A version of this article appeared previously in Ravage Magazine

Odds are that if you were a fan of the recently released Dark Heresy RPG you were quite the annoyed consumer last month after Games Workshop decided to pull the plug on their Black Industry subsidiary and cancel further work on the Dark Heresy RPG and halted production of the Talisman board game. To say that this annoyed fans of the RPG and board game is an understatement. To say that the decision to scrap a product that had sold out online in minutes and was flying off the shelves in local games stores was puzzling is an even grosser understatement. It is not difficult for people on the web to develop a sense of outrage disproportionate to the actual cause but even taking this into account the reactions on the Black Industry message board, and on others, was, to be polite, highly passionate. There was, though, a silver lining in that dark brooding cloud.

Fantasy Flight Game came to the rescue of fans when they and GW recently announced an agreement (PDF link) whereby FFG would be publishing, and one assumes developing, the Dark Heresy RPG as well as producing expansions for the popular Talisman board game. FFG also was granted the rights to publish games from GW’s back catalogue of board games with the exception of products such as Space Hulk and Blood Bowl. Now in hindsight this was actually something that we should have seen coming. Fantasy flight already produces two old GW board games (Fury of Dracula and Warrior Knights) and was also recently advertising for new RPG developers. But hindsight is renowned for its clarity of vision and no-one wins awards for seeing the build-up to a deal such as this after it has been announced. This is though a very momentous announcement for several reasons.

Games Workshop is not a company that gets a lot of credit for the way it is run. That is due, largely, to the fact that most people think it is being run into the ground and that the managers don’t understand the industry or the fans of GW’s games. This agreement with Fantasy Flight Games is a positive sign because it made me, at least, regain some small amount of faith in the people managing Games Workshop. To see the company axe another profitable and popular subsidiary on the heels of announcing a sell-out of a product made me think that the new CEO of Games Workshop was sadly continuing the habit of past CEOs by attempting to salvage the company by cutting even further. GW has made, to my mind, some very bad decisions in the last few years. Their mismanagement of the Lord of the Rings bubble and their recent, and bewildering, decision to release their own hobby tools are just some of them. The decision to terminate Black Industries though was something that I though either heralded the announcement of even more serious issues at GW or was indicative of a new regime that had even fewer ideas than the previous one. Thankfully it appears that this entire decision, closing Black Industries and canceling their games, was just really very poor communication with their fans and the first steps in finalising this agreement with FFG.

The perplexing thing, to some people, in all of this is the lack of any agreement to produce a new version of Space Hulk. Fans have been begging for this game for years and while GW has explored reissuing it I am lead to believe that the deciding factor in not producing it has been the cost of the tiles used to create the Space Hulk interiors that the game is played on. Surely if anyone could produce this game at a reasonable cost it would be FFG and yet Games Workshop is walking away from not only a nice chunk of money but also from the new 40K fans this game would have created. Often in situations like this when someone is not doing something so obviously popular there must be a good reason for it and probably the only conclusion that makes any sense is that GW will not let anyone else sell their minis and FFG believes, rightly so, that no-one will buy Space Hulk without the figures. As sad as it is to say it, this most likely means that Space Hulk is never going to be republished. Games Workshop closed their one subsidiary that was producing board games and I can’t ever see them allowing Fantasy Flight to sell a boxed game with plastic Terminators and Genestealers in it.

This agreement also marks the beginning of a new phase for Fantasy Flight Games as a company. They have recently made several important announcements. First the agreed to become the English distributor for Rackham and now they will be producing and publishing games based on Games Workshop’s Intellectual Property and delving into their back catalogue of games to resurrect some fan favourites. From the wording of the agreement it also sounds as if we can look forward to new board games and other properties based on the Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40K properties. Given GW’s reticence to produce Space Hulk I would imagine that any new games would be similar to the recently released Starcraft board game with smaller 10-15mm sized figures that couldn’t be used in a 40K or Warhammer Fantasy game. Not that this is a bad thing though as I have always dreamt of playing a grand strategic board game set in the 40K universe and with this deal I just might get my wish.

This also marks the continuation of FFG’s development in a huge publisher and distributor of gaming products. Their influence in France and Continental Europe is probably not what it is in North America and the UK but I would not expect that to continue to be the case for much longer. FFG is beginning to turn into a type of company that is more akin to the old GW that fans talk about in such glowing terms. It produces board games, RPGs and other gaming titles and generates crowds at events like GenCon that dwarf any company baring someone like Wizards of the Coast. It gives its fans what they want (perhaps not in as timely as manner as many fans would like) and seems to follow the same business plan that GW used to. Namely producing a wide range of products so that can keep customers within a single commercial sphere as their tastes change or they explore new genres. Games Workshop had an entire “hobby” developed and it has had to let that go to cut costs and focus on its most profitable markets and FFG appears to be attempting to reduplicate that wide range of hobby offerings. Oddly with GW’s help.

Games Workshop developed into the company it is today due in no small part to their ability to get gamers interested with products like Space Hulk and Blood Royale and then draw them into the tabletop gaming end of their business. Space Hulk as a great game in its own right but its ultimate benefit to GW was to familiarise gamers with the 40K background and material and get their appetites whetted for more. Fantasy Flight Games, currently, has no such tabletop games to serve as an ultimate end target for their customers but they do produce enough different types of games and in enough different genres that once they bring a person in they can often keep them as a customer much longer than other companies with a smaller range of products. If FFG is able to manage this transition and develop into a larger company we could easily see a change in the current way that board games are developed with far more North American games being translated into French and German in the way that board games from Continental Europe have been making their way to North America for some years now.

This passing of the torch, as it were, may also be the first steps in a change in how Games Workshop does business. GW has been attempting to resurrect their declining sales numbers of some years and there has been little evidence that this has worked. The company has trimmed games and divisions away and the only thing they have left to cut is the wildly profitable Black Library business and the equally profitable Forge World subsidiary. I can’t see either of those going. I also can’t see GW trimming their design and art staffs any further. This may mean that unless Games Workshop gets into serious financial trouble that we may not see them trimming the company any further. That doesn’t mean that we won’t continue to see the unusual situation where Black Library sells books based on products such as Blood Bowl and Necromunda that GW doesn’t actively sell in their current forms.

GW is not, by any means, out of the “doghouse” yet and it needs to finally see some reward for the years of refocusing the company. While they work on doing this, and I think you can see the direction they are taking with the recent 40K Apocalypse game, they need more revenue and this agreement with Fantasy Flight may be the first in a series of agreements that Games Workshop may be forced into in order to leverage the immense amount of IP that it has created over the years. They recently settled a lawsuit that has lead to the impending release of a Blood Bowl computer game. The perpetually in development Warhammer MMO may finally see the light and I have heard rumours of a Warhammer 40K MMO being in the first stages of development. I wouldn’t be surprised to see if games based on other GW properties like Gorka Morka and Necromunda aren’t in the works as well.

There may also come a day, quite soon in fact, when GW starts to move some of their production from the UK and US to places like China to help reduce their costs and add some more black to their balance sheet. GW is in a precarious position. It has cut away almost all the “fat” that existed in the company and is still not making a solid and consistent profit. If it can’t do that it may need to either sell out to a larger firm or come up with more creative ways to save money. And moving their plastics development off-shore is one way to do that. Especially if GW follows the major players in the market and moves to a prepainted plastic game or adding prepainted plastic models to 40K or Warhammer Fantasy. If Rackham is successful with AT-43 and Confrontation there may be a lot of pressure on GW’s management to follow suit. And if they move that production to China then why wouldn’t they take the rest of their plastics manufacturing there as well?

I think in the next five years we may see Games Workshop develop into a company that produces fewer tangible products and instead licenses their IP for production in games and movies. GW has a fairly solid business selling games and miniatures based on their two core games as well as Lord of the Rings. It needs to develop more sources of revenue and the simplest and easiest way to do that is to license rights to some parts of their game’s IP to other developers. They have already done so for video games and have now done so with Fantasy Flight Games to produce board games and RPGs. More of this is inevitable if GW is to build up heir revenue stream with the smaller company they have created. The fact remains though that Games Workshop has turned a corner and that old company that many fondly recall will not be coming back.