 Before we begin, there's really no other good place to put this, so I would like to give a brief shout out to my new patrons this month. Tyler Butler, Praise Princess Celestia, Jacob Kolonko, Mr. McGuffin, Soret, A. Blaise Ingram, Blaine Silver, Jake, Dr. Phantasmal, Troubling Declan. Thank you all so much for pledging to buy Patreon, which you can find in the link below. It's because of you that I can afford to make videos that are 30 minutes long. But with that out of the way, let's begin. Long ago, in the before times of 1975, a trio of buddies named John Peake, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, no not that one, were living in a small flat in Shepherd's Bush, London, and they came up with a remarkable idea. What if they decided to start using their home as a workshop, out of which they could produce games such as Backgammon, Mancala, Go, The Beloved Tower of Hanoi, and many other traditional board games that your Nan would be so happy to pick up for her grandchildren. It was then that the creatively named Games Workshop was breathed into existence and grandmothers everywhere rejoiced. Games Workshop started out small, producing the aforementioned granny games and helping other companies produce theirs, and Steve Jackson, no not that one, who had been working as a journalist for a local gaming magazine, thought that it would be a good idea to drum up publicity by making his own magazine for Games Workshop, and thusly created the Owl and Weasel Newsletter, a little document detailing the modern wonders of 1970s board game enthusiasm. And Steve, not that one, sent his little owls and weasels to every prominent business that he could find, with the hope that one of them might be interested enough to start circulating it themselves. And indeed, one businessman did wake up to a weasel shitting on his front porch, and while that man did not receive a newsletter, a different businessman named Brian Bloom did. You may remember Brian Bloom as the hero of the first history of D&D story, but if you're new to this series, Brian Bloom was, while not a founding member, one of the earliest stockholders in TSR, the company that created Dungeons and Dragons, and he was the guy who had all the money. He was also the guy, without any sense, so when Brian needed a way to distribute D&D overseas, he crawled out of his money cave one day to see a subscription for some newspaper that he didn't order, assumed that it was from some large overseas business and not three dudes living in a cramped apartment, and he sent back to Steve Jackson, no not that one, an early copy of the original D&D, a new game that had just started to take America by storm, and both Steve, not that one, and Ian Livingstone jumped on the opportunity, with Games Workshop quickly becoming the exclusive dealer of D&D merchandise within the European region, and the trio silently whistled along as their tiny fledgling company was signal boosted higher than they had ever imagined. While this was an outstanding move for GW, the unfortunate truth is that John Peake, the man behind the money, had gone into this wanting to create little granny games, but now it looked like the company was on the fast track to new fengal TTRPGs, which were far too many letters for Nan to keep track of, so he broke off from Ian and not that Steve, sailing off into the sunset never to be seen again. Despite the fact that he was the owner and proprietor of the money, TM, Games Workshop didn't actually suffer financially, because once they started selling dungeon supplies, this little homegrown business venture was making big people bucks, or pounds, I suppose. What had began as a let's sell board games out of our apartment business, turned into a let's sell all of the board games out of our apartment super business, and it got to the point where their landlord actually had to kick them out eventually, because people kept showing up at his apartment office asking if this was the crusty crab. At some point, still within the amazing year of 1975, they had planned to show off D&D at a European gaming convention, only to find that said convention had been cancelled due to the hosts of the convention cancelling it, and decided that this could be another opportunity for exponential growth. They kicked over the old group's flag, planted their own convention in the same time slot, and began hosting what would almost immediately become a popular new convention. The creatively named Game Day, hosted by the creatively named Games Workshop, acted as a hub for nerds and outcasts to crawl out of their hiding places and convene in a place where they could play tabletop games without fear of ridicule. Things were looking up for Games Workshop, and it had only been one year since the company was founded. The next few years would see this pattern of maneuvering into quick success continue. Firstly, Steve, not that one, changed the name of his newsletter from Owl and Weasel to a more affectionately named White Dwarf, which is a name that time travelers from the future might recognize. White Dwarf specialized in detailing the comings and goings of TTRPG trends. It became widely popular as a result, which meant that Games Workshop became more popular, as the newsletter would often shout out products owned by the company. And the feedback loop of popularity continued GW's success, but perhaps the greatest achievement of Games Workshop's early career would be their introduction to a man named Brian Ansel. Mr. Brian had a similar journey to success as our first three heroes, having founded a company that made metal tabletop miniatures alongside a few of his buddies. When his company got big enough to get noticed by GW, Brian jumped ship and landed into a business deal with the Big G, wherein he started up a new miniature store with Blackjack and Hookers that he named Citadel Miniatures. Citadel would spend the rest of its life acting as the miniature branch for Games Workshop, but Bry Guy had more ambitious plans for himself. In 1983, while Ian and not that Steve faded into the background of this history lesson due to their focus on cooking up board games such as Talisman, which was a fantastic game but is ultimately unimportant to this narrative, Brian bought in two new protagonists in the form of Richard Hallowell and Rick Priestley, two childhood friends that were amateur game developers that had actually met Brian via asking his old miniature store to produce minis for their games. He said no, but he liked their Hutzpah. So when Richie started working for Games Workshop, Brian swooped in and said, hey, wouldn't be nice if you made a game for us so that we could sell more miniatures? To which Rich said, what are you doing in my home? And also that would be a great idea. Thus the boys got to work. Pulling inspiration from a previous game called Reaper, they crafted a game that was one part classic war game, one part newfangled RPG and one part miniature statue collector. And in 1983, they released the creatively named Warhammer, the mass combat fantasy role playing game, soon shortened to just Warhammer. The game consisted of three parts, the basic rules of the game, an additional rule book dedicated specifically to the magic system, and a third rule book that went over the role playing aspect of the game, such as tracking experience points and maintaining weapons over time. While the role playing aspects were milk toast at best and only really existed to capitalize on the success of Dungeons and Dragons, the actual core of the game as a mass combat simulator was received very well. And Brian realized that this game had staying power if they ironed out all the rough spots. So not even two years later, Games Workshop released Warhammer 2 with updated rules and three new books that massively expanded the gameplay. It also dropped the role playing angle in favor of a bestiary book that acted as a codex for all of the armies with the role playing aspect getting delegated to its own separate game in the form of Warhammer fantasy role play, still made by Rich and Rick, by the way. Now you loyal fans might be wondering, Davy, didn't you say in your D&D video that releasing new editions of a game too soon is a bad thing? Did you lie to me, Davy? Is my whole life a lie? Well, no. Actually, in the world of Wargaming, releasing new editions is imperative to the longevity of your game. See, role playing games have potentially endless amounts of things that you can do in them, as much as the mind can conjure. But Wargaming sessions boil down to hit each other, and when you've done that, hit each other again. It's a wonderful time for a while, but it'll leave the game stale after you've played it for too long, unless you continually update the rules so that armies change, new armies appear, and new rules are made to complicate the game and confuse old people. Keep doing that, and you can potentially have a game that lasts forever. And so Games Workshop kept making the game. After the first edition in 1983, second edition came in 1984, and third edition came in 1987, which didn't come out with an updated army list at first, so would ask you kindly to buy a second edition supplement until they worked their shit out, thus beginning the trend of releasing rule books before the armies that used those rule books even exist. And it also introduced special hero units who could do cooler things and were generally more expensive, both in game points and in real life points. It was around this time that Rick Priestley came forth to Brian with an idea that he had been cooking up in a spare time, involving spacemen and the 40,000 things you could do with them. Ricky wanted to make a game that eschewed the traditional fantasy genre and took to the stars with epic space battles and over-the-top 80s action, and Brian saw this as the perfect opportunity to expand Citadel's miniature line into the one place uncorrupted by capitalism. SPACES! So they teamed up and began working on Rick's rogue trader. The initial plan was to create a basic supplement for warhammer fantasy, so that players who were into that game could have a taste of what rogue trader had to offer. But after realizing that logistically it was already going to be expensive enough to craft new materials for weapons and armor, they might as well just go the whole nine yards and make fully new armies. They decided to turn rogue trader into its own game with rules that were just similar to warhammers, but with an emphasis on small-form skirmishes and role-playing elements, so that new players didn't have to buy so many miniatures in order to get into this new game, and once they've bought those miniatures, they would grow attached to them and want to keep playing. This would mitigate potential losses if things flopped, and things were looking shaky for a moment, as just before they were about to release the game, they were forced to change the name from rogue trader, because the main branch of games workshop had just started producing board games for a comic book called Rogue Trooper. Instead, the creatively named warhammer 40,000 rogue trader was released in 1987, and it fucking bombed. By which I mean it exploded in popularity, because holy shit did people like this game. The incredibly campy nature of a world in which all of the overly edgy character tropes that were getting popular in the late 80s were posted on a wall and simultaneously laughed at and embraced brought in all of the science fiction nerds who were in on the joke, while warhammer fans and outsiders who wanted to join the hobby were more than willing to buy 40k because the barrier for entry was so low. Plus, while fantasy battle never fully embraced its role-playing roots, 40k reveled in it, encouraging players to name and grow attached to their own beat-shaped stormtroopers that would then be sent off to die in horrible deaths. It was gallows humor in an era where gallows humor was not overtly popular, and when games workshop knew they had a hit, they started pumping out material for everything. New rules, new mechanics for vehicles, full books of background information for specific armies, which considering warhammer fantasy had all but dropped the role-playing aspects and shoved them into the dark corner of a niche RPG book, this was a major change in the dynamic between war games and role-playing games. Also around this time, some nobody named Tom Kirby was promoted to general manager, but that's not important, I just like giving random facts. For the next few years, games workshop had relatively little to worry about. Their business was profitable, the community of fans who liked their games was growing, especially for 40k, and whether it be because these guys just knew how to run a business, or because recordkeeping in the 80s was fucking abysmal, I don't have anything interesting to talk about until the year of 1991. Mullets were out, easy squeeze was in. The white dwarf magazine switched from being about tabletop games to being only about tabletop games produced by Games Workshop, and Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, no not that one, had decided that it was time for them to finally rest. They had spent 16 years building Games Workshop into a profitable business, and after selling their shares of the company for 10 million apiece, they sailed off into the sunset and left Games Workshop in the capable hands of Brian Ansel and the general manager, Tom Kirby. Tom looked to Brian and said, hey man, are you ready to make the greatest gaming company in the world? And Brian looked back and said, no, and then left the company immediately to pursue his passion of selling historical miniatures, leaving everything to Tom Kirby, who looked down at the unlimited power that he now had with this multi-million dollar company, and thus began the era of Kirby. Over the next few years, the working dynamic of Games Workshop slowly shifted. Tom decided that upwards growth for the community was no longer necessary, and that Games Workshop had found its fanbase, so all it needed to do now was get the money out. Remember those hero units from Warhammer 3rd Edition? You bet you do. Well, 4th Edition came out in 1992 and made them into untouchable gods that would annihilate anything in their path, and at the same time, Tom Kirby ramped up the prices on those hero units so that you could either keep playing with your army of mooks and get crushed into a fine paste, or you could shell out the bells for some hero units, which would end up costing you about the same amount as your whole army. The second edition of Warhammer 40k, which dropped the rogue trader moniker, did the exact same thing in 1993, and the design focus for Games Workshop turned away from selling licensed 3rd party games and shifted entirely into focusing on the wallets of existing Warhammer fans. Tom Kirby had good groundwork too. Until now, Warhammer had been cultivating a fine field of fans by encouraging them via lore, roleplaying supplements, and endless amounts of painting supplies to have a real emotional investment in their armies, so the sunk cost fallacy was basically their primary business model, and Tom Kirby knew that. Over the next few years, a new concept would further change the way that the game was played by shaking up which units were important so that those who wanted to stay on top of the meta would always be buying new things. They came in the form of codexes and army books. Up until now, all of the armies in the game had been given an overhaul for a new edition at the same time, and they would all appear in one single book for you to buy, but with codexes and army books, a single army could be updated independently of the main game, and if you wanted to learn about all the armies, you'd have to buy all the books. It also meant that armies would be stuck using the rules of older editions until they got updated, which as even a modern day Warhammer fan will tell you could take a long time. To be fair, this isn't a bad idea in its own right. Games release updates all the time, and if you don't keep changing your game, people will get bored. But because Warhammer, both 40k and fantasy, were expensive to get into already, this business model made the game expensive to stay into, and it made every purchase come with a voice nagging at the back of the player's mind, wondering if this box of dudes will be in the meta come next year. It should also be noted that by this time, Games Workshop had started including starter sets in their edition releases so that they could at least give some incentive for new players to try the game. As time went on, Fantasy 5e, released in 1996, was basically just a rules update from 4e, with no substantial changes, but 6e, released in 2000, finally scaled back on the power of the hero characters so that they didn't possess all of the power in the universe. On the 40k side of things, besides the hero hammer problem, 2nd edition had changed the lore substantially from the 1st edition, to the point where it was no longer lampooning the attitude era of the 80s, it was the attitude era given form, it had become the very thing that it swore to destroy, and the gimmick stopped being, haha it's so funny that the world is terrible, and instead became, the world is terrible, why are you laughing? Subsequent editions would not change this, and when 3rd edition rolled out in 1998, it scaled back on the aforementioned hero hammer, but the power creep of individual armies started to really get into full swing, especially with the introduction of two new armies, the necrons, robot terminator men with acid rifles, and the tau, good guys in a bad world who fight off evil using space mechs, both of these armies were insanely powerful upon release, which was most likely done to get more people to buy them, because releasing a totally new army is an investment that comes on shaky ground if the community doesn't like them, and speaking of shaky ground, Tom Kirby was starting to have a problem, long time viewers know that the bane of bad business owners is competition, and in 1993, a hot new game called Magic the Gathering was sweeping the nerd scene, drawing interest away from the miniature toys of Warhammer and towards the cardboard crack of magic. By 1997, MTG had grown into a gaming superpower, and in response, Tommy established the Black Library, a magazine that told short stories about the worlds of Warhammer, and would eventually grow into an entire subdivision of books and lore drops for the main company. He also took a look at the models that were being produced and noticed something strange. When small children put these tiny toy-sized figures in their mouth, they sometimes develop a curious case of stop-moving disease. Tom realized, wait a minute, these toys are made out of lead, and he switched materials from lead to white metal, or pewter for you normies. But notably, he did not change the prices on his little men, despite the fact that pewter is less expensive than lead. People kept buying them anyway though, and he must have thought that this was a pretty clever idea, because he tried to recreate this money hack by steadily raising the prices of everything Games Workshop sold without actually changing the content of the product in any way, citing inflation as the reason at first, but the only thing inflating was his wallet. By the time that the 2000s rolled around, Tom had started to get antsy from this new competition, as well as a small lingering problem that was the player base of Warhammer, slowly but surely decreasing in size, and after releasing Warhammer Fantasy VI edition at the turn of the millennium, the focus of the game pivoted back to full armies instead of merry men. But, since Tom Kirby had his epiphany regarding intrinsic value, people who had bought mostly heroes now had to switch back to buying a bunch of random mooks, who were now just as overpriced as the heroes were. With 40k in fantasy ringing out the whales, Tom was interested in finding a third ziggurat of wealth, and luckily for him, a different beloved franchise had just seen a spectacular theatrical release. In 2001, the Lord of the Rings strategy battle game came out, sporting rules that were superficially similar to GW's flagship games, with more of a purposeful bent towards hero hammer, given that Lord of the Rings was all about a small band of dudes kicking ass and being bros. It was also heavily marketed as a collector's game, since being based off of a licensed movie came with a predestined obsolescence. So once the fad of the movies died out, the only thing these toys would be good for is looking cool. Still, once again in the short term, they sold well, and Lord of the Rings taught Tom Kirby another life lesson. If he markets his product a certain way, he could potentially hit a bigger audience. So, when 40k 4th edition came out in 2004, the painting and collecting side of the hobby was marketed heavily, and over time a new attitude began brewing within GW's workshop. The workers, under the direction of the super tough stinkpuff, were taught to prioritize the money over the hobby, stop selling games, and start selling collectibles. And this mindset further alienated customers, new and old, who would come in because of the big bold gains on the sign and would be shocked to find both high prices and workers who behaved like pod people made out of pewter. In a transparent bid to get more money out of the collectibles fanbase that they were now marketing towards, Citadel, which, as a reminder, was the painting and collecting side of the hobby, started changing the pots in which their paints were kept. The original pots were fine, but Kirby thought that what would be even better is if the pots were cut down to half their size, but make sure the prices stay the same. And if the joints that hold the lid together were changed so that they don't close as easily, increasing the likelihood that one could accidentally close their lid improperly and dry up all that paint they bought. Despite these grim dark galaxy brain plays in motion, Games Workshop was making slight short-term games, but their long-term games suddenly plummeted. The number of people joining the hobby versus the number of people that were leaving the hobby in frustration was getting dangerous. So when Fantasy 7 and 40k5 came out in 2006 and 2008 respectively, fun fact, this is when I started playing. They both made an attempt at attracting new players by coming packaged with a smaller bite-sized version of the main book so that all of the many years of accumulated mechanics could be better grasped by 12-year-olds who just wanted to play with the spacemen. This era also saw the switch from white metal to resin, which traded its higher-quality detailing on the miniatures in exchange for being once again toxic to children. My assumption is that they switched because resin is less expensive than Pewter, but the resin models kept gunking up the molds and breaking them, so I truly don't know why they did this. In any case, Games Workshop was sweating. In danger of losing everything, they threw out the remaining eggs into a basket and handed that basket to a man named Matt Ward. Matt Ward was the one who wrote the fifth edition 40k rulebook, and right away, the story shifted from multiple different factions vying for control of the universe to a show about the spacemarines being awesome and how they could kick anybody's ass and how the forces of the world were just waiting on the spacemarines to save them. This did not sit well with the fans of the non-spacemarine armies because while it was understood that the spacemarines were the poster boys of the franchise, the game had never been about them exclusively. They were just the introductory human group that were easy to play for beginners, and that made them good to put on the marketing. Ward had written their lore to be unstoppable forces of power, and when he went on to write army rules for three different spacemarine factions, they ought less of a power creep and more of a power stalker. They were the ridiculously powerful heroes of the universe, and the reason why I'm putting so much emphasis on this one edition of the game, when I honestly skimmed over most of the other ones is because this is the moment when the new design philosophy truly locked in. Matt's books were awful as far as the community was concerned, but they succeeded in gathering money because people who wanted to win Warhammer would buy his books because they were overpowered, then topple anybody else who hadn't bought a Ward brand battle book yet, and Games Workshop considered this a job well done. It was another short-term game that would have long-term consequences. One of those consequences was that poor old Rick Priestley, the guy who made Warhammer all those years ago, who had silently clung on to Games Workshop for all this time as a voice of reason in the company, finally looked upon his creation in disgust and horror, and he left in 2009 to pursue his passion of not being a corporate shill, with Rick Priestley finally having given up on Games Workshop, and Games Workshop confused about why their numbers were going down, they came to the conclusion that the real reason why people stopped buying products was because there were other options for Wargamers and Space fans, which to be fair to Games Workshop was not an inaccurate thought. However, instead of doing market research to understand what made their game special and what they could do to make it more special, their reaction was to start throwing down lawsuits against anything that was superficially similar to Warhammer, Fantasy or 40K. DMCA's flew everywhere and they changed the names of all of their armies from generic titles like Imperial Guard to more intellectual property friendly terms like Astrum Militarum, whatever that means. They also tried to get in on other markets, releasing video games, board games, and starter packs for their Wargames, all trying to sell the Warhammer brand to anybody who would touch it. Some of these games actually managed to catch fire and the good publicity drew interested nerds to GW, where they saw all the 40K models and thought, aw hell yeah! Before looking at the price tags and thinking, aw hell no! Despite releasing two really strong video game titles, Vermintide and Total War, Warhammer Fantasy was having trouble catching the eye of prospective buyers because its main draw was being unique and that just wasn't true anymore. By 2010, Warhammer Fantasy was on its 8th edition and if you've been having trouble keeping track of all these addition numbers, don't you worry, you won't have to in a bit. Game's Workshop was having trouble keeping track of things as well. Making a bunch of individual army books is great and all, but it does come with a caveat that you have to keep releasing new army books every time that you release a new edition. Game's Workshop did not get this critical information and there were multiple armies that just weren't updated for 8th edition and there was even one major army that was just not updated for two whole editions. 6th edition 40K, released in 2012, had this problem too, but it compensated by creating an alliance system which let you combine army so that the bigger, more spacemeny ones could help carry the littler ones. 8th edition Fantasy had no such options and there were those who assumed incompetence on GW's part. The truth, however, was much darker. 7th edition 40K rolled around in 2004 and it shook the game up by updating the magical psychic system and giving more freedom to how players could build their armies. 9th edition Fantasy rolled around in 2015 and shook the game up by not existing. You see, in reality, Warhammer Fantasy Battle, the game that put Game's Workshop on the map and eventually got outshined by its younger brother who dreamed of going into space, was discontinued in 2015, ending the reign of the fantasy world, causing much confusion, panic and rage throughout the now dwindled player base and freeing me from the obligation of having to find something interesting to say about a game that went through 8 superficially similar iterations. By this point, Warhammer Fantasy had a shrinking fanbase that existed wholly within the shrinking fanbase of Game's Workshop and as if prophetic of times to come was destroyed by perceived lack of interest. Now, here's the thing, Warhammer, as a game, or Games, was in a very weird spot. If you just looked at the number of products being sold from the Wargames, it would seem that the Wargames weren't that popular. However, if you looked at the number of video game and board game sales, it would seem that not only was the brand popular, but outsiders were likely to be curious about it. And if you looked at the number of forums and fan creations for longer than it takes to file a DMCA takedown, you'd recognize that Warhammer had a fanbase that almost seemed to be hiding from its own creator. Tom Kirby did not look at these numbers. As he was more than happy to admit, he didn't look at any numbers and Game's Workshop proudly did no market research as it instead went with its gut and sailed through the storm of financial ruin with nothing but a paperclip and a bucket of water and as it was just about to hit that storm, Tom Kirby, having made his fortune off of short-term sales, suddenly stepped down as CEO of Game's Workshop before he could face the long-term consequences and shielded his face with a new guy named Kevin Roundtree. Kevin Roundtree was confused, to say the least. He looked around at all of the obvious neglect the company was facing, which had apparently been going on for years. He wasn't a Wargamer at heart. He was a businessman and since the previous CEO was neither of those things, Kevin's Spherewood had his work cut out for him. First things first, he tried appeasing all of the newly dishevelled Warhammer fantasy fans by rolling out Age of Sigmar, a new game that played similarly to 4EK, but in a fantasy land with all the same fantasy characters as Fantasy Warhammer, minus a couple of fan-favorite armies. Age of Sigmar was meant to modernize the fantasy aspect of the game into something more easily marketable than blocks of soldiers moving in a uniform formation, and taking heavy inspiration from the much more popular 4EK, it had been in development since before Kevin got the job, but Kevin was the one who had to lead it into the public eye and it fucking bombed. By which I mean it didn't do very well, which is the normal use of that sentence. Like a 4th Edition D&D game, the fan outrage that one of their beloved franchises got axed in favor of this new different thing that they were now supposed to love caused the actual contents of the game to be irrelevant in the face of the anger. And, like a 4th Edition D&D game, because Age of Sigmar ran on a totally new and unrefined rule system, there were a lot of kinks that needed to be massaged out, and those kinks were shamed by anybody who already didn't want to like Age of Sigmar. Notable angry noises came from the introduction of a new faction called the Stormcast Eternals, which looked and behaved very similar to the Space Marines, and were also marketed heavily as the new poster boys of the game as a result. This made Age of Sigmar feel like a watered-down clone of 40K, and the Storm boys were derogatorily given many nicknames such as the Sigmarines as a result. Speaking of 40K, since Kevin had fallen flat on his face with his inaugural attempt at garnering favor with the beaten and distrustful fanbase, he was not about to let that happen again. Over the next two years, he did what no Smash Bros. character had ever thought to do. He did market research. In a twist nobody saw coming, gathering information about the market he was trying to sell to actually proved useful. And two years later, in 2017, the fruits of his labor were released as Warhammer 40K 8th Edition, a complete overhaul of the game that scraped off all of the vestigial rules that had been built over seven editions, and aimed to streamline the games that a new player could pick it up and get the gist by their first game. The rules had been changed so heavily that all of the army books were no longer compatible, but 8th Edition thought of this by having its own temporary army book that held all the stats of every unit in the entire game, accidentally updating armies that hadn't seen a rules change in aeons. Much like a 5th Edition D&D game, the reception for this edition while hesitant was altogether positive because the previous edition was complicated and unenjoyable, proving that you can get a fanbase to try out a new thing just so long as they don't like the thing that came before it. This sudden shift of gearing both of the Warhammer games towards new players didn't stop there. All of a sudden, strange new boxes titled Start Collecting began to appear in stores with the intention of providing fully built starter armies so that new players could make a single purchase and get right into the game. In a paradoxical turn of events, Games Workshop was seeing an increase in growth as the overall number of people buying their products began to go up, not down. This wizardry caused both the shareholders of GW and the greater fanbase to start seeing Kevin Rotundwood as some sort of God, and Kevin decided to be a merciful God by replying to this worship with gifts of new models, spicy memes, and a new game mode for both Age of Sigmar and 4DK that slimmed down the number of models in a fight to just one small kill team with each individual soldier getting special abilities so that it's more of a normal dude based hero hammer. Not only was it fun for old players but it acted as yet another way for novice war gamers to buy into the game without putting down a second mortgage on their house. A year later, Age of Sigmar would see its second edition and in my incredibly biased personal opinion, it was pretty fucking good. It answered a lot of the problems of the inaugural edition and turned Age of Sigmar into something that, yeah, was still a lot like 4DK but 4DK was good so it didn't matter. Meanwhile, more video games washed up on the shores of the nerd scene, introducing more new people to Warhammer and spreading the word that this devious company that only wanted to take your money was actually getting better. Between 2017 and 2020, Games Workshop focused almost entirely on reconnecting with its community like a parent that had walked out on you and suddenly showed back up when you're 20. It looked like nothing could stop this upward scale of progress and the Warhammer community looked towards the next year with excitement and anticipation. Then 2020 happened and everybody everywhere experienced a multiple year long mass trauma event due to a worldwide virus that was murdering thousands of people every day. It was not good for anybody and it was especially not good for hobby stores that relied on groups of nerds to congregate in close quarters for multiple hours at a time. Games Workshop was forced to close its physical stores and it had to shut down its online web store because the factories could no longer be banned. Delays were inevitably announced and despite Games Workshop having set record high earnings in the previous year, the board of directors started sweating when they thought about how much money they could be losing so Games Workshop started to fall into relapse. When the online store was reopened and eventually the physical ones too, prices were steadily increased. Army books for 4DK 9th edition were getting wildly unbalanced and, most damningly, in 2021, Games Workshop announced a service called Warhammer Plus where you can watch animations, read books, and get your face blasted with all the grim dark you could ever want. The only caveat, YouTube animators must die. Because Warhammer was moving into officially licensed animations with Warhammer Plus, they now saw fan-made animations as direct competition to their business and began slapping down DMCA takedowns on anything that even resembled 1D8 bludgeoning damage. This caused a level of outrage never before seen in the Warhammer fandom. See, because Games Workshop for the longest time was incredibly expensive to get into, a lot of fans got their fix in Warhammer through the animations, especially shorts like Astardies or the long-running If the Emperor Had a Text to Speech device, the latter of which effectively acted as a crash course in Warhammer history through the comedic lens of a bunch of characters from the stories. These shows were beloved by fans, and since Games Workshop's reputation was so low for so long, there was a not insignificant number of people who actually preferred the animations to a tabletop game that they couldn't get into. When Warhammer Plus forced all of these animations off of the internet, people lost their shit, and despite the fact that Games Workshop actually hired the people who created the aforementioned Astardies to come and make things officially for Warhammer Plus, the damage had once again been done, and a number of fans began toting the benefits of 3D printing while also showing places where hobbyists could find totally original and new battle sword models. And unfortunately, at the time of this video, that's where we have to end. Overall, the future of Games Workshop is on shaky ground. It stands on a precipice, where it can either continue trying to fix itself so that it doesn't alienate its fanbase again, or it can continue down the long road of riding whales through an ocean of money until all of that money dries up. There's no telling what the future holds. But for now, that'll about do it. I hope you all enjoyed this video. Please share it around if you think somebody could get enjoyment out of it. Let me know in the comments if there's something that I got wrong. This video was by far the hardest thing I've ever had to make. It took me so many days to get all of the information together, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can make another huge video like this in the future. But yeah, dabby out.