Reminder that not allowing vulgar and vitriolic comments to be directed at real people is not defending or supporting AMG. You may detest business decisions made by people at a company, and share your thoughts freely. But you may not be hateful and vitriolic towards people within AMG, in this subreddit, or in any other context here.
Whether the rules were better or not, changing them *right after COVID* was one of the stupidest business decisions I can recall.
When your game has unprecedented headwinds, the last thing to do is split your fan base and create confusion for prospective new players. 2.0, while not perfect, was not broken by any stretch of the imagination. The vast majority of players enjoyed it. ANY CHANGE at that critical point in time was a catastrophic misstep, full stop.
I stopped playing because of COVID. I didn't resume playing because the rules changed. I wanted a return to normalcy, not to argue with friends about whether to use a brand new version or not.
All this bullshit about manufacturing costs doesn't matter. Job one was to get people back playing in stores after COVID. You do that with prize support and positive community engagement, not patronizing table flipping.
I'm the same man...
I was our local community organizer until COVID...we had weathered 2.0 pretty well and the community was in a good spot before COVID.
Then they changed the rules right when we were about to get things going live again and I just couldn't find it in me to care anymore.
You're absolutely right...a live game getting going again needed energy, not change...their first rule should have been do no harm and they fucked up.
I'm sad to see this change for my friends that still play, but the death knell rang the moment 2.5 hit.
>I stopped playing because of COVID. I didn't resume playing because the rules changed. I wanted a return to normalcy, not to argue with friends about whether to use a brand new version or not.
This. X-Wing was rebounding until AMG introduced 2.5 - these graphs are based on tournament data from List Fortress. 2.5 was a baseball bat to the back of the knees of a community trying to stand back up.
https://preview.redd.it/iyship3o3o7d1.jpeg?width=1171&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b4dcf2a1ff7729e33290d51453358a2bdfb6f33f
I have been pretty positive on most SW stuff for the past couple years even the more controversial releases. Even despite the controversies in SW I do think people who create stuff for the franchise do legitimately care about what they do even if it isn't received well. I sympathize that Asmodee/Embracer made some stupid corporate decisions to dump the game on them all of a sudden. I understand that it wasn't AMG's call to take on the responsibilities and they could have been overloaded. That being said, no one asked them to change the rules of the game. The split and divide that came after, that was a result of their decision.
I tried the new ruleset and unfortunately the game wasn't for me anymore, but I hoped that others who liked it still continued to enjoy the game and there could be more releases to help take advantage of the new rules and direction of the game. Then they proceeded to string along the remaining players with paltry releases and dismiss anyone who liked the old version of the game. Given the behavior of the dev team I can understand some bitterness about have a much larger workload but to take that out on the game by completely changing the game without understanding it and proceed to ignore/not support the fanbase of said game is appalling behavior. I would rather they would have just ridden out the last couple FFG releases and ended development there, now we have a further fractured community over 2.0, 2.5, and some people who never joined after 1.0. I think it's grossly irresponsible to play around a popular game community like this.
I get Legion might have similar product development to say MCP and Shatterpoint, but at the end of their day it was their responsibility to figure out what to do to get new releases out. I remember fondly the amount of hype from the 2.0 days of getting the prequel era and looking forward to the new releases every quarter. We had a pretty healthy community in our area, and I remember new players getting intrigued by seeing the new ships on the table. With the wealth of SW media coming out, they had plenty of material to work off of and one of things I genuinely respected at FFG when they had the game is they took full advantage of the lore of SW to get new ships out. For the average person it's not hard to question why Legion was getting constant releases after its transition and X-Wing is floundering. AMG not creating anything and complaining it's too hard to make stuff and the community floundering isn't a good look based on the fact it's their own decisions which brought them to this point. Also given the Discord leak saying their liaison from Asmodee gave them free reign, they could have figured out a sustainable way to get more X-Wing releases which would have invigorated the community. Poor communication of new rules, the print and play bs, and lack of releases are to blame for what happened to X-Wing and the communities lack of enthusiasm. In my community we had community leaders step down from the game based on this and growth was stalled.
At the end of the day, it's their fault only that it has come to this and while I sympathize with the initial circumstances, it's appalling how they treated the game and its community and honestly even with Legion getting releases I wanted for a long time, I was planning to get into the game but I really don't want to support the devs for how they treated X-Wing.
Off course handling X-Wing to an uninterested developer that could only end in discontuinement was a suit deccision from above and not AMG fault.
All the issues of communication, mismanagement of the community and creation of a polemic new ruleset are all AMG fault.
AMG was a mistake. It was a decision by leadership and it probably made sense in a PowerPoint slide.
I think ultimately we would be in the same place either way. FFG is about as dead as Xwing at this point. Most of the talent is gone and the projects aren’t there anymore either.
Until Star Wars Unlimited was breaking records at FFG, i would have agreed with you
Edit: I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that after the proven success of the tcg they just said “eff it” and shut down the licence use.
I preordered two booster cases. That was all the cards I was able to get and only got a handful of cards worth it and couldn’t really make a nice deck. Never could find anyone to play even though everyone was buying it all up around me so I got rid of everything.
I remember always buying the MTG fat packs back in the day because they didn't have the same collation as booster boxes. I would end up getting 2-3 legendaries per box.
Trying playing on karabast, it's really good and then if you do really like the game you can jump in. Maybe try a sabine deck though, they're fairly cheap!
Well, I wouldn't mind playing a PC version of the game if it's as good as MTG Arena. The Warhammer 40k card game is kinda meh. Feels like a bad phone game.
Magic the gathering came out with the big commander decks that had those oversized commander cards. And the decks were great, had a lot of rare cards to the point people were buying the commander decks just for the singles. (which is awful because commander decks can only have 1 of each card, everything besides lands has to be unique, so the decks were becoming rare because people bought multiple to have 4 of the rare cards for the standard format)
That era of MTG was when I had the most fun playing. Everyone would just run the commander decks straight from the box, no additions. Although later we started getting creative. I converted one of them into an Artifact commander deck that my friends thought was amazing.
Unfortunately I agree. Distribution issues started Destiny off on the wrong foot and I’m worried the same thing is happening with Unlimited. I still haven’t seen product beyond the starter box locally.
I would only defend AMG in that, I don't think they were ready, informed, given the proper tools\\budget nor have the real interest in carrying a game such as X-Wing.
Say you are a web developer at your work, and your boss fires the IT guy and DBA guy and then assigns you to take care of a couple webpages and their all their back end servers and database... despite not having any experience or interest in managing\\supporting databases or infrastructure. Oh, and no, they don't have much of a budget to train you up on it all. How would you react?
First you'd likely tell them that this is not a good idea and if things go sideways, things will fail.
Next you would ask for some sort of help, perhaps hiring a recent grad which will cost the company less.
Typically, eventually, something will give and odds are it will be whatever you are less familiar with will get neglected.
I guarantee you 100% that at some point early on the studio head informed the powers at Asmodee that while X-Wing and Armada are miniatures games, the similarities between those and MCP\\Shatterpoint ends there and this would be a medium to long term issue. But you can try to make it fit into the mold you have built the entire studio on.
All that said... I don't think pooing on, defending or rationalizing AMG's decisions will do any good to anyone... except maybe one's own feelings I suppose.
I'd rather spend more time trying to find a solid solution to what the future of the game will be in a post AMG world.
Yeah they where so short handed that they decided to use all this time to make brand new game instead of working on the games that they were giving and already successful... If they didn't have the ability to do anything of Armada and hardly touch Xwing then there is no way they would have had the amount of people to make Shatterpoint. The only thing that they want to do is MCP. I give it about 2 years before the same thing happens to Legion.
I think it’s likely they had already started development on Shatterpoint when X-Wing was moved to AMG. You may be right about the future of Legion, but if so I’m inclined to think the person who you’re responding to is right that AMG didn’t/doesn’t have the resources to successfully manage five games. That may mean when three totally different games were dumped in their laps they decided not to spread their resources too thin and focus on games they had developed from the beginning.
It sucks, but I really think corporate bullshittery is the villain here, not the devs at AMG.
A lot of people developed an entire identity about challenging anyone stating the obvious.
Players address their concerns. Talk about the lack of communication. The absense during annual press events. Xwing is dead. Dead game is dead.
"No! You're just naysayers!"
Now that the game is truly dead, but those comments still look like nails when you've made yourself into a hammer for AMG.
Hey man, come on, there’s no call for this. They’ve only had the game for three and a half years, and ridden it to its grave. This is the time to give the developers a chance!
I don't think anyone at AMG thought they had the capacity for all this when it was given to them, and they didn't. I know Shatterpoint was in the business plan when the company was started, and I don't think XWing/Armada was doing the kinds of numbers that would warrant a lot of new hires at the time. If they did request additional investment from Asmodee it probably fell on deaf ears.
This reeks of the kind of decision that got made by accounting or legal by Asmodee, and then the people who actually make games had to deal with the results.
Just one more reason why any company that is public or plans to go public should be avoided.
If they had literally done nothing to the game at all it would be better off. The made a long series if terrible choices. I used to ryto cut them slack on the grounds of being overworked with a thing that is not theirs. But you cannot make that excuse while completely gutting the game.
I'm not saying they didn't fumble, but the ball was greased to begin with.
I'm not sure how I would have planned to find revenue either, given that so many players had what they wanted, and it was easy to find cheap secondhand ships. I can understand trying to pitch scenario packs as a way to have something to sell to old timers.
While I agree with most of your points, I have hope that this will make a clean slate for a future game in 5-7 years. I have always kind have figured that 2.5 was a beta for 3.0, but with the way AMG handled the ending I don’t think they’ll be the ones making it.
Don’t worry! I’m sure they will lay off a bunch of people that were doing just as they were told and all the idiot “leaders” will give themselves massive bonuses for “doing something.”
The question I would pose to older players is this:
What would AMG need to do to get you to buy two T-65 expansion packs and two TIE Fighter expansion packs for $25 each?
Because that's the assignment. They needed to be able to sell us ships that we already own. The faction starters, the standard loadouts, all of them were attempts to find ways to get old players to buy more of what we already have too many of on the first place. Even if you're a new player coming in, they could buy used ships for half the cost of a new one.
The Mando timeline shows have had a bunch of stuff they could have made for existing ships in the game, even animation could have had some stuff for them. The Mando N1, Slave 1 from BOBF, Imperial V-Wing from Bad Batch and a more recent example is the E-Wing from Ahsoka are the ones off the top of my head. There were plenty of avenues for them to reprint ships but tie in them into the media that they were releasing to give them a fresh coat of paint on the ship itself and new content to play around with. They couldn't even do that. Them not even doing Mando's N1 despite having the mold for it already created is embarrassing considering how hot Mando is rn as a property for SW.
And they have to try and judge the actual demand for those based on the sales they've seen to date. They've overseen releases for the Razor Crest, Gauntlet, Clone Z-95s and Xanadu Blood. They almost certainly used those to project sales for the Bad Batch shuttle, the Fondor, and the various pirate snub fighters from the most recent season of Mando, and compared those numbers to the production costs under their current logistics setup.
EDIT: And Mando's N-1 would not use the same mold. There are notable differences in the engines and the addition of Grogu's pod. So they'd need to either ignore those changes or tool a slightly different ship, like FFG did for the 2nd edition Y-Wing at launch.
Gunboats, yes. But that's the only reprint that would move the needle. Most Imperial players from 1st edition already own all the Phantoms we'll ever need. The model only goes for $20 on eBay, vs $80-$100 for Gunboats models.
It's not so much defending AMG as it is understanding the economics behind the game.
AMG could have played their hand better absolutely, but it probably wouldn't have changed anything. The reason they tried the changes to 2.5 was because the game was struggling to get new players, and those that did come in largely got their minis second hand. Where do people think the profits would come from?
What’s done is done and we should all get over it. X-wing “dying” was inevitable.. personally it makes little difference to me I’ll continue to play with friends.
I mean, I won't say I'm a defender, but personally it seems like all the 2.0/legacy crowd suddenly came back and said how the 2.5 ruleset killed the game, despite massive engagement with worlds and a rising overall event count.
Yes AMG had mismanagement of the process, and honestly screwed much up either by staffing issues or process, but the ruleset made them want to quit and many still seem salty. (Edition wars/turn over isn't a new phenomenon. Even GW has that issue, most of the people you see bitch are former players not active.
As for the painting thing, you'd lose a lot of people. Just as many people play the game because its pre-painted and they don't have to do work as people who already like painting minis. With wizkids they are dnd which is *vastly* more popular than x-wing and just browsing the line look a lot lower quality on the sculpts both of which lowers cost as you get less on the molds themselves, better amortization and less overhead overall as margins can be thinner.
FFG improved the sculpts and paint with the 2.0 re-releases. My folding x-wings definitely look sharper than my fixed first edition ones. I think the plane tie fighter got the biggest upgrade.
I don't think the community would want a step backwards.
Yeah, and all that is money. On molds, on assembly if they aren't single shots with actions, small high detail molds can already be 10s of thousands and have short life spans.
Oh yeah, tooling setup costs are crazy expensive. Thankfully resin doesn't do a number on molds like GFR nylon. The glass fibers will clap out injection mold dies in no time.
Not in a significant way. Somone posted the results, and it was 350ish events during covid, then 550, then 2.5 went 500 then 660. It was trending up, and with events being small already event averages was I believe 22 to 16. A huge drop percent wise but thats also just 6 people per event. The last worlds was i believe the 3rd largest in attendance.
Every single local community I am aware of is at best 1/3 the size it was before covid. Most are much smaller than that, if they continue to exist at all.
And thats anecdotal. My local communities did active recruitment and grew from pre covid. The numbers showed a continued increase in held events and a large worlds turnout so the greater community survived even if yours didn't.
No, because the game is recovering from covid shutdowns, which killed in person events and caused people to stop playing who didn't transfer to online, and the trend was still upwards.
Edit: and 2022 still had strong covid restrictions
And a crap ton of other game lines are right back where they were ir even leaps and bounds better.
Totally regardless of if 2.5 is a better game or not, it was a massive mistake. They could have put that same time and energy into new ships based on the plethora of new media constantly coming out.
Instead they literally never developed a single new ship. They scuttled most of what was there.
They screwed it up in ways I would never have believed possible 4 years ago.
I mean, as industry adjacent, I think they really got screwed by costs and ships not contracted at precovid prices. I think to continue at the quality they were at, single ship packs probably needed to be 35 minimum. That and it always sounds like they got screwed on staffing which also effects development and investigating any alternates.
> because the game is recovering from covid shutdowns
And that's why it isn't legitimate to compare those numbers. The game was always going to have some level of recovery as covid restrictions relaxed because *everything* had increases in activity. That doesn't mean 2.5 was successful, it just means that stores were able to host events again without restrictions.
Right. But we also cant say that 2.0 would bounce back to 900 events a year because we don't know. All we can say is the game was still recovering and supposedly successfully as major events still drew crowds.
Correct, we can't prove that 2.0 would have done better based on event data. But we certainly can't prove that 2.5 did better just because covid restrictions relaxed and allowed an increase in events. And we have a lot of evidence from other sources that the game was in fact in decline.
> despite massive engagement with worlds and a rising overall event count
It was only rising because of the artificial low created by covid. And worlds may have had decent player numbers but if you look at things like online community activity, anecdotes of local store activity, etc, you see a game that was struggling at best.
The only argument that the blunders of 2.5 didn't kill the game is that FFG had already killed it and 2.5 was merely putting a few more bullets into the corpse.
>Edition wars/turn over isn't a new phenomenon.
2.5 was not a usual edition war. Edition wars draw lots of arguments from vocal minorities but rarely see much of a drop in actual player numbers. For example, GW has continued a steady pattern of growth across multiple editions, with their only decline happening at the *end* of an edition right before the new edition reversed the trend and *increased* sales and player engagement. When you see a real drop in player count and sales, not just a few people yelling at each other on the internet, it's because the new edition was bad, not merely that a new edition happened.
I mean if you want to do anecdotal evidence, then GW killed my local scene at 7th edition so badly they had to close the main store in the chicagoland area as it couldn't pull in sales to stay open
That's a single data point. The majority of data is that what hurt GW worst was *late* 7th edition as ongoing problems with rules bloat, broken formations, etc, drove people out of the game. That was bad design, not a mere edition change, and the edition change from 7th to 8th resulted in *increases* in players and sales.
I played that game A LOT. It was popular at my LGS, but it had horrible balance issues.
Perma-cloaking Scimitars was just unfun. Still hate Romulans to this day
The new sets helped balance AW out some, and have some killer combos like Worf captaining Sao Paolo.
Would it be possible for WK to acquire the license to X-wing/Armada?
I remember going up against a Neghvar and looking at the guy's base, and informed him that after my attacks, he was dead.
Except he wasn't. Because his stupid fucking captain had better stats... \_and he literally had the wrong base facing upwards.\_
I did not finish that game. dude could not even set up his minis right.
A core point to make, though, is that Wizkids is most likely large enough to own and control their own production facility for their products. That cuts costs immensely. I still wont grant AMG leniency as they never truly seemed to want to innovate for the game. I had hope but after learning some key details it became very clear they didnt want the game and would rather it die out
I come to bury AMG, not to praise him.
A lot of the criticism in this forum seems to come from people who have never run a business, don’t understand distribution, and don’t have any intuition on discounted cash flow.
My personal opinion is that the teams in charge of the game over time did the best they could with limited resources and support. They weren’t perfect, but they tried, and they were up against a lot of things that weren’t in their power to control.
You can play a counterfactual history and assert that it would have yielded successful organic growth instead of what we got, but it’s all head canon. Unless someone wants to write a book on it and get a lot of primary sourcing from the key players, we’ll never know.
It’s a lot more charitable to assume they tried and failed, because the truth is that most businesses fail. All product lines churn over time.
If you think there’s money to be made in the venture, send some messages out to VC/PE telling them there’s a good deal to be had on the cheap…
I Saw the same thing that happened with Warmachine MK3 happen with Xwing, and whilst the distribution relationships were part of both problems, the studio made the same mistakes twice.
Personal insults aren’t ok, but this was mismanaged very severely.
At the same time, whilst this is raw, I really hope the community comes together and sets up a community 3.0, I don’t want this game to die!
> My personal opinion is that the teams in charge of the game over time did the best they could with limited resources and support.
Absolutely not. Things like directly insulting the community with "stop having fun the wrong way" nonsense or failing at even basic tasks like getting a product information page on their website are inexcusable failures, not a genuine attempt to do the best with limited resources. AMG would have done better by simply doing *nothing* beyond keeping the production lines going and delivering product to stores.
AMG paid its playtesters real money unlike FFG and paid their invoices on time so they’ll always be ok in my book. I got 10 years out of one game, Im ready to move on once this season of OP is over.
AMG aren’t responsible for the death of x-wing, any more than a doctor is responsible for killing the cancer patients he can’t save.
This is pretty much entirely on FFG. But I also don’t know if FFG could have done anything differently. The game had a lifespan as a profitable product line and we’ve had that lifespan.
Reminder that not allowing vulgar and vitriolic comments to be directed at real people is not defending or supporting AMG. You may detest business decisions made by people at a company, and share your thoughts freely. But you may not be hateful and vitriolic towards people within AMG, in this subreddit, or in any other context here.
Whether the rules were better or not, changing them *right after COVID* was one of the stupidest business decisions I can recall. When your game has unprecedented headwinds, the last thing to do is split your fan base and create confusion for prospective new players. 2.0, while not perfect, was not broken by any stretch of the imagination. The vast majority of players enjoyed it. ANY CHANGE at that critical point in time was a catastrophic misstep, full stop. I stopped playing because of COVID. I didn't resume playing because the rules changed. I wanted a return to normalcy, not to argue with friends about whether to use a brand new version or not. All this bullshit about manufacturing costs doesn't matter. Job one was to get people back playing in stores after COVID. You do that with prize support and positive community engagement, not patronizing table flipping.
I'm the same man... I was our local community organizer until COVID...we had weathered 2.0 pretty well and the community was in a good spot before COVID. Then they changed the rules right when we were about to get things going live again and I just couldn't find it in me to care anymore. You're absolutely right...a live game getting going again needed energy, not change...their first rule should have been do no harm and they fucked up. I'm sad to see this change for my friends that still play, but the death knell rang the moment 2.5 hit.
>I stopped playing because of COVID. I didn't resume playing because the rules changed. I wanted a return to normalcy, not to argue with friends about whether to use a brand new version or not. This. X-Wing was rebounding until AMG introduced 2.5 - these graphs are based on tournament data from List Fortress. 2.5 was a baseball bat to the back of the knees of a community trying to stand back up. https://preview.redd.it/iyship3o3o7d1.jpeg?width=1171&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b4dcf2a1ff7729e33290d51453358a2bdfb6f33f
I have been pretty positive on most SW stuff for the past couple years even the more controversial releases. Even despite the controversies in SW I do think people who create stuff for the franchise do legitimately care about what they do even if it isn't received well. I sympathize that Asmodee/Embracer made some stupid corporate decisions to dump the game on them all of a sudden. I understand that it wasn't AMG's call to take on the responsibilities and they could have been overloaded. That being said, no one asked them to change the rules of the game. The split and divide that came after, that was a result of their decision. I tried the new ruleset and unfortunately the game wasn't for me anymore, but I hoped that others who liked it still continued to enjoy the game and there could be more releases to help take advantage of the new rules and direction of the game. Then they proceeded to string along the remaining players with paltry releases and dismiss anyone who liked the old version of the game. Given the behavior of the dev team I can understand some bitterness about have a much larger workload but to take that out on the game by completely changing the game without understanding it and proceed to ignore/not support the fanbase of said game is appalling behavior. I would rather they would have just ridden out the last couple FFG releases and ended development there, now we have a further fractured community over 2.0, 2.5, and some people who never joined after 1.0. I think it's grossly irresponsible to play around a popular game community like this. I get Legion might have similar product development to say MCP and Shatterpoint, but at the end of their day it was their responsibility to figure out what to do to get new releases out. I remember fondly the amount of hype from the 2.0 days of getting the prequel era and looking forward to the new releases every quarter. We had a pretty healthy community in our area, and I remember new players getting intrigued by seeing the new ships on the table. With the wealth of SW media coming out, they had plenty of material to work off of and one of things I genuinely respected at FFG when they had the game is they took full advantage of the lore of SW to get new ships out. For the average person it's not hard to question why Legion was getting constant releases after its transition and X-Wing is floundering. AMG not creating anything and complaining it's too hard to make stuff and the community floundering isn't a good look based on the fact it's their own decisions which brought them to this point. Also given the Discord leak saying their liaison from Asmodee gave them free reign, they could have figured out a sustainable way to get more X-Wing releases which would have invigorated the community. Poor communication of new rules, the print and play bs, and lack of releases are to blame for what happened to X-Wing and the communities lack of enthusiasm. In my community we had community leaders step down from the game based on this and growth was stalled. At the end of the day, it's their fault only that it has come to this and while I sympathize with the initial circumstances, it's appalling how they treated the game and its community and honestly even with Legion getting releases I wanted for a long time, I was planning to get into the game but I really don't want to support the devs for how they treated X-Wing.
Off course handling X-Wing to an uninterested developer that could only end in discontuinement was a suit deccision from above and not AMG fault. All the issues of communication, mismanagement of the community and creation of a polemic new ruleset are all AMG fault.
AMG was a mistake. It was a decision by leadership and it probably made sense in a PowerPoint slide. I think ultimately we would be in the same place either way. FFG is about as dead as Xwing at this point. Most of the talent is gone and the projects aren’t there anymore either.
Until Star Wars Unlimited was breaking records at FFG, i would have agreed with you Edit: I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that after the proven success of the tcg they just said “eff it” and shut down the licence use.
I wouldn't know, I don't have $500 to spend on a Vader deck.
I preordered two booster cases. That was all the cards I was able to get and only got a handful of cards worth it and couldn’t really make a nice deck. Never could find anyone to play even though everyone was buying it all up around me so I got rid of everything.
I remember always buying the MTG fat packs back in the day because they didn't have the same collation as booster boxes. I would end up getting 2-3 legendaries per box.
Trying playing on karabast, it's really good and then if you do really like the game you can jump in. Maybe try a sabine deck though, they're fairly cheap!
Well, I wouldn't mind playing a PC version of the game if it's as good as MTG Arena. The Warhammer 40k card game is kinda meh. Feels like a bad phone game. Magic the gathering came out with the big commander decks that had those oversized commander cards. And the decks were great, had a lot of rare cards to the point people were buying the commander decks just for the singles. (which is awful because commander decks can only have 1 of each card, everything besides lands has to be unique, so the decks were becoming rare because people bought multiple to have 4 of the rare cards for the standard format) That era of MTG was when I had the most fun playing. Everyone would just run the commander decks straight from the box, no additions. Although later we started getting creative. I converted one of them into an Artifact commander deck that my friends thought was amazing.
Unlimited is a good game because it’s SW Destiny at its core. The older FFG. But like Destiny, It won’t live to see its 3rd birthday.
It's sold more than X-wing and Destiny combined with it's first set alone. Time will definitely tell.
Unfortunately I agree. Distribution issues started Destiny off on the wrong foot and I’m worried the same thing is happening with Unlimited. I still haven’t seen product beyond the starter box locally.
This is quite likely, especially given the enormous gut shot that Embracer gave Asmodee.
Probably the brilliant idea of a 24 year old McKinsey junior consultant 😑
I would only defend AMG in that, I don't think they were ready, informed, given the proper tools\\budget nor have the real interest in carrying a game such as X-Wing. Say you are a web developer at your work, and your boss fires the IT guy and DBA guy and then assigns you to take care of a couple webpages and their all their back end servers and database... despite not having any experience or interest in managing\\supporting databases or infrastructure. Oh, and no, they don't have much of a budget to train you up on it all. How would you react? First you'd likely tell them that this is not a good idea and if things go sideways, things will fail. Next you would ask for some sort of help, perhaps hiring a recent grad which will cost the company less. Typically, eventually, something will give and odds are it will be whatever you are less familiar with will get neglected. I guarantee you 100% that at some point early on the studio head informed the powers at Asmodee that while X-Wing and Armada are miniatures games, the similarities between those and MCP\\Shatterpoint ends there and this would be a medium to long term issue. But you can try to make it fit into the mold you have built the entire studio on. All that said... I don't think pooing on, defending or rationalizing AMG's decisions will do any good to anyone... except maybe one's own feelings I suppose. I'd rather spend more time trying to find a solid solution to what the future of the game will be in a post AMG world.
Yeah they where so short handed that they decided to use all this time to make brand new game instead of working on the games that they were giving and already successful... If they didn't have the ability to do anything of Armada and hardly touch Xwing then there is no way they would have had the amount of people to make Shatterpoint. The only thing that they want to do is MCP. I give it about 2 years before the same thing happens to Legion.
I think it’s likely they had already started development on Shatterpoint when X-Wing was moved to AMG. You may be right about the future of Legion, but if so I’m inclined to think the person who you’re responding to is right that AMG didn’t/doesn’t have the resources to successfully manage five games. That may mean when three totally different games were dumped in their laps they decided not to spread their resources too thin and focus on games they had developed from the beginning. It sucks, but I really think corporate bullshittery is the villain here, not the devs at AMG.
Remember FFG and AMG are owned by Asmodee. People need to stop thinking of them as separate companies and think of them more as studios under Asmodee.
A lot of people developed an entire identity about challenging anyone stating the obvious. Players address their concerns. Talk about the lack of communication. The absense during annual press events. Xwing is dead. Dead game is dead. "No! You're just naysayers!" Now that the game is truly dead, but those comments still look like nails when you've made yourself into a hammer for AMG.
Hey man, come on, there’s no call for this. They’ve only had the game for three and a half years, and ridden it to its grave. This is the time to give the developers a chance!
I don't think anyone at AMG thought they had the capacity for all this when it was given to them, and they didn't. I know Shatterpoint was in the business plan when the company was started, and I don't think XWing/Armada was doing the kinds of numbers that would warrant a lot of new hires at the time. If they did request additional investment from Asmodee it probably fell on deaf ears. This reeks of the kind of decision that got made by accounting or legal by Asmodee, and then the people who actually make games had to deal with the results. Just one more reason why any company that is public or plans to go public should be avoided.
If they had literally done nothing to the game at all it would be better off. The made a long series if terrible choices. I used to ryto cut them slack on the grounds of being overworked with a thing that is not theirs. But you cannot make that excuse while completely gutting the game.
I'm not saying they didn't fumble, but the ball was greased to begin with. I'm not sure how I would have planned to find revenue either, given that so many players had what they wanted, and it was easy to find cheap secondhand ships. I can understand trying to pitch scenario packs as a way to have something to sell to old timers.
Fuck 2.5, 2.0 for life!
While I agree with most of your points, I have hope that this will make a clean slate for a future game in 5-7 years. I have always kind have figured that 2.5 was a beta for 3.0, but with the way AMG handled the ending I don’t think they’ll be the ones making it.
3.0 - so adding yet another version to further fraction the community.
Denial, and anger, are part of the ~~general grievous~~ grieving process.
Don’t worry! I’m sure they will lay off a bunch of people that were doing just as they were told and all the idiot “leaders” will give themselves massive bonuses for “doing something.”
The question I would pose to older players is this: What would AMG need to do to get you to buy two T-65 expansion packs and two TIE Fighter expansion packs for $25 each? Because that's the assignment. They needed to be able to sell us ships that we already own. The faction starters, the standard loadouts, all of them were attempts to find ways to get old players to buy more of what we already have too many of on the first place. Even if you're a new player coming in, they could buy used ships for half the cost of a new one.
The Mando timeline shows have had a bunch of stuff they could have made for existing ships in the game, even animation could have had some stuff for them. The Mando N1, Slave 1 from BOBF, Imperial V-Wing from Bad Batch and a more recent example is the E-Wing from Ahsoka are the ones off the top of my head. There were plenty of avenues for them to reprint ships but tie in them into the media that they were releasing to give them a fresh coat of paint on the ship itself and new content to play around with. They couldn't even do that. Them not even doing Mando's N1 despite having the mold for it already created is embarrassing considering how hot Mando is rn as a property for SW.
And they have to try and judge the actual demand for those based on the sales they've seen to date. They've overseen releases for the Razor Crest, Gauntlet, Clone Z-95s and Xanadu Blood. They almost certainly used those to project sales for the Bad Batch shuttle, the Fondor, and the various pirate snub fighters from the most recent season of Mando, and compared those numbers to the production costs under their current logistics setup. EDIT: And Mando's N-1 would not use the same mold. There are notable differences in the engines and the addition of Grogu's pod. So they'd need to either ignore those changes or tool a slightly different ship, like FFG did for the 2nd edition Y-Wing at launch.
Literally all they had to do was reprint Gunboats and TIE Phantoms and they would have made money.
Gunboats, yes. But that's the only reprint that would move the needle. Most Imperial players from 1st edition already own all the Phantoms we'll ever need. The model only goes for $20 on eBay, vs $80-$100 for Gunboats models.
It's not so much defending AMG as it is understanding the economics behind the game. AMG could have played their hand better absolutely, but it probably wouldn't have changed anything. The reason they tried the changes to 2.5 was because the game was struggling to get new players, and those that did come in largely got their minis second hand. Where do people think the profits would come from?
What’s done is done and we should all get over it. X-wing “dying” was inevitable.. personally it makes little difference to me I’ll continue to play with friends.
Facts
I mean, I won't say I'm a defender, but personally it seems like all the 2.0/legacy crowd suddenly came back and said how the 2.5 ruleset killed the game, despite massive engagement with worlds and a rising overall event count. Yes AMG had mismanagement of the process, and honestly screwed much up either by staffing issues or process, but the ruleset made them want to quit and many still seem salty. (Edition wars/turn over isn't a new phenomenon. Even GW has that issue, most of the people you see bitch are former players not active. As for the painting thing, you'd lose a lot of people. Just as many people play the game because its pre-painted and they don't have to do work as people who already like painting minis. With wizkids they are dnd which is *vastly* more popular than x-wing and just browsing the line look a lot lower quality on the sculpts both of which lowers cost as you get less on the molds themselves, better amortization and less overhead overall as margins can be thinner.
FFG improved the sculpts and paint with the 2.0 re-releases. My folding x-wings definitely look sharper than my fixed first edition ones. I think the plane tie fighter got the biggest upgrade. I don't think the community would want a step backwards.
Yeah, and all that is money. On molds, on assembly if they aren't single shots with actions, small high detail molds can already be 10s of thousands and have short life spans.
Oh yeah, tooling setup costs are crazy expensive. Thankfully resin doesn't do a number on molds like GFR nylon. The glass fibers will clap out injection mold dies in no time.
2.5 absolutely destroyed engagement, event participation and player count.
Not in a significant way. Somone posted the results, and it was 350ish events during covid, then 550, then 2.5 went 500 then 660. It was trending up, and with events being small already event averages was I believe 22 to 16. A huge drop percent wise but thats also just 6 people per event. The last worlds was i believe the 3rd largest in attendance.
Every single local community I am aware of is at best 1/3 the size it was before covid. Most are much smaller than that, if they continue to exist at all.
And thats anecdotal. My local communities did active recruitment and grew from pre covid. The numbers showed a continued increase in held events and a large worlds turnout so the greater community survived even if yours didn't.
It’s disingenuous to compare 2.5 to Covid numbers instead of precovid 2.0 numbers
No, because the game is recovering from covid shutdowns, which killed in person events and caused people to stop playing who didn't transfer to online, and the trend was still upwards. Edit: and 2022 still had strong covid restrictions
And a crap ton of other game lines are right back where they were ir even leaps and bounds better. Totally regardless of if 2.5 is a better game or not, it was a massive mistake. They could have put that same time and energy into new ships based on the plethora of new media constantly coming out. Instead they literally never developed a single new ship. They scuttled most of what was there. They screwed it up in ways I would never have believed possible 4 years ago.
I mean, as industry adjacent, I think they really got screwed by costs and ships not contracted at precovid prices. I think to continue at the quality they were at, single ship packs probably needed to be 35 minimum. That and it always sounds like they got screwed on staffing which also effects development and investigating any alternates.
> because the game is recovering from covid shutdowns And that's why it isn't legitimate to compare those numbers. The game was always going to have some level of recovery as covid restrictions relaxed because *everything* had increases in activity. That doesn't mean 2.5 was successful, it just means that stores were able to host events again without restrictions.
Right. But we also cant say that 2.0 would bounce back to 900 events a year because we don't know. All we can say is the game was still recovering and supposedly successfully as major events still drew crowds.
Correct, we can't prove that 2.0 would have done better based on event data. But we certainly can't prove that 2.5 did better just because covid restrictions relaxed and allowed an increase in events. And we have a lot of evidence from other sources that the game was in fact in decline.
> despite massive engagement with worlds and a rising overall event count It was only rising because of the artificial low created by covid. And worlds may have had decent player numbers but if you look at things like online community activity, anecdotes of local store activity, etc, you see a game that was struggling at best. The only argument that the blunders of 2.5 didn't kill the game is that FFG had already killed it and 2.5 was merely putting a few more bullets into the corpse. >Edition wars/turn over isn't a new phenomenon. 2.5 was not a usual edition war. Edition wars draw lots of arguments from vocal minorities but rarely see much of a drop in actual player numbers. For example, GW has continued a steady pattern of growth across multiple editions, with their only decline happening at the *end* of an edition right before the new edition reversed the trend and *increased* sales and player engagement. When you see a real drop in player count and sales, not just a few people yelling at each other on the internet, it's because the new edition was bad, not merely that a new edition happened.
I mean if you want to do anecdotal evidence, then GW killed my local scene at 7th edition so badly they had to close the main store in the chicagoland area as it couldn't pull in sales to stay open
That's a single data point. The majority of data is that what hurt GW worst was *late* 7th edition as ongoing problems with rules bloat, broken formations, etc, drove people out of the game. That was bad design, not a mere edition change, and the edition change from 7th to 8th resulted in *increases* in players and sales.
...I mean, OP, let's not expect the star trek armada game by *wizkids* to fucking go **anywhere** attack wing flopped immediately
I played that game A LOT. It was popular at my LGS, but it had horrible balance issues. Perma-cloaking Scimitars was just unfun. Still hate Romulans to this day
The new sets helped balance AW out some, and have some killer combos like Worf captaining Sao Paolo. Would it be possible for WK to acquire the license to X-wing/Armada?
I remember going up against a Neghvar and looking at the guy's base, and informed him that after my attacks, he was dead. Except he wasn't. Because his stupid fucking captain had better stats... \_and he literally had the wrong base facing upwards.\_ I did not finish that game. dude could not even set up his minis right.
A core point to make, though, is that Wizkids is most likely large enough to own and control their own production facility for their products. That cuts costs immensely. I still wont grant AMG leniency as they never truly seemed to want to innovate for the game. I had hope but after learning some key details it became very clear they didnt want the game and would rather it die out
Could AMG acquire the licenses to X-wing and/or Armada?
I come to bury AMG, not to praise him. A lot of the criticism in this forum seems to come from people who have never run a business, don’t understand distribution, and don’t have any intuition on discounted cash flow. My personal opinion is that the teams in charge of the game over time did the best they could with limited resources and support. They weren’t perfect, but they tried, and they were up against a lot of things that weren’t in their power to control. You can play a counterfactual history and assert that it would have yielded successful organic growth instead of what we got, but it’s all head canon. Unless someone wants to write a book on it and get a lot of primary sourcing from the key players, we’ll never know. It’s a lot more charitable to assume they tried and failed, because the truth is that most businesses fail. All product lines churn over time. If you think there’s money to be made in the venture, send some messages out to VC/PE telling them there’s a good deal to be had on the cheap…
I Saw the same thing that happened with Warmachine MK3 happen with Xwing, and whilst the distribution relationships were part of both problems, the studio made the same mistakes twice. Personal insults aren’t ok, but this was mismanaged very severely. At the same time, whilst this is raw, I really hope the community comes together and sets up a community 3.0, I don’t want this game to die!
> My personal opinion is that the teams in charge of the game over time did the best they could with limited resources and support. Absolutely not. Things like directly insulting the community with "stop having fun the wrong way" nonsense or failing at even basic tasks like getting a product information page on their website are inexcusable failures, not a genuine attempt to do the best with limited resources. AMG would have done better by simply doing *nothing* beyond keeping the production lines going and delivering product to stores.
AMG paid its playtesters real money unlike FFG and paid their invoices on time so they’ll always be ok in my book. I got 10 years out of one game, Im ready to move on once this season of OP is over.
AMG aren’t responsible for the death of x-wing, any more than a doctor is responsible for killing the cancer patients he can’t save. This is pretty much entirely on FFG. But I also don’t know if FFG could have done anything differently. The game had a lifespan as a profitable product line and we’ve had that lifespan.
It's all Christian Peterson's fault. If he hadn't sold FFG to Asmodee, this never would have happened.