40K Deep Thought: The Incredible Shrinking Codex Lifespan
Cryptic teasers for next week’s release arrive as the Space Marines are said to be almost upon us. You might get Whiplash on this one…
If you blinked yesterday, you may have missed quite a bit. The new White Dwarf started leaking, and we have what looks to be an amazing new formation that lets you combine Mechanicus with Imperial Knignts, and grants some pretty powerful ‘freebies’ to the units selected for it.
Next up was the new release teaser of ‘hit fast, hit hard’ (translated from French) which might very well describe the Space Marines.
Seems like a very short life cycle for a book that is fairly close in age as the previous Imperial Knight book from last year. One thing seems for sure, this has been one heck of year release-wise for Warhammer 40,000, leading us all to the…
The Elephant in the Room…
Just what is an acceptable lifespan for a codex? In this day and age when GW is apparently becoming more of a paper book publisher than a miniatures company (almost like TSR was like in the final years of old DnD), they are just churning out rulebook after rulebook almost each week. But with codices running $50 a pop (or $185 for the fancy limited editions), just how much life should a gamer expect out of these. Imperial Knights shows us just how short GW thinks is acceptable, and some new codices may even invalidate multiple older books in one fell swoop (like a new AM book could easily invalidate both AM/Scions books).
I kind of get this funny feeling that While GW says they are a model company first they have realized that codices appeal to a large slice of their entire playerbase (you have to know what to expect from the opposition after all). Thus they have settled on a policy of rapidly producing as many army books as possible with the shortest livespan they can push out the door to increase the monthly spend from their average customer.
So what do you think is a reasonable lifespan for your hard earned army books?
