So, Warhammer and recognition

By now this is all old news, but I still want to talk about it. 

Several years ago, GamesWorkshop killed of warhammer fantasy via the End Times and introduced Age of Sigmar to replace it. There are... speculations of why this happened and some of them are more or less accepted as truth. I also believe one that isn't as common, but I'll get to it and why it's a double edged sword.

The common argument why they did this huge move is copyright laws. Since Warhammer fantasy was mostly composed of common fantasy tropes, they were unable to protect most of the designs... because simply put, they were not their original creations. They simply took a common design, modified it slightly and made models out of it. 
Now this has been a thing for many years but why it suddenly began hurting them was the rise of decent-ish 3D printers. There are printers out there that can produce models in extremely similar quality to GW's own. And since the designs their models are based off are common, anybody with a printer could do the same thing, print their own design and even sell it and GW would be unable to do a thing about it.

So they did the rational thing, cut their losses and killed the world.  
They created a new world, full of original concepts and filed for patents on all of them. 
Rational.

But in that same move they accomplished something entirely different, something that isn't mentioned much.  

Warhammer Fantasy had a lot of lore written about it. Not a lot of it is good, but there is still a lot of it. This lore has to fit in somewhere. And then some people who had armies wrote their own lore that also had to fit in somewhere. 
Long story short, the world was getting a teeny tiny bit crowded. And of course when you write lore for a world, every new piece has to be in accordance with all the lore that was there before, especially it has to fit with the lore of the place where your piece fits. 
For example, if you write a story about a small empire city in the north and want to say that there is an inn or a tavern across from a church, you better search all the books written about it to make sure somebody doesn't dispute the location of said tavern. 

Clearly, with enough time, that creates a problem for the writers.  

Killing off the world and replacing it with a bigger one (or several) is one of the solutions. And so it happens, that's just what happened.  

But that introduces another kind of problem: recognition. 
When the world is as big as the age of sigmar realms, the possibility of having city, place or character featured in multiple books is unlikely. Which discourages people from reading them, because you are constantly reading about new things, you are never having those random cameos, the recognition of a place you read about earlier, the interest of what happened with a city over ages.

Thankfully, GW is aware of this problem. Maybe they realized it late, maybe they had other problems at their hands, but at least finally they addressed it. 
Today they released a new post, talking about a specific one city, including a map of it, describing it in greater detail. Hopefully that will be one of the core places for upcoming novels, making sure people get that feeling of being in a place they know of.

In my opinion that is a good first move. It should've happened sooner, but at least it happened now. 
Further moves are to make several more of these points but not too many and then expand out from them.
Create 'points of interest' that could seal the locations of recognition and play out of them.  

I still believe that the huge amount of space in the realms realistically hurts them right now, maybe they should've introduced them one by one instead of all at once.  
And maybe they can fix them by focusing on just some of them for a while and then expand that focus later.

But they probably won't.