It’s been nearly THREE months since Games Workshop unveiled Age of Sigmar and subsequently set the gaming world on fire, but not in a good way. Is this how they SHOULD have done it?
Like most of you I frequent a local a game store that deals with Games Workshop pretty much every week. If you ask my buddy that runs it he’ll tell you they are one the most maddening distributor’s to deal with, and to that effect actually orders with other distributors some weeks just so he doesn’t have to deal with his sales rep’s patronizing tone.
That brings us to the whole “Age of Sigmar” debacle which he is quick to point out has let to his worst summer sales wise in over 15 years. That’s right FIFTEEN YEARS! And to make matters worse not only were sales flat on Fantasy, but it also seemed to spill over into a general malaise for 40k which affected sales as well.
Conversely sales of X-Wing, Star Wars Armada, and Fantasy Flight Games in general as well as Kings of War increased as players started looking to other games as a source of entertainment as GW seemed to implode over the summer.
The worst part as my buddy put it boldly, is that he believed this was all very avoidable if Games Workshop had just thought this whole thing through instead of passing it down from their corporate Ivory tower, and forced everyone to drink from the company Kool Aide so to speak.
Here’s some of his ideas about how Games Workshop should have handled their product reset of Fantasy.
- Training. Not even GW’s own stores seemed to know what Age of Sigmar even was or how to sell it to the players that Games Workshop was expecting to buy it. A week before the release the Internet was one fire with rumors and such, that only helped add fuel to the fire. Had Games Workshop communicated what the new game was, and how to sell it/ overcome objections this launch may have gone better.
- End Times AoS It is literally unfathomable to some that GW just destroyed the old Fantasy fluff, and profited off the End Times books when they effectively killed off that game system mere months later. They should have perhaps re-launched fantasy as Age of Sigmar BUT kept the same fluff. Like the new world that Sigmar made was just right overtop the old Fantasy one. The realms of the Empire, Brettonia, Worlds Edge Mountains etc got overrun, but now daddy Sigmar’s coming back with his Sigmarines and starts cleaning that all up. Giving players something to relate to fluff wise INSTEAD of killing everything they held dear for 25+ years couldn’t have hurt the new product any more than they way Games Worksjop handled it I believe.
- Points. Look I get that GW thinks we’re all just a bunch of stupid collectors BUT at the end of the day we are buying warGAMES. Games inherently have RULES. Unless something is marketed as a “collectors item”, it’s probably not expected to have any sort of “replay value”. People really don’t seem to like the no points cost game mechanic of AoS, would it hurt too much to give them what they want?
Those are just a few of the ideas I’ve heard kicking around the old gaming pavilions as of late. Feel free to chime in with your own as well. I think gamers and heck even games stores themselves NEED GW products, but in this day and age it seems like one of a dozen other companies are ready to stab Games Workshop in the back and take the wargaming crown from them.
Truth be told, they may just do a better job at it as well.
