...Its really, really difficult. So they've announced a one off game in a box. Nothing wrong with that board games companies have been doing that for years now and to be brutally honest I expected nothing less really considering the Games Workshops business plan. They have an overly bloated retail chain that quite frankly skews their entire busuiness model because the retail chain struggles to support itself and the company with just the 3 core games they have now. There's much more that I could go into about how in effect the games development wing and the commercial wings of the company are effectively hampering each others performance, but I'll leave that for now and return to it in a later blog. For now however lets just say I do have a problem with it because I can't help but feel its a very, very cynical marketing move on behalf of Games Workshop. I still want to be positive about them I honestly do but here, with Dreadfleet I think I have a product that just sums up everything that's wrong with the Games Workshop right now in a nutshell.
First off I think most of us who follow the hobby as intently as the like of me will have heard rumblings months before Storm of Magic was released that there was going to be a one off game like Space Hulk this year, which made sense to me. Because in the previous year the sales bump was provided by the new Warhammer Fanatasy Battle rulebook and 6th edition 40k just feels like it's still a little way off for now. I hoped and prayed they'd do something sensible like bring back Warhammer Quest, something that might actually help them sell a few Warhammer monster miniatures and stuff as well, but they haven't. I still think Blood Bowl is 2 years away because we'll have 40k in 2012 and then in 2013 we'll get the Blood Bowl 25th aniversary edition. You see I started hearing about 2 to 3 months ago now that it was going to be a Warhammer Naval game, not a Man-o-War remake but some sort of spiritual successor. We then started getting the recent drip feed of John Blanche artwork, which all but confirmed for me it was a naval game probably based around pirates. Now regardless of whether you like John's artwork you can't say it doesn't have a distinctive character now can you? Plus it got the interweb a flutter, sadly many felt it might be the return of Man-o-War and even better a return to supporting specialist games properly because you can't have a naval battle game with just two fleets can you? I love optimists I really do, but how misguided...Read more �
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