Games Workshop Just Can’t Stop ‘Horus Heresy’ Scalpers

It’s become an unfortunate par for the course in modern collecting that if you want something, you’re no longer just racing against fellow fans who want it: you’re facing off against a bot army driven by scalpers who want to make a pretty profit on the aftermarket. From trading cards to action figures, from sneakers to event tickets, bots are everywhere… including the grim dark future of Warhammer.

This week Games Workshop announced plans to launch pre-orders for a bonus “final” entry in its long running series of Horus Heresy novels. Set roughly 10,000 years before the contemporary events of Warhammer 40K, the saga, which first began in 2006, recounts a galaxy-spanning civil war among the Imperium of Man–when the titular Horus, one of the Emperor’s most trusted warmasters, falls to corruption and brings swaths of Space Marine legions to the side of Chaos as he turns on the Imperium. The series, which spanned sixty four primary books, came to an end in January of last year with the release of The End and the Death Volume III, itself the 10th chapter of the “Siege of Terra” miniseries that covered Horus’ final assault on Earth itself.

The latest book, End of Ruin, was a surprise final chapter. An anthology of short stories set in the aftermath of The End and the Death announced earlier this year, it was set to go live for pre-order this week. But while the release of the novel itself is exciting for Warhammer fans, the recent Horus Heresy books have been on a whole other level of interest for a different reason. Throughout the “Siege of Terra” sub-series, Games Workshop has debuted each book with a premium limited edition: not only did they come with faux-leather bound covers, embossed with gold foil and detailing to make them look like ancient texts ripped right out of 40K‘s universe, these limited editions were the exclusive way to get each book physically earliest. Although digital copies of each release launched alongside the limited editions, the standard paperback release would come a month later.

Suffice to say, this made each limited edition extremely in demand, for a dedicate fanbase that is already primed to clog up the internet tubes that make up Games Workshop’s official website every weekend to buy the latest models. Not only are the limited editions truly limited–running roughly a few thousand copies, and only available directly through Games Workshop–the standardized nature of them all makes completing the set a risky gamble of investment. Once you get one, it’s hard to stop at just one of them, because it’ll look weird on the shelf without its faux-leather friends. And thus, with every release of a new chapter since “Siege of Terra” began in 2019, Games Workshop’s website would buckle under demand, fans would get angry, and dozens upon dozens of copies would inevitably end up on sites like eBay for double or triple the original price.

No matter how hard Games Workshop tried to counteract scalping–including completely overhauling its website in 2023 to implement queuing systems meant to deter bots–each limited edition would sell out almost immediately, leading to a new wave of aftermarket sales, and a new wave of anger. Fans thought it would be over when The End and the Death Volume III launched last year (which itself had suffered a similarly controversial launch) but with the announcement of End of Ruin, they braced themselves once more this past Tuesday, June 10, to enter the fray. And it did not go well.

Within moments of End of Run going live on Games Workshop’s website at 5am Eastern, the queue system displayed waiting times numbering in the hours. Soon enough, the queue was paused. And then, Games Workshop’s website went down completely, for a period of maintenance that would last hours. People were furious, and it turns out, so were Games Workshop, enough to release a rare statement about the mess this week.

“Today we launched our pre-order for the much-anticipated special edition of Siege of Terra: Era of Run,” a statement posted to Facebook read in part. “Unfortunately, scalpers attempted to use bots to bypass our normal safeguards. our eagle-eyed Tech-Priests caught this happening in real time, so we pulled Warhammer.com offline. What this means is we’re pausing the launch of Era of Ruin and have removed it from Warhammer.com for the time being.”

“Don’t worry, it’s still coming–we’re just absolutely determined that real fans get it,” the statement continued. “All erroneous orders are being purged. This is our number one priority. Please forgive us for a delay as we sort it all out.”

Included in the statement was seemingly the first step of Games Workshop’s renewed attempt to stop resellers: a newsletter sign up link for customers to be notified when pre-orders for Era of Ruin would relaunch. It’s already a slight step up from when the same issue struck the launch of End and the Death Volume III, which simply hit the same website issues a few weeks later when it opened up the queue system again. But considering this is far from the first time that this has happened to the Horus Heresy series, at what point do the companies “normal safeguards” stop being safe enough?

Whether or not the new round of sales for Era of Ruin will go more smoothly remains to be seen. But if there are just as many headaches for Horus Heresy fans once more, then one of Games Workshop’s most beloved book series is going to end in an era of ruin of a different sort.

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