Precinct Omega
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New Podcast Episode - Steamforged Games Buys Warmachine!
🕑 Added 2024-06-07 09:30:33 +0000 UTCI was trying to make this a YouTube video, but learning my way around the new software is presenting... challenges. An MP3 with no audible distortions, when I add it to PowerDirector, suddenly has loads of audio distortions. It is to do with "clipping" which I notionally understand but cannot work out (a) where it came from or (b) how to get rid of it. Suggestions are welcome.
However, with the news hot off the press and rapidly evolving, I wanted to get this out there before the story just... changed again. So, here you go.
For Patrons, exclusively, I will post the script for those who prefer to read their news rather than listen to it:
...
This week, the news broke that Steamforged Games has bought up the rights to Warmachine - and not only Warmachine, but also to all of the associated properties, games, art, miniatures and publications.
Now, I have already done a deep dive into the history and context of Privateer Press, who were, until recently, the owners of the Warmachine property. And I actually started researching a deep dive into Steamforged Games a while ago, and came back to that research when they announced the re-release of their seminal wargame, Guild Ball, earlier this year. But the story has just become a thousand times more interesting for what it says about the miniatures wargaming market.
My name is Robey Jenkins. I’m an independent wargames designer and fascinated observer of the miniatures wargaming industry as a lens with which to better understand economics and business.
There was general rejoicing in the world of miniatures skirmish wargames in February 2024, when Steamforged Games announced that they would be re-releasing Guild Ball.
And before we come to talk about what their purchase of Warmachine really means, I thought it would be worth taking this opportunity to re-visit not only Guild Ball, but also Steamforged Games. How did the game come to exist in the first place and, once it existed, why did the company who built their reputation on it decide to put it aside, and what are they doing today?
It’s a fascinating tale. It’s a tale of greed and capitalism, but also innovation, focus and a really, really, large amount of money. I mean, OK, by the standards of global capitalism, it’s not going to sound like a large sum of money, but in terms of the industry of wargaming… it’s a lot of money.
And, by way of a minor spoiler, I would also like to do a future video looking at another company that took a very similar path: Mythic Games. I think the stories of Steamforged Games and Mythic Games are fascinating to compare and contrast, because one is a tale of consistent, efficient delivery on promises and the other… is not. But that’s a story for another day.
Let’s start by winding the clock back to February 2014 when two British chaps called Richard Loxam and Matthew Hart launched a Kickstarter for a game called Guild Ball.
Now, Rich and Mat were a good combo to launch a miniatures game. Both were - indeed are - keen wargamers themselves. They were part of the competitive play scene back in the day and it is extremely significant to the end of this story that they were instrumental in building and sustaining the competitive Warmachine scene in the United Kingdom. But in addition to that, Rich was very invested in community organising within a selection of miniatures wargaming communities, with a professional background as a digital designer, while Mat was a game design professional working in the more obviously-lucrative world of console games. What probably made them a particularly good dream team is that they both went into the Kickstarter with solid business experience in different areas.
The original Kickstarter for Guild Ball was a modest success. With a funding target of £30,000, they attracted 890 backers and a final funding value of £93,691. For a first foray into crowdfunding for a new business - although, at this point, Steamforged Games didn’t exist - this was a commendable success. And it was a success that was, to a large degree, built upon the collapse of Privateer Press that I described in my previous video. Guild Ball was never explicitly marketed by Rich and Mat as a “new” Warmachine, but it was definitely seen as that by the community that had grown up around that game, and in which Rich and Mat were recognised and respected members. The demise of Warmachine had left a gap in the market into which a number of other companies sought to rush, including Corvus Belli, with Infinity, Wyrd Games, with Malifaux, and GCT Studios with Bushido.
But whilst all of these benefited to some extent from the Warmachine dip, it was Guild Ball, designed by Warmachine veterans to appeal explicitly to fans of tight, competitive miniatures wargames, that most benefited from the rush.
Steamforged Games was incorporated a few months after the end of the Kickstarter and, as far as I can tell, all the backer rewards from the first Kickstarter, including stretch goals, were fulfilled and dispatched to backers by August 2015, just 16 months after the Kickstarter concluded. And this, too, was an important achievement that would serve Mat and Rich well in the coming years.
Now, I should take a moment to say that Guild Ball was never my game. I liked a lot about it as a concept, but one of Guild Ball’s biggest selling points at the outset was that it was designed for tournament play. It was written by competitive players for competitive players. The whole point of the game was to develop clever synergies and then execute them on the tabletop. Whilst I’m certain that the designers didn’t intend the game to have a culture of Win At All Costs, it was built to appeal to the kind of wargame player who loves to play to win. I am not that kind of player.
But the people I knew who played Guild Ball, played Guild Ball. Whilst it could technically be played on a casual, beer-and-pretzels basis, that was not how the majority of its fans engaged with the game and it was an intentional part of Steamforged’s business strategy that they pivoted very quickly to running official tournaments at major gaming events.
The challenge with any tournament game is, of course, how to keep it accessible to new players without alienating the veterans. This is not the first time I’ve told this story. Warmachine failed to sustain their growth for a lot of reasons, but it was at least partially because of the inability to balance those two factors. Infinity hit a wall in its third edition and found their way out of it, somewhat, in the fourth edition of the game, by creating a version of the game explicitly for new players.
The approach that Guild Ball took was to have “Seasons”. That is, every now and then - I think it was roughly annual - they would shake up the game, introducing new rules, new teams, new characters and also use the opportunity to develop the setting and narrative, which doesn’t really help new players but it is fun.
Now, my impression of things is largely anecdotal, but I got the impression from talking to retailers that interest in Guild Ball ramped up quickly in the first three or four seasons, then plateaued and began to fall back. There could have been a lot of reasons for this, but when trying to work out what was really behind the cancellation of Guild Ball, we could do worse that to start with the words of the company itself, who told players:
We set out to make the cleanest, most balanced miniatures game you could play at that time. And we achieved this hands down, flat out, nailed it! Guild Ball truly was a competitive player’s dream. It rewarded player skill and experience, with a very flat probability curve to minimize variance. The competitive scene grew and grew. But this ended up hurting the lifespan of the game. Guild Ball became the type of game where you win your [demo] game and then lose the next 100 games. When matched against a lesser skilled or inexperienced opponent, a better player would simply win the vast majority of games. As the competitive scene began to dominate, the design space for wilder, more ‘fun’ elements began to shrink. New minis were either ‘OP’ or ‘trash-tier’ the second they were announced. Why take a new model when model XYZ already filled the role? The style of gameplay changed to low-risk, ultra-conservative play where the ball was often deliberately side-lined. This wasn’t the Guild Ball we envisaged.
You might be unsurprised to hear that a lot of players read this and felt that Steamforged Games was blaming their players for the game’s inability to prosper.
Rich and Mat, of course, weren’t to blame. They set out to make Guild Ball the competitive miniatures wargamer’s perfect game, so they were shocked when it attracted competitive wargamers!
Well, to be fair, I don’t feel that’s necessarily what they were trying to say. I think they really meant to say that any ultra-competitive miniatures wargame is going to have a natural lifecycle in which it draws in new players, those new players become skilled in the game and then any new players who are attracted to the game are crushed by the more experienced veterans and so the game stalls. It happens all the time, to the point that any competitive game that starts to gain traction needs a plan to keep the game fresh, and…
But, hang on. Matt and Rich did have a plan to keep the game fresh. I’ve already mentioned it. It was Seasons. And when players are rating new characters as either OP or trash-tier, is this speaking to the players, or to the people who are designing and testing this game?
And if the style of gameplay was shifting, then… what is that, if not the emergent meta-game that we see in all competitive miniatures games and for which the responsible companies are supposed to account with rules changes and occasional shake-ups.
So, I guess what I’m saying is that something about this smells a little fishy. If it is possible to predict that an ultra-competitive miniatures game might face this problem, and if Rich and Matt did predict it and have a strategy for dealing with it, but they still decided to can the game… is it possible that there may have been another motivation for canning Guild Ball?
Inevitably, the answer to that question is “maybe”, because Guild Ball was cancelled in August 2020, almost exactly one year after another big thing happened in the world of Steamforged Games.
Someone gave them £5 million.
Now, this development needs some context.
In 2016, two years after Guild Ball successfully raised a smidgen under £100k, Steamforged Games returned to Kickstarter, having acquired the rights to make a Dark Souls board game. This was thanks to Mat’s connections in the console gaming world. And in 48 hours they hit £1 million in funding.
That is, they raised more than ten times what Guild Ball had attracted in just two days. And when the campaign closed, they had more than £3.5m in funding for a Dark Souls board game with over 30,000 backers. Thirty thousand! Guild Ball got less than a thousand!
Now, like I said at the start, Rich and Mat weren’t just enthusiasts for games. They had some proper business nous. And £3.5m and more than 30,000 new customers are figures that anyone with an ounce of business sense is going to pay a tonne of attention to.
Delivering 30,000 units of a complex product is a massive undertaking, but having £3.5m in the bank is a pretty decent enabler. And although the subsequent campaign for the Resident Evil board game didn’t come close to those numbers, netting £800k from 7,500 backers, it was still no slouch in terms of capital funding.
Creating a contained board game, without the intention for highly competitive play, or the need to feed a very demanding and critical audience that nevertheless spends a comparative pittance on new products, is a piece of cake! The challenge is in manufacture and delivery. It’s logistics. And, please don’t get me wrong, getting those logistics right is a headache and requires a very specific set of skills in someone with a very particular mindset. But it’s a discreet task with a start and a finish and after that you walk away and move on to the next thing. Maintaining a set of miniatures wargame rules is a lifestyle. It’s a permanent state of being. And if that wargame is ultra-competitive in nature, that state of being is harassed, abused and unappreciated.
Maybe, if miniatures wargaming pulled in numbers like board games did, Guild Ball would never have gone away. But, as everyone who ever wrote a miniatures wargame will tell you, they don’t.
So I should return to the £5m.
That wasn’t Kickstarter funding. It was private equity extended to Steamforged Games by the Foresight Group. Private equity means that investors trust their money to the Foresight Group and Foresight uses that money to buy stock - or, as we call it in the UK, shares - in businesses. So much, so ho-hum. Anyone can buy shares, sure. But only in publicly-traded companies. Private equity typically buys shares in companies whose shares aren’t available on the stock markets or buys up the share options of staff in order to acquire a controlling interest in a publicly-traded company. Private equity investments are mostly made in small-to-medium-sized enterprises and start-ups. That means that these are risky investments. But the way the private equity companies manage that risk is by spreading their investments - and therefore the risk - very widely.
Businesses can apply to such companies for investment, and those businesses will be rigorously scrutinised. And, assuming they pass scrutiny, the private investor will still expect significant levels of control and influence over the direction of the business. So, if you seek out private equity investment, you should be certain in advance that what you want to do with the business and what your private investors want to do are aligned.
The Foresight Group added a number of people to the Board of Steamforged Games, including Sir Steve Jackson, one of the original founders of Games Workshop and not in any way related to Mister Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games and citizen of the United States of America. Sir Steve is, by the way, no longer a director of Steamforged Games.
Dragging this narrative back to the main point, it is a fact that, a year after they received the investment, Rich and Mat binned Guild Ball to focus on other products, and I suspect that the reason is that there was a powerful alignment of interests between the company’s executive team and its investors: they all wanted to make money, and Guild Ball was approaching the point at which it would cost more money to sustain that it was earning in sales.
By contrast, running high profile Kickstarters for established digital game products turned into tabletop and board games looked like a guaranteed money maker. And between the contacts and reputation they had established with their first three Kickstarter projects and the potential expansion of in-house manufacturing made possible by their £5m windfall, the compass was pointed due “Kickstarter” for Steamforged Games.
Now, it should be said that Rich and Mat - still very much at the helm of the company’s day-to-day business - were by no means entirely at the beck and call of a Board fixated upon exploiting video game licences to make low-quality board games with flashy Kickstarters. That’s not to say that there weren’t a series of low-quality board games with flashy Kickstarters. There absolutely was. But Steamforged Games was still led by two men with a passion for miniatures wargaming and tremendous imaginations.
The first new product line they released was Godtear.
Godtear is a hex-based fantasy miniatures skirmish game in which small warbands led by champions fight over control of a resource called, yes, godtears - the remains of dead gods, fallen from the heavens and conveying enormous power upon those who can claim them.
As a game, it’s… fine. It has a similar theme to Moonstone from Goblin King Games, but lacks the whimsical charm of that game. Mechanically, it reminds me a little of Aristeia!, although the way it applies those mechanics is completely different. I think the biggest selling point to me of Godtear is its miniatures. They are single-piece hard plastic, with decent casting quality, albeit not a patch on the white metal Guild Ball minis from its early incarnation. But that’s fairly ho-hum. The minis are OK designs. But what I like most is that they come in warband boxes, with a clear plastic window and a vacuum-formed interior and what that means is that you can paint the minis, put them back in the box and the box serves as both storage and display and, because they are plastic, they can stay comfortably in the box without much risk of damage to your paint work.
When Godtear pulled in £340k on Kickstarter, it launched with fourteen warbands and, since then, has released four more warbands and two expansions without going back to Kickstarter. But for all the promotion it has enjoyed through YouTubers, it seems to have made a relatively modest impact on the wargaming scene as a whole.
With Corvus Belli also leaping into a similar thematic area, with Warcrow Adventures on its way, and my scepticism on that release already well established, it’ll be interesting to see if it get more table time.
My guess is that Godtear was Mat and Rich’s opportunity to try to create something with a similar appeal to competitive wargamers as Guild Ball, but with a more sustainable business model that would make it a reliable money maker over time. If so, I’m not sure they’ve necessarily succeeded.
Meanwhile, they have continued to pump out video game tabletop adaptations, including Horizon Zero Dawn, Devil May Cry, Monster Hunter and, of course, Elden Ring. And these continue to be the primary source of fresh income, routinely pulling seven-figure funding numbers on Kickstarter. But if we want to come back to their recent acquisition of Warmachine, we’re not really interested in those. We want to know how they treat their other acquisitions and, fortunately, we’ve got a couple of other examples, because they have previously acquired Street Masters and Rivet Wars.
Without being able to see behind the curtains, it’s quite hard to piece together exactly how these properties ended up with Steamforged Games. But it looks like they both fell through the gaps when Asmodee established its distribution deal with CMON, formerly known as CoolMiniOrNot and about which I’ve previously done a video. But basically, Asmodee acquired distribution rights, whilst CMON retained the licences for a number of their games, most prominently being A Song of Ice and Fire. In the course of this, Rivet Wars, which CMON had the rights to, got a pass from Asmodee. Meanwhile, Asmodee had become the distributor for Street Masters from Black List Games. Somehow, both of these properties found their way into the hands of Steamforged Games and, from there, onto Kickstarter where they enjoyed reasonable success, with both getting more than £300k in backer funding.
Unfortunately, though, neither has made it through to retail and, moreover, neither had the kind of enthusiastic player interest that Warmachine has sustained despite the challenges the company has faced in the last few years.
Which brings us back to Guild Ball’s re-release, earlier this year.
When I first started drafting this script, in February, my final question was to try to answer why SFG decided to being Guild Ball back. And my answer at the time was a great big shrug. My best guess was that it was a property that SFG wasn’t exploiting, and a smart business doesn’t leave money on the table. But if that had been their only objective, they would have been better off selling it to another business. Instead, they released as, essentially, a “print on demand” product, with rules in digital form and miniatures as high-quality printed resin: a medium they had already begun to exploit for the later Godtear and Epic Encounters products, as well as a series of other one-off releases such as their dog and cat themed adventurer packs for Dungeons & Dragons.
My feeling was that the re-release was essentially a “why the hell not?” answer to an obvious question.
But now…
Now I wonder if the Warmachine acquisition was already in the works and the move was to put themselves back onto the radar for miniatures wargames enthusiasts, to test the market for the residual interest and, basically, to remind players that Steamforged Games used to do competitive fantasy miniatures wargaming really bloody well.
Of course, it might just be a coincidence that they jumped back into traditional miniatures wargaming just before picking up the rights to a different traditional miniatures wargame, and it’s not like I’m suggesting they did anything underhanded. But if they did re-release Guild Ball in anticipation of this acquisition then it speaks positively to their commitment to miniatures wargaming as a market, compared to the board game focus they’ve really had in every other case.
But that’s enough about Steamforged, because the question on everyone’s mind, right now, is “why did Privateer Press decide to sell?”
I have no insider intelligence to inform my opinion. This is just based on an observation of the themes, and it boils down to this:
Warmachine is Matt Wilson. It was born almost entirely out of his imagination, from the earliest sketches to the ongoing storyline. Its aesthetic, its narrative, its sense of humour… it is 100% the brainchild of a single person in a way that, for example, Warhammer 40,000 never was. And whilst this can deliver a unity and consistency that a more committee-driven setting cannot, it also provides a major commercial weakness that is the Single Point Of Failure. Matt has been exploring and exploiting this idea relentlessly for over two decades. And if he’s a bit tired of it, I honestly couldn’t blame him.
Quite apart from that, what felt like Privateer Press’s relentless rise to challenge Games Workshop was reversed so suddenly and so decisively that I cannot imagine that Matt didn’t suffer serious psychic damage from the experience.
But, on the other hand, Matt built the Warmachine universe almost single-handed. Not that others haven’t had their influence on game design and manufacturing methods and licensing deals, but the heart of Warmachine - how it looks, how it feels, the stories it tells - are Matt’s. I struggle to imagine handing the Horizon Wars property over to someone else, and that’s like, barely 10% of my life and quite a lot less than that of my income. If I had been doing Horizon Wars and very little other than Horizon Wars for twenty years and been entirely reliant upon it for both my income and my intellectual validation, the idea of handing it over to someone else would be… very hard to come to terms with.
And on that basis, it makes sense that the property would go to Steamforged Games. SFG was founded and is still run by two people who were absolutely passionate about Warmachine, who understood the charm at the heart of the game and its enormous potential. They have also, like Matt, been through the experience of seeing their own brainchild, Guild Ball, run foul of the competitive wargames scene pitfalls. There is literally no one else out there whom you could imagine being better custodians for the game’s future.
It seems almost crass to mention it, of course, but SFG has one other great positive quality, which is that they are extremely flush with cash and, let me tell you, few things make you feel less bad about giving away something you love than being handed large quantities of money to do so.
Not that I think the sale will have been Big Bucks.
As I understand it, Matt shared intellectual property ownership with the Privateer Press company and, of course, has a major holding of equity in the company as well. It is likely that the sale will have lined Matt’s pockets comfortably and paid off some loans PP has been carrying.
But what next, then for PP?
As far as I can tell, PP will retain the Level 7 and Monsterpocalypse properties and continue to exist as a game development enterprise. I imagine the headcount is going to scale back pretty hard. But something worth noting is that, thanks to the 4th Edition release which saw all of their minis move to 3d printing for manufacturing, they are ideally placed for their main daily activity to be producing miniatures.
As we’ve already mentioned, SFG moved to a print-on-demand model for Guild Ball and were already using 3d printing as a manufacturing method for Godtear and Epic Encounters. This means that PP and SFG are well aligned to become manufacturing partners, with SFG doing their manufacturing in-house to support the UK and Europe markets, and PP picking up the US and Asia-Pacific markets, reducing shipping costs and allowing a level of stock to be sustained on both sides of the Atlantic.
Whether Matt Wilson decides to stay with PP, becomes a consultant for SFG, somewhere in between or none of the above remains to be seen, but one thing Matt has done through this sale is to detach Warmachine from its Single Point of Failure, putting the property into a much stronger position to prosper in the market under SFG.
And of course, we have to wonder what SFG will do with the property. They have bought everything. Warmachine, Hordes, Riot Quest, the Iron Kingdoms roleplay game setting for D&D, the board games, the Loot Crate scheme, the paint range… Personally, I would love to see SFG, who have a consistent history in board games, take a look at Grind. I love Grind, which is a fantasy sports board game set in the Iron Kingdoms, best described as a blend of 5-a-side football and basketball played by giant steam-powered robots. It’s very entertaining.
But I think their first focus will be on getting miniatures back into stores. Mat Hart has already done an AMA on the r/Warmachine subreddit in which he more or less acknowledged that step one will be persuading independent wargames retailers, burnt by PP in the past, to stock the products again. This will mean taking a really solid, strategic look at how to package and price starter kits for Warmachine. Whilst everyone wants to see neglected favourites return, and long-promised new pieces released, I think we should expect to see a hard-headed, commercially-focused approach - perhaps not unlike Corvus Belli’s “Code One” version of Infinity, to encourage new players to take a shot with a more accessible version of the game.
And this prediction is further under-pinned by the announcement, as I was preparing to get this video up, that SFG would be producing brand new 2-player starter boxes - not in printed resin or restic, but in high-impact polystyrene or HIPS: the same stuff that Games Workshop uses for all of its plastic kits. This is striking, because this is a significant investment of time and money to manufacture these kits, suggesting that SFG has managed to get their investors fully on board with the fast-earning potential for Warmachine. We’ll just have to wait and see if this stands up.
What does this all mean for Privateer Press and the future of Steamforged Games?
Well, for Privateer Press it is really the final nail in the coffin. Whilst the company may continue, it will only be as a shadow of the business once seen as the only viable challenger for Games Workshop. As a force in the market, its days are done.
But what about Steamforged Games? Are they going to be the new challenger?
Well, no, I think not.
Private equity investment comes with a huge caveat. You see, the way PE investors make money is to buy equity in businesses that are either failing or - as in SFG’s case - have tremendous potential that they can’t achieve without money. But every PE investor eventually needs to cash out and see their investment turn into profit, which usually means either selling on their stake to someone else (usually a larger competitor) or taking the company to an Initial Public Offering where they make a killing selling shares to the public, then they walk away.
SFG doesn’t look anything like being ready to go to an IPO, so could the investors be looking to sell their stake to someone else? Such as Asmodee?
That’s entirely speculation on my part, but SFG right now looks unfocused. On the one hand, they’ve got the big budget licensed board games that pull in the big numbers but don’t create much in the way of sustained sales. Then you’ve got the miniatures games - Epic Encounters and Godtear included alongside Guild Ball and, now, Warmachine. These don’t generate the same big numbers at release, but create consistent, modest income from additional sales, because that’s how miniatures wargaming works as a business model.
The Foresight Group and their investors don’t give a monkey’s about miniatures games. They want big returns, quickly, because that’s their business model. They are prepared to be patient, but patience in PE investing means 5 years, not 50.
This is another reason the Warmachine purchase can’t have been a bank breaker for SFG or their PE partners simply wouldn’t have endorsed the sale.
I, of course, want to see Mat and Rich succeed. I want Warmachine back on the shelves and back on wargaming tables all over the world, alongside Guild Ball. But late-stage capitalism sucks, dear friends, and it doesn’t want you to have nice things.
Comments
Italianmoose
Yay, enjoyable and insightful, thank you :)
Precinct Omega
I'm still wrestling with the video editing software. There should be a video out by the end of Monday, latest.
Jonathan Lupton
When I first heard about the Warmachine IP purchase my first thought was "It would be really good if Robey did a podcast about this!"
