Privateer Press

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A company what wen' make da kine games. Yeah.

The employees of Privateer Press are often bearded and like to fondle balls. They created the Iron Kingdoms as a setting in D&D 3.5, then also made Warmachine and Hordes as wargames within that setting, then just invented their own RPG system when the OGL dried up.

Also, Monsterpocalypse. First they tried to bring microtransaction-randomness to our tables, forcing us to buy the same damn boxes over and over hoping they'll randomly have what we want. Then the game died for like five years. Now it's back.. as long as you live in the USA and you're willing to hork up twice as much per model. Or $20 for a single resin building.

They also make the P3 line of paints, which are a whole hell of a lot cheaper than the Citadel line. They have a better range of paints too, including a bunch of colours that Citadel no longer carries. Depending on where you go, they are probably the second most easily available line of paints, and since they save you money, why the fuck would you buy GW's line? Privateer's paint selection has nowhere near the color range of Tamia or Vellajo, however they have way more than Citadel and in lots of places easier to come by than those other "professional modeling" paints.

So far the company has avoided becoming the epitome of that guy, that Games Workshop has become in recent years. HAHA DISREGARD, Cocks, &c. See below.

The company is also based in America, as they have their headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. Curiously for this 'murican enterprise, they haven't tried to expand their market to the Southern continent. It's often the custom and rule of most gaming and toy companies, may be related with the sad fact most young people at Latinoamerica don't have the resources or cultural interest to get into anything more complex than Pokémon and Monopoly, and if they actually have it they will opt for Warhammer 40k as GW have managed to establish some stores in Latino land.

/v/ Privateer Press

That said, however, they are a bit more inexperienced than their older competitors. In pursuit of expanding their reach to a video game space in the same manner Games Workshop did (before throwing it all away in case of Wh40k) they've hired an indie studio to make a game based on their franchise at the height of Kickstarter frenzy in 2009. This studio is called Whitemoon Dreams and they didn't have a single game to their account, a sign better than any for anyone knowledgable in /v/'s turf that they might not be the wisest choice. Unlike having to transfer over Wh40k, a notoriously crappy game into a whole new genre and format, the Warmachine in on itself is balanced and well made as well as the resulting game keeping the genre intact... what could go wrong? In short, everything.

Even after getting the best engine money could buy, mounting a highly successful KS campaign and having the best inter-developer help imaginable by the poor folk of Privateer Press, the idiots at Whitemoon couldn't make a game worth playing. All of the Kickstarter awards, content paid for by the fans, sold separately as DLC, interface worthy of your sub-average /g/ undertaking, fine balance of Warmachine smashed to pieces under the excuse of "engine limitations" (which is really a code name for incompetence), gameplay design stuck between a table-top adaptation and a video game, story that reads worse than a 12 year old's fanfiction, graphics that require a NASA computer to run well and absolutely not good enough for such resource intensivness, copy protection that makes you redownload 30GB of data in a game that has less than 5GB itself whenever you want to patch it, rushed release postponed only under heavy pleading from fans that the game's not ready yet and a plethora of other game breaking issues all tacked under a price that has until recently rivaled AAA releases.

The fans of Warmahordes and Privateer Press still have a way to go before they'll be able to venture outside pure table-top gaming.

The Great WMH Fuckup

A concise explanation.

You may have noticed that no-one's edited the Warma-hordes page since Third dropped, and WMH generals are scarcer than pony threads when the mods are awake. And every thread, someone comes into /awg/ and wants to know.. "What happened?" TL:DR -- See the pic.

• 1) Begin writing new edition without testing it. Set it up to give hundreds of free points to players who use extremely rigid force comps. And of course, 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 on official channels gets called names and banned.

• 4) Sales start to tank 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. 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) ???

• 8)th edition Warhammer 40,000. It came out. It sucked less than usual. A lot of the people who abandoned GW back in 2005 came back.

PP is currently trying to undo some of the damage. In addition to rules patches, they're pushing skrimishers like Riot Quest, the new SF Warmahordes knockoff, and such. Unfortunately, they've also been randomly abandoning shit, and throwing Kickstarters at the wall and fleeing. The community is a massive Skub-fest right now, and the no-call firing of their entire demo team managed to piss off a lot of the people who'd normally be running damage control for them.

See Also

• Warmachine
  • Hordes, Warmachine's sister game.
• Monsterpocalypse