Leave the Multi-Billion Dollar company ALONE! 😢 They’re just trying their best!

A company becoming publicly traded is the death knell of its future

The fundamental issue is the underlying structure of the organization, it's logic, and the incentives that facilitate them. From GW's (the organization's) perspective, everything they're doing makes sense within the logic they've constructed, and adopted, for themselves. The same is true of many other modern organizations. Watering their settings down, gearing their games towards competitive gameplay, cranking prices, and injecting a particular ideology into everything aren't unique actions to GW, and actually reflect a much broader trend.

What we've essentially been seeing since the end of WW2 is the bureaucratization of everything (to an extreme degree) to facilitate the Postwar system and its underlying ideology. I realize that this statement seems outside the scope of the video, but it's extremely relevant to it. These bureaucratized systems ultimately begin to move under their own weight and divorce themselves from reality in favour of their own abstract and arbitrary logic. This is why the same pattern of short-sighted, illogical, and often spiteful behaviours and attitudes we see out of modern GW are mirrored in just about every other industry and facet of society - from movies and games, right on down to political and educational institutions.

You are totally right. I keep picking up old and alternate rule sets whenever I find them. There's a fair chance that 11th and beyond will have so many paywalled rules, and that GW will go after alternate service providers that a lot more people will be going to Old/Midhammer, The Long War or OPR to play with our expensive toy soldiers.

This isn’t a problem that is specific to Games Workshop.

Investor Capitalism is inherently based on extracting maximum short term profits from everything. It has no interest or incentive to maintain a healthy community or workplace.

It’s get in, inflate the numbers, crash the car, sell off the parts and move onto the next one like a swarm of locusts.

You want to solve this problem? Eliminate profit incentive. End parasitic capitalism.

I have seen companies who did stuff like that , when they know competition/technology is going to kill their monopoly in the future .

Warhammer 40k didn't need to go past 3th ed. Maybe some clean up, but otherwise it was thematic, tactical, fast and fun. The EOs took care of the tournaments and the adjustments needed for a fair tournament game.

They tried a form of your idea of keeping narrative and competitive separate back in 6th edition.  The problem from my perspective is the my fellow American citizens turned competitive 40k into a cash cow for GW.  I stopped playing/paying in 8th because of this.  I’m just now coming back after 8 years and only buying/printing old school stuff.  I apologize for my entire country.

100% agree. I’ve been playing since 3rd and the game is getting worse in my view. The over pre prescribed nature of game set-up, relentless scoring mechanisms and rules change churn isn’t good for the game. The ‘competitive’ nature of game should be kept completely separate from the core game. A separate expansion book released after the core rules set which by the way, should have a life span of at least 6 years.

One of the things that made me eventually just stop playing 40k was the time I had to spend keeping up with the rules and points changes. I remember when lots of people including me were begging for a living ruleset and now we all regret asking for it lol. To be honest the balance updates would be fine to me if the only thing they changed was points costs so that your codex isn't made completely invalid, and if those changes only happened once every 6 months rather than every second month or whatever it is now.

Showing my age but I started at 3rd. Im 42 now, back at that time you got like 1-2 new launches a year lol. The same armies launched edition after edition. New models and resculpts was the focus. Now its like a complete army refresh every year its nuts, I think its the leadership there now has WTC background and this churn style

Just watching that recent GW FAQ was uber cringe.  That pretty much answered that GW as a Hobby for players is dead and is only here to sell toys.  Very sad since I've been involved in the hobby for 30 years

I've never seen such a level of greed with a miniatures game like I have with Warhammer. Its gotten to the point where I just dont want to give them any money. I've changed paints, bought 3D prints and sought out alternate games because 40K just feels like it lost it's soul. You're totally on the money

I was really excited when they introduced the crucible champion system that let you create a custom character unit. As a keen kitbasher who wants to build an army full of models with their own stories, this was incredible.
But now it's just a tacked on feature that'll probably be left to die rather than something that could be a major fun element and I can only think it's because it would upset the competitive crowd.

Produce, buy and sell 3D resin  printing. That is the paradrop to victory.

I agree. Rules for Competitive and rules for everything else.

It has been like this for ever. 7th saw a bit of a reset, but was horrible. However, in 5th Necrons were playing with 3rd Edition codexes until they got updated just before 6th, Elder had a 4th Edition but were still using it in 6th, same for Orks and a couple of others. That was the whole of 5th that was entirely skipped. Those armies that got rules updates in 5th ruled the meta through that edition and into 6th. The staggered release of codexes has plagued the game since 3rd edition.

Of course they are. They only care about the current stock price. The CEO only cares in the short term until they leave

Reliks saying the same thing I've been saying I got back in right before 11th drop I didn't know that 11th was dropping and been watching it change daily and realized back in Sept that it's not acting like a Table top game it's acting like a Live service video game it even has seasonal buffs and now it's really kicking up because I've noticed that they don't want you to use the books they want you to use the app and the game will continue down this route till it falls on its face and the thing is it's only going to get worse when it really hits main stream and scalpers start buying up kits like pokemon cards

100% The game feels like a death march trying to keep up with the rules. A constant slog where you loose players along the way moving from one rule after another to an unknown destination. I think the only solution is to change course and have a rules set that is horizontal in its progression, where new content is added to a solid foundation allowing for the game to mature and still have fresh new things.

Actually, it reminds me of World of Warcraft and the issues they have with all of their latest expansions and they just announced WoW forever  a separate game set which is basically as i described , a horizontal  progression system.