Precinct Omega Podcast - News #46 - The Exaggerated Demise of Guild Ball and Other Stories

In this episode, I revisit the apparent demise of Guild Ball. No, really, it's dead. But only... kind of dead? Stuff happened. I talk about it.

Also, Secret Weapon Miniatures is dead. Probably. Again, kind of. I talk about that.

And Asmodee. Definitely not dead, but responsible for other things maybe kind of dying. But not really. Let's talk about that!

SCRIPT FOLLOWS!!

NEWS

Fri 27th August. My name is Robey Jenkins...

<and my name is Bernard>

And here is the news.

First is a piece of news to which I am personally coming a bit late, but because it’s fundamentally interesting and significant, I’m going to mention it now: Guild Ball isn’t quite dead. Two things happened back at the start of August to suggest that there is life in the old dog, but they stand diametrically opposed to each other. First, Steamforged Games released new fluff for Guild Ball. And second, the Guild Ball volunteer community released a set of errata for the game. The details of these don’t matter for the purposes of this podcast and, in any case, I wouldn’t understand them. But we’ll talk about why they are interesting and significant.

Second is the sad news that Secret Weapon Miniatures is the latest victim of the COVID pandemic and has announced their imminent closure, with various knock-on effects upon their product range and projects in-hand. We’ll look at whether this really represents the end and for what.

Speaking of things coming to an end - though less dramatically - Asmodee has finalized the shift of the Star Wars license from their Fantasy Flight Games subsidiary to Atomic Mass Games by… putting it all on the Asmodee website. I’ll do my best to peer into the crystal ball to understand what’s going on here.

Let’s break it down.

DISCUSSION

Given that I don’t play Guild Ball and certainly don’t care about its fluff or lore or whatever you want to call it, then, why am I so interested by the news from SFG that I’m prepared to return to it almost four weeks since the events took place.

Well, the first thing I need to do is give a shout-out to the Roll Better podcast whose show I happened to stumble upon the other day and who alerted me to these events. I’m not that deeply plugged into loads of other games and try as I might, I simply cannot keep my finger on every pulse, so I spent a highly enjoyable couple of hours listening to them talking about a wide range of topics before they got to Guild Ball - a game with which their show has been particularly associated over the years. And it does have to be said that there is something strangely meditative in listening to four guys discussing the minutiae of amendments and errata in a game about which I know almost nothing.

But if you cast your mind back almost exactly twelve months to when the news of Guild Ball’s imminent demise broke, you might remember me mentioning that there were no signs then that SFG was looking for a new owner for the Guild Ball property. Well, nothing has changed in that respect. And, frankly, I find that mildly surprising.

SFG, after all, sold its soul to licensed board game Kickstarters in return for a mess of potage or, more specifically, £5m in venture capital funding. There is, in that, an inevitability in squeezing the maximum value out of an intellectual property and a property that’s sitting around doing nothing is just money not earned. As interest in a game wanes, the value of the IP is only going to wane along with it. So it’s odd to me that the representatives of SFG’s sugar daddies aren’t pressing them to sell off the IP for a fat chunk of extra cash while it’s still worth something.

But, as I said, only mildly surprising. Because a cooler head would appreciate that, in our industry, letting an intellectual property slip out of your direct and exclusive control can end up being a costly mistake. We’ve seen it happen over and over with Battletech, Robotech, VOID, Warzone, Traveller and even the Lord of the Rings if you dig back far enough. A lot of these properties had, at one point, the potential to dominate the market only to fall back. But subsequent attempts to exploit them for licensing have diluted the clear understanding of where ownership lies, resulting in attempts to re-boot or re-launch these properties stalling and failing time after time.

So should Guild Ball fans take heart from SFG’s reluctance to sell out and hope that there may be a resurgence in support for their favourite game?

Well… probably not.

You see, I don’t think that the release of new fiction to support the Guild Ball setting and the release by the volunteer community at the Longshanks.org site come at roughly the same time by coincidence.

Rather, I think that SFG has taken some wise counsel when it comes to protecting their Intellectual Property. The fact that Guild Ball refuses to die and continues to be supported by enthusiastic fans means that, left to its own devices, there is a very real risk that it could grow out of SFG’s future control. Without actively seeking to exploit their IP whilst permitting amateurs to tinker with it, SFG’s ownership could eventually be perceived to have lapsed making them unable to fully exploit that ownership in the future.

Releasing new fiction is SFG’s way of sending their mascot to take a piss on their opponent’s goal.

Did I get that reference right, Bernard?

<How am I supposed to know? Ask your friends at Roll Better.>

Ooh, I think I’ve made her jealous by listening to other podcasts.

Anyway, the point is that, by releasing new fiction, SFG has made a unilateral statement that the IP is theirs and that they stake their rights over it. By doing so without seeking to shut down or control Longshanks or their volunteer committee of rules developers, SFG has retained the authority to tolerate the fan exploitation of their works without losing the legal right to slap that with a banhammer should they so choose.

So it’s a mixed bag of news for GB fans. First: new errata - yay! Second, the gaming community still lives - double yay! Third: SFG clearly still wants to own and control the IP - triple yay!

But none of that adds up to them having any plans to do anything with the game or the IP any time soon. In fact, if anything, it’s indicative of the opposite: that they will be doing the absolute bare legal minimum to sustain their ownership of the IP for the foreseeable future.

But, one day… who knows?

And talking about things coming to an end, let’s take a moment of solemn silence to remember the awesome and entrepreneurial company that was Secret Weapon Miniatures.

If you’ve not encountered it before, I can’t say I’d be hugely surprised. Secret Weapon was established by Justin McCoy, a.k.a. Mister Justin, about fifteen years ago, give or take. And it’s been one of those little businesses in our industry that kind of just about does OK and once in a while produces something of genius that gets people excited. Secret Weapon mostly started out in the resin base explosion of the early 00s and was notable by the quality of their resin casting. A few projects caught my eye over the years.

The first was the release of a 28mm resin and metal IFV that looked like it might be the start of their own miniatures range, but although that was a lovely mini and I owned one for a long time before selling it on, it never really turned into anything bigger. They also grabbed a lot of attention when they started making their own range of washes not long after GW first released Nuln Oil and Devlan Mud. Secret Weapon were among the first to make their own washes, in-house, in the kinds of quantities that made it feasible to wash entire tanks or titans, and at a fraction of the cost of the GW offering with all of the same quality and consistency.

Remarkably, they also released their recipe for making the washes. I don’t know if that resulted in any lost sales, but it certainly did a lot for the credibility of the business as a company on the side of the consumer.

The most recent project that really caught people’s attention, though, was Tablescapes.

If you missed it - and it was a few years ago, now - Tablescapes was Secret Weapon’s closest approach to what might be vaguely thought of as “the big time”. Inspired by Games Workshop’s now out-of-production plastic Battle Boards, which were 2’x2’ plastic moulded sheets that could be joined together to make a hardwearing, transportable and modular gaming table, Tablescapes were all that but better.

Justin set out to make a collection of modular tiles that players could mix and match - smaller, lighter and more transportable than the relatively unwieldy Battle Boards. The designs covered fantasy, science fiction, urban, rural desert and more. The Tablescapes were painstakingly designed and manufactured in the factories of the masters of cheap injection moulded plastic - the Chinese. The Kickstarter successfully funded at over $300,000 and went into production smoothly and on schedule and backers received their rewards pretty quickly.

But then things went wrong.

Precisely what went wrong depends on who you ask, but it boils down to Secret Weapon and their Chinese manufacturing partner having a fundamental disagreement over who owned the steel dyes from which the modules were cast. This is far from the first time this has happened in our industry and others and is a common problem facing Western-based Kickstarters that seek to manufacture their goods in China. The lesson is simple: don’t make contractual agreements with people against whom you can exercise no meaningful legal restitution if things go wrong.

For Secret Weapon, what it meant was that, once the Kickstarter was fulfilled, they had no way of expanding manufacturing to put the product into retail sale or onto the shelves of stores worldwide. The demand was there, but supply was tied up in legal knots and literally written in Chinese.

A sort-of second attempt at Tablescapes was made by Secret Weapon in partnership with Reaper Miniatures, but this was for modular dungeons and, to be honest, it’s a crowded market and, although the campaign met its funding goal, there was little in the way of follow-up. Since then, Secret Weapon has mostly stuck to doing what it did best, which was resin bases of the very highest quality and in a huge range of different designs and themes. But resin bases do not a deep or sustained business make.

The impact of COVID in this cannot be overstated.

And it’s worth acknowledging, here, that tabletop games have been in the mainstream news, recently, with a nice BBC article about how people discovered or returned to the hobby during their respecting lockdowns as a way of staying in good mental health or of connecting in new ways with family not used to having so much face-to-face time. These articles have cheerfully reported how well companies like Games Workshop, Mantic Games and Warlord have done out of lockdown and have featured photographs of useful things like the last edition of Kill Team, just in case that should inspire readers to search for the game and discover - Lo and behold! - that there’s a new edition literally just out right now.

Did I say that the current Head of Marketing is a legitimate master of the art? I think I may have mentioned this.

However, to the credit of the journalist behind this story, it ended up not just being about the satisfied grins of Ronnie Renton and John Stallard (Kevin Rountree, GW’s CEO, keeps such a low profile that I had to look up his name for this episode). At the tail-end of the story, Annie Norman of Bad Squiddo got to have a say.

A quick aside to say how glad I am that Annie has graduated from being “token female industry representative” to being very much the media face of independent micro-enterprise in the wargaming industry. I honestly can’t think of anyone I’d rather have take on that job and I know so many others in the business who think the same.

Anyway, the point was that Annie made it clear that, whilst the lockdown had been great for the big operators, it had been painful for the hundreds of much smaller businesses who have historically relied upon the day-to-day social brownian motion of the independent sector of retail stores, clubs, conventions and events for their existence.

And it looks like Secret Weapon has stepped up to be the object lesson of this very scenario.

However, having said that, is this necessarily the end for Secret Weapon?

Well, not exactly.

For a start, they are already making plans to ensure that their products stay in production with new owners; and they have also committed to ensuring that their outstanding Kickstarter commitments are fulfilled by them or by the new owners of relevant IP. So if there’s anything in particular that Secret Weapon makes and you want it, well, odds are it will find a new home somewhere.

In the meantime, by the time this episode airs, their website should have re-opened in a grand stock sell-off that will run until the end of the month at least.

Which brings me to the last thing to think about, when it comes to the end of Secret Weapon. Because we’ve been here before… several times, in fact. Why, not that long ago I was reporting that Fenris games, whom we thought had died just before the first lockdown, had found themselves so buoyed-up by the response to their closing down sale that they… didn’t close down. In fact, just this week I saw that they are releasing new anthro miniatures of dogs, badgers and… is that a polar bear with a sword?

<That’s a polar bear with a sword.>

OK, then.

Anyway, my point is that a small and well beloved business like Secret Weapon announcing their imminent closure… doesn’t necessarily mean that they are imminently closing. I suspect, in this case, that they really are, so you really should get along and take advantage of their sale while it’s happening. But at the same time, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the massive spike in income could change their mind entirely and see Secret Weapon limp on just a little longer yet.

Star Wars Legion is one of those games I’ve always wanted to like yet have never quite felt that I can. There are a lot of reasons why that might be, but I think a big part of it is exemplified in the decision at Asmodee to rationalize their Disney IP licenses under the Asmodee website rather than shifting it from the FFG website to a new Atomic Mass Games website.

If there is a company out there with the clout to really challenge Games Workshop in the miniatures wargaming market, it isn’t Warlord of Mantic, both of which are run by ex-GW men along GW lines and as part of the wider GW  hobbysphere. No, the real potential challenger is Asmodee.

You see, Asmodee doesn’t play by GW’s rules. They don’t care about emulating GW in order to muscle in on their market. Rather, Asmodee operates like… well, like any other company in any other market. They make acquisitions to expand. They sell off or shut down unprofitable teams. They market hard in conventional ways and they reach their consumers through routes like… toy shops and department stores and independent retailers. GW carved out its niche by playing a bit of a different game, which meant they never had to compete in the same commercial milieu as Asmodee has.

I’ve reported in the past regarding the relatively high-handed and shoddy way in which Fantasy Flight has treated its employees since its acquisition by Asmodee, but in retrospect I think I made two mistakes. First, I laid too much blame at the foot of Fantasy Flight for decisions that were almost certainly imposed upon them by Asmodee. And second, I treated Asmodee as if it were a company like Games Workshop.

GW has come under fire multiple times for its business practices, but the fact that it has and the fact that, in every single case, its business practices were entirely lawful and completely normal for commercial enterprise just highlights that GW has thirty-five years of operating under the scrutiny of its fans. Asmodee just doesn’t have that level of engagement nor is it used to operating in that way.

So whilst Atomic Mass Games continues to be a thing, it now seems to have been relegated to being a miniatures game development division for Asmodee, whilst Asmodee has taken entirely unto itself the responsibility for engagement with its customers in the miniatures wargaming market. This makes me wonder how long it will be before Fantasy Flight goes the same way - relegated in status from wholly-owned subsidiary to “hobby board game development team”.

This makes a certain amount of commercial sense. No longer will customers continue to pay a lot of attention to who’s in AMG or FFG. Instead, all roads will lead to Asmodee.

But at the same time, I wonder if Asmodee is aware of what they are taking on. The fans of Star Wars Legion are very much the same people who play or have played GW games. They have certain… expectations. And Asmodee is going to have to start engaging with them at that point if they want to keep marketing into the chunk of the market in which GW has built its considerable and very comfortable nest.

It’ll be interesting to see how Asmodee progresses in their use and exploitation of both the Star Wars licence and their entrance into miniatures wargames.

PRECINCT OMEGA

I’m about eighteen months into running Precinct Omega as a full-time venture and I find myself forced to ask myself how I move forward.

The experiences of companies like SFG, Secret Weapon and, yes, Asmodee, bring me face to face with some difficult truths:

I can keep pouring time and money into developing games that are as good as I can make them, but I have ambitions for this business that go beyond me sitting at a laptop, throwing words out into the universe and hoping that someone will pay for the questionable privilege of reading them. I want this to be a business that provides a route to market for innovative and imaginative new products and services. I want to help more people than just me scratch a living from our niche of a hobby. But doing this seems to require compromises I don’t feel ready to make.

Would I take venture capital if it were offered to me? It’s easy to take the ethical high road when no one is offering to buy my soul, but I’m pretty confident that the answer is “it depends who’s doing the offering”. And, funnily enough, you might think that it depends on what they want in return for the money but, thinking about it, that matters - but less than the person on the other end of the transaction. More importantly, to take venture capital, I’d have to have an idea on what to spend it. Venture capitalists don’t have to look for investment opportunities - those opportunities tend to come to them, with plans and proposals and grand visions to deliver a spectacular return on their investment. I, meanwhile, don’t have that.

Secret Weapon had a plan for growth and they turned to crowdfunding. I’ve talked about this and my reservations multiple times, so I won’t rehash that here. Suffice to say that Justin took the Wile E. Coyote approach in which he was constantly coming up with innovative schemes to help push Secret Weapon past the barrier from micro enterprise into small business and beyond.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, small businesses are usually considered to be any business with between 5 and 50 employees. Between 50 and 150, you’re usually considered to be “small to medium” and having between 150 and 500 makes you a medium-sized enterprise.

These are very rough figures, of course, and some people struggle with businesses with only a handful of employees that nevertheless make millions of dollars in annual profit. But the use of employees rather than revenue to define a business like this makes sense because employees are an intensely sensitive measure - when losing a single employee means losing 20% of your workforce, that’s a big deal.

Secret Weapon is a good illustration of the tenuous nature of micro-enterprise that Annie Norman alluded to and Precinct Omega is super-sensitive to the same pressures. It’s one reason that I am looking to scale back my retail enterprise. I understand that another retailer is taking on Strato Minis stock, so I’ll be selling mine off without a plan to re-stock it. Basically, I can’t afford to keep £1000 of assets in blister packs on my studio wall and I can’t afford to take the time out from my work writing games that pay my wages in order to better market the miniatures that don’t.

Asmodee is a fascinating case.

After selling a 40% stake to an investment company in 2007, they were acquired in whole by a private equity firm which led to a splurge of international acquisitions. To give you a sense of the scale of their growth, Asmodee’s 2013 acquisition was completed for the non-insubstantial fee of €143m. But their subsequent sale to private equity firm PAI Partners was for the rather more eye-catching figure of €1.2b. That’s a tenfold increase in value in five years.

I don’t expect or, indeed, want Precinct Omega to ever be worth even the lower of those two figures, but it serves to illustrate the galvanizing effect on a business not simply of money but of a plan for how to spend that money. Asmodee’s 2007 deal funded their acquisition of Esvedium, the UK’s largest hobby games distributor. Their 2013 deal led directly to the acquisitions of Days of Wonder, Fantasy Flight, Mayfair, Z-Man, Plaid Hat and others. The plan to take Asmodee into the global market was well-plotted and flawlessly executed.

Precinct Omega has had a plan from the start. I’ve talked about it before. But as I spend more and more time studying the market and the performance and behaviour of other companies, the more I think that my plan for steady, consistent, modest growth simply won’t return the performance that I want, even given my very modest ambitions. If I want Precinct Omega to achieve the breakthrough success for its games that I imagine for it - and for me - I need a more ambitious plan.

I’m always highly suspicious of trite motivational sayings. I’m sure you’ve heard it said that you should shoot for the moon because, even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars. But the stars are cold and dead and airless and you’ll die there. I’ve already chronicled multiple moon-shots that ultimately ended in metaphorical death. I have plans for Precinct Omega and Horizon Wars and I want to see them come to fruition for those people who’ve already bought into the project to one extent or another. But I can’t afford to be timid when it comes to advancing those plans.

Over the next six to twelve months, I need to begin actively making things happen. I need a better plan.

But I’m not sure what it should be.

Ideas on a postcard, please.

PROGNOSTICATIONS

I had to kind of bite my tongue on a few things as I recorded this week’s podcast because, not long ago, I got to chat with the owner of Nordic Weasel Games and author of Three Parsecs from Home, Ivan Sorensen. We talked about his path into games design, which was a lot more like mine that previous interviewees who cut their teeth in Games Workshop, and about his approach to games and mechanics - which are entirely unlike mine!

I had a great time learning from him and some of what he had to say is, actually, directly relevant to my philosophizing in this episode, so please come and check that out… next week!