Honestly, with so much Thanksgiving cheer I had over the weekend, I found hard to get upset, but thanks to Games Workshop everything becomes possible.
When I woke up this morning after my second Thanksgiving feast I was happily surprised to find...
A new Daemon Prince for me to use in my Chaos Space Marine and Deamon Codexes! Be'lakor, the Dark Master! Games Workshop digital is running a promotion called the 2013 Digital Advent Calendar,with the goal of releasing a new product everyday till Christmas.
Sounds amazing doesn't it?
I know, at first I thought the idea seemed really cool, of course I assumed most of the days would be filled with fluffy articles about obscure wargear, but at the very least some nuggets would shine through. Be'lakor seemed just like that perfect little item to brighten my day. Instead, what I get is a unit that should be a free updated to my Ipad codexes I paid for. Beyond that, I could understand paying, say, $1 for 16 pages of which four is useless filler, leaving me 12 pages of fluff and one page of rules. Instead, this lovely Daemon Prince will cost me $4.99 for the Ipad version, and $3.99 for eReader version-- psst btw I don't think there is any difference between either.
The final insult though is Be'lakor rules come sepeate between Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy, so if you want both better pucker up and pay another $4.99! Oh, wait you can bundle both for $7.99 saving you two bucks! I have to admit, I was one who never got mad at the same overpriced digital content GW charged for fluff only products. Let us put this in perspective though, an average codex has about 30-40 unit options at a cost of about $1.50 per unit of content, Be'lakor is 3x that cost.
I was foolish not to see it coming really, the misleading rip-off Inquisition codex should have been my first hint. GW is taking a page from the video game industry by charging for content as an add-on. Aren't the supplements not just a glorify version of the same process? The new Dataslate are just a bit more bite size, like charging $2 bucks for a new skin on your Xbox avatar. This is an easy, painless way, to insert more stuff to the already over growing, convoluted war chest of rules becoming the new normal for Warhammer 40k.
Getting back to the video game analogy, because I can remember all the same complaints made about "additional"
digital content for games-- GW is just a newcomer to this easy cash-cow. Before, gamers questioned, why should I pay for something that should already come with the game in the first place? Once video gamers grew accustomed to the sticker shock, this kind of content has had smooth sailing ever since. Now, you have entire games like Farmville where the entire business model system built on micro-transactions. These sort of things might not be new, but now they are the norm.
We could have a future where whole portions of Codexes are omitted, instead parsed out for everyone's "convenience". At this point you cannot put much past GW, I have a feeling by this time next year we will have a very clear idea of the trajectory of this company going forward. The growing impatience with GW current paradigm must be reaching some sort of apex, because this cannot be sustained. Then again I see the amount of disposable cash my friends throw at this hobby, and once again I must question my own sanity.
Warning
Meat for Meta is rated editorial nonsense. These articles are meant to complain about some group, somewhere, that is playing the game for all the wrong reasons or simply to just make fun of 40k nerd rage.