MiniWarGaming, one of the longest running and historically successful Warhammer and miniature wargaming YouTube channels, is making eight out of twelve staff redundant. Studio cofounders Matt Glanfield and Dave Nordquist announced the cuts in a YouTube video on Tuesday, as well as providing an update on fulfilment plans for the Ravaged Star Backerkit campaign, which they state is unaffected by the financial crisis gripping the main business.
The duo do not say who they are letting go, but it will be obvious when they no longer appear in videos. Ridvan 'Skari' Martinez announced in a Facebook post on August 26 that "MiniWarGaming will no longer need me to create content with them".
The video comes in response to discontent and rumours in the fan community. Much of this centered on the delayed fulfilment of the 2023 Ravaged Star Tabletop Miniature Wargame Backerkit campaign; 2,794 backers pledged a total of $1,625,886 for a substantial range of grimdark plastic miniatures, but the delivery of pledge rewards has been repeatedly delayed.
Concerns about whether or not fulfilment would ever be completed were amplified when it became apparent that MiniWarGaming was having to cut costs and raise crisis funds; this included putting their studio building on the market, ending the contract with Skari, and putting some of their massive collection of painted Warhammer and Warhammer 40k factions up for sale.
In the video, Glanfield states that "Ravaged Star has all the funding it needs for the current backers to receive their product". Addressing why fulfilment is so late, he adds that "pretty much every single delay in it has not been funding related", but that the team has been "in way over our head" facing the logistical challenge of the complicated, multi-product project. He calls the original delivery date advertised in the campaign "optimistic", and Nordquist adds that there was "no padding" in the timeline for factors "outside of our knowledge or control".
Nordquist states that he will take personal responsibility for communications with backers via the Backerkit campaign going forward, and that these updates will be both regular and based entirely on concrete information from the manufacturers.
The rest of the video is spent explaining the cuts to the main business of MiniWargaming, and the reasons behind them. In the simplest terms, the channel is losing money.
MiniWarGaming was one of the very first seriously successful YouTube channels covering miniature wargames, and was the first channel to launch a successful standalone video subscription service. Today they face substantially more competition. Glanfield states that the team has attempted several experiments in content format and monetization over the last few years, but "most of it hasn't worked".
One part of the problem is the substantial overheads on the channel's studio building in Welland Ontario, the Bunker. This is substantially larger than needed for studio filming, and while the channel could once afford the on-costs associated with it, revenues have decreased since then.
When MiniWarGaming bought and renovated the venue in 2017 the team planned to operate it as an event space, but two years of COVID lockdowns and social distancing measures rendered that plan untenable. The studio documented the construction of The Bunker extensively on YouTube, if you're interested in learning more about the original plans:
The building is currently up for sale, but Glanfield and Nordquist emphasise that the commercial property market in their area is very slow moving, and they may not be able to shift it any time soon.
The duo state that they have a six month plan to make the business profitable again. Going forward, the channel's YouTube videos will concentrate on useful onboarding videos for people interested in getting started with new games - introducing the lore, the factions, and as Nordquist says "show the experience and feature the fun" of wargames. That will include making complete narrative campaigns available for free without any episodes separated behind paywalls.
Glanfield emphasises that the direction of free content is heavily informed by what the YouTube algorithm will reward. In contrast, he says that content in the subscriber-only Vault will offer a "deeper experience, getting to know us, seeing how it's done". Nordquist adds that "YouTube is presenting the experience, the Vault is a conversation about the experience".
The team also intends to run one more crowdfunding campaign for miniature wargaming terrain. Glanfield says he would prefer not to, so the studio can concentrate on its core business. However, the next terrain line is already designed, and MiniWargaming and the terrain designer have a profit sharing agreement; canning the crowdfunder would leave the designer out of pocket.
Do you have a favorite MiniWarGaming series? Who will you be most sad to see leave the channel? What do you think of their plans? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord community!