How come the hobby gets more and more popular every year, but the quality of the products get WORSE and WORSE every single year? It doesn't make sense

This applies to RPGs, wargaming, trading cards, etc

Market leaders tend to get lazy and complacent, and this hobby seems to attract kind of whales that will never stop consuming the products no matter what.

>>96243912 (OP)
Consoomers

>>96243912 (OP)
Companies, specially those in the stock market, aim to maximize profits at all costs.
Product quality is just another slider to play with. If you can tone it down to save money without losing too many sales, then it's worth it.
Since popularity is going up and basic normie consoomers with no sense of quality are hoping aboard, they can tank quality and still make bank from them. So they do.

Normies have no taste. Appeal to normies, lose the flavor.

Left is what I fell in love with warhammer for as a kid
I remember staring at these pictures in the starter rulebook and being amazed, not really knowing what was going on but thinking it looked awesome
Too bad the models have rarely if ever fully realised this vision of 40k
They had an opportunity with the new space marines to do it but they decided to ruin it all with Primaris, it's sad

>>96243912 (OP)
millennial consoomers love dogshit slop with brands they like plastered on it. it's why funko pop figures are such a hit with those people. they aren't even real hobbyists, at most they maybe play 5e every now and then, maybe collect some magic cards, but they never wander outside the safe walled garden of entry level trash from the big corporations they have a weird stockholm syndrome relationship with. unfortunately this demographic of "performative nerd" is now the vast majority in the hobby space, thanks to the normie-fication of everything.

all that said, it's not the end of the world. there are still plenty of people in the hobby space with real passion making good products, they're just in the independent space. i stopped buying anything from dogshit companies like wotc or gw years ago (even before shit like the OGL disaster) and never looked back, and my gaming experience has been way better for it.

>>96243912 (OP)
>RPGs
I know things often seem bleak when you get your news from some shitsite, but I thing RPGs are genuinely doing good atm. There's lots of cool new stuff coming out.

>wargaming
Games Workshop has no real competition and grew too comfortable.

>trading cards
WotC is too busy printing money to develop their own ip, Pokemon just wants to sell shiny cardboard to retards, and Konami couldn't maintain a good game if their life depended on it.

>>96244930
The problem with RPGs, and really Warhammer as well, is that it doesn't matter if they are producing the best product in the world right now, the problem is the PLAYERS. DnD could produce the greatest game in the world next week, and it wouldn't matter because the average DnD player is a fucking faggot in 2025.

>>96243912 (OP)
The quality of the products gets worse and worse every single year BECAUSE the hobby gets more popular. When your population expands, the lowest common denominator typically gets lower.

>>96244949
Hey at least Matt Mercer is herding the faggots towards Daggerheart now so they're finally playing other games.

Not even joking, I'm an actual fag myself and I'm starting a Daggerheart campaign with my bf as the GM later this month. We tend to play other games anyway tho. He plays pf and I'm a big fan of 5e and CoC.

>>96243912 (OP)
It's kind of unfair to compare those two artworks, considering the right one is from the cover art of a novel, so the art budget probably wasn't amazing.

>>96244979
problem is its not just the art cover but the two models as well have a noticable drop in quality

>>96243940
This.

Why work hard when customers will buy up any low-effort slop you churn out?

>>96244072
It's not even just about saving money, it's about managing expectations. Once a game gets big enough to have an established fan community like 40k or MTG, the manufacturers are no longer in the mindset of competing for random potential customers' time and money against games made by rival companies but rather in milking the existing fans with a steady stream of iterations on the products they've already consumed. The trouble is that once a company reaches this stage, everything they do is basically competing with themselves. If they make something that's too good and can't consistently maintain that level of quality afterwards the fans might get disappointed and start leaving. The company is incentivized to enforce deliberate mediocrity so they're no constantly setting new benchmarks for themselves they might not be able to top. Corporations have basically learned all the wrong lessons from everyone telling them to be more "sustainable".

>>96243912 (OP)
>How come the hobby gets more and more popular every year, but the quality of the products get WORSE and WORSE every single year?
Same as fastfood

>>96243912 (OP)
>the quality of the products get WORSE and WORSE every single year?
Kali Yuga.
Everything is in decline.

>>96243912 (OP)
These factors are often directly interlinked. GW started out full of hobby enthusiasts, nerds just like anyone else on /tg/. Over the decades, it's been slowly infiltrated by business suits who saw the opportunity to make a buck. Now rather than GW producing 40k to make a good wargame, they produce 40k to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Management mandates quantity of products over quality, micro-managing project budgets to squeeze more out of employees who get paid less. The entire 40k wargame has had its rules gutted, codexes stripped of all personality and soul, to make the game easier to learn and more tournament friendly. These were not decisions made by people who like playing 40k. These are decisions by people who like making more people play 40k - no matter what its actual quality may or may not be, no matter how many lifelong fans they drive out by sucking all the fun out of the hobby. They just don't care.

>>96243912 (OP)
There are a lot of people in the hobbies that are in the community, but don't particularly interact or participate in any meaningful way. For example, People who follow the 'lore', generally through 3rd hand sources like YouTube, wikis, and recycled memes. Suits see these people as potential customers who just haven't had the bar to entry lowered enough to get them to buy in. The truth is though that they'll never start to participate as these consumers prefer their low effort skimming as opposed to painting a mini or reading a book.

Stay in Reddit

Because of Blackrock pushing Woke jewish cultural marxism.

>>96243912 (OP)
Capitalism.

>>96244949
RPGs are more than just D&D anon

>>96243912 (OP)
>the hobby
>wargaming
Let's face it when some fag on /tg/ is complaining about the state of """"""wargaming""""""" it's GWshit and the, at the absolute most, five GW refugee games the average deeply incurious and borderline retarded cryptonormie GW orbiter is capable of remembering exist at any one time.
Sure the tin price, cost of living pressures and the new era of protectionism are putting pressure on indie minis manufacturers, but besides that it's a great era for wargamers. 3D printing, everyone being online means networking is easier than ever, more new rules and design philosophies, more plastic models than ever.

>>96243912 (OP)
Define quality. The hobby (which is bigger than 40k) is healthier and in a better state than ever.

>>96244979
The problem is that they own the rights for the picture on the left side, and could have just re-used it, but they felt the need to commission a new version of the same picture and then decided it's good enough.

>>96243912 (OP)
>reddit

>>96244979
Tell that to classic BL novels. The fact that the art budget for novel covers is now in the toilet is just further evidence of GW's decline.

>>96246843
Look I'm just gonna come out and say it. Clint Langley's art is ugly and he'll never be half the artist Simon Bisley is.

>>96243912 (OP)
because the more popular a thing is, the more it's quality drops because there will be someone to pay for it even if it's worse.
There is a very thin line of financially viable but not popular enough to make low effort money and we have crossed that by a lot.
I miss the days of social stigma for nerd activities

>>96243912 (OP)
Exposure. Mass marketing has never been easier.

>>96243912 (OP)
Took me a second to see the inquisition logo; I thought right was a sigmarine and it was comparing aos art to 40k.

>>96245486
>trannyrock

face the wall

>>96243912 (OP)
Literally because of normies being introduced to a cool thing so long into its lifespan.

>>96243912 (OP)
Your problem is with Warhammer. Have you tried playing good games instead?

>>96244072
This.
Everyone hates it, but let's be real: It just comes down to math. When the franchise is new and exciting, the developers care, the fans care, the developers put it cool art, the fans like it, etc.
But as the years go by, all the passion is replaced by pure capitalist calculus. They don't need to bother with quality, and you'll buy it anyway.
So... Why the fuck would they put in effort when you're willing to buy shit? If you'll buy garbage, you get sold garbage. It's a corporation that sells consumer products, not your fucking buddy. If you won't have standards, you won't get quality. That's just how it is. The world doesn't operate on magic fairy dust. If you don't like it, you need to stop buying it.

>>96255399
This. Its so simple.
>It's a corporation that sells consumer products, not your fucking buddy

This sentiment is a problem, especially within hobby environments. Even if some hobbyists start a company to sell hobby products (and GW is past that stage for ages anyway), they are not your hobby friends providing you with hobby material out of their love for the hobby, no matter how good they act to make you believe this. As soon as you have to pay money for whatever "hobby" item you are buying, its no longer a deal between friends, but you are the customer. Just because you and the seller might share the same interests and hobbies, this seller does not become your friend and his primary interest is not your hobby-wellbeing, but your fucking money.
GW, Mantic, Northstar, Archon Games, TTCombat, Corvus Belli, the Perry brothers and all the other big and small companies in the wider Wargaming Industry.. they all dont give a shit what i do with my purchased miniatures or other hobby products.

>>96252273
Space Weirdos is kind of fun.

>>96243912 (OP)
Number go upenomics

>>96245486
Why blame them when we could be blaming Baillie Gifford?