Late to this particular party, but wanted to say I don’t think the title is click-bait in any way. The reality is that Infinity has had trouble expanding its reach, N1 hasn’t panned out, and their forays in board games have been poor, Defiance being just a complete failure (although not necessarily a financial one, because as you say they’re not a game company). Aristeia is the exception on this later point, but they pretty much stumbled into that one. None of this is a catastrophe, or even points at a failing company. But there is more and more competition, both within the miniature business and from external sources. Lack of growth is a potential issue, and I believe CB has understood this very well, hence their efforts to expand their player base. In that sense, I think Warcrow is pretty much the future of CB. Not in a “massive success on day 1 or go bust” way, but very much the decider of any serious longevity. And I do want to say that I find Warcrow underwhelming. I thought a bit about it, and my own read is that fantasy settings have been rehashed ad-nauseam. Mini-wise, there is an incredible selection, both from GW and independents, so it’s extremely difficult to wow the audiences. The increased size is a big plus for many painters, but also comes at the cost of not being compatible with any of those lines. It’s still early, the game is coming out in a couple of months, we’ll have to see. One thing I still need to do is to read the rules. CB is a company that simply does not know how to write rules, and that’s before any translation issues. Ultimately, if they want Warcrow to catch people beyond the current Infinity crowd, they will have to overperform when compared to their usual fare.

McVey left GW in 1999 to work for Wizards of the Coast on things like Chainmail. That's where he met Wilson, and didn't joined PP until 2002.

I was trying to check this game out at last year’s Gencon. The presenter was such a Simpson’s comic book guy with me that it just turned me off to the game. Too bad as it looked very cool.

Great video, very insightful. However, the audio quality is quite bad, it's even worse when the music plays.

Had to stop for the awful audio quality ... it's a pity cos your commentary are always worth listening... still you have to improve audio quality or flatly invest in a good mic 😅

Geez ... Im still waiting for my super dungeon legends kickstarter. 10 years ago...

Guild Ball was (is) such a fantastic and fun game. It baffles me that SFG tossed it aside. It could be very competitive, but I played it more casually with my friends and we all had a blast. I always wished they had some kind of TTRPG spin off. The world they made was really cool. (Now, knowing the owners are major D&D 5e fans, I’m glad they didn’t do that since it likely would have been a D&D supplement and that would suck.) Anyway, seeing how SFG managed Guild Ball, it will take a LOT to make me trust them again. They clearly threw GB aside so they could focus on big budget (and half baked) licensed board game adaptations. One of my biggest hobby regret purchases was the Dark Souls Board Game. I went in heavily on it and it was…just not fun. It was not a good game. My group played it a few times, got the rules down, and collectively decided we didn’t want to touch it again.

Misleading and stupid video about nothing.🤦‍♂ CB is awesome studio and have high quality worldwide popular games.

lAtE-sTaGeD cApItAlIsM.

Great work!

YEEEAH! Great to see you back with another video.

great insightful video

Your last Warmachine video was so good that I'm excited about what you got to say now!!!!

"As a game it's... fine." Talk about damning with faint praise! 😁

Warmahordes was so unbalanced, some of the factions had much better abilities than the others, it showed in the tournament win ratios

Hey man, a little late here but i am wondering if i can interview you about your experience with warmachine? Since they were now bought out by SFG I'm doing a video documenting how they got to this point and I'd love to hear about other players experiences with the game and just world and company as a whole. Let me know!

Excellent video, and very eye-opening. I remember when Privateer announced the end of the PG program. By that point, I was already on my way out of WM (it had started drying up in my area, anyway), but it really felt like a bigger nail in the coffin than a lot of the other stuff did. For what it's worth, though, I don't think PP ever intended to alienate their players and fans. Nothing ever felt as deliberately jerk-ish as GW; it always seemed more a series of unfortunate circumstances or bungles. But, yeah, great video.

I genuinely don't know why you'd be on GW's side. Maybe it's because my own political views and I think IP law is a bad thing for everyone, but I also don't expect GW to go after individual printers so Cults making them a target is ridiculous. It's like the music industry going after people who pirated mp3s but on a much much smaller scale.

I don't play Corvus Belli games, but they have the best promotion for their products than many other miniature companies. Good KZfaq videos explaining the basic rules and the factions for the game.

Love to see an update on this. PP is coming back around and feels like they are coming back strong

curious if you've revisited this because i think MkIV is sick. i've played since Mk1 and, while i didn't absolutely hate the Mk3 changes, the Pressganger program getting dropped just really put a knife into the heart of my once vibrant local community. i definitely was less interested in the super wacky, alternate timeline Riot Quest stuff that happened. i think the reset -- while still keeping legacy models playable -- is such a breath of fresh air. it feels so vibrant again. the MkIV rules streamline away a lot of the fiddlier elements of the game while keeping the core appeal of the game intact. i think it makes the game much more accessible to newer players in the way the older editions really just weren't. the way they're rolling out product, i.e., tied directly to the way you would build lists, i think is great. i know it isn't a big deal to hobby veterans but having pre-drilled holes and magnets to magnetize 'jack/beast kits and make them stretch further is a great idea. also the sculpts themselves are just a step up from the previous offerings. i initially balked at the implosion in the lore but i now think the new factions and the changes to the old ones feel really great. they cleared out the design space to do some really fun and interesting stuff. having seen it all in action, i'm really excited about the new stuff and i hope my local meta returns.

Still cant even buy warcrow. Saw it at salute last weekend and looking for it to have a poke i just keep finding a big middle finger.

I adore the fact that all the things I absolutely loathe about nu-GW have a root in this cancerous company.

Great video, I was wondering what had happened to outsiders and your vid came up first, keep up the good work

dont know if it is relevant or not but at the time that PP started loosing market share Every Single game store in my area just up and died and I had absolutely no where to go until a GW store finally opened ...

Rip warmahordes, it was my fav game and setting for a long time. Its sad to see its dead, but im grateful i got to play the crap out of it during its peak.

Was curious why Pressgangers weren't mentioned in the WM video, this explains it thoroughly. I had never heard of the other programs, even Outriders. Good stuff, thanks for making this

I seriously lovel Corbus Belli and their games but the launch of N4 was such a missend oppotunity it killed the gam ehere. People wanted top PlayCode1 so badly and just couldn't get lists for their armies and the main game ist just waytoo much effort. I realy wish they#d find away to go with ten order lists in general, none of that two combat groups stuff and maybe even slightly smaller boards (with reduced ranges) just so you don't have to buld half a city each time.

The heads of PP really drove what they had into the ground. They had all the goodwill and momentum and found a way to blow it and MK4 was the final nail. Now its just them weezing before true death takes them.

Theres another factor that I believe is a major one from personal experience myself as we as a large portion of the gaming community I was a part of which included the PNW and others traveling from across the US and even other countries. A great many people left GW because they became disenfranchised with how releases, rules, prices and the felt relationship between the customer and GW started to shift, peaking roughly around 6th edition 40k and 8th edition fantasy. Nearly all of those people moved over to PP because of the tighter and more competitive rules, lower barrier of entry and miniature collection expansion and relationship that PP had with its players as well as the attitude of grit by grinding to get good at the game. I remember clearly the feeling of dejavu when the announcement was made of having the Grimkin faction added shortly after that the MK3 release announcement, the same feeling I'd had just prior to the exodus from GW which ended up playing out all over again in reality. Many of those that left GW did so again with PP when it felt like the entire draw to WarmaHordes was undermined by roughly the same reasons and a sense that PP had left the ideals and identy which had drawn those players to their game in the first place. Some have given GW another try with 9th and now 10th, most went into a variety of other games some of which being extremely obscure with only pockets of niche followers. Some stopped gaming altogether and went into other hobbies or pursuits. A decent number are coming back around though with the recent successes of Battletech kickstarters (most of whom are because we're old enough to have had it as our "first love" miniature game and its generally speaking the same game and rules from 35-40 years ago with just fine tweaks). Theres something to be said about an old faithful that gets a fresh coat of paint (pun intended). Despite leaving various companies over the decades I really do wish them all well and success so long as they do it based on satisfying their customers and player base and produce good quality products at a fair price. The raising of one companies game thats creates competition ends up benefitting the gaming community as a whole. So here's to the tabletop miniature gaming industry and even more so the community, for all the good memories and times in the past, and to more in the future regardless of what logo was/is on the product.

save Corvus Belli from what? They are a healthy company unless u have access to financial data that we don't know about... Also War Crow (= Corvus Belli) aimed at being a successor to Confrontation not a competitor to GW (they started as a boutique brand like Anima). They never wanted to compete with GW, where did u get this idea from? Then I did not pledge, I don't care for tabletop/computer hybrid games but WC is a secondary project, CB's not giving up infinity. GW is one of the players in today's market, the world does not revolve around them anymore and 3dprinting will kill these companies' core business soon anyway unless they find new business models. Experimenting makes sense.

One year on..... the caskuda has returned.... in plastic. 😊

What killed the game in my area was when they dropped their Pressganger program! We had tournaments everywhere in Kentucky. We had active demos and paint days. Now their minis are sitting on clearance racks.

A living setting was nothing new in North American TTWG settings, if anything the static setting is a British thing that made GW stand out as the weird one out in the late 90s and early 00s when it filled the void FASA and Wizards of the Coast's collapse left that people forget is how GW got mainstream here to begin with.

Hi there. If you ever want to hear the side of Chapterhouse feel free to reach out. Chapterhouse didn’t go out of business because of GW. I was burned out due to the length of the legal battle and lost interest.

mAsOgYnY

I came over following the link you posted on your Fall of PP video. Don’t know if you’re aware, but the CB volunteers (points and all) were heavily modeled after the Pressgang. I remember one Gencon I ran demos for a few days, and we estimated I’d gotten about 25 people to purchase one of the starter boxes they’d just released. I got points equaling ~300 USD in product. As for the cultural currency GW has and it’s ability to weather the killing of the Outriders program, especially in relation to the Pressgang, you said it yourself: size. Even at its height, PP was nowhere near GW, and was so ubiquitous, they didn’t *need* the Outriders (for good or ill). PP was doing great (odd vanity projects notwithstanding), and you could make the case they were a medium sized (or at least growing) game company (especially with the exposure in the US). Killing the Pressgang meant killing, at a minimum, all that exposure, as ambassadors. Relevant to above, as well as the knicking references, I’d never got wind of anything like that: a lot of the other PG (including myself occasionally) would simply forget that we even had those points. Sometimes we’d use them, but my GenCon experience with the demoing was more an exception. What soured so many Pressgangers (myself included) wasn’t that we wouldn’t get compensation for our time, it was that we were being flat-out told we weren’t getting support anymore to spread this game that we all loved. Support to run demos, leagues, tournies, etc. it was absolutely a result of the WotC suit, but instead of trying to modify the Pressgang’s official role in some way, or even staying the course, they unceremoniously pulled the plug. That was that. No more support. And, at least from LA through Santa Barbara and up into San Luis Obispo, where we had dozens and dozens of dedicated players and (off the top of my head, including me, something like 6 or 7 Pressgangers to run demo days and tournies) all that lack of support led directly to the death of Warmahordes in the area as people turned to other games (including Infinity). Tl;dr I’m salty the PG was unceremoniously axed, and as I see it, was a major contributing factor towards the downward trend of PP. Also, keep making great videos!

Corvus Belli doesn't need saving, its going stronger than it ever has. Please stop with the clickbate, it just hurts a small company.

Frankly amazed you skipped over the triple punch of MKIII/CID/killing the Pressgang, not to mention the debacle of the injection molds in china. I actually like (and still occasionally play) MKIII, but a SIZABLE proportion of the community actively disliked it, and caused a significant lose of the player base. HOWEVER, what REALLY caused the company to bleed players and, by extension, cultural capitol, relative ease of distribution, and profit, was that around the release of MKIII PP implementing CID and giving the Pressgang the axe. Rules continuously changing as a kind of ‘living playtesting,’ combined with a source of supporting, eager volunteers to run demos and events all over the country/world being unceremoniously dumped meant no real way for any appreciable amount of new players added to a contracting player base, which led to the inability of traction developing in an area, which led to lose of potential (and, importantly, sustained) sales, which led to lower demand, etc. etc. etc. In Southern California and the Central Coast (where I live, played, and acted as a Pressganger), this is absolutely what happened, and it killed WMH in this region almost overnight. There were also a lot of ‘little’ things that players disliked (No Quarter getting axed, cards ceasing to be printed and included due to pushing Warroom, too heavily investing in ‘passion projects’ WMH players didn’t care about sapping resources, etc), as well as some ‘bigger’ things (AMG…), but whether these were causes or symptoms…🤷🏼‍♂️ This is essentially all memory lane for me, a former Pressganger who was passionate about playing and spreading WMH from the end of MKI through the beginning of MKIII: 9 years of dedicated gaming during their rise, height, and fall. In essence, I’m just… sad. Some of the contributing factors were absolutely out of Matt and PPs hands, but the majority of these were (now, as well as then) solely PP’s doing.

I live in the Pacific Northwest where they are located, and I can't find a single store that carries their products. There was a single game store where I found their older models, that were clearly old stock that was perpetually on a 70% off discount, because nobody was buying them. This is such a shame, because I used to have massive Khador and Legion of Everblight armies. I still have some P3 paints laying around too.

I really liked your video when you took them out of the package I learned that the reason bristles are hard is they pack them in xantham gum so a quick dip in water before you mess with bristles your can actually like break them cause they are hard probably not these synthetics though just something to think about I really love your review thank you!

with 3D printing a small miniatures doesnt need far smaller capital to produce your mini's you could do production inhouse having more control. When 3D printing takes off more you could also develop and sell your own filament and do licensing on your plans. Maybe even design and sell your own printer.

1. "'Play like you got a pair' was a problem..." - Correct "...Because it was misogynistic" - Lol, no. Wargames were and still are a male dominated space, groin reference jokes would is a positive boost to a player base in the 15-30 M demographic that was their core audience. There were a few problems with Page 5: They brought in a brand of tournament neckbeard who didn't paint his models, barely built his models, or played on empty bases, which is a shitty way to advertise your game to passerbys. It also excused the big problem with getting new players into the difficult to learn, hard to master system; grognards going hardcore on a newbie, who says "F*** this" and leaves. 2. 100% correct on the metal to plastic change and subsequent low-quality plastic being a problem. It was a hurdle they never got over and a cause for increased prices that should have never gotten that high. But that was not the company's killer. The real killer was a combination of making a number of poor/hurtful decisions around the time of Mk3's launch (including the launch) a few months thereafter, along with a renaissance at GW (aka, they did good things instead of bad) and more things out of their control. There was a California court ruling that MTG Judges were technically employees and deserving of water/food breaks etc during events. Because of this, PP ended their Press-Ganger Program out of fear of similar lawsuit. It was for an understandable reason, but it was a major introduction point for new players to get in a game where they wouldn't be instantly crushed. GW had a disastrous launch with Age of Sigmar, but eventually turned that game around with newer releases. Duncan Rhodes developed as a de-facto figurehead, and the one-way communication from Warhammer-community was a positive sign. Eventually a 40K 8th edition launch that took a lot of the good lessons from the AoS fiasco, bringing back a good portion of the player base that had left 5th-7th Ed 40K for Warmahordes. But what really killed Mk3 was a promise from designers that the edition was being 'balanced'. The problem was that it wasn't, and that's the worst thing to promise a group of competitive players. One faction (Skorne) that wasn't good at the end of Mk2, somehow became definitively worse at the start of Mk3. Besides player feedback on PP's own forums, this could actually be seen in tournament results, as every other faction but them (including a few factions seen as 'incomplete' or 'not-core') received a Top 3 finish within the first year of play. At the start of the next year, PP put out the 'January Skorne Update', which fixed a lot of the things that made the faction playable. Also bad was that a faction (Cryx) that was a boogeyman in Mk2 became well-balanced upon launch of Mk3 to everyone's delight. They were then the first faction to receive the new list-building gimmick for the Edition, and promptly shot into first place in tournament results with minimal competition (By edition's end, this would balance, but it was a rough quarter). And then PP nuked their built in forums from orbit, and that's what really killed the company. You were greeted upon log-in with a list of demands that you not talk ill of the game and the forum was heavily moderated. The Faction Pages where a lot of players congregated and where the complaints boiled over were gone. What was gone was the biggest hub for the community, along with an absolute boatload of good information that helped new players get into the game after that first grognard beating. Sure, Reddit and Facebook had pages, but everyone was set adrift.

Honestly, N4 miniatures have been pretty lackluster imo. I may also be a bit tismy with this, but I see that they shifted away from the anime aesthetic that I loved from N2 and most of N3 which is why I stopped playing at N4. The technical quality of the miniatures from what I've seen is still astounding, but design and art direction have been a bit...bland? Or maybe I'm being harsh and it's because I'm comparing them to the extremely high standards they set for themselves. But I agree that Warcrow looks pretty boring. With their announcement of a fantasy game, I was sincerely hoping for something in the likes of anima tactics or even jrpgs like fire emblem or even something as escentric as final fantasy.

I totally agree with all your saying and Ivan is a mint guy I contacted him on face book to get five parsecs gangwarfare coz a couldn't find it and he just sent me the pdf the face book group is well worth joining by the way loads of good downloadable content

Yeah apart from Warhammer fantasy and 40 k 2nd edition I hate all PvP shit

As someone investigating warmachine as a new player, i can confidently say just their website alone has turned off potential new players. it's just...first off, why is there a "related products" section that links to their other games instead of more models within the same army? the details of models and site nav needs...a lot...of help

Do Dream Pod 9 next

The way he explicitly called out GW in the article was so distasteful it put off any possible interest I had in that game.

F GW