Sure, I'd be interested. I mostly picked up the two 3.5 Monsternomicons and then some cheap second hand early warmachine books for the world and faction flavor so I am not deeply plugged in to the last decade of their stuff or how GW is involved.
Iron Kingdoms has, for the past decade and a half, been primarily a wargame setting (the Warmachine/Hordes games). It never really broke out of the hobby gaming shop market but was a lot faster to play than 40k, quite a bit cheaper to field an army, and worked on the "Imbalanced balance" (or whatever it's called) principle where most things in the game were broken in ways that cancelled each other out and more or less worked well. It never really broke out of the "game you play when you're fed up of 40k being a time and money sink" niche but it was extremely easy as a game to move on from 40k or Warhammer Fantasy to.
Round 2013-2015 they were in a really good place. 40k drew people in - but they had a much better game that looked almost as good. People who found 40k not tactical enough often moved to Warmahordes. People who found 40k too slow often moved to Warmahordes. People who wanted there to always be a chance to win often moved to Warmahordes. And Games Workshop had just blown up the Warhammer Fantasy setting and replaced it with a terrible game that didn't even have a points system (Age of Sigmar) causing an influx of gamers towards all the second tier tabletop wargames. And Warmahordes was better placed than most of its rivals to take the competitive gamers because the game had very similar design assumptions and even stats, so was easier to learn.
The seeds of disaster had already been planted. The first was that GW fired its CEO and replaced him with someone that thought they should listen to the fans. It sounds like an obvious thing you should do but GW stopped being utterly arrogant and even ignoring things like Facebook. The second was that PP had shafted the friendly local game stores to chase the internet profit margins. So the friendly local game stores stopped pointing newbies looking for something other than 40k at Warmahordes. It would take a few years for the impact of this to become obvious because the existing players didn't stop playing or buying and online profit margins were high, but gaming shops slowly stopped stocking them because they didn't want to give people their first taste and then have the future minis bought through the internet.
Then we have the tale of three new games, two in 2017 and one in 2018. The first new game was Warhammer 40k, 8th edition. It was a much faster playing game than its predecessor with much more flexibility in list building. Up went a lot of the reasons to switch to Warmahordes in a puff of smoke and indeed players went trickling back. They didn't come the other way, of course, because the hobby shops weren't recommending it and the groups playing there had been suffering natural attrition. The second was Warmachine/Hordes Mk3 and any edition change annoys people and loses players - who looked at what GW were doing. This was particularly true in my Skorne faction where it was obvious that the entire faction update had been half-assed and they were almost unplayably weak (the entire faction got overhauled a year later). The third was Age of Sigmar 2e - which I'm told was a pretty good game and has great looking fantasy minis.
So Privateer Press had a new edition that wasn't bringing in new people. Old players weren't buying new minis because they already had more than they needed for viable armies. People weren't finding the Warmachine groups because they weren't in the local gaming shops (they'd naturally moved to private homes or fallen apart over time and new ones weren't being set up in gaming shops with the products leaving the shelves). This was not going well.
The first thing they tried was selling entirely new armies in the Grucible Guard, the Grymkin, and now the Infernals. In 2006, when Hordes launched, there were nine separate factions with the Minions faction having models (that would work for multiple other factions) but being short of leaders; no one was surprised when they became a faction in 2010. There'd also been one new army launched in 2009 (who'd had one of the most popular models in the game since 2003), and one army in 2013 that was only a mini-faction and that had been around in the fluff since the Witchfire trilogy in about 2000. There has been a new faction launched in
each of 2017, 2018, and 2019 and at least one of these factions is already out of production. The other two don't really fit the Warmahordes aesthetics; the Grymkin are the monsters under the bed and the Infernals are demons, demon summoners, and demon worshippers who've come in to nuke the setting.
The second thing they tried shattered one of their huge advantages over GW. Games Workshop wargames have "Codex Creep"; the new army book is generally the one with the strongest armies at any given time. This is annoying. It also sells minatures as people jump on the new bandwagon. Warmahordes, as a game for more competitive gamers, used to produce new minatures by advancing the storyline. And instead of completely overhauling a faction they gave a few models to
all the Warmachine factions or
all the Hordes factions. Some would probably be a bit overtuned but it didn't disrupt balance much because there would be a minimum of four (and normally five or six) factions all sorting through their new stuff at the same time. Instead they moved to a "CID" system where they focused on one part of one of the factions and revamped it. That faction almost always jumped straight to the top of the power rankings, making people enthused to play it ... and everyone else grit their teeth at the new wave of broken stuff. Again this sold minatures to people who played the faction with the new broken stuff but was bad for the long term health of the game.
Instead of a new army set this time they've gone with "Riot Quest" - a set of boardgames with a goofy post-apocalyptic feel to provide the new minatures. Which coaxes you into buying the board game with models for multiple armies (PP has always been good at that through the Mercenary/Minions system which coincidentally they broke in Mk3). And adding goofiness to a game that styled itself "Full Metal Fantasy" (which they dropped when they were big enough to produce plastic minis) with a tag line "Play like you've got a pair" didn't draw people in - but did come as a final straw to even more people.
They're in the process of nuking their setting as mentioned, and back in March had a kickstarter for a new attempt to be the 40k to Warmahordes Fantasy Battle; Warcaster: Neomechanica. It made just under half a million dollars off just under 2500 people. Which ... is probably not going to get critical mass to get people recruiting friends and buying again. By comparison their 2013 kickstarter for a computerised version of Warmachine managed $1.5 million with almost 20,000 backers.
