The Business: Signs That The Corpos Want To Go Lifestyle Brand

Remember all that talk about Wizards of the Coast pivoting out of being a pure gaming company, but instead making their brands into Lifestyle Brands? That applies to Games Workshop too.

This is up for preorder here. I hope you hate money as much as you love the God-Emperor.

This is not the first licensed 40K toy; there's been several Space Marine toys over the last decade, and there's been others, but an Imperial Knight toy with a pricetag on par with its Forge World counterpart but it comes fully assembled, painted, with a figure (also assembled and painted) is quite the tell that GW wants the same thing. Northern Exile's been all about how GW wants to do a Great Replacement of its audience with Normie Consumer Pop Cultists, and one of the pivots is via toys.

Games Workshop turning hostile to its established audience isn't that different from what Wizards did in courting the Theater Kids; they're doing this under the open premise of courting a younger, wealthier (LOLno x2) more general audience of unthinking spendthrifts. That's why the game's revisions over the last five years have culled the model lines, has culled the army types, and has attempted to change the lore (and failed).

When this happens, it's time to seize the game from the corpos, and GW is one of the corpos most vulnerable to having that control taken from them by the audience.

And, in many respects, it already has- not as well as how BattleTech is in the hands of the audience, but going that way.