WoollyMammoth Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 I heard a guy say that fantasy is on the decline, that its a dying game. I asked him where he heard that, he said, all the forums online, everyone is saying how AoS sucks and nobody plays it. This is definitely not the case..... I went to GW and talked ot my local store manager. Apparently GW profits were way up last year. He estimated about 1/3 of the sales to be AoS. He said its random, some days you get all AoS people coming in and playing games! They had to put in a 4th table since so many people are coming in. People are even organizing mini-tournaments for AoS there. Since the Generals Handbook, things have been getting much better. Interest in AoS has been going way up. Last week my local community organized the first day of a slow-grow/escalation league for AoS, and we took a pic with 21 people in it! Last year when I was desperately getting one guy to show up to play games, I never would have believed such a turnout was possible, let alone for the first day of a new weekly event. I set up a local Facebook group to organize the 2-3 guys I was playing games with, and now its got 61 members and is growing weekly. For the first time in 6 years, GW is sponsoring a fantasy tournament at the LVO this year and it has at least 100 people. 100 fully painted 2000 point armies! I can't wait. This exponential growth has really only been sine the Generals Handbook. It was like night and day when the handbook came out, suddenly people were interested again. All this growth has happened despite the fact that no new models have come out. When the Tzeentch book went on sale, it was sold out almost immediately - people are starving for new AoS stuff! Fantasy is not dying, it is growing rapidly for the first time since I have been playing, maybe the biggest growth ever and it's very exciting to see. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arkiham Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 Yeah ignore him, probably a bitter 9th age player. Fantasy has been dying for decades.. Shares have nearly doubled since the generals handbook. Almost as High as back in 2005, I assume when it was at its peak. Ignore the doom sayers the game hasnt been in a stronger place for over a decade Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
#SteveJames Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 Totally agree been playing fantasy for years and I haven't seen people this excited in ages. Our little club in Dorset has gone from 3 or 4 people playing AOS beginning of last year to a 17 person campaign based on Blood in the Badlands. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SuperHappyTime Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 WFB was dead to rights in my area. Occasionally AoS gets a mention. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kaleb Daark Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 doomsayer speaks balls Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daedalus81 Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 Well, the financial report was out a few days ago. They are up over 13% after accounting for currency. Profit before royalties more than doubles. And I can almost guarantee that it wasn't all 40K's doing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daedalus81 Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 And before someone says, 'Well, it was the made to order stuff!' -- Broken down by channel the 'Mail Order' segment, which includes 'Made to Order' was up 1.1M pounds. While Retail and FLGS stores were up 14.6M pounds. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
#SteveJames Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 My local independent store saw sales up massively when the Sylthaneth stuff came out and with the amount of new Tzeench books floating around at moment (they are Tzeench after all) AOS seems pretty healthy at the moment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BaldoBeardo Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 My favourite Dakka screecher has yet to surface on the subject. [emoji23]Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Turragor Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 Some people don't like it when other people enjoy themselves. Especially if they predicted that it'd never work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
swarmofseals Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 GW continues to suffer from all of the ill-will that they generated in the transition to AoS. I got re-interested in Warhammer when Total War: Warhammer came out, and nearly everything I saw posted about AoS was super negative. I didn't even know the switchover had happened (I quit WHFB just before 8th was released), so I was curious and dug a little deeper. Some quick google searches turned up a ton of negative articles and youtube videos where people ranted about tons of aspects of AoS. What I didn't notice initially is that most of these were a year or two old at least if not older. Luckily, some random reddit commenter replied to an AoS hate thread that it's really not that bad and that things have really turned around in the past year. When I actually started reading current stuff on forums and in the actual AoS community I got a very different impression. I'm really glad I took the effort to go deeper, otherwise I'd probably have just assumed that the vast majority of what I was hearing was correct and that AoS is awful and GW is awful and I should in no way take a second look at tabletop gaming. So yeah, if you mainly talk to people that have been out of the hobby for a couple of years or have had no recent (ie: past 6-12 months) in-depth interaction with AoS or AoS gamers, then you'd probably get a very bad and very biased impression of the state of Warhammer fantasy gaming. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zeratan Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 @swarmofseals Basically my story except I haven't been into WHFB before transition to AoS (I knew it existed and read a few books in the universe but that's it). Ironically without maniacs furiously hating the game and GW on TW:Warhammer forums I would have likely never paid much attention to AoS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amysrevenge Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 3 hours ago, WoollyMammoth said: Since the Generals Handbook, things have been getting much better. Interest in AoS has been going way up. Last week my local community organized the first day of a slow-grow/escalation league for AoS, and we took a pic with 21 people in it! Last year when I was desperately getting one guy to show up to play games, I never would have believed such a turnout was possible, let alone for the first day of a new weekly event. I set up a local Facebook group to organize the 2-3 guys I was playing games with, and now its got 61 members and is growing weekly. Haha I had to look up to make sure that I hadn't posted this and just forgot, as it is almost an exact parallel to my story. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Squirrelmaster Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 Unfortunately for me, WFB was pretty dead in my area prior to the end times, and AoS has been pretty much equally dead since then. Occasionally we manage to organise an AoS campaign/event which draws people in, but otherwise everyone seems stuck on 40K. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amysrevenge Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 I tell you, mate. @Ben did it in Derby, we did it here in Calgary, @WoollyMammoth did it where ever WoollyMammoth is. "It" being a jump from 2-3 players to 20+ players in a VERY short time. Not saying that everyone can and should be able to pull this off - it takes some serious mental and social energy to make it happen, and not everyone can pull that off (it wasn't me, it was our club leader that drove the process for us - just me and it would still be those 2-3 players haha). But it can happen when you don't even expect it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Azure Guardian Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 I decided to get into the hobby this year and was looking at 40k. I really wanted to run Eldar but the start collecting box looked really lame to me compared to all the others so felt really let down. Nothing else in 40k drew my attention so I had a quick look at Sigmar. My friend (who loves 40k and played a 'little' fantasy back in the day) had told me that AoS was lame and used all the stupid names for it (skubbar etc). But after looking into it and seeing how much cheaper and easier it was to learn and play, and how much nicer the models looked, I couldn't really see a reason to play 40k over it. After getting a reasonable force of what would now be about 1000 points I went to my local GW to look for players. And there were none. The manager said that they had a few during the season of war but that it died down after. I then basically had a revaluation out of Wayne's World 2 "if I build it, they will come". So I have been slowly building up the scene in my local area. I started a whatsapp group, forced my friend to pick up a AoS force (not actually has hard as I thought it would be), and now I have a reasonable 6 players after creating the group 2 weeks ago. I hope it grows from here but will we have to see. The 40kers out number us but I am nothing if not patient and determined. "WHO SHALL CLAIM THE TABLES AND CAST OUT THE MARINES" "ONLY THE FAITHFUL!!!" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shinros Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 2 minutes ago, Azure Guardian said: I decided to get into the hobby this year and was looking at 40k. I really wanted to run Eldar but the start collecting box looked really lame to me compared to all the others so felt really let down. Nothing else in 40k drew my attention so I had a quick look at Sigmar. My friend (who loves 40k and played a 'little' fantasy back in the day) had told me that AoS was lame and used all the stupid names for it (skubbar etc). But after looking into it and seeing how much cheaper and easier it was to learn and play, and how much nicer the models looked, I couldn't really see a reason to play 40k over it. After getting a reasonable force of what would now be about 1000 points I went to my local GW to look for players. And there were none. The manager said that they had a few during the season of war but that it died down after. I then basically had a revaluation out of Wayne's World 2 "if I build it, they will come". So I have been slowly building up the scene in my local area. I started a whatsapp group, forced my friend to pick up a AoS force (not actually has hard as I thought it would be), and now I have a reasonable 6 players after creating the group 2 weeks ago. I hope it grows from here but will we have to see. The 40kers out number us but I am nothing if not patient and determined. "WHO SHALL CLAIM THE TABLES AND CAST OUT THE MARINES" "ONLY THE FAITHFUL!!!" I like this post a lot. Funny enough it was kinda similar in my store then people started to slowly realize it's a pretty fun game and most of the armies people run work pretty well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daedalus81 Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 6 hours ago, swarmofseals said: GW continues to suffer from all of the ill-will that they generated in the transition to AoS. Honestly that ill will existed loooong before AoS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Fraser Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 Our group have done the regular night thing for about 6 months now and it's been great the new people have piled up. Also a slow grow league is just kicking off and I'm sure the attrition rate will be huge (always are) but I looked at who were WFB players that played out our venue on the list and as you can see (green circles were WFB 5, plus 3 I know that played elsewhere), it is mostly new players that are in. 18/26 new in the last 18 months and most of those in the last 6 months Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RossMHoward Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 Here's our current count. Back during 8th edition Fantasy there were only a handful of us. Also our club ran a poll about what people were most excited about playing in 2017 This game is in a great place! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RossMHoward Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 14 hours ago, swarmofseals said: So yeah, if you mainly talk to people that have been out of the hobby for a couple of years or have had no recent (ie: past 6-12 months) in-depth interaction with AoS or AoS gamers, then you'd probably get a very bad and very biased impression of the state of Warhammer fantasy gaming. This is exactly it! Too much credence on various forums is given to people who HAVE played previous editions of Warhammer Fantasy and HAVE NOT or HAVE BARELY or HAVE, BUT BEFORE GENERALS HANDBOOK played AOS. Which is exactly why this forum is so important and I'm constantly sharing it on reddit.com/r/ageofsigmar. Also in terms of building a community, it's my opinion that we shouldn't waste our time trying to convert these Gruffallos over and instead should put our communities forward for new players and when they do show up for games, give them a good time. That mind sound a bit bitter toward the old guard, but those of us who have been enjoying games of AoS at the club have in a few situations been invited to stop playing and explain how we're enjoying it to a person who's just drifting around. This has stopped since the GH, but was a big deal whilst we were using SCGT or Clash Comp. After getting more than a little fed up of advocating for the game to somebody who just wanted to moan we decided our energy was just better spent in enjoying it for ourselves. The more people see you enjoying the game, the more people tend to want to get involved. And, more often that not, the people who want to get involved as a result of this are the kind of people you want to roll dice and have a good time with. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RuneBrush Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 Completely agree with all of the comments. There is sadly still a lot of negativity - my hard-counter to every argument that I've heard about AoS is "Have you played it", and on every single occasion the answer has been "no" (often slightly awkwardly), which opens up the route for a more sensible conversation. Which generally ends with a "give it a go" or "not a problem if you don't fancy it, but don't criticise something you've never tried". @Chrisdanish, @Splitbristle and myself (who all met up via TGA) are starting to play more regularly on a Sunday at a club in Devizes and little by little getting other members involved - most of which have just needed somebody to play against who can explain the rules! My hope is that we'll get enough momentum going so that there will be a game or two going on, every week (even when the three of us aren't there). The nice thing is that AoS is much more visually striking than most of the other games being played - golden armoured warriors pitted against blood splattered warriors looks more engaging at a distance than one brown army facing a green army (sorry if that's negative towards other game systems). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KHHaunts Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 18 hours ago, WoollyMammoth said: I heard a guy say that fantasy is on the decline, that its a dying game. I asked him where he heard that, he said, all the forums online, everyone is saying how AoS sucks and nobody plays it. This is definitely not the case..... I went to GW and talked ot my local store manager. Apparently GW profits were way up last year. He estimated about 1/3 of the sales to be AoS. He said its random, some days you get all AoS people coming in and playing games! They had to put in a 4th table since so many people are coming in. People are even organizing mini-tournaments for AoS there. Since the Generals Handbook, things have been getting much better. Interest in AoS has been going way up. Last week my local community organized the first day of a slow-grow/escalation league for AoS, and we took a pic with 21 people in it! Last year when I was desperately getting one guy to show up to play games, I never would have believed such a turnout was possible, let alone for the first day of a new weekly event. I set up a local Facebook group to organize the 2-3 guys I was playing games with, and now its got 61 members and is growing weekly. For the first time in 6 years, GW is sponsoring a fantasy tournament at the LVO this year and it has at least 100 people. 100 fully painted 2000 point armies! I can't wait. This exponential growth has really only been sine the Generals Handbook. It was like night and day when the handbook came out, suddenly people were interested again. All this growth has happened despite the fact that no new models have come out. When the Tzeentch book went on sale, it was sold out almost immediately - people are starving for new AoS stuff! Fantasy is not dying, it is growing rapidly for the first time since I have been playing, maybe the biggest growth ever and it's very exciting to see. Its only natural that you will be hearing this. As the negativity en masse declines the few trolls who insist upon hating the game will lash out desperately to bring all of us down. Thank you for posting this thread through. While some would say that we should just ignore them (and i do agree) IMO everytime this happens it just increases me and my friends drive to look at all the good things that are happening right now and make an effort to organize more games and events. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chickenbits Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 I live in Sweden, one of the most anti-AoS nations on the planet (one of the 9th age creators is a swede), so naturally, opposition has been fierce. However, we're slowly growing, and I have friends who have not touched a fantasy model in years who now got 2k pts AoS armies. Hell, I'm one of those people myself. I'm hosting a small 1k tournament in february, and interest in it has been fairly high, and we see a lot of posts of newbies who have gotten the starter or whatever and are excited to expand their armies. Even got a naysayer to give the game a try, and now one of my play groups is hosting a inside-tournament later this year. A lot of the nay-sayers still don't know that the generals handbook exists and what it brings to the table, and quite frankly, they don't care. They want to hate the game and they will continue to do so. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WoollyMammoth Posted January 24, 2017 Author Share Posted January 24, 2017 The purpose of the thread was that AoS is growing and its awesome. Negball posts are still floating around but they are 100% from people who have never played the game. At this point most of the negativity is from people frustrated to see AoS growing over the 8th/9th age/KoW they are trying to promote, or 40k players who cant get a table because there are too many fantasy players now. Most of the players I see are new and started with AoS. This is inevitable for growth, since so few people were into 8th edition, which is the reason for the reboot in the first place. A lot of people are coming back from like 7th or earlier, which is surprising. I fought the good fight from 8th, through the end times and into AoS since day one. (Pre-generals handbook I used house rules to limit summoning so the game was fun) I actually quit for a while after the generals handbook. Not for lack of love for the game but because the two closeset stores closed down and there had not been any AoS releases for months (and still not a single new death model in the age of sigmar). I'm starting to get back in but slowly. I was pioneering a gaming group, setting up facebook and doing a weekly event. Now other people have taken the charge to organize events. @swarmofseals GW did what they had to do with the End Times. It's sad they had to close the book on the dedicated fans, but things must move forward. Its time for the sad Dwarves to close their book of grudges and give AoS a chance. @Squirrelmaster, @Chickenbits Keep at it, it will grow for sure @amysrevenge I'm in Phoenix, Arizona @Azure Guardian If you picked 40k you would still be reading rules right now!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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