Has GW REALLY brought new blood into the hobby?

[Nosher]

Is GW the catalyst that brings wargaming to the masses and is the future of the hobby in terms of the Grognards of club life going forward or did Airfix/Britains do much the same thing only a couple of generations before?

Gentlemen, cast your votes!

[Aquahog]

I started with GW. That being said, I reckon a whole lot of kids introduced by GW get a bunch of figures and then loose interest rather quickly.

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

I started with Warhammer 1st Edition back in the 80's.
So, partly yes.

However, being a teacher (on a free) in their prime age targetted range (9-14) I find the problem is that they catch the boy's interest, they never settle to one army and then there is nothing to move on to the next craze (usually girls and/or cars), unless you can get said boys interested in anther period (which usually involves something like Wab or Fow) they are lost to the hobby. Usually because Mummy & Daddy won't pay anymore for 'Super-wozzer-gravity defing-tanks', which is out of date next month anyway.

Hence I always tell my kids if they get into it, to look on e-bay first...

An example I can think of is a boy I was teaching, spent 100s of 'Space puppies', went off them, sold them at a complete loss three years later.

This was always the situation I found, (until I joined MKWS), it left the same Grey beards in the clubs (the Old Guard), pushing around beautiful 28mm Napoleonic figures (that were of no interest to the Young Bloods), moaning about GW players in the corner, then moaning about the lack of new members between 16 - 25 (when you stop being a 'B****' Student' and get a job).


I guess I got lucky, the club hippy when I was 15 introducced me to 6mm, I realised I could buy a whole army for the price of a GW figure! Then I found 15mm and hISTORY...

However, saying that MKWS has a huge corp of GW players, who are adults AND REALLY TOP BLOKES! They also either have a large disposable income, or access to e-bay to pick off yound lad's collections as they sell theirs off (look, I got a whole Undead-Giant-Halfling-Space Alien-Ogre army for £100, I'll sell these bits for a profit, once I've dipped them and rebased them, keep these and still have an army, for free), I swear some of them habven't actually paid for a figure in 10 years, without making a profit on it first!

[goat major]

not sure your options work - i wanted to say 'definitely' but GW didnt spark my interest.

I think the 'entry' route to wargaming has changed over the decades

Pre-60s was Britains
60/70s was Airfix
80s was D&D/Roleplaying
90s + is GW

My son is following that route - no interest in traditional wargaming soldiers despite being surrounded by them, then tempted in by GW, and now through going to shows becoming aware of non GW products by Hasslefree etc.  I have a 15 year plan to get him into 10mm AWI for his 25th birthday. We may even have some Tarleton wearing cavalry by then.

But obviously not all GW players end up as wargamers - i listen to a few 40k podcasts where its clear the (adult) guys have no interest in anything beyond 40k. I reckon that even if we get, say, a 10% transfer rate then would stay pretty healthy as a historical hobby

[Hertsblue]

We've tried in the past to interest the the 40K crowd in historical games. In fairness, some of the older ones have seen the connection between the strange mechanical devices they play with and real armoured vehicles, but most of the younger ones don't want to know. Perhaps it's a function of age and they may grow into the historical genre, but for most it seems to be a fad that disappears with puberty.

[Steve J]

None of the GW players at the club has, off their own back, moved onto historical games. Those that have have been as a result of being introduced to other games by club members. FoW is an easy entry into historical gaming due to its 40K roots.

[Leon]

I reckon the people coming over to historical from GW are a lot less than 1%, but that's still better than 1% of nothing.  At the very least, they're showing kids that you can buy something, paint it up, and have a game with it, and then we just have to hope that some of these kids are able to use some initiative and look for the next step in their own gaming evolution.

FoW is an easy entry into historical gaming due to its 40K roots.

FoW is definitely the better intro for our genre, and we get a lot of people coming to us asking if they can play it in 10mm.

[Steve J]

Peter Pig admit that Battlefront/FoW have really breathed new life into 15mm WWII wargaming.

[Matt J]

I started out in the late 80's in the GW 'golden era' when I was in my teens and spent a small fortune on 100's of models and every game system GW made. I fell away from the hobby at uni (beer and women becoming the main distractions) and only decided to get back into gaming/models a couple of years ago now I'm a settled family man. Naturally I turned to GW products and bought a few bits and bobs but was disappointed. At the end of the day WFB and 40K aren't really wargames they're skirmish games of about 100 models a side where everything is massacred in the shortest possible time (90% by some tooled up dragon/daemon/terminator hero lord).
I didn't realise there was anything else other than crusty old men playing games with airfix models. Image my delight at discovering the whole world of 10mm where you can have proper armies having proper battles in historical settings which provide so much more background colour research than GW could ever create.

My feeling is that GW does a good job as an opening point for young people into the hobby and though the models/rule sets are now hellishly expensive they are usually high standard sculpts and castings/ lavishly written affairs. At the end of the day I only stumbled on 10mm through GW historical and warmaster which is a widely played rule set and adapted by other companies (BKC etc). For example how much business has Pendraken done by selling models for warmaster and it variants, a not inconsiderable amount i'd wager.

GW may be a huge monolithic monster but it leaves more than enough scraps lying around for others to feed on.

[Luddite]

For the 4 options - 'none of the above' i'm afraid.


Aside from GW what other company/game manufacturer/figures supplier is focussed on the 8-16 year old market?

Who's brining in the new blood if it isn't GW? 

At my club 90% of the members are 40+ (admittedly you have to be 18 to get in - all that beastly CRB nonsense...

The simple fact is that GW gets their revenue mainly from the 8-16 years olds.  Gamers tend to drop off the radar until their late 20's (the courting years), and when they come back, its historical that attracts them more than that 'silly' fantasy stuff.

Seriously?  If GW isn't bringing in the next generation who is?

[ciaphas]

i said yes, as it was my introduction to wargaming, had built arfix etc as a child.  i am not sure i would be gaming historicals now if it were not for GW.  having worked for the company in the past i think they have gotten somethings right in terms of recruitment of new gamers but have gotten other aspects completly wrong, such as appearing to not give a hoot about older players who have already suck a fortune into gaming (tried not to use the word hobby inorder to avoid that minefiled)

the trouble is that GW are going about pricing themselves out of the market, with the emphisis on larger and larger armies and the obvious rise in cost, but I would think most folk my age (mid 30's) have been pulled through at least originally by GW having a street level presence.

To be fair it has taken me nearly 20 years of gaming to get to where i am now gaming the periods i want to, this is partly down to GW dragging me into sci-fi fantasy for 10 or 12 years of that period as it is really the only gamming store with a presence on the street.  Local gaming stores while not new, were when i first started not a place i wanted to visit as they were frequented by people i had nothing in common with.

jon

[Leman]

Judging by the variety of responses it would appear that sometimes yes and sometimes no GW gets people into historical  wargaming. I got into it via an interest in military history from the age of about 5 - which is about when I got over Dinky and Matchbox vehicles. Never got over trains though. Yet now I have 10mm Warmaster fantasy armies. So sometimes it works the other way round. I can think of at least 5 people in my club who came via GW - and still play it sometimes.
DP

[Trencher]

I see it rather sceptical.

I think that GW has the ability choke off the new blood as well. My eldest son (aged 10) found some of my older 28mm miniatures and starts to build them up. He really enjoyed it. But when he learned about the GW price-tags, his enthusiasm was quickly cooled down. His friends aren't interested in the hobby and the steady output of new editions isn't of any help either...

When I was in the same age as my son in the late 1970s, we used to play in secrecy with the 1/32 Matchbox toy soldiers and moved on to 1/76 Matchbox (we preferred the Matchbox over the Airfix - personal taste!). It was an era in Germany when my parents - in the spirit of peace and political correctness - forbade us to play with toy soldiers ("No wargaming in childrens rooms!"). I moved on to modelling. Mainly aircraft.

I started in earnest with playing "Warzone" in the late 1990s, as I liked the fluff and the armies. But I was annoyed when they managed it to f**k it up twice in the recent years. That was the time when I decided to hoard and collect miniatures rather than gaming or follow specific rulesets.
So you won't see me running into my FLGS to buy tons of expensive GW-stuff like a hysteric fanboy. I've neither started 40k nor Fantasy as well. Admittedly, when working with some 28mm stuff, I like to use specially assorted GW-Bits. These bits are brilliant for scratchbuilding and conversions.

Nowadays, I am rather inclined to buy miniatures from inventive small manufacturers who lay their hearts into their work and who have a brilliant communication with their customers which works in both ways.

[Nosher]

Kind of what I thought really.

Probably 29%- Probably not 40%. 

GW will most likely be a route that a few will follow but certainly isn't the 'life-blood'  some seem to perceive it as. I still have to see anyone who has come full circle from GW to historical.

[Last Hussar]

This isn't GWs fault - why would they be handing them over (imagine some one in Tesco's saying "Don't buy that - you'd be better off going to to Lidls"?  What do we do to open awareness of historicals to older GW players?