The End of Citadel Colour

So on Friday the Warhammer marketing team announced the end of Citadel Colour. The paint range is being rebranded as Warhammer Colour, another step in GW’s long-running push to unify everything under the Warhammer name.

GW published a video which jokingly explained that their customers are just too dumb to understand that acrylic paints have to match the brand name of the models (Which ironically used to be Citadel Colour and Citadel models respectively).

This joke doesn’t quite land for me. It’s either dumb or unfunny.

Why the move you ask? Well, it’s GW’s attempt to define the hobby as something other than miniature wargaming. They are trying to pigeonhole different aspects of the hobby into what they call the “Warhammer Hobby”, which started with their rebrand of their stores back in 2015. Go to your local warhammer store, pick up your warhammer models, paint them with your warhammer paint. Their slogan from the launch of Warhammer+ back in 2021 is quite descriptive: More Warhammer, More often.

All in all it feels like a loss. I genuinely liked GW having separated different aspects of their company. There is also a lot of history going back to the mid 80s as to why the different subsidiaries of GW had different names. I recommend reading “Dice men” by Livingstone and Jackson, which gives a good insight.

Now with Forgeworld and Citadel gone, I guess the only things left are is Black Library and White dwarf, which will probably be renamed Warhammer books and Warhammer Monthly by the end of the decade. Ironically the book publishing arm of GW was called Warhammer books up until the creation of BL in 1997.

Ultimately this isn't doing anything to improve their paint. This was an opportunity to either change their formula, or fix the worst part of their product: The lid. I actually like Citadel Colour, although I do also use other paint ranges, but for a company that prides itself on being the industry leader their paint pots are the absolute worst. I think that they feel like they don't want to imitate others by doing dropper bottles, but this was kind of a golden opportunity for them to do something cool and unique, like bringing back their early to mid 90s hexpots.