this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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Is it customer hostile? I thought it was just licencing-hostile, fucking over others with their IPS left and right.
I don't know much about them.
They used to give out their IP to shitty mobile games for pennies. Then they went after actual creators who made something amazing and gated them behind a subscription service.
In the sense that you're going to overpay for editions and minis that they're constantly updating to squeeze more money out of you while having a genuinely good but expensive paint catalogue ruined by paint pots designed to waste paint, yes.
In the sense that it's pure entertainment and no one and nothing is making you buy them despite all that, no.
Now, if we want to talk about how they're essentially monetizing fascist rhetoric and the "satire" died decades ago that's a whole new ballgame.
I'd like to know more about that last point.
In 40k, everyone is fascist. The Imperium worships a corpse who is gonna wake up from life support and save humanity any day now guys. Their creed is "suffer not the xenos, mutant, nor heretic to live".
Their main enemies are Chaos: nightmare demons and cultists worshipping evil gods spawned from the Imperium's own fascism.
The biggest threats on the horizon are the Tyranids, a ravenous swarm of bugs who want to eat the galaxy, and Necrons, a feudal empire who sold their souls for immortality while destroying the galaxy.
There are also the Drukhari, murder rape pirates who had such a big cocaine orgy they tore a hole in the galaxy, and Orks, fungal football hooligans whose only purpose in life is to get into a good fight.
The only "good guys" are the Eldar of the Craftworlds, who are arrogant communists with a birth rate issue, and the Tau: a Marxist-Leninist Federation of Planets who are secretly all being mind controlled.
The setting is supposed to be a satire of fascist ideology, but at some point Games Workshop started believing the pro-Imperium propaganda they spend all day writing.
There's also the Votann now but they have the same problem the Eldar and Tau do, there aren't enough of them.
Some of that I already knew, but why do you say games workshop is believing their own propaganda? Aren't they just telling a story and creating a universe? What are they, the company, doing that is fascist?
That's a lot more effort to explain than I'm willing to do for a Lemmy post but basically they've not only confirmed the Big Magic Strong Man does at least try to work in humanity's favor and was right about most everything, but there's a lot of "the Imperium might be fucked but it's the only hope" going on in general.
All of the Imperium's propaganda is justified, all their little fascist warrior cults are all that stands between life and Chaos, the Inquisitor Puritans are right because the Radicals always go Chaos etc etc etc.
I thought some of that was them trying to wash away the original fascist roots of OG 40K. Haven’t they been trying to slowly retool and rebrand the imperium more as the “good guys” so they can sell more merch?
Original 40k was Rogue Trader, written largely by British anarchists, and the actual motivations of the Heresy Era figures like the Primarchs and Emperor were left vague, so you could figure out for yourself they were genocidal megalomaniacs.
Rebranding the outright fascists as the unironic good guys is exactly why it's now fascist propaganda.