Nearly everyWarhammerfan I know was incredibly excited forWarhammer 40K: Space Marine 2. A bunch of people I know who don’t care about Warhammer were excited for it, too. Warhammer YouTubers who were given early access were crying that it could be in with a shout of winningGame of the Year. I want to make one thing clear right now: there is zero chance Space Marine 2 wins Game of the Year.
However, that doesn’t stop it being a fun game. It’s great. It follows genre conventions, it doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but it feels great while doing so. The combat is so crunchy you don’t need a DualSense controller to feel the gravity of a Thunder Hammer, and the PvP is good enough to get players jumping into CtF against other Space Marines. There are balancing issues aplenty here, but it doesn’t matter too much at the moment.
Space Marine 2 has quickly moved from being a runaway success to a bona fide phenomenon, especially in Warhammer terms. It’sthe tenth best selling game on Steam this year, it’ssold better than any other Warhammer gamein its first week, and it nails what it should feel like to be a Space Marine. It’s broken containment of only capturing the hearts of Warhammer fans and penetrated the wider gaming audience. So how has Games Workshop capitalised on this success to convert Space Marine 2 fans to miniature collectors? It hasn’t.
Workshop has one miniature that ties in with Space Marine 2 specifically, Lieutenant Titus. While you can buy many of the game’s units in plastic, none of them are characters of note. Sure, you can grab a Carnifex or Zoanthrope, but players don’t want to be the mindless horde, they want to be Lieutenant Titus and the heroic Primaris Space Marines.
While the generic units are available on the Warhammer website, Lieutenant Titus is not. He was released as a part ofSpace Marine: The Board Gamelast year (only available in the US). I’m not sure if he was ever made available separately, but he’s certainly not able to be bought at present. This is Games Workshop’s first misstep.
The second is the miniature itself. The pose is, frankly, terrible. The heroic Titus of the video game is nowhere to be seen, and he looks like he’s slipping over rather than charging forwards. The detail on the face is lacking, which isn’t helped by the realistic qualities in the video game. He needed an epic model befitting his courageous character, this one mini needed to be good enough to pull people from digital to tabletop by himself, and – even if it was available – this still isn’t good enough.
Comparisons toWeta Workshop’s enormous Titus modelfeel unfair, but it doesn’t do Games Workshop’s much smaller attempt any favours.
The only Space Marine 2 product available on the Warhammer website at present is amousemat. Posters, t-shirts, JoyToy figures, and a custom controller are available on a separate merchandise website, but they won’t help get players from the digital realm head to the tabletop.
Games Workshop needed a unified approach to Space Marine 2’s release. In the same way it has homogenised the old Games Workshop site and Forgeworld into the new-look Warhammer website, this was an opportunity to bring yet more players on board. As it stands, this was a huge missed opportunity.
Workshop should have approached this like Pokemon does every year. Every new Pokemon game, no matter the declining quality, is accompanied by a range of plushies, a TCG expansion, events in live-service games like Pokemon Go, and the ongoing anime. Each arm of the company aims to pull its players or viewers to the others. Oh, you liked Maushold? It looks even better on this sick-ass card art. You get the picture.
Where was the multimedia approach from Games Workshop? There’s an episode of Amazon’s Secret Level TV show coming in a couple of months, there was a Titus board game released in one country a year ago, and what else? I understand that each of these things is difficult to coordinate and most people would prefer to face a Carnifex armed only with a Lasgun rather than take a peek at the spreadsheets involved in such an effort, but that’s the task you need to face if you want to build a (more) successful business. Far be it from me to offer a multi-billion dollar company unsolicited business advice, but if Games Workshop wants to continue to grow, it needs to follow Pokemon’s business model.
It’s worth acknowledging that Space Marine 2’s delay could have played a part in this poor scheduling.Originally meant to release in 2023, perhaps Games Workshop was hoping that 10th edition starter box Leviathan could act as a pseudo tie-in to the game. But developer Saber Interactive gave the public nine months notice of the delay, so Workshop likely got even more, and the miniatures company couldn’t design a new miniature in that time? It couldn’t dosomethingto acknowledge this enormous release from a plastic perspective?
Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 is the game that Warhammer fans have been waiting for, but it feels like it could have been the perfect entry point for a new generation of tabletop hobbyists, too. Maybe it’ll all work out in the end, but right now it sure feels like a missed opportunity.
