The end of White Dwarf?

[godswearhats]

There is a set of rumors suggesting that White Dwarf as we know it will be dead as of next week.

[Welshy]

Well..... if these rumours are true, then surely these would be changes for the good?
More hobby based content??
Anyway, wait and see I guess!!

[Balakul]

How many of you buy that magazine? With all pictures on internet, YouTube battle reports on the quality level of miniwargaming, and any news, rumors they could surprise will be as soon as it is printed (sometimes even before) all over the WWW, I think white dwarf is way to expensive content for me.

But I admit i newer read on, so maybe I am totally wrong do you get any surprises in it? like rare minis or something?

[Dragon halitosis]

I stopped buying it 13 years ago when I went back to uni and money was tight for a bit. Its just too much of a big cooercial with too little substance. Recent changes to the formatt were for the better but they lost me by then.

[Dragon halitosis]

Take a look at the flames of war web site... they do a free to access weekly online 'magazine'. Over the course of 4 weeks that has much more depth that a white dwarf mag. Maybe gw should adopt that approach.

[Beithir Seun]

'Back in the day', I used to think White Dwarf was actually decent value for money. They squeezed all the new release info on about two pages, and the rest was filled with articles, background and battle reports. I still go back and read my old WDs from the "Fat Bloke" era. For me, it started going downhill when Paul Sawyer left as editor. I don't think the new magazine was really an improvement at all - just the same old stuff dressed up in fancy new clothes. For me, it takes a lot more than a new format/layout to revitalise a magazine that used to be great...

[hutobega]

The newer style magazine with a bigger per month mag seems cool but, I don't think people want to spend the money on paper... Suposedly there will be more gaming content and rule type stuff... i'm interested at least.

[Balakul]

I, from my point of view, might I am wrong, but here it is: I think GW is taking a completely wrong marketing way from point of view of a economic.

They are decreasing costs on little products, they believe don't bring enough profit, while those thing add to the whole structure of GW products. The worst part of it is that they are doing this in time that real competitors just star to to be pooping out everywhere.

10 years ago i believe there weren't as many competitors as now days. Now they have other gaming company, they have to compete with cheaper plastic molders, with ebay against their own products... and I sincerely believe that this could ruin them (which I really don't wish see happening)

[Dragon halitosis]

Yeah, the gaming market has blossomed over recent years. At my club and local shops, as well as in my local bunch of mates, people are trying out lots of different game systems as the quality of competing rules and miniature options, as well as prices, has improved so much over the last 10 years. GW are looking increasingly like dinosaurs, confused that the world has changed around them and not able to learn from more adaptable and specialized competitors. I think inertia is the main thing driving GW at the moment... and this inertia is being lost as Flames of War, Distopian Wars and other games are effectively replacing 40k (which has very few gamers at my club now) and WHFB, which has gone from tournaments of 50 to 60 players to more like 10 or 12 (again, specific to my local club only - and largely due to disgust at 8th edition).

Having done a lot of organisational development work it is really hard for a value product based organisation to recapture what made it such good value in the past when so much of the substance has been knocked off by accountants, share holder demands and a bureaucracy of execs and managers who operate to KPIs (which are usually $$ focused due to the difficulty of seriously measuring much else over 3 month timeframes) and are really there for the sake of personal career promotion. The 'creatives' tend to be positioned lower in the organisational hierarchy, but for GW to recapture the magic the bureaucracy has to let the creatives drive the evolution of the games and engagement with the gamers. As much as I would like to see GW revitalize WHFB I suspect it will be incremental improvement if we are lucky.