We've come to the end of yet another ICv2 Miniatures Week (see "
ICv2 Miniatures Week 2025"), and it's time to wrap things up. I'd like to thank our sponsor Atomic Mass Games, the miniatures publishers who sent us press releases for news stories, and of course, our audience for making this one of the most robust ICv2 Miniatures Weeks since we first began hosting this specialty week in 2021 (see "
ICv2 Miniatures Week 2021"). The support has been unbelievable, and I hope next year's Miniatures Week is even better.
Per usual, there were a few tidbits and topics that got pushed to the end of the week due to the overwhelming amount of news that hit the wire over the last two weeks. This column is essentially an attempt to "pick up the spare" with a few thoughts on some the stories that we ran out of time on. So, without further ado, here we go:
More Warhammer 40,000 Codices Finally Head to Market. One of the big concerns for some retailers that I have talked to is that Games Workshop isn't pushing out the
Warhammer 40,000 10E codices fast enough to meet players' demand. Essentially, players are worried that their faction's codex won't see the light of day very long before GW moves onto an 11E at their current release rate. GW seemed to respond to this concern at Adepticon 2025 by announcing three codices for this year:
Thousand Sons,
World Eaters, and
Death Guard. Hopefully, they step-up production of these books further over 2025.
Atomic Mass Announces Path of the Worthy Winners. We talked a little about the Golden Demon painting competition winners earlier this week. The Path of the Worthy, which is a painting competition by AMG that is growing in popularity, also occurred at AdeptiCon 2025. Anthony Wang took home the top prize at that competition for his Jean Grey model entitled "Red." Other category winners can be found on AMG's website.
Steamforged Games Upgrades U.S. Manufacturing. This is an initiative that had been in progress for a while, but SFG finally offered more details about it at their Adepticon keynote presentation. SFG has been investing in their U.S. manufacturing capabilites to the point where their output has tripled in eight months time. They bet big on new equipment, and their manufacturing is fully scalable now. All of these things seem very relevant in this new age of tariffs.
Speaking of tariffs (and who isn't?), the worst case scenarios for tariffs were recently announced on April 2, 2025 by President Trump at a press conference (see "
Worst Case Tariffs"). I've been asked a bunch of times for my opinion on how these tariffs affect the games industry at this point, and my general response has been "depends on how much of this sticks and who decides to deal." Right now, if everything stands as announced, it's probably going to be a rough ride for companies producing plastics, cardboard components, or packaging outside of the U.S.
I've already heard stories of some companies hard at work trying to make the worst case scenario work for them. However, it seems that any way this all goes down, small publishers will have to make changes (to product configurations or manufacturing models) and margins may not be the same. This all, of course, depends on what countries make deals with the current administration to better their situation. The worst case scenario is very location dependent as not all countries will end up with the same deals. Right now, it seems like China, South Asia countries, and the EU have gotten the clobbered the most with tariffs, but the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and parts of South America are hovering around a livable 10% tariff.
Overall, the only real thing I can predict about this situation is that there will be high levels of uncertainty for the games industry in the near term. As our Editior-in-Chief Milton Griepp stated the aforementioned article, "Buckle up."
For more from ICv2 Miniatures Week,
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The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
