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GW, in 2008: Here, Fantasy Flight, make games based on our intellectual property. Go forth and make us both a bunch of money!

FFG: *makes lots of games that are cool and good*

GW, in 2016: Ok stop now

Probably won't hurt FFG much, since X-wing and Star Wars in general is their current license-to-print-money, but some good games are falling by the wayside - and, sort of sadly, this really spells the for-real end of the Old World (outside of a couple computer games anyway), since the FFG licensed stuff was the only thing keeping it alive.

My personal feeling is that this is a typically short-sighted move on GW's part that will cost them, but that may just be a knee-jerk reaction to everything GW doing seeming like a dumb short-sighted move these days. Some folks are saying it's GW being upset at FFG moving more and more into miniatures, first with Imperial Assault and now the newly-announced Rune Wars, but the fact that FFG's now owned by the Hasbro-level Asmodee, and GW not wanting a big company like that having any fingers in their IP pie, might be an issue as well. Who knows!

It does mean you have til February to get all those WHFRP and Rogue Trader books you were thinking of getting, though.

I suspect there's more to it than simply "hey, stop making games that make our games look bad". The Asmodee thing is probably relevant, and it could be as simple as GW demanding X amount of money for the renewal of the licence and Asmodee saying "nope." There's also the announcement regarding FF's new fantasy game. It does seem counter inuitive to allow what is increasingly a rival in the miniatures wargame market to continue to make money from your IP (even if in doing so you are making some money yourself.) Likewise, GW is moving into FF's board game territory (Betrayal on Calth, Warhammer Quest) so it could easily just be a case of two companies working in related but separate industries morphing into two companies who are directly competing in each other's markets.

Still, it's a shame Talisman and the RPG stuff is on the way out

Oh, sure - the imaginary conversation was for comedy purposes as much as anything. I'm sure there are serious grown-up business reasons for it all, heh.

Given how many RPG games they have made and then stopped adding to the line when they felt they were finished actually makes me happy. 40k is a deep universe. Just stopping all of a sudden really makes me as a customer feel like they used me as a cow for milk.

Seem to remember reading something months back (BoLS maybe?) about GW looking to find new companies who would be interested in picking up their licences - one of these being pimped was Fury of Dracula, which seemed odd at the time as it was then a FFG thing. Are they looking to do more digitally with existing licences?
Find other boardgames companies to bring old games back?
And there are rumours about their own redos of Dark Future, Necromunda, Mordheim etc.
Now it seems obvious why FFGs Warhammer Quest was a card game relatively unrelated to the original board game - they were wanting to resurrect it... But then we got Silver Tower. Which the old guard are unlikely to want.