Wait, what happened here?
Go look up the chapterhouse lawsuit if you want details, but the summary is...
GW used to make rules for shit that didn't have models, companies filled the gap. Chapterhouse then started making more and more stuff like faction pauldrons and shit. GW's CEO at the time(Tom Kirby who was also responsible for a lot of other fuckups at GW between 2010-2014) has a bug up his ass about it and sues the shit out of them in a case that took damn near 2 years, during which GW tried to claim trademarks over everything from "space marine"(they lost), to "pauldron"(yes really, they lost that too), and "ultramarine"(I wish I were kidding but they also lost this). Out of the hundreds of items the court basically told GW to fuck off on about 2/3 of them because the names and symbols and shit were too generic. After this case had dragged out so long Chapterhouse went out of business due to being unable to do business and legal fees.
The end result was GW changing the name of everything to something they could trademark. Hence "Adeptus Astartes", "Aeldari", "Drukhari", shit needing 3 names like "Mephitic Blight Hauler", every paint color having a GW specific name, and so on. GW also stopped releasing rules for things without models, and then anything that didn't have rules shit was sent to "legends" AKA an unplayable mess that never gets properly updated and is also where things go when GW wants to stop making models for them(and then just remove them altogether later on).
That CEO was then eventually replaced by Kevin Rountree in 2015 and the company has been a lot less ridiculous since but will still go after people for selling shit using their IP and trademarks/copyrighted stuff.
I take it Guard and Chaos will be paid DLC instead of a proper expansion? Shame. I’m hoping they’re not going to further lock subsections of Chaos or Guard under more DLC and if there isn’t an army painter in game I’ll deem it absolutely inferior to the old DoW games.
4 factions with full multiplayer support and a 70 mission campaign is plenty for a base game in an RTS. The fantasy TW games have been getting releases to add shit constantly over the years because its proven popular enough. If the new devs working on DoW 4 don't fuck it up like DoW 3, it should be popular enough to get continued releases as well.
Frankly it's better they didn't include Chaos because 1. They're already in damn near everything else and 2. for the most part they're just space marines with extra spikes and not enough differentiation. If they're just adding factions for multiplayer or real expansions, it's too early to tell because it was just announced and we know barely anything about the base game as it is.