Time to shout at some clouds ...
- It's been going on a long time and it's not exclusive to 40k sites or groups but when did people start feeling that posting a picture of a pile of boxes of stuff was worthwhile in some way? You see it when someone starts a new army, when a new set of units for an army is released, when someone gets their kickstarter shipment ... why? What possible value does it have? What does it contribute to a group? It's meaningless - "hey I bought some stuff ... and it arrived ... and ... I took a picture of it."? Yay. Congratulations. How about doing something with it and THEN posting about it?
Build it and show us. Paint it and show us something. Play it and share a battle report or first impressions or a comparison to your other army or to another game.
Acquisition is easy - it's a simple monetary transaction. The rest of it is what makes the difference. I say this as someone with several armies still in boxes, boardgames unopened on a shelf, and RPG's unread. You won't see them on the blog until I've built or painted or played or at least read the things.
- One thing that seems to be fading finally - the need to mix in what kind of alcohol one is consuming while painting or playing a game. This seems to be on the downswing now but for a few years there was some weird need to add some kind of extra ... credibility? ... to a post or a video for say a 40K battle report by talking about beer or wine or whiskey before (or during) the playing of the game. I don't know if this was some leftover trauma from the "nerds aren't cool" days or something but two guys playing 40K on YouTube is not a place I am going for craft beer recommendations. Just talk about the game - no one cares what, or if, you are drinking. Many of us have been able to drink or smoke or whatever for a very long time. It's not anything that's impressive or particularly interesting. Focus!
- The constant proclamations of doom or "Beyond Clickbait" takes in articles or on YouTube - things like "6 Reasons D&D is Doomed in 2025", "Is 40K dying?", "Games Workshop/WOTC/Hasbro about to go Bankrupt" etc. I know it's BS, you know it's BS, they know it's BS but they have to keep upping the hype to get attention. D&D has been the biggest RPG since the beginning, it's the biggest right now, and it will be the biggest a year from now and for a long time after that. Now that doesn't have to mean anything to you - I'm not sure why anyone not trying to sell RPG material would be too concerned about which game is more popular right now - but if you care there it is. Correspondingly 40K is the biggest miniature game, has been the biggest miniature, and will continue to be that until something wild happens.
Yes I am aware of the several quarters circa 2010 where ICV2 reported that Pathfinder was outselling D&D 4E. I was there when it was published amidst much crowing by certain parties but keep in mind that's a very limited sample of stores and included neither Amazon nor Paizo's direct sales. Hey, it may have been true, but there's the one time you can -maybe- point to a time when D&D wasn't number one. How has it been doing for the past decade?
These days I see it even from sources I otherwise respect - bringing up things like Shadowdark having a million dollar kickstarter for the rules and then another one a year later for a setting and pronouncing that it is more popular than D&D. Sure. It's doing well and that's great. It's this year's retroclone flavor of the month. Remember OSE? Remember Labyrinth Lord and OSRIC and Shadow of the Demon Lord and Black Hack and 13th Age and a bunch of other tweaked D&D rulesets that everyone talked about for a year or two that have been pretty quiet for a while? It's one of those and it's not going to replace D&D even if the 2024 edition ends up less popular than 2014.
It has long been a dream of mine to find a reason to include a picture from "Wicked" on the blog and that day has finally arrived. The wife will be pleased. - Regarding miniatures yes I saw the report a month or two back that said Battletech was the #2 game at a very small set of hobby stores. Cool. It was clearly a very distant #2. On Dakka I saw a discussion about Zeo Genesis, a new mecha skirmish game designed by Andy Chambers and Gav Thorpe (two former GW big names):
"This seems to be the popular genre right now with BLKOUT, Gamma Wolves, this, and the name of the third one is escaping me at the moment...... "
"Arsenal, from Blaster magazine issue 7, or maybe Steel Rift. It's a pretty saturated genre."
Apparently it's a saturated genre with 4-5 games you've probably never seen or heard of and certainly never seen played.
And don't get me started on "popular" here - will there be a dozen games of any of these played over the weekend world wide? The "popular genre right now" is 40K - just like it has been for the past 30+ years. Age of Sigmar, Old World, Flames of War, Bolt Action, and of course Battletech are also in the mix for "what's popular".
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| Yeah that's Grand Moff Tarkin playing miniature battles. Your welcome. |
- A final point for the day: The constant anxiety around the state of the various gaming hobbies is overblown and unnecessary. If GW went out of business tomorrow we would still play the games. If WOTC went under we would still play the games. If your FLGS disappears we will still play the games. Resist the lure of the clickbait and the anxiousness. Let the older cloud-yeller assure you that some of us were playing before "games at the store" was a thing, before the FLGS existed really. We survived the Satanic Panic. We played before GW was anything important. We played before WOTC and Hasbro made RPGs full-on corporate assets. We played before the internet existed. If all of it disappeared tomorrow we could still play.
H.G. Wells published a set of miniature rules 100 years ago that you can still find today in book or online form. We have the books. We have the figures. We have the dice. Best of all, we can make more - ourselves, without needing sizable corporate entities to be a part of the process.
None of this is going anywhere. We're going to be OK.
