Saturday, April 21, 2012

A little rant in favor of Specialist Games

Been a little bit guys. Lots going on right now.  But I have not forgotten about this little blog or thehobby.  If fact I have been Semi-productive on the hobby side of thing by putting out a lot of terrain here as of late and making my war band.

Anyway I digress.  Today I wanted to talk about 'outdated' games, mainly Games Workshop Specialist Games.  It always kills me GW's attitude on Specialist Games.  I mean they develop them, hype them up, and push it out then tell the fan base that it is in their hands.  That's usually it, no support, no new models, no anything.  We all know this, so what I am saying here is nothing new.

The only Specialist game they ever give a passing glance to every now and then is Blood Bowl because it's good for a momentary cash cow for them.  They will rerelease it every 5-10 years and have people scramble buying the 'limited supplies', then when they don't instantly sell out they kinda let it go to the side and stagnate instead of trying to promote it at least every now again.

Like I said, they tell the fanbase to keep those games going. But to add insult to injury, when fan site pop up they put an IP hammer down on them.  I understand totally that they have all the basic resources on the website, thats great.  I am sure those fan sites don't want to waste space reposting that stuff save for maybe links to.

But that being said, in November, GW went to a lot of the sites that promoted Mordheim and told them to remove PDFs they had up of the Town Cryer.  For those of you that don't know the Town Cryer was the support magazine for Mordheim that was originally given away with issues of White Dwarf then later became it's own entity.  The thing in is they have not reprinted any thing for quite some time, they have worry from people 'curbing' their cashflow on it.  In fact, quite the opposite.  They kept the flame going for quite some time.  Enough to warrent having the warbands still available to sell.

And this just not happen to Mordheim, it happened to Specialist Games Fansites across the spectrum.  All of them were asked to take down any material relating to those games (Battle Fleet Gothic, Necromunda, etc...)  I mean whats the deal GW,  You pretty much shown you don't care about truely supporting them which makes me sad as you you keep putting out games like latest Dread Fleet.

Now Jervis Johnson is supposedly a big proponnent on snail mail and is said to try to open and read all of it.  So I encourage you to write him and tell hi, to 1) Start support Specialist games more.  And 2) Stop squashing the resources we have from the people that do.

You can mail him at:

Jervis Johnson
c/o Games Workshop Design Studio
Willow Road
Nottingham
NG7 2WS
UK

Thank you

No comments:

Post a Comment