It’s spicy editorial time again as GW continues to make more boneheaded tone-deaf moves that just leave us shaking our heads…
Look, giveaways are cool, we can all agree. But giving away armies and shipping out allocated product to reviewers doesn’t sit well with us when local stores can’t even get the boxes/ products they need to survive.
GW’s new giveaway promises five $1000 Armies will be awarded in January…
Go Home GW, You’re Drunk Again (and its your own fault).
Don’t get us wrong either, while unlocking the datasheets in the 40k app is a nice gesture, they need to do way more to get gamers to adopt the product in our opinion. The community seems to have been pretty clear on their concerns in the past, and sometimes they are met, but most times not, if we’re being real here.
When it comes to this 40k app, we feel like hobbyists just want something that works and is actually better since they are paying for it. It’s just hard when you’re faced with free products that work better and have fewer bugs to pay for something.
One of the rules of business is that you have to be first to market or 10x bigger than your competition to get positive traction, and this app is still neither.
After 5 months of promises, we have all become beta testers for something some of us have already paid for, and no amount of free datasheets or a giveaway (for product that everyone knows GW doesn’t even have right now) is going to get our staff at least, to start using this app for army list creation.
Looks Like GW is Pretty Desperate IMHO
We’ve said it before, releasing all the datasheets is definitely a move in the right direction, but this new giveaway feels pretty desperate and doesn’t actually help anything with the problems that are plaguing the app itself.
Are giveaways cool, of course! But 5 armies to a worldwide audience is basically nothing in terms of the player base (of course unless you win- and good luck to everyone entering for sure).
GW, you promised something better would arrive on July 11th, 2020, and we still have yet to see it. People have been pretty clear, the app (original & Battle forge feature) is super buggy and plagued with issues.
While they say the new Battle Forge is in Beta, the main app has had people paying for it for months and it’s still not working as intended. So we think if you’re so desperate to get people to use something, just make it better, and keep it that way.
Imagine You Own a Game Store…
All of this circles back and ties in with all the allocation issues as of late. We understand that things aren’t running smoothly because of COVID. But when stores can only get a single box of most new releases, seeing entire armies go to giveaways and reviewers still getting copies of products that are only going out in ones and twos to stores really leaves a bad taste in our mouths.
Just because we feel like it needs to be said, while we do review GW’s products we always BUY them off store shelves, and lately at full price, and where they are even available.
Overall the way GW is trying to get hobbyists to adopt this app just feels like a very tone-deaf way of going about it.
Do you think the feature will be working well by the time it goes for a fee? Have you used it now that it’s free?
Let us know in the comments of our Facebook Hobby Group, and make sure you enter the latest monthly giveaway for FREE today! You can also support us on Patreon and get ad-free access to the site, plus a ton of minis that helps support some of the best creators out there!
About the Author: Rob Baer
Rob Baer
Job Title: Managing Editor
Founded Spikey Bits in 2009
Socials: Rob Baer on Facebook and @catdaddymbg on X
About Rob Baer: Founder, Publisher, & Managing Editor of Spikey Bits, the leading tabletop gaming news website focused on the hobby side of wargaming and miniatures. Rob has won many Warhammer 40k Tournaments over the years, including the Adepticon Team Tournament and American Team Tournaments, and is on a first-name basis with almost every major company in the space.
He’s all gaming all the time. With over 30 years of experience in retail and distribution, Rob knows all the products and exactly which ones are the best. He advocates for gaming stores and manufacturers in these difficult times, always looking for the next big thing to feature for the miniatures hobby, helping everyone to provide the value consumers want.
While he’s played every edition of Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy (since 5th Edition) and has been hobbying on miniatures since the 1908s, Titans of all sizes will always be his favorite! It’s even rumored that his hobby vault rivals the Solemnance Galleries, containing rulebooks filled with lore from editions long past, ancient packs of black-bordered Magic Cards, and models made of both pewter and resin.
