It has been over 5 years since me and the studio parted ways. It came as a bit of a surprise to me when a colleague at my current company told me that I had come in for a kicking on-line. Frankly when I left GW I wanted as much seperation as possible so I did not make any effort to keep up to date. Now, with a lot more water under the bridge and an approaching bit of christmas induced nostalgia I decided to at least post something.

As I have no personal agenda any more - I am not even a GW hobbyist these days - what follows is as near the truth as I can remember.

The reason I left GW is that I was made redundant. At the time I was told that as the strategy was to recycle rather than create new material then senior developers were not needed. My feeling was that outrageous claims had been made commercially that the passing of the LOTR movies would not affect the growth of sales. When this was proved as ridiculous an assertion as everyone might have guessed the share price fell. GW's customary response to falling share price was always to cut headcount. For every developer in the studio there are 1000 fans willing to do the job for less money so they can do this with impunity. I was actually quite ambivalent about it. On one level I knew what I was getting into when I joined GW - they were a hire and fire company with job security being the private preserve of those above a glass ceiling in the company. As joining the company was analagous to a mid life crisis (some people buy high powerered motorbikes and crash them, some people run off with unsuitable blondes, I ran off and joined the circus) then I didn't really give it that much advanced thought.

The main thing that studio outsiders need to understand is that the games developers in the studio are small fish with negligible say. They may get their faces in WD a lot but that is pure marketing. Worse, the fact that it happens makes doing the job harder because being in the public eye attracts the bitter jealousy of many managers. Thus the developer is in a position with no authority, taking lumps for projects that they are not responsible for scoping and subject to summary dismissal so a suit can show how big his balls are. It's not great, mostly you can focus beyond it because you are working with your hobby and that is a bit like the key to the sweet shop but I always felt uneasy there.

For myself, I was always torn between trying to make 40K a role playing wargame where lists encouraged outrageous conversions forming part of highly personalised armies and, on the other hand, a competitive game that had to be properly balanced. As the Index Astartes series had already begun doing rules for chaos chapters when I started then I pursued the role playing approach for the chaos codex. In retrospect I should have thought it through more but I was still primarily an enthusiast at that time so it was easy to get carried away and I had found the previous (Jervis) codex to be bland to the point of tedium. The problem was always going to be that an ideal codex had 15 to 25 product codes. By the time Index Astartes had run its course the chaos codex would have needed two to three times that many. I really tried to keep as many of the options as I could because that was what I beleived people wanted. The end result was unbalanced but then with so much variation possible it was kind of inevitable. Al I can say to the people who have piled into me for it is sorry, I was actually trying to be true to the enthusiasts, rather than the bean counters. Later I managed to achieve something similar with traits etc without the balance issues but thats life.

Anyway I am now back working in IT and look back on my GW time fondly despite the constant worry and stress that came with it. I still have my armies but have returned to my original interest - playing historical ancients - and am thoroughly enjoying it.
So - to the people who have said courteous things, cheers, to the rest, well, if your world view is such that you spew vitriol at people for what they do in the context of a game of toy soldiers then you really ought to get out more. There are many things in the world worthy of opposing far more than a bit of codex creep.