a point of evidence that warscrolls act as a form of free advertising. They draw people to the web store and let them get excited about a model in a different way from just the aesthetics. How can this be anything but added value?

Edited October 27, 2021 by Neil Arthur Hotep

[Noserenda]

6 hours ago, Sarouan said:

Free advertising ? Not really. People wanting to see the warscrolls are people who already know the game. Actually, it's more a deterrent to impulse buy miniatures : if you want to see the warscrolls, you want to be sure if it's interesting first in game.

The traffic here is more about "jamming" the sales than anything else. Which is why I said it can be a problem in the end.

Advertising is about more than just awareness, im "aware" that the various AoS forces exist and their broad concepts. I have no idea on the rules details for most of them or how they interact with each other. Been burned far too many times by pretty minis with toss rules to drop cash on things without seeing them first.

How does website traffic jam sales exactly? You really need to explain that. 

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

12 minutes ago, Noserenda said:

Advertising is about more than just awareness, im "aware" that the various AoS forces exist and their broad concepts. I have no idea on the rules details for most of them or how they interact with each other. Been burned far too many times by pretty minis with toss rules to drop cash on things without seeing them first.

I can honestly say that the additional barriers to accessing the warscrolls of units might have stopped me from starting a Stormcast army. Even though I was not initally super interested in Dominion when that dropped, I like the look of the new Stormcast models. Since the new book came out they have become a fairly simple to play, but powerful, force that can easily be built at sub-30 models at 2000 points. That makes them an attractive side project to me. Plus I already have a bunch of Cities of Sigmar stuff, so that would further increase the amount of lists I could build. I think a Stormcast army would be perfect to have around to play games with friends who are interested in AoS, but don't have their own armies.

So I have been in this sort of non-committal planning stage for a while. Usually, I would have probably looked at the warscrolls on the webstore a bunch to see whether I could construct a list that I'd be happy painting, that didn't have models I don't like (of which Stormcast still has a lot) and that would be mechanically strong at the same time. I know I can look up warscrolls on the app, but here's the deal: I just happen to have an old, cheap phone and tablet as my only compatible devices, and the app is not available on either. So there is just currently not really a convenient way to check out the new Stormcast warscrolls.

I know that if I put in the effort I could get around this. I have some computer knowledge, I could probably get the app to run if I really wanted to. I could ask my wife to lend me her phone for a while to look stuff up. I could use youtube reviews and other rule-aggregating websites to find out. But the important thing is that all of those steps are additional barriers of inconvenience. I am not yet in the stage where I am committed enough to this army to go through the trouble, it's still just a "might be nice" thing. I would say that I am fairly plugged in to what is going on with Age of Sigmar, both model and rules wise. I can only imagine the barriers being even higher for a completely fresh player.

I'm not going to claim that my experience is universal. I also don't want to play it up as "I would definitely have bought 2000 points of Stormcast right now if warscrolls were free". But I think what happened to me can serve as an illustration how lowering the barriers of entry might contribute to more sales. As far as I can be objective about this, I find that the removal of warscrolls from the store have definitely negatively infulenced my likelyhood of starting a Stormcast army.

[RuneBrush]

16 hours ago, zilberfrid said:

Traffic is pennies to the marketing dollar of getting people to your webstore.

15 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

Yeah, companies will pay dozens or hundreds of times the traffic/hosting costs to get a customer to their store through advertising. Being able to do it for only the cost of hosting some warscrolls is a major bargain.

13 hours ago, Noserenda said:

Yeah drawing in traffic is really all upside, with the possible exception of release morning for something popular, which is relatively rare time wise. 

I mean ultimately thats all any rules are, marketing for the minis.

Going to give you my "professional" view here - for context I'm a web dev and responsible for a largeish ecommerce website.

When it comes to ecommerce platforms, there's only one statistic that actually bears any weight - the conversion rate.  This value represents the number of people who have come to the website and purchased something.  Generally most sites achieve something between 1% and 5% conversion.  Increasing the amount of traffic an ecommerce store has will actually decrease the conversion rate if they don't purchase anything.

The underlying infrastructure of an ecommerce website is very costly, it needs fairly pokey database servers, fast http servers and various other supporting elements.  By comparison a blog or forum doesn't need the same level of performance - if a reader has to wait an extra half a second for something it makes little difference, conversely a half a second delay on every page may cause a customer to give up and you've lost a sale.

TL:DR  Over time we've seen GW move things away from the main ecommerce platform - FAQs, legal bits, etc because they have a negative impact on the actual store.  It doesn't surprise me to see Warscrolls go for these reasons.

However from a personal perspective, moving them over to WarCom would have been the solution I would have gone for.  As I've said previously, I think they do more good than harm because they provide a great way to look at units for potential purchases, helping people out etc.

[Enoby]

11 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

*snip*

I'm in the exact same boat as you here. While I'd definitely buy a new Slaanesh battletome, if a Dark Aelf one came out and I liked the models but was unsure on starting an army, I think knowing their warscrolls beforehand would be make or break. Looking through someone's review or a quick 1d4chan style write up is often awkward and difficult to navigate, so isn't really what I want to be doing when planning an army. 

Certainly, a lack of free warscrolls will not make me spend more.

And that's not even mentioning those who are starting the game and don't want to make a £30 investment into something they may not even like. 

[EMMachine]

Well, we at least have two new free warscrolls in the download section of warhammer Community, the Unterworlds Warbands from Harrowdeep:

https://www.warhammer-community.com/downloads/#warhammer-underworlds

I had the feeling before it would have made more sense if GW would have made 1 pdf for each faction to download on Warhammer Community instead of 1 pdf each warscroll.

The removing of the warscrolls is also bad for the lore wikis. The main authors will most likely have the books but it gives people not having the books the change to write a stub article about a unit including the weapon loadout that unit has.

The nice thing with free Warscrolls was, that you were able to see what the unit is able to do when the Warscroll was released.

 

[Enoby]

1 minute ago, EMMachine said:

The nice thing with free Warscrolls was, that you were able to see what the unit is able to do when the Warscroll was released.

I do wonder if this will have a big impact on preorders for any new AoS stuff. I'm unsure how much rules affect sales, but if you can't see what a unit does and attempt to list build much before the book is released, then I'd imagine pre-orders would be lower. Sure, you can look at 'man reads book', but they're usually a bit boring and require a lot of skips to see what you want - no replacement for browsing at your own pace. 

[pnkdth]

8 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

I can honestly say that the additional barriers to accessing the warscrolls of units might have stopped me from starting a Stormcast army. Even though I was not initally super interested in Dominion when that dropped, I like the look of the new Stormcast models. Since the new book came out they have become a fairly simple to play, but powerful, force that can easily be built at sub-30 models at 2000 points. That makes them an attractive side project to me. Plus I already have a bunch of Cities of Sigmar stuff, so that would further increase the amount of lists I could build. I think a Stormcast army would be perfect to have around to play games with friends who are interested in AoS, but don't have their own armies.

So I have been in this sort of non-committal planning stage for a while. Usually, I would have probably looked at the warscrolls on the webstore a bunch to see whether I could construct a list that I'd be happy painting, that didn't have models I don't like (of which Stormcast still has a lot) and that would be mechanically strong at the same time. I know I can look up warscrolls on the app, but here's the deal: I just happen to have an old, cheap phone and tablet as my only compatible devices, and the app is not available on either. So there is just currently not really a convenient way to check out the new Stormcast warscrolls.

I know that if I put in the effort I could get around this. I have some computer knowledge, I could probably get the app to run if I really wanted to. I could ask my wife to lend me her phone for a while to look stuff up. I could use youtube reviews and other rule-aggregating websites to find out. But the important thing is that all of those steps are additional barriers of inconvenience. I am not yet in the stage where I am committed enough to this army to go through the trouble, it's still just a "might be nice" thing. I would say that I am fairly plugged in to what is going on with Age of Sigmar, both model and rules wise. I can only imagine the barriers being even higher for a completely fresh player.

I'm not going to claim that my experience is universal. I also don't want to play it up as "I would definitely have bought 2000 points of Stormcast right now if warscrolls were free". But I think what happened to me can serve as an illustration how lowering the barriers of entry might contribute to more sales. As far as I can be objective about this, I find that the removal of warscrolls from the store have definitely negatively infulenced my likelyhood of starting a Stormcast army.

Being able to check out the warscrolls as your browse were a huge thing for me when turning window-shopping to actual shopping. Not having to double check or invest in a tome before making the plunge made me more confident I was making the right call.

Similarly, I really wish they'd start sharing their road map since that would also rebuild my trust in the company since I do not actually want to continue my boycott GW products (sticking to principles can be annoying sometimes). This would also make it easier for me to plan my purchases since the current rapid releases and/or FOMO shenanigans is actually making me not wanting to spend money, because I have no idea what's around the corner (and around the corner's corner and so on). Not to mention GW would look a whole lot more confident in their own product and brand if they did.

 

 

[Orbei]

10 minutes ago, RuneBrush said:

The underlying infrastructure of an ecommerce website is very costly, it needs fairly pokey database servers, fast http servers and various other supporting elements.  By comparison a blog or forum doesn't need the same level of performance - if a reader has to wait an extra half a second for something it makes little difference, conversely a half a second delay on every page may cause a customer to give up and you've lost a sale.

This is very helpful context that I never realized. So hosting the warscrolls on the store is more costly than potentially hosting them on the community site. A potential solution might be a master unit listing hosted on Warcom with the current pitched battle profiles, a link to the warscroll, and a separate link to the unit on the store page. This would let people evaluate the units and then know where to find them on the store. The pitched battle profile being included is just my personal wish list. It's annoying to have this separate from the warscroll IMHO.

[EMMachine]

2 minutes ago, Enoby said:

I do wonder if this will have a big impact on preorders for any new AoS stuff. I'm unsure how much rules affect sales, but if you can't see what a unit does and attempt to list build much before the book is released, then I'd imagine pre-orders would be lower. Sure, you can look at 'man reads book', but they're usually a bit boring and require a lot of skips to see what you want - no replacement for browsing at your own pace. 

In case of preorders it could be a double-edged sword.

If the warscroll is shown and we see the unit is weak, the preorders can be lower as well, and if the unit is strong preorders would be way higher in case of the competitive community.

 

[Orbei]

11 minutes ago, pnkdth said:

Being able to check out the warscrolls as your browse were a huge thing for me when turning window-shopping to actual shopping. Not having to double check or invest in a tome before making the plunge made me more confident I was making the right call.

This is how I make purchases as well. I recently started an IDK army. When I determined I wanted to start an army this was my process:

List out the factions I was most interested in. This happened to be IDK, DoK, and Seraphon. 

Look at the rules and build some sample lists. What would a 2k army for these factions look like for me? I needed the warscrolls and points to do this. So I wrote a few sample lists for each of these factions, with about 500 points extra to give me some variety.

Then I priced these out. I was curious to see how much each of these factions would cost for what I wanted to buy! Turns out Seraphon was significantly cheaper and IDK was about $100 more than DoK.

Then I made my decision. The warscrolls were very helpful for me in this process, and I ultimately ended up buying all of the models at once. I knew exactly how many kits to buy. I also bought the battletome, even though I had already reviewed all of the rules contained within. I wanted it because I am very interested in the lore on my faction and wanted the nice book.

Access to the warscrolls helped me to spend a sizeable amount on a new army. It still is as I consider expanding into potential allies. I am not going to buy every order battletome, sorry. But I would like a splattering of the different factions as allied units. 

Edited October 27, 2021 by Orbei

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

1 minute ago, pnkdth said:

Similarly, I really wish they'd start sharing their road map since that would also rebuild my trust in the company since I do not actually want to continue my boycott GW products (sticking to principles can be annoying sometimes). This would also make it easier for me to plan my purchases since the current rapid releases and/or FOMO shenanigans is actually making me not wanting to spend money, because I have no idea what's around the corner (and around the corner's corner and so on). Not to mention GW would look a whole lot more confident in their own product and brand if they did.

I get why they don't want to do a roadmap, but I am currently in a bit of a state of paralysis with my Cities of Sigmar because I don't know what to expect. Basically, in AoS 2nd, I built a Steam Tank heavy CoS list. That list doesn't really work in AoS 3rd anymore, but I am kind of unsure what to do with it. I want to build to theme, but the most thematically appropriate units for me are currently bad (Helstorm Rockets, Handgunners, more Tanks) and units I could compromize on are just OK (Outriders, Greatswords).

At the same time, Dawnbringer Crusades seem like they are at least a possibility for a new release in the near future. And there is a good chance that they will actually come with stuff that would play really well into my theme, like new Steam contraptions and updated Freeguild sculpts. If I knew that Dawnbringers are actually coming as a Cities expansion, I would probably just wait for them to come out. If I knew they are not coming for at least a year more, I'd probably start working with what is available right now. Worst case, Dawnbringer Crusades actually don't turn out to be anything and I just end up not buying Cities models for a few years out of uncertainty.

[Grimrock]

56 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

I get why they don't want to do a roadmap, but I am currently in a bit of a state of paralysis with my Cities of Sigmar because I don't know what to expect. Basically, in AoS 2nd, I built a Steam Tank heavy CoS list. That list doesn't really work in AoS 3rd anymore, but I am kind of unsure what to do with it. I want to build to theme, but the most thematically appropriate units for me are currently bad (Helstorm Rockets, Handgunners, more Tanks) and units I could compromize on are just OK (Outriders, Greatswords).

At the same time, Dawnbringer Crusades seem like they are at least a possibility for a new release in the near future. And there is a good chance that they will actually come with stuff that would play really well into my theme, like new Steam contraptions and updated Freeguild sculpts. If I knew that Dawnbringers are actually coming as a Cities expansion, I would probably just wait for them to come out. If I knew they are not coming for at least a year more, I'd probably start working with what is available right now. Worst case, Dawnbringer Crusades actually don't turn out to be anything and I just end up not buying Cities models for a few years out of uncertainty.

I'm in the same place with all of my factions. I collect most of chaos and I know some are going to get updated sooner than later but I have no way of knowing which. Tzeentch and Slaanesh seem the least likely, but given how fast the last Slaanesh and LRL books came out it's hard to say, and Slaanesh isn't particularly exciting for me these days. Khorne is probably a safe bet for at least 4-6 months, but when they do get an update I'd expect them to change significantly given how the 3.0 rules devastated the viability of pretty much everything outside of bloodthirsters. Nurgle is the most exciting for me at the moment, but it's also the most likely to get an update soon so I'm stuck waiting to see what GW is going to nerf into the ground and what they're going to buff (and then subsequently nerf in the 1-2 month FAQ afterwards). I'm so stuck at this point that I've bought into Marvel Crisis Protocol instead (and I'm really rather enjoying it). 

Before I bought into MCP I went through all of the factions in AoS to see if I could find anything else that might give me a fun project for a while. Like you mentioned earlier a small force of elite stormcast piqued my interest, but without the scrolls on the site I had no way to quickly check the new rules from the 3.0 book. At the time my interest wasn't strong enough to spend an hour or two collating data from a youtube video so I quickly dropped the idea. If the warscrolls had been available I would have read through them and it might have gotten me to the next step, which in turn may have gotten me to hit that buy button on a dominion box. No guarantees of course, but I do know when those scrolls weren't available my interest died immediately. Now I'm off enjoying a totally different game and giving my money to a different company. 

[CommissarRotke]

I have the same experience as a lot of folks here wrt window-shopping warscrolls before settling on my army (Stormcast). I'm not sure how far I would've bought into the hobby without that free access, though it certainly helped me buy into AOS proper instead of sticking to WHU.

[RuneBrush]

16 hours ago, Orbei said:

This is very helpful context that I never realized. So hosting the warscrolls on the store is more costly than potentially hosting them on the community site. A potential solution might be a master unit listing hosted on Warcom with the current pitched battle profiles, a link to the warscroll, and a separate link to the unit on the store page. This would let people evaluate the units and then know where to find them on the store. The pitched battle profile being included is just my personal wish list. It's annoying to have this separate from the warscroll IMHO.

In basic terms it will be more costly.  There's options that can be done to reduce that cost, as you say shoving them off onto WarCom with a nofollow link would be the simplest answer and likely the one I'd employ if I were making the decision.  It wouldn't fix the potential bounce issue so some other solution might have to be put in place to mitigate that.

[zilberfrid]

5 minutes ago, RuneBrush said:

In basic terms it will be more costly.  There's options that can be done to reduce that cost, as you say shoving them off onto WarCom with a nofollow link would be the simplest answer and likely the one I'd employ if I were making the decision.  It wouldn't fix the potential bounce issue so some other solution might have to be put in place to mitigate that.

Can't check now, but I thought the file on the store page was already a link to another filestore, so the PDFs themselves wouldn't be traffic from the store page.

That doesn't say anything about the load the store itself generates before clicking that page.

[Sarouan]

2 hours ago, zilberfrid said:

Can't check now, but I thought the file on the store page was already a link to another filestore, so the PDFs themselves wouldn't be traffic from the store page.

That doesn't say anything about the load the store itself generates before clicking that page.

Nope, they're stocked on www.games-workshop.com .

Moreover, they're still there. It's just the link that was removed on the webstore. Found this one through Google search typing "warscroll" with the name of the unit :

https://www.games-workshop.com/resources/PDF/AoS_Warscrolls/warhammer-aos-liberators-en.pdf or https://www.games-workshop.com/resources/PDF/AoS_Warscrolls/aos-warscroll-freeguild-greatswords-en.pdf

Of course, it's the 2.0 version. For Stormcast Eternals, they're not the updated one.

About the "free advertisement" argument, I do get your point from a customer's point of view. Believe it or not, as a customer myself, I do agree with Runebrush here : rather than keeping them on the webstore, I would simply move them on warhammer-community. However, if I was in the shoes of GW and seeing what is the content of new battletomes...I do see why they took another road in the end. Warscrolls are now a huger part of the main rules than in 2.0 - and thus the battletome's rule content. If they were still "free", there's even less incentive to buy the books afterwards, IMHO.

Obviously, it really concerns the veteran players most of the time. Battletomes are still very good value for the complete newbies ; having the lore, a good painting guide and all the rulesto play your army in the same book. People really using warscrolls on the webstore are more those who know the game for quite some time / did buy the books from previous versions and thus don't need that muych the lore and painting guides - they're just looking for the rules. And they know warscrolls are half the battle (points and core rules can be quite easy to find on reviews online / can be found in the general hanbook for older versions).

Which is why they are angry GW didn't put the new 3.0 warscrolls on the webstore, because it's more tedious to gather the full rules from reviews now. The battletome looks the more convenient way...for a price, and that's the real issue IMHO. They don't want to pay for the rules, in the end.

Edited October 28, 2021 by Sarouan