r/StarWarsArmada • u/Adventurous-Mud-4787 • Jan 08 '26
Question Why armada is not supported?
First of all I haven’t played yet, waiting for everything to be printed, but what I see in rules and how I understand gameplay - it’s fantastic! Why they stop official support ?
36
u/Bose_Motile Jan 08 '26
Profit concerns aside...All the StarWars IP stuff got moved from Fantasy Flight to Atomic Mass games so AMG could make Shatter Point. The contracts with Lucas/Disney made it so that they couldn't spread it across companies easily. The leadership at AMG had negative interest in supporting Armada in any way and let it die.
11
u/PyroConduit Jan 09 '26
Yea, it seemed like armada didnt fit the new companies design philosophy or style.
I mean xwing was arguably alot more popular and also got canned.
10
u/MortalSword_MTG Jan 09 '26
FFG had over printed X-Wing product and it was flooding store shelves all over the world. 2.0 caused a major disruption in the community so the demand had dropped suddenly.
I will distinctly remember the era of when you could walk into Barnes and Noble and see an entire endcap of X-Wing products with nearly everything that was currently in print available. Then it was all clearanced out and shortly after we started to hear about FFG being pieced out by Asmodee and all the SW IP being sent to AMG.
Quite a fall from grace, there was a time around a decade ago when X-Wing was rivaling WH40k sales in North America.
5
u/Black_Metallic Jan 10 '26
Not only did FFG flood the market, but they also released conversion kits for 2.0 so that players could quickly update their entire existing collection to the new system. And those kits came with everything that you'd find in the new reprints. On the bright side for players, it meant players didn't need to buy any of the $20 black box reprints of their existing ships. On the down side for retailers, it meant players didn't need to buy any of the $20 black box reprints.
On top of that, they also decided to change the philosophy so that there were no more generic upgrade cards that were exclusive to a single pack. You could get everything you need within your chosen faction. Rebel players didn't need to buy three copies of an Imperial ship to get three Tactician crew cards. Imperials didn't need to buy Scum ships to get Autothrusters for their Interceptors. Again, a very player-friendly move, but reduced the demand for those other ships. That's likely why they started adding more multifaction ships in both X-Wing and Armada towards the end.
2
u/MortalSword_MTG Jan 10 '26
Ironically those conversion kits were super controversial.
I resisted buying them myself until I started seeing the discounted. I had been collecting everything up to that point and didn't want to spend $200 plus for cardboard I had technically already bought.
It was just one thing after another and broke the game's back on the end.
2
u/Black_Metallic Jan 10 '26
It's unfortunate because 2.0 mechanically was a huge improvement over 1.0 in most areas. The elimination of 360-degree turrets made piloting relevant, and they eliminated most of the auto-include and power-crept upgrades that plagued the latter stages of first edition (Harpoon Missiles, Twin Laser Turrets, Veteran Instincts, and pretty much everything involved with the Jumpmaster). The biggest balance issue came from the inclusion of the Force as a quasi-Focus token, especially when the Republic showed up and added Force-powered maneuvers and actions.
2
u/sellout85 Jan 09 '26
I got Star Wars Legion and MCP at around the same time during covid, at that point FFG still had X-wing, Legion and Armada.
As an X wing player, I was really worried about both X wing and Armada when AMG took over as they were both so very different to MCP, Legion was always going to be the one of the three that lived longest as it's the only one with remotely similar mechanics.
1
u/Black_Metallic Jan 10 '26
X-Wing and Armada were also more expensive to produce. The minis came fully painted and assembled. That adds a level of production expense that you don't have to worry about with plastic sprues.
3
u/Extent_Opposite Jan 09 '26
All of the miniatures games were moved to AMG. Star Wars IP is still shared by Asmodee across companies: Edge for RPG, FFG for card games, Days of Wonder for board games, etc
2
u/Bose_Motile Jan 09 '26
It was something to do with 'Miniature Wargames' specifically if I remember. That was a specific contract that had to move intact. I am remembering this from hearing an insider talk about it on some podcast shortly after Armada was canned. Don't know how accurate it is, but it explains a lot.
This was also when Asmodee was toying with unraveling itself and there was an idea of focusing the product types to better sell each studio. Or it looked like that at least.
20
40
u/AlexWIWA Jan 08 '26
Private equity
8
38
u/mrhobbles Jan 08 '26
The answer is always the same - not generating enough profit to the company to make it financially worthwhile continuing.
15
u/Infinite-Detachment Victory Star Destroyer Jan 08 '26
Unfortunately yeah. Its really a shame they game was/is still very alive and there were a lot more ships to come out with (even if some of them were similar to what we have already like the first order Dreadnought) as well as other commanders and heros ect
8
u/Durandy Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 10 '26
Because once a customer owns a ship there’s only so many you can sell to them so if the game doesn’t keep pulling in new customers it will fail. Then there’s the production cost increases and supply issues that made it was difficult to get people through the door and sustain the business. Next Disney’s sequel did not land nor did they create many new ships. And the final nail was the parent company made bad financial decisions and needed to cut costs.
5
u/LeosK1ein Jan 09 '26
Everytime I see Shatterpoint product untouched and on SALE at my lgs I smile, AMG won the battle but we'll win the war.
-1
u/MortalSword_MTG Jan 09 '26
AMG didn't take anything from you. They got a product line they never wanted dumped in their lap.
2
u/LeosK1ein Jan 11 '26
Tell that to Will Schick. He killed certain games to make room for a game literally nobody asked for( I mean Shatterpoint is horrible). They mismanaged and insulted the Armada community every time they had a live event. Did you ever get banned from their streams? I did everytime simply by bringing up the game they were trying to kill.
Screw them and their slimy ways.
1
u/MortalSword_MTG Jan 11 '26
The story of a what happened with these games is much bigger than any of the devs and happened far before anyone at AMG had any say in what was supported or not.
This all starts with FFG and Asmodee acquiring FFG, and then Asmodee getting acquired by venture capital.
At that time AMG was a small studio working on MCP.
No one should ever have shoved several already successful games attached to one of the largest and most popular IP in the world and gave it to a studio with a headcount of like six people.
I won't defend the atrocious approach AMG took for these games after that, but it was a poor decision from the start to give them to them.
1
u/Wolfshead009 Jan 13 '26
Rumor has it they ASKED for them. Should never have been given to them.
1
u/MortalSword_MTG Jan 13 '26
AMG may have asked for access to the licensing but they reportedly did not ask to have Legion, X-Wing and Armada dumped in their laps.
Asmodee was carving FFG up into pieces at the time.
26
u/Stonetwig3 Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
It's a complicated story of dev studios being bought and sold, dev leadership changing, experienced personnel leaving the company, the game ending up in the hands of a studio ill-equipped to handle it, and then that studio's fantastic inability to leverage what they were given. I'm just glad AMG had a light touch on Armada because their assertive efforts in their other games were horribly thought out and horribly received.
Armada didn't get discontinued because the sales weren't there, it was discontinued because leadership of the companies at multiple levels mis-managed it.
Edit: it's the best game, btw. Definitely get into it and get involved in the awesome community :)
9
u/Separate_Crazy_983 Jan 08 '26
It's annoying how a game that was 3rd place in popularity (X-Wing at 1st and Warhammer 40k at a surprising 2nd) in iirc 2016 was virtually discontinued afterwards until it was officially cancelled.
5
u/No-Cold-423 Jan 09 '26
The sales figures that support this claim are inherently flawed. Icv2 is owned by Alliance Distribution, and reports Alliance's sales numbers. The fact that WH40k was still the 2nd most selling game from Alliance is very telling in just how much more popular WH actually is, every game store owner I've ever talked to ordered WH directly from GW since it was a better wholesale price than Alliance could offer. At the time, Alliance had an exclusivity contract to distribute FFG products and WH40k STILL SOLD more than all of FFG's product line except X-Wing
1
u/MortalSword_MTG Jan 09 '26
Alliance was the way that stores that didn't want to commit to GW's stringent agreements were able to get GW product at the time.
Their stockist program is still restrictive but not nearly as bad as it was in that era. It is quite a bit more flexible these days.
4
u/uprooting-systems Jan 08 '26
Honestly, miniature gaming is incredibly difficult to pull off as a business even without hefty licence fees.
All development is artificially slowed down due to the licence and needing to vet with licence holder. I wouldn't be surprised if that effectively doubles development time. That means you're doubling all wages.
So now you need to sell twice as much, but when someone has a star destroyer they can use it infinite times. They expanded to prequel trilogy, but that doesn't guarantee new purchases.
You need to constantly put out new content to pay for wages (wages are due each month after all). Star Wars doesn't actually have that much content. There is a lot of niche stuff, but... it's niche, it won't sell as well, but still requires licence holder review.
Additionally, rules and cards are very easy to proxy/copy.
3
u/PaineintheBurke Jan 09 '26
Basically, Asmodee was given a bunch of very expensive, high demand production games without any additional infrastructure to support the sudden expansion and due to both the lack of experience with the kind of miniature game Armada was, as well as the sudden change in the kind of models, plastic, and painting that requires a lot of support Asmodee could not scramble in time, they rushed out several products that failed, and to avoid sinking with the sudden influx, shut down the games to not have to bother at all.
It's not exactly easy to get that infrastructure either, given how often Fantasy Flight was behind on models and new waves having been planning the game for years and still struggling. Probably the main reason Legion is still around, it has more demand because people prefer the 28-32 mm big army miniature soldiers because, well, frankly it looks cool and has more that people like that aren't into wargaming, and most that already are in fact, as well as the fact that it can be sold and was made the same way they already have their current products set up with Crisis Protocol and Shatterpoint.
The fact I discovered they added the Clone Wars after a few years away from the game the same day they announced discontinuing the game still irks me.
5
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u/Adventurous-Mud-4787 Jan 08 '26
Yes they have whole new trilogy ships to sell, they can add ships like millennium falcon, or new fractions from books… such a shame I find this game only now…
14
u/GarlicBow Ship Painter and Collector Jan 08 '26
Fortunately, there is a pretty active community keeping play afloat.
9
u/deeare73 Jan 08 '26
The millennium falcon is already in the game. It's in one of the fighter packs
7
u/AlexWIWA Jan 08 '26
Thankfully the 3d printers are keeping it alive. The cardboard and paper are honestly more difficult than the ships at this point.
5
u/GreatGreenGobbo Jan 08 '26
The ST didn't do much for X-Wing. There is even less it can provide for Armada.
Also there is no ST stuff for Legion.
ST ships for Armada would have been a total waste of effort.
-1
u/RealRexxios Jan 09 '26
- It's Star Wars.
- Too expensive.
- FFG and AMG both have bad records with competitive games.
85
u/Spongedog5 Jan 08 '26
The death of Armada is so annoying because it isn't like the product itself was dead. There were plenty of companies that could have run the game well and been happy with the returns. It just ended up with a bad company in charge.