Last week and over last weekend, Gamza laid bare what Games Workshop is doing and why.
The TLDR is that GW is doing this:
Which means this.
This requires the infantilization of the audience, and Cult Psychology is the proven method to achieve this state.
By doing this, a successful Brand Cult (a Pop Cult) is able to get away with ridiculous things without relying on technical architecture because you make it emotionally painful to contemplate Doing It Yourself instead of swiping the card to buy the Approved Merchandise.
Couple that with deliberately and frequently unbalancing the game and creating a competitive environment--and no, you don't need a playmode of direct PVP to do this; compeititive PVE can and will do this just fine as the MMO world proved over 25 years ago--and you have what you need to create the very Pay To Win conditions we see today in so much gaming media.
Wizards of the Coast's many announced changes will have the aim of creating this effect within its own Walled Garden, and because it is already a proven business model it will succeed and part of that success will come from privledging sweaty tryhard Whales over everyone else- just as we see with 40K, MTG, World of Warcraft (Retail AND Classic alike, and spread successfully to FF14 too, via Race To World First events).
You cannot maintain a commercially viable operation in such an environment, anymore than any MMO game could after WOW hit big. The pattern, repeated across generations and across continents, proves that once this takes hold in whomever wields the Network Effect it will dominate that entire sector of the economy and culture thereafter in a positive feedback loop.
The changes are already felt; every would-be competitor to 40K and Fantasy end up having its players demonstrating the behaviors that make copying GW's moves a no-brainer, just as every MMO post-WOW ends up aping WOW sooner or later because that formula works.
You cannot avoid this now and stand a chance of winning in the commercial space. You can only go non-commercial as a glorified hobbyist or be a grifting faggot like Colville and stay in the Cargo Cult. Otherwise you have to quit the Cult entirely, abandon all pretension of being Le Hecken Game Designer, and just be a hobbyist at the Clubhouse.
One-two of videos showing why GW is fucked and deserves it.
Yes, this will happen and sweet fuck-all will work to prevent it.
The next step will be to be able to print models with the desired color scheme imparted in the printing process, killing that tedious bitchwork that is painting the damned widgets.
This will force GW to stop being focused on pushing minis and instead focus on what their real business value is: providing secure locations to play the fucking game.
It would be nice if they also bothered to put money into producing proper fucking rules and manuals, but they won't because tri-annual edition churn has been their business model since the 1980s and they ain't stopping now even though they are in dire need of doing exactly that.
So go ahead, pirate that shit and print away. Fuck GW, and flat-out lie to them if they ask if your minis are Official Product.
But it does open up a massive line of attack: If, as you say, "Folk D&D" doesn't care about rules then why are you selling yours? LOLCow Garipay gets it. Dancey got it. Cargo Cultists pretend not to get it, but they do as their behavior reveals.
The reason is simple: there is no reason to buy anything but Official Game if the rules don't matter. This is another reason to Just Play D&D.
The reality is that Only D&D Matters. Nothing else does. Not even Cthulhu (most don't know COC exists), Traveller, HERO, or RIFTS.
In reality, what matters is D&D, Warhammer, Star Wars, and BattleTech. Not even Cyberpunk and Shadowrun (despite videogame tieins) matter anymore, while both BT and SW hang on by threads.
This guy didn't realize it, but he proved that "Fantasy" and "Science Fiction" ARE FAKE GENRES!
TLDR: All that changes are the trappings and the setting. The narrative structure is IDENTICAL so they play out EXACTLY THE SAME WAY!
This is why Andre Norton and Leigh Brackett can write "science fiction" that is really "fantasy" with a bare whiff of justification for the tale's telling: they are both doing Fantastic Adventure fiction, same as Burroughs, Meritt, Moorcock, Howard, Smith, and everyone else in Appendix N.
It's also why Shadowrun is just D&D With Chrome & Guns; changing the trappings and the setting didn't change the substance of gameplay one damned bit.
Dune (and its knockoffs, 40K and Fading Suns) is just a resetting of The Sabers of Paradise (go look that one up).
Star Wars (the original) is The Hidden Fortress plus The Dambusters.
Never, ever mistake a Product Category for a Genre; the former is a Brand Name thing, while the latter is all about narrative structure- seeming vs. substance.
"Fantasy" does not exist. "Science Fiction" does not exist. There are other fake genres; they also do not exist.
— Marshal Bohemond ⚔️⛨ | Space Marine Vtuber (@HMBohemond) April 1, 2026
This is evidence of Refusal To Engage.
The further tell that Games Workshop is backpedalling? The new edition. Fan favorite Imperial Guard hero is back? Blood Angels get the focus again? 4th War of Armageddon? They're retreating due to the poz push failing.
Retreating, but not surrendering. The tells are still there in the new releases--there's a signal for a new Girboss Commissar to take over from our hero, but GDubs has not yet committed to it--and you still have other signs of the sickness therein but this means that it's time to double-down on the pushback and hammer GDubs harder where it hurts--where they care--and pirate harder.
Those new models? The STL files should be in the wind ASAP so Printer can go BRRR and you can make them at home for a fraction of the cost and equal quality.
"But they demand official models!"
How will they know? You're going to treat those wankers as Enemy Agents and lie to them about the provenence, right? Of course you are. You do your part, and they'll pass any inspection necessary, so print away and give no fucks--or money--to corpos that hate you.
This is how it has to be done; play the game, but give them no money. Make the spreadsheets bleed.
Warhammer: Age of Sigmar is dying in the most literal way imaginable. According to leaks, poor sales and a worse reputation for the game are pushing Games Workshop to push the "End Times" button again and reboot the setting. But that's not the funny part.
— Marshal Bohemond ⚔️⛨ | Space Marine Vtuber (@HMBohemond) March 23, 2026
Considering that Games Workshop had to be compelled to re-release Fantasy as The Old World (and still, spitefully, slipped pozshit into it) I am not at all surprised to hear this. No one likes Shitmar.
Keep chasing those cultists that have no money and hate what you do, GW. Meanwhile, I'm telling everyone to pirate what you do that's worthwhile so that it exists after you're nothing but a putrifying corpse in a bog.
This is him not only waking up and choosing violence, but deciding that Exterminatus is not the extreme option.
He has such a firm grasp on the psychology of Resentment that Chaos personifies that he is now ready to see the real-life counterpart.
That's right, this not something harmless. The end result of this in real world terms is the destruction of Civilization and the extinction of Designated Enemies.
You want to know the Death Cult and the Mammon Mob have to control the narrative down to the level of hobbyist pursuits? Because even the smallest of things can hold the power to expose them and thus give both form and name to an otherwise invisible enemy; if you can name it and shape it, you can kill it.
This is what those skilled in Sophistry know too well; that's why they play wordgame and deal in gaslighting as easy as breathing- and it's why they weaponize lore, history, and precendent--three forms of word-based foundation-building--in their attacks. ("It's just fiction", "It's just Your Truth", "It's just Oppressive Construcs" respectively, and when they seize power they waste no time changing it to suit, as Virginia recently showed again.)
GW didn't intend it, but via stealing Chaos from Moorcock to label their Cosmic Enemy they would provide a model for the very trans-national crime syndicate and death cult that threatens the world and all within it. The enemy noticed, and they cannot forgive or ignore this; by their reaction, you know that Arch's presentation is correct. This is textbook "Protest Too Much" revelation.
Late last weekend, Jon Del Arroz cut this video on the end of Rise of the Merlin.
Near the end he makes plain the same thing that Professor DM did with regard to his YT channel: if you are not talking about The Dominant Thing YOU DO NOT MATTER!
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Google (i.e. SEARCH ITSELF) deliberately tanks whatever is not the dominant thing in a niche; this is a Second Order Network Effect because what is happening is that one technology utterly dependent upon Network Effects exerts its power over a lesser (and yes, Trek is lesser than Social Media in itself) Network by culling all discussion within its network of anything but The Thing On Top within that niche.
This is before any deliberate manipulation. The technology, by its nature, does this.
You can't blame Elon, Dorsey, the lizardman at Meta, the Illuminati, or whatever for this. This is entirely on the Nomries themselves. What the technology did is give real power in real time to the Revealed Preferences of the anonymized mass of Normies, Tourists, and Casutals that dominate all niches within the global culture industry.
You are seeing, in real time, just how difficult it is to fight against an undesirable position when Network Effects are so strong a factor in How Society Works.
No, you can't Thousand True Fans your way out of this; mass media, by its nature, cannot be splintered down to such small silos that you can have that be a viable option and yet maintain the mass media cultural institutions- nevermind seize control of them.
What this means is that a lot of discourse about the corpo-controlled mass media brands and their Network Effects is 100% wrong.
Paramount gave no fucks about JDA's book. Paramount brought out the big guns against Axanar, and Paramount is dog-fucking Seth MacFarlane over The Orville. The Revealed Preferences are the tell. Books DO NOT MATTER. Comics DO NOT MATTER. Film, Television, and Streaming matter.
We see this repeated in Tabletop. WOTC ignores most of Tabletop because Not-D&D DOES NOT MATTER. Games Workshop only cares about minis (still, for now, the cornerstone of their business model) and tie-in mass media (i.e. videos and Vidya). Not-40K? DOES NOT MATTER. Not-Fantasy? DOES NOT MATTER.
Normies, et. al.--i.e. THE AUDIENCE YOU'RE AFTER--will not, even if God Himself said so, turn away from the Brand until it is so disgusting and repgnant that it triggers a critical mass of them all at once; then something equally ruinous (for us) happens- they switch off THE ENTIRE CATEGORY permanently, barring successful rehabilitation attempts (rare, expensive, but possible), and nothing will convince them otherwise- and no, you're not going to rehabilitate it.
Network Effects are the strongest Walled Garden system that there is. They reinforce Brand Loyalty by making the friction for defection so high as to be ruinous for Normies to do so, until it is preferable to amputate that cultural element entirely than suffer futher.
If you want to win, you have to be seen by the people you're fighting over. Like it or not, "Complain about Brand, then offer The Same But Different alternative actually fucking works and moves the needle. No one would care about the Bros if we didn't talk about D&D. No one cares about what Josh Strife Hayes says if he didn't talk about World of Warcraft. You get the idea.
You are not fighting this war as an equal. You are waging an insurgency. Your job, right now, is to generate and sustain support by the population. You cannot do that outside the Network, so you cannot succeed outside the Network; you have to learn how to leverage it to your advantage- the Bros successfully did this by changing the discourse about The Only Game That Matters such that YT grifters try so hard to either steal them for their own gain or to defame the Bros to the same end.
Therefore a different approach must be taken, one that well-meaning dissidents will balk at, but the tells from the corpos show--by their fears--what needs to be done.
Make your own Branded material. Corpos play dirty; you gotta play dirtier to win, and the tools they use--information disparties, global arbitrational arbitrage, etc.--are now at your command also.
Make that 40K fanfilm. Host it where GW's lawyers get told to pound sand. Hide your names behind global privacy rules. Learn how outlets like Caribbean Thule publish and distribute actually banned books and shamelessly copy their methods; this includes their finances. Make that Trek series; host it where takedown requests get routed to /dev/null. Make a 40K rulebook that isn't shit, share the PDF freely and include a POD-friendly version so folks can run off their own copies at-cost via unlisted Lulu uploads (or something like it). You get the idea; this is Samizdat Territory, so act like it.
Then promote the hell out of it; show off your hardcopies on your socials. Screen it at cons; have QR codes on hand for folks to access it online. Get folks to donate to Uncle Gene's Better Space Literature Society and be surprised (LOL) at getting your own copy of The Trek Show That Paramount Won't Make arrive in a 20 disc BD boxed set a month or so later.
"But that's-"
No one cares. Normies run off vibes; corpos went hard after Axanar because it has better Trek vibes than anything official so the Normies embraced it as legit. That is what must be done; make things with superior vibes and shove it into their faces. Trek, Star Wars, D&D, 40K- you name it, it can be done. Now YOU control the Netwok Effect, and that vast mass media audience will default to listening to YOU.
That's what the enemy understands--go read Edward Bernays; this has been in the open for over 100 years--and it's time to face that these are the rules of the game.
This, as Arch notes, is not the first time that GW did this.
This is also, as Arch notes, not just GW doing this.
This is part of a trend by corpos using lawfare to shut down anything at all looking askance at them. We're not even close to where Axanar was when Paramount nuked them from orbit; this is a passing resemblance in one blink-and-you-miss-it shot in a trailer we're talking about.
Yes, GW is that petty; remember the lawsuit over "Space Marine" that ended up going MCA Hoegarth's way, forcing GW to asspull renames because they couldn't lawfare others into not using "Space Marine" or "Imperial Guard" anymore? We're on that level of petty here, and others (e.g. Trench Crusade) are now following suit.
Not that GW was done there. Pat has more.
GW flubs a release. Tuesday.
That's not the issue (but it is an issue).
The issue is refusing to fix a problem that GW is responsible for, knowing full well that the buyers lack the means to enforce their rights so they can just screw the customer even harder while capitalizing on the success of a tie-in product in order to buoy revenue during Yet Another Fucking Edition Turnover.
Chimping out is in order here.
No, not unhinged ranting. I mean the effective kind; if Pat were to have included links to legal authorities able to coerce corrective action out of GW, that would be effective chimping.
This is a Consumer Rights issue. The Yookay, occupied and deliberately dysfunctional as it is, still has those things and those agencies- use them. You're not whining about Pakis and rapists, so they may actually do something about it. Here in the US, this is a Federal agency: The Federal Trade Commission. Drop them a line, with all the information they ask for and more, and do so in massive numbers (so yeah, spread that link around). The FTC is SLOW, but when it hits it does so like a colony drop; GW can't ignore the damage.
Oh, and if you GW people on YT want a hint: see that above paragraph? Cut a video; show the link(s), and have a template ready to copy/paste for the complaint. Call To Action, friction minimized, Great Success.
The smart move for both Games Workshop and Wizards of the Court is to herd the majority of the hobby into their Walled Gardens. GDubs already has very strong and effective Officialdom Cult practice as it is, which is going to be reinforced by technical methods that introduce such superior convenience that the Network Effect will swing that way irrevocably and thus drag the holdouts with them.
WOTC is already there with Beyond, reinforced recently by allowig third parties into their storefront, and they've been pushing the social end slowly over the course of Current Edition (to mixed effect, and that's being generous). The push for re-engagment into an IP-focused business is meant to drive larger audience recruitment and engagement via the draw of popular media that is Normie-facing, and Normies only go towards what is easy and convenient to do; Beyond is easy and convenient to do, can be done digitally from anywhere at any time, etc. and doesn't require going to a specialist hobby store or even buying from Amazon.
It is not in the interest of either corporation to permit use of their properties outside of their Cults of Officialdom.
As both of these are publically-traded corporations, with legal mandates to maximize shareholder value, they have both Carrot and Stick before them to chase and capture Normies and punt the hobbyists that made their success possible.
Do not think that their management is stupid. That's how you get blindsided. They may be ill-informed, or lack understanding of what works and why, but they are not stupid; they can and they will find out how to get from A to B and thus firmly colonize the Normiesphere in ways that you need to mention Monopoly and Catan to match.
Then back that up with a tournament tier (40K's practice, which WOTC will also do in due course) and you have the backstop needed for the Officialdom Cult to get and keep its power over the property and its audience.
Common experiences, for Normies, is what drives the perception of legitimacy in tabletop gaming; if everyone does it, then everyone will do it. That's Network Effects in action, and everyone that isn't the Top Dog is going to get left behind due to the Walled Garden lockins gatekeeping everyone else out of the Normie-farming. In an environment where the room for commercial viability is already in a state of collapse, this will push it into freefall and begging on Kickstarter ain't going to cover the gap indefinitely. We're going to see more people tap out as this happens; some will downshift to non-commercial publishing, the rest will just quit.
I can't blame them for doing this. I can still say that it's a waste of time; these were Roll For Combat's end-of-year filler streams.
What astounds me is the continued resistance against the logical conclusion to Just Play D&D and dump the Also-Rans, Never-Weres, and Never-Wills by Stevie, Derik, and Pat despite acknowledging this state of affairs.
No, they even acknowledge that there is no competition for The Only Game That Matters. They acknowledge that everyone else is wasting their time and money pretending that this is not so, but then carry on in the same breath as if they didn't just confess their own insanity.
If they weren't trying to pretend that they were viable commercial operators, I wouldn't care; non-commercial hobbyist publication is how things ought to be in this hobby. The objection comes from the insistance that there is competition; there isn't, and they keep refusing to accept the conclusion that they ought to just shut down and do something else or openly become solely motivated by fulfilling patronage demands- i.e. being paid to do what someone else commissions them to make for them.
These people can't crash and burn fast enough.
You compete within the D&D Network Effect, which means only Past Editions can compete with Current Edition.
Not knockoffs. Not Temu D&D. Not Just So Theater Sports. Real D&D Editions.
Everything else is better off shutting down commercial operations and going non-commercial hobbyist publications or going with neo-patronage and just fulfilling commissions.
They do not interpret your complaints as valid so long as you buy their shit- any of it.
This is why they go after third party alternatives, legal and not alike. This is why they enforce Official Product Only and maintain their Cult of Officialdom, and why they turn on fan channels on a dime.
They want to establish and enforce Fear of Missing Out and There Is No Alternative. If you would only ignore them and just print your own minis, use counters, and just use PDFs downloaded for free you'd starve these people into compliance with your will.
Again, BattleTech fans know how this is done; learn from them. You can play the game without giving Catalyst a penny.
You can do this, but you have to actually put in work and maintain discipline.
We're doing this. Too many of you either forgot or didn't get the memo.
YOUR LIFE IS GOVERNED BY NETWORK EFFECTS!
Tabletop is utterly dependent upon Network Effects for their value. Your fucking product is USELESS ASS-WIPING PAPER without a user network.
The reason that The Only Game That Matters is Dungeons & Dragons is because D&D has the largest user network. Every single user is connected to EVERY OTHER USER because they all play the same game. This is what Ryan Dancey got on about 25 years ago when he pitched the Open Gaming License to Wizards of the Coast for D&D3.X; time proved him correct and continues to prove him correct.
Every other competitor to The Only Game That Matters that did not tap into the dominent network faltered and continues to falter. The utility for anyone coming into the hobby to learn ANYTHING other than D&D is a diminishing utility that is fast eroding as macro-level economics and global geopolitics continues to collapse and shift. Why? Because this is a hobby billed on being dirt-fucking cheap to get into and stick with, which sets very firm AND very low expectations regarding cost- this is why D&D Beyond, despite everyone and their uncle complaining about it or about WOTC, is still where the majority of hobbyists are and remain to this day.
You cannot compete within the hobby while being without the dominant network. YOU CAN ONLY LOSE SLOWLY.
"but-"
You have the apperance of competition because people somehow think begging on a crowdfunding site is not actually begging, and because publication costs are so low now that very small operations can--even after the tarriffs--can crack out product without needing to be Big Corpo, but that it all it is: APPEARANCE. Seeming. ILLUSION!
In reality, there is D&D and there is Fuck You Get Lost.
The reason? The utility of a Tabletop product is physical; you can't play by yourself, so you must have others who agree to play and that means that the game that gets played is the one everyone agrees to play. That's going to be D&D 99% of the time. It's just a matter of what edition to play, and the rest is details.
Therefore there is only competition within a network, especially in Tabletop, which means there is only competition within the D&D Player User Network and the further you get from that core--centered around Beyond--the worse your commercial viability becomes. Wizards of the Coast does know this, which is why the smarter people in the corporation decide to exploit that position at every turn; they just suck at succeeding at exploiting that position, but it doesn't matter because--contra D&DTube's Usual Faggots--alternatives to The Game That Matter are irrelevent because everyone does not agree on what to play other than D&D.
You have legacy subnetworks out there--Palladium being the oldest surviving one that still matters--and they survive by tapping into that D&D network through familiarity or similarity to a D&D edition, and you can slot the OSR into this for the same reason; it's why so many of them are/were B/X clones or built on those bones (e.g. Mutant Future cloning Gamma World).
The few other notable Tabletop properties out there are likewise Old As Fuck and remain on top because they are the dominant property through a dominant Network Effect, and so many of them have reached Escape Velocity where it no longer matters if the game itself is in print or published by this or that corporation or whatever; BattleTech was an outright dead game for years at a time and it still dominated Giant Robot gaming in Tabletop, with Heavy Gear only ever as a Number Two, and that's how D&D is overall.
(N.B.: This is why Star Wars in its d6 form remains so dominant despite there being d20 and Whatever That Fucking Abomination Is. Furthermore, it shows that 40K and Fantasy can be maintained should G-Dubs ever completely lose the plot.)
Tabletop has not been a Blue Water economic sector for generations; it was saturated by 1980, and crowded by 1990. The last serious shake-up was D&D3.X and Dancey's attempt at applying Copyleft principles to Tabletop, and we saw what happened as soon as he was out of the picture; at least that fuckup ended with the release of Current Edition into Creative Commons, and the forking of 3.X into Pathwanker, but in terms of actual "I am a serious businessman pursuing serious commercial endeavors" Tabletop hasn't been shit for dick since 1980. If you're not a Boomer or a Joneser, you're not a real player and you never were.
The hobby's commercialization was a gross mistake, one that entropy itself is now correcting, through the relentless power-flexing of the Network Effect. It no longer matters what WOTC does or does not do; D&D is now the Forever Game, with a Network Effect that cannot be beaten because it has escaped the control of any IP owner or controller, and thus it is to Tabletop what Xerox is to photocopying or Google to search engines- no, even worse.
This is why I say "Just play D&D". If you actually want to play, that's how it is and now that's how it will always be. The next Traveller edition will (again) be built on D&D's bones, and all of them will in due course. You go where the action is, and the action is the Network.
You're going to see this happen more and more as (a) the collapse continues and (b) the dominant Network Effect flexes its power by proving why it's the dominant Network in that niche. For MMOs, that's World of Warcraft; it's the game that everyone knows and will agree to play, such that it defines what MMOs are and how they work, confirmed by would-be alternatives only able to change up the variables- a practice that, inevitably, ends up feeding the winning Network just as Ryan Dancey said would happen 25 years ago.
You're going to see this more and more.
CCGs are going to collapse on Magic. Wargames on 40K and Historicals. Adventure Games on D&D. Normie games will fall back on The Games Everyone Knows (Monopoly, Uno, Clue, Catan). Risk-taking by going outside the Network is already falling off, and what is now slow will become sudden within the next year or so.
In the Single-Player space, this will be a collapse on Brand and Genre; only the proven forms will survive, and only the proven Brands therein will remain strong while all else struggles. Be ready for more Metroidvanias, more Roguelikes, more knockoffs of Vampire Survivors, and so on.
This is the time to hunker down, retreat, retrench, and prepare for the next window of expansion- not the time to launch, to risk, to dare as it's clear that this is a Dying Time that needs be weathered.
Winter has come. Sit out the cold and the snow, doing that underground planning and preparation, so that when Spring comes you are ready to act- to move.
Will actually get played, unlike the Tabletop products.
Doubt that last part? You better believe most of the folks who bought it either never played it, or can't keep folks playing it because it's not D&D.
Will this succeed? Yes, it will. That means the next one will be Deathwatch, letting you make up your own Space Marine while you have your Kill Team do things for the Ordo Xenos somewhere in the Calixus Sector that the Traders and Inquisition couldn't handle.
With that will come the full confirmation that Conventional Play is better, cheaper, easier, and more accessible in Vidya than Tabletop because you actually get to play the damned game as intended, you play when you want, for as long as you want, without needing to Schedule Your Fun.
The Real Hobby cannot avoid the comeback because it will become increasingly obvious that Vidya will be better for Conventional Play going forward.
Which dovetails nicely with a Dark Herald article at Arkhaven this past weekend. Key points:
Generation Born Into Decline
Warhammer 40k is their mythic mirror
Tone Resonance: Irony Without Illusion
TLDR: "For Gen Z, Warhammer 40k isn’t nostalgia. It’s mythic realism — a world that reflects the one they’ve always known, just turned up to 11 and rendered in gothic sci-fi.
Which means it is piss-fucking-easy for the Right to win them over for life. Meme the fuck out of the enemy using 40K!
This is the last step Arch needs to take to go from commentator to leader, and chances are good he'll be bullied into it by the enemy sooner than later; his lingering LOLbertism is steadily eroding and soon he'll be where Gen Z is: wholly embracing the Imperial Truth out of survival. The Pontius explained this in one of his videos, and what he said of the Imperium in 40K applies to all children and adults in the West (and I am including "adjacent" nations like the Japanese and Koreans here): THIS IS EXISTENTIAL!
The future can be summarized thusly, if we are to survive: "An open mind is like a fortress with its gate unbarred and unguarded."
Games Workshop sicced the attack lawyers on an Italian miniature studio.
No, this is not a clean act of hubris; we do have issues that need to be sorted out here as Arch's video makes plain.
That said, Northern Exile is correct is that if G-Dubs wins this--by judgement or by forcing the targets to fold by financial pressure--the hobby side is dead as there will be full legal capture by G-Dubs which they will use as a legal cudgel, fully assisted by the United Kingdom and European Union's digital and copyright regimes, to destroy all competition.
This is not the same route that Wizards of the Coast pursues to accomplish total capture of revenue from their Network Effect Dominance, but it has the same objective: making the corporation owning the IP itself the sole merchant for goods and services regarding the Network.
I remind you that most tabletop wargaming is 40K. Not Warhammer generally- just 40K. Fantasy (including Age of Sigmar), BattleTech, and everyone else (including historicals) are the minority. G-Dubs shutting down anyone that makes mins on the claim that they are to be confused with 40K-legal models, which includes ALL OTHER MINIATURES as they can be from places in 40K's galaxy, is not a trivial threat.
If G-Dubs gets its way, it's going to force miniature companies to move juridisctions to places where UK (and, by extension, Western) law and judgements can go pound sand- and that is prohibitively expensive, which kills all but millionarie hobbyists doing this as a self-funding hobby, which is Good Enough for G-Dubs.
Conventional Play is aware that there are too many products chasing too few dollars and buyers.
What they are not accepting of yet is that "too many" is "More than a handful, after D&D". Most of Conventional Play is not commercially viable; they are delusional, but increasingly unable to maintain that delusion. I am now seeing that those able to break their delusion soon will be able to downshift to a self-financing hobby successfully, using crowdfunding to finance operations and offering premium quality books for backers while going POD thereafter to eliminate overhead. Everyone else will fold and shit down; no one will follow WOTC to Vidya.
Other Tabletop sectors are set to follow this trend as Network Effects play out there to the same end. Miniature wargaming is 40K, BattleTech, and Random Shit No One Plays; historicals are already well down that path, with Napoleonics still on top overall followed by World War 2 and Random Conflicts Most People Don't Care About. CCGs? Magic, maybe L5R, and Shit No One Cares About (which is sad, because Shadowfist is not a bad game). All of them are already showing signs of doing more or less the same thing: going self-funded hobby mode, defacto or de jure, and downscaling thereafter to conform to market realities. (CCGs would benefit greatly by selling the actual card graphics tied to a user-only print-at-home license, provided that they are printed on proper card stock.)
The realities of the market can't be ignored forever. Only The Only Game That Matters is truly viable; others can struggle to make a fragile niche, but they'll never break out of that struggling state and as soon as the one figure keeping it together is gone so is that other thing.
Not ever cultural artifact needs to be profitable to be worthwhile.
Pat's reporting that the Stupid British Toy Company fucked up the launch for Horus Heresy 3rd Edition.
We are seeing GW get the stick for not giving the customers what they want, which was to not have a new edition at this time.
Pat buried the lead here, but this is the culprit: Shareholder Demand For Action.
The reason for this launch is because the shareholders are demanding that every single product line in the company adhere to the same three-year model that GW's two primary product lines (40K and Fantasy) have adhered to for decades; those that cannot be maintained at this pace get culled.
Combine this with pressure to push the prices ever-upward by those same shareholders, at a time when discretionary spending has all but collapsed, and and you have Yet Another Mammon Mobster Fuck Up. You can't blame the Death Cult for this problem; this is the pure and demon-inspired greed of the Mammon Mob in action, not realizing that this was an entirely preventable problem.
"So they'll correct course, right?"
LOLno.
That pivot to being a Brand-focused company means that products that underperform will be axed in favor of products that do. Space Marine 2 and Darktide did far more numbers than even top-tier 40K Tabletop stuff, so guess what happens to secondary product lines that don't deliver on their delusional expectations of performance? They get a bolter round in the face and the corpse dumped into a processor vat.
You are going to see GW accelerate away from Tabletop towards Vidya as the tabletop product launch failures and underperformances accumulate. Make nice with the Oldhammer folks if you haven't already, you GW diehards; you're going to be pushed into their camp sooner than you think by the company that hates you. (Also, accelerate forking their products.)
