"Goodbye Warhammer Historical..." Topic

Finally gone…

Warhammer Historical Has Now Closed
We can no longer accept any further orders for our products

We would like to thank our customers who have purchased our publications over the years and hope you will continue to get many more years of gaming enjoyment from them

If you have any queries regarding orders that have been placed with Warhammer Historical please
contact the Forge World Customer Service team

No

it's still right there in the games cupboard…..

WHAB : wasn't this meant to be the death knell for WRG ?

It is sad that it happened but as an observer, it was a suicide.

The core business was WAB and they took it from being the one of the most popular historical rule sets to a joke with the disastrous handling of WAB2.

The book was so full of errors that even the contributors and play testers distanced themselves from it. Then to add insult to injury, the corrections demanded changing every supplement to match the mistakes in the new book.

I opened my Wargames cupboard this morning, and was blinded by a ghostly half-light. Then my WAB Rulebook and Army books turned into a shower of luminescent butterflies, which rose up, fluttering around my head and then faded away, to tinkly music and a faint smell of rosemary.

Was it all some sort of dream, I find myself wondering?

Pat

Oh hang on, they are back. It was one of them there Hallucinationabobs.

Pat

I guess there will be no 50% off sale this year.

I guess there will be no 50% off sale this year.

They'll have to dump the remaining stock somewhere ….

Think they may have done that at Salute…

Man, and I was just out there last night looking over the books and downloading a few QRLs!

Sad news. Hopefully the last remarks about forge world mean a transferring of goods that will eventually be available rather than an out and out dismissal and loss.
Larry

Is anyone really surprised by this? They have been winding the business down for the past few years. I'm sort of surprised they didn't go the PDF only route (though that may come back at some point).

I can almost see the body of WarHammer Historical settling down into the pit,gaping wound in the back of its head, as Forgeworld walks away,tossing the smoking pistol into the weeds and lighting a cigarette.ForgeWorld pulls out its cell,calls the boss and says 2 words-"It's done".

Surprised?

No.

The corpse has finally stopped twitching.

I'm surprised WAB lasted that long, GW selling a product that broke the Omerta about miniatures existing outside of "The Hobby" ???

The move to Forge World was decided by people who wanted it to die a slow death, but still make at least some money out of it if possible.

"The move to Forge World was decided by people who wanted it to die a slow death, but still make at least some money out of it if possible."

Not really. They never wanted it and fought against carrying it. They never cared, did as little as they humanly could and as soon as Rick Priestly was gone they threw it under a passing steamroller as fast as they could. It was an annoyance to them. They wanted it to die as FAST as it could.

Another interesting dimension of this, that nobody's talking about, is:

WH was the first significant gaming publisher to try to take the retailers out of the loop and sell only directly from their online store. The strategy was to maximize profit, obviously: when you sell directly to the customer you keep all the margin on each product, whereas when you sell to a dealer, he gets most of that profit.

The risk is that without all that "push" from dealers, in the form of all their free advertising, direct mailing, and web presence, your products will die a lonely death.

So what killed Warhammer Historical? Was it a bad product launch? Or was it the retreat from the traditional retail marketplace?

I have my suspicions that it's the latter. There are plenty of examples of big, crappy product releases that still sold well, because they were being pushed by dealers.

I'd love to see the numbers on this. If you deliberately take the dealers out of the loop, then you'll sell fewer copies, but at a much higher profit margin on each. BUT… does that mean that you print fewer books, in anticipation of fewer sales? Because the fewer you print, the higher the cost is for each one, and thus your profit margin drops.

WAB2 as FW published it, killed it. Forgeworld taking over killed it. Years of delays and frustrations and inactivity, killed it. Pissing the contributors (and players) off and screwing them over killed it. Throwing out the informative quality projects that the enthusiastic knowledgeable gaming contributors (i.e, the players) had spent years developing, and instead starting over and releasing all in-house error ridden glossy content lite rubbish, killed it. Removing dedicated staff and throwing it in with the general Forgeworld staff for anyone to pick up -or ignore – killed it. Treating it like the staff's pet hobby instead of a business to keep successful killed it.

I could go on.

Glad I never got around to picking up WAB Ver 2.0. I can honestly say that that is the first rules set I have ever said that about. I have the supplements for the original that I wanted so I guess they will go to the dead letter files of rules I keep around just for kicks.
VR
James Mattes

To those who may want to try and buy something, I got this email from Forgeworld when I asked about the decal sets;

Hi,

Thanks for your e-mail. We are more than happy to deal with any issues that have arisen with existing orders, but we are no longer accepting new orders.

The Warhammer Historical licences, names, rules and images are still copyright of Games Workshop Plc and are not going to be sold or available for offers.

Regards
Forge World

I was holding out hope that the Successors book would get published.

as a contibutor to that, I could have told you it was never going to happen 4 years ago!

Pat

Well I never picked up version 2 of WAB and I still play the original version and have a grand time doing so. The going away from selling to stores and trying to do everything direct is what killed what was a wonderful product. Short sighted and too bad really. I think WAB will continue to endure for a while as there are many of us who enjoy the game. But it will be hard to bring in new players if there will not be reprints of the current books and supplements. It may be that Hail Caesar! and its supplements will now step in to fill the vacuum left by Warhammer Historicals departure. I know that I was already heading in that direction as I just did not take a shine to Fields of Glory.

Does this mean that no one is allowed to play WAB any more?
Will the Gaming Police arrest you for playing Legends?

Gee!

Does this mean that no one is allowed to play WAB any more?

Haha! Exactly – this weekend there are two dedicated WAB games at our local convention, Enfilade! TMP link Dean

Are you patronizing for fun?

Not at all. It was intended as a sneer at the idiotic "OMG, this game is no longer supported! We cam't play it anymore!" attitude that so many weak gamers seem to have on TMP.

But if you wish to be offended in a different way than I intended, be my guest.

Does this mean the Kampfgruppen Normandy is now also unavailable?

Well, glad I got my copy of "Over the Top!" when I did!

Keep an eye out for free WAB pdfs, that's where everything will be dumped.

Free PDFs is an interesting thought,there is precedence in that area.

Gattamalata:

2.0 mainly so everyone is on the same sheet for the con – otherwise, most of the local WAB guys I play with have no problem using 1.5 and the earlier supplements. I need to use Armies of Chivalry to get my Early-HRE carrocio on the table! Best, Dean

Our small group in So Cal shifted to Clash of Empires over WAB 2.0. Similar to WAB but a much cleaner game system and the heavy WAB character effect was muted. Excellent rule indexing and lots of support and constant list review and updating of .pdfs by GEG and the game designer (Stuart). Being veteran WAB gamers, COE has given us only a rare "poorly worded" rule problems/issues compared to WAB2.0 rulebook.
Never looked back as WAB 2.0 and AoA2 caused problems at WHH.

I would guess that it was not the direct only approach that killed it. I think that many of the people at GW that were really interested in historicals are gone now. Well those at the top anyway.

The others have taken their interest in historicals in a different direction or are working with the ones that left in some capacity.

That is probably what killed it. Alternately it may have been a business decision higher up than the creators and then they left slowly after realizing that it wasn't going to be supported. Either way GW Historicals was withering on the vine before it went to the direct only sales route.

So the real question is, do I sell my books now or wait until they are collectors items?

Oh, wait about 6-8 months, and then flog them as rare OOP items on ebay

Well, glad I got my copy of "Over the Top!" when I did!

Yep.

Well i may as well give up on the hobby now….

What's odd is that their catalog is still worth something, even if no new books/supplements, etc. are published.

Why wouldn't they just continue to sell them? Could it really be that the cost of producing and selling them was more then the money the brought in?

And wouldn't that then mean you'd license the books to somebody else?

Wow, there are folks who have been thinking about picking up KGN but now they're gone?

OFM I am not one of those who is not going to play the game because it is no longer produced. I have too much invested in it to do so and plenty of folks to game with that only play the original. My main thrust is that without books being reprinted that it will be difficult to garner interest from new players. But not impossible. Never took a shin to the second edition rules so for me that is not a loss. I know many folks who try to pick up copies of Legends of the Old West and its Supplements and now I wish I had picked up Over the Top. Fortunately I did buy a copy of Kamphgruppe Normandy and that was an excellent investment.

No gaming police to worry about.

Also no in-print edition to get your friends into playing this or that Warhammer Historical game to worry about either.

Nothing like trying to get a small league together to play a good rule set and to have to point them to ebay as the only place to pick up the rules.

Wow, We where going to probably use the Old West . Now not so much.

But, as the OFM sort of said before, if you had a copy you could still play it ! Especially true for the old west – it's not one of those really huge subjects that would require a lot of supplements. More a stand alone game.

Same with WAB – ok, there are supplements that never got published (or written) but there's a whole lot of stuff that did. And it's not exactly rare.

What's all this with WAB? Us WECW players aint had no love for way longer than you guys.

Warhammer Historicals existed only because former GW employees like the Perry twins wanted to dabble in it; it's nothing more than a hobby diversion they wanted to share.

I'm surprised that GW let it stick around for so long.

What's crazy to me is that like with Dreadfleet, they're not selling things until they run out: they're just locking them down and pulping/melting/recycling the bits involved.

If they'd done a closing down sale, I'd have been front and centre with a fistful of twenties.

For a "hobby diversion" they made about as big an impact on ancients gaming as you can make, and the supplements, while fan written, were expertly put together by Broom et al, and were (still are) the benchmark by which all other ancients wargaming publications are judged.

From my own historical gaming/community perspective it has been very sad to watch GW suck the life blood out of what was once there, but I guess from the GW corporate perspective, WH barely registers on the balance sheet in the decimal places, and is just a nuisance, upsetting the perfect symmetry of their core business.

But as many folks have already said. We all still have the books on our shelves and the figures in our cabinets. And if we want to play something that is actively supported, more current, and dynamic, the successor games are out there and looking fab.

Its just a shame we will see the 28mm "ancients-hammer" community fragmented now. One of WABs great strength was the number of active players and contributors across the globe, and it is difficult to see the new games achieving this, at least in the short to medium term.

This is a sad day. I'm off to listen to Auld Lang Syne played on the bagpipes

"If they'd done a closing down sale, I'd have been front and centre with a fistful of twenties."

But they did. For the last several months they were selling ALL their books at 50% off, and apparently for even less at Salute at their table. You must have missed all that. Sure they didn't SAY it was a closing down sale, but many of us were fairly sure that was what was going on. I mean, half off of EVERYTHING from a company owned by GW?!! The writing was surely on the wall if one chose to read it.

And saying they are "pulping/melting/recycling the bits involved" is probably a bit off-- I would imagine they sold most or all of what they had in stock. I know by the time the sale was ended many of the titles said "No longer available" on their catalogue entries.

I guess I should get back to pulping my OWN copies of all the WHH rules I have bought and enjoyed so much (and still play) since it seems the consensus is that we aren't allowed to play "dead" rules any more. Sniff. 8)=

Naz, the 50% off sale ended several months ago. I was looking to pickup a copy of KGN and it sure wasn't discounted at all and neither were the WWI books.

Thanks,

John

Yeah, I know John, but it was on for a good long while and since GW NEVER discounts things I certainly took it as an indication of something odd going on with the business. Then when I heard about the even deeper discounts at Salute I was sure we were seeing the end. That they stayed open a little while longer with all the books at full price is just another bit of weirdness in the overall joke of a business plan that WHH has had since moving over to Forgeworld.

I bought my copy of KGN right before the sale, mind you, so I paid full price as well!

I think GW realized that they could never successfully build the vertical retail model with WH that they could with their other games. There are all sorts of historical miniatures out there to compete with anything historical that GW might have put out. There just wasn't the money in WH.

If they were smart, they would PDF it and sell it through Wargames Vault or something.

Given that they are refusing to sell anything and making a fuss about their copyright, I am guessing that someone higher up decided that what limited interest there was was diverting attention from the core business of Warhammer 40K, Warhammer and Lord of the Rings and the plug was pulled for that reason.

Glad I got Warmaster Ancients, Legends of the High Seas and Trafalgar when I did. But, everyone who really cared about Warhammer Historical has already moved on to better things.