White Dwarf

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White Dwarf is a monthly magazine from Games Workshop which has quite frankly gone to the fucking dogs.

In the beginning, it was just a magazine that advertized whatever games GW had the rights to publish in the UK. When they produced their own game, Warhammer, it became a primary focus of their magazine. Issue 93 (from 1987) is a big one in /tg/ history, because that's when they announced Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader.

The halcyon days were around 98-99, when 3rd edition 40k was shiny and new and Adrian 'WAAAAAAGH' Wood worked there on a reasonably frequent basis. The general level of grimdark was pretty low and they even included battle reports for the good specialty games as and when they got released, most notably Mordheim and Battlefleet Gothic. Oh and they used to actually put army lists before all of their battle reports, and gave the actual turn-by-turn play. They stopped doing the former because people with calculators were able to backwards engineer army lists from them and thus not buy codexes (luckily the internet came along, making buying anything that can be stored in a PDF strictly optional), and they stopped the latter because it meant that their flavor-of-the-month army could get humiliated.

White Dwarf also used to have a Chapter Approved column with experimental rules and errata. The errata went away when GW realized that they could put errata online and use the saved space for more advertisements, and by the time the experimental rules became actual rules, GW was no longer doing playtesting in public.

Anyway, White Dwarf is alright, but no where near as awesome as it once was. The real point of decline was when it started shilling for the Lord of the Rings game that no-one ever played.

In 2012, GW re-released it. It became a decent magazine, but not worth ten dollars.

In January 2014, it became known that Games Workshop would reinvent White Dwarf again in February. White Dwarf was announced to became a $4, 32-page weekly magazine which would focus on the hobby, featuring, for example, model and book releases, rules updates, and modeling features. Games Workshop would also release a monthly 236-page "Warhammer Visions" magazine at $12 which...nobody actually said, but it would also be available for iPad. GW would convert all remaining White Dwarf subscriptions to this "Warhammer Visions" magazine. This magazine would focus on wider hobby news, citadel model painting examples, various articles to deal with conversions, etc.

However, what this meant is where as before you paid one sum a month to get your hobby's magazine, at a stroke games workshop now wants you to buy five seperate magazines a month with a combined cost that means you'll end up paying about four times what you were paying before. Think about it. The cost of an old white dwarf was about the cost of two of these weekly magazines now. So already you are having to pay double to get all four for the month. And that is not including the monthly magazine at $12 a pop.

Games Workshop could argue that it is dividing it's adult and teen markets up to appeal to everyone by making them seperate magazines (with the monthly aimed more at the hardcore fans) but really this is being biased against the hardcore players then, as to get all the news and features related to their hobby they have to get all five magazines a month.

There is a whole unpleasant taste to the whole affair that has just tainted poor White Dwarf more then it has been....