Warmachine may be a lesser-known miniature wargame to newer hobbyists, but at its peak around 2012 it was the second best-selling miniature game in America, beaten only by industry heavyweight Warhammer 40,000. Its fortunes have waned since then, so much so that in October 2024 its original owner Privateer Press sold the game and its design studio to British firm Steamforged Games. I met up with Steamforged’s co-founders Mat Hart and Rich Loxham, and head of design Jamie Perkins, to find out how they plan to revive Warmachine and bring the fight back to Games Workshop.
The trio already set out many new initiatives for Warmachine at Adepticon at the end of March, in a presentation which – to cut a long story short – was simply packed with good ideas. I’ve covered those in a separate article, which also goes into detail about the history of competition between Warmachine and Warhammer 40k. With this interview, I wanted to understand whether there was a genius plan behind all the Adepticon announcements, or simply a lot of hot air.
A new edition
“I’m working on a five year plan, and the next edition appears in that”, Hart says. Steamforged acquired Warmachine Mk IV partway into its lifecycle, but this is the first anyone has heard about a new version of the game.
Now, a new edition isn’t quite as monumental a thing for Warmachine as it would be for Warhammer 40k. Unlike the Warhammer 40k factions, all the rules for Warmachine models are available in a free app, and there’s no waiting around for Warhammer 40k codexes to release before models get updated. But it still surprised me: Warmachine is getting a new faction every three months. Perhaps it’s because Mark IV’s actual launch was muffled by Covid, but the edition still feels new.
“We’re approaching this in a small ‘c’ conservative way”, Hart says, “Preserve what is good, change what is not”. He’s complimentary about Mark IV: “If you look at the core rule set right now, I think it’s in rude health. It’s a really good version of Warmachine. The direction of travel for the next edition is not necessarily revolutionary, it’s more an evolutionary step”.
Hard plastic and resin
At the moment, Steamforged is listening to the community about what’s working in the game, and what needs work – but it’s thinking years ahead. Partly, that comes from the timeline of making miniatures. “The dev team are working in two lanes at the moment”, Hart says, “one is the immediate resin releases coming up in the next 12 months. But then also, [we’re asking] what do the releases look like in a couple of years’ time, that we want to make in hard plastic, because we need to work on both of them now”.
Hard plastic manufacturing was a repeated stumbling block for Privateer Press, but early indications are that Steamforged has a handle on it: it has successfully released two starter sets so far. It’s planning to get most of the range into plastic: “the high volume items, the ones that we think most people will buy one of at least, if not two, absolutely, all of those are going to be in HIPS at some point” Hart says.
But resin releases aren’t going away. “If we maintain a dual material approach, it actually gives us a huge amount of flexibility to react quite swiftly”, Hart says. The firm has already committed to bring out of production ‘legacy’ factions back using 3D printed resin.
Loxham suggests that this will make it far easier to support a deep back catalogue: “As SKUs rotate out of retail form, the resin gives you a perfect landing spot to still facilitate and support those releases. We have an easier way to scale and produce those items, rather than having 5,000, 10,000 HIPS sets [in warehouses]”.
Sales graphs for miniatures look like a comet, with an initial burst of sales followed by a long thin tail. This is tricky for wargames companies, since the most committed players want access to the full range of miniatures, no matter how uneconomical it is for the publisher to order a 10,000 unit production run. On demand resin 3D printing lets Steamforged sidestep this problem: the limiting factor on how big its back catalogue can get is its ability to balance the rules.
The new approach should also make the game more appealing to retailers. “One of the things about Warmachine [prior to Mk IV] was the SKU bloat got out of control”, Hart explains. The range contained hundreds on hundreds of products “and it became quite invasive in stores, quite difficult for them to manage. And for a new player coming in, the wall of minis became an impediment”.
Now that the back catalogue is produced on-demand, retailers can concentrate on just stocking whatever’s newest – and players will be able to get everything else on special order.
Subtle changes and new models
Speaking of new stuff, Steamforged has a treat for me – the concept artwork for a previously unrevealed Warlock for the upcoming Old Umbrey faction. The team are tight lipped about her abilities: she’s equipped with a sniper rifle, which seems self explanatory, and has a bird companion who I assume has some kind of battlefield effect.
All that they will reveal is that she’s the model for the Old Umbrey battlegroup box, and she will be particularly well suited to supporting the Warbeasts that come with her.
This illustrates one of the small but significant changes that Steamforged made to the Warmachine line as soon as it took ownership of it. Battlegroup boxes are one type of starter product for the game, consisting of a leader and two magitech robots or giant monsters. Warmachine has a long history of releasing battlegroup boxes with bugger all internal synergy – I’m looking at you, Mk II Trollbloods – and when Steamforged took on the line, it adjusted these products so that each one contained a leader who actually worked with the other models in the box.
“It shouldn’t be remarkable!” Hart says when I tell him I’ve noticed it. “It’s just good sense”. The team has been making other, subtle changes to the game, which also hint at the directions the next edition might take.
Hart gives the example of changes to character units, which have traditionally been three totally unique models which happen to move around together: “that’s great if you’ve got a couple hundred games of Warmachine under your belt, but if you haven’t, it’s actually quite a barrier”. In coming releases they’re now going to “share the same rule set throughout the unit”, and while each model “might have a different gun, that’s a lot easier to recognize” than trying to pin a specific special rule to a specific 30mm miniature.
Steamforged has also exerted subtle pressure on model designs. It received a lot of mostly completed sculpts from Privateer Press. “Some of the miniatures were incredibly pleasing on a technical level”, Hart says, “but weren’t necessarily the most enjoyable or exciting to actually paint”.
“We refer to it internally as the rivet pass”, he says, “I like to go through models and remove rivets, or I shift rivets away from the edges”. Why rivets? “So if I’m doing an edge highlight, I’m not flicking the top of a rivet every damn time”, he says.
We’re now starting to see designs that were conceptualised under Steamforged: Loxham characterises them as being closer to the original vision of the Irong Kingdoms setting than some of the latter Privateer Press releases. “Privateer had started to move a little bit away from that in some of the early releases of Mark IV”, he says, but “I think you can see with the new Grave Diggers and upcoming Old Umbrey they’re very much rooted in the Iron Kingdoms feel”.
Warmachine for the casual player
At its peak, Warmachine was the last word in competitive wargaming. But it struggled to retain a casual scene, something that’s utterly essential for keeping a game on store shelves. What makes Steamforged think they can do any better?
“If I described a casual game to you and said, ‘Hey, would you like a really clean, easy to understand, balanced rule set?’ I rather suspect the answer would be yes for a casual game as much as it would be for a competitive game”, Hart says. “Foundationally, Warmachine has what it needs. It has a great aesthetic, it has a really clean rule set, it has enough depth in it to keep you really engaged, but I can teach anyone to play Warmachine in 10 minutes or less”.
Hart has been beating the drum for the hobby side of Warmachine as one recruitment tool. “If you’ve got awesome looking tables, 3D terrain, fucking enormous Triple-snake monsters running across the battlefield to fight with giant trolls that throw ships at you, well color me interested”, Hart says. A new digital subscription, which comes with terrain, bases, and conversion parts, is one strategy in that battle.
Perkins pipes up with some good theories about what ‘casual’ players actually prefer in games. The fun of games comes, in part, from making decisions, but competitive and casual players find different kinds of decisions fun. Competitive players are looking to squeeze the most opportunity while opening themselves up to the least risk, and enjoy the tight, easy-to-lose scenarios of matched play. Casual players want opportunities to use the abilities that make their models unique, and benefit from scenarios that don’t have such narrow margins of victory or defeat.
It’s a good design theory, for sure. Whether support for narrative play, and scenarios built to match, can cultivate a lower intensity Warmachine scene alongside its traditionally highly competitive community, is another matter. But it’s something the team is clearly cognisant of.
Lessons from Guildball
One thing that is not in doubt: these guys absolutely love Warmachine. Throughout most of the meeting, whenever one member of the team wasn’t speaking, he was painting a miniature (something I deeply relate to). Loxham and Hart met through the Warmachine, and Steamforged’s first ever game, Guildball, was directly inspired by it.
Guildball had its own arc of success and then decline – some parts of the community are still upset with how Steamforged handled its eventual retirement (though the game is available again in a made-to-order capacity). I ask the team what they’ve learned.
“You do a much better job on your second child than you do on your first child”, Hart says. “When Rich and I first started talking with [Privateer Press owner] Mat Wilson, we could identify and empathize with a lot of the challenges that they had been forced to deal with over the years, and we could therefore intellectually understand and again, empathize with some of the decisions they were forced to make… Rich and I, and the Steamforged team, have all been in similar situations”.
Reflecting on the Adepticon presentation, Hart says the “keynote was us presenting a lot of things that we think are just fundamentally cool ideas that should be in place for a healthy wargame and the community surrounding it”. He adds that “one of my favorite bits of feedback was people coming up going, ‘Yep, absolutely everything we could possibly ask for, you got it’”.
But “we haven’t just put [our plan] in place because we want to people please”, he continues. “We’ve put it in place because these are the foundational blocks that you need for a successful war game, because this is what we learned through our experiences with Guildball”.
Most of that plan remains under wraps. But having spoken to the people behind it, I’m more excited than ever to find out what it’s going to entail.
Want to learn more about Warmachine? I’ve got a short feature explaining why its dice system is so good at creating dramatic moments. And the official Wargamer Discord server has a growing Warmachine community in it, including some great content creators.
Source: Wargamer
