I personally like that GW is coming back to points. Whether its from sales not meeting expectations, or whether its from listening to the fanbase. I think this is a good move for Games Workshop, and I for one am excited to see what they come up with for points and narrative play (which to me are looking like much stronger ways to play the game than the current system).
There is a lot that Hastings has said over there, a lot of his thoughts on it. For this though I wanted to concentrate on exactly what he has been told.
Warning..... The comment section has gotten bad and quite a few people attacking or getting mouthy with each other. It needs to be said, that just because someone is being critical about AoS, does not mean to jump all over them, and start a back and forth argument on every Age of Sigmar thread. I have had to shut down the comments on the last two AoS threads, which is very annoying.
Lets keep the directed away from other readers, and get them back on the subject.
Ive only posted a couple select hastings segments that I felt more than enough gets the point across he is trying to make.
via 75hastings69 on Warseer
AoS is selling worse than WFB did, it's popularity is much lower, if GW don't reach out and get someone to start buying/playing do you think GW will support AoS for very long if it is actually making them less money than WFB did???
That's what this 3 ways to play is all about, they have got to try and appeal to a bigger market, because the market they selected (picked at random) is not spending enough money. Hence the very very early warning to sharholders despite having 2 very popular launches (BaC and DW:O) AND some well received 40k releases..... this should at least be some kind of indication of how much AoS tanked even for the most ardent fan of it.
By the way for those asking I do not have information on how other products sold or why this or why that, I will happily share with you all the two things I was implicitly told:-
1/ WFB was still making profit before end times, just not as much as some people would have liked. This is kind of ironic because IMO the reasons it didn't make more profit is it was largely put on the back burners behind anything that had power armour (i.e. space marines/40k) - and I guess because of popularity that is understandable. And the cost of entry. However the making cost of entry so high is directly the fault of GW, the costs per army towards the end of WFB were beyond crazy, a small unit (one of many in an army) costing between 50 -100gbp is just crazy when there are so many alternatives out there. What is even more unforgiveable and moronic is that there would have been an easier fix to boost sales of WFB, release an entry level/skirmish game, get people buying the very same models you already sell for WFB but in smaller numbers, you've already paid for the development so any extra sales add to profit. Then once people have built a small force under skirmish rules let them add to it for the main WFB, they'll have spent the same amount of money (if not a little more when you take into account the cost of the skirmish game) but it wouldn't be in one big stupid hit!
2/ Sales of AoS are poor, and it doesn't have a strong sales/customer base anywhere world wide. In some countries it is all but dead already, in others there is a small and slowly growing community, however these are not near the levels WFB had before it was decided to be scrapped (and this means sales BEFORE end times spike). The reception of the game from the wider community has been overwhelmingly negative, from the ruleset, to the background material.
Hastings starts up around here for those that are interested in reading more.
http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthread.php?417713-Three-ways-to-play-AoS-starting-this-summer&p=7620227#post7620227