The people saying "I won't give GW money for femstodes!" weren't their paypiggies anyway. I know the IRL whales and they will slurp up this slop just as greedily as the last bit of plastic GW put out.
I'm really curious where that argument even comes from, because it reads like utter cope "look their stock didn't change!!!". it reminds me of that AOS circlejerking talking shit about fantasy players and no one cares, it's a good thing and it's gonna be great, where it got to the point people were literally burning their armies - the same people "that don't spend money", to get replaced by literally no one.
as for woke=broke, as I said somewhere else it's not a fucking hollywood movie where you get a happy end after a 3 minute montage, change takes time and is not always obvious. same way people don't happily play warhammer but no, femstodes is suddenly THE reason to sell all your stuff and play something else. that's not how it works, everyone has his own personal straw that breaks the camel's back.
the tech sector is massively contracting, videogames devs have been whining for months now getting laid off due to their shit work, which is all directly or indirectly due to DEI/ESG shit. you already had companies being less eager to go all in with rainbow shit last year, it will most likely be even less next month. the whole globe is suffering economically because of MUH FEELS MUH IDEOLOGY retards in charge everywhere, and the rest are mostly grifters. when shit goes bad, and it most likely will, people are gonna figure out you can't eat warhammer minis - femstodes or not.
I wanted to get an apolitical or right leaning artist for book art and likewise for a sculptor. But I can't advertise that because I will invariably either get brigaded by the terminally online troons for not being a commie, or I will attract right wing grifters looking to just get in and start drama. I want to create something fun and engaging with good rules, but the culture war is now here on the doorstep and I won't be able to run from it. I could learn to do my own art, a mere 5+ year investment, then learn sculpting so I can produce my own miniature line, another 3-4 year investment. Maybe in 11 years when I can write my own rules, do my own art, sculpt my own minis will I be able to take the risk of making my own wargame.
you don't need art if you don't have any lore, and if you have any lore you don't need any sculpts either. unless you want your own mini business and your setting is niche like turnip28 or something there's really no need to bother with that. and even if it's successful there are plenty of sculptors you can work with at that point, or people do their own sculpts to jump on the train. for example modiphius works with titan forge for official five parsec minis. stl miniatures did 2 kickstarters that were all about frostgrave.
besides that the more you push your own minis the more you increase the likelyhood of people not buying in. people having to basically start from scratch to "play another game" is one of the reasons warhammer has such a captured audience due to sunken cost. you really wanna go mini-agnostic, unless you hook up with a big enough company you can sell the rules to.
art is also a secondary concern since I assume you wanna publish digitally first, where all you'd really need is an eye-catching cover. if and when you do a printrun, there's still enough time to look for an artist then, after collecting some kickstarter money for it, and unless you advertise it as NIGGERS GETTING BUCKBROKEN + TITS, no one is gonna care. it's not like they need a reason to cancel you anyway it they want. or just find a publisher who takes are of all that itself.
you're more likely running into shitty unprofessional artists who gonna steal your money or take ages to finish the work. might as well learn how a LLM works to be ready once the OMG AI topic has been phased out of the newscycle.
I may steal a lot of STL files but I always pay for my favorite artists.
to be fair if you just hoard it and don't really print/play with it there's not much difference, at that point it's just a copy of ones and zeros somewhere. I tend to spend money when I actually use someone's stuff.
as for OPR, I can understand when people look for something more meaty (even with the advanced rules), that's usually when I put this on the table: