The Finnish Foundation for Economic Education has awarded the research student Aase Timonen roughly $30,000 (€26,000) for her doctoral research project "transmedia worldbuilding in massive game franchises". To summarise a massive project in very brief terms, Timonen will look at the Warhammer franchise's tendency to build its world from all kinds of media - from miniatures to novels to rules and adverts - and how this 'transmedia' approach has shaped its development, and contributed to its massive success today.
The Foundation for Economic Education "promotes research in business and economics by awarding grants and scholarships" to enhance Finland's competitiveness. I can see the logic in them commissioning research into Warhammer: Games Workshop is big business, and a major component in its success is the huge buy-in to the Warhammer 40k intellectual property. Understanding the factors behind that success could have genuine benefits for games developers and media makers.
Timonen is undertaking the research as a member of the Game Research Lab at Tampere University. Her previous publications include a study into how player personality traits affected their choice of Warhammer Fantasy Battle armies, and examining GW publications for evidence of the shift in Warhammer player motivations and game development away from narrative towards a competitive metagame She presented the following talk on the Stormcast Eternals at the 2025 Warhammer Conference:
Timonen's PhD research will look at a variety of transmedia - the broad spread of different publications, art, and artefacts that collectively express what Warhammer is in all its different aspects - from throughout the game's history, and work out how they have shaped Warhammer as a game, setting, and product. That'll include the shift towards competitive play; how a setting that was once very malleable has become concrete and canon based; and the role transmedia has played in Warhammer's increasingly wide appeal. The goal is to identify what's made the Warhammer universe so successful, and find the right kinds of questions to ask to better understand other transmedia games and media properties.
Warhammer has been around for over forty years but Warhammer studies are in their infancy. The annual Warhammer conference is the standard bearer for the discipline - I've written before about why it's well worth your while to watch the free conference recordings available on YouTube, even if you're not an academic yourself.
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