"Historical Gamer vs Generic Gamer Discussion " Topic

"Yesterday I was involved in a rather interesting discussion at my local store about our little hobby. Some very interesting points were made and it got me thinking about this post I am writing now. The discussion started about how a certain UK based Historical company was not happy about how their sales were doing in the good old US of A. This seems to be a discussion that has happened with many companies that are based outside of the US.

It would seem that Historical sales compared to Sci Fi and Fantasy sales are always low in the US. So I asked the group of friends I was talking with what their take on it was. Here is what I found out, which is not eye opening in any means, but rather interesting none the less.

One comment was that Historical gamers are the blame for the low sales and no new blood coming into the hobby. The comment was stated that most if not all Historical hobbyists are rather button or rivet counters and this just turns off new players all together. I would tend to agree to some point of this, but not wholeheartedly. Yes some historical gamers can be rather sticklers to history and yes most of us have run into rivet or button counters. But to use a broad brush and say that all of us are like that is not fair…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Hmmm. I'll grant you that I'm having much more trouble finding a historical miniatures game in town than I did 40+ years ago. Partly that's because when I started, historical miniatures were literally the only game in town. But I also blame the Internet. With the local game shop often out of the loop, it's easy to miss the other gamers. (And there must be some. Someone has to be buying all that Flames of War gear. Someone with more money than I have.)

But it could also be the unknown British historical gaming company has unrealistic expectations. Many British companies think, since there are more Americans, American sales should be higher. But there do not seem to be more American miniature gamers overall than their are British ones.

[I'm going to skip the paragraph on American appreciation of military history and European neglect. I think we could all write it by this time.]

Do we have any direct evidence that historical gamers are a smaller percentage of overall miniature wargamers in the USA than they are in GW's home market? I'd really like to know.

The shrinkage of the historical wargaming hobby seems to be a US issue. The hobby continues to grow in the UK and Europe.

As someone who loves historical minis, I can relate. I have a very hard time finding opponents these days. I also think that a lot of the current euro board gaming crowd is really reluctant to play minis. My gaming group is mainly the later, and they are always up to play a board game, but when I pick a minis game, even when I offer to put up all the miniatures, suddenly they have excuses not to play that night. I've been told by a couple of them that it's because pushing around all those figures is 'too complicated.' This from people who love games that take 90 minutes how to explain the rules and endless list of exceptions for.

I went to a Protospiel this weekend in my town, and was told by a friend who is one of the organizers and knows that I am a miniatures player not to bring any of my miniatures sets to play as 'we just don't do that here.'

It's frustrating, but I don't think it's because of a lack of history fans in the US. We're a big population, and there's always history lovers in the bunch, but historical games just don't get the buzz that other games do (with the exception of Bolt Action around here, which I do enjoy and does have a following).

I think one of the issues is that the majority of historical gamers do not play commercial rules sets, but rather independent rules with no supporting miniatures line. Most of the popular fantasy and sci-fi games are produced by the larger companies in the industry that produce both rules sets and miniatures and some times even terrain. Also, get me ten Napoleonic gamers in a room and you will probably find they use ten different rules sets, different manufacturers of figures and three or more different scales. It's difficult to find opponents because we all have our own view in how to recreate historical battles.

Also, historical gaming always gets a boost when a big budget film gets made. Waterloo jump started Napoleonic gaming back in the 70s and films such as Gettysburg boosted Civil War, Last of the Mohicans did for F&I and Saving Private Ryan did for WWII. We won't see another big draw to historicals unless Hollywood produces a decent big budget war movie. But these films do not make money anymore and Hollywood would rather fund superhero movies because of the large return on investment. Who aside from gamers and a few history buffs would go see a movie about the Franco-Prussian war?

The other thing is figures have a certain longevity to them, once you have a 28mm american army and vehicles you really don't need to buy any more, even if you switch rulesets. I've seen armies that have been in games for the last 30 years, changing hands at a convention to go do it again.
Sy-Fy, and Fantasy on the other hand, keep adding new troop types, so there is always something new out there to buy.

when I started wargaming 'the historical hobby' (aka wargaming) was the hobby. i.e. seriously history was responsible for the very creation and rapid expansion of wargaming.

Fantasy is/was, for good or ill, an offshoot. For me it is too commercialised and too 'lightweight' to be of interest – but some people like it and that's fine …

But it is a bit ironic when the offshoot hobby starts moaning that its own apparent inability to sustain itself is all the fault of the original historical hobby …

And it is a peculiarity of Fantasy/Sci-Fi (maybe even/also just in some countries) … I am involved in battlefield protection/interpretation so have a broad connection with reenactment, publishing, media etc. and military interests have been on the up for quite some time (nothing like the cinderalla niche it was when I first became involved) and within that broad area, wargaming and recreating in miniature seems to have a magnetic appeal.

So … crisis? What crisis?

Is interest in Warhammer not sustainable? Is that what this is about? I wouldn't have a clue. Is it the fault of historical wargamers? Hardly.

Phil

Pish posh. More narrow minded claptrap regurgitating the old graying of the hobby nonsense. Why do we consider button counters as limited to historical genres?

I could tell you stories about fantasy gamers (Gondor never had cavalry like that!) as well as SciFi gamers (don't get me started on 40k).

It would be much too expensive to get you started on 40K

Wherever you go in the western world ( and Russia belongs) one can find fantasy, Wh40. , scifi etc. Historical gamers? Hummmm.
Much much harder.

Link care more tenuous: no shops with little invites on a scrap paper on the wall anymore… internet does not seem to have replaced it as most of those who already have opponents just do no bother looking for more.

Sect mentality is more the norm: a few pals in their den. No space or need of others.

The youngster ( and that goes to now30+ yo) are used to everything fast, ready made, rules and miniatures or anything, to fashion, calibrated, well advertised, flashy stuff and they have less time than the same types 25 years ago, hours a day spent moving thumbs on an iphone.
Ok not everyone.
Many of the old timers do not have nor the time nor the space for proper grand historical games. Hence the spreading of skirmish type games. Those games for the fantasy, sci fi etc. players, well, are quite close to what they already do, gamewise, and lack the splendour that the pics in the first 100 Wi brought to my generation.

Then in Europe, well 1/3 to 70% of the less than 30yo, depending of where one lives, are unrelated to any of that white European military history. And they are not taught it in school anyway: wars are bad, military is near bad…
Most people won't go against the tide.

On the other hand there never was so many rules, miniatures and companies so maybe, historical miniature games is still thriving. Or their sales margins are huge;))
To my modest but true international experience, it is held up by far from the Uk whose customer base might be 1/2 the world's players.

British style historical enthusiasts tend to do things non-commercially so form clubs, societies, organise shows and tournaments. Shops much less so … Commercial operations? Really a more recent post-GW thing (and heavily aping or actually mixing in GW style products) …

So if you want to meet historical players just join a club, join a society, go to a show or enter a tournament.

I have done plenty of the above and organised quite a few. I have had a warm welcome in over a dozen countries world wide and enjoy the cameraderie of like-minded enthusiasts. No sign of any problems …

OK … Maybe fewer young enthusiasts than once was – but I imagine they get trapped by GW stuff on the high street, waste a lot of money making GW execs rich, then get bored with it and spend their money on X-box or snowboarding or whatever.

So I think it is possible that GW does a lot of harm to historical wargaming (by distracting potential enthusiasts with a shiny but essentially light-weight version of wargaming – which they can be excused for getting bored with, frankly) … but unlikely that the effect is the other way.

Phil

' shiny but essentially light-weight version of wargaming'

as opposed to bloated, boring, slow and overly complicated historicals? I play fantasy, sci-fi and historicals, the rulesets I use most often for historicals are the simplest of the lot and more light-weight than my sci-fi and fantasy rules. Bit of a sweeping statement there Phil, and quite condescending to fantasy players – perhaps that kind of attitude is why kids who get attracted to the hobby via GW, don't go onto historicals, peoples attitudes put them off. I think this was mentioned ealier by the term button counters.

Is this from a parallel universe where Bolt Action and Flames of War are not massively successful games available at pretty much any gaming store I have stepped into?

It's no secret either and it has nothing to do with the game rules:

Pick up books for either game and they will tell a new player how to get started:
What do the units mean? Where do I start? How do I paint them up? What do the rules actually mean and represent?

If your first experience with Napoleonics (f.x.) is an indecipherable mess of French military terms and when you go online, you get told that kids are too stupid and ill-educated to appreciate toy soldiers… yeah, I wouldn't bother either.

In what world does that actually happen, though, Weasel?

Phil

I think we just have to accept that some historical miniatures genres are inherently more alluring to the majority of younger and neophyte wargamers, and others will always remain the domain of that tiny minority with a pre-existing, passionate interest in, and knowledge of, military history.

Napoleon at War was an attempt to 'GW' 15mm Napoleonics that anyone with an awareness of this state of affairs could have easily predicted was never going to work.

Phil – In this very thread?