Star Wars is still one of the biggest media franchises in the world, beaten out only by Pokemon and maybe two or three others that I can't be bothered to look up. Just because a company or a franchise is turned to utter shit doesn't mean it failed or has stopped printing free money. Star Wars hasn't produced anything of worth other than maybe The Mandalorian in years. It pumps millions into these projects that are terrible. It doesn't matter though because the franchise still makes billions. Normies don't care and are happy enough to watch anything with a lightsaber in it. It doesn't stop kids from buying toys of the characters, or Fortnite from making Storm troopers do the latest meme dance. It is the most successful it has ever been.
Indeed. Normies don't care, still watch the shows, still go to the theme parks, still buy merch, etc.
Same with D&D. It's not dying. Oh no, it only has 60% of the TTRPG market now instead of 70% or whatever, that's not "dying". Yes, a bunch of other companies produced competing products, but outside of youtube and shit just like with trench crusade an OPR, is anyone actually playing them? How much shelf space is dedicated to D&D at the game store compared to pathfinder 2 and because someone mentioned kobold press, whatever they're doing with Black Flag, Tales of the Valiant, or whatever it's called this month? Just because Hasbro can't figure out how to make more money off of it, doesn't mean it's "dying". Hell, Critical Role has taken more of a hit in viewership than Hasbro has with D&D, because it seems people have finally gotten bored of watching 400 hours of voice actors play a campaign, and there was hardly any interest in Matt Mercer's rules light system he dropped after the D&D OGL fiasco(the reality is the critical role people made a fuckload of money off of their cartoon, and will likely be spending more time on that since that seems to be as popular as CR was at it's peak if not moreso).
That said. Warhammer was never at the same level of Star Wars, D&D, Marvel, and likely never will be and the company actually does need to consider onboarding new players/customers, but even then that still happens. There's always some kid(I mean actual kids, like 12-14) at the LGS wanting to play a game of 40k that some of the adults generally try to avoid because even at the LGS no one wants to be the weirdo adult who is always playing games with other people's kids. What GW primarily needs to not do, is shit up the entire company top to bottom like they did in 2013 pissing everyone off with lawsuits, shit rules/balance, retail stores bleeding money(being a loss lead is one thing, but just burning cash for no reason is another, it's why so many switched to being closed on Monday and Tuesday, and only single employee/manager running the place), a playerbase of weirdos driving other people away from it(another reason why GW doesn't seem to actually like people playing in its stores), providing customers with a laughably inferior product(finecast had been out for a couple years at that point and everyone hated it), fans still had bad memories of CS Goto, Robin Cruddace, Matt Ward, etc. WHFB had been left to collect dust on shelves, and Privateer Press was able to swoop in with a product(before spending the next decade doing everything possible to sabotage themselves, and even the new owner of the IP still fucking it up to this day).
I don't think GW is stupid enough to allow such an idiotic convergence of dumb shit occur all at once again, but it's not impossible. Stagnation and becoming a boomer brand is a more likely possibility.
