CBT/MW Popularity

Now, I'll admit that Battletech Tabletop is not doing as well as it was back in the mid 90s, but I think it's safe to say that very few games are doing as well as during the mid 90s. I can't speak for the UK, but here are my observations going as far back as I remember hunting after the franchise.

The first thing that Battletech doesn't have that it used to have is publicity. For the more public markets, Battletech used to be everywhere. The earliest three Battletech computer games were all released at right about the same time towards the late 80s; you had the Virtual Reality pods being released at Virtual World sometime around 1989 or 1990; You had some Arcady Battletech titles being released for both Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo around 1994; a Saturday Morning Cartoon in 1994; and most importantly of all - the Mechwarrior 2 series in 1995. The Battletech franchise was common place. MW2 alone was a highly rated game, with free copies and graphically upgraded editions being included with the earliest graphics cards for PC. The damned game was everywhere. When anyone thought of "Western style giant robots", people thought of Battletech. What made MW2 so great for the franchise was that even though the graphics were cutting edge at the time, they were so polygonal that the graphical limitations of the franchise made people more accepting of the old school miniatures designs. I don't think anybody ever complained that Battletech was "ugly" back then. After that, the game production started to slow down. Likewise, it also used the same construction system as Battletech tabletop (as would MW3), which helped people become comfortable with the tabletop game even before they ever played (One of the hardest parts to getting people to try Battletech tabletop is when they see the record sheets. Most people get scared off immediately on seeing them, calling it "Filling out a tax report", when it is in fact a very easy, intuitive gaming tool. When they've already seen everything on that sheet in a Mechwarrior PC game, though, they take to it like a duck to water without so much as a nervous leer.), MechCommander and Mechwarrior 3 were great, but didn't "Make new fans" so much as sated old ones. Still, they kept all the 'mechs looking almost exactly like their tabletop counterparts, so I heard few complaints regarding the aesthetics (Barring people from the 40K franchise, who'd had a graphical overhaul around 1998, when the marketing team realized that the 12 year olds they were marketing to didn't actually "Get" black humor and just want things to be edgy and violent, so changed their game aesthetic from gecko-nids painted in day-glo orange, to the Grimdark Dark Grimness we have now. Also, the release of Tau seemed to be intentionally there to attract players away from Battletech and other fans of not-knights-in-space aesthetics). Mechwarrior 4 was a franchise killer for sure, though. While old games used the Battletech systems and aesthetics, Microsoft took a lot of liberties, not only creating custom designs and changing the look of classic ones, but dumbing down the customization system to a drag'n'drop game, getting rid of the more hazardous critical hits like ammo explosions, and the works. The mechwarrior games were suddenly counterproductive to getting people to play the tabletop, as the MW players would not recognize anything from the game. The system, the aesthetics... When Microsoft tried to make Mechwarrior in a different direction from the tabletop, the layman stopped being interested.

The other problem was happening in store fronts: Battletech was a very common Miniatures wargame for a long time, In fact, I'd say that after Games Workshop games, they were in second place in terms of popularity. You could find Battletech starter boxes and Technical readouts books at just about any Comic shop, and even in 1996, they started a TCG that could be found at even the smallest of comic shops. Even other smaller games. Deadlands, Rifts, Gurps, Traveller, Shadowrun, Vampire... They all had a place in the comic shop. Then in 1998, something happened that turned the average comic book store right upside down - Pokemon was released to the western world. The next thing you knew, every comic book shop was pushing all their stock (including comics) out of the way to make room for as much Pokemon memorabilia as you possibly could. Kids were buying Pikachu plushies and Squirtle toys as fast as humanly possible. I remember the comic store at my local mall (Where I used to get my Battletech books and cards) was absolutely crazy during the holidays. Anxious mothers buying their kids pokemon merchandise for christmas when Toys R Us old out. Small children screaming for packs of Pokemon cards... everything. Meanwhile, The Battletech merchandise never got restocked, and it steadily dwindled. Three books, A few of all the boosters for the TCG, and a tabletop introbox... Two books and half of the TCG boosters... One shelf-warn book and two of the oldest booster sets... Eventually it dried up, never got restocked, and if any Battletech product cropped up at all, it found it's way into Bargain Bins. Battletech disappeared from the Comic Shop almost entirely, only popping up sporadically in a few. It only survived in well stocked Tabletop Gaming Stores that specialized in games like 40K and D&D, and even then, the effect of it disappearing off of shelves at Comic shops had an adverse effect on popularity as a whole.

In fact, when the "Pokemon Bubble", as I call it, burst around 1999 or 2000, I noticed that a lot of comic book shops started failing. Some closed up shop outright, while others, now without a cash-cow to keep them running, started "Diversifying" into sports memorabilia. Many of those Sports'n'comic shops are shadows of their former selves, now sporting 90% sports apparel, and maybe a few dusty boxes of 40K and Yaoi Manga in the back.

The other thing that worked to Battletech's disadvantage was Fasa closing up shop. When Fasa announced that they were closing, many people immediately jumped ship to other games, thinking that every game Fasa had ever made was immediately going to die. Comic Shop and game shop owners also shared the same thoughts and many stopped stocking Battletech outright, telling anyone who came by to buy the game that "Battletech was dead". While I think there was a 6-month dead period as things were passing hands, the Battletech franchise was quickly bought back up by Fanpro/Wizkids in 2000, and product kept being churned out. Of course, with everyone assuming that with Fasa's passing, all the franchises that went with it simply vanished, there were still tons of people even five years later that assumed Battletech was a "Dead Game", even in the face of new published product. In fact, when Mechwarrior Clix were released in 2002, many people assumed that the hex-board game had ceased to be, and only the clix game remained; the reality of it was that the game was still alive, but with Wizkids dumping all their art and marketing budgets into the clix game, Battletech got little publicity at all, with just enough product being released to sate the old fans. The loss of the Battletech novel line in 2002 also took a heavy toll on Battletech, making the easiest way to get into the fluff cease to exist. That, I think, plays a huge role in why so many people are against the Jihad era that we've just completed - the only way you could get a feel for the era was to read sourcebooks or 30-page short stories in PDF format off of some obscure website (Battlecorps.com).

So I think that's just it. To abridge the above, a combination of being pushed out of the market by Pokemon, having demand sabotaged by Microsoft, the fall of FASA, the death of the comic book shop were what nearly killed Battletech, and Wizkids' pushing of Mechwarrior Clix. Luckily, our fans are die-hard, and we kept right on playing. Once Catalyst Game Labs started taking over the franchise, and Mechwarrior Clix (Colloquially known as "Clickytech) died things took a huge turn for the better: Better publicity; low cost intro-boxes with miniatures instead of cardboard standups; bigger art budget... the Books might never have come back, but judging from the 25th anniversary introbox's brisk sales (They sold out of all their stock in 10 days, and are still trying to get a second run done), I would say that Battletech is well on the rise in tabletop gaming.

The only things I think that are keeping Battletech from being popular right now are two-fold. One, is that many people prefer playing Campaign games at home to pickup games at a comic shop, and since people automatically assume Battletech is a miniatures game game just like Warmachine or 40K, they expect to see players at the LGS. When nobody shows up, they assume nobody plays - and yet, books for battletech fly off the shelves like hotcakes. The other detractor is Megamek, the Javascript recreation of the tabletop game. While some people DO have it rough and can't find players in their cities, a lot of the time it's just sheer laziness, and if they don't see someone playing Battletech at an LGS when they walk in, they assume nobody in their city plays (Rather than trying to recruit new players through posters at the LGS or with the store owners' help). The other problem - many people are just too lazy to get out to the LGS, so they just park their *** in front of the computer and play Megamek.

CBT/MW Popularity

#21 ice trey

#22 John Clavell

#23 Atlas3060

#24 Adridos

#25 Kodiak Jorgensson

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