I did want to revisit one idea though:

But if what the hobby needs to compete with WoW is to evolve into something I don’t want to play, well, that doesn’t help me much.

I’d argue though that it does ultimately help you. Without new players coming into the hobby it dies.

The other poster was talking about the hobby as a whole. If it has to become something that I don’t want to play in order to get new players, it doesn’t help me at all. It’s like saying a new racket that gets people into tennis will help someone no longer interested in tennis. Help them with what? More potential opponents for a game they don’t play?

I’m taking the opportunity to buy the metal confrontation stuff that is being so deeply discounted at various places. I’m also not at all interested in pre-painted plastics.

One way or another, it’s a huge gamble for Rackham. They built their company on selling really high quality sculpts that really showed off one’s painting skill. They were high ticket items that really showed off what some might call the “French” style of painting miniatures. Until AT43, their core market was people wanting their gorgeous figures to paint. Now they’re completely changing gears and going with prepaints. Their existing customers aren’t necessarily going to be their future customers. Hopefully for them, they can get enough new people who are interested in pre-paints into it.

Those of us who like the metal miniatures and skirmish gaming can use them with other rules sets like Ares or Song of Blades and Heroes or some other rules. At one online store, I just grabbed over 20 metal Confrontation miniatures for $50 after shipping. It’ll be a challenge to complete my collection of a given faction before they’re gone, but I’m part way there already.

I’d be quite surprised to see copies of AT-43 or Confrontation minis.

HeroClix and all the other Clix games have been made in China for years with no pirated versions being made available i North America.

I for one applaud Rackham for coming to the aid of the busy gamer. Prepaints are going to be a big part of the gaming sector due to people being insanely busy, at least in the U.S…..

A recent article in White Dwarf, a writer stated we have a great hobby (painting miniatures) that also has some great rules to allow us to play with our hobby. So GW is clearly pointed at people to paint mini’s first, game second. While Rackham new direction is to aim at gamers first, and if you wish to repaint, go for it.

And from that comment, and the fact that AT-43 did not do as well as Rackham anticipated on the European continent, I would think that Europeans, with their socialist economies and governments, which favor the workers (which is not a bad thing and I don’t want to start a debate about it) allows for people to have the time to paint mini’s. While in the U.S., with an economy that cares more for the big dogs (ie corporations) most people (like myself) work 50-60 hours a week just to make ends meet. I’d like to make ends meet, so time is a huge factor.

And for those that think the Mini’s will be as crappy as the ones from WOTC… the AT-43 mini’s are a hell of a lot better than those. So I think that the Confrontation Mini’s will be just as good if not better.

So now I’ll buy some AT-43 minis and some Confrontation prepaints and just play the game rather than buy into the hobby mentality. When I want to paint a cool mini, I’ll do just that … paint one cool mini.

Iain.

I also would suggest that the miniatures were, for the most part, too darned complicated for a miniature game. I *never* painted any of my figs with the exception of a few Ophidian slaves and I have to say that I always found them far too fussy to paint. Looked great when a skilled painter did some work on them but they usually frightened the heck out of me.

I painted close to 40 minis for some Weird WWII pulp games in a month but did three Conf figures in three years.

Not arguing about that, but I wonder about the timing of their figuring this lack of success. Was it before they started to dedicate most of their efforts to AT43? Was it before the coffee break when they scribbled a quick version 3.5 of Confrontation that brought more problems than it was supposed to fix? Was it before they released an nth army that they hadn’t planned ahead of time and that they couldn’t support with a regular supply of new releases until it got even remotely on par with the other ones?

I feel like I could spend the day coming up with reasons why Confrontation wasn’t the success the company wanted it to be… Such a waste of talent truly saddens me.

It is but the fact is that Confrontation as it stood wasn’t the success that the company wanted it to be. It sucks that they have made this decision but for a number of reasons they never did have the success with Confrontation in its old incarnation that they could have or wanted.

No point beating a dead horse.

It was disabled after Gen Con. It wasn’t really very well written and generated a huge load on the server. Especially if there were a lot of comments in a page.

I’m working on a smarter replacement that won’t cause the same problem.

YMMV. One of the local shops here has Black Scorpion figs (Tombstone and pirates) on the shelves and regularly solicits orders for West Wind, Super Figs, AE-WWII, Hasslefree etc. Gets a fair bit of business doing it as well.

Even back in the nineties the local shops over here carried only the major brands. Occasionally they’d give something less well known a try, but as this sort of thing hardly ever works out, fans of less commercially succesful lines would soon have to fall back on mail order. So much for getting kids hooked on Mass Market Game X to cross over in significant numbers to other genres.

(btw, quoting doesn’t seem to work for me today)

This is something that clearly differentiates it from the “Hobby gaming” side of things that their old metals were about, and classes 1/ and 2/ of my initial analysis go big on.

These are

1/ “Traditional” metal, paint-em-yourself games.
2/ The GW plastic multi-part (rumours abound that GW is going all-plastic soon),
3/ Clix/CMG/boardgames.

Rackham’s AT-43 (having played a few games now with my nascent Red Blok) seems to fit more closely into the psychology of the 3rd bracket more closely than the other two, even though on face value it might seem to be a challenge to the 2nd.

As a 39-year-old gamer with a reasonable eye to quality AT-43 appeals because the models of the walkers look very nicely done, and while the painting and posing of the infantry is “basic”, its good enough for me for the sake of a quick game out the box of an evening. They are reasonably pretty playing pieces and no more.

And at that level it succeeds.

My “worries” for the Rackham products are.

1/ Price. They carry a hefty price tag in the UK (£20 for 6 elite infantry, £7- £10 for a solitary hero) which doesn’t sit well with them fighting against cheap-as-chips clix games for the attention of gamers wallets (typically horrorclix goes for around £5 for 4 models). Also, the hefty price tag makes me think twice about developing my “army” beyond the few units that are needed for the odd game every now and again, as opposed to developing it into something large enough for “serious” sized games and attention.

2/ Genre. Standard “fantasy” is something that hasn’t taken off in PPP even as a clix game. As such it is a big risk for R to pin their long term hopes on.

Overall, I think the issue comes down to value for money. R goods carry a hefty price tag (in Europe at least) so are R’s prepaints worthy of consideration as “value for money” to justify that level of investment by the punter? In my view they are treading a very fine line.

If they could sell their infantry units at around 1/2 to 2/3 of their current European price then I would think they could be a good bet. As things stand though with such high prices, they will only ever attract marginal interest in Europe I believe.

And as for the issue of “hits” on Rackham topics on TGB; as a previous poster said “interest” doesn’t necessarily equate to “support”. A lot of us are at lest as interested in the development of the “industry” side of things as we are in the possibility of playing the games. Rackham have rocked the boat with ditching their artisitically acclaimed metals in favour of an untried range of prepainted plastic, and a lot of us are fascinated in seeing how it all plays out.