What was it about 40k that made it skyrocket in popularity compared to WHFB? Was it because 40k was/is seen as kind of unique, compared to the somewhat generic (though enjoyable) setting of Fantasy? I think the whole Gothic-medieval-times-but-in-space theme is cool as frick but ultimately I prefer Fantasy, for a multitude of reasons, one of them being that the whole "everyone is bad! there are no good guys! the universe is doomed! it's hopeless everything sucks noooo!" thing in 40k gets kind of old after a while. In Fantasy it has an element of grimdark but I appreciate the fact there are clear good guys and clear bad guys, who at times maybe do something contrary to their good/bad nature, making it a little more grey in that sense compared to 40k which is just "black".
Anyways enough of my own opinions, I'm curious as to why 40k completely overtook WHFB as GW's premier setting/game. Are there are cold hard facts as to why? Was it marketing, was it the setting, was it the game itself? Tell me, anons.
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the same reason Palworld is doing well it has guns and Americans love guns.
God I miss that game, sucks that it's close to dead and that there will never be another Red Orchestra/Rising Storm.
I've been trying to find a reupload of this video forever.
Make a 40k game like that
100 player coop, instant respawn
All a bunch of imperial guards charging on the battlefield against tyranids and orks and shiets sacrificing their life to gain an inch or keep a trench one more minute
warhammer fantasy had guns too
40k has more guns.
Space marines are cool, easy to paint, and they have something for everyone. Is there any one faction in fantasy with all those traits?
Going to be an unpopular opinion but vampire Counts.
>skeletons are easy to paint
>has chapter like bloodlines with lots of fluffy character for people to choose.
>vampires are cool
Playstyle wise though they lack shooting and are kind of restricted to horde swarms backed by elite characters
This is a really good point. Space Marines are basically the Platonic Ideal of a starter faction. Simple to play, simple to paint, and there's a thousand flavors of them that don't deviate from each other *too* much. They even have the conceit of the Sergeant not wearing a helmet, so you can slowly learn to paint skin tones.
In WFB, the Empire is the "default" faction, but they're 16th century Germans in slashed doublets and hose. Their outfits are intricate, colorful, and varied. While there are different flavors, they aren't as wildly different as say, the Space Wolves and the Iron Hands.
Much as I dislike the Sigmarines, they do work as a starter force for newbies because they're basically just Marines in a fantasy setting.
This is probably why Stormcast are a thing too.
I guess they could have gone more low fantasy and made the Brets Normans or early Crusaders and Empire they could have even pushed further into a Puritan/New Model army style
Be interestimg to see if they do kislev and cathay
https://www.goonhammer.com/the-goonhammer-interview-with-james-hewitt-part-1-age-of-sigmar-and-40k/
Straight from an ex-GW guy that validates this.
I can't speak for others, but I got Warhammer models before 40k when I was in middle school, and a big reason for why I moved to 40k when I was in high school was that assembling the models was much easier (don't have to worry about them fitting together in ranks), and there were less rules and generally less difficulties with moving units.
As an adult now, the tactical elements of 40k feel lacking compared to Warhammer or other games I play now, so maybe I'd enjoy it more, but I also was under the impression then as I was now, that despite being ridiculously expensive Warhammer 40k was and is the cheaper of the game to get into.
40k was a smidge darker which better reflected the times.
A skirmish game with a platoon size is easier to get into than a regiment based game with a few times that number.
It's because people who loved WFB, Starship Troopers and Dune were brought into one setting
>I'm curious as to why 40k completely overtook WHFB as GW's premier setting/game. Are there are cold hard facts as to why? Was it marketing, was it the setting
From the perspective of someone who was a wide-eyed kid looking to get into Warhammer during the prime years when 40k began to rapidly overtake WHFB, it was the marketability of the setting and aesthetics that did it, IMO. Simply put, at a surface level WHFB doesn't do enough to distinguish itself from all the other run-of-the-mill fantasy settings - I distinctly remember having basically 0 interest WHF as a kid because I already got my "fill" of fantasy from Lord of the Rings and D&D, and at least on a very superficial surface level, WHFB didn't seem distinct enough to warrant pouring my energy into. Meanwhile, 40k is quite aesthetically distinct - at least as far as mainstream consumer sci-fi properties like Star Wars, Star Trek, etc are concerned. I remember 40k sticking with me far more than WHFB when a friend first introduced me to the two Warhammer games because "orcs in space with chainsaw swords riding motorbikes" was something a lot more memorable and charming to me than the vaguely Tolkien-esque dwarfs, elves, etc of Fantasy.
Chainswords are dope. That's basically it.
this sure has a lot of fricking words
It was the 00s webcomic boom. Shit was just like that.
B^Uckley was a low bar renowned for wordswordswords even amongst shitty 00's webcomics.
buckley is uniquely wordy
if brevity is the soul of wit then buckley is a dumbass
i liked the trend of people whiting out 90% of the words in his comics
>this sure has a lot of fricking words
man you literally brain blasted me to 10 years ago when we had daily cad threads on Ganker and the constant words words words edits
>"these guys here have chainsaw swords"
>points at what is obviously grey knight terminators with force halberds
Dude hasn't even read the rules and already he's proxying.
ya ever hear about tabletop games?
>millennials thought this shit was peak comedy
You are quite mistaken, child.
B^U
People grew up on Star wars so 40k is a bit different and a natural progression
Genuinely I think that 3rd edition 40K was at the right place at the right time, while also being a game that seemed to (at a glance) scale better for small-scale games meaning it was easier to get into it and play.
Couple that with two great editions that followed, possibly GW's best team of artists ever, new factions, Dawn of War and its expansions, and an aesthetic that wasn't familiar to most folks and it seemed like this new, dark thing that despite being peak nerd shit, looked cool to nerds.
>Genuinely I think that 3rd edition 40K was at the right place at the right time
Rogue Trader overtook Warhammer Fantasy in the 80s within a year or two of launch, a decade before 3rd edition.
Sci-fi does better than fantasy in most mediums. 40k outstripped Fantasy from the first release simply because it was sci-fi.
Everyone feels like they "know" fantasy, and you have to dig a little deeper to see what uniqueness WHF has offer. 40k hits you right off the bat with ultra-gothic space medievalism that nobody else was really offering.
It's simple, fantasy just sucks. It's an awfully outdated cumbersome game. I also couldn't care less for its super generic fantasy with added pantihose krauts.
When it comes to surface-level appeal, Space Marines draw more than Bretonnians. Human-mains tend to be the core of any gaming base, so winning on that front means it doesn't matter how neater your Elves are than Eldar, or how the fantasy Greenskins had cooler stories than the Orks (but even in these cases the 40K armies tended to look cooler at initial glance).
People are forgetting just how bad WHFB 7th and 8th edition really were.
>7th and 8th edition
moron. 40k became more popular than Fantasy when Fantasy was still in 3rd.
People like sci-fi, but also I do wonder if model counts were also a major factor. WFB was still quite popular in 6th before all the compounding mismanagement around 7th started to slam the customer base, but even then it took way more models to make a 2k point force (which you needed to take Lords) than most armies with 40k's 1500 point widespread tournament standard.
>another moron that doesn't realize 40k beat out Fantasy in the fricking 80s before tournaments even existed.
you moronic, or stupid on purpose so you can find posts to misinterpret so you can seethe at them? tedious loser
Because they have a Space Roman aesthetic with a bunch of other references mashed in there like a smorgasbord of nerdy tropes all woven together so you basiclaly have a setting that appeals to men of all types.
Everyone thinks the Roman empire is the coolest thing ever so whats fricking cooler than putting the Roman Empire in Space and making the Caesar a psychic space wizard god king.
40k resonates with people on a deeply unconscious level.
rome is lame and romaboos are cringe too
Amazin
Yes. From a different sort of perspective.
Non meme answer: Warhammer40k setting is realtively unique, yeah it is inspired by dune but it is still a story about a goverment with the worst traits from Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Feudalist Europe and every other mainstream form of goverment and economy and combined it into one.
Meanhile Warhammer Fantasy is too similar to other fantasy setting to stand out
>worst traits
yet they arent antisemitic or espousing aryan theory or marxism
curious
Exactly. Worse yet, they have a strong state religion and practice free trade.
The state ideology of the Empire is basically Juche. Approximately 90% of the citizens have intestinal worms.
Did you know that recent research over the last 20 years has shown that intestinal worms are actually good for human health? The immune system is simply incapable of coping with a lack of intestinal worms, and that's why allergies and other autoimmune disorders have become so incredibly common over the last 150 years.
There are currently ongoing experiments where humans are being deliberately infested with species of helminths that cause no negative symptoms and can't reproduce inside humans, and the results so far have been good.
I mean they enforce the imperial truth, if there were any israelites left they would be discriminated against if not killed.
Dawn of War
I got into Warhammer a little over 2 years ago. I'm mainly in it for the lore. I do play some tabletop but it's rare. I mainly stick to reading the books and watch some lore videos. It's the setting for me. The badass setup of a golden science dude tearing through the galaxy with armies that are meant to win a galaxy of war. I've mainly stick to Horus Heresy novels. With some 40k sprinkled in. Only cringe part is the board game runs the show. The novels are cool and all, but at the end of the day it's just about the board game.
Incredibly bold of you to throw out bait like this on the board game section of Ganker
Why don't they make space lizard men
This is what tau should have been tbh tbh
Business idea:
We delete one faction from the setting completely because we are raising the stakes.
Hardmode: make it make sense
Tau should be absorbed into Votann
Better: Tau get wiped out after considerable hubris and exploitation of their proles. Fartsight jumps jnto the warp with nice Tau and friendly humans for spacekeks
The Votann are made more Squatty and get a land train in 28mm
I eat Christmas cake in July
Everyone wins
SPACE MARINES
Tricky to write them out admittedly. Best to go for a soft retcon where the mutants in power armor exist but they're not a meaningful force, just part of the Imperium's propaganda efforts. The whole story about the primarch's and the Emperor's gene-seed is, of course, entirely made up.
Guns are cool
Space is cool
Aliens are cool
Space Aliens with Guns are cool
Gothic science fantasy is inherently a fun aesthetic no matter which coat of paint you have (The original grungy underground comic feel of the RT/2nd ed era to the modern era) while fantasy suffers from an optics problem that fantasy as a genre just suffers in general.
I find it funny that some people are talking about Dawn of War and shit from the 2000s when from what I've heard it only took months for 40k to outsell fantasy.
As for why, I'd have to say the fluff. 40k - specifically the Imperium - has a very strong, distinctive flavour that was present right from the original Rogue Trader book. It has lots of very obvious, distinctive influences and mashes them together in a way that's both enticing and inspiring.
Fantasy by contrast suffered from being fantasy soup when fantasy soup was already old hat, and the 3rd edition book which was out with RT didn't do much to make it distinctive.
Smartest post ITT.
Because there are hundreds of fantasy universes out there, and while I love WHF, it isn't that different from them, certainly not on a first glance
Meanwhile 40k is pretty damn unique in its vibe and aesthetics. Sure, there are also plenty of sci-fi universes out there, but nothing like that really, definitely nothing as developed. Maybe Mutant Chronicles, but this one came slightly later.
Shortly speaking, people into WHF had lots of other competing games fighting for their interest that could also scratch their itch. WH40k had no such competition
Space Marines are just that cool. Also Orkz are the best orcs all around
despite popular belief, the least selling elements of fantasy have always been their lower fantasy elements, while chaos warriors were always extremely popular
so the success of 40k was due to a crazier, more fantastical setting, guns and good-guy-chaos warriors
40k's space-based, galaxy-spanning setting leaves plenty of room for Your Dudes and their homeworld. WHFB's single-planet-based, filled-in setting does not leave space for Your Dudes and their country.
That's why they replaced WHFB with AoS, which is plane-based and provides the lore with space for Your Dudes to have an imaginary country somewhere.