To Sell Toys

"Merchandising is where the real money from the movie is made!"

– Yoghurt, Spaceballs

To understand "Warhammer" fiction, regardless if it is Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, or really anything on /tg/, it is important to understand that it exists "to sell toys". Games Workshop (and others like it), at its core, is a model company, and they are primarily interested in continuing to sell models and model accessories to children and adults. The books, art, painting guides, overpriced streaming services, etc., mostly exist to make this happen via marketing. To be sure, they normally make a profit in their own right, but this is regarded as a mere cherry on top — tiny plastic space men are where the bulk of the money is.

Taken from our friends at TFWiki, to describe a similar, more pronounced, phenomenon in Transformers fiction, we've appropriated it to describe similar phenomena in some /tg/ franchises, notably, as mentioned, Warhammer. But it doesn't quite stop there.

The "to sell toys" effect often distorts the fiction in interesting ways. Primarily, since you can sell someone the same model only so many times, Games Workshop constantly introduce new models, and often require the creators of the stories to introduce the new characters into ongoing storylines. Older models (whom no longer sell as well, look ugly, or even have nerfed statlines to make sure they sell less well) are shoved aside to make room for the new hotness. Eventually, such low sellers, performing poorly either intentionally or not, may be discontinued altogether, or shoved into the nebulous realm of "you can totally still use it as long as the other guy at the table says it's okay!", before quietly being taken off the tabletop for good.

Another effect of "to sell toys" is when the models have gimmicks which must be explained in the fiction. Sometimes this is relatively easy (e.g. any given Tyranid), while other times it requires a lot of imagination on the part of the writers (the explanations for why Space Marines can shoot extra bullets from bolters are kinda wonky).

GW Examples

• Age of Sigmar itself in the beginning. Which was made since GW didn't get the desired profit from Warhammer Fantasy, so they decided to torch the setting and reboot it/still cash in on fantasy fans.

• Primaris and everything that accompanies it is the biggest example of Games Workshop pushing new models HARD, but it is by no means the only example. Since the introduction of Primaris, lore notwithstanding, non-Primaris models have been getting the axe, with more and more older kits being removed every edition. Playing with old models that were already paid for is becoming less and less of an option if one is an older collector of those models.

• Older factions have had discontinued units and model kits as well, though with less frequency than Space Marines. The main difference is that for many of those factions, they don't always receive a newer model to replace it, if people were even willing to buy a newer sculpt to begin with.

• Ultramarines being the constant poster boys for 40k as a whole. Moreso than even just Space Marines, Ultramarines are featured on fucking everything because they're Space Marines who have the most "Space Marine-y" aesthetic even when you add in their chapter-specific bits, and have an easy-to-paint color scheme and heraldry in a very eye-catching yet pleasing color palette that appeals to the largest number of people. Lore-wise, they're also one of the less Grimdark Marines Chapters, which make them great for introducing the universe to new people, who will have (relatively) unproblematic "good guys" to buy. They are, for better or worse, the best advertisement to someone who isn't familiar with 40k to convince them to buy more toys.

• Imperial protagonists being more reasonable than the codices present the Imperium as. Oh, sure, it's easy to write a couple of lines in a codex talking about the Imperium being a nest of nepotism, hatred, dogma, incompetence, idiocy, and prejudice, but readers want to read about relateable people having adventures, and GW wants them to be sympathetic enough that readers will want to buy their models. Ever wonder why the two most well-known Commissars are caring commanders rather than trigger-happy idiots who will kill someone for not charging a Gargant, and do their best to keep soldiers alive and happy? Why the only named character of the AdMech codex is someone that values innovation, adaptation, reflection and outright proposes cooperating with other races? Why we read about Dark Eldar torturing children, but never see Captain Titus stomping on a baby Craftworlder? Why the two Primarchs who returned to 40k have explicitly mellowed out and are cool-headed genuinely heroic protectors of mankind, compared to their Horus Heresy depictions? Good guys are easier to market, and sell more toys.

• Allies Chart as a mechanic is removed in 8e edition and thereafter. Now you can't field mixed armies, and have less chances to use these units of other faction you have.

Non-GW but Still /tg/ Examples

• There's an indirect version of this visible in some Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder comic books, where some pages are dedicated to rules for the monsters/items featured in that issue, all the better to promote brand synergy.

• Also a major factor behind Splatbook power creep: you want to be as powerful as the guy working from his class/faction's splatbook? Well, you'll need to buy one for your own class/faction! And this phenomenon applies even in not-directly-competitive RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons or World of Darkness.

• Any given card game, from Magic: The Gathering to Yugioh to Pokemon, all exist to sell more cards. To this end, cards constantly get stronger the longer the game goes on, in order to incentivize players to buy more cards. Even companies/fans that swear up and down that "We don't have powercreep, I swear!" tend to cause the same effect via a rotating card pool that still requires one buys more cards on a somewhat regular basis.
  • To give card games some credit, though, if you opened a new pack of cards and everything in a set offered no improvement over the cards and decks you already have, it would produce disappointment and a metagame that would not change.
  • To take that credit away, though: You ever wonder why TCGs sell their cards in packs? They are the original loot box; they want you to buy more card packs just for the chance to get the ones you actually want.

• Lego moving away from its original products to focus on license deals. There's more money in Marvel and Mario than an original Castle or Rock Raider set.

• Transformers, which named the original concept.

But why can't they just let the coolest stuff in the lore decide the models?

Games Workshop, to make their little plastic space/fantasy/super-fantasy army men, pay people to make molds, which is then filled with plastic. These are not cheap. For a full factory production line, these have to be done years in advance, in order to build up enough stock not only initially to sell, but to create enough to fill any gaps after, for a worldwide market. This is also not cheap.

So, even if Games Workshop might seem to have very stupid plans at times, they do still have to plan out in advance, and can't pump out a random surge of demand for a lore-only faction before that demand dies back down. That's why you can't have your really cool minor xenos as a faction, no matter how much you, individually, might be willing to pay—they can't gauge long-term interest without it either being pre-established, or having lasting hype for years on end. This goes even for cool minor subfactions of existing factions; they can't make them on a dime, and in some cases, licensing problems from old tie-in partners gets in the way.

But what if I reaaaaaaaaaaaaally want X?

3D Printing.

Or if you're really on tight budget: virtual tabletop simlator, like Tabletop Simulator and its analogues. If you can't even do that, you'll just have to make do with your imagination.

But why are you saying this?

It might seem really obvious, at first. Of course a product exists to make money—the damage to one's wallet should make that evident! But it's far, far too easy to get bogged down in lore, rules, and a number of comically intensive bouts of media and entertainment that it's easy to forget why it all happens, and how cyclical any changes are. It's important to have any discussion about Warhammer, or really any product, with that thought in the back of your mind—instead of saying your dudes should be the best simply because a book says they're the best and can do a thing that makes them the best.

No matter what citations you make, what examples you can give, or past experiences you can recount; at the end of the day, Games Workshop (or really any company) will take what actions they think will make them the most money. That's why people still have to buy codexes instead of having free rules (despite evidence of free rules leading to more than enough increased models sales to offset those costs), that's why (insert X faction) is underpowered right now, and that's why (insert X character) is no longer being made or got written off and replaced with a female equivalent, and the only way to prove otherwise is to vote with your wallet, and encourage others to do the same in a respectful way. Just don't expect it to have much of an impact unless there's millions of you, because otherwise you're just one drop in a very large ocean and your not buying a product on its own will not do shit.

But I don't even care about GW/Hasbro/etc...

Well, tough shit. If you enjoy anything made by a company, or even many things that are not, those things exist because they make money. For-profit organizations are there to make a profit, and so are many non-for-profit ones too. Even things made publicly available by independent groups still have people, who gotta eat.

All the core points made here affects 99% of the things you do or use in the world. Tabletop games, video games, film, television, food, medicine, prostitutes, the list goes on—but everything that costs money does so because a good or service is being provided, and the person providing it can't do it for free, even if they wanted to. That's capitalism for you.

And if you're using something that is made by a corporation, is not pirated, and seems free?

You are the product. Selling data is big bucks, and don't think for a second that whoever's buying it will use it to do something nice for you.

The only situation in which "making profit" would cease being a thing in the future, is if entire core principles of economy got changed. Like, "World Revolution happened and we live in planned economy" or "Singularity Happened and our minds are all united" or similarly massive scale events. But that would not happen soon - in a few decades or so, if at all - and until then, the only thing companies would care about is making profit.

Alternatively in far future, "making profit" would come to end if the "buys our products em masse no matter how shitty it is" people category would go extinct - once audience is made entirely out of people which care what they spend their money for, companies must either make true masterpieces or go bankrupt. But this is practically impossible normally, as for that to happen, either stupidity as as a phenomenon or rich-ness as a phenomenon must go extinct; the former requires artificially boosting intelligence and cognitive abilities of population (which leads us back to The Singularity, as it leads to exponential "Rapid Self-Improvement", aka people becoming smarter and therefore coming up with better ways to make himself even smarter ad infinity) - and the latter requires either massive overhaul of economy (e.g. planned economy) or complete collapse of economy (e.g. "everyone are poor and starving").

And even in small spare time projects, the popular characters (with the creators, if nothing else) are going to get the spotlight if the creators have any sense.

As for the future? We don't know, but unless something drastic happens, we suspect that the only things that will change are what the "Toys" are and how stupid things get.

See also

• Whales, the financially irresponsible people that keep this alive
• TF Wiki's take, which named ours