Like It or Not, Warhammer 40,000 Is Now Mainstream
Warhammer was once a small niche, now it’s becoming a mainstream attraction.
For much of its existence Warhammer has been a pretty unknown and niche thing. It, and wargaming in general, are a subset of overall geek/nerd culture. A culture which for a long time was not mainstream at all. However over the last decades nerd culture has become mainstream, and now Warhammer is following suit.
Hide Your Shame
Courtesy of Netflix
Basement dwellers. Its a term I’ve heard used a lot in regards to Warhammer players or fans. Nerds, geeks, etc. you get it all. Warhammer, like D&D for a long time was part of the “uncool” bit of geekery. Even as things like comic books hit mainstream, gaming remined hidden. I mean, it’s grown ups playing with toys right? How shameful. Better hide that in the basement. Even though its a hobby like any other, aspects of it, such as the perception of the miniatures being “toys” and the weirdness of the fiction kept Warhammer in a smaller niche then many other nerd hobbies. This however is clearly changing.
The Lore Was The Start
When I got into the hobby over twenty years ago it was really rare to find someone, even among geek circles, that knew about it. Slowly however that’s started to change The real push wasn’t with the game, but the lore. Black Library novels became staples at book stores, go to any Barnes and Nobel and you’ll find a whole stack of shelves with the novels. A raft of video games, including major hits like Dawn of War and Total War Warhammer, introduced the setting to millions of new fans. Many of these might not even have known the tabletop game existed. People started to know about Warhammer, but it was still kind of fringe.
The Breakthrough
Over the last years Warhammer has started to get more mainstream and you’ve seen more and more coverage. By 2019 it was even widely known enough to be used in current political discourse. The last few weeks however have seemed to show a bit of a breakthrough. There has been a lot of coverage of Warhammer, both in geek news and more mainstream media. Not all of it was positive of course. In November the issue of Nazi players, and Game’s Workshop’s fast response came to the fore.
The response made big waves, with major websites like, Gizmodo, Kotaku and PCgamer covered it. Earlier struggles within the community were covered by sites like Vice. More recently however you have positive very mainstream mentioned of Warhammer. For instance you’ve got major movie stars talking about their love for the game and wanting to play it on TV. Now you’ve even got BBC articles talking to players and hobbyists and talking about why it should be mainstream.
This isn’t the first time the BBC has talked about Warhammer of course. However in the past they’ve normally focused on GW news and the finicals of the company. Now we are getting major news organizations writing about Warhammer like it’s pretty normal. Highlighting the players and showing a normal joy to be found in the hobby. This feels like a marked change in their coverage and a major move towards being a lot more mainstream. Also, by the time major news like the BBC thinks something is mainstream, well it’s probably been that was for a while.
What Now?
So what does going mainstream mean for the hobby? that’s the big quest for all of us enthusiasts. Let’s look at a couple of other niches that exploded into mainstream culture and how they fared.
Going Mainstream- Game Of Thrones
There are a lot of players and fans out there worried about Warhammer going more mainstream. They worry that a franchise that goes that way will change, and yeah. It will. One worry I hear a lot is that the game and lore will have to get too kiddy. All the violence, and crazy stuff will be taken out. All that will be left will be Warhammer Adventures. And yet this doesn’t have to be the case. Lets take a look at Game of Thrones.
Prior to the HBO show this was a pretty niche fandom and relatively unknown. After the show it’s about as mainstream as you can get. To get there however GoT didn’t have to sacrifice it’s adultness. Sex, nudity, violence, death and gore remained in GoT the whole time. Yeah, you can buy plush Direwolves for your kids and goofy Funko Pops!, but that doesn’t mean it got all kiddy. The same is true of 40K. Yes, we will likely see more things aimed at kids and the like, but that doens’t mean the gritty side of Warhammer has to go away.
Going Mainstream- D&D
A closer to home example of something going mainstream might be D&D. D&D and 40K have fairly similar histories. Either due to being American or thanks to the Satanic Panic D&D has always been more widely known in (in the US) at least than 40K and its no wonder that it went mainstream first. These days its pretty normal and widely enjoyed, and like 40K, this was helped along by major celebrates getting involved and showing love for it.
Now there are some who might say D&D has suffered from going mainstream. Not so much in its lore, which hasn’t really changed. But its rules. There are arguments to be made that D&D has seen a slow simplification of rules to make them both easier to understand and make the game more friendly towards players. D&D has lost some of the player/gm antagonism of AD&D and turned into a cooperative game these days. This has made it more appealing to the masses. So it is possible that 40K will see something like this. A simplification of the rules to get more players on broad. I’m not so sure this is bad.
The Changing Face of 40K
Kerriss Brown, courtesy BBC
40K has long been a hobby dominated by white men. It’s not always been very diverse. It’s had its issues with far right groups. That’s changing and thats good. One of the traditional stereotypes of a 40K is the large unwashed man, coming out of his basement and seeing daylight for the first time in many weeks. Now this has never been particularly accurate, most large men I know are well washed, and in Texas where I started playing almost no one has a basement. But its how a lot of the public has seen the fandom.
Thats changing now, and a lot of those old negative stereotypes are being washed away. Instead of this charecterure of nerd being the face of 40K, articles like the BBC one are giving us people like Kerriss Brown and Bukayo Saka normal millennials for diverse backgrounds. Now, I’m sure there is a part of the 40K fandom who will be angry that someone like Kerriss, a woman with great makeup skills and punk-ish pink/red hair could be the new face of Warhammer, I have to think that original creators born out of the British punk scene must approve. Warhammer, after all, is for everyone*, and now everyone is learning about it.
Let us know what you think about Warhammer going mainstream, down in the comments!
*except hate groups. duh.
