My Life As A Gamer: How Not To Fix Your Product Mistakes

This video showcases two big mistake that gaming companies make: Never Own Up To Mistakes, Needless Fucking With The Product.

Games Workshop is a success largely despite its massive fuckups than because they are particularly competent. They aren't. They can't design a ruleset to save their lives, and they have too much Gamma Male ego as a group to just own up to them.

Because Games Workshop has the common gaming company problem of thinking that they have to constantly push things forward even if there is no need, they tried to paper over the ego damage that fixing a long-standing scale issue with their core Space Marine minature product line by messing needlessly with the lore surrounding the Space Marines.

Gamers being, as a class, sensitive to needless change noticed this as such and rightly read GW the Riot Act.

GW, being the typical Gamma-dominated gaming company, doubled-down on the decision and compounded the error by half-assing their move and walking back the promises of the New Thing being flat-out better. Gamers, as a class, being sensitive to bullshit rightly called this out as such and GW again doubled-down.

Now we're here. It's 9th Edition, Primaris are clearly superior to Firstborn across the board, and the inevitable conclusion--the old sculpts being retired and permanently removed from legal tournament play--is now clear to all observers. Needless resentment continues, and GW has learned nothing because like the Imperium it can learn nothing.

How, then, could this have been avoided?

• Be honest about the new Space Marine sculpts. Call them "True Scale", actually make them truly in scale, and openly sunset the old sculpts from sale and tourney play. You will get grumbling, but that will be brief compared to this years-long bitchfest. Don't bullshit your way around your mistakes; own them, and fix them openly.
• Never Advance The Timeline. Do like Harn or Exalted did; fix the end of the lore at a given date. All of your storytelling tie-ins regardless of medium tell stories that start before, and usually end before, that date. Gaming requires a static state over a long period of time to produce a strong gameplay hobby, so confining narrative development to a pre-history that has no impact on actual play guarantees this while reaping all of the business benefits that narrative development allows.
• If you can't be bothered to learn probability or technical writing, then learn how to vet the people you hire to do that for you. Rulesets are so often complete ass because the gaming company failed to work out the math, write the documentation properly, or--as we see with 40K--both. Your bullshit degree that's only good if you're a beneficiary of nepotism simply will not get the job done and you deserve to get bullied trying otherwise.

It's a lot simpler than it looks, both in word and deed, to just treat your audience like grown men and not like children to be coddled. Alas, the common gaming company cannot do that because it's not run by grown men.