Skitarii - Why the cheaper codex?

A sequel to my original post, a week on and a week to go before we get the codex, and some brainstorming about the broader implications, if any, for 40K.

Firstly, the codex is 48 dollars Australian for 80 pages (I think $33 US)

That’s compared to 65 dollars for 64 pages of Imperial Knights codex, and 83 dollars for 96 pages of Harlequins.

That’s …. curious.

Secondly it has a double title.. Codex Adeptus Mechanicus – Skitarii.

Now you might say ‘well so what? Look at Guard, Sisters..' yadda yadda

To which I would say ‘yeah but the webstore faction name is Adeptus Mechanicus, not Skitarii ’. Who else has their small print name as their webstore faction name? No-one. That’s new.

Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but there again maybe it does. Both names are exotic (read: sue-your-arse-off ‘copyrightable’), so that’s not it either.

GW have gone to lengths to iterate that this is a new faction – even though it’s not quite what we call a full codex. No transports, no HQ that we know about yet.

Yes they might be dipping their toe in to see how people like it, but GW do take risks. They took one in completely redo-ing Dark Eldar, a faction they could have squatted. And in the overall scheme of things, 2-3 more kits than we are going to get wouldn’t have been a stretch, particularly given fans have been asking for Ad Mech for years.

It just seems to me they want to encourage you to consider tacking this on to another army, and THEN sometime later they’ll provide more options for a pure Ad Mech force. Very seductive, and makes a lot of comforting logic. It’s consistent with the approach some of us have perceived for a while wherein they stabilise all the traditional codices with a view to not redoing them for a while. Instead we’ll get other sub-factions, campaign forces, and shared units.

A bit of comparison here....

40K is huge. It has so many factions, so many models that people want on the shelf at all times, that were it not for its omnipresence it would be unsustainable in the same way that fantasy with its 15 odd factions became unsustainable.

Fantasy will have fewer factions in 9^th. Six, if the rumours are true - the shape of that still remains to be seen. But that’s a key difference in the future trajectory of the two systems:  If 40K is not to have its own End Times… then the Venn graphing all over the place needs to work and armies need to be very fluid personal things not bound to this or that book.

To sell a model they need to sell a unit, and to sell a unit the faction has to matter a whole lot less than it once did… in that bygone age where we had one codex and all we could make work for us was contained in it, for better for worse, for however many years still they redid the range.

Will units will disappear, quietly, if they can’t have a formation that sets off sales for them?

Probably.

I don’t think GW have really pegged to the wall their long term strategy for 40K, and it would have to start failing (‘fail’ by their definition - not yours) hugely before they’d dare do an End Times on it. It’s much safer to have units that aren’t big sellers go to direct order only and then quietly go out of stock - goodbye see ya later - than attempt a huge structural change, and in any case I think that change is already here.

I run Orks – maybe my clever Mek has slaved the sub routines of a bunch of Skitarii to his bionic cranium in the best tradition of brutal kunnin'.

You run Astra Militarum, maybe you have Blood Axe Ork mercenaries.
I think from a fluff point of view even Tyranids – the hivemind is immensely more subtle and intelligent than any human or space marine – can work temporarily in a parallel direction to another faction.

I don’t care who the match-up is – I reckon we can find a narrative way to explain a temporary overlap. It’s all in our imaginations, at the end of the day.