Games Workshop Should Have Gotten on The Community Use Bandwagon By Now

Folks who can read between the lines know that over the past few years I've become something of a Warhammer 40K fan. While I don't play the minis game, I've been enjoying the lore and learning about the setting, and I did recently join a Black Crusade campaign. Part of what allowed me to really dig into the world and start finding enjoyment in it was the vibrant community of fan creators. From lore videos on YouTube, to animations depicting important events, it was an introduction that let me move at my own pace, and to find elements that really appealed to me. I even made a few contributions of my own, such as my character conversion guides for the Imperial Commissar, the Death Korps of Krieg, and the Catachan Jungle Fighters. I also wrote a few fan stories, like Waking Dogs: A World Eaters Tale about what happens when one of the Blood God's berserkers remembers what he used to be, and is very upset about it. Or Almost, a tale about a Cadian trooper who refuses to give up, which was dramatized by A Vox in The Void below!

However, if you are also a fan of this Games Workshop property, then you know about the demolition that recently occurred. For those who aren't familiar I'm going to do my best to break it down, and to make a suggestion as to what I think a better course of action would have been. A course of action that I think Games Workshop could still take in order to undo some damage, and win back some positive regard from fans and creators alike.

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Warhammer +, And What Went Down

For those who have been living under a rock (or who aren't a big part of this community), Warhammer 40,000 has been going strong for decades. With minis war games, board games, novels and short stories, video games, at least one official film, and dozens of other properties, there's always been a strong thread of ingenuity and creativity among the fans. Whether it was kitbashing together different minis to create unique looks, building terrain out of literal garbage, or making all kinds of unique art and stories of their own to tell, there's real passion among folks who enjoy the grim darkness of the far future.

In the past this was encouraged by Games Workshop (with unique creations often being featured in White Dwarf magazine, among other publications), or at the very least tolerated. And while there had been moves more recently to try to limit the impact of fan creations on their product and sales (such as not allowing 3rd-party or 3D-printed designs in official tournaments and such), it seemed to have been more of an irritation than a serious problem for a lot of the fan base.

Then they decided to drop a bomb.

And it looked like some Exterminatus-level shit.

The short version is that there has been a large community of fan creators who made a variety of projects. From channels like Baldermort's Guide To Warhammer (for fellow lore lovers), to readers like A Vox in The Void, to perhaps the most famous fan-created thing right now Astartes, there were people who put time, energy, sweat, and blood into making things they thought were cool. And a lot of people had built up an audience on platforms like YouTube and Patreon to help them keep making cool fan content.

Then Games Workshop changed their policies.

More to the point, they made it abundantly clear that fan animations were no longer allowed. And while some creators received an opportunity to contract with the company (something that had a very shady vibe to it given the alternatives), others were put under serious legal threat. And while this was initially about animators, it seemed like GW might be willing to wipe out creators across the board, dealing a huge, self-inflicted blow to their own community. After all, these creators were essentially doing a ton of free advertising and PR for Warhammer 40K as a product, bringing in all sorts of fans who may otherwise never have engaged with the property at all... and for some reason the company suddenly decided that was a problem instead of a benefit.

The why of all this quickly became apparent. Games Workshop wanted to get into the streaming game, it seems, and their Warhammer + program would have been in competition with a lot of fan creations (many of which are far more beloved than similar things produced by the company itself). While the service comes with shows besides animation including painting tutorials, access to a lot of digital content, etc., this whole clumsy consolidation of power appears to have been an attempt to sweep the board so that fans would feel compelled to subscribe to this service in order to get their fix.

And hoo boy did it not go over well. At all.

What They Should Have Done Instead

There has been a huge problem with streaming services of late, particularly for those coming to the party at this stage of the game. Because the more services there are, and the more subscriptions someone needs, the more it's going to cost... and the whole point of subscribing to a streaming service is to save money by not paying for cable, movie rental, etc. If someone just wants exclusive content, and they don't want to pay yet another streaming subscription, they're just going to pirate it... and if the company making that exclusive content has angered the fans of the content in question then they're more likely to pirate it out of spite. I don't know if that was brought up in any business meetings, but it would have been the first thing out of my mouth if someone had asked what the potential fallout from these kinds of actions could be.

I'm just saying, the numbers don't look good.

In their defense, Games Workshop appeared to realize they were hemorrhaging fans, so they softened up a little bit. They put out rules about fan-made animations, communicated more openly with creators whose work and livelihoods seemed in peril, and didn't push as hard as they'd been threatening to. The damage was done to a lot of people's goodwill, though.

However, I think that the company made a gross miscalculation trying to make their own streaming platform in the first place. Because at the end of the day, they make games, not movies and TV shows. What they should have done instead was to create a community use platform so that all those eager fans could keep making cool content, while also ensuring that GW gets a tithe for the use of their intellectual property.

Again, if I'd been in a meeting to offer advice, I would have suggested creating something like The Administratum Archive as a kind of community-use version of the Black Library. Let fans create 3rd-party rulebooks and splats, supplements for games like Necromunda or Assassinorum, write stories, put out RPG products, and even make animations. Allow those fan creators to sell those things, and to take a percentage of the profit the same way Paizo does with Pathfinder Infinite, or how Onyx Path does with Storyteller's Vault, or how Wizards of The Coast does with DMs' Guild. It makes you money without all that much extra effort, it lets you gauge who the fans want for future potential creators, and it gives you ideas for things you can choose to make official or not going forward.

Would this make the company as much money as Warhammer +? I have no idea, as I don't have the internal numbers. However, what I do know is that a community use platform is basically free money if you have a large number of active fans who are making stuff that you can capitalize on. Because you, as the company, don't have to do any work in this situation. You don't make the videos, write the books, or drum up attention... but you get a cut of the action all the same. And, in this case, it would have had the added benefit that it would have looked like Games Workshop was giving its fans a chance to step up and get paid for all their hard work, even if it meant they were subtly taking a cut of all the action the way a mob boss does from outside dealers who operate on their turf.

And if there's anyone from Games Workshop who comes across this blog who thinks this is a great idea, feel free to make it happen. I want this as much as any other creator because it would open up a whole new sandbox for me to play in, and at the end of the day that's what we all really want.

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