My Life In Fandom: It's Time Cut Loose Irrelevant Companies

One of the funniest fan parodies in gaming is shutting down to avoid being bankrupted by legal actions. Activision? Tencent? No, Games Workshop.

TLDR: Rather than waste precious time fighting legal actions--despite being clearly in the right due to parody being protected internationally--because YouTube (et. al.) have fucking retarded procedures on copyright they're shutting the parody down and moving on to something that won't get them ground down in legal fees and wasting time fighting spurious actions.

First: As with the California push to ban certain PC prebuilds using Muh Climate as a cover for a defense fear move, this IP policy that GW now enforces is also a defense fear move. They sense that they are losing control over the narrative of the property, so they swiftly moved to shut down all voices but their own with the clearest targets being the fan animators and the next most likely being the lore channels.

It is entirely possible to thwart this. TTS's fans are already archiving the entire backlog and will soon be uploading to other channels on YouTube; I expect that they will also upload it elsewhere in its entirely. Fans of Astartes have already done this, as have fans of SODAZ for his 40K videos--he's the guy that did those great Death Korps of Krieg shorts--as well as for Hellsreach and others. This has only spread awareness of these fan animations, and with them the IP policy and the means to circumvent it.

Therefore I can only conclude that the safe way to go forward is to deliberately leak new material, deniably distribute it to every online platform you can reach, and if you do opt to monetize you so do by inserting a credit page where supporters can give you money somehow (donation, merch, etc.) thus accept the guerilla approach over the formal release that heretofore was fine. Stay light and mobile and you'll wear them down over time.

Second: As with Wizards of the Coast, this move by GW is doomed to fail. The rules for the current edition are already freely available online; the codices and errata are also. The same is true for older editions of the game, as well as for all of the sidegames and spinoffs. There is a thriving market for recast miniatures, which are often much cheaper than the highway robbery that is GW's prices, and 3D Printing makes that even cheaper with higher quality and fidelity. You can participate in the hobby for a lifetime and never give GW a penny. Given the contempt GW has for its audience and customers, cutting them out of the loop is only fair.

This also means that the hobbyists--not the company--are the final word for what is and is not accepted as lore, which means there is no reason to rely on Black Library to put out books when hobbyists could learn to write and produce their own. All of the tools that independent authors have to produce professional-grade work are also freely available to them, all of the resources need to learn and master the skills required to write entertaining fictions are freely available, and the means to distribute what is made are also freely available. The hobbyists can and should do it all themselves.

Conclusion: As with D&D, the only way out is through the floor. Tank the commercial viability, make 40K into something only done by hobbyists for hobbyists, and all of the problems with GW being petty little shits goes away. The key thing that I'm going to emphasize here is freezing out GW from the scene entirely, which means all of the following:

• Give GW no money.
• Give GW no time.
• Give GW no love.
• Give GW no hate.

Freezing them out means becoming indifferent to them, an indifference born of their irrelevance. The hobby doesn't need GW anymore, so it's time to cut GW loose. Cut GW out; give them nothing, and enjoy your Epic Gothic Space Opera hobby without them.