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Pp forums were a salt mine steeped in groupthink and snark. Good riddance.

Pressgangers was the hig one.

As for the 'sword' comment, I was a big fan of mk2, and everything in early mk3 felt like pp 'doing a gw' but with less competence. It wasn't that I was determined to not enjoy/hate the game, pp's antics did that for me all on their own and never gave me anything to enjoy in it.

I remember a tournament in early mk3 and mechanically speaking, I was bored of the game. Had that sudden epiphany that I was done with mk3 sadly.

Cyel wrote:Oh, I remember how disgusted I was by the toxicity of the forums at the start of mk3 (and even a bit earlier, after the card leak) and how absurd the accusations were. I could see it for my faction, Protectorate, where so many people were just hell bent on moaning how unplayable it was (because some of the mk2 broken things were toned down) even though it was just a perfectly good, powerful, well balanced faction, which for me was obvious from playing games with them in the pretty competitive Polish meta where they fared great.

But no, there were pages upon pages of whining on how the change of the timing of fire damage (could use Focus now) completely neutred the faction...eh.

Could be worse. I was in Mercenaries trying to switch to Skorne.

Overread wrote:Oh true as soon as MK3 hit things turned toxic, but it didn't help that they'd gutted the forums just before and shut down the PG and that MK3 was somewhat rushed out etc...

Things were toxic before hand. It just became stronger and more vocal, especially when army creation looked more like replicating all of 40K 7th Edition's problems.

I may not be remembering this 100% correctly but I vaguely recall our top WTC player taking Skorne to WTC at the time, just to spite the whiners. The team placed top, as always, but I don't remember his individual results. He was confident enough to do so, though.

I remember a tournament in early mk3 and mechanically speaking, I was bored of the game. Had that sudden epiphany that I was done with mk3 sadly.

My experience was just he opposite. didn't care for MKI or II generally, hated the tournament crowd and tournaments in general. MKIII however is a blast. but we play friendly so for us MK III is great at 50 points with no theme lists with 3d terrain and all the terrain rules. my general take on MKIV is -great production idea especially modular jacks-terrible dumbed down rules. doesn't even feel like WM/H kinda like how 8th ed was to 40K. and the modernish tech aesthetic is bleah. i like my steam punk. but i have a huge MK III khador army and a solid group of like minded players, so as with GW i don't care what PP is doing we can still play the game the way we enjoy it.

 LunarSol wrote:
So many games built themselves on the Mk2 foundation; Malifaux 2E, Guild Ball, even eventually 40k.

...wut?

I don't think Mk3 was the main problem for PP, the game still sold really well - according to icv2, in 2018 Warmachine was still one of the top dogs, beating AoS in sales: https://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/41010/top-5-non-collectible-miniature-games-spring-2018

But since then, the game dropped from the top.

My issues with MK4 are: 1. they burned their bridges by stopping production for everything not Mk4. I understand the backlog was too much to handle, but dropping everything was too much. They could have dropped 60% of the line, everything released before 2016, or 2015, whatever. But not all. This way, the options for a new player are drastically reduced: instead of 15 factions, you have..3? Plus, there are so many cool models released/rereleased recently.

2. the price - which is stupid. I made a comparison of starter sets for the main wargames, and Warmachine came out on top by far. A starter for mk4 costs 170 eu. If you want to get into 40k, you can buy a starter for half the price (and a similar amount of models). Conquest has starters for 120 eu, which includes 2 rule books for 2 games. AOIAF and Legion cost around 110~eu. KoW has 80 eu 2p starters, and Dropzone 60 eu 2p starter. And all of them give you more than just models.

The price for infantry is also stupid - I was happy finding a box of 10 Bane knights for 62 eu - best deal online - that until I found that 12 household guards from Conquest costs 34 eu. ASOIAF elite infantry (12 dudes) are around 38eu. Even in 40k, I can buy 10 hellblasters for 40eu.

I just don't get how PP survives with these prices.

I still like this game, though. I love the models, the universe, and the rules seems much better than most.

Yes, I don't know how prices are mentioned so rarely here. They are really absurd, to the point PP eliminated me as a customer ~5 years ago or more. Whenever I wanted something I was just trying to find it second hand, scratch build it or find a cheaper WYSIWYG alternatives for conversion (for example I used many GW models and it saved me 1/3 to 1/2 of the price...and I mean normal retail price, not second hand!).

For me it's easy to understand how people searching for a game to start look at the entry prices for different games and PP falls somewhere far behind the total absurdity point and is not even considered as a serious choice. If I can buy Massive Darkness 2, a few kg heavy box with dozens of minis for not much more than a single character warjack I can use for absolutely nothing on its own, then yeah, you can guess where my money is going to go.

I think the reason we don't mention price as much is because so many of us are on the fence before we even get to wanting to buy the models in the first place.

Which is a REALLY bad sign.

Heck for me I'm an Everblight fan so I've basically nothing for a long while before PP even has things for the army I once collected (that apparently got shattered or something and now part of it is pirates?)

Which was another thing, combining the games (which honestly marketing wise should have been done way back in MK2) was a solid move but then having the Hordes material years after the Warmachine was a poor choice to really snub Hordes players as a whole for a long time. I get production was an issue, but axing the whole line and then dripping out replacements was not the best move. Even if they'd shut down retail and upped pricing it would have been good to keep some core production going in some form and roll armies over one by one.



But yeah way back on page 1 I think we were mentioning that along with all hte other issues, having a super high buy-in price is a really poor move from PP in growing the game. Burning bridges with established fans and then having buy-in prices that are basically set for established buyers not totally new people is a really strange move.

They need cheap buy-ins to get people back into the game. Without them they are still relying on the same dwindling core of established gamers they had before, which is just not a healthy position. Especially when already former and current fans are balking at the prices they are asking for.

You know I feel like MKIV is made from a series of problems the firm has at the company end. They've asked themselves how to solve problems that they have in the head-office end of things. So they are not totally daft plans, they are just plans made for solving their problems without then pausing to ask who the market for their game is; what the focus is; who they are really targeting and what the goal of their market growth is. Ergo they are not answering consumer questions with their product line.

 Overread wrote:
I think the reason we don't mention price as much is because so many of us are on the fence before we even get to wanting to buy the models in the first place.

Which is a REALLY bad sign.

Heck for me I'm an Everblight fan so I've basically nothing for a long while before PP even has things for the army I once collected (that apparently got shattered or something and now part of it is pirates?)

I'm in a similar boat - my faction (Cryx) doesn't even exist anymore, from what I can see, and I don't like the changed aesthetic on the new models, so the prices are pretty much irrelevant.


I do wonder if PP worked themselves into a corner by making the decision to move to 3D printing but then having the end result wind up costing more than they had originally planned on. They would have presumably done a cost analysis on outsourcing conventional production against 3D printing, but production costs everywhere went up significantly in the last few years, and it's possible that in that time the cost increases for 3D printing (at least the way they're doing it) outpaced the increases elsewhere due to demand and/or labour issues. That would make more sense than deciding to move to 3D printing if it was always going to be more expensive.

Saving on shipping costs by outsourcing the printing globally is a sensible idea on the surface, but from the looking around I've done, to get retail-quality prints it's just too expensive. 3D printing for production only seems viable from a price perspective if you're doing it in-house.

Well, prices may not matter for you considering an mk4 army, but they matter for the natural flow of players in and out of a given game and it was true already in mk3 when prices were starting to get more and more insane.

 insaniak wrote:


I'm in a similar boat - my faction (Cryx) doesn't even exist anymore, from what I can see, and I don't like the changed aesthetic on the new models, so the prices are pretty much irrelevant.

Cryx is still legal - there are 2 armies legal in Prime: Blackfleet and Dark Host. I just ordered a bunch of cryx models for my army.

I another news, I just saw a new model for MK4 - Magnus the unstoppable with a warjack - both looks really cool, even if the jack looks a bit too much like a 40k knight. What's more interesting is that they are available for the legacy prime armies - which is weird, since PP said legacy armies will not get new models. This is pretty great, I will get the new magnus. He is also available at gen con.

https://home.privateerpress.com/2023/07/27/gen-con-2023-and-the-unstoppable-privateer-presence/ - the article with the models.

£55 though. Bit steep.

The Warjack is 80mm so closer to a Redemptor than a normal Warjack. It's the first in a new line of "super heavies". Expensive, but not a surprising price.

They're making him available to Legacy armies because he's supposed to be a celebration of the game's 20th anniversary (also obviously to sell more of them). Personally, I'd be more excited if he could be taken with Magnus2 separately. Taking him as a Journeyman is less exciting to me.

Oh, be honest -he's available to every faction so that he may be sold to as many players as possible

I thought I made that clear enough already

 emanuelb wrote:

 insaniak wrote:


I'm in a similar boat - my faction (Cryx) doesn't even exist anymore, from what I can see, and I don't like the changed aesthetic on the new models, so the prices are pretty much irrelevant.

Cryx is still legal - there are 2 armies legal in Prime: Blackfleet and Dark Host. I just ordered a bunch of cryx models for my army.

I another news, I just saw a new model for MK4 - Magnus the unstoppable with a warjack - both looks really cool, even if the jack looks a bit too much like a 40k knight. What's more interesting is that they are available for the legacy prime armies - which is weird, since PP said legacy armies will not get new models. This is pretty great, I will get the new magnus. He is also available at gen con.

https://home.privateerpress.com/2023/07/27/gen-con-2023-and-the-unstoppable-privateer-presence/ - the article with the models.

Oh boy. More giant models, just what we asked for...

Forums and especially official ones have always been toxic and always will. From fanboys to whiners and cliques. Its all forums ever are.

Early aos sold very poorly. Beating it wasn't hard.

PP selling 100 dollar units was Insane. They seriously need to forget being a production company and switch to the 3d print patreon model if they want to survive. There's no way they don't make more money. And I'm sure it would revive the game. Be the first "real" 3d printed game system.

Technically they won't be the first. There are a few games entirely relying on being 3D printed with their parent companies selling STLs - Blood Fields and Full Spectrum Dominance spring to mind.

Yo7 wrote:
They seriously need to forget being a production company and switch to the 3d print patreon model if they want to survive. There's no way they don't make more money. And I'm sure it would revive the game. Be the first "real" 3d printed game system.

Utterly laughable suggestion. Of the 4 largest 3d printing patreons, none are making more than about $2 mil a year. I can assure you that PP was making a fairly large multiple of that number annually just a few years ago, I would be stunned if they were making less than that now.

chaos0xomega wrote:

Yo7 wrote:
They seriously need to forget being a production company and switch to the 3d print patreon model if they want to survive. There's no way they don't make more money. And I'm sure it would revive the game. Be the first "real" 3d printed game system.

Utterly laughable suggestion. Of the 4 largest 3d printing patreons, none are making more than about $2 mil a year. I can assure you that PP was making a fairly large multiple of that number annually just a few years ago, I would be stunned if they were making less than that now.

Has PP fallen to making less than 1% of GW now or is that just rampant speculation?

there is and was never a company making as much money as GW
GW being the only one that need to publish their numbers so we don't have the exact ones for others, but there are sources to get a very good estimate (and no, 3rd party sales in the USA are not one of them)

and yes the biggest competitors of GW are in the 1-2% range

GW is not the biggest fish in the miniature gaming pond, GW is the pond

Iirc, about ten years ago, i remember seeing 10-20m being bandied around, but that was the glory days of mk2.

More recently i remember reading that minicrate was their best earner.

Wouldn't surprise me if financially they are well off their peak.They've gone from over a hundred employees then to maybe a couple dozen now.

Also, on the $$$/£££ valuers of companies in this industry - gw are the behemoth. Next biggest operators are the likes of warlord which are orders of magnitude smaller. And it very quickly drops down further into 'guy running a hobby/side business out of his garage' level of cottage industry.

 kodos wrote:


GW is not the biggest fish in the miniature gaming pond, GW is the pond

As much as I want to violently and aggressively set this statement on fire to show my objection to it...... I do get what your saying

But I don't think that is quite true. Other games are thriving and yes, they don't have quite the cultural mainstream impact of GW, but they are important. As much as I respect GW, we can't allow them to have the sole monopoly over the wargaming space. If I ONLY had GW, I probably wouldn't be playing anymore. Instead when I turn up to a local Malifaux tournament with 30 other people in my corner of the UK, im please that other games with other approaches exist and have support, quality products and great communities.

Don't forget that many GW gamers also play other systems. Its an ecosystem, with each part feeding the other.

so yes..... but no.... but....

 kodos wrote:
there is and was never a company making as much money as GW
GW being the only one that need to publish their numbers so we don't have the exact ones for others, but there are sources to get a very good estimate (and no, 3rd party sales in the USA are not one of them)

and yes the biggest competitors of GW are in the 1-2% range

GW is not the biggest fish in the miniature gaming pond, GW is the pond

Asmodee and Hasbro both make more than GW does, so wrong right off the bat. There are/were various competitors that pulled in the tens of millions range within the past 5-10 years, which is a good bit over 1-2%.

And Netflix and Disney are also making more than GW, so your point is?

Asmodee and Hasbro are both tabletop gaming companies that produce games with miniatures?

And produce a lot of other stuff
so unlike you want to say that Asmodee or Hasbro is making more money with their Wargaming branche than GW, and there I would like to have any proof with numbers, the comparison is pointless

and for what I can find both make the majority of money with boardgames, cardgames, toys and RGP

but we can look into it to show that MCP, Shatterpoint. X-Wing, Armada and SW Legion are combined outselling 40k, AoS, Necromunda, KT and Warcry

That's a lot of goal post moving, but whatever.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Asmodee and Hasbro are both tabletop gaming companies that produce games with miniatures?

Not sure about Hasbro, but with the restructuring for Asmodee you'd need to look at Atomic Mass Games' numbers, not Asmodee's as a whole. Or in the past, FFG's numbers I guess.

As to PP prices, well... if your company compares unfavorably price wise with melon-fething Games Workshop... well, that's not a great look.

I was in WMH during the heyday of MK2 and it was a lot of fun, it felt like they actually gave a crap about making a good game with steamroller and everything, though you could see obvious cash grabs like the colossals which were, oof.

And then I kinda dropped out a bit after the mk3 transition because i didn't care for where the game was going and got into X-wing instead, which had that similar sort of good, competitive feel.

X-wing went through a needed edition change but it was enough to get me focused on other things, and last I heard, it got handed to some old PP guys(Atomic Mass) to 'caretake it' who had no interest in what X-wing was and threw out rules for what they thought X-wing should be and then tossed it aside so they could go back to their favorite kind of game: Marvel Crisis Protocol and now Star Wars Shatterpoint, these tiny character-based games.

I'd love to go back to try WMH but god the issues in 3rd killed entirety of the game in my area.

Flat 2d terrain focus was bad and game tournaments look really unappealing to other gamers who were used to a very nice collection of terrain

Rules in 3rd changed so much towards the end and theme machine made us longer mk2 players have fragmented lists or play 15+ pts down.

The price was frankly too high and needed too many models. Factor in tournaments and multiple lists and each being totally different themes with not many non warbeast/warjack crossover and its even MORE unappealing than just getting 2k of 40k/AoS and having fun.

The changes to 4th basically gutting my Trollbloods was final straw for me. I check semi frequently but it's done nothing to draw back me or anyone else in our group back.