Games Workshop is reopening its Specialist studio and is bringing back some of your old favorites.
In an announcment made on the Games Workshop App, the company wrote:
“Our all-new Specialist Design Studio will even be tasked with bringing back and re-vamping some of our old favourites. Blood Bowl, Epic, Necromunda and Battlefield Gothic are just some of the great games the team are already eyeing up.”
I think they could earn themselves a lot of good will by making the new games compatible with the old figures. I think that their business model of making older figures obsolete by releasing incompatible games every couple of years has cost them more ill-will than they will ever know. I think the assumption was that there would always be youngsters entering the hobby with the deep pockets to purchase large armies of high-margin figures.
Probably not so much. As a teacher, I can provide lots of anecdotal evidence that the current generation just doesn’t have the patience to paint those figures. And their spending money is dumped on other activities that don’t require a huge sense of delayed gratification. If you buy a video game, you can play immediately. I think the lack of patience is one reason why board games have had a resurgence. People want the face-to-face interaction, and board games offer quick setup, constrained playing times and quick cleanup. Best of all is that you can play the same afternoon you buy the box.