You tend to play games you have opponents for. In a wargame-heavy local market, you're far more likely to invest in a smaller wargame that interests you.Lago PARANOIA wrote:Why is no one going to run games where people run 90+ figurine armies in the future? Is it too expensive/too hard to run/too hard to get all the pieces/too time consuming to paint? Do the games that enjoy that kind of thing threaten to dissolve? If it's that, then why wouldn't some other company revive that model? I thought that the model was to try to soak players for as many figurines as they could expect their audience to afford--which obviously means encouraging players to field armies as big as they can get.
Of course there's the issue that one big WG company could convince you to drop money on 100 figurines more easily than one small company, but that's assuming that some young turk won't grow the pie higher and eat the market.
Games Workshop is the 800 pound gorilla partially I suspect because there isn't a widespread player base in a lot of areas. You take what you can get.
The game shop owner in San Jose says they have a healthy minis wargame group, which means that it's easier to branch out.
I'd also suggest that maybe the days of 100+ figs on the battlefield are over because of time, cost, and effort to pain them. Painting 50 figs is a large investment of time and money. Playing that large of an army is pretty time consuming too.