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"Aussterben" der Squats

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Dieser Artikel beschäftigt sich mit Aussagen zum Ausscheiden der Squats als aktives Volk bei WH40k.

Es gibt zwei Versionen der Geschichte.

Erste Version 1

Der englische Originaltext stammt aus einem Post aus dem Black Library-Forum aus dem Jahr 2006 von Games Workshop-Mitarbeiter Jervis Johnson.

I know I shouldn't get drawn on this... but... can't... resist

Seriously, a couple of points just so you can have an informed debate based on the real reasons that Squats are no longer available. Be warned, it is going to be hard reading for people that like the Squat background.

First of all, Squats were *not* dropped because they were not selling well. There were then, and are now, plenty of other figure ranges that sell in the sort of % quantaties that the Squats pulled down, especially when you look across all of the ranges produced by GW rather than just those for 40K.

No, the reason that the Squats were dropped was because the creatives in the Studio (people like me, Rick, Andy C, Gav etc) felt that we had failed to do the Dwarf 'archetype' justice in its 40K incarnation. From the name of the race (Squats - what *were* we thinking!) through to the short bikers motif, we had managed to turn what was a proud and noble race in Warhammer and the other literary forms where the archetype exists, into a joke race in 40K. We only fully realised what we had done when we were working on the 2nd edition of 40K. Try as we might, we just couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the Squats. The mistake we made then (deeply regreted since) was to leave them in the background and the 'get you by' army list book that appeared. With hindsight, we should have dropped the Squats back then, and saved ourselves a lot of grief later on.

Anyway, the Squats made it into 2nd edition, and since we were doing army books for each of the races, we started to try and figure out what to do with them. Unfortunately we just couldn't figure out a way to update them and get them to work that we felt was good enough. The 'art' of working on an army as a designer is to find the thing that you think is cool and exciting about an army, and work it up into a strong theme. This 'muse' didn't strike any of us, and so, rather than bring out a second-rate product simply re-hashing the old background, we kept doing other army books instead, with stuff we did feel inspired by. Now, while this was all going on for 40K, we were actually doing some rather good stuff for the Squats in Epic. On this scale there was a natural tendancy to focus on the big 'hand-made' war machines the Squat artisans produced, and this created an army with a feel that was very different to the biker hordes in 40K. However, this tended to reinforce the problems we saw in the Squat background rather than alleviate them, underlining what we *should* have done with the Squats in 40K.

In the end (and it took years to really get to the roots of the problem) this led to a realisation that we were going to have to drop the Squats in their 'Squat' form from the 40K background. There was little point having a major race that we weren't willing to make an army book for, and their inclusion in the background meant that people kept asking us when we'd do a Squat Codex. Instead we decided that we'd write the Squats out of the background by saying that their Homworlds had been devoured by a Tyranid Hivefleet. This would give us the option in the future to return to making a race based on the Squat archetype for 40K. This race was given the name of Demiurg, and a certain amount of preliminary work was done to get a 'feel' for what the race would be like. At present the only hint of the Demiurg in 40K is the Demiurg spaceship for BFG. However, we do have this race 'in our back pocket' as a possible new race for 40K, or an interesting character model in Inquisitor, or whatever. So far the Demiurg have lost out to other projects, and it may be that their time never actually comes, as they will have to win through on their merits, not simply because we once made some Squat models in the past. At present, I have to say that it is more lilely that they *don't* make the cut than do, as there is a certain predudice these days to simply taking races from Warhammer and cross them over to 40K like we did in the early days, so it may be that the Squats/Demiurg end up remaining a footnote in the history of the 40K galaxy. Only time will tell...

The second point I'd like to make is about 'old moulds'. In the past, Mail Order in the UK and US used to be the place that we kept all of the retired moulds for Citadel Miniatures, and we used to offer a service where you could order any Citadel Mniature ever made from MO. However, there are now so many of these 'back catalogue' miniatures that it is simply impossible to keep all of the old moulds in Mail Order and offer this service. Instead, we pick and choose which back catalogue miniatures are kept available. At present we're still struggling to produce special catalogues for these ranges (in the US there is the 'Phone Book' catalogue with everything in it, while the UK has special 'collectors guides' that are themed round a race). Once we've ironed out the kinks in the way we deal with the range of collectors models we want to keep permenantly available, the plan is to offer up other parts of the back catalogue for limited periods of time. In effect this will divide the back catalogue into three parts: a range of classic models that are permenantly available, a range of classic models we dip into and bring out for a limited release, and a range of retired models that will no longer be sold either because we've decided that they are embarrassingly bad, or because we are no longer allowed to sell them due to licencing agreement changes. So far we're still slowly working on deciding which classic models we want to keep permenantly available, and its going to take several years to work through just those. The old Squat range is most likely to end up as retired models, I have to say, though there is a good chance that the Squat war engines they could simply into the limited release classic range. Once again, only time will tell...

I'll finish off by saying that whatever we decide to do 'officially', there is nothing stopping players with Squat armies from using them, either in Epic or 40k for that matter. There is no GW 'rule' against using old Citadel Miniatures, as long as you use them with exisiting army lists and in a way that won't cause confusion for other players. I recommend taking a positive stand by saying "Have you seen these cool old models? They're called the Squats and GW used to make them back in the late eighties/early nineties. I love 'em, so I count them as Imperial Guard and use them with the current rules..." Put like this I can't imagine that anyone would stop you from using your army.

Best regards,
Jervis Johnson
Head Fanatic

Zusammenfassung

Achtung: Alle Zeitangaben beziehen sich auf die Gegenwart des Jahres 2006.
  1. Die Squats wurden *nicht* fallengelassen, weil sie sich nicht gut verkauften. Es gab damals, und es gibt immer noch, viele Miniaturen-Reihen, die prozentual in dem Ausmaß verkauft werden, wie damals die Squats, besonders wenn man alle Reihen von GW überblickt, und nicht nur 40k.
  2. Der wahre Grund, warum die Squats fallengelassen wurden, war, weil die Schöpfer bei GW sie von Anfang an falsch designt hatten: Die Zwerge sind in der gesamten Literatur eine stolze und edle Rasse, aber sie haben sie in WH40k zu einer Witz-Rasse aus kleinwüchsigen Bikern gemacht. Der Fehler war, nicht von Anfang an ernsthaft an ihnen Hintergrund-mäßig und als Armee zu arbeiten.
  3. Die Squats sollten es nicht einmal in die 2. Edition schaffen, aber dann wurden sie doch irgendwie übernommen, obwohl keiner der Designer wusste, wie man sie jetzt eigentlich fertig machen sollte. Deswegen wurden sie wieder und wieder zurückgestellt. Am Ende führte es zur Einsicht, dass die Squats in ihrer jetzigen Form ausscheiden müssten, um später eine neue, ähnliche Rasse zu erschaffen: die Demiurg.
  4. Die Squats wurden fallengelassen, weil es keinen Sinn machte, eine Haupt-Rasse zu behalten, für die es nie einen Codex geben würde.
  5. Zurzeit gehen die Designer von GW durch die alten Miniaturen-Reihen, um die auszusondern, die aus verschiedenen Gründen nicht mehr zur Lieferung angeboten werden können/sollen. Die alte Squat-Reihe wird wahrscheinlich ausscheiden, obwohl ihre Kriegsmaschinen vielleicht im Sortiment bleiben.
  6. Alte Squat-Miniaturen können weiterhin in Armeen verwendet werden, solange sie mit tatsächlichen Armeelisten benutzt werden und auf eine Weise, die andere Spieler nicht verwirrt.

Zweite Version 2

Dieser Text stammt von einem anonymen Forumsmitglied aus dem Jahr 2015 und erzählt, was ihm angeblich Games Workshop-Mitarbeiter Jes Goodwin 2012 erzählt hat.

Ok guys, first you can all forget the rumor mill and assumptions garbage right now. I'll tell you the real story of why the Squats were discontinued and GW from that point on wards having reluctance to continue them. (also forgot all the garbage you were fed by store staff and owners, they are at the bottom of the pecking order at the company and often are themselves simply people working there and don't know everything, often they know very little).

I attended one of the last Games Days in Australia in 2012 (as there hasn't been one here since from what I've been aware of, not sure if we are still having them, all I know is there wasn't one in 2013 or 2014).

At the Games Day 2012 Sydney, we were lucky enough to have guests from the Nottingham office of the company that year, which meant illustrators, writers and miniature designers primarily.

Of those I got to have a chat with Jes Goodwin. Yes, I got to chat with the Jes Goodwin himself in person!

Of the many questions and things we discussed I brought up the topic of Squats (someone else also brought up the topic of Squats at the conference presentation he did that day as well), to which he replied to both myself and everyone in that room with similar answers. This can be confirmed if you wish for confirmation, ask these developers of EC to ask Jes himself and he will tell them that these things did happen and this is all true if you don't believe me.

Ok, long story short ...

Squats are not in Warhammer 40 000 anymore due to a copyright dispute; And that, is that.

But ...

There is more to it than just that ...

What happened was, during the time period when Games Workshop transitioned from a private to a public company as the owners previously were in the process of selling the company, a bunch of the then designers at the head studio were not pleased with the decision so decided to leave the company. Before Games Workshop became a formalized corporation, when it was a small business, the way copyright on their artwork, books and written materials were not centralized, only that of the miniatures under Citadel, which at the time was a separate company. As in Games Workshop as a company did not hold the rights to all works produced by it's employees, it was at the time owned by it's individual employees - as before that time Games Workshop was simply a chain of brick and mortar hobby stores that sold a broad range of products, Citadel was their only fully owned company at the time.

Part of the process of the selling of the company involved the formal establishment of ownership of copyrighted materials to be added to the ownership of trademarks of all assets that were produced and sold by the members of the company to then be formalized into the whole. That was part of why those designers and artists left, they were upset about this change as they also did freelance work, they didn't like the idea of Games Workshop "owning" their artwork and writings, before then anything to do with Warhammer fantasy and Rogue Trader belonged to the people who created it, not the company, the company only owned the Miniatures. See where I'm coming from here?

The bloke who created the Squats during the Rogue Trader days was one of the people who left GW before the copyright was formalized, so they were unable to get his permission to acquire ownership of the Squats. Jes suggested it was believed by everyone at the time he did this intentionally because he had grown attached to his creation, felt that it was entirely his right to make money from and that GW as a corporate entity had no right to make profits off his creation. The attitude which the members of the studio expressed towards Squats from that point could be seen as a 'knee-jerk' reaction to what that designer who left in a huff did. Which the resulting was the decision to retcon them.

But it didn't end there. Due to the outcry from fans and also the studio staff who themselves liked the idea of Squats and wanted it to be in the game soon after (as in the following few years) decided to approach the wayward designer about acquiring the rights to the squats name, story, lore and appearance.

Unfortunately, by then the person in question had gone ahead and put the squats in another game, using the same name, the same appearance and the same lore for them. Because they had become an official race in another game (which is a steampunk game if I recall him mentioning, can't remember which name of the game it was, he also mentioned good luck to anyone trying to find info on it on the internet as it was a 90s table top board game that sold poorly from a company you've likely never heard of, given that I go to hobby stores on a regular basis outside the scope of Games Workshop's stores and I've seen many different games, I can confirm you will be pressed to find anything about them on a google search, especially stuff pre-dating 2004). the name "squats" had by then been trademarked and the lore and appearance of them copyrighted to another company.

So as a result, it is now impossible for Games Workshop to use the name and the same lore.

For the last 10 years GW designers have at varying times attempted to bring back the Squats under different names and background lore, but each time they have, it has only received cold receptions from the customer base along with themselves having not felt right with the designs, so they never pursued it past conceptual stages, the closest they ever got to it was an experimental shot at them in Battlefleet Gothic.

So that's the whole story and the real truth according to Mr Goodwin.

Why doesn't Games Workshop talk about it?

Because they don't want to get sued, that's why.

Zusammenfassung

  1. Games Workshop war einst eine private Firma im Besitz ihrer Angestellten. Citadel war wiederum eine Unter-Firma von Games Workshop. Die künstlerischen Copyrights lagen bei den Angestellten selbst, die Copyrights auf die Miniaturen lagen bei Citadel.
  2. Als Games Workshop in eine öffentliche Firma umgewandelt wurde, sollten die Copyrights alle auf Games Workshop übertragen werden, aber das gefiel einigen Künstlern nicht. Sie wollten nicht einfach so einer Firma ihre Schöpfungen überlassen und so verließen sie Games Workshop lieber, darunter der Erfinder der Squats.
  3. Aufgrund von Druck durch die Fans versuchte GW, dem Künstler die Squats abzukaufen, allerdings hatte dieser die Squats da bereits in einem anderen Spiel verwendet. Trademark und Copyright an den Squats lagen nun bei dieser anderen Firma. Deswegen kann GW nicht mehr den Namen Squats und die bekannte Hintergrundgeschichte der Squats verwenden.

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