Warhammer 40K Tabletop Thread XLII: The Dice Make Fools of Us All

[Fable Wright]

Is GW some sort of crowdfund or support purveyor for animation artists? You pay GW (or a retailer who bought from GW) plastic miniatures. Thats it. Thats as far as your transactions, past and present, go. You may imagine or assume that with this you're "supporting", "reinforcing", "steering" or "rewarding", but none of those show on your receipt. You pay X dollars for Y models, thats all. No strings attached.

I will say that you are being extremely dismissive of the value of the IP that GW has developed here.

Games Workshop does more than supply plastic figurines. It licenses the world that these figurines are from to a variety of other forms of media, including video games and novelizations. The reason your model is so much more expensive than the cheap chinese knockoff that has the same amount of resin in it subsidizes the work on associated properties. When I buy Warhammer over, say, Malifaux or WarmaHordes or whathaveyou, I am specifically paying for the advertising as well—my ability to get games, speak with fans of the intellectual property, and more.

You can't tell me that the intellectual property underpinning the model line isn't worth money when game studios pay large sums for the right to use the name, branding, and images from the series in their games. If they begin to take their intellectual property in a direction I do not like, I lose interest in the models and subsequent support. I quit Malifaux when they deprecated support for my favorite set of models. The models can still be bought, but I will no longer be able to play them in tournaments, and no future products will come out supporting that set of models.

Being hurt because some third party had been using private property with no permission and is quitting is pure entitlement. Its scrub mentality; making all these imaginary rules and restrictions and obligations that nobody ever agreed to, then acting indignant when they're 'broken'.

Have you ever heard the term 'statutory neglect?' It's a policy the British Empire held toward the American Colonies in the decades directly before the American War of Independence. The colonies were basically cut off and allowed to do their own thing with British intellectual property, calling themselves British, using king and crown iconography. This resulted in the colonies thriving and viewing themselves as loyal British citizens, importing what they needed from more or less Britain alone.

When statutory neglect ended, a very bloody war ensued. The colonists had in their heads a set of imaginary rules and restrictions and obligations that were never formally agreed to, and acted extraordinarily indignant when they were broken. Britain had technically maintained the legal right to levy taxes, to be sure, but it was an unspoken agreement that they wouldn't.

GW has ended its policy of statutory neglect. They always had the right to strike down fan creators. They chose not to exercise it for many years. This created an unspoken expectation, and the consequences are neither unforseeable nor do they absolve GW of responsibility for their policy shift. No one is arguing that GW doesn't have the legal right to do this; but neither does GW have a right to gratitude or repeated business.