Editing Privateer Press (section)

==The Great WMH Fuckup==
[[Image:WMH_is_kill.png|thumb|right|A concise explanation for why the British dropped them.]]
[[Image:Widget-Wonka-Color-scaled.jpg|thumb|right|[[Fail|The best thing to come out of PP in 2020 was them ripping off a 50 year old movie for a limited issue solo.  How the mighty have fallen...]]]]
You may have noticed that no-one's edited the Warma-hordes pages since Third dropped, and WMH generals are scarcer than pony threads when the mods are awake. And at least once every /awg/ thread, some lost soul walks in and wants to know... "What happened?" 

TL:DR -- See the pic. 

* 1) Begin writing new edition, which of course you prepare for with <s>THREE YEARS OF PLAYTESTS</s> [[Lorraine Williams|no playtesting whatsoever]]. Set it up to give hundreds of free points to players who use extremely rigid force comps (which weren't playtested). And of course, [[Games Workshop|massively increase the number of models required to play]]. 

* 2) Enact draconian retail and shipping policies that hose most stores (see pic) and make it even '''more''' expensive to get models.

* 3) When new edition is released, stick fingers in ears; anyone who mentions the flaws/errors/imbalances of the new edition on official channels gets called names and banned. Demo agents come forward revealing that they offered to help beta-test the game and were shot down by the devs. Ban said demo agents, threaten legal action.

* 4) Post-release sales start to slip for some reason. Panic-dump huge grab-bags of backstock at 25-50% of MSRP, just before Christmas. Secondary market immediately collapses. Retail sales go into free-fall from a mere uncomfortable downwards glide.

* 5) Local convention loses lawsuit for abusing volunteer labor? FIRE ALL THE DEMO AGENTS PANIC PANIC DELETE FORUMS DELETE CUSTOMER SERVICE PAGE, they were volunteer-run anyway and people are asking uncomfortable questions like "are you going to issue an FAQ". Note that they did this literally days before a major convention without warning any of said demo agents, or the convention itself. 

* 6) Pull out of all convention appearances and advertising. Stop shipping overseas. 

* 7) ???

* [[Warhammer 40,000 8th Edition|8)th Edition 40k]] emerges in the midst of all this shit-storming. It sucked less than usual. A lot of the people who abandoned GW back in 2005 came back, as GW seemed to make a genuine turnaround to something resembling actual community engagement and not just the tight-fisted miserliness that was symbolic of [[Tom Kirby|the Kirby years]].

PP is currently trying to undo some of the damage. In addition to the long-awaited rules patches, they're pushing skirmish games like Riot Quest, the new  Warmahordes/[[Infinity]] knockoff in SPAAAAAAACE! (Warcaster; so far the models look good but the factions are blander than bread), and such. They even brought back [[Monsterpocalypse]] without blind boxes. Unfortunately, they've also been randomly abandoning games, marketing like morons, and throwing Kickstarters at the wall but fleeing before they have a chance to take root. The community is a massive free-for-all [[Skub]]-fest right now, and abruptly firing their entire demo team managed to piss off a lot of the people who'd normally be [[Shill|running damage control]] for them.

Among the many projects fired in a desperate attempt to stay afloat is an attempt to go back to their roots and crowdfund a [[Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition|5E]] conversion [[Iron Kingdoms: Requiem |splatbook for the Iron Kingdoms]]. Considering how absurdly open to homebrew 5E is, it would've been easy to turn out a halfway-decent product that could scratch that steampunk fantasy itch for a new generation. Instead, a bunch of old 3.X dogs completely failed to learn new tricks, and the supplement was laughably bad and amateurish on both a rules and a basic design level. Still, it made a good bundle of money thanks to both the 5E crowd and the strength of the setting itself, with more such supplements in the pipeline.

July 2022 saw PP attempt to resurrect their old cash cow wargame Warmachine, releasing [https://home.privateerpress.com/2022/07/27/mkiv-beta-rules-and-change-comparison/ beta rules for MkIV], not only attempting to simplify the game (including flat-out merging all of Hordes into it) but also trying to step back some of the more game-destroying revisions of MkIII. Only time may tell if this may resurrect the dying wretch of a company...