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For years now, Games Workshop has struggled with how to get some of its fanciest collectibles in the hands of its actual fans—only for disaster to strike as resellers snap them all up the moment they go on pre-order. We’re not, for once, talking about the company’s vast arrays of Warhammer models, but instead, its novels… and the struggle to let fans get copies without a ton of frustration and stress might finally be on the way.
This past summer, Games Workshop was forced to cancel pre-orders for the limited edition variant of a new entry in its long-running, beloved Horus Heresy novel series, End of Ruin, when its website’s servers immediately buckled under demand. But not just from fans eager to get this supposed final chapter of a saga that, at that point, had been over 60 books in the making, but because bots had managed to bypass the company’s usual safeguards and hoover up copies. Games Workshop pulled down its entire website for several hours before issuing an apology that it would cancel its plans to release End of Ruin until it could find a way to get the books into the hands of Horus Heresy readers rather than eBay reseller listings.
This was far from the first time that the Horus Heresy novel series in particular had faced this issue. The final 10-book saga of the prequel series, Siege of Terra—depicting the invasion of humanity’s homeworld by the titular, traitorous Horus and the legions of Space Marines corrupted by Chaos he had swayed to his side in a quest for vengeance against the Emperor of Man—attracted much attention not just for its status as the last chapter of a story in the works since 2006, but for the fact that each entry in Siege of Terra debuted exclusively through very limited, leatherbound physical editions, designed to look like a tome taken out of the Warhammer universe itself.
Every time a new book was released, Games Workshop’s website would crumble, the editions would sell out in minutes at most, and guaranteed orders would find themselves appearing on resale sites for well beyond the prices Games Workshop asked for in the first place. Despite that, the company would just do it all over again with the next release, no matter how increasingly frustrated fans got as they raced to complete their collections.
That is, until the End of Ruin‘s attempted release. Although the company had previously made great pains in recent years to update its webstore with methods to try and stem the tide of visitors on high-traffic preorder release days, the move to completely shut the site down and scrap the book’s release for several months was still extreme. But now, six months later, Games Workshop has come back from the purity-seal-laden table with a plan.
And it’s admittedly a pretty obvious plan: today Games Workshop announced that End of Ruin will go up for preorder on December 13, but instead of being a traditional preorder, the book will be what the company refers to as a “guaranteed stock run.” Any order placed for the limited edition between December 13 and early December 24 will be guaranteed to receive a copy, with End of Ruin‘s final run total being based on demand.
Games Workshop does this all the time for model releases, especially when it revives classic models from yesteryear as limited-time chances for players to secure out-of-print kits, but it doesn’t do this kind of thing for its novels regularly. And it seemingly might be the plan going forward—Siege of Terra‘s successor novel series, The Scouring, a new range of books that kicked off this month, was heralded with its own series of limited edition books that contain no run numbers and will eventually be reprinted.
Some fans who enjoyed the thrill of the chase may groan that making a limited edition release less, well, limited, robs them of some of their magic. But for the most part, actually letting these books get in the hands of people who want to read them, instead of just turning around quick profits in the aftermarket, can only be a good thing.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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