WHY Are Some People Leaving the Wargaming Hobby?

In this video, I'll tell you why some people leave the wargaming hobby, maybe even why you left, and how to fix it. Some hobbies are easier than others. Most hobbies are kind of equally easy to get interested in, especially in this day and age. It's just as easy to kind of go down a rabbit hole of research online about fishing as it is for say photography, as it is for you know bicycling, and so on.

It's also incredibly easy to learn a lot about tabletop wargaming by watching videos, you know, like this, uh and reading blogs and stuff like that. However, once you finally decide to move from like the initial research phase to the kind of actually doing stuff phase, you quickly find out which hobbies are easier than others.

Now, right off the bat, this is not a doom and gloom video about tabletop wargaming. Sales, like kind of across the board, are actually doing pretty well. Not as amazing as they were during the pandemic, of course, but now people aren't stuck as at home as much, and so they do have other ways to spend their time.

This means that they're not buying as many minis and paints and all that kind of stuff as they were, you know, back then in you know '22 and '23. The sales numbers kind of corrected after the world started to kind of open up again. But still, sales aren't bad at all. For me, a great indicator of the health of the wargaming hobby is the attendance at wargaming conventions.

I go to three big wargaming conventions during any given year. The Las Vegas Open, I was just out there last month as a matter of fact, and then, you know, AdeptiCon, which is just a little over a month away from now, and then the Nova Open in Washington, D.C. in late August. All of these conventions are growing in attendance year over year.

AdeptiCon has grown so much that it had to move to a different state, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for a new larger venue this year. However, this ain't the easiest hobby to get into. I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about. Either you had some struggles getting into tabletop wargaming, or you've had some friends that have had some struggles getting into tabletop wargaming.

Maybe those friends eventually dropped out of wargaming altogether. Heck, like you might have actually dropped out of tabletop wargaming yourself, and you're just here keeping up with the like the easy part of the hobby, watching videos and and learning about it online. What makes this hobby so difficult?

Why do people leave? I want to go over those things and try to offer some solutions as well. Let's get started with a big old problem, cost. In comparison to many hobbies that I can think of like, I don't know, classic cars, sport fishing, wildlife photography, you know, stuff like that, wargaming isn't that expensive.

But when you compare it to other tabletop gaming hobbies like board games, role-playing games, then it can be wildly expensive. The prices rarely, if ever, go down. Um you know, if you got in at one point and you thought, "Well, I can handle this level of cost." Well, you know, after a few years of price hikes, you potentially have reconsidered.

Many folks do. And of course, some wargames and wargaming supplies are more expensive than others. It doesn't take much research to realize that the wargaming property with the biggest marketing budget, the one that brings the most kind of eyeballs to the hobby, it is also the most expensive. I'm of course talking about Games Workshop.

Have you or any of your friends gotten interested in Warhammer because of the marketing and the video games and the lore and all of that stuff, and then like bounced off the cost of the actual models and paints and supplies? A lot of folks do. So, how does this cost problem get fixed? It's pretty easy, actually.

Uh Games Workshop isn't the hobby. It's a big part of the hobby, but it is not the hobby. There are tons of other games out there and models and paints, and nearly all of them are cheaper. I made a video a couple years ago about how to get into wargaming for under 100 bucks. Pachow. And it included like the paints and the tools and the miniatures and the rules.

That rhymes. And and all that kind of stuff. Everything was included in less than 100 less than 100 bucks, and none of those things that I mentioned in that video were Games Workshop products. And it was completely due to price. "But I love the lore of Warhammer," I hear you say. "I got to have my Space Marines." Well, you know, here's the deal.

Lore is just stories, and stories, once you ingest them through your eyes or ears or whatever, then they live in your head. So, you could use other rule sets that are cheaper and frequently easier to play out your stories about Space Marines and Orcs and whatnot. Games like Stargrave and Five Parsecs from Home and Space Station Zero and Space Weirdos, and of course, Grimdark Future from OnePageRules.

All of these sci-fi games could easily be populated with denizens of the 41st millennium, for example. And it's not just the rule sets themselves. So many companies sell models cheaper than Games Workshop. And Games Workshop's not the only company selling very expensive models lately. Atomic Mass Games has had some pretty beefy price hikes over the last few years for Marvel Crisis Protocol, uh Star Wars Shatterpoint, and even Star Wars Legion.

I'm sure that the Disney licenses that are attached to those games probably don't help with the price, either. But there are plenty of great companies out there producing reasonably priced miniatures that are far more affordable. And lastly, you can always buy used models. Since many people get into the hobby and buy some stuff, frequently too much stuff, and then quit, they're usually trying to recoup their cash by selling their models, whether it's places like eBay or Facebook Marketplace or even uh local wargaming swap meets that some stores will host, you know.

You can usually find everything from unopened boxes, you know, of minis, all the way up to finished and, you know, painted figures. And if those painted figures aren't to your liking, you should watch some videos by Casey over at eBay Miniature Rescues. Pachow. To learn to, you know, well, I mean, rescue your eBay miniatures and then, you know, repaint them.

Okay, well, we've fixed the cost problem. But it's not the only thing that sometimes causes people to leave wargaming. Another problem is directly related to the crafting portion of the hobby, the building and the painting. Many people just know from the get that they won't enjoy the building and the painting and the gluing and the all that stuff and whatnot, and maybe not even enjoy the actual playing, either.

So, those folks generally stick with the lore and the video games, and they don't jump into the deep end. For example, there are tons and tons of people who are BattleTech fans who read the novels and play all the different video games, but but that's it. And that's totally fine, there's nothing wrong with that.

However, some people buy in, especially during, you know, big Kickstarters, because they think that they're going to enjoy the craft part as well. And they watch a bunch of videos, they learn techniques and such and all that kind of jazz and then they start a gluing and a painting, and some people almost immediately find out that they don't enjoy it.

And then you buy their models from them on eBay. It's the circle of life. Others, however, find out that they love it, and it becomes a lifelong hobby. But others still find that they enjoy it, but they don't like the results that they're getting. I see a lot of people who leave the wargaming hobby not because they don't like the crafting part of the hobby, you know, but because their paint jobs don't look anything like the paint jobs that they see on the boxes or the paint jobs that they see on Instagram or the paint jobs that they see on, you know, YouTube and stuff like that.

It turns out that getting good results that you're happy with is something that takes time and practice. Now, some folks know this and understand that it's a journey. I've been painting for years, and I'm mostly happy with my output at this point. It's good enough for me, and that's something. But a lot of potential wargamers see, you know, the fancy stuff online and compare their finished models to those models, models that were usually painted by someone who has been doing it for far longer than you or I have.

I made a video about four or five years ago about comparison in the hobby. Pachow. And how it really is the thief of joy. The only things you should compare your most recent paint job to are your previous paint jobs. Building and painting models generally takes practice to get good, and realizing that early on can help you from quitting the hobby.

The last big issue I see that causes people to leave wargaming, the constantly changing rules. For the most part, we're heading back into Games Workshop territory here again. No one goes through the amount of rules churn that GW does these days. All of their main games get completely new editions every 3 years, and due to their focus on the tournament scene and the like meta watch, there's constant rules updates every 3 to 6 months in their most popular games like Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar.

If you're a casual player in those games, and the majority of people who play them are casual players, then you've probably run a foul of this yourself. Let's say you're like most wargamers and only get to play every few months. That's what the great wargaming survey from Wargames, Soldiers, and Strategy magazine tells us is normal for most wargamers.

How many times have you gone online to grab some FAQs and some errata, you know, before a friendly game of 40K and found out that things have changed surprisingly in your army since you last played, be it points costs, rules changes, or whatever. It's probably happened to most of us who have played 40K in the past, say, several years.

And for some folks, after it happens every time that they want to play, it's driven them away. Case in point, it's mostly driven me away. Well, I mean, from 40K, right? I was playing some fun games of Combat Patrol when 10th edition started, and then the rules changes started coming, and then they didn't stop coming, and we got tired of hitting the ground running nearly every time that we wanted to play.

We had to download new stuff and figure it out and all that kind of stuff, right? Now, this didn't cause me to leave wargaming because I enjoy many other games. So, I just played those games instead. However, if you're new and 40K is your first game, or it's just the only game that you're interested in because it's all you kind of know, then this can be a real problem.

The really easy answer is to play a different rule set. Now, I know I talk about it a lot on this channel, but you can find something similar that you can still use your 40K models with. But, there's an even easier solution that a lot of people don't do for some reason. Just ignore the updates. If you're playing casually with friends, you got a group of friends and you're playing in your basement, or maybe at the shop, or whatever, you can all just agree to stick with the base rules that maybe came out at the beginning of 10th, let's say, for an example, and just not grab all the updates and all the points changes and all that type of stuff and whatnot.

If a big problem comes along amongst the group, something that you all feel very strongly about, right? Like, this is a bad rule, or this is a bad point cost, or whatever, then maybe adopt that update, or maybe even make up your own house rules when you want to. Maybe start a Google document that's shared amongst your crew, and this is the only rules addendums that your group is going to follow.

You don't need to update every 3 months, or every 6 months, or whatever, if you don't play in tournaments and such, right? You can just make changes to this document you all share, or you know, when you come across like egregious rules issues, whether GW fixed them like in an FAQ, or what you know, or whether you you and your crew just kind of figured it out, this is how we're going to handle it.

Tabletop wargames are all about making the game your own. So, just ignore the constant churn of it and if it annoys you, and then, you know, just have fun with your own version of 40K. Strangely, some of the same things that bring people into this hobby are the exact same things that drive them away, except for the excessive cost.

I don't think that anyone is really attracted to Warhammer because it's so expensive. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. But, I can tell you that the belief that Games Workshop is the wargaming hobby and not just a part of it doesn't help to attract more people to wargaming. GW brings folks in, for sure, but we'd potentially keep even more of them in the hobby with some of those solutions that I mentioned previously in the video.

So, what do you think? Did you kind of fall out of the wargaming hobby? How come? Or did you find a way to fix your mindset before you gave up? Or, you know, has it been absolutely no problem, totally smooth sailing for your hobby the entire time? That must be quite nice, actually. Uh please do let us know how you did it.

We'd love to see all of these responses down in the comments below, wouldn't we, folks? Of course. Also, you can help to kind of stay in the hobby through the depressmentation of the like button down below, as well. It somehow seems to help. I you believe me. Uh and to see more of these videos every single Friday, hit subscribe while you're down there as well.

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