Is Competitive Play Killing The Hobby?

Anyone who knows anything about me and my hobby knows that, after you sift through the nitty gritty, I am a narrative player at heart. Sure, I enjoy the tactical side of my games, I love coming up with strategies to outwit and confound my opponents, but when you get down to it it’s all about forging a story, playing out a scenario and imagining how my battles would look were it really happening in front of me. For the early editions of Warhammer, this was pretty much the focal point of the game, yet somewhere along the way this changed and with that change a whole different demographic orbited the hobby with a growing hunger for glory in the shape of Tournaments of both the grand and local variety. 

Most people won’t know this, but I began my humble journey into the hobby in 1996 back when Warhammer 40k 2nd edition, which incidentally my first ever box set, was one of the two big systems Games Workshop was promoting at the time - the other of course being Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Coming from a background of watching my father paint miniatures for games of Dungeons and Dragons and being enchanted by his stories of quests and characters he encountered in his gaming sessions I knew I wanted to forge and play my own stories and thus my addiction to the world of miniature wargaming was born. Back then, during the dark days when hand-to-hand combat took longer than any other part of the game, these epic and thematic moments came purpose built into the rules themselves, from Vehicles having their own unique damage charts to reflect their varying and unique constructions to Marines getting back up after being wounded because they were lucky enough to be hit in their bionic eye instead of the pink squishy thing rattling around their skull. It was a glorious time for narrative games and some moments, such as the time my Ultramarines Dreadnought slowly fell apart as it denied a Dark Eldar Talos passage to a vital strategic location, will remain in my memory forever as epic moments that happened during my many years in wargaming.

2nd Edition 40k was a different beast to today’s 10th Edition

The hobby has bloomed and gained massive mainstream popularity since those days of course, but us veterans still remember those old days with fondness, nostalgia and a little sadness. Popular Necron enthusiast and YouTuber IDICBeer addresses this point in one of his more recent videos and even the hugely entertaining guys over at Tabletop Tactics took the time to film a game of 2nd edition in the last year that somehow felt even more gripping than their usual battle reports, and that’s saying something considering they always find ways to make their games as thematic as possible. The question of whether the latest editions of Warhammer, particularly 40k, are a step up or step down is and always will be a hotly discussed topic, but one thing that is utterly undeniable by anyone is how these historic systems have moved away from their RPG roots and ventured more into the competitive scene, and so this begs the question…

Is Competitive Play Killing The Hobby?

We’re not talking about financially here of course, no. Financially speaking Games Workshop is in an excellent place as wargaming’s industry leader with healthy rises in stocks and net worth, which means people are spending more money in the hobby which likely comes down to more people getting into the hobby as opposed to existing hobbyists spending even more money and in that sense the hobby is alive and well. But what about the soul of the game? It feels like forever since I played a game of 40k and really felt engrossed in what was happening in front of me with the game almost turning into a shopping list of “must have X amount of this unit”, or “I shouldn’t take this unit because, despite how cool it is, it’s terrible in game”. Essentially it has become a maths essay in miniature format and I can see why some hobbyists lose their passion for the game, the magic of the game is gone and has been replaced with an endless stream of statlines and working out optimal moves for each unit. Poor old Khorne Bezerkers have been resigned to occupying objective markers for Victory Points due to their 2 OC instead of following their life passion of slicing off heads - you hate to see it.

Khorne Bezerkers have been reduced to “thinking” now!

So how exactly did we arrive at this point? Well the answer to that is simple. Money. The customers who buy the most amount of miniatures in the industry are tournament players who are always playing new armies and trying new play styles. Now, don’t get me wrong, Games Workshop are still a company and as such will always be profits focused, so leaning into their main demographic is smart and totally what I would be doing in their position - streamlined rules, constant updates and points balances, it all comes part and parcel in appeasing the great cash gods, and yet there are still a select number of wargaming veterans who have been feeling more and more that something’s missing from their games, that the “fun” has been taken away in favour of something more profitable and sterile.

Tournaments remains very lucrative for GW

The issue is, and I know it is a bitter pill to swallow, that these veterans make up such a minority of Games Workshop’s consumer base that their cries of disappointment just aren’t top of the company’s priority list, but that doesn’t mean they are being ignored entirely. 40k’s now regularly supported Crusade rules are a great alternative to the typical match play and offer somewhat of a decent variety of missions that focus more on the narrative as opposed to the Even-Steven missions that offer a straight forward and fair gaming experience, and the Tyrannic War/Pariah Nexus mission decks are a great compromise between the two, but more than that this massive influx of money has allowed the return of something veterans had also cried out for many many years - Specialist Games.

Specialist games are a thing of beauty

Specialist Games were always near and dear to the hearts of us old time players. Personally I was a huge fan of Mordheim, Battlefleet Gothic and the oft forgotten Inquisitor game, most of which were heavily narrative focused. Necromunda and Blood Bowl, two games that were hugely popular back in the day have made a comeback and are seeing semi-regular updates to their ranges with a brand new box set recently released for Necromunda in the form of Hive Secundus. It is a heavy contrast to the Specialist Game releases of old which received minimal love and died a death because of lack of funds and wider appeal back in the 90’s, two problems that are virtually non-existent nowadays due to the financial gains and popularity Games Workshop has gained since then. Anyone hankering for a narrative buzz can easily pick up Necromunda and paint up a gang for some classic hive warfare with rules very similar to the original release.

As well as Specialist Games, I cannot harken back to the story driven glory days of Games Workshop without mentioning two more systems that the company has released in recent years - Warhammer: The Horus Heresy and Warhammer: The Old World.

Rejoice! The World That Was has become The World That Is!

Now, whilst the Horus Heresy game was always popular with players even back in it’s pure Forge World format, the Old World, or Warhammer Fantasy Battles as it used to be known, experienced a literal world ending event and was completely killed off both in the lore and game system wise in favour of the far sleeker Age of Sigmar ruleset. Why? Because it made no money towards the end, and yet they brought it back because it was what the fans wanted, and how was this made possible? Because of all that money tournament players and new hobbyists are pumping into the company. These systems are love notes to the dedicated and loyal fanbase they had acquired, a promise that even as the company evolves into something new that their contributions had not been forgotten and were, in fact, appreciated and rewarded.

In Conclusion

Is competitive play killing the hobby? No, of course it isn’t, in fact I’d argue the opposite, it is probably saving the hobby. Whilst the Warhammer systems of old have become more catered to the competitive scene in recent year, the range of systems has expanded exponentially. We went from Fantasy, 40k and a smattering of barely supported Specialist Games to a huge variety of systems with full support from Games Workshop - 40k, Age of Sigmar, Horus Heresy, Old World, Middle Earth Strategy Battles, Necromunda, Blood Bowl, Warcry, Underworlds, Kill Team, Legiones Imperialis… the range of both actual game systems today and what they offer is mind boggling, and so the trade off of a more story driven system to a more competitive, but still good system is well worth it in my opinion.

But it’s not only the money side of things that has improved the hobby, the sheer amount of passionate competitive players giving feedback on the company’s main game systems has forced the company to engage and listen to it’s consumer base on a regular basis, and this has led to quarterly balance updates that make each faction feel cared about with regular codex releases to boot - back in 3rd, 4th or even 5th edition 40k you were lucky if your army got a codex at all! This brings me to another point, and that is I think people tend to look back at the old editions through the rose tinted glasses of the children we were back then and in actual fact most current systems, 40k especially, offer more freedom than they ever offered before, and if you’re old enough to remember when split firing wasn’t an option and that you had to fire at the closest unit unless you passed a leadership test you’ll know exactly what I mean, plus it was no fun playing against the easily abusable Chapter Rules system Space Marines had in 4th edition - Detachments are a far more even and elegant way to represent this in my opinion.

In conclusion, whilst not everyone will be thrilled with the current state of systems such as 40k as they are today, there is no denying that the hobby community as a whole has grown, in my mind for the better exponentially because of competitive play, and whilst the magic of thematic play may have lessened over the years, those of us who yearn for the days of old most likely still have our old source books to draw inspiration from and adapt into this new and exciting era of wargaming, and the fact that we still have those memories as well as the old, beaten up copies of rulebooks of yesteryear is something that Games Workshop can never take away or, indeed, ever replace.