On New Editions

For those that haven't heard, rumor has it that Paizo Publishing has taken the large sponsorship position away from Wizards of The Coast for GenCon 2013. With it they receive the largest exhibition hall in the entire show. If you check your 2012 GenCon Map you'll notice that Paizo already had quite a large foothold. Over the last couple years the Pathfinder RPG has picked up steam. Many a gamer both local and from afar are reporting that D&D NEXT feels like a hybrid of 3rd and 4th edition. A lot of people are speculating that this new edition is an attempt to recapture some of the audience they lost when they transferred to fourth. The same audience that transitioned to Pathfinder.

It's tough to tell whether there's a marketing team sitting in the Wizards of the Coast tower scheming up this new edition. I can imagine five or six people in corporate suits, sitting around a dark marble table with the WotC symbol etched menacingly in it. They're all sipping imported tea and coffee, while the most nefarious one at the head of the table begins cackling as he pets his equally nefarious cat.

Honestly, I still think that the team they hire to write a new edition still has the lions share of creative control when it comes to these sort of things. Even with Monte Cook parting ways with the company I still feel like the creative differences he described had more to do with the overall direction the company was taking, as opposed to any specific difference he might have had with villainous marketing directors.

That being said, every new edition that comes to the market is a solid product. 4th edition was a fantastic game in it's own right and D&D NEXT will have a lot going for it. The major failing of these editions are the fact that they won't evoke the same feelings that earlier iterations of this game have. This is what Wizards of the Coast so desperately needs, whether they know it or not.

The real problem with this industry seems to be a simple question; how does one generate continued income from a product that -by it's nature- is designed to last forever. A well written RPG can stand the test of time. Even early game designers used "the new edition" as a tool to increase the quality of already existing products. Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons were sold next to one another on the shelf; one did not invalidate the other. It feels like WotC is using new editions as a marketing tool. They attempt to replace the entire previous edition in hopes of creating a boost in sales.

It's this vicious cycle that has my store moving away from Wizards of the Coast entirely. Games that have picked up steam are Pathfinder, Shadowrun, and Savage Worlds. These are games that respected their previous editions in a lot of ways. Most of their sales come from creating new intellectual properties such as Savage Worlds plethora of world settings. Shadowrun and Pathfinder continues to expand on an already existing intellectual property with campaigns, adventures, and optional supplements that helps players dig deeper into their rich lore.

The Rising Cost

So the Sixth edition of Warhammer 40,000 dropped over sixth months ago. Let me warn you that I've been back and forth about the new edition constantly since I first opened the book. Suffice to say the Manager in me and the Gamer in me have had a lot to talk about. We have fought over the subject of the new edition itself and the rising price of little plastic army men. So let's talk about the new edition.

The SRP for the new "rulebook" is 74.25 USD. The Gamer in me can tell you that it's a beautiful book, contains amazing art, and the basic rules are the cleanest they have been in a long time. The Manager in me never quite got beyond the price tag. What he sees is a hefty tome that -at it's core- is three books bound into one. The first book is the actual rulebook. The second contains all the background and "fluff" of the 41st millennium. The third book is a hobby section that's shameless in it's promotion of other Warhammer 40,000 products.

Any gamer would be happy to spend money on the new edition once they learn of all the improvements made therein. Any gamer with a budget would prefer to see the game released as a series of books, kin to the Dungeons & Dragons formula.  A rulebook,  A background book, and a hobbyist book all sold at a reasonable SRP of about 30 USD each. In this way the tournament circuit players can have their rulebook, the role-players and collectors can have their history, and the hobbyist get their tips and tricks as well. The die hard's like myself? We can actually budget for all three over time.

So why wait half a year to talk about this? It all ties into the rising cost of Games Workshop products, and the shift I've seen the store take in those sixth months. My retail space no longer buys directly from Games Workshop. Over the last couple years the retailer policies that Games Workshop has made have been very baffling. I watched as prices rose each June for three consecutive years. The store had metal figures taken away and replaced by finecast. Then in a matter of months Games Workshop took finecast away and moved it to direct sales, straight from their website. I could no longer order models for customers at their convenience. I continue to support the game with plastic kits via secondary distributors but the stage had already been set. My retail space no longer has a Warhammer 40,000 following.

Now the core war-gaming community here plays Warmachine and Hordes. They have cited the rising cost of Games Workshop product and it's limited availability as the reason they've switched. They could have easily moved to web orders, but the ones I'm most familiar with have also told me the biggest reason as to why they switched; Because they want the community and a place to play.