Less is more
Now GW gets more than its fair share of abuse. Even here at TGN the company probably gets more negative commentary than any other company. I am, myself, not a big fan of the company despite being a very big 40K fan and a very big fan of the entire Inquisitorial theme in 40K. That said, I’m willing to guess that almost everyone reading this has at least one GW miniature in their collection and perhaps a Warhammer or 40K army. I know I have a lot of them.
GW’s mandate, and rightly so it has to be added, is to sell as many miniatures as possible to its customers and so it focuses its attention on providing rules and background that facilitate the purchase and use of large armies. One has to wonder though if GW might be able to make even more money from selling and supporting rules that allowed gamers to play smaller scale games with the same miniatures.
What got me pondering this was a link I found this morning to a Yahoo Group set up to create and discuss variant rules based on the GW Lord of the Rings ruleset. Without a doubt, most of these variants are historical or for genres like Barsoom. But it seems that it wouldn’t be difficult for GW to produce a LotR variant for Warhammer. This is what got my “gamer sense” tingling this morning. I really like the Skaven models and the background for them. But there is no way, and I can’t emphasize this enough, that I would ever play a Skaven army for Warhammer. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to paint the vast number of minis that a Skaven army requires. Even a small Skaven army would tax my free-time.
So the net GW sale of Skaven minis to me? Zero. Potential sales if they had a game that allowed to me play using a smaller number of minis? Who knows, but it would certainly be more than they currently sell me.
GW has made some rather half-hearted attempts to provide skirmish based Warhammer rules. The problem being though that they have always seem like promotional material made to get you painting and then move you into playing Warhammer. Not solid rules on their own. I can’t speak to what GWs actual motives were when they released things like Kill Team or Border Patrol but there never seemed to be much follow-up or additional support to maintain interest in these ancillary games.
GW does produce Mordheim but the game is restricted, quite deliberately, to a limited setting with a small number of available troops. As well, GW, sadly, doesn’t seem to provide any real support for an of the Specialist Games lines anymore and the fact that they haven’t just killed the company off seems to be slightly morbid at this point. One pictures GW accountants circling around and poking the Specialist Games balance sheets with a stick to see if it reacts. Perhaps GW is waiting for warmed economic times to resuscitate Specialist Games?
And I think its obvious that there would be quite a lot of people interested in a 40K skirmish game. Again GW has done some half-hearted attempts to create rules like Kill Team and promote the 40K in 40 Minutes rules but these also seem incomplete and certainly lack anything approaching the level of support the “core” games get.
Does GW think it would lose sales if it supported skirmish gaming? Probably. Its really the only explanation for the lack of official, solid skirmish rules from GW. Its a market that GW could mine to extract some extra miniature sales so the fact that they haven’t made a push into the genre makes me think that GW is worried about cutting into their existing sales.
That said, I’m going to look more closely at the LotR Variants Yahoo Group. Maybe someone has Skaven rules. :-)
Note: I do know that GW has made some skirmish rule systems. I just think that they all suffer from a general lack of attention and have been left untended when some of them need work.
This piece is also just a random musing about why it is that GW doesn’t appear to sell or support skirmish rules. No rant is intended nor should one be assumed :-)
Update: I’ve gone back and reread the Kill Team rules that Phil Kelly originally wrote for White Dwarf and also looked at some of the scenarios online. One could, with a bit of work, run some interesting scenario based skirmish games with the rules. So if you are interested in 40K scenario based gaming then Kill Team could fir the bill. That said, GW appears to have a lot of Kill Team material that could easily fit into a book and perhaps make it easier for gamers to explore Kill Team.