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I use them, I play against them. Just like I download all my music and watch GoT on stream.

Call the feds m8, I'm just down the road from Dotcom.

If GW cared at all about its customers maybe I'd look out for them. The very least they could do is once a month sit down and write answers to questions that plague the boards and gaming community. That wouldn't cost them hardly anything.

We are a model company 1st and a game by chance seems to be their motto. It is almost like we aren't good enough for them and look down at us for playing.

It's amazing how many people here think it's ok to break the law as long as you're stealing from someone who "deserves" it. It's just a pathetic justification, and I actually have more respect for the people who admit they buy recasts/pirate games/etc because they're selfish and don't give a about anyone else, without trying to turn it into some kind of bizarre moral high ground.

Hollismason wrote:
Yeah, you figure out why GW is one of the largest pirated miniatures ( I'm sure like Gundam or something is actually the largest) for wargaming and you'll point yourself directly to what is wrong with the whole damn company.

You know why GW is the most pirated miniatures company? Because GW is the biggest miniatures company. Recasters aren't some kind of moral crusaders out to destroy the evil GW empire while leaving the good companies unharmed, they're just greedy amoral s who recast whatever is going to sell the most copies. And major GW kits sell a lot more copies than stuff from other companies with lower market share.

Warlord_Grotsnik wrote:
Look, in the US making the recasts isn't illegal, ...

Yes, it is.

Fair Use doesn't cover making copies so that you don't have to buy more.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 greyknight12 wrote:
. Recasting without permission is illegal in many places and unethical everywhere.

Not actually true. There are quite a few countries where copyright isn't particularly highly regarded, so copyright infringement isn't seen as unethical at all.

 insaniak wrote:

Warlord_Grotsnik wrote:
Look, in the US making the recasts isn't illegal, ...

Yes, it is.

Fair Use doesn't cover making copies so that you don't have to buy more.

Actually, not quite true.

US law protects until the item copied has been changed by a fairly subjective 10%. The act of recasting in a different material, using a different casting process pretty much protexts the person making the copies.
Where such a person would get into trouble is by making any attempt at passing the models off as authentic in an effort to make a profit.

For those that are paranoid that GW will send their legal thugs or the cops after them, then just paint the models in a non-standard scheme.
IP cannot limit "artistic" expression in the US.

Clearest Dakka poll ever or what? ;D

 Peregrine wrote:
It's amazing how many people here think it's ok to break the law as long as you're stealing from someone who "deserves" it. It's just a pathetic justification, and I actually have more respect for the people who admit they buy recasts/pirate games/etc because they're selfish and don't give a about anyone else, without trying to turn it into some kind of bizarre moral high ground.

Hollismason wrote:
Yeah, you figure out why GW is one of the largest pirated miniatures ( I'm sure like Gundam or something is actually the largest) for wargaming and you'll point yourself directly to what is wrong with the whole damn company.

You know why GW is the most pirated miniatures company? Because GW is the biggest miniatures company. Recasters aren't some kind of moral crusaders out to destroy the evil GW empire while leaving the good companies unharmed, they're just greedy amoral s who recast whatever is going to sell the most copies. And major GW kits sell a lot more copies than stuff from other companies with lower market share.

This is more of a case of moral ethics or ethical morality.

Piracy is a symptom of when there is a problem within the free market.

In a free market, the company is supposed to provide a good value for the price demanded for their products. A measure of that good value is to walk the line of charging what the market will bear and of not gouging your customers.

If a company decides to not give fair value for price charged then they end up price gouging their customers. People can tell when such profiteering is occuring by whether one can make the same quality product for a lower price and still be profitable enough to survive as a full-time business (hence product piracy/clones).

In cases such as these I have little to no sympathy for the corporate entities that wish to profit from the free market system while simultaneously trying to subvert such with IPs and copyrights designed to create mini-monopolies.

 SarisKhan wrote:
My friend has recast a few Tyranids models himself. I'm not 100% fine with that, but since it's mostly because of the amount of money normally required to buy such models and nothing moral, I play against them without saying anything.

I did something similur. I play IG , but didn't realy like the GW models for troops. I traded all the IG models I had for recasts of infinity models I like. My two chimeras are recast too , I bought them because a friend of a friend made 10 and needed only 6. Other people have recast titans, recast aegis gunlines. Most of the characters I see used are recast too , specialy if they are FW. The prices are crazy for the non FW stuff , and recasts are actualy more resilient then a lot of the finecast models.

It's unethical because it's supporting intellectual property theft. It's no different than buying a Metallica CD from someone who bought one then re-burned it en-masse

Isn't recasting more like creating your own band band and doing a cover.

Yeah I would, wouldn't really bother me at all.

It's amazing how many people here think it's ok to break the law as long as you're stealing from someone who "deserves" it. It's just a pathetic justification, and I actually have more respect for the people who admit they buy recasts/pirate games/etc because they're selfish and don't give a about anyone else, without trying to turn it into some kind of bizarre moral high ground.

Am not going to buy stronghold assault to use my aegis , which didn't change at all in rules , just because GW decided to remove it from the main rule book. The fact that stronghold assault is no longer sold in any shops here, only helps me to decide on that.


By the way I remember an article in ze WD that showed how to make your own purity stamp with green stuff. Is making those or weapons , and then selling them illegal too?

 Captain Avatar wrote:
If a company decides to not give fair value for price charged then they end up price gouging their customers. People can tell when such profiteering is occuring by whether one can make the same quality product for a lower price and still be profitable enough to survive as a full-time business (hence product piracy/clones).

Except that's a terrible argument that completely lacks any understanding of the situation. Recasters aren't able to undercut GW because GW is selling at some morally unacceptable price, they're able to do it because they don't have to invest any of the design work required to create that model, don't have to pay their employees a fair wage, and don't have to worry about any of those pesky safety regulations or other nonsense that might get in the way of profit. If those recasters had to design their own models instead of just making some molds from a GW kit they'd go out of business overnight.

Also, price gouging by definition does not exist for a luxury item like gaming miniatures.

In cases such as these I have little to no sympathy for the corporate entities that wish to profit from the free market system while simultaneously trying to subvert such with IPs and copy-writes designed to create mini-monopolies.

Are you serious? IP and copyright laws are essential to a free market. If a company has no way to protect their products from being copied then why would anyone make any investment in designing new products? Just let someone else invest the design work and make your own copies. This isn't one of those ridiculous cases of copyright abuse, like the constant extension of copyright lengths every time a profitable movie/book/etc is about to expire, it's just a straightforward case of a business having the right to protect their work.

Makumba wrote:
Isn't recasting more like creating your own band band and doing a cover.

No, the equivalent to that would be creating your own line of 28mm power armor soldiers that are clearly meant to be space marines for 40k, but are your own sculpts. You're using the original work as source material, but you're creating your own version of it. Recasting doesn't involve any new work, you're just creating a perfect duplicate of the original, like copying a CD so you don't have to buy it.

Recasting doesn't involve any new work, you're just creating a perfect duplicate of the original, like copying a CD so you don't have to buy it.

But that is not true , recasts are always smaller then the originals , unless someone uses a high grade printer to do them. And you have to do stuff, you have to know how to recast , get the material for it , buy it etc.

This isn't one of those ridiculous cases of copyright abuse, like the constant extension of copyright lengths every time a profitable movie/book/etc is about to expire, it's just a straightforward case of a business having the right to protect their work.

But coping is the driving motor of industry. If people weren't coping stuff , then firms from companies in countries that weren't destroyed durning WWII , which was more or less western countries. And everyone else would suffer , unless they had huge natural resources they could trade. And with each year the countries that had the untouched by war infrastructure would put a bigger and bigger gap , between themselfs and the rest of the world. Living in such a world , would be like being condemned to being III world till the end of time.

I have a FW reaver and warhound titan, and tens of thousands of points of GW plastic, much of that bought from my FLGS. Some 3rd party stuff like the Doc Thunder female Cadian parts. I run some recasts as well. No Chapterhouse though. I made that mistake once and regretted it.

 TheCustomLime wrote:
Is all thievery equally wrong?

All thievery is wrong. Maybe not equally - if you steal bread to feed your starving daughter or if you steal cancer-diagnosed person's life savings it's two morally different things, but it's still theft nonetheless and nothing makes it 'good' in everyday situation.

I personally discourage buying recasts as they're very unhealthy for the hobby in the long run. People seem to be perfectly fine with it now, some even stating that it's good as long as it's just GW(lol), but guess what happens when some other tabletop game gets so big on the international market. Think they'll not recast Warmachine models when it gets popular? Of course some of you may hesitate due to moral objections, but others will start buying them and it will hurt PP. Same goes for other games. And suddenly it'll become a whole different deal when it's not GW that's losing money thanks to someone stealing their designs(which costed them money and designers' work).

I wouldn't mind playing against recast miniatures given the fact that 40k is really expensive here due to much lower salaries and I understand that some people do it because they simply can't afford paying the prices (imagine putting an equivalent of $2000 for a 1850pts army and paying 100$ for a tact squad), but bragging about it or acting like it's something cool and that it's 100% justified and okay? No. The only acceptable recast purchases for me are finecast miniatures as most chinese recasters use much better resin with better details and little to no bubbles while keeping the hard plastic's durability rather than semi-soft rubber that'll bend(my finecast Tau Commander tips over onto his back because his legs bend at the ankles due to the model's weight and I am seriously considering a recast because I'm tired of trying to fix him and risking flaking the paint).

P.s. - "Oh, I see you wrote a book and you'd love to sell it.. it'd be a shame if someone photocopied it and sold at half of your price without investing any of the development cost and time(research, writing, spellchecking, quality control, character/location designing). What, you wrote it? You have the rights for it? It's your intelectual property? Well, too bad." - that's exactly how recasting works.

I'll be honest. I'm a kitbasher. I've recast a few things that I couldn't reasonable acquire through legitimate means.

Mostly armoured SoB heads. But whole models? No, I've never recast a whole model. There's no point or challenge. I kitbash and convert because it gives me an awesome feeling to have achieved something awesome.

Would I play against someone using recasts?

Nobody I know is stupid enough to admit to using them.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Captain Avatar wrote:
If a company decides to not give fair value for price charged then they end up price gouging their customers. People can tell when such profiteering is occuring by whether one can make the same quality product for a lower price and still be profitable enough to survive as a full-time business (hence product piracy/clones).

Except that's a terrible argument that completely lacks any understanding of the situation. Recasters aren't able to undercut GW because GW is selling at some morally unacceptable price, they're able to do it because they don't have to invest any of the design work required to create that model, don't have to pay their employees a fair wage, and don't have to worry about any of those pesky safety regulations or other nonsense that might get in the way of profit. If those recasters had to design their own models instead of just making some molds from a GW kit they'd go out of business overnight.

Also, price gouging by definition does not exist for a luxury item like gaming miniatures.

Your living in la-la world if you think that re-casters have the exact same resources as a multi-national publicly traded corporation.

You are also completely ignoring how economics work on the scale
of mass production. Bootleggers and pirates are only able to operate profitably when the corporation is drastically overcharging.

Mass production is supposed to be the corporations defense against piracy in that large scale mass production is supposed to allow them to bring a product to market at a price that small scale limited producers just can't match.

Anytime someone working alone out of their garage can beat a mass producers price and still survive as a business...then it is the corporations fault for overcharging.

Oh yeah, I'm so tired of this GW/ corporate apologist excuse about design and prototype costs. These designers make a middle class wage and 3d rapid prototyping allows for insanely fast and cheap design expenditures.
Also, drop the notion about the molds being super costly/time consuming. For and individual they are prohibitive but for a multi-national like gw they usually account for less than a penny per model.

Re-casters are able to undercut GW because GW overcharges and then overpays their board of directors. Designer pay and prototyping are nothing compared to what the company rewards their operating officers with.

And lastly, the practice of price gouging most certainly does exist on luxury items, just doing such is not a prosecute-able offense.

Peregrine wrote:]

Captain Avatar wrote:]In cases such as these I have little to no sympathy for the corporate entities that wish to profit from the free market system while simultaneously trying to subvert such with IPs and copyrights designed to create mini-monopolies.

Are you serious? IP and copyright laws are essential to a free market. If a company has no way to protect their products from being copied then why would anyone make any investment in designing new products? Just let someone else invest the design work and make your own copies. This isn't one of those ridiculous cases of copyright abuse, like the constant extension of copyright lengths every time a profitable movie/book/etc is about to expire, it's just a straightforward case of a business having the right to protect their work.

Funny, in the Washington Redskins thread weren't you one of the people arguing that the loss of copyright protection was a blow "for" the free market?

You might want to go back and look at what Copyrights and IP laws were originally designed for, not what decades of corporate lobbying has turned them into. They were there to protect small businesses and sole-proprietorship's. They were never intended to be used as a means by which corporations create mini-monopolies.

Now you ask why corporations would invest in new products if they
weren't allowed to abuse the copyright & IP laws.

My answer is simply be the first to market with the product at a fair price and your companies name becomes synonomous with that new product.
Be willing to work with other corporations in a fair and mutually benificial manner and you can dominate that industry for a decade(s).

Peregrine wrote:

Makumba wrote:
Isn't recasting more like creating your own band band and doing a cover.

No, the equivalent to that would be creating your own line of 28mm power armor soldiers that are clearly meant to be space marines for 40k, but are your own sculpts. You're using the original work as source material, but you're creating your own version of it. Recasting doesn't involve any new work, you're just creating a perfect duplicate of the original, like copying a CD so you don't have to buy it.

Re-casting does not create perfect duplicates......unless the re-caster puts as much if not more time into his casts than GW does.

Plastic manufacturing is so expensive that the average gunpla kit contains four times the number of sprues as a similarly-priced GW kit. Much smaller wargaming companies also charge half or less for comparable number of sprues. So expensive!

I'd have no qualms about playing somebody using recast GW models, although I wouldn't buy them myself, I'd rather support the wargaming business by grabbing proxies from other companies or converting my own from toys and whatnot. Purchasing counterfeit goods is generally ethically dubious, but I feel GW's policy towards their customers justifies it. I'd go as far as to say that buying directly from GW is unethical, as it only reinforces their terrible attitude and harms the market at large, stifling its growth.

greyknight12 wrote:In the US, making those copies is illegal.

No, in the US, you probably have the most protected rights to reproduce things for your personal use in the whole world. It's very, very legal to copy whatever you like for personal use because of a few key concepts in the law (which I'll go into below).

insaniak wrote:Yes, it is.

Fair Use doesn't cover making copies so that you don't have to buy more.

It's nothing to do with a fair use defense. There's some relation, but it's more than that.

Captain Avatar wrote:US law protects until the item copied has been changed by a fairly subjective 10%. The act of recasting in a different material, using a different casting process pretty much protexts the person making the copies.
IP cannot limit "artistic" expression in the US.

That's a very interesting idea. Changing the material of the miniature is your form of expression.

Now to get the key concepts I mentioned above:

Courts only care about what can be said to legally exist. A stature, miniature, painting, picture, etc., that is copied and not distributed does not exist in eyes of the court. This is true of almost every jurisdiction on the planet. I've seen this tested in court when a sculptor found out that the guy who bought his sculpture made 4 copies to put around his estate. The sculptor didn't even make it past the pre-trial hearing. Why? Those duplicates do not exist as far as the courts are concerned because they haven't changed hands.

The second key concept is damages. The rights holder has the burden of proof on proving damages. The reason file sharing lawsuits end up with people paying so much money is that the rights holder can actually show that someone distributed their song or movie without authorization and in many cases, just how widely the file was distributed and how many potential sales they lost. If they could not show this, the whole thing would get tossed.

The next concept is one of standing. If you are not the rights holder or the rights holder is not an injured party, there's no basis for any legal proceedings. I can't sue you on behalf of someone else's copyright unless they have authorized me to do so. Similarly if I were to bring a suit to stop something or to get some damages and there was no injured party, I'd have no standing in the court. No basis for my claim. Those who hear someone has recast miniatures and gets all mad about it have no standing. It's not their job to be the enforcement arm of copyright law and they have only their normal rights of expression to decry it rather than any actual power.

The next concept is that the law is not necessarily the code, but the totality of enforcement, how it interacts with other legislation, precedents and the litigation process itself. If you've been raised with a law or rule centred basis for your ethics, then you mail recoil at this practical take on the matter. The idea that a law itself is insufficient without all the messy details that goes into enforcement might strike you as deeply wrong. You may be tempted to think "just because you can get away with it doesn't make it legal!" And you'd be right, but only in a technical sense that is irrelevant to our public life. If you want to see an example of this, every area has their old and stupid laws that no one cares about. If the act of something being written down as a law really was the totality of the matter, then you should also demand that grocery stores in Texas remove limburger cheese for sale on Sundays. Or that school children who cheat on assignments or tests must receive jail time in Bangladesh. These (and a million other laws like them) are "the law" in terms of being currently valid statutes that are on the books. "Just because you can get away with it doesn't make it legal!" Get those cheating kids to jail and get that cheese out of the shop!

Enforcement (in criminal matters). Standing. Distribution. Damages. If you don't have all these things, you don't have a legal issue worthy of the courts. Someone recasting for personal use does not have distribution and you certainly don't have standing as you're not the rights holder (you're just some guy insisting that something is illegal on the internet, which is cool, I guess). Furthermore, there will be no criminal enforcement. And there are no damages without showing distribution as personal lost sales don't count. In the case of the sculptor and the guy who made four copies, he was never legally responsible to buy those four statues from the sculptor. They simply don't count for damages.

I think the poll results also show a demographic shift. The generation that grew up with electronic media being everywhere tends to have far looser views on copyright and are far more tolerant of those who ignore it. Just like we are more tolerant of those grocers who dare to sell the wrong type of cheese on Sundays. We'd never see the pro-recasting poll results like we see now had this poll been done ten years ago.

This also ties into people's perception of GW. Earlier in the thread, the point was made that the law doesn't change just because you think the person or company in question deserves it or not. And that's true. But the ethical considerations do indeed change. When we see someone or something as being against us, we naturally extend them less consideration. It's a good thing. It's an instinct that protects us against con artists and bullies. We are social animals and our ability to identify social threats and to treat them differently can be very, very useful. If you feel GW has mistreated people and want to extend them less consideration for doing so, then great. You're free to do so up to the point where you yourself violate the law (and not just the law in terms of what someone thinks it says, but the whole messy reality of it all).

.

 -DE- wrote:
Plastic manufacturing is so expensive that the average gunpla kit contains four times the number of sprues as a similarly-priced GW kit.

There's a difference there that wargaming miniatures also are used for, well, wargaming. Gunpla(or any other japanese mecha scale kits) as far as I remember are display only and serve no other purpose. Here miniatures have non-decorational uses too.

 -DE- wrote:
Much smaller wargaming companies also charge half or less for comparable number of sprues. So expensive!

Most of the companies have nowhere near the sculpt quality and/or are in 28mm scale.

 -DE- wrote:
Purchasing counterfeit goods is generally ethically dubious, but I feel GW's policy towards their customers justifies it.

Jut wait till they start recasting FoW, WM/H and Infinity models once the games get popular enough for it to be profitable for them. Chinese recasters don't care about that.

 -DE- wrote:
I'd go as far as to say that buying directly from GW is unethical, as it only reinforces their terrible attitude and harms the market at large, stifling its growth.

Given the fact that 40k's both games bring more players into non-historical wargaming in general than most likely other games combined(doesn't matter that later on they spill into other games), I guess it is only true in that they could make it even bigger, but I would never say that it hampers the growth of the market. In most FLGSes here it's the fancy, pretty painted 40k/WFB miniatures that draw newcomers' attention, especially the bigger kits as they have the oomph effect to them. If someone wants to start or check it out, here you can ask any player or the employee if you could come watch a game or even ask two players if they would be nice enough to do a demo battle, even with the possibility of asking them if you could play their army and get some advice on how to play.

Prices and business decisions aside, it's GW's products that still haul the market in many areas where Warmachine, Infinity and X-Wing didn't make their stand, and even then, in case of my country, it was former 40k and WFB players that decided to give them a shot. Vast majority(like.. 98%) of wargamers here started off with GW. Most of them stayed, some moved over, some play both GW and other companies' games simultaneously.

I have to admit that I am totally shocked Peregrine is on the side of "No" in this debate; I would have bet money that given his stance on 40k and GW in general he would have been here arguing how it's okay to cheat GW because they cheat us.

 welshhoppo wrote:
Would you play against this guy knowing that he is undercutting the hobby or would you not?

Don't care. Maybe because I'm not living on the wrong side of the Channel.

Duplicating works of art you've bought is perfectly legal here, as long as you don't sell them. Yes, that's right, if you want that 10k pts White Scars force, you just have to buy one attack bike.

Minis could be considered not to be work of arts, of course. In that case, duplication is illegal for the first 20 years (if you pay the annual fee for each patented creation), then your creation falls in the public domain and anybody can duplicate and sell these minis at will.

 Klerych wrote:
Jut wait till they start recasting FoW, WM/H and Infinity models once the games get popular enough for it to be profitable for them. Chinese recasters don't care about that.

The consumers care. There's no point in recasting if no ones buying, everyone I've talked to about it are happy to reward good companies for their products and shaft the bad companies until they play nice. Just like piracy, of course some will still buy recasts, but also just like piracy if you make it a good experience for the customers many of them will do right by you.

edit: It was mentioned above that copyright was to protect small companies, that's not true. Copyright was implemented to encourage the production of creative works for the enrichment of society. The mechanism by which it encourages this was to ensure the creator has an opportunity to make a profit on that work - which was originally 7 years. It's quite a bit longer than 7 years now ; /

 Yonan wrote:

 Klerych wrote:
Jut wait till they start recasting FoW, WM/H and Infinity models once the games get popular enough for it to be profitable for them. Chinese recasters don't care about that.

The consumers care. There's no point in recasting if no ones buying, everyone I've talked to about it are happy to reward good companies for their products and shaft the bad companies until they play nice. Just like piracy, of course some will still buy recasts, but also just like piracy if you make it a good experience for the customers many of them will do right by you.

I really understand what you're saying here, but I think that you're somewhat wrong thinking that morality regarding your stance towards the company makes that much of a difference here. Sure, it affects it, but I would rather say that it's a minor influence. Just remember that the miniatures made by the other companies are even more expensive than GW's ones while most often not being better in quality of sculpt and/or material(aside from failcast). Sure, the army for those games is cheaper than that for GW's games, but the miniatures themselves are even more expensive. I don't think I know a single person that could look me straight in the eye and tell me that, say, Sword Knights box for Warmachine is priced appropriately and I am sure that a lot of people would buy Warmachine unit recasts due to the value for price ratio model-wise, not really bothering to think about the bigger picture of the market or taking into consideration the fact how nice a company PP is. That, and some hard resins used by recasters are a lot better and easier to work with than the crappy pewter so popular in wargaming.

So, yeah, no matter how "good" they are, recasts are going to hurt them once the community is big enough for it to be profitable on an international scale as people most often don't give a crap about who they pay, but they care about how much they pay.

 Klerych wrote:

 Yonan wrote:

 Klerych wrote:
Jut wait till they start recasting FoW, WM/H and Infinity models once the games get popular enough for it to be profitable for them. Chinese recasters don't care about that.

The consumers care. There's no point in recasting if no ones buying, everyone I've talked to about it are happy to reward good companies for their products and shaft the bad companies until they play nice. Just like piracy, of course some will still buy recasts, but also just like piracy if you make it a good experience for the customers many of them will do right by you.

I really understand what you're saying here, but I think that you're somewhat wrong thinking that morality regarding your stance towards the company makes that much of a difference here. Sure, it affects it, but I would rather say that it's a minor influence. Just remember that the miniatures made by the other companies are even more expensive than GW's ones while most often not being better in quality of sculpt and/or material(aside from failcast). Sure, the army for those games is cheaper than that for GW's games, but the miniatures themselves are even more expensive. I don't think I know a single person that could look me straight in the eye and tell me that, say, Sword Knights box for Warmachine is priced appropriately and I am sure that a lot of people would buy Warmachine unit recasts due to the value for price ratio model-wise, not really bothering to think about the bigger picture of the market or taking into consideration the fact how nice a company PP is. That, and some hard resins used by recasters are a lot better and easier to work with than the crappy pewter so popular in wargaming.

So, yeah, no matter how "good" they are, recasts are going to hurt them once the community is big enough for it to be profitable on an international scale as people most often don't give a crap about who they pay, but they care about how much they pay.

The issue with that argument, as has been said constantly in these kinds of debates, is that the price per miniature is irrelevant, it's the price of the force. Those games are cheaper due to that, and that alone.

WayneTheGame wrote:
I have to admit that I am totally shocked Peregrine is on the side of "No" in this debate; I would have bet money that given his stance on 40k and GW in general he would have been here arguing how it's okay to cheat GW because they cheat us.

Based on past discussions about this and other subjects, Peregrine struggles with anything ambiguous or involving shades of grey, everything has to be binary. Therefore, because recasting = illegal in pretty much any context (and definitely if doing it for profit) recasting = wrong, any nuances or subtleties be damned.

 Klerych wrote:
So, yeah, no matter how "good" they are, recasts are going to hurt them once the community is big enough for it to be profitable on an international scale as people most often don't give a crap about who they pay, but they care about how much they pay.

I have to disagree, and I'll use game piracy which is similar enough to use as reasoning. If money was the only motivator, steam would not be as hugely successful as it is. Everything is still available on torrent sites straight away but people who used to torrent started buying from steam even though they didn't need to. Pirating media has to be the easiest thing to do, far easier than buying recasts and with no quality concerns. But still people choose to pay. I used to pirate basically everything but I haven't pirated a single game for years because steam (and GOG etc) has removed all the service issues I had (ie. lack of online distribution, intrusive DRM, limited selection). It's similar for most people i know. Only one guy I know will still pirate everything he can, everyone else at least buys what they can, when they can - usually steam sales.

So no, whilst some will buy recasts purely to save money I don't think it's anywhere near the majority, and for a labour intensive and somewhat risky proposition like recasting miniatures, I don't think it will be worth doing unless the company generates as much ill will as GW does. A poll on the topic could be interesting actually.

WayneTheGame wrote:

The issue with that argument, as has been said constantly in these kinds of debates, is that the price per miniature is irrelevant, it's the price of the force. Those games are cheaper due to that, and that alone.

"I bought an army for 50% the price" can work with any system, no matter how expensive/cheap the army/models are. And on the most basic level - a single purchase being more expensive than that with GW games is going to make people think about alternative ways of obtaining the army. Give them 50% off with recasts and a lot of people will buy them, no matter how cheap/expensive their army would otherwise be.

 azreal13 wrote:

Based on past discussions about this and other subjects, Peregrine struggles with anything ambiguous or involving shades of grey, everything has to be binary. Therefore, because recasting = illegal in pretty much any context (and definitely if doing it for profit) recasting = wrong, any nuances or subtleties be damned.

That sounds almost insulting. I disagree with Peregrine on some stuff but I can admit without any problem that he is a reasonable person and I respect his opinion. You say it like treating things in black and white is something wrong or stupid, but look at all those people trying to convince you that grey is almost just as good as white. You can go wrong both ways, you know. Justifying morally wrong things to feel better about it yourself is far, far worse than condemning all morally wrong choices even if they're not as bad as some others.

 Yonan wrote:

 Klerych wrote:
So, yeah, no matter how "good" they are, recasts are going to hurt them once the community is big enough for it to be profitable on an international scale as people most often don't give a crap about who they pay, but they care about how much they pay.

I have to disagree, and I'll use game piracy which is similar enough to use as reasoning. If money was the only motivator, steam would not be as hugely successful as it is. Everything is still available on torrent sites straight away but people who used to torrent started buying from steam even though they didn't need to. Pirating media has to be the easiest thing to do, far easier than buying recasts and with no quality concerns. But still people choose to pay. I used to pirate basically everything but I haven't pirated a single game for years because steam (and GOG etc) has removed all the service issues I had (ie. lack of online distribution, intrusive DRM, limited selection). It's similar for most people i know. Only one guy I know will still pirate everything he can, everyone else at least buys what they can, when they can - usually steam sales.

So no, whilst some will buy recasts purely to save money I don't think it's anywhere near the majority, and for a labour intensive and somewhat risky proposition like recasting miniatures, I don't think it will be worth doing unless the company generates as much ill will as GW does. A poll on the topic could be interesting actually.

Steam is a whole different thing, to be honest. It's a very popular thing and you're trading your money and 'freedom' for convenience. If you'd really want to go with the Steam example then it'd be more like "you can't play the game using any model that wasn't made by us, but if playing it on our terms you will always be able to find other players in our local store and, say, get a discount". Also comparing it to piracy is less accurate given the fact that buying recasts is, as far as I remember, not punished by law in most countries. Although it's somewhat similar to GW and recasts. Majority of people buy original models for various reasons - they want them in trays, they want them in plastic, they want to just grab them on the shelf and purchase 'physically', they want to support their FLGS, they are in a hurry, ...[insert other various reasons]... , or they just were raised the way where they find it just normal to buy stuff rather than buying copies, even though they're cheaper. Then we have the reasons why people buy recasts.. and I dare say that it's probably 5-10% with the reason "BECAUSE GW IS BAD AND THEY -SO- DESERVE IT!" and 90-95% being "Oh, it's cheaper; can't afford/ don't want to spend so much, will buy recasts".

Now don't get me wrong, I am not saying that "but the company is good, I don't want to harm them by denying them profits for their work..!" is non-existant, I'm just saying that it's a minor thing and it will only vary by a few % depending on how nice the company is once the community is big enough to contain all kinds of people with all kinds of views and opinions. Comparing 40k community to any other is in this case a bad thing because it's so exponentially bigger worldwide than any other game's community it's much different. a 100 people saying that they buy Infinity recasts would be a big thing while for GW games it's like a bunch of Guardsmen.

No insult intended, merely a statement of opinion based on several years of interaction.

If you're ascribing any sort of insult, you're projecting it.

Please do also bare in mind the Peregrine has managed to contrive to argue with me on issues where I was agreeing with him in the past, so one should also allow for the fact he just likes disagreeing!

More power to them. GW can afford to profit at the same price as the recasts, they merely choose to exploit their customers. Unfortunately for them they chose to do it in a field where their product is easily replicated.


Everyone who voted no is the kind of person that GW caters to. Believe it or not there are people who like the price of GWs miniatures, as having easy access to army compositions and total collection size that others with an average do not, makes them feel like oh such a special snowflake. Oh you have an army my size but haven't matched my investment into this hobby? How dare you sit down at the opposite side of the table expecting to have a challenging duel of strategy with miniature SciFi avatars!






Automatically Appended Next Post:
Peregrine is quite the pot-stirring contrarian, and while sometimes it places him on the correct side of an argument, more often his posts should just be viewed as a good perspective of the other side of the argument. I'm sure he doesn't even believe half the arguments he puts forth, even if he is good at arguing the underdog perspective, you already know when he posts that it's generally to fuel and argument and be contrary to popular opinion. Take it for what it's worth, and when his posts are incapable of taking in everything relevant to the topic just so that his contrary opinion doesn't fall apart (e.g this thread) that's when you know a decent counter-argument is probably not to be found, or he would have used it. Provides decent perspective and stops threads going stale by fuelling discussion. Hes a great contributing poster and undeniably gifted with a razor sharp intelligence, however "reasonable" is not a word I'd ever use to describe him.

There is more to this argument than "recasting is legally classified as theft which makes you a bad person and anything else is irrelevant". Admitting that would take away all legs to his counter argument, and as such he cannot do it.

I'm pretty sure everybody has at one point been part of or heard of an action that was unlawful and yet ethical. If a person terrorizes the neighborhood, making deadly threats, and you organize a lynch, it's clearly unlawful, but wouldn't most people say it was ethical? I would. Take the opposite situation - you stand by and remain passive, and the guy eventually axes somebody to death. You broke no laws, but wasn't your inaction unethical?

With the abuse GW has laid on their fanbase over the years, I do not find it unethical to pirate their publications or purchase illegal recasts of their models. If it was Corvus Belli, I would find it unethical, because it's a company that doesn't abuse its position and power and treats its customers with respect. All GW has towards their customers is spite. Cheating Tom Kirby and his cohort out of a couple hundred dollars would hardly sully my conscience.