The ETC Captains have spoken. Next year's event will be run using the Ninth Age rules.
The vote which finished this morning effectively saw Ninth Age receive 24 first votes to KoW 10 (after preferences). Age of Sigmar picked up two votes and 8th Edition one.
Continental Europe largely voted en masse for the new Ninth Age. Kings of War gathered support from the following counties - Australia, Greece, Latvia, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Singapore, USA and Wales. The two Age of Sigmar votes came from England and their Scottish subjects.
What is interesting is that largely the split was along language lines with no predominantly English-speaking nations favouring Ninth Age. That will be an interesting dynamic going forward, methinks.
The New Zealand vote was split between Ninth Age and Kings of War though I suspect if taken today might more firmly favour one over the other.
This result comes close on the heels of the US GT circuit (all seven regions) opting for KoW next year. They have also chosen it for the US Masters that leads on from this.
While I know GW don't pretend that Age of Sigmar is a tournament game, you've got to think that a tournament presence would at least be an attractive proposition. As it stands this seems to be limited to the UK and some parts of Australia. This may or may not impact sales for GW.
What I would say is once the genie is out of the bottle it is very hard to put it back in.
Wow.. inside of 6 months, it's not even on the radar (AoS) - I've been a brand manager amidst my many hats in media and design - that result, from a core buying group, would seriously be hard to slide across the table in my report. GW just got tabled.
ReplyDeleteIt will certainly be an interesting case study. If Gw are correct and tournament gamers don't buy many models compared to hobbies, then there shouldn't be any impact. However if US sales drop precipitously then it would infer this is not entirely correct and some market research may not be a bad thing!
ReplyDeleteUnless people still buy GW models to use in KoW. Interesting times ahead.
I think this was probably a mistake for the health of the ETC. KoW would have been the better choice, AoS probably the worst. 9th Age was too divisive and unproven, where Mantic have been open about wanting to work with/write specifically for the event.
ReplyDeleteThere's just no point (yet) in playing a completely untested game and one where there's no real model support to inject new life in years to come. Unless the writing team can show that they can write rules for new units that GW produce (or completely rewrite units/army books well), the game will stagnate terribly and we'll be doing this all over again next year. That and getting a game of 9th outside of europe/universal battle will be impossible - so any team that is spread across a country/the world is at a huge disadvantage.
Not inspiring - Greece is a big draw card, but I'd rather just go on my own time for a holiday than play 9th.
Don't think this will have much/any impact on GWs bottom line - most ETC players have well established armies/will borrow armies/proxy rather than buy something from scratch and their current business model doesn't seem to care about tournament players in the slightest anyway.