The Hobby Begins to Crumble: WizKids Falls!!!

Wiz Kids falls and is it the first of many companies to crumble in this economic turmoil?

Tom Vasel is in panic mode trying to save the hobby by putting out 50 video reviews a week but is this enough to save the hobby?

I really doubt that this is the fall of the hobby, and more in line with the fall of a struggling, under performing company.

Be that as it may, the culling is coming...

WizKids was a TERRIBLE enterprise...having dealt with them both personally and hearing time and time again from distributors what clowns they are(were) in terms of business practices it's pretty surprising that they've managed to limp along for the past couple of years. The weird thing is that I think PIRATES OF THE SPANISH MAIN was pretty much their breadwinner...and surprisingly, TSURO did really well for them. But they kept dumping money into shit like CREEPY FREAKS, HORROR CLIX, HALO CLIX, HOBO CLIX, HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL CLIX, and then proceeding to change everything, make figures incompatiable, and put out out otherwise crap games that few people wanted to really get into.

When MECHWARRIOR came out, there were already signs of trouble. Dollar Bill and I both bought booster cases because we thought it was going to be the second coming of BATTLETECH. Then we sat there looking at the 20-30 farming mechs we got and the one or two Mad Cats or Atlases and realized that they had totally missed the ball.

SPORTS CLIX...wrong audience.

ROCKETMEN...no audience at all.

HEROCLIX...Steve Avery still likes 'em.

Serves them right for fucking up Shadowrun.

Octavian wrote:

Serves them right for fucking up Shadowrun.

Which, I have to admit, I thought was completely impossible. I really thought Shadowrun was a slam-dunk in any format...and then I watched both WizKids *and* Micro$oft fuck up Shadowrun in every way imaginable. Wow...

Man, we gotta change our news reporting day. All the wild stuff happens during the week!


Heroclix was awesome when it debuted. Sportsclix was brilliant, but like Mike says, was the market there? I think the market for a collectible figure baseball game consisted of me and about a dozen other people, if that.


But the bad decisions they made were overwhelming. First came the overpowered figures and poor playtesting for Heroclix. Then came the bannings and figure rotation for tournaments that were pretty unpopular, sucking the wind out of the game's early momentum.

Sportsclix was treated like a red-headed stepchild, killing any chance the game had to get a foothold. They went with a 2005 edition that was miles better but completely incompatible with 2004, simultaneously alienating the previous customer base and scaring new customers--what if 2005's figures were incompatible with the *next* edition? Of course, no one had to worry about that. Wizkids spent tons of money promoting the 2005 release initially but just as suddenly the advertising and support disappeared.

As I understand it, the designers of the game didn't know it was discontinued until the players did!


Then they threw good money after bad investing in all the Clix stuff that was never destined to go anywhere. Horrorclix was cute but there's nothing "horror" about the clix system. Mechwarrior was a confused mess. Then there were the million different games announced that never went anywhere...Toonclix. Scoobyclix. Development and production for mock-ups and promos...money all wasted. It became clear there was no one at the helm, or at least no one who had any clue what was going on.

And don't get me started on the little constructible game thing. Pirates was a hit, but instead of truly nuturing that game (which besides the plastic ships, the rules had little going for them) they spent money on making Rocketmen and Falconus Racers and Race Day (man, if Sportsclix had a limited audience, how about a freaking constructible Nascar game with big paper maps and flimsy, uglier than they should be little cars?)



Speaking of cancellations, have they officially cancelled VS. yet? There was another case of dumping tons of money into a game, cashing in, but not having the know-how to develop the game properly and keep it going. All they knew how to do was pump out four expansions year after year.



It's not the hobby market that's crumbling. It's just the gravy bowl of the collectible market has emptied and there's no longer room for inefficiencies and poor management. There was a time where a company could count on quick $$$ just by developing any half-assed licensed CCG. No longer.


Though they are cousins, the collectible market and the boardgaming market are two separate entities. Most people who moved from CCGs to boardgaming consider themselves to have left that other hobby entirely in pursuit of a new one.

Lots of good points.

I'd bet that anything sold in boosters not named "Magic: The Gathering" or "Dungeons and Dragons" will be done soon.

Most of these CCGs, and the CMGs for sure, have proven to be pretty dispensable. When they're canceled, they're done.

Dead on about Shadowrun. The ironic part is that even though it's the most kick-@$$ rpg setting, even the rpg f's it up. That game was, is, to damn complicated for the high octane action it should be providing. I think the card game did a fair job. At least the cards where amusing. The best version of Shadowrun to date is the SNES game. Not because it's true to the rpg, which blows, like the genesis one, but because it gives all the background and feeling of the setting with fun gameplay.

But seriously, an action figure game....

(Edit: I don't like the outlook for that monster thing PP put out either. The theme is cool, but collectible = bad, and the factions all suck. Play MMA instead.)

You think the Star Wars minis are going down too? I dunno, with The Clone Wars becoming quite popular I think it will still have legs as both a CMG and with the popular Star Wars Saga Edition RPG.

Speaking of Pirates of the Spanish Main, anybody want some of mine?

WizKids can go fuck themselves and rot in the coldest, darkest and wettest place in hell for all I care. I know it's a minor detail...but if you're going to call a ship the USS Constitution and give a flavor text to suggest that it's the USS Constitution, you can at least make the ship look like the Consitution. And when some person complains about it's appearance and sends you pictures of the real ship, don't give the lame excuse of, "Well, it was not meant as a historical representation." And then, the ships......Good god, if you blew on them just right they'd fucking break.

As for Shadowrun, if they had made the minis like....Oh I don't know....Mini size, I probably would have bought some. But nooooooo...they have to make them action figure size and then go and make crappy action figures to boot. So they somehow manage to fuck up two aspects of the game.

Never bought any of the Battletech minis. See above.

The sports minis would have been cool but sadly it didn't last long enough.

If they hadn't fucked up everything else they touched, I might have considered some of the Star Wars ones......

WizKids didn't make STar Wars Minis...that's Hasbro. WizKids made the same fucked up models like pirates but STar Wars.

You think the Star Wars minis are going down too? I dunno, with The Clone Wars becoming quite popular I think it will still have legs as both a CMG and with the popular Star Wars Saga Edition RPG.

Maybe. I don't know the numbers, but I can imagine the sales of D&D minis is stronger than SW. Plus, with D&D being the house brand I could see WotC cutting SW and going straight up D&D if times got too tough. Hard to say though, SW is a very strong franchise.

Serves them right for fucking up Shadowrun.

No Fucking kidding.

Wizkids was inovative at first but for every good product they had there was 5 or 6 craptastic games that should never of been made.

Heroclix was fun for awile but it got old (how many freakin wolverines and spider-mans does a person need)plus side clix paid for my computer after selling them all on ebay.

The best version of Shadowrun to date is the SNES game

Wrong wrong wrong...the sega genesis one was the best rpg console game at that time.

Going off on a tangent here, but I just want to say that I always loathed Shadowrun. It was cyberpunk for unimaginative D&D powergamers. There, I said it. Michael Pondsmith did a better job with his straightforward take on the Cyberpunk genre, and frankly wrote more innovative rpg rules. Also, the Cyberpunk rpg inspired the excellent Netrunner CCG, while the tedious Shadowrun rpg inspired the utterly generic Shadowrun CCG, as well as the sketchy Shadowrun DMZ game.

Dogmatix wrote:

Octavian wrote:

Serves them right for fucking up Shadowrun.

Which, I have to admit, I thought was completely impossible. I really thought Shadowrun was a slam-dunk in any format...and then I watched both WizKids *and* Micro$oft fuck up Shadowrun in every way imaginable. Wow...

Totally agree, I saw what both of them did to Shadowrun and I backed out of the room slowly; making no sudden moves and keeping my eyes averted.

The best version of Shadowrun to date is the SNES game

Wrong wrong wrong...the sega genesis one was the best rpg console game at that time.[/quote]

Seconded on that. The thing I hated about NES at the time was their trying to "Family Friendly"-ify a gritty RPG but toning down the background, language and everything.

Seconded on that. The thing I hated about NES at the time was their trying to "Family Friendly"-ify a gritty RPG but toning down the background, language and everything.

right...because 'gritty' is better than solid gameplay...

At any rate, it wasn't like the genesis version was actually any gritter, unless you're talking about the grainy graphics...The genesis did follow the rules of the table-top rpg better, but the SNES version gave a much better sense of being in the SR world, IMO.