Last week, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar fans were confronted with an unpleasant reality that Warhammer 40k players are already used to, as the rules for the Skaven disappeared from the Age of Sigmar app – unlocking them again requires a single-use code only available in the back of an expensive ‘Battletome’ rulebook. This rules paywall sucks for consumers, and it’s holding back the otherwise irrepressible growth of the hobby.
Warhammer 40k Codexes and Age of Sigmar Battletomes are costly products but appropriately priced for what they are. They’re well produced, glossy, premium volumes; the profit margins on books are surprisingly small due to the high costs for print plates, materials, shipping, and warehousing. But keeping them a necessary cost of entry to Warhammer 40k or AoS is a misstep.
A core rulebook costs $65, a Codex or Battletome $60. That’s for one army, and doesn’t give you the full information about what your opponents might field. A player who plays for more than one edition can expect to pay the same again, adjusted for inflation, in three years time.
This is a profitable product line and in that way a success for Games Workshop . But rules have a far more important role in any wargame than as products; they are, primarily, a tool for marketing toy soldiers, where the margins are much better. This idea was pioneered by Games Workshop itself, and was a major driver of its growth in the 1980s.
The late Bryan Ansell, founder of the Citadel Miniatures brand and later an influential CEO of Games Workshop, had the bright idea that nerds would be more likely to buy more minis if they had a game that they could use them in. The game that he and others created to meet that purpose would eventually be called Warhammer.
While it was still on the drawing board, Ansell actually considered giving the game away free to mail-order customers to entice more sales. That idea was dropped as the project expanded in scope, ambition, and printing cost, but the game’s role marketing miniatures was never forgotten.
The first edition of Warhammer had rules for every miniature the company produced, leading to some odd inclusions, such as fishmen originally cast as licensed DnD miniatures. (The pair above were cast by Foundry miniatures, the firm Ansell eventually moved to after leaving GW). During the eighties, some adverts for new models also included their gameplay stats, so that players could see what they would offer to their armies.
As rulebooks, rules compilations, and supplements became larger and more deluxe towards the end of the 80s and into the 90s, filled with more lore and original art, they could justify a considerable cost. They marketed the setting as an IP, creating the interest that would make Warhammer 40k books, licensed Warhammer 40k games on PC and console, and the Total War: Warhammer franchise such a success. And in the era before ubiquitous smartphones, a book was still the best way for players to reference rules.
But we’re not in that era now, and we haven’t been for a while. While plenty of players enjoy paper books and prefer using them to apps, nobody likes the feeling that they have to buy a premium product to remain current with a game they have already committed a lot of money to.
They dislike it more when they know those books have a three year shelf-life. They especially dislike it when they need to buy the Codex for a Warhammer 40k faction to get access to the stats for a single model – as in the case of the Imperial Assassins, popular ally units that are now locked into the Agents of the Imperium Codex.
Rules paywalls add to the already considerable costs facing a new player who wants to get into a miniature wargame, and they stop existing players from spending even more money. Each time a player using the Warhammer 40k app hits a rules paywall, they’re encouraged to log out.
That is the exact opposite of what a business wants. A customer inside an app, building imaginary lists with models they don’t own, is spending their finite attention daydreaming about Warhammer. They could spend that attention anywhere else, and they will, as soon as they bounce out.
There are costs to developing rules and to maintaining applications, but they’re costs that some companies are happy to swallow. The rules for Corvus Belli’s skirmish wargame Infinity have been available online for free for over a decade, along with an online army builder. Steamforged Games makes its Warmachine rules available in a free, and very functional, application. The core rules and army building tools for Kings of War are likewise free online, while everything for Conquest: Last Argument of Kings is free.
There are signs that the Games Workshop experimenting with how it releases rules. There are massive multi-army tomes for both Horus Heresy and Warhammer: The Old World, which are better value by far than single-army rulebooks, supported by campaign supplements and svelte ‘Arcane Journals’.
The latest edition of Kill Team is making all faction rules free, and keeping them free. Fans were sceptical when this news was announced, burnt by the bait and switch of free rules at launch that gradually get locked away which we’ve seen with the most recent editions of Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar.
Workshop is a large company with a lot of inertia. Production teams and workflows have been geared up around creating Warhammer rulebooks on a set schedule, and those may already be set to run for years to come. The paid-for premium army rulebook has been a successful product for thirty years, and divesting from it will have costs and risks: jobs will be on the line.
But GW has grown so much that its competitors aren’t just other wargames, nor even other tabletop games. Space Marine 2 is bringing a massive influx of total newbies to the setting who are considering, for the first time, getting into a tabletop game with miniatures. Warhammer is competing with freemium videogames, Twitch streams, and YouTube for their attention, forms of entertainment where paying any money at all is optional. When those newcomers hit the rules paywall, some of them will put those shiny new Space Marines on the store shelf, and leave them there.
Want to get into a GW miniature wargame where the only cost is minis and paints, not army rules? Check out my Kill Team: Hivestorm review to see how the latest edition of the Warhammer 40k skirmish wargame is shaping up.
Source: Wargamer
