A case for mixed race teams

[Gracehoper]

Dear Games Workshop


I think it’s brilliant to see mixed Blood Bowl teams. I’ve been expecting it for a while. 
If you guys didn’t put out rules for mixed teams sooner or later, either I had fundamentally misunderstood the importance of core design in making and selling games – or you had.

Mixed team rules give me the perfect reason to buy even more minis to pair with all the teams I’ve bought since 2016. I totally want that.
If you want to sell a niche product and have a hard time getting new players, you can simply give the current customers a good reason to buy more of the old product.

It’s the same reason Dungeon Bowl makes business sense. 
I might not run out and buy several new full teams for a niche of a niche – but I’ll buy the boxed game and add-ons for my main-product teams. And if you give me incentive and value, I’ll gladly buy even more full team boxes I already own, just so I can paint them up differently and use them in all kinds of different settings and dungeons and Beach Bowls. That would be awesome!

Unfortunately there’s a bit of a “but”.
There are some key features that are necessary for this logic to work as the consumer part of my brain is being guided down whatever funnel is supposed to bring in customers. 
Those key features would be “incentive and value”.

Until recently the Underworld team had just that.

With two boxes of skaven, a box of goblins and a troll I could get the full skaven team I actually wanted – and a team I didn’t want but was too good of a bargain to pass on. 
It’s much easier to justify another full box of skaven to get the last two gutter runners, if the remaining miniatures can be put to good use elsewhere. I get the team I want and, for just the price of goblins and a troll, I get another full team! Do I ever really want to play Underworld? Isn’t the price for goblins and a troll actually… Nevermind that, practically half the cost!
This was a smart way of using a top tier team to give incentive and add value to a less popular lower tier team.

Now the community has already had three years to purchase what was a brilliant overlap in design of rules and product.
Simply changing the rules to be able to repackage an existing product might be sound logic in the boardroom – but much less so on the message boards.
It might look like a new product in a spreadsheet. But to everyone who already got their Underworld team – or simply care about the hobby – it’s a reminder that you never really seem to quite understand the community.

Who is this new Underworld team for? New players? Hey kids, wanna play one of the worst teams in the game that half the community now loudly opposes for lazy game design?
Games Workshop, you’ve brought so much joy to my life, but your decisions are killing my opportunities to market your products to myself – and mind you, that’s really kinda your job.

This might sound like a radical suggestion, but why not let the community bring in new players simply by making good, synergetic design decisions that benefit both the game and the bottom line? 

I know it’s a pickle. 
Blood Bowl was left untouched by the GW business logic for so long that it actually became a really good game. It was kept alive by the fans who loved it and nurtured it.  But those fans are now more loyal to the game than to the brand and will either rage quit or simply ignore big changes.

I realise that Dungeon Bowl might need rework to bring up to date. The turnover rule and rules for moving through tackle zones never fit what was really a 2nd ed. game at heart. I can see why it might not seem worth the development costs.
But how about Sevens? Sixers? Or something entirely new with a smaller or maybe weirder pitch for quicker games?
You don’t need to make the rules easier to increase accessibility. Simply making an official variant that is slightly quicker to play would make the game more accessible by allowing it to happen more often and in more situations. And it would open a playground for designing mixed race teams.
Make the game designers and the model designers get in the same Zoom Room and let them figure out the best synergy between rules and products.
I’ll gladly buy the 15 Blood Bowl team boxes I’ve bought since 2016 all over again, if you give me good reason and good value.
I’ll buy blister packs for all the competitive teams and even for the bad ones that just look cool – as long as they don’t insult my intelligence. Did the orc blister pack outperform any expectations? I’ll bet you the time it takes to write this that it didn’t.
Sell me single sprues in plastic bags, if you want.
But make me buy more models through good game design, not 20th century monopoly bullying.

Design from the inside-out. How can mixed teams be balanced, interesting, make sense in the lore and also cleverly overlap to give good consumer value and incentive to buy more products that are already on the shelves?
Underworld was a pretty good example of just that. Now they are a reminder of a game and a company that once more failed to recognise what made them great in the first place.


If you have read this far and are, in fact, not a decision maker at GW, I’ll venture a guess that you probably have opinions on the matter of your own. If they reflect some of mine, feel free to share this letter. Thank you for reading.

[viyullas]

I would not have been able to explain it better


Thanks

[cornixt]

The lack of consistency is the most frustrating thing here. It seems that the Chaos Renegades were considered by GW to be completely fine as a mish-mash team that needed models from five different sprues not including the big guys. Team boxes were considered completely fine despite being missing key positionals for almost every team. Yet for the Underworld they do the opposite, and rejig the roster to fit the sprues, invalidating existing teams and making Gutter Runners even harder to get.

It should be a good thing - making full teams easier to build without having to buy the missing parts - but it's a bit hamfisted. I think this is the first time they have taken something so fundamental from an existing team rather than just adding to it.

[Gracehoper]

It should be a good thing - making full teams easier to build without having to buy the missing parts - but it's a bit hamfisted..

Right? I've worked with marketing and video games the past 8 years, and if I'm not right about this, I haven't learned a darn thing.

It's funny how the old underworld team (via its overlap with the skaven models and rules) was the closest GW came to offering a bulk deal.
To be able get an Underworld team in just one box is, when viewed in isolation, good. But I'm concerned with the philosophy it represents. It's that of Mattel, a toy company telling children what to want. And yes, I know. That's been the GW way since the 90s. But listening to the consumers, I'm as certain as I can be without having the actual numbers, that there would be more money in smart rules with incentive, possibly via a side product, to add extra value to the main product.

I don't mind buying two team boxes to get all the pieces. I want more than six linemen anyway and I like to use extra bits for conversions. Yet it's a common complaint that the boxes "aren't complete".
Using a side product like Dungeon Bowl, GW could adjust the mixed team rosters to fit nicely with eg. the leftover blitzers and throwers from your elf team etc. to quiet the complaints about "incomplete team boxes" – simply by adding perceived value to getting a second box. Or a third.
And no one would complain that it ruined the carefully composed main game simply because consumers are much more likely to pay for what's essentially beta testing if it's an experimental side product that doesn't interfere with the core product they love.

My main concern is not the balance of Underworld teams. It's not even that my own Underworld team might be superfluous or grandfathered. I only want GW to make decisions that give the community good reason keep buying Blood Bowl. And I think this approach to mixed teams is a big missed opportunity in that regard.

[soyelpera]

Blood Bowl was left untouched by the GW business logic for so long that it actually became a really good game. It was kept alive by the fans who loved it and nurtured it.  But those fans are now more loyal to the game than to the brand and will either rage quit or simply ignore big changes.

This sentence was to good to be ignored, had to quote it. I think the big mistake made by GW is making players chose between the loyalty to the brand and their love to BB. Couldn't agree more with the topic in general and with this concept in particular