Ben Harnwell 
This week, out of the blue, our favourite dealer of ‘plastic crack’ announced a surprising new website. Billed as two worlds colliding, the new site merges the traditional games-workshop.com and forgeworld.co.uk in the new Warhammer.com.
Now for the first time you can shop in one place for all your hobby gaming needs including Citadel miniatures, Forge World resin, paints, glue, hobby tools, and Black Library books.
I won’t lie, the new site has hit a wall of controversy – many commenting on Reddit that they don’t like the change, that its UI is terrible and it is harder than ever to navigate and use.
I wouldn’t say their complaints and comments don’t hold some truth but really, was the old site any good? The fact you used selection boxes to display the range of miniatures and game related material was fairly ‘old web’.
But it had a charm to it. You could work around the clunky system and that site had the infamous 360 images of the miniatures – something sorely lacking from the new site.
Warhammer? Citadel? Games Workshop? Not sure of the overarching name anymore. Let’s just call it Warhammer for now.
Warhammer is in the middle of a huge upwards trajectory. With the release of the latest 10th Edition of the world’s biggest tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000 there seems to be no stopping the juggernaut.
I rejoined the cult only in the last few years. Digging out my old beaky Space Marines and being overjoyed with the rerelease of the Squats (Ok I know they are Leagues of Votann now but they will forever be the Squat to me). I had slowly been learning 9th Edition when the new release was announced. Yes I was one of those who got the Leviathan Box and the rest, as they say, is history. I am building up an Ultramarine and League army with a smattering of Kill Teams and obviously some Tryanids (thanks to the Leviathan Box).
The hobby for me, and dare I say many others, is about miniatures. I love building, painting and collecting these tiny plastic pieces of (dare I say it?) art. Gaming has always been secondary, mostly due to the difficulty in getting time to play.
Kill Team certainly has a lure unlike the larger scale 40,000, but even that is hard to arrange.
So will a changed website be a friction point that will dethrone the mighty model maker? Or will this just be a glitch and like all new things the reworld testing will result in a better product and like the old site we will learn to deal with the quirks and still feed our desire for more plastic.
What do you think? Are you happy to test it yourself or will you be one of the Reddit haters and tell the world you’re abandoning the hobby?
For me I’ll keep collecting and painting minis, and try to wrangle the guys to a game night. It might mean less desktop shopping and more exploring my local Warhammer and LFGS. I’ll give it a bit more time before laying out my judgement on Warhammer.com. To be fair I’m waiting for the new Votann Codex and hopefully (a lot) more miniatures.
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