| Brood Brother |
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Joined: Fri Oct 15, 2004 10:04 am
Posts: 121
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First, I agree that the absence of future printed supplements spells doom for EA and provides a very good insight at what GW intends for the game : pay lip service to an existing community with web "support" (when will we get at least a changelog for the LRBs ?) and try to sell a couple of models with as little investment as possible (AKA bitz archives). People expecting to see a Necron army from GW (FW being still a possibility, however remote), and expecting online supplements with the quality of the rulebook and Swordwind are either very optimistic or borderline delusional.
That being said, I'm not sure that having a "complete" product would have guaranteed a success for EA.
After all, SM2 was not a finished product from the start : it had 4 expansions (Armies of the Imperium, Renegades, Ork & Squad Warlords, Hive Warriors) and a standalone/spinoff game (Titan Legions), not to mention the tons of articles for extra units/options in WD. All of that took some time to get released. SM2/TL was (back then) a sufficient success to get supported pretty well, even when other games already got axed (RIP Man'O'War...).
On the other hand, rules-wise, Epic 40K was a finished product from the start, since the book had army lists for all existing and upcoming armies. And army releases were pretty frequent at first (the game had SM and Orks in the box, and it took only a few months for Eldars, IG and Tyranids to get released, even without counting the incomplete Chaos line). Also, people with SM-era armies could use them with tournament-sanctionned rules right out of the box. That wasn't enough to prevent E40K from being axed.
I also don't think that E40K tanked because of its rules : although some old-timers were miffed because of the very high level of abstraction, it's not unusual for new versions of GW-products to generate distress/anger for a part of their older customers (I suspect this is partly by design to get rid of people who don't by that much anyway). And (donning flameproof suit here), a company able to sell an atrociously flawed system like WH40K would definitely have been able to sell E40K if it had put its mind to it.
In hindsight, I don't think anything could have saved EA considering how it started :
- very confidential game (no advertisement in WD, no demos in stores...)
- many rehashed models
- weird release schedule spanning over many years and having small unknown armies (Feral Orks, Siegemasters) take the place of some of the main armies (Chaos, Nids)
But with their recent decisions GW is not deciding to correct those flaws, but to make them even worse ! 
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I've got most of it arrayed in my War Room ! And I collect IG, SM (including Traitor-SM1), Ork, Eldar, Chaos/Cultists, Squat, 'Nid, TL, and Tau ! Did I miss any ?! 
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