[Ntrails]

> Something not selling well? Change the game rules to make that it more powerful

It probably didn't sell because it wasn't very good. So you re-balance it later and now it doesn't suck. Like, fundamentally keeping the "best" and "worst" models/armies/strategies from stagnating keeps the game interesting (and drives more sales... so depends how you look at it).

I don't think they've every been super good at balancing though, and that at least is a fair criticism - albeit a hard task given how time consuming playtesting is to get data.

[MentatOnMelange]

I agree completely, the game would get boring if things didn't constantly change. It was more-so the way they'd go about it, not the general sales strategy. Perhaps I should have said overpowered, typically they'd intentionally overcorrect so a unit would go from too weak to way too strong.

It didn't help they had 2 very different philosophies in the creative/design department. For example if an army was getting a revamp, competitive players would pray Gav Thorpe wasn't in charge of it. Whereas other people loved how he made the game more fun and goofy.

[YokoZar]

It was definitely not just balancing rules patches for gameplay purposes - there was a clear deliberate intent to force people to buy new models. Complete with arbitrary changes to the game lore itself that accompany those updates: when I first started playing Warhammer Fantasy only the smaller lizardmen could ride the dinosaurs, and in the next edition only the larger ones (with entirely different new models) could.

By way of comparison, Games Workshop updates their Warhammer rules about twice as often as Wizards of the Coast updates Dungeons and Dragons.