Dark Days for Collectible Miniatures Gamers?
You had a good run, Wizkids.
It’s not exactly breaking news that Wizkids has been dissolved by Topps and is no longer selling or supporting their many games, but what will it mean for gamers? The one-time king of the collectible miniatures hill has been wiped right off the map, and there might not be anyone in a position to fill the void. Here’s a look at the dark state of CMGs.
When Topps dissolved Wizkids to focus their efforts on their sports and entertainment business (and more than a few people saw that coming way back when Topps first bought Wizkids from Jordan Weisman), they declared that they were looking for other companies to buy HeroClix and other Wizkids properties. Catalyst Game Labs, which has a track record of breathing new life into abandoned intellectual property, and Pinata Games have announced plans to team up and buy HeroClix and other former Wizkids brands from Topps. There are questions about the portability of some of the licenses required to produce those games, Marvel and DC chief among them.
The logical heir to the Wizkids CMG throne would be Wizards of the Coast, but they already failed to crack that market with Dreamblade. The D&D Miniatures game seemed to be a solid success, but it is in a state of turmoil right now. Non-random packs, 4th edition rules and an end to league play for the skirmish version of the game are all major changes, but WotC also seems to have handed off development of new skirmish rules to a volunteer group of fans. I’m honestly not sure what’s going on there. At least the Star Wars Miniatures game appears relatively stable, although word has filtered through to the official forums that prize support for sanctioned tournaments will be scaled back or eliminated this year.
That leaves us with Monsterpocalypse, the only other really big name in collectible miniatures right now (is the World of Warcraft minis game doing well? I have no idea, but Upper Deck is a heavyweight). This could be a case of incredibly good timing for Privateer Press, if they can take advantage of the power vaccuum. It’s been hard to judge the success of Monsterpocalypse – there are certainly pockets of enthusiasm, and Privateer reportedly has sold out at least one print run of the first set. I’m just not sure if the subject matter fills too narrow of a niche. I figure, who doesn’t love giant monster battles, right? I certainly hope the game enjoys tremendous, long-lasting success.
So where does all that leave us, the gamers? Some of you might be secretly relieved. Not many of us have much extra money burning holes in our pockets these days. One less HeroClix set to buy a case of might not be the worst thing in the world. But for a lot of us, the best part of a collectible game is competitive tournaments, and with games dying and tournament support drying up, those might be few and far between in 2009. I only hope other companies can learn from what’s happened here. Wizkids really ran every property they had into the ground, created byzantine rules systems that they constantly changed, and flooded the market with game after game after game. I really believe if they had stuck with their three main properties, Mage Knight, HeroClix and MechWarrior, the company would be alive and strong today.
The bright side is, we’ve got some great games we can continue to play against friends and family (with extensive house rules) for years and years to come. Good things Wizkids didn’t run an MMORPG.
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January 10th, 2009 5:45 PM
After posting this, I discovered that Topps Wizkids as early as August 2008, fired almost everyone, and put random people in charge of game design. Also just testing the comment system.
January 14th, 2009 3:09 PM
The D&D Miniatures guild is a strong group, not sure how Successful they will be but they have been working with stats for some time now and really understand the system.
If you want more info on the project you can sign up here http://www.ddmguild.com/ to sign up for their newsletter called Unbroken. Or Drop by http://www.hordelings.com as the community leaders post there.
I’m sure hoping the game can stay on it’s legs as I’ve been a fan for several years now.
Also it’s sad to see so many other games falling apart.
January 14th, 2009 7:02 PM
Theres also AT-43, I forgot the name of the company though. But I hope someone picks up Mechwarrior. They’re about 1/144 scale, so I can team them up with my Gundam action figures for truly wicked game of Mechwarrior.
January 14th, 2009 7:07 PM
There’s not much good news on the Mechwarrior front. Topps pulled that property and Shadowrun out of the potential Catalyst/Pinata sale this week. I’ll have a bigger post about it next week, when more news becomes available.
January 16th, 2009 11:53 AM
I was the first “rules arbitrator” WizKids brought in to run HeroClix championship tournaments and adjudicate the roles on their forums and I must say that they had some serious problems with the rules since day 1. The primary designer for the rules had moved on to creating other games and didn’t realize how many holes and confusions there were in the original rulebook and when presented the opportunity to change them with the “cleanup” done in Unleashed went the path of least resistance.
I saw this again and again on so many of their other games and wasn’t happy with how they were treating their customers, so I left.. It’s too bad though, I liked the idea of “Clix” related games, there were jsut too many problems with their internal politics to stay agile enough to remain innovative and at the top of their game.
January 22nd, 2009 10:14 PM
[...] at WizKids, we almost missed the news entirely that the Clix line of collectible miniatures is now dead. While Mage Knight was discontinued by WizKids some time ago, the system behind the game lived on, [...]