4 ms·

How Warhammer became one of Britain’s biggest companies

42 points by GeoAtreides 9mo ago

MentatOnMelange 9mo ago
I used to play warhammer when I was younger and am honestly astounded gamesworkshop is still in business let alone one of Britain's biggest companies. At least in the 00s and 2010s, they were the epitome of a greedy corporation squeezing blood from a stone. Sales were down? Increase the prices of everything. Something not selling well? Change the game rules to make that it more powerful (or conversely, hype it up constantly so people only realize it sucks after they buy it). And of course constant changes so it was likely any models you bought would eventually become uncompetitive due to new, flashier, more overpowered things released. Basically every bad business practice we see now was Games Workshop's wheelhouse. And while this may come across as bashing on them, I'm psyched to hear the company is thriving because their games are immensely fun and its impressive they've avoided stagnating or run out of ideas. It gives me hope for the software industry because if an in-person, expensive niche hobby could survive through social media and the pandemic, tech can bounce back from the current enshitification and short-term profit seeking. If you have the money and enjoy lots of lore/worldbuilding and complex strategy games, Warhammer is a fantastic hobby I'd recommend checking out
- Ntrails 9mo ago
  > Something not selling well? Change the game rules to make that it more powerful It probably didn't sell because it wasn't very good. So you re-balance it later and now it doesn't suck. Like, fundamentally keeping the "best" and "worst" models/armies/strategies from stagnating keeps the game interesting (and drives more sales... so depends how you look at it). I don't think they've every been super good at balancing though, and that at least is a fair criticism - albeit a hard task given how time consuming playtesting is to get data.
  - MentatOnMelange 9mo ago
    I agree completely, the game would get boring if things didn't constantly change. It was more-so the way they'd go about it, not the general sales strategy. Perhaps I should have said overpowered, typically they'd intentionally overcorrect so a unit would go from too weak to way too strong. It didn't help they had 2 very different philosophies in the creative/design department. For example if an army was getting a revamp, competitive players would pray Gav Thorpe wasn't in charge of it. Whereas other people loved how he made the game more fun and goofy.
  - YokoZar 9mo ago
    It was definitely not just balancing rules patches for gameplay purposes - there was a clear deliberate intent to force people to buy new models. Complete with arbitrary changes to the game lore itself that accompany those updates: when I first started playing Warhammer Fantasy only the smaller lizardmen could ride the dinosaurs, and in the next edition only the larger ones (with entirely different new models) could. By way of comparison, Games Workshop updates their Warhammer rules about twice as often as Wizards of the Coast updates Dungeons and Dragons.
- toyg 9mo ago
  People love to shit on GW, but at the end of the day they keep buying their wares. Most drug addicts despise their dealers in a similar way.
  - dchftcs 9mo ago
    There's a somewhat niche game publisher that had very gamer-friendly practices. At some point they released older games for free, and for new popular ones they were relatively friendly to mods. Now they only operate a lootbox game. The sad reality of commerce.
  - 1313ed01 9mo ago
    There are still many smaller publishers, and individual self-publishers, keeping small niches of miniatures gaming alive and well completely outside of the reach of GW or other big companies. I follow many old blogs and some forums where people discuss miniatures games and the mentions of GW or Warhammer are so rare I can forget they exist. Depends on what internet bubble you happen to live in of course.
- imp0cat 9mo ago
  True. I used to play warhammer when I was younger, too. I am not suprised they are still in business, because it's a very enjoyable hobby (And I don't mean just playing, also the painting part of it). And yep, as far as I rememember, they were always horribly expensive.
- Beretta_Vexee 9mo ago
  Not to mention the ‘new edition of the rules’: buy back half of your units, the other half now behaves completely differently.
- bigstrat2003 9mo ago
  They still kind of are that business imo. I'm pretty damn upset that they have pulled the card of invalidating people's armies with Primaris Space Marines. Context for those who are fortunate enough to not have a plastic addiction: about 6 years ago, Games Workshop introduced a whole host of new models for the most popular faction in 40k, complete with lore about how these are newer and better versions of the units. At the time people were concerned about their old models not being usable, and GW assured everyone that they weren't going to remove the old units from the game, and that you could still keep using the models you bought. Fast forward several years... and they have been removing the old units from the game. Just as they promised they wouldn't. It's not surprising that they are invalidating people's armies. They are, after all, a miniatures company and they have a vested interest in getting people to buy the new models they are making. But it is really scummy imo, because these models are not cheap. If you have a decent size 40k army, you've spent thousands of dollars on miniatures, paint, and so on. For GW to start removing those units from the game leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
- 1313ed01 9mo ago
  They also aggressively went after fan-made variants and other content posted online, unlike almost any other miniatures/boardgame publisher. Lot of (ex-)fans upset about that. I think that has in particular bothered older players, as traditionally, pre-GW, miniatures gaming was all very DIY, dominated by amateurs. GW turning it into big business and throwing lawyers around did not make many friends from that hobby old guard. There are still niches of the hobby where GW are not very popular, or just never talked about.
alberto-m 9mo ago
The article does not explain much about the “how”. Games Workshop was a small company that failed to grow for most of its history, then suddenly struck gold. Look at the stock quote: it fluctuated in the 400–800p band from 1996 to 2016, then soared for five years in a row, hitting 10'000p in 2020. What happened in that crucial period? Did GW manage to spread its brand awareness to the mainstream public?
- fakedang 9mo ago
  I think Henry Cavill was a big part of why it grew in popularity. As Henry Cavill's career and profile grew, he did not shy away from putting his favorite nerdy interests in front of the media spotlight, which included Warhammer. That obviously caught the imagination of the internet crowd who ran away with it to create all sorts of memes with Cavill as the God Emperor, or "Behold the Omnissiah!" memes. That naturally sparked the interest of a lot of bystanders, and credit where credit's due, Warhammer lore is deeply enthralling.
  - alberto-m 9mo ago
    Thanks, an interesting theory! I last played Warhammer (Fantasy) in the past century, we were a small circle of friends and I never heard the game mentioned by “non-nerds”, so it was quite surprising to me to find out some years ago that the Games Workshop Company has become one of Britain's “national champions”.
- lovich 9mo ago
  Total War: Warhammer came out in 2016 and was a massively popular game that kicked off a franchise. If I recall right that was when GW started seemingly letting pretty much every studio take a crack at making games with their IP. There was a lot of trash but the sheer number of games put out meant they kept having 1-2 a year that were popular.
  - RobotToaster 9mo ago
    Yeah, they used to be immensely against anyone licensing their IP because they didn't want anyone who wasn't them making something with it, at one point going as far as to start their own record label. Now they seem to let anyone make video games with it.
xhkkffbf 9mo ago
It don't mean to diminish Warhammer's success, but part of the reason why it's one of the "biggest companies" is because many of the other big companies have slowly disappeared. Britain used to have a viable ship building industry that employed huge amounts of people. It's gone. It can't compete. And the same story is repeated again and again. Companies like Morris Garage and Triumph used to compete on the world stage. No longer. Again, I'm proud of the Warhammer folks. It's just the fact that it's one of the "biggest" makes me sad.
- dboreham 9mo ago
  Somehow all this was done seemingly deliberately, as some MBA new hire project at a BigCo. Like how Google kills off half their useful services because nobody in the C suite knows what they're for. Also, they (the Callahan government) had a plan to bring state of the art semiconductor manufacturing to the UK. Basically TSMC but in Wales. Thatcher killed it.
  - alexisread 9mo ago
    It was a massive shame the TV-toy project at Sinclair did not work out. It was a SOC/low cost computer based on the Inmos transputer (Called the T400, an M212 without dedicated link hardware) around 1983. That might have kept Inmos afloat- they were responsible for a lot of the RAM chip innovation, VGA standard, transputer etc. so the world would have looked very different. I do wonder what could have been with that chip paired with the Slipstream chip, oh well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer TV-toy https://www.abortretry.fail/p/inmos-and-the-transputer https://www.abortretry.fail/p/inmos-and-the-transputer TV-toy https://www.transputer.net/tn/50/tn50.html https://www.transputer.net/tn/50/tn50.html M212 details https://forums.atariage.com/topic/271372-flare-technology-and-the-canceled-konix-multi-system/page/2/ https://forums.atariage.com/topic/271372-flare-technology-an... 9.2mb/s bandwidth+sequencer_list
- clarionbell 9mo ago
  Yes. One advantage GW has, is that it has never outsourced manufacturing. The miniatures are still made locally, so they haven't lost their expertise, nor are they threatened by a former contractor turned competitor.
ssenssei 9mo ago
The thing about Warhammer is there are so many ways to experience it and an unbelieveable amount of content. I've never set hands on the codex (guide books) nor the actual miniatures (too expensive) but I've read so many books from the dark library, and engaged most of its community through its lore. I've spent the last 3 years just within the circle of the Horus Heresy, I don't know anything about the Tau nor the Orks... The game has so much to offer its actually incredible.
- somenameforme 9mo ago
  I've always wondered about the licensing on their video games. There are just so absurdly many of them. Somebody could have a game collection just made up of Warhammer and it'd be more than enough to last many years!
SunlightEdge 9mo ago
My take on Games workshop is: 1. In general I don't like their boardgames - but I like co-op Euro style board games while the majority of their games are pvp (apart from Warhammer Quest line and maybe 1-2 other ones). 2. In the early 2000s the CEO stated that they are a model company first rather than a boardgame company (and it shows in my view). They do have fantastic miniatures though. 3. Most of the cool lore was written in the 80s. Their lore is fantastic (if dated) and I do enjoy reading from the black library. To geek out, I'm not a fan of the lore change in Warhammer fantasy battle world to Age of Sigma around 2015- even if they did need to revise change the battle system the new lore sucks and come across as a money grab. I have no problem with them wanting to make money - but the new lore seems so lame (looking at you storm cast eternals). Still the AOS line seems to be doing well - I'd argue they could have had the same system in the old world. 4. The model building and painting is a healthy hobby and a nice hobby for an adult/child to do. I am about to have a child and I do want to introduce them to painting and modelling and playing boardgames - but I would be cautious about introducing them to a warhammer store - the models are very pricey, the staff are pushy, and I don't really rate the games. Maybe something like killzone or lord of the rings (but probably not). 5. Still I did pick up the new warhammer quest so they do have things in there even for me.
- bovermyer 9mo ago
  Mm. Part of GW's modern success is that roughly a decade ago they decided to push third parties to create a ton of Warhammer-branded experiences. There's even a Warhammer movie in the works, if I remember right. That would never have been possible before that "please use our IP" shift. For me, over the last thirty years I've amassed and then sold a big Warhammer collection multiple times. It finally dawned on me a few years ago that I don't actually like playing the game (I'm really bad at it), but I loved the miniatures. No one else really made the same style of minis. About when we hit the "you can just 3D print an entire army" time period is when I stopped liking even that part of the hobby, and exited for good.
  - SunlightEdge 9mo ago
    Ah that makes complete sense. So they had to go with AOS for IP reasons which allowed them to have more control of videogames, comic, future movies etc. That makes sense. Good to know your views on playing the game! I have similar feelings (but I stopped playing with the armies side when I was a teenager).
nindalf 9mo ago
This is going to be a really silly question. Do Warhammer players who buy the miniatures ever 3D print their own? Just curious if that's a thing.
- riffraff 9mo ago
  there was a very interesting blog post on this a few weeks ago https://matduggan.com/the-year-of-the-3d-printed-miniature-and-other-lies-we-tell-ourselves/ https://matduggan.com/the-year-of-the-3d-printed-miniature-a... apparently some do, most don't.
  - nindalf 9mo ago
    Thanks, that post answered the question perfectly > In practice, the effort to get the STL files, add supports, wash off the models with isopropyl alcohol, remove supports without snapping off tiny arms, and finally cure the mini in UV lights was exponentially more effort than I'm willing to invest. And I say this as someone who has painted individual eyeballs on figures smaller than my thumb. I have a high tolerance for tedious bullshit. This exceeded it.
    - Symbiote 9mo ago
      The following paragraph is also significant — if you're going to spend 5, 10+ hours painting the thing, which might be free evening time for several weeks, the £35 cost isn't a problem. I spend more money per hour if I go to a bar.
      - nindalf 9mo ago
        It definitely is. He also mentions that he has several unpainted sets acquired during the Obama Administration. He's constrained by time he can spend painting, not money to acquire more sets. There's no point adding to his backlog.
  - runaround555 9mo ago
    Anecdotal but the last time I actively still played at local games half of the players for that ruleset had at least 30-40% of their armies 3D printed. Half of that had 100% of their armies 3D printed and weren't buying GW at all. I think a big part of it comes down to scale- like that author mentioned, going through the effort of setting up a printer, printing, curing etc. for a handful of models is a pain in the ass. But if you're printing then curing half an army in one go (which the nature of resin printers easily allows you to do by stacking/arranging minis) it comes out as worth it over spending a few hundred USD on official plastic.

42 points by GeoAtreides 9mo ago

I used to play warhammer when I was younger and am honestly astounded gamesworkshop is still in business let alone one of Britain's biggest companies. At least in the 00s and 2010s, they were the epitome of a greedy corporation squeezing blood from a stone. Sales were down? Increase the prices of everything. Something not selling well? Change the game rules to make that it more powerful (or conversely, hype it up constantly so people only realize it sucks after they buy it). And of course constant changes so it was likely any models you bought would eventually become uncompetitive due to new, flashier, more overpowered things released. Basically every bad business practice we see now was Games Workshop's wheelhouse. And while this may come across as bashing on them, I'm psyched to hear the company is thriving because their games are immensely fun and its impressive they've avoided stagnating or run out of ideas. It gives me hope for the software industry because if an in-person, expensive niche hobby could survive through social media and the pandemic, tech can bounce back from the current enshitification and short-term profit seeking. If you have the money and enjoy lots of lore/worldbuilding and complex strategy games, Warhammer is a fantastic hobby I'd recommend checking out

Ntrails 9mo ago
> Something not selling well? Change the game rules to make that it more powerful It probably didn't sell because it wasn't very good. So you re-balance it later and now it doesn't suck. Like, fundamentally keeping the "best" and "worst" models/armies/strategies from stagnating keeps the game interesting (and drives more sales... so depends how you look at it). I don't think they've every been super good at balancing though, and that at least is a fair criticism - albeit a hard task given how time consuming playtesting is to get data.
- MentatOnMelange 9mo ago
  I agree completely, the game would get boring if things didn't constantly change. It was more-so the way they'd go about it, not the general sales strategy. Perhaps I should have said overpowered, typically they'd intentionally overcorrect so a unit would go from too weak to way too strong. It didn't help they had 2 very different philosophies in the creative/design department. For example if an army was getting a revamp, competitive players would pray Gav Thorpe wasn't in charge of it. Whereas other people loved how he made the game more fun and goofy.
- YokoZar 9mo ago
  It was definitely not just balancing rules patches for gameplay purposes - there was a clear deliberate intent to force people to buy new models. Complete with arbitrary changes to the game lore itself that accompany those updates: when I first started playing Warhammer Fantasy only the smaller lizardmen could ride the dinosaurs, and in the next edition only the larger ones (with entirely different new models) could. By way of comparison, Games Workshop updates their Warhammer rules about twice as often as Wizards of the Coast updates Dungeons and Dragons.
toyg 9mo ago
People love to shit on GW, but at the end of the day they keep buying their wares. Most drug addicts despise their dealers in a similar way.
- dchftcs 9mo ago
  There's a somewhat niche game publisher that had very gamer-friendly practices. At some point they released older games for free, and for new popular ones they were relatively friendly to mods. Now they only operate a lootbox game. The sad reality of commerce.
- 1313ed01 9mo ago
  There are still many smaller publishers, and individual self-publishers, keeping small niches of miniatures gaming alive and well completely outside of the reach of GW or other big companies. I follow many old blogs and some forums where people discuss miniatures games and the mentions of GW or Warhammer are so rare I can forget they exist. Depends on what internet bubble you happen to live in of course.
imp0cat 9mo ago
True. I used to play warhammer when I was younger, too. I am not suprised they are still in business, because it's a very enjoyable hobby (And I don't mean just playing, also the painting part of it). And yep, as far as I rememember, they were always horribly expensive.
Beretta_Vexee 9mo ago
Not to mention the ‘new edition of the rules’: buy back half of your units, the other half now behaves completely differently.
bigstrat2003 9mo ago
They still kind of are that business imo. I'm pretty damn upset that they have pulled the card of invalidating people's armies with Primaris Space Marines. Context for those who are fortunate enough to not have a plastic addiction: about 6 years ago, Games Workshop introduced a whole host of new models for the most popular faction in 40k, complete with lore about how these are newer and better versions of the units. At the time people were concerned about their old models not being usable, and GW assured everyone that they weren't going to remove the old units from the game, and that you could still keep using the models you bought. Fast forward several years... and they have been removing the old units from the game. Just as they promised they wouldn't. It's not surprising that they are invalidating people's armies. They are, after all, a miniatures company and they have a vested interest in getting people to buy the new models they are making. But it is really scummy imo, because these models are not cheap. If you have a decent size 40k army, you've spent thousands of dollars on miniatures, paint, and so on. For GW to start removing those units from the game leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
1313ed01 9mo ago
They also aggressively went after fan-made variants and other content posted online, unlike almost any other miniatures/boardgame publisher. Lot of (ex-)fans upset about that. I think that has in particular bothered older players, as traditionally, pre-GW, miniatures gaming was all very DIY, dominated by amateurs. GW turning it into big business and throwing lawyers around did not make many friends from that hobby old guard. There are still niches of the hobby where GW are not very popular, or just never talked about.

alberto-m 9mo ago

The article does not explain much about the “how”. Games Workshop was a small company that failed to grow for most of its history, then suddenly struck gold. Look at the stock quote: it fluctuated in the 400–800p band from 1996 to 2016, then soared for five years in a row, hitting 10'000p in 2020. What happened in that crucial period? Did GW manage to spread its brand awareness to the mainstream public?

fakedang 9mo ago
I think Henry Cavill was a big part of why it grew in popularity. As Henry Cavill's career and profile grew, he did not shy away from putting his favorite nerdy interests in front of the media spotlight, which included Warhammer. That obviously caught the imagination of the internet crowd who ran away with it to create all sorts of memes with Cavill as the God Emperor, or "Behold the Omnissiah!" memes. That naturally sparked the interest of a lot of bystanders, and credit where credit's due, Warhammer lore is deeply enthralling.
- alberto-m 9mo ago
  Thanks, an interesting theory! I last played Warhammer (Fantasy) in the past century, we were a small circle of friends and I never heard the game mentioned by “non-nerds”, so it was quite surprising to me to find out some years ago that the Games Workshop Company has become one of Britain's “national champions”.
lovich 9mo ago
Total War: Warhammer came out in 2016 and was a massively popular game that kicked off a franchise. If I recall right that was when GW started seemingly letting pretty much every studio take a crack at making games with their IP. There was a lot of trash but the sheer number of games put out meant they kept having 1-2 a year that were popular.
- RobotToaster 9mo ago
  Yeah, they used to be immensely against anyone licensing their IP because they didn't want anyone who wasn't them making something with it, at one point going as far as to start their own record label. Now they seem to let anyone make video games with it.

xhkkffbf 9mo ago

It don't mean to diminish Warhammer's success, but part of the reason why it's one of the "biggest companies" is because many of the other big companies have slowly disappeared. Britain used to have a viable ship building industry that employed huge amounts of people. It's gone. It can't compete. And the same story is repeated again and again. Companies like Morris Garage and Triumph used to compete on the world stage. No longer. Again, I'm proud of the Warhammer folks. It's just the fact that it's one of the "biggest" makes me sad.

dboreham 9mo ago
Somehow all this was done seemingly deliberately, as some MBA new hire project at a BigCo. Like how Google kills off half their useful services because nobody in the C suite knows what they're for. Also, they (the Callahan government) had a plan to bring state of the art semiconductor manufacturing to the UK. Basically TSMC but in Wales. Thatcher killed it.
- alexisread 9mo ago
  It was a massive shame the TV-toy project at Sinclair did not work out. It was a SOC/low cost computer based on the Inmos transputer (Called the T400, an M212 without dedicated link hardware) around 1983. That might have kept Inmos afloat- they were responsible for a lot of the RAM chip innovation, VGA standard, transputer etc. so the world would have looked very different. I do wonder what could have been with that chip paired with the Slipstream chip, oh well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer TV-toy https://www.abortretry.fail/p/inmos-and-the-transputer https://www.abortretry.fail/p/inmos-and-the-transputer TV-toy https://www.transputer.net/tn/50/tn50.html https://www.transputer.net/tn/50/tn50.html M212 details https://forums.atariage.com/topic/271372-flare-technology-and-the-canceled-konix-multi-system/page/2/ https://forums.atariage.com/topic/271372-flare-technology-an... 9.2mb/s bandwidth+sequencer_list
clarionbell 9mo ago
Yes. One advantage GW has, is that it has never outsourced manufacturing. The miniatures are still made locally, so they haven't lost their expertise, nor are they threatened by a former contractor turned competitor.

ssenssei 9mo ago

The thing about Warhammer is there are so many ways to experience it and an unbelieveable amount of content. I've never set hands on the codex (guide books) nor the actual miniatures (too expensive) but I've read so many books from the dark library, and engaged most of its community through its lore. I've spent the last 3 years just within the circle of the Horus Heresy, I don't know anything about the Tau nor the Orks... The game has so much to offer its actually incredible.

somenameforme 9mo ago
I've always wondered about the licensing on their video games. There are just so absurdly many of them. Somebody could have a game collection just made up of Warhammer and it'd be more than enough to last many years!

SunlightEdge 9mo ago

My take on Games workshop is: 1. In general I don't like their boardgames - but I like co-op Euro style board games while the majority of their games are pvp (apart from Warhammer Quest line and maybe 1-2 other ones). 2. In the early 2000s the CEO stated that they are a model company first rather than a boardgame company (and it shows in my view). They do have fantastic miniatures though. 3. Most of the cool lore was written in the 80s. Their lore is fantastic (if dated) and I do enjoy reading from the black library. To geek out, I'm not a fan of the lore change in Warhammer fantasy battle world to Age of Sigma around 2015- even if they did need to revise change the battle system the new lore sucks and come across as a money grab. I have no problem with them wanting to make money - but the new lore seems so lame (looking at you storm cast eternals). Still the AOS line seems to be doing well - I'd argue they could have had the same system in the old world. 4. The model building and painting is a healthy hobby and a nice hobby for an adult/child to do. I am about to have a child and I do want to introduce them to painting and modelling and playing boardgames - but I would be cautious about introducing them to a warhammer store - the models are very pricey, the staff are pushy, and I don't really rate the games. Maybe something like killzone or lord of the rings (but probably not). 5. Still I did pick up the new warhammer quest so they do have things in there even for me.

bovermyer 9mo ago
Mm. Part of GW's modern success is that roughly a decade ago they decided to push third parties to create a ton of Warhammer-branded experiences. There's even a Warhammer movie in the works, if I remember right. That would never have been possible before that "please use our IP" shift. For me, over the last thirty years I've amassed and then sold a big Warhammer collection multiple times. It finally dawned on me a few years ago that I don't actually like playing the game (I'm really bad at it), but I loved the miniatures. No one else really made the same style of minis. About when we hit the "you can just 3D print an entire army" time period is when I stopped liking even that part of the hobby, and exited for good.
- SunlightEdge 9mo ago
  Ah that makes complete sense. So they had to go with AOS for IP reasons which allowed them to have more control of videogames, comic, future movies etc. That makes sense. Good to know your views on playing the game! I have similar feelings (but I stopped playing with the armies side when I was a teenager).

nindalf 9mo ago

This is going to be a really silly question. Do Warhammer players who buy the miniatures ever 3D print their own? Just curious if that's a thing.

riffraff 9mo ago
there was a very interesting blog post on this a few weeks ago https://matduggan.com/the-year-of-the-3d-printed-miniature-and-other-lies-we-tell-ourselves/ https://matduggan.com/the-year-of-the-3d-printed-miniature-a... apparently some do, most don't.
- nindalf 9mo ago
  Thanks, that post answered the question perfectly > In practice, the effort to get the STL files, add supports, wash off the models with isopropyl alcohol, remove supports without snapping off tiny arms, and finally cure the mini in UV lights was exponentially more effort than I'm willing to invest. And I say this as someone who has painted individual eyeballs on figures smaller than my thumb. I have a high tolerance for tedious bullshit. This exceeded it.
  - Symbiote 9mo ago
    The following paragraph is also significant — if you're going to spend 5, 10+ hours painting the thing, which might be free evening time for several weeks, the £35 cost isn't a problem. I spend more money per hour if I go to a bar.
    - nindalf 9mo ago
      It definitely is. He also mentions that he has several unpainted sets acquired during the Obama Administration. He's constrained by time he can spend painting, not money to acquire more sets. There's no point adding to his backlog.
- runaround555 9mo ago
  Anecdotal but the last time I actively still played at local games half of the players for that ruleset had at least 30-40% of their armies 3D printed. Half of that had 100% of their armies 3D printed and weren't buying GW at all. I think a big part of it comes down to scale- like that author mentioned, going through the effort of setting up a printer, printing, curing etc. for a handful of models is a pain in the ass. But if you're printing then curing half an army in one go (which the nature of resin printers easily allows you to do by stacking/arranging minis) it comes out as worth it over spending a few hundred USD on official plastic.