As a former envoy for their MW product line (think GM for official tournaments, but with less respect given by players and by wizkids themselves for that matter) I'd like to point out that wizkids is moving away from the small independant gaming/hobby/comic stores who represent most of their sales to date, to the mass-merchant end of things (kmart/walmart/toysrus) and that includes getting rid of all the lines involving minatures like MW and Horrorclix and likely heroclix too. But as they're doing this they're still lying to what few players/envoys still play the soon to be dropped lines, about the future of those lines, in order to sucker the people who spend money on the games, to KEEP spending money, for what will soon be cancelled outright. As is Mechwarrior which has always operated like M:TG does with sealed booster packs and such every few months for each new expansion is now going to clear boxed "action packs" (think toy boxes like you see star wars figures packed in) which the wizkids mechwarrior staffers claim is to appease players who don't wanna collect every faction in the game, so now they'll know what they're buying. It also makes the toys more marketable at the walmarts and such for whatever time remains for the line.
Of course wizkids staffers handle criticism so badly that when the company recently announced they were changing to a new exclusive distributor for their product lines, they also disabled access to their online forums for a week, so nobody would be able to complain on them about the change (and this I learned from one of their brand managers for one of the lines not getting dropped this year).
Anyways getting back to the new star wars game, Topps recently posted their yearly earnings and they made profits in every division EXCEPT wizkids, which posted another loss. The fact they're going to styrene card based games is purely because they're cheap to produce versus how much they sell for. Whether or not the games will be playable (and enjoyable) when there's an excellent star wars miniatures stratergy game already on the market remains to be seen.
As to Jordan's termination agreement, during the same "coup" as I refer to it that he was let go, 2/3rds of the mechwarrior development staff was also let go, including the lead sculpture designer for all the miniatures.
