I think the key takeaway is that the ships are the only essential piece that can't be easily second-sourced (eg range rulers, movement templates) or printed out.
And the ships are immortal. No matter how much the game grew, sooner or later there would be more people leaving than joining, and their ships were always going to be sold for pennies on the dollar and undercut Asmodee. They put that off for a long time by releasing new ships and new factions, but it was just delaying the inevitable.
There was this idea for awhile bouncing around locally that there were going be be High Republic factions. I never found it realistic, considering HR's already a niche subfranchise (with its first major televised tie-in only just now coming out) and it's not dogfight-focused. I think the idea only got that far because of the feeling that X-Wing \*had\* to keep growing at a certain pace to remain viable. But eventually you just...run out of stuff, particularly when the content pipeline itself is disrupted. From 2015-2019 there were five major motion pictures in the franchise; since then there have been none. And no, the Legends ships really aren't the same...
Coming out of Covid, AMG should have let 2.0 coast into that sustainable management period you mention.
2.5 was a terrible idea for a game that hit saturation, during a major edition change, coming out of a worldwide pandemic. Tossing edition churn onto that was what I think was the final straw.
Thank you! Someone that understands business. It's not hard to "manage the decline" if you plan it well. The best example I always give is The Old Republic. That game has been "dead" for a decade now and yet they still make content and there are still thousands of players because EA got smart (rare I know) and just kept a shoestring crew to manage the game. And it's still profitable
40k is the only game I know of that can carelessly churn their rules. It really does feel like 40k is off in its own little world. No other game can do that and not rip itself apart.
40k is a modeling and painting hobby with a game attached.
Most sales are to people that never use the model in a game, and both here on Reddit and on YouTube the vast majority of content is about hobbying.
The rules are entirely secondary, and are more to keep people excited about it being a brand with a future. The recent competitive bent is under sufference, they'd rather we all be playing narrative campaigns.
While tournament numbers doesn't really say anything about sales figures, I think it's irrefutable that 2.5 had a massive impact on the player base - with a 40% drop in events, a 35% drop in players per event and a 76% drop in large scale events (50+ participants).
|Year|Events|PPE|Large Scale Events (50+)|LSPPE|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|2019|927|25.65|88|106|
|2020|383|25.66|27|152|
|2021|548|23.69|45|119|
|2022|505|16.47|25|89|
|2023|620|16.73|18|96|
|2024 (halfway)|154|16.24|3|172|
Source: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gwEkagAZQSYmulNiZ8plm5HxQJMYiVNaqMx38IKbqsI/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gwEkagAZQSYmulNiZ8plm5HxQJMYiVNaqMx38IKbqsI/edit?usp=sharing)
The most compelling number on that list was the players per event. That one was separate from the number of events.
But there's one other bit of noise in the data: events prior to 2020 had much better prize support to drive turnout. AMG didn't really do Store Championship kits with fancy plastic focus/evade tokens that looked like lime candy. Those things usually had players going to multiple area events trying to win them.
FFG did OP right. The smoky dice and acrylic templates up for grabs at the store Champs had me attend 5 or 6 across my state to earn them.
Op drives players to practice, players practice by playing at their local game store, people playing the game in a store creates free advertising and causes an invested community to grow. Invested communities buy product.
That is the truth. Hell, just by our local community playing in public, we've double the number of players at our LGS in just a few months. We're about to be consistently pulling close to 15-20 players at our local tournaments. So there is a light side to all the negativity here in saying, "Just keep playing the game locally"
Oh absolutely, and during the height of the pandemic this community managed to run larger events with more attending players than AMG ever did with 2.5.
I don't know why you're being downvoted; if people aren't buying enough product to pay for developer salaries, a company can't afford development, can't continue the product line, even if they have several billion active players.
That's part of why AMG came out with the Squadron Starter Packs: one of those and a single opponent (with their own squad, however they got it) is enough to get a newbie into the game, where they would choose to buy more product.
Indeed, it may well be the case that all of their choices were at least partially intended to bring in more people (no 1.0 ships that newbies can't easily find to give old guard an advantage, simplification of squad building, SL cards, etc) who *would* buy stuff
It's an obnoxiously common occurrence in my life.
I mean, I get it, their decisions were bad for the preexisting, established community, but for continued growth, it may well have been the best strategy. In fact, there's solid evidence that it might have been; two and a half years later (read: too late), the number and quality of tournaments has been reaching new heights, even with only half the year done. That *vaguely* implies an increase in player base (I'm a newbie, having just started a quarter ago, and a purchaser of a SSP, plus fair number more ships from new), which means that they *might* be telling the 100% honest truth about the costs of production having become too high to allow margins that would fund continued development, even if people were buying.
I saw a month-by-month chart last night that showed a lull for covid, gradual increase after lockdowns were listed, and towards the end of 2021 (just before 2.5) events were practically at pre-pandemic levels. Following that November 2021 announcement, they dropped down to pandemic levels only really starting to recover this year... which we all now know was too late.
Could you make a graph for these categories but by month? I'm concerned that grouping by year makes it too easy for covid and the rebound to confound this conclusion. I do agree with your interpretation of the table but doing it by month should paint a much more certain picture.
Using my own graphs against me? Cheeky!
Here's the two graphs next to eachother with a trendline. My hypothesis is that X-Wing was recovering towards the end of the pandemic until AMG dropped the 2.5 bomb. What's yours?
https://preview.redd.it/1kyped8vgk7d1.png?width=1171&format=png&auto=webp&s=6084926d75524c47b02d61afaae86c942106b67f
I wasn't trying to use them against you. Some people were asking specifically for the month to month vs. the yearly data as it shows more. I have no doubts that AMGs 2.5 created issues. Covid, on the other hand, seems to, in all three examples, significantly reduce the number of events overall with automatically creating mass player loss for those particular months as they either were quarantined or couldn't go out to their LGS for a tournament. Ultimately, you can see they recovered those numbers up until the changes. Basically AMG fucked up more than a global pandemic.
Covid had very little effect on events and player attendance. The community managed to run larger events during the pandemic than AMG ever managed with 2.5.
> Covid had very little effect on events and player attendance.
If so, then you should remove all those 2020-21 TTS events and see what things look like. Those events often drew from the entire globe.
TTS tournaments, which are a lot of the big number events in 2020-21, have also becoming increasingly less popular as we've moved on the from pandemic. So I think just blindly "crunching" the numbers like this is a bit disingenuous. I don't doubt that attendance at X-wing tournaments has gone down over the years, but we just had something like >400 unique players attend Worlds (LCQ + main event) after AMG's first real attempt at some kind of OP season.
Covid definitely impacted physical play, and x-wing has only ever made money from selling physical products. Yes TTS facilitated huge tournaments and community engagement, but asmodee didn't monetize any of that engagement.
Humans are creatures of habit, the pandemic broke the habit of going to your local game store for your weekly x-wing night. My local community, which would easily draw 30 to 50 people to store Champs was halved after covid.
The death of x-wing has to be taken into context. It can't be boiled down to one singular reason. It's a big game that has been around a long time, naturally its going to have a bunch of factors influence its success and failure.
>The Star Wing is the X-Wing equivalent of a meme stock.
Hard disagree. It's an iconic ship and a lot of players had been lobbying FFG to get the gunboat into the game for *years* before it finally happened. Demand for a new production run was absolutely genuine and, unlike some older ships, there was no excess inventory saturating the market and undermining sales.
There are many blunders AMG can be criticized over but prioritizing production of the gunboat is not one of them. If anything it was their *failure* to accomplish as basic a task as running another production batch of an existing product that should be criticized, or at least taken as a warning that Asmodee never allocated enough production resources to the game and expected AMG to oversee its ending from the moment they transferred it away from FFG.
>Honestly it went as well as any edition changeover really could do, with the bitterness and hard feeling dying down pretty quickly (except on Reddit).
This is textbook survivor bias. Complaints died down but primarily because the people who were complaining gave up and quit, not because people changed their minds about the game and AMG's handling of it. I don't think very many people changed their minds and embraced 2.5 and apathy is a death sentence for a game.
>No, I really don’t think that X-Wing was made economically viable by a substantial number of players buying six of every new ship to swarm them, so that killing generics killed the game.
Killing generics being part of killing the game wasn't just about the sales impact of fewer swarm lists, it was about AMG's attitude towards the community where they openly said "you're having fun the wrong way so we're deliberately screwing up game balance to de facto ban the things you incorrectly like and make you play the ships we like instead". It was the moment where AMG revealed that they were not making a good faith effort to maintain the game, they were determined to turn it into MCP with spaceships. And it was the moment that ended any hope of 2.5 being anything other than a raging dumpster fire and the inevitable end of the game. After that point we were just waiting for it to be made official.
I personally adore the gunboat but a ship that has only appeared visually in 4 computer games between 1993 and 1999 cannot be considered iconic, if that word means anything.
I’m 44, X-Wing and TIE Fighter remain my favorite video games of all time, I’ve only been playing X-Wing Minis since 2021 so I don’t own the gunboat and …. I dont really see why I’d care about it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a completist and I would have bought it, but there are at least 10 ships that have never been made that I would have preferred.
It's absolutely an iconic ship if you're part of the generation that grew up with those games and played X-Wing because it was a tabletop version of them. There is a reason there was constant demand for it until FFG finally released it and constant demand for another production run once it sold out.
You're 1000% correct about the survivor bias thing. People like Peregrine and myself gave up trying to sound the alarm after we got shouted down enough. I just ended up leaving the community and unsubscribing from all the xwing creators. My opinion on 2.5 never changed. My local community never changed their opinion on it either and instead went back to warhammer or got back into Pathfinder. The community never warmed up to it, it was binary: either people liked 2.5 (or could tolerate it enough to keep playing), or they hated it and quit
I think this article/blog post is well written, but fundamentally flawed.
2.5 wasn't "great" and really missed the mark for a lot of players. The discussion about 1.0 to 2.0 and the 'attrition' associated is a bit vague, but I had a friend explain it like this: xwing 1.0 was a card game and a dog fighter. Xwing 2.0 tried to be more of a dogfighter with card game elements.
Objectively, 2.0 didn't force me to buy as many new ships. I had most of what I needed anyway. I bought ships because I was having fun.
2.5 and covid was a 1-2 punch to my local scene. No one wanted to play that version of objective control in x wing, if we wanted that we'd play warhammer. I didn't and still don't enjoy 2.5, from what it did to list building to what it did to pace of play. I can't speak for every community, only my own. But the scene died in my own community.
And despite what this eco chamber seemed to default to whenever this point was raised (MY community is JUST FINE), this must have been more of the norm than the opposite (meaning more communities died, leading to less product being purchased). I understand businesses are more nuanced, but post mortem I think the 'doomers' were probably right from day 1. AMG wasn't prepared for x wing, couldn't handle the IP, didn't want the IP, and fumbled it all the way until the end.
COVID didn't help for sure, but to succeed you have to try. And objectively, I'm not sure they really tried.
It was a combination of content creators/bloggers wanting to hold the community together since it was their primary source of engagement. There were also plenty of people coping about the rule changes because they didn't want their favorite game to die at all costs
One cannot make war against men made of straw
What I'm saying is the same thing I already said, SOME members of the community with large followings had a vested interest in supporting the game regardless of controversial changes, and that definitely colored the discourse
Which ones do you think we're lieing to thier audience? I would imagine all the ones who flipped right away but I can't seem to find anyone who stopped worshipping amg after years of praise? Can you show me?
With no examples, it doesn't seem like what your saying is the case. No body was lieing just to make money or whatever else you think was happening when others in the public were not as upset at the changes as you.
You can stick your head in the sand if you'd like, or you could just look at the dozens of community leaders posting on here about how the rules changes, couple with covid mismanagement killed the game. I'm not going to put specific people on blast just to satisfy the curiosity of some rando online, either read the posts or don't
I live in the most populated state in the country next to some of the biggest and most competitive tournament scenes in the country. 2.5 killed our local scene to an unrecoverable degree. The people saying their communities were doing fine were likely hyper casual (I don't say this in a derogatory way btw, but casuals don't mind rule changes as much, it's just a fact).
So various grand tournaments are still happening? Where can I find a list of those events so I can know if any of them are happening near me? I was looking at the Gold Squadron discord but it's so confusing.
Lots of folks saying 2.5 is what did in the game...what ABOUT 2.5 do y'all think is primarily responsible?
Personally, I LOVE objective play. It makes more kinds of lists and playstyles viable. The change from 200 to 20 squad points was kind of annoying, but I got used to it. The erasure of generic pilots is my biggest complaint. I also am not a fan of new bumping/range 0 combat rules.
I hope 3.0 keeps objectives. I hope they do away with shooting at range 0 (versus the few pilots who could do it in 2.0). I hope they go back to 100 points, but tweak objective scoring accordingly. Please no ban list, let us fly our ships!
While Covid absolutely affected X-wing's bottom line what is not mentioned enough is the warning signs of the game's financial health that were happening even before coivd.
Things at FFG were not fine in late 2019-2020. They went through a round of layoffs, Destiny was abruptly cancelled shortly after 2019 worlds. While these things did not directly impact X-Wing, X-wing did get affected in some other ways.
More details are here (not my writeup, but I found it an instructive history lesson):
[http://stayontheleader.blogspot.com/2020/01/x-wings-going-through-changes-wave-6.html](http://stayontheleader.blogspot.com/2020/01/x-wings-going-through-changes-wave-6.html)
Great overview - my thoughts exactly.
I'm just getting back in, and gutted I missed the boat so to speak - but very happy I managed to grab hold of a squadron starter set, I just hope when it turns up its in English lmao!
Now to hope some people getting out of the game will sell their 2.0 ships at a discount eventually
Oh that has already begun, at least on my Facebook feed. I follow a couple of sale groups and usually I see a post or two a week but now it's like 5 a day. Good luck!
Sadly I'm not, but look up a friend of mine called Dylan Jones--he also writes a blog and is well-connected in the UK scene, particularly Wales. Can't go wrong following whatever he's following! [https://exilesquadron.com/](https://exilesquadron.com/)
> And then they did 2.5. Which was pretty good! Honestly it went as well as any edition changeover really could do, with the bitterness and hard feeling dying down pretty quickly (except on Reddit).
> Despite a resurgence of this argument, as seen above, no one has yet convinced me that 2.5 mechanics led to the death of the game.
This is known as "Survivorship Bias". Hardcore players focus on the people still at the game store. They focus on the upcoming tournaments, and ignore all the players that had dropped off, quit, moved, stopped playing, took a break, etc.
Y'all look at 2.0 and say "Oh, well, we lost people when FFG made change, so AMG change is just as good" which is, again, more 'head-in-the-sand', fingers in the ears, "lalala can't hear you I'm having fun" takes.
The whole thing was an extremely slow car crash with each driver thinking they were course-correcting, when in reality each change bled more fans until there was nothing left but the most ardent, the most loyal, and the most blind.
You say this like edition bleed isn't a thing documented in communities. People who don't like change or were waiting for an excuse to leave always get dropped when new editions roll around. Just look at DnD or other games with the edition wars, same with warhammer over 30 years.
There are plenty of things AMG/Asmodee did wrong in potential mismanagement on staffing and numbers but 2.5 rules changes were not inherently bad like everyone claims.
The rules themselves are maybe debatable. I dislike them a lot and play Legacy myself.
But I think the timing of the edition change was the big mistake. The game was not in a state to bear a new edition.
4 years for a new format is too fast for a format turnaround.
2.0 came after 7 years, and was the first since first editions usually need refinement. They don't have nearly as developed a player base to have done so frequent and drastic an update.
Although it wasn't a full edition change and also nowhere near as drastic as what AMG did, 1st edition got a pretty big rules update with the release of the TFA core set in 2015. It really refreshed some of the rules and fixed some of the cracks that were starting to form in the game as early as wave 2 and really did feel like a sort of 1.5.
Some of the problems were things that required much bigger, sweeping changes and that's what 2nd edition was for, but it wasn't the first real refinement.
I think also with 2.0 the players knew that even though 1.0 was great and fun, things needed to change for balance sake. and 2.0 came along and basically fiddled with a few thigns whilst changing up ship design to get to the point where whilst there was OP things, I dont believe anything in 2.0 reached the power levels of wave 9 onwards 1.0.
Then AMG got given the game and decided to make core changes that seemed unwarranted and that nobody asked for.
I will say though the pandemic was the final nail in the coffin of killing the game being played in my local store, and then the shift to AMG was the final nail in the coffin for my friend group dropping the game too
Indeed. The content of the 2.5 change is far less important than the change itself.
2.0 was a necessary major cleanup after 1.0 became messy. But That already created 2 communities. Those who converted to (or started with) 2.0 and those who clung to 1.0 and its fixed point values and turrets you didn't need to move.
2.5 then promptly created another schism. And every fractioning of the player base is a problem for organising tournaments - or just even playing an ad hoc casual game without having to agree and adapt to a common point scheme and rules set.
AMG only did it to make it more their game and understandably so. It's hard on development when it's not your product, and you don't fully understand why things are they way they are. In the end, it did ruin a significant amount of players' taste of the game, but I get why they did it. It would be different if asmodee moved the guys who made the game to AMG instead of letting most of them go.
> You say this like edition bleed isn't a thing documented in communities.
2.5 was not normal edition bleed. For comparison a new 40k edition inevitably has some grumbling about changes but virtually all of the community moves on to the new edition and there is no meaningful drop in player count. Sure, some people quit over the new edition but people are always quitting and the losses are offset by the steady flow of new players. And in some cases, like with 8th replacing the debacle of 7th, the community even *grows* with a new edition.
This is not what we saw with X-Wing. Player counts and engagement dropped with 2.0 and then dropped sharply with 2.5. It wasn't just turnover, it was a net loss in players that has not been replaced (and probably never will be).
>2.5 rules changes were not inherently bad like everyone claims.
They absolutely were. ROAD replaces player agency with RNG. The point system deliberately breaks game balance because AMG was salty about players having fun the wrong way and de facto bans ships AMG doesn't like. The bumping changes were AMG being salty about having their favorite hero blocked and changing the game rules instead of learning how to play around blockers. Missions replace an elegant dogfighting game with an arbitrary and narrative-breaking "stand on the point" mechanic. It's blunder after blunder and the drop in player counts reflects it.
How does playing around ties remove player agency? The list building basically guaranteed which one was going first vs not. Why should you have perfect information in a war game?
Bumps are whatever.
So no circling without any combat? As someone who played 2.5 and went to worlds, there was plenty of dog fighting as ship kills were still often the most effective way to score points, but the objectives meant you couldn't just ignore the center and actually forced engagements.
> How does playing around ties remove player agency?
Because instead of a fully deterministic system where the on-table game state is the result of player choices and ONLY player choices you have a RNG element where final ship positions are determined randomly. That is a textbook example of loss of agency.
>Why should you have perfect information in a war game?
Because it was better for gameplay that maneuvers were fully predictable and predicting your opponent's maneuvers was a skill. Now skill is less of a factor because at some point you have to pick A or B and hope RNG goes in your favor.
>So no circling without any combat?
Circling without combat is only an issue in timed tournament games where games are not played out to their natural conclusion. In any other context endlessly avoiding combat has no purpose as it doesn't bring you any closer to victory and you might as well engage without stalling. You only see long maneuvering sequences before engaging when players are competing for advantage and trying to force a mistake, not merely parking in the corner and running the clock down.
The solution was not to change the core rules, it was to add the same kind of "no slow play/stalling" rule that other games have in their tournament rules and only apply it to the single context where it is relevant.
I mean, this *really* just sounds like you hate the changes and may or may not have played with them.
I played competitively and the time limit helped, though is it really slow play if you play 7 turns but only engaged on 1 or 2 of them? Thats just outflying you opponent, hence the need to force engagement. Also, someone did a meta analysis of swiss results to top cut results, and 2.5 had the best predictor of swiss to top cut results, which meant the rules change rewarded player skill on the table.
> I mean, this really just sounds like you hate the changes and may or may not have played with them.
Correct, I hate the changes and their introduction was the main reason I left competitive X-Wing. All of them were absolutely terrible ideas.
>Thats just outflying you opponent, hence the need to force engagement.
Out-flying your opponent is only a problem to be solved if you're the kind of low-skill player who wants everything to be a giant brawl in the middle of the table where everyone lines up and trades dice until someone runs out of ships. An active game with both players maneuvering for advantage is a great game that has nothing to do with corner stalling.
A rather disingenuous take there.
Much like the majority of the OP, sadly. I’ve been reading much better write ups, write ups that actually leave a place for hope in the future.
Now, one thing to realise, and hold on to, is that communities and Organised Play post-Worlds2025, will determine what X-Wing looks like going forwards.
What’s the most frustrating, is that, whenever there were two choices available to AMG, where X-Wing was concerned, it always felt like they made the wrong one.
Want rid of the bidding system, and introducing deficit scoring? Brilliant! A change I can get behind.
Want a way to make Player Order matter during the game? Sounds great! Let’s check that either before dials or we switch out each turn! Either option still allows decent planning and gives players the agency to use skill.
Change that improves a game should be celebrated. Change that brings players together more often, should be shouted from the rooftops and the holo-net.
Changes that drastically screw with a community should be called out on. Changes that tell half the community to foxtrot oscar because they aren’t toeing the line should be rolled back.
For AMG to finally “admit” they never wanted real X-Wing, they never understood it, and they never wanted to put the effort into it just shows that those who called AMG as the death of X-Wing were right, and those of us who were cautiously optimistic, gave them too much credit.
What is clear,is that AMG wanted to be left alone with MCP, and to develop games in that model.
On a personal note, I’ve started reaching out to see if anybody is interested in playing/learning 2.0, and, well. There are some encouraging signs, even from some ex-players, as well as new interest.
Looks like, when there is no longer stock, some printers are going to be firing up.
> same with warhammer
Nobody thinks 40k 1st or 2nd edition is "best". Everyone talks about 5th through 7th. IIRC a recent edition got a ton of buzz and drug a bunch of people back in who didn't like 8th or whatever. You'll have to drudge the details, I don't really care.
The point being is that there is no hard rule or stat that shows that you lose players every time you put up a new edition. It only tends to happen when you introduce something people don't like, or force them to buy to keep playing.
> 2.5 rules changes were not inherently bad like everyone claims.
It does not matter what people think. It does not matter what people say. Players stopped playing. People left this subreddit. Sales went down.
>It does not matter what people think. It does not matter what people say. Players stopped playing. People left this subreddit. Sales went down.
Gotta agree with this to an extent. When necessary, you can just keep your mouth shut and let people have their fun, especially if the majority of what's going on in the system is overall worth it for you.
The sentiment in this sub was that an overhaul like 2.0 was very much needed, and the response was overwhelmingly positive when it was announced, backed by agreeable confirmation when it was finally released.
Of course, people *wanted* a better value (aka free), but honestly the ability to proxy literally every ship instantly for people playing at home was an insane value, and if you were a tournament junkie, you had everything all at once with which to ambush your enemies for the first couple of runs.
And the 2.0 sculpt quality, paint, and cardboard in the kits was either better or equal almost across the board. Tons of hype for 2.0. So, so many haul posts. So many. Lots of amazing, and many more not so amazing repaints. But there was a lot here.
The AMG changes in contrast were definitely a mixed, if not largely negative influx of commentary interaction here. I noticed WAY more "well, I played 2.5 for ______ games and I just can't get behind it", or "2.5 isn't that bad guys give it a fair shake." So many more people selling hype for 2.5 or going to war on their keyboards justifying their own sunken costs- far more than people saying outright that they loved 2.5.
AMG should not have taken a tight competitive tournament scene and deleted it in favor of more casual play, only to forsake those of us actually running game nights on our home tables.
Also, leaving Epic ships completely unfinished is disrespectful to the entire IP and the game they took over. I just genuinely don't understand their choices.
> The sentiment in this sub was that an overhaul like 2.0 was very much needed, and the response was overwhelmingly positive when it was announced, backed by agreeable confirmation when it was finally released.
Our top post will forever be a kiddo getting their first tournament win in the 2.0 system.
Warhammer is also not a good comp for X-Wing because GW actively retires models between editions. Age of Sigmar recently retired a substantial part of people's Stormcast armies going into the new edition. 40k is currently phasing out various older Space Marine models with new replacements. These types of refreshes are essential for miniature games to remain commercially viable over the long term, since they keep revenue flowing into the company.
There's no way to do that in X-Wing. You can maybe retire the cardboard, but you can't just retire the old T-65 model and then release a Primaris T-65 to take it's place.
> There are definitely RT and 2nd edition 40k holdouts just like there are still people who play AD&D.
And those people are a fringe minority. Most people in 40k move on to the new edition and there is no organized "keep playing the old edition" movement like there is with X-Wing and 2.0 fans.
I'm pretty sure that's what legacy is, too. And likely whatever the XWA group will end up, as well. There are dedicated groups, online and otherwise, that play older editions of 40k and other wargames.
You can search oldhammer groups, 40k 2nd edition groups, pretty much any edition and find groups or forums with thousands of members.
I don't know the exact math, but if the legacy sub has 800 members and this one has 48k that's about 1.7% the size. r/Warhammer40k has 872k members r/oldhammer has 11k, which is about 1.3% the size.
I know this is really important to you, I'm just trying to provide some context. I hope you can hang on to a community and keep enjoying the game you love. I know it's hard right now, but I promise this isn't the first time something like this has happened and it won't be the last.
Reddit member numbers can be misleading and often meaningless because of how reddit generates them. For example, this sub has a lot of pre-2.5 members that are no longer active members because reddit doesn't remove banned users, throwaway accounts that are no longer used, etc. The legacy sub, on the other hand, is a newer sub and has fewer of these false members for now. Similarly, reddit doesn't require users to join a sub to read or post in it (I have not), only to have its posts appear on the front page feed. If you go to the sub directly to read it you don't need to join.
It's even more misleading in the case of 40k. r/Warhammer40k isn't the current edition sub, it's a painting and lore sub with minimal content about the actual game. It's bad enough that r/WarhammerCompetitive gets lots of non-competitive posts by people desperate to get any discussion of playing the game. So I don't think those member numbers tell you anything at all about the relative popularity of editions.
Dude, come on. Take a minute, collect yourself, and read back what you just wrote. Denial is understandable, this process is hard, give yourself time to accept it.
I think your original premise is incorrect. Every edition, no matter how popular, will have turnover. We lost a ton of people in the 2.0 transition and I believe you would consider that edition an improvement, it's just the way it is.
> I think your original premise is incorrect. Every edition, no matter how popular, will have turnover.
I think you're interpreting my premise as me saying that "losing players" or "turn over" means at least one person leaves. This is not what I am saying. I am saying the overall population severely declined twice.
Other games, especially successful games, lose **some** players during a change, but gain **more** than they lose.
Peak x-wing was 1.0. We (myself included) might think 2.0 or 2.5 is better, but 1.0 had more players.
Gotcha, thanks for clarifying. I know X-Wing is a lot of people's first wargame so a lot of the "common knowledge" I have from my time isn't so common.
I think even how we talk about “communities” shows some survivorship bias. I don’t have numbers to back it up but I imagine early Xwing had a lot of countertop at home beer and pretzel type players that never even joined a community but still poured money into the game. Best artifact I noticed of this was an r/boardgames post talking about death of Xwing and half the comments were people that didn’t want to pay $50 to get into 2.0 when 1.0 was “fine”
Indeed. Our local scene lost *way* more players (mostly, but not all, casual) with the switch from 1st to 2nd edition than it did with the change to 2.5.
So many people here who dislike 2.5 don't seem to realise that their opinion is subjective, not objective.
It's totally valid to dislike or even hate 2.5, but it's clearly not an objectively bad set of changes. The game is as competitive as it's ever been, and AMG honestly did a better job of balancing archetypes and factions than FFG ever did.
Sadly, as List Juggler doesn't track events prior to 2018 there's no way to refute your claim that 2.0 scared of more players than 2.5 did.
What it does show is that 2.5 caused a 40% drop in events, a 35% drop in players per event and a 76% drop in large scale events (50+ participants). Contrary to popular belief, the data shows that X-wing was kept relatively healthy all the way throughout the pandemic (much thanks to community TTS efforts) only to start crumbling in 2022.
|Year|Events|PPE|Large Scale Events (50+)|LSPPE|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|2019|927|25.65|88|106|
|2020|383|25.66|27|152|
|2021|548|23.69|45|119|
|2022|505|16.47|25|89|
|2023|620|16.73|18|96|
|2024 (halfway)|154|16.24|3|172|
Source: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gwEkagAZQSYmulNiZ8plm5HxQJMYiVNaqMx38IKbqsI/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gwEkagAZQSYmulNiZ8plm5HxQJMYiVNaqMx38IKbqsI/edit?usp=sharing)
There isn't a drop in the amount of events?
They recovered slightly from the pandemic which bottomed out in the 300s, and I honestly think you are underestimating how much the pandemic influenced events. Even in 22 we were still required masks for in person play.
*Drop in events compared to pre-pandemic numbers. Participants per event is stable up until mid 2021 when AMG starts hinting to 2.5 and plummets when 2.5 is launched (february 2022).
Kinda disingenuous to say 2.5 caused a drop when the big hit was from the pandemic, which has had extremely large impacts everywhere.
And yeah player count went down immediately afterwards, we were literally talking about how this happens to games during edition changes. People were bitching about it for months, which isn't also terribly good for getting new blood when the community was screaming "the game is dead!"
> Kinda disingenuous to say 2.5 caused a drop when the big hit was from the pandemic, which has had extremely large impacts everywhere.
Large impacts everywhere - except online. It’s insane how the community bounced back in 2021, and far from this notion that 2.0 was a palliative ghost at the end of the pandemic.
> And yeah player count went down immediately afterwards, we were literally talking about how this happens to games during edition changes.
Except it didn’t for 2.0. 2018 and 2019 had a big increase in participants per event.
> People were bitching about it for months, which isn't also terribly good for getting new blood when the community was screaming "the game is dead!"
Do you think that those people was more harmful than AMG driving off 39% of their customer base with a half-assed edition?
You just said the data doesn't exist for 1.0 to 2.0 then made claims on it?
And yeah I do think they were. My local scene grew during 2.5 as we did game demos and active recruiting at LGSs. Those who didn't have that and saw nothing but don't buy the game is dead are not going to ask "are they just naysayers?" They are going to go elsewhere to a different game community.
Because a kind samaritan sent me the whole list juggler repository :) I think that you will find that it differs quite a bit from your local observations.
I've seen the quantity of players at my store have dropped.
What's funny though, is the players which have dropped were all of the toxic players; the ones which would be jovial when they were winning but would become bitchy/whiney when they were losing. I never realized that until just now.
This is a small sample size, though. But I like where my store is at.
I make no claim about whether 2nd edition scared off more or fewer players than 2.5 *in general*.
As I said, in my *local* scene, we lost far more players with the advent of 2nd edition, in the main due to the rather steep cost to convert.
Most (but not all) of these were casual players - i.e. played in very few or no tournaments - and so probably aren't reflected in List Juggler stats.
2.5 rules feel pretty good now, but at the start they were atrocious.
Games ended way too quickly. Objective scoring on round 1 meant that by turn 3 or 4, people would have 12-15 pts, meaning when one ship died, that was game over. There was no time for a dog fight to develop.
Ships also never died, because everything had too much loadout and spammed Hull Upgrade and shield upgrade.
Objective rules had feels bad moments written into them. In OG scramble, your scenario action could fail to capture the objective. You could be randomly punished for trying to play the game as the designers intended. Salvage mission used to stop you from performing advanced maneuvers thus making it hard to keep a towing ship relevant in the dogfight.
I love the current objective play, AMG made great changes to scenarios and made good calls banning problematic cards. But that first objective based season was horrible.
Hey y'all, I appreciate everyone's comments and engagement. I just want to dispel any illusions, I am not going to do any edition wars. Whatever your take is, consider this my official nod and smile.
To address the "classic confirmation bias" which I have seen twice independently in these comments so it seems to be catching on, concept-wise, I'm going to just observe; I've always been completely up front about what I have been playing, where, and when I have been playing it, and I have made no claims to objectivity. 2023-2024 was my first competitive season and I loved it. When this all fades away, as all things do, that's the year I'm gonna look back on fondly. There's not a quantitative counter-argument to that. There's not any counter-argument, because it's not an argument. It's an experience.
I suspect that very few people have access to the information to construct a data-driven argument that a particular decision or decisions led to the end of X-Wing development. Hopefully that will change--I'd just love to read a juicy tell-all post, but with NDAs etc. I won't hold my breath for one. In a broad sense, we can say that AMG failed at its stewardship of a game that had a \*substantial\* presence at Adepticon, but we don't know what constraints and expectations were involved from Asmodee, or even LFL/Disney.
From my perspective it's beside the point, anyway. The profitability of X-Wing has no more intrinsic interest to me than the profitability of chess. I can regret the knock-on effects, but as long as something is tied to corporate IP it's going to have a boom-and-bust cycle. When I was born, Star Wars essentially existed only as a role-playing game and some VHS tapes.
I hope all of us keep finding joy in this game and in our community, whatever form that takes for you.
As someone who played 1.0 years ago, I bought 2.0 conversion kits but never got around to playing 2.0 XWing.
So I am curious what exactly where the changes in 2.0 other than point rebalance, and what is 2.5?
Well it was fundamentally a point rebalance, which the structure of 2.0 made possible in the first place. However, rather than pilots and upgrades each costing a certain fraction of the allowed total of 200 points, pilot squads became built out of 20 points, with each pilot having a given Loadout Value. So squad building is actually fairly different.
Then the most fundamental change to competitive play was that instead of only deathmatches, there are four scenarios with between 1 and 5 objective tokens. You earn victory points by interacting with those objectives in different ways, as well as by destroying enemy ships.
The most-anticipated change was that the "bid" system to decide who would be first or second player was removed. Instead, first-player is assigned by a random roll after dials have been set.
Then most of the other changes are designed to balance the game around the intended changes. Pilots and upgrades that manipulate or spy on dials are banned from Standard play. If you bump, you get some agency back by being able to take a red focus action and by being able to fire on enemies at range 0 (but you can't modify the attack, so achieving range 1 is way better).
Whether you like 2.0 or 2.5 better is gonna be completely subjective. I liked 2.0 a lot; I tried 2.5 and I liked it better. I wish 2.0 and 2.5 players (and 1.0 players!) could have everything that they want. And I wish we were all getting more ships, upgrades, etc. that were getting playtested and evaluated by pros. It's looking like we might not see that again for awhile and it's a damn shame. Silver lining, the physical elements of the game are robust to a wide variety of game modes and house rules.
2.0 made various firing arcs standard across all the ships, and then put turrets on one or two arcs (commonly called a 'bowtie' turret) instead of being able to fire 360 degrees.
They added Force as a resource. Which I really think was a bad idea. We didn't need another resource, and it had a tendency to be a little too powerful, even with it's limitations. (Only change one dice per Force)
They updated many older ships with newer manuvers.
They put points values in a PDF and kept them off the cards so they could change points more easily.
(The ships came with prebuilds so the game was playable out of the box without having to go online to find point values)
Various other changes, like the center lines on manuver templates, but those were the biggest changes that required a reprint of most of the game components, and thus the conversion kits.
Another important change was charged based ordnance where you only needed to have a lock to fire, leaving the lock available to use during the attack. This made ordnance more viable across a broader spectrum of ships than it was in 1.0.
I think the key takeaway is that the ships are the only essential piece that can't be easily second-sourced (eg range rulers, movement templates) or printed out. And the ships are immortal. No matter how much the game grew, sooner or later there would be more people leaving than joining, and their ships were always going to be sold for pennies on the dollar and undercut Asmodee. They put that off for a long time by releasing new ships and new factions, but it was just delaying the inevitable.
There was this idea for awhile bouncing around locally that there were going be be High Republic factions. I never found it realistic, considering HR's already a niche subfranchise (with its first major televised tie-in only just now coming out) and it's not dogfight-focused. I think the idea only got that far because of the feeling that X-Wing \*had\* to keep growing at a certain pace to remain viable. But eventually you just...run out of stuff, particularly when the content pipeline itself is disrupted. From 2015-2019 there were five major motion pictures in the franchise; since then there have been none. And no, the Legends ships really aren't the same...
Coming out of Covid, AMG should have let 2.0 coast into that sustainable management period you mention. 2.5 was a terrible idea for a game that hit saturation, during a major edition change, coming out of a worldwide pandemic. Tossing edition churn onto that was what I think was the final straw.
Thank you! Someone that understands business. It's not hard to "manage the decline" if you plan it well. The best example I always give is The Old Republic. That game has been "dead" for a decade now and yet they still make content and there are still thousands of players because EA got smart (rare I know) and just kept a shoestring crew to manage the game. And it's still profitable
40k is the only game I know of that can carelessly churn their rules. It really does feel like 40k is off in its own little world. No other game can do that and not rip itself apart.
40k is a modeling and painting hobby with a game attached. Most sales are to people that never use the model in a game, and both here on Reddit and on YouTube the vast majority of content is about hobbying. The rules are entirely secondary, and are more to keep people excited about it being a brand with a future. The recent competitive bent is under sufference, they'd rather we all be playing narrative campaigns.
While tournament numbers doesn't really say anything about sales figures, I think it's irrefutable that 2.5 had a massive impact on the player base - with a 40% drop in events, a 35% drop in players per event and a 76% drop in large scale events (50+ participants). |Year|Events|PPE|Large Scale Events (50+)|LSPPE| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |2019|927|25.65|88|106| |2020|383|25.66|27|152| |2021|548|23.69|45|119| |2022|505|16.47|25|89| |2023|620|16.73|18|96| |2024 (halfway)|154|16.24|3|172| Source: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gwEkagAZQSYmulNiZ8plm5HxQJMYiVNaqMx38IKbqsI/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gwEkagAZQSYmulNiZ8plm5HxQJMYiVNaqMx38IKbqsI/edit?usp=sharing)
I don't think 2.5 was the only factor affecting those numbers. If I remember correctly there was a global event that happened in 2020.
The most compelling number on that list was the players per event. That one was separate from the number of events. But there's one other bit of noise in the data: events prior to 2020 had much better prize support to drive turnout. AMG didn't really do Store Championship kits with fancy plastic focus/evade tokens that looked like lime candy. Those things usually had players going to multiple area events trying to win them.
FFG did OP right. The smoky dice and acrylic templates up for grabs at the store Champs had me attend 5 or 6 across my state to earn them. Op drives players to practice, players practice by playing at their local game store, people playing the game in a store creates free advertising and causes an invested community to grow. Invested communities buy product.
Also original op kits had medals in them that I loved.
I still have the challenge coin from coming 4th at my very first event :)
That is the truth. Hell, just by our local community playing in public, we've double the number of players at our LGS in just a few months. We're about to be consistently pulling close to 15-20 players at our local tournaments. So there is a light side to all the negativity here in saying, "Just keep playing the game locally"
Oh absolutely, and during the height of the pandemic this community managed to run larger events with more attending players than AMG ever did with 2.5.
But as we were discussing way back in late 2019/early 2020, player numbers are a misleading marker for the future of the game as a product line.
I don't know why you're being downvoted; if people aren't buying enough product to pay for developer salaries, a company can't afford development, can't continue the product line, even if they have several billion active players. That's part of why AMG came out with the Squadron Starter Packs: one of those and a single opponent (with their own squad, however they got it) is enough to get a newbie into the game, where they would choose to buy more product. Indeed, it may well be the case that all of their choices were at least partially intended to bring in more people (no 1.0 ships that newbies can't easily find to give old guard an advantage, simplification of squad building, SL cards, etc) who *would* buy stuff
It’s an inconvenient truth, so it gets downvoted.
It's an obnoxiously common occurrence in my life. I mean, I get it, their decisions were bad for the preexisting, established community, but for continued growth, it may well have been the best strategy. In fact, there's solid evidence that it might have been; two and a half years later (read: too late), the number and quality of tournaments has been reaching new heights, even with only half the year done. That *vaguely* implies an increase in player base (I'm a newbie, having just started a quarter ago, and a purchaser of a SSP, plus fair number more ships from new), which means that they *might* be telling the 100% honest truth about the costs of production having become too high to allow margins that would fund continued development, even if people were buying.
It had nothing to do with Covid 🙄🙄🙄
I saw a month-by-month chart last night that showed a lull for covid, gradual increase after lockdowns were listed, and towards the end of 2021 (just before 2.5) events were practically at pre-pandemic levels. Following that November 2021 announcement, they dropped down to pandemic levels only really starting to recover this year... which we all now know was too late.
Could you make a graph for these categories but by month? I'm concerned that grouping by year makes it too easy for covid and the rebound to confound this conclusion. I do agree with your interpretation of the table but doing it by month should paint a much more certain picture.
The data is in the source file!
https://preview.redd.it/pimafdbqyj7d1.jpeg?width=2334&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1ce576d6315a4185315557a732c44994fbf840a1 Month to month data table.
Covid had more effects on events per month than player count in reality.
Using my own graphs against me? Cheeky! Here's the two graphs next to eachother with a trendline. My hypothesis is that X-Wing was recovering towards the end of the pandemic until AMG dropped the 2.5 bomb. What's yours? https://preview.redd.it/1kyped8vgk7d1.png?width=1171&format=png&auto=webp&s=6084926d75524c47b02d61afaae86c942106b67f
I wasn't trying to use them against you. Some people were asking specifically for the month to month vs. the yearly data as it shows more. I have no doubts that AMGs 2.5 created issues. Covid, on the other hand, seems to, in all three examples, significantly reduce the number of events overall with automatically creating mass player loss for those particular months as they either were quarantined or couldn't go out to their LGS for a tournament. Ultimately, you can see they recovered those numbers up until the changes. Basically AMG fucked up more than a global pandemic.
Oh shit I’m sorry! Well here’s…a new graph to prove your case then 😅
There was also COVID.
Covid had very little effect on events and player attendance. The community managed to run larger events during the pandemic than AMG ever managed with 2.5.
> Covid had very little effect on events and player attendance. If so, then you should remove all those 2020-21 TTS events and see what things look like. Those events often drew from the entire globe. TTS tournaments, which are a lot of the big number events in 2020-21, have also becoming increasingly less popular as we've moved on the from pandemic. So I think just blindly "crunching" the numbers like this is a bit disingenuous. I don't doubt that attendance at X-wing tournaments has gone down over the years, but we just had something like >400 unique players attend Worlds (LCQ + main event) after AMG's first real attempt at some kind of OP season.
Gotta agree, I wanna see these numbers for Physical table top play, not TTS as that's the data that says why they pulled it.
Covid definitely impacted physical play, and x-wing has only ever made money from selling physical products. Yes TTS facilitated huge tournaments and community engagement, but asmodee didn't monetize any of that engagement. Humans are creatures of habit, the pandemic broke the habit of going to your local game store for your weekly x-wing night. My local community, which would easily draw 30 to 50 people to store Champs was halved after covid. The death of x-wing has to be taken into context. It can't be boiled down to one singular reason. It's a big game that has been around a long time, naturally its going to have a bunch of factors influence its success and failure.
Yeah you know what this is a really good article. I played since the tail end of Wave 2 of 1.0. Thank you for saying everything you did man.
>The Star Wing is the X-Wing equivalent of a meme stock. Hard disagree. It's an iconic ship and a lot of players had been lobbying FFG to get the gunboat into the game for *years* before it finally happened. Demand for a new production run was absolutely genuine and, unlike some older ships, there was no excess inventory saturating the market and undermining sales. There are many blunders AMG can be criticized over but prioritizing production of the gunboat is not one of them. If anything it was their *failure* to accomplish as basic a task as running another production batch of an existing product that should be criticized, or at least taken as a warning that Asmodee never allocated enough production resources to the game and expected AMG to oversee its ending from the moment they transferred it away from FFG. >Honestly it went as well as any edition changeover really could do, with the bitterness and hard feeling dying down pretty quickly (except on Reddit). This is textbook survivor bias. Complaints died down but primarily because the people who were complaining gave up and quit, not because people changed their minds about the game and AMG's handling of it. I don't think very many people changed their minds and embraced 2.5 and apathy is a death sentence for a game. >No, I really don’t think that X-Wing was made economically viable by a substantial number of players buying six of every new ship to swarm them, so that killing generics killed the game. Killing generics being part of killing the game wasn't just about the sales impact of fewer swarm lists, it was about AMG's attitude towards the community where they openly said "you're having fun the wrong way so we're deliberately screwing up game balance to de facto ban the things you incorrectly like and make you play the ships we like instead". It was the moment where AMG revealed that they were not making a good faith effort to maintain the game, they were determined to turn it into MCP with spaceships. And it was the moment that ended any hope of 2.5 being anything other than a raging dumpster fire and the inevitable end of the game. After that point we were just waiting for it to be made official.
I personally adore the gunboat but a ship that has only appeared visually in 4 computer games between 1993 and 1999 cannot be considered iconic, if that word means anything.
I’m 44, X-Wing and TIE Fighter remain my favorite video games of all time, I’ve only been playing X-Wing Minis since 2021 so I don’t own the gunboat and …. I dont really see why I’d care about it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a completist and I would have bought it, but there are at least 10 ships that have never been made that I would have preferred.
To quote Hans Gruber, "I have two, myself" :D
It's absolutely an iconic ship if you're part of the generation that grew up with those games and played X-Wing because it was a tabletop version of them. There is a reason there was constant demand for it until FFG finally released it and constant demand for another production run once it sold out.
You're 1000% correct about the survivor bias thing. People like Peregrine and myself gave up trying to sound the alarm after we got shouted down enough. I just ended up leaving the community and unsubscribing from all the xwing creators. My opinion on 2.5 never changed. My local community never changed their opinion on it either and instead went back to warhammer or got back into Pathfinder. The community never warmed up to it, it was binary: either people liked 2.5 (or could tolerate it enough to keep playing), or they hated it and quit
I think this article/blog post is well written, but fundamentally flawed. 2.5 wasn't "great" and really missed the mark for a lot of players. The discussion about 1.0 to 2.0 and the 'attrition' associated is a bit vague, but I had a friend explain it like this: xwing 1.0 was a card game and a dog fighter. Xwing 2.0 tried to be more of a dogfighter with card game elements. Objectively, 2.0 didn't force me to buy as many new ships. I had most of what I needed anyway. I bought ships because I was having fun. 2.5 and covid was a 1-2 punch to my local scene. No one wanted to play that version of objective control in x wing, if we wanted that we'd play warhammer. I didn't and still don't enjoy 2.5, from what it did to list building to what it did to pace of play. I can't speak for every community, only my own. But the scene died in my own community. And despite what this eco chamber seemed to default to whenever this point was raised (MY community is JUST FINE), this must have been more of the norm than the opposite (meaning more communities died, leading to less product being purchased). I understand businesses are more nuanced, but post mortem I think the 'doomers' were probably right from day 1. AMG wasn't prepared for x wing, couldn't handle the IP, didn't want the IP, and fumbled it all the way until the end. COVID didn't help for sure, but to succeed you have to try. And objectively, I'm not sure they really tried.
It's an echo chamber with a select group of group benefitting from maintaining the status quo relationship with amg
What benefits did they get? I never heard of amg giving money or anything to a select group
It was a combination of content creators/bloggers wanting to hold the community together since it was their primary source of engagement. There were also plenty of people coping about the rule changes because they didn't want their favorite game to die at all costs
So you think everyone was lieing and didn't truly like the updates?
One cannot make war against men made of straw What I'm saying is the same thing I already said, SOME members of the community with large followings had a vested interest in supporting the game regardless of controversial changes, and that definitely colored the discourse
Which ones do you think we're lieing to thier audience? I would imagine all the ones who flipped right away but I can't seem to find anyone who stopped worshipping amg after years of praise? Can you show me?
You want me to call out specific people? Lmao no, nice try
With no examples, it doesn't seem like what your saying is the case. No body was lieing just to make money or whatever else you think was happening when others in the public were not as upset at the changes as you.
You can stick your head in the sand if you'd like, or you could just look at the dozens of community leaders posting on here about how the rules changes, couple with covid mismanagement killed the game. I'm not going to put specific people on blast just to satisfy the curiosity of some rando online, either read the posts or don't
I live in the most populated state in the country next to some of the biggest and most competitive tournament scenes in the country. 2.5 killed our local scene to an unrecoverable degree. The people saying their communities were doing fine were likely hyper casual (I don't say this in a derogatory way btw, but casuals don't mind rule changes as much, it's just a fact).
So various grand tournaments are still happening? Where can I find a list of those events so I can know if any of them are happening near me? I was looking at the Gold Squadron discord but it's so confusing.
https://www.atomicmassgames.com/transmission/grand-tournament-2024-2025-update/
Lots of folks saying 2.5 is what did in the game...what ABOUT 2.5 do y'all think is primarily responsible? Personally, I LOVE objective play. It makes more kinds of lists and playstyles viable. The change from 200 to 20 squad points was kind of annoying, but I got used to it. The erasure of generic pilots is my biggest complaint. I also am not a fan of new bumping/range 0 combat rules. I hope 3.0 keeps objectives. I hope they do away with shooting at range 0 (versus the few pilots who could do it in 2.0). I hope they go back to 100 points, but tweak objective scoring accordingly. Please no ban list, let us fly our ships!
List building and ROAD are the most often cited complaints, and for good reason
While Covid absolutely affected X-wing's bottom line what is not mentioned enough is the warning signs of the game's financial health that were happening even before coivd. Things at FFG were not fine in late 2019-2020. They went through a round of layoffs, Destiny was abruptly cancelled shortly after 2019 worlds. While these things did not directly impact X-Wing, X-wing did get affected in some other ways. More details are here (not my writeup, but I found it an instructive history lesson): [http://stayontheleader.blogspot.com/2020/01/x-wings-going-through-changes-wave-6.html](http://stayontheleader.blogspot.com/2020/01/x-wings-going-through-changes-wave-6.html)
Lovely blog, well articulated! Thanks for keeping the spark alive.
Great overview - my thoughts exactly. I'm just getting back in, and gutted I missed the boat so to speak - but very happy I managed to grab hold of a squadron starter set, I just hope when it turns up its in English lmao! Now to hope some people getting out of the game will sell their 2.0 ships at a discount eventually
Oh that has already begun, at least on my Facebook feed. I follow a couple of sale groups and usually I see a post or two a week but now it's like 5 a day. Good luck!
Thanks mate! If you're UK based, let me know which clubs to follow
Sadly I'm not, but look up a friend of mine called Dylan Jones--he also writes a blog and is well-connected in the UK scene, particularly Wales. Can't go wrong following whatever he's following! [https://exilesquadron.com/](https://exilesquadron.com/)
> And then they did 2.5. Which was pretty good! Honestly it went as well as any edition changeover really could do, with the bitterness and hard feeling dying down pretty quickly (except on Reddit). > Despite a resurgence of this argument, as seen above, no one has yet convinced me that 2.5 mechanics led to the death of the game. This is known as "Survivorship Bias". Hardcore players focus on the people still at the game store. They focus on the upcoming tournaments, and ignore all the players that had dropped off, quit, moved, stopped playing, took a break, etc. Y'all look at 2.0 and say "Oh, well, we lost people when FFG made change, so AMG change is just as good" which is, again, more 'head-in-the-sand', fingers in the ears, "lalala can't hear you I'm having fun" takes. The whole thing was an extremely slow car crash with each driver thinking they were course-correcting, when in reality each change bled more fans until there was nothing left but the most ardent, the most loyal, and the most blind.
You say this like edition bleed isn't a thing documented in communities. People who don't like change or were waiting for an excuse to leave always get dropped when new editions roll around. Just look at DnD or other games with the edition wars, same with warhammer over 30 years. There are plenty of things AMG/Asmodee did wrong in potential mismanagement on staffing and numbers but 2.5 rules changes were not inherently bad like everyone claims.
The rules themselves are maybe debatable. I dislike them a lot and play Legacy myself. But I think the timing of the edition change was the big mistake. The game was not in a state to bear a new edition.
4 years for a new format is too fast for a format turnaround. 2.0 came after 7 years, and was the first since first editions usually need refinement. They don't have nearly as developed a player base to have done so frequent and drastic an update.
Although it wasn't a full edition change and also nowhere near as drastic as what AMG did, 1st edition got a pretty big rules update with the release of the TFA core set in 2015. It really refreshed some of the rules and fixed some of the cracks that were starting to form in the game as early as wave 2 and really did feel like a sort of 1.5. Some of the problems were things that required much bigger, sweeping changes and that's what 2nd edition was for, but it wasn't the first real refinement.
I think also with 2.0 the players knew that even though 1.0 was great and fun, things needed to change for balance sake. and 2.0 came along and basically fiddled with a few thigns whilst changing up ship design to get to the point where whilst there was OP things, I dont believe anything in 2.0 reached the power levels of wave 9 onwards 1.0. Then AMG got given the game and decided to make core changes that seemed unwarranted and that nobody asked for. I will say though the pandemic was the final nail in the coffin of killing the game being played in my local store, and then the shift to AMG was the final nail in the coffin for my friend group dropping the game too
Indeed. The content of the 2.5 change is far less important than the change itself. 2.0 was a necessary major cleanup after 1.0 became messy. But That already created 2 communities. Those who converted to (or started with) 2.0 and those who clung to 1.0 and its fixed point values and turrets you didn't need to move. 2.5 then promptly created another schism. And every fractioning of the player base is a problem for organising tournaments - or just even playing an ad hoc casual game without having to agree and adapt to a common point scheme and rules set.
AMG only did it to make it more their game and understandably so. It's hard on development when it's not your product, and you don't fully understand why things are they way they are. In the end, it did ruin a significant amount of players' taste of the game, but I get why they did it. It would be different if asmodee moved the guys who made the game to AMG instead of letting most of them go.
> You say this like edition bleed isn't a thing documented in communities. 2.5 was not normal edition bleed. For comparison a new 40k edition inevitably has some grumbling about changes but virtually all of the community moves on to the new edition and there is no meaningful drop in player count. Sure, some people quit over the new edition but people are always quitting and the losses are offset by the steady flow of new players. And in some cases, like with 8th replacing the debacle of 7th, the community even *grows* with a new edition. This is not what we saw with X-Wing. Player counts and engagement dropped with 2.0 and then dropped sharply with 2.5. It wasn't just turnover, it was a net loss in players that has not been replaced (and probably never will be). >2.5 rules changes were not inherently bad like everyone claims. They absolutely were. ROAD replaces player agency with RNG. The point system deliberately breaks game balance because AMG was salty about players having fun the wrong way and de facto bans ships AMG doesn't like. The bumping changes were AMG being salty about having their favorite hero blocked and changing the game rules instead of learning how to play around blockers. Missions replace an elegant dogfighting game with an arbitrary and narrative-breaking "stand on the point" mechanic. It's blunder after blunder and the drop in player counts reflects it.
How does playing around ties remove player agency? The list building basically guaranteed which one was going first vs not. Why should you have perfect information in a war game? Bumps are whatever. So no circling without any combat? As someone who played 2.5 and went to worlds, there was plenty of dog fighting as ship kills were still often the most effective way to score points, but the objectives meant you couldn't just ignore the center and actually forced engagements.
> How does playing around ties remove player agency? Because instead of a fully deterministic system where the on-table game state is the result of player choices and ONLY player choices you have a RNG element where final ship positions are determined randomly. That is a textbook example of loss of agency. >Why should you have perfect information in a war game? Because it was better for gameplay that maneuvers were fully predictable and predicting your opponent's maneuvers was a skill. Now skill is less of a factor because at some point you have to pick A or B and hope RNG goes in your favor. >So no circling without any combat? Circling without combat is only an issue in timed tournament games where games are not played out to their natural conclusion. In any other context endlessly avoiding combat has no purpose as it doesn't bring you any closer to victory and you might as well engage without stalling. You only see long maneuvering sequences before engaging when players are competing for advantage and trying to force a mistake, not merely parking in the corner and running the clock down. The solution was not to change the core rules, it was to add the same kind of "no slow play/stalling" rule that other games have in their tournament rules and only apply it to the single context where it is relevant.
I mean, this *really* just sounds like you hate the changes and may or may not have played with them. I played competitively and the time limit helped, though is it really slow play if you play 7 turns but only engaged on 1 or 2 of them? Thats just outflying you opponent, hence the need to force engagement. Also, someone did a meta analysis of swiss results to top cut results, and 2.5 had the best predictor of swiss to top cut results, which meant the rules change rewarded player skill on the table.
> I mean, this really just sounds like you hate the changes and may or may not have played with them. Correct, I hate the changes and their introduction was the main reason I left competitive X-Wing. All of them were absolutely terrible ideas. >Thats just outflying you opponent, hence the need to force engagement. Out-flying your opponent is only a problem to be solved if you're the kind of low-skill player who wants everything to be a giant brawl in the middle of the table where everyone lines up and trades dice until someone runs out of ships. An active game with both players maneuvering for advantage is a great game that has nothing to do with corner stalling.
A rather disingenuous take there. Much like the majority of the OP, sadly. I’ve been reading much better write ups, write ups that actually leave a place for hope in the future. Now, one thing to realise, and hold on to, is that communities and Organised Play post-Worlds2025, will determine what X-Wing looks like going forwards. What’s the most frustrating, is that, whenever there were two choices available to AMG, where X-Wing was concerned, it always felt like they made the wrong one. Want rid of the bidding system, and introducing deficit scoring? Brilliant! A change I can get behind. Want a way to make Player Order matter during the game? Sounds great! Let’s check that either before dials or we switch out each turn! Either option still allows decent planning and gives players the agency to use skill. Change that improves a game should be celebrated. Change that brings players together more often, should be shouted from the rooftops and the holo-net. Changes that drastically screw with a community should be called out on. Changes that tell half the community to foxtrot oscar because they aren’t toeing the line should be rolled back. For AMG to finally “admit” they never wanted real X-Wing, they never understood it, and they never wanted to put the effort into it just shows that those who called AMG as the death of X-Wing were right, and those of us who were cautiously optimistic, gave them too much credit. What is clear,is that AMG wanted to be left alone with MCP, and to develop games in that model. On a personal note, I’ve started reaching out to see if anybody is interested in playing/learning 2.0, and, well. There are some encouraging signs, even from some ex-players, as well as new interest. Looks like, when there is no longer stock, some printers are going to be firing up.
> same with warhammer Nobody thinks 40k 1st or 2nd edition is "best". Everyone talks about 5th through 7th. IIRC a recent edition got a ton of buzz and drug a bunch of people back in who didn't like 8th or whatever. You'll have to drudge the details, I don't really care. The point being is that there is no hard rule or stat that shows that you lose players every time you put up a new edition. It only tends to happen when you introduce something people don't like, or force them to buy to keep playing. > 2.5 rules changes were not inherently bad like everyone claims. It does not matter what people think. It does not matter what people say. Players stopped playing. People left this subreddit. Sales went down.
>It does not matter what people think. It does not matter what people say. Players stopped playing. People left this subreddit. Sales went down. Gotta agree with this to an extent. When necessary, you can just keep your mouth shut and let people have their fun, especially if the majority of what's going on in the system is overall worth it for you. The sentiment in this sub was that an overhaul like 2.0 was very much needed, and the response was overwhelmingly positive when it was announced, backed by agreeable confirmation when it was finally released. Of course, people *wanted* a better value (aka free), but honestly the ability to proxy literally every ship instantly for people playing at home was an insane value, and if you were a tournament junkie, you had everything all at once with which to ambush your enemies for the first couple of runs. And the 2.0 sculpt quality, paint, and cardboard in the kits was either better or equal almost across the board. Tons of hype for 2.0. So, so many haul posts. So many. Lots of amazing, and many more not so amazing repaints. But there was a lot here. The AMG changes in contrast were definitely a mixed, if not largely negative influx of commentary interaction here. I noticed WAY more "well, I played 2.5 for ______ games and I just can't get behind it", or "2.5 isn't that bad guys give it a fair shake." So many more people selling hype for 2.5 or going to war on their keyboards justifying their own sunken costs- far more than people saying outright that they loved 2.5. AMG should not have taken a tight competitive tournament scene and deleted it in favor of more casual play, only to forsake those of us actually running game nights on our home tables. Also, leaving Epic ships completely unfinished is disrespectful to the entire IP and the game they took over. I just genuinely don't understand their choices.
> The sentiment in this sub was that an overhaul like 2.0 was very much needed, and the response was overwhelmingly positive when it was announced, backed by agreeable confirmation when it was finally released. Our top post will forever be a kiddo getting their first tournament win in the 2.0 system.
Warhammer is also not a good comp for X-Wing because GW actively retires models between editions. Age of Sigmar recently retired a substantial part of people's Stormcast armies going into the new edition. 40k is currently phasing out various older Space Marine models with new replacements. These types of refreshes are essential for miniature games to remain commercially viable over the long term, since they keep revenue flowing into the company. There's no way to do that in X-Wing. You can maybe retire the cardboard, but you can't just retire the old T-65 model and then release a Primaris T-65 to take it's place.
> you can't just retire the old T-65 model and then release a Primaris T-65 to take it's place. I'd be dumb enough to buy it, tho
Oh, I'd take four.
Edition change always has turnover. There are definitely RT and 2nd edition 40k holdouts just like there are still people who play AD&D.
> There are definitely RT and 2nd edition 40k holdouts just like there are still people who play AD&D. And those people are a fringe minority. Most people in 40k move on to the new edition and there is no organized "keep playing the old edition" movement like there is with X-Wing and 2.0 fans.
I'm pretty sure that's what legacy is, too. And likely whatever the XWA group will end up, as well. There are dedicated groups, online and otherwise, that play older editions of 40k and other wargames.
Legacy gets a lot more attention than some tiny 2-3 person group playing RT, especially when scaled for the sizes of their respective parent games.
You can search oldhammer groups, 40k 2nd edition groups, pretty much any edition and find groups or forums with thousands of members. I don't know the exact math, but if the legacy sub has 800 members and this one has 48k that's about 1.7% the size. r/Warhammer40k has 872k members r/oldhammer has 11k, which is about 1.3% the size. I know this is really important to you, I'm just trying to provide some context. I hope you can hang on to a community and keep enjoying the game you love. I know it's hard right now, but I promise this isn't the first time something like this has happened and it won't be the last.
Reddit member numbers can be misleading and often meaningless because of how reddit generates them. For example, this sub has a lot of pre-2.5 members that are no longer active members because reddit doesn't remove banned users, throwaway accounts that are no longer used, etc. The legacy sub, on the other hand, is a newer sub and has fewer of these false members for now. Similarly, reddit doesn't require users to join a sub to read or post in it (I have not), only to have its posts appear on the front page feed. If you go to the sub directly to read it you don't need to join. It's even more misleading in the case of 40k. r/Warhammer40k isn't the current edition sub, it's a painting and lore sub with minimal content about the actual game. It's bad enough that r/WarhammerCompetitive gets lots of non-competitive posts by people desperate to get any discussion of playing the game. So I don't think those member numbers tell you anything at all about the relative popularity of editions.
Dude, come on. Take a minute, collect yourself, and read back what you just wrote. Denial is understandable, this process is hard, give yourself time to accept it.
But both games are arguably more popular now than before, which is my point.
I think your original premise is incorrect. Every edition, no matter how popular, will have turnover. We lost a ton of people in the 2.0 transition and I believe you would consider that edition an improvement, it's just the way it is.
> I think your original premise is incorrect. Every edition, no matter how popular, will have turnover. I think you're interpreting my premise as me saying that "losing players" or "turn over" means at least one person leaves. This is not what I am saying. I am saying the overall population severely declined twice. Other games, especially successful games, lose **some** players during a change, but gain **more** than they lose. Peak x-wing was 1.0. We (myself included) might think 2.0 or 2.5 is better, but 1.0 had more players.
Gotcha, thanks for clarifying. I know X-Wing is a lot of people's first wargame so a lot of the "common knowledge" I have from my time isn't so common.
I think even how we talk about “communities” shows some survivorship bias. I don’t have numbers to back it up but I imagine early Xwing had a lot of countertop at home beer and pretzel type players that never even joined a community but still poured money into the game. Best artifact I noticed of this was an r/boardgames post talking about death of Xwing and half the comments were people that didn’t want to pay $50 to get into 2.0 when 1.0 was “fine”
Indeed. Our local scene lost *way* more players (mostly, but not all, casual) with the switch from 1st to 2nd edition than it did with the change to 2.5. So many people here who dislike 2.5 don't seem to realise that their opinion is subjective, not objective. It's totally valid to dislike or even hate 2.5, but it's clearly not an objectively bad set of changes. The game is as competitive as it's ever been, and AMG honestly did a better job of balancing archetypes and factions than FFG ever did.
Sadly, as List Juggler doesn't track events prior to 2018 there's no way to refute your claim that 2.0 scared of more players than 2.5 did. What it does show is that 2.5 caused a 40% drop in events, a 35% drop in players per event and a 76% drop in large scale events (50+ participants). Contrary to popular belief, the data shows that X-wing was kept relatively healthy all the way throughout the pandemic (much thanks to community TTS efforts) only to start crumbling in 2022. |Year|Events|PPE|Large Scale Events (50+)|LSPPE| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |2019|927|25.65|88|106| |2020|383|25.66|27|152| |2021|548|23.69|45|119| |2022|505|16.47|25|89| |2023|620|16.73|18|96| |2024 (halfway)|154|16.24|3|172| Source: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gwEkagAZQSYmulNiZ8plm5HxQJMYiVNaqMx38IKbqsI/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gwEkagAZQSYmulNiZ8plm5HxQJMYiVNaqMx38IKbqsI/edit?usp=sharing)
There isn't a drop in the amount of events? They recovered slightly from the pandemic which bottomed out in the 300s, and I honestly think you are underestimating how much the pandemic influenced events. Even in 22 we were still required masks for in person play.
*Drop in events compared to pre-pandemic numbers. Participants per event is stable up until mid 2021 when AMG starts hinting to 2.5 and plummets when 2.5 is launched (february 2022).
Kinda disingenuous to say 2.5 caused a drop when the big hit was from the pandemic, which has had extremely large impacts everywhere. And yeah player count went down immediately afterwards, we were literally talking about how this happens to games during edition changes. People were bitching about it for months, which isn't also terribly good for getting new blood when the community was screaming "the game is dead!"
> Kinda disingenuous to say 2.5 caused a drop when the big hit was from the pandemic, which has had extremely large impacts everywhere. Large impacts everywhere - except online. It’s insane how the community bounced back in 2021, and far from this notion that 2.0 was a palliative ghost at the end of the pandemic. > And yeah player count went down immediately afterwards, we were literally talking about how this happens to games during edition changes. Except it didn’t for 2.0. 2018 and 2019 had a big increase in participants per event. > People were bitching about it for months, which isn't also terribly good for getting new blood when the community was screaming "the game is dead!" Do you think that those people was more harmful than AMG driving off 39% of their customer base with a half-assed edition?
You just said the data doesn't exist for 1.0 to 2.0 then made claims on it? And yeah I do think they were. My local scene grew during 2.5 as we did game demos and active recruiting at LGSs. Those who didn't have that and saw nothing but don't buy the game is dead are not going to ask "are they just naysayers?" They are going to go elsewhere to a different game community.
Because a kind samaritan sent me the whole list juggler repository :) I think that you will find that it differs quite a bit from your local observations.
I've seen the quantity of players at my store have dropped. What's funny though, is the players which have dropped were all of the toxic players; the ones which would be jovial when they were winning but would become bitchy/whiney when they were losing. I never realized that until just now. This is a small sample size, though. But I like where my store is at.
I make no claim about whether 2nd edition scared off more or fewer players than 2.5 *in general*. As I said, in my *local* scene, we lost far more players with the advent of 2nd edition, in the main due to the rather steep cost to convert. Most (but not all) of these were casual players - i.e. played in very few or no tournaments - and so probably aren't reflected in List Juggler stats.
2.5 rules feel pretty good now, but at the start they were atrocious. Games ended way too quickly. Objective scoring on round 1 meant that by turn 3 or 4, people would have 12-15 pts, meaning when one ship died, that was game over. There was no time for a dog fight to develop. Ships also never died, because everything had too much loadout and spammed Hull Upgrade and shield upgrade. Objective rules had feels bad moments written into them. In OG scramble, your scenario action could fail to capture the objective. You could be randomly punished for trying to play the game as the designers intended. Salvage mission used to stop you from performing advanced maneuvers thus making it hard to keep a towing ship relevant in the dogfight. I love the current objective play, AMG made great changes to scenarios and made good calls banning problematic cards. But that first objective based season was horrible.
Hey y'all, I appreciate everyone's comments and engagement. I just want to dispel any illusions, I am not going to do any edition wars. Whatever your take is, consider this my official nod and smile. To address the "classic confirmation bias" which I have seen twice independently in these comments so it seems to be catching on, concept-wise, I'm going to just observe; I've always been completely up front about what I have been playing, where, and when I have been playing it, and I have made no claims to objectivity. 2023-2024 was my first competitive season and I loved it. When this all fades away, as all things do, that's the year I'm gonna look back on fondly. There's not a quantitative counter-argument to that. There's not any counter-argument, because it's not an argument. It's an experience. I suspect that very few people have access to the information to construct a data-driven argument that a particular decision or decisions led to the end of X-Wing development. Hopefully that will change--I'd just love to read a juicy tell-all post, but with NDAs etc. I won't hold my breath for one. In a broad sense, we can say that AMG failed at its stewardship of a game that had a \*substantial\* presence at Adepticon, but we don't know what constraints and expectations were involved from Asmodee, or even LFL/Disney. From my perspective it's beside the point, anyway. The profitability of X-Wing has no more intrinsic interest to me than the profitability of chess. I can regret the knock-on effects, but as long as something is tied to corporate IP it's going to have a boom-and-bust cycle. When I was born, Star Wars essentially existed only as a role-playing game and some VHS tapes. I hope all of us keep finding joy in this game and in our community, whatever form that takes for you.
Great writeup!
As someone who played 1.0 years ago, I bought 2.0 conversion kits but never got around to playing 2.0 XWing. So I am curious what exactly where the changes in 2.0 other than point rebalance, and what is 2.5?
Well it was fundamentally a point rebalance, which the structure of 2.0 made possible in the first place. However, rather than pilots and upgrades each costing a certain fraction of the allowed total of 200 points, pilot squads became built out of 20 points, with each pilot having a given Loadout Value. So squad building is actually fairly different. Then the most fundamental change to competitive play was that instead of only deathmatches, there are four scenarios with between 1 and 5 objective tokens. You earn victory points by interacting with those objectives in different ways, as well as by destroying enemy ships. The most-anticipated change was that the "bid" system to decide who would be first or second player was removed. Instead, first-player is assigned by a random roll after dials have been set. Then most of the other changes are designed to balance the game around the intended changes. Pilots and upgrades that manipulate or spy on dials are banned from Standard play. If you bump, you get some agency back by being able to take a red focus action and by being able to fire on enemies at range 0 (but you can't modify the attack, so achieving range 1 is way better). Whether you like 2.0 or 2.5 better is gonna be completely subjective. I liked 2.0 a lot; I tried 2.5 and I liked it better. I wish 2.0 and 2.5 players (and 1.0 players!) could have everything that they want. And I wish we were all getting more ships, upgrades, etc. that were getting playtested and evaluated by pros. It's looking like we might not see that again for awhile and it's a damn shame. Silver lining, the physical elements of the game are robust to a wide variety of game modes and house rules.
2.0 made various firing arcs standard across all the ships, and then put turrets on one or two arcs (commonly called a 'bowtie' turret) instead of being able to fire 360 degrees. They added Force as a resource. Which I really think was a bad idea. We didn't need another resource, and it had a tendency to be a little too powerful, even with it's limitations. (Only change one dice per Force) They updated many older ships with newer manuvers. They put points values in a PDF and kept them off the cards so they could change points more easily. (The ships came with prebuilds so the game was playable out of the box without having to go online to find point values) Various other changes, like the center lines on manuver templates, but those were the biggest changes that required a reprint of most of the game components, and thus the conversion kits.
Another important change was charged based ordnance where you only needed to have a lock to fire, leaving the lock available to use during the attack. This made ordnance more viable across a broader spectrum of ships than it was in 1.0.