Editing Games Workshop (section)

===2022: Mostly Back on the Old Shit===
[[File:GW Cease&Desist-Flashgits.png|right|thumb|400px|"Oh and how is that cease and desist coming for all those Youtube animation faggots?"]]
Turns out it was all a ruse, and that GW is still a shit company, as within a period of around 12 months GW has fallen back into almost all of their old habits again.
*Prices have slowly crept up again with many new (and a fair few old) kits being more expensive, and while this is only by a small amount in some cases, the creep in price is definitely felt in start battle boxes, as many of the recent ones have had little in it and cost far too much.
** Oh, and they made so much money on all you COVID shut-ins that [[Profit|they gave everyone in the company a £5,000 bonus]].
*Power creep has reached and surpassed the point it was during 7th edition, with every almost every new codex having broken and meta lists, typically built around new units introduced making so that GW in a not so subtle way is trying to make the best things for armies new stuff that no one will have, so people almost always have to buy the new thing to have competitive armies.
**Just for reference it took 16 years and 5 editions (3rd-7th) for the old system of 40k to become broken enough that GW decided to scrap the whole thing and redo it. It's taken around 4 years and 2 editions for the game to become as broke (and arguably a bit more broken) this time around.
***To add to this, an entire faction - the [[Leagues of Votann]] - were being outright banned from many tournaments. Why? Because in an edition known for it's horrendous power creep, the Votann were ''exceptionally'' broken. Let that sink in.
*There were also several cases of false advertising, when the contents of the boxes did not match the description in articles on Warhammer community site (those had to be retroactively changed). On top of it just being a bad business practice, preorders of GW boxes in countries without official GW stores can open before said boxes are put on GW's webstore, therefore making people who believed those articles and paid up front understandably angry.
*GW has been also squashing fan animations and projects, updating their IP laws to have a [[Bullshit|"Zero Tolerance Stance"]] for people who use their IP and make money out of it without their permission. Commissioned fan art? Fan animation on Youtube? Patreon supported artist who makes Warhammer fanfiction? [[BLAM|"Cease and Desist, faggot."]] We have yet to see if this extends to people who make lore videos and battle reports, but considering GW has been burning down anything that could be in competition with [[Warhammer Plus|Warhammer+]], they soon could.
**After the channel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxIy_cPihn8|"AbsolutelyNothing" discussed his run in with GW legal] it proved what a few people had believed: that GW was actually Shanghaiing a bunch of different creators to add to their Warhammer+ service and telling them to demonetise their content with the threat of legal trouble if they didn't. Because most fan animations were both of better quality than [[Ultramarines: The Movie|GW's]] [[Inquisitor_(film)|official]] [[Warhammer_Epic_40,000:_Final_Liberation|stuff]] and more importantly free, it meant that random cunts on Youtube would outperform Warhammer+. GW thus came in and offered those a job in order to make 'officially-sanctioned and supported' animations. Not a bad thing on its own, but with the fact that if the creators didn't agree they were forced to demonetise their entire channels and cancel any monetary support to make these animations shows that these meeting were pretty much just blackmail to either get creators to work for them or potentially cripple their main source of income. Though it's also easy to see why a company wouldn't want other people profiting from what they see as their product (even though it doesn't all actually belong to Games Workshop). But, GW is so ignorant of its fans, the company never realized these creators brought in people who bought 40K products. Usually not models, but everything else.
**Because of these new IP rules [[If the Emperor had a Text-to-Speech Device]] has been shelved indefinitely as even though GW has not sent them anything yet, Alfabusa and the rest of the crew don't feel like their livelihoods are secure with the threat of GW breathing down their necks, thus killing what is arguably the widest reaching piece of free marketing for 40k. Images of guns and feet come to mind.
***Hilariously one of the few places that mostly doesn't give a shit about TTS indefinite hiatus is good old [[/tg/]]. While most disagree with overbearing IP rules, /tg/ has not been seeing eye-to-eye with projects like TTS as of late and the uproar on sites like Reddit and Twitter have generated large amount of mocking, joy and general feelings of schadenfreude on [[4chan]]. This stems mainly from screenshots of Twitter and Reddit accounts saying things along the lines of "I was thinking about getting into the hobby, but now I'm not", confirming in the mind of /tg/ that the majority of the TTS audience were [[That_Guy|no-model secondaries]] [[No gamer|that didn't play the game to begin with.]] As far as /tg/ is concerned, those added nothing to the hobby to begin with and [[Just_as_planned|their removal from the fandom is a net positive in the long run]]. To say that this has caused somewhat of a rift to develop within the community would be an understatement.
***Some argue that this comes off as laughably hypocritical, deriding one of the most beloved and wide reaching 40k fanmade series, but also of being elitist gatekeepers who turn off new prospective fans from potentially joining the hobby. TTS also acted as a major way to bring people into buying everything other than models. The games, the books, and whatever else they could get that didn't involve physical effort and finding time to go to a store tucked into a forgotten corner of their hometown or a nearby city.
*This has caused several fans who grew tired of GW’s shit to abandon Warhammer 40k in favor of [[Battletech]], which has recently seen something of a resurgence as of late. Which may eventually create the one thing Games Workshop fears the most, [[Not as Planned |a rival]] [[Derp |big enough to]] [[FAIL |threaten them directly.]] This could have far-reaching consequences in the future, though when we can expect results is up in the air.
*The release of Horus Heresy 2.0 humiliated both veteran Legiones Astartes players by removing many iconic units such as Land Raiders Phobos and Castaferrum Dreadnaughts from the core rules and non-Marines players by simply not giving them any rules at the system's launch, essentially declaring them second-rate citizens. The Legacies document that came later to add these modern-day units and stuff that never got models was routinely lambasted for incredibly lazy writing and making these units straight-up shittier than the stuff they want you to use in the big black books. As for the non-marines players, their rulebooks are only coming out roughly as fast as any other codex. Hopefully history doesn't repeat itself and make the game fall off the radar due to [[Alan Bligh|a lead dev dying and the team struggling to fill the gap.]]
*Being a British company, on the 8 September 2022, the day Queen Elizabeth II died, they added a black square and statement of condolence tribute on their website and kept it there for several days. On the 19th of September, the day of Queen Elizabeth II's funeral, Games Workshop closed all their UK stores and didn't publish anything on Warhammer community. While many businesses in the UK and other parts of the world have made similar tributes, it goes to show even Games Workshop knows some things are more important than money.

tldr; As a company, prices are creeping up, Codex's are broken and horribly balanced, GW is being about as anti-consumer as they can get, outside of throwing dried cat shit at people who walk into their stores and they seem to have nothing but contempt for the fanbase. So we're right back to where we were during 5th edition 40k.