Space Marines vs. Xenos: Who got the lovin’ in Warhammer 40K 5th Edition and who did not?

Warhammer 5th Edition is over. Everyone’s talking about Warhammer 40K 6th Edition now. Yet the final closing of 5th Edition also offer a unique moment to stop, look back and reflect on how those years have changed, for better or worse, the miniature wargame that still is – without a doubt – the big kid on the block.

One common dispute I see is how Games Workshop has handled the heavy focus of Warhammer 40K on GW’s trademark Space Marines. A strong consensus appears to be that 5th Edition intensified the already skewed focus on Space Marines. Almost instinctively, Xenos players claim they have again been feeling the pain.

Right? Well, I believe it is time for some mythbusting.

From 5th to 6th: Analysing 4 years of 40K releases

The industrious Warhammer 40K-fans at Warseer have kept a detailed log of all the releases by GW for 40K since… well, since forever. I am not going to dig into 4th or even 3rd edition releases at this point. Nevertheless, since the release of the big 6th Edition book has put a definite close on 5th, we can now assess the entirety of releases during the last edition from the summer of 2008 to the summer of 2012.

I will ignore the massive batch of Ork and Chaos Daemon miniatures released before 5th Edition in 2008. They may or may not have been designed with 5th Edition in mind, but… well, it’ll just turn into a mess trying to figure out what was or was not, strictly speaking, 5th Edition. And this isn’t really about the rules anyhow. So lets get started.

First, what was released?

Going through the GW releases, it seems there have been exactly 150 new and original releases for 40K in 5th Edition. This obviously ignores repackaged Warhammer 40K battle forces, re-casts into finecast miniatures and a few oddities, for example the the White Dwarf in Space released late 2009. 150 is an oddly even number, but there you have it.

Second, how do these add up?

• Fully half of all models released for Warhammer 40K during 5th Edition – 75 out of 150 – were specifically for Xenos-armies. Mainly they have been Tyranids, Dark Eldar and Necrons, though there have been a few Spearhead-related Eldar additions and late-coming Orks.
• A third of 5th Edition’s releases were for the Marine armies released (including things like the Jokaero, which I’ve made an honorary Space Marine). This includes the large splash of Marines released after the 5th Edition Codex in the second half of 2008.
• The rest of the releases is split between IG and that one odd Chaos-wave that hit the shelves sometimes last year.

A Codex does not equal a Codex

So why do fans of Xenos armies in 40K still feel robbed by Games Workshop?

One reason may be that the releases of Xenos miniatures are spread across fewer books. Three Xenos races have seen their own books updated during 5th Edition.  Space Marines saw four new books. Often as not, the first instinct people is to equate the number of Codices released with the amount of attention an army receives.

That is seriously misguided. If books like Dark Eldar or Necrons are accompanied by huge offerings of over 20 or, in the case of Dark Eldar, 30 new releases, while books like Blood Angels (9 releases, including the Stormraven) or Grey Knights (7 releases, including the Stormraven) just fill gaps in the release schedule, it becomes painfully clear that not all 40K Codices are created equal.

In the end, we all indulge this hobby with the miniatures. In this regard, the Warhammer 40K-codices and the releases they spearhead differ immensely. By forgoing, say, the low hanging fruit of a Blood Angels Codex, GW could not have possibly created a different book on the level of Dark Eldar instead. The latter came with over three times as many new 40K miniatures. These two releases are two very different beasts. They are not even remotely in the same league.

Marines, Marines, nothing but Marines?

This may also hint at a possible second explanation. Games Workshop may – year after year after year – release fully 50% more Xenos miniatures than Space Marines miniatures, but that does of course not mean these are the miniatures that people buy.

If the tables near you are always filled with power-armour, it may be because this is what people are buying despite the greater variety provided by Games Workshop for Xenos armies in Warhammer 40K. Yet if that is the case, one could hardly blame the guys from Nottingham.

Occasionally people quip that Xenos-armies would see more action if Games Workshop gave them more proper lovin’ and more time in the limelight. Well, guess what, they did. They have done so for years. Games Workshop gave Xenos-armies all the lovin’ they could ever hope for.  If you’d want to have more Xenos in your 40K, than its time to stop griping and to start painting.

Z.