I'm still dipping my toes in the water so to speak with 8th edition 40k. It seems promising but I have to wonder if I'm just throwing more money down the hole. I get enraged with them pulling the rug out from under me every few years and making me buy new stuff again. (Been in this game 23 years) So I'm into 8th ed now for the Dark Imperium set, as well as codexes for Space Marines, Blood Angels, Eldar, Chaos Marines, and Imperial Guard. Also a few boxes of Primaris guys, because they're good at getting my money.
What really got me though was the prices for individual plastic character models. I paid like $30 for a single BA jump pack chaplain. I work around the plastic industry and believe me, it isn't 30 cents worth of material.
I came home and was putting stuff away when I came across one of my EBay purchases from awhile back. A rogue trader/2nd edition metal techmarine, still in the blister pack. There's also an Imperial commisar in the same pack for some reason.
The 90s price tag for this model? $5.50
I'm not saying they should give em away but it's hard not to feel a little bit angry. I swear there are less expensive drug habits I could take up.
Yeah, they're ridiculous. They're typically monopose one or two half size sprue models with at best one or two extra bits and they're charging as much as they used to for 5-10 models from the 3rd-5th edition eras. I wouldn't mind getting a few if they were at most $15 but double that is ridiculous IMO. I've stayed away and focues instead on buying character models from the secondary market instead.
It is swings and roundabouts though. I remember paying £12 for 10 Ork boys 18 years ago now, and at this present moment they cost a grand total of £18!
Not to mention the wealth of customisation options available in the current kit compared to the old one.
So yes they can gouge you on some things, but they do have bargains in there still (the start collecting sets for one!).
Desubot wrote: They can do it because they are pretty much the only game in town. (for the very specific scifi and fantasy niche)
It wont get better any time soon.
It won't as long as people keep buying. Every consumer makes a determination whether it is worth it for him or herself. In my case, it's a no. I don't play regularly because of the mess of 6th/7th editions (and 8th edition while not bad isn't good enough to convince me to come back) so I don't need the latest and greatest.
Kroem wrote: It is swings and roundabouts though. I remember paying £12 for 10 Ork boys 18 years ago now, and at this present moment they cost a grand total of £18!
Not to mention the wealth of customisation options available in the current kit compared to the old one.
So yes they can gouge you on some things, but they do have bargains in there still (the start collecting sets for one!).
That same box of Ork boyz had 16 models in it too. The modern one has 11.
Desubot wrote: They can do it because they are pretty much the only game in town. (for the very specific scifi and fantasy niche)
It wont get better any time soon.
It won't as long as people keep buying. Every consumer makes a determination whether it is worth it for him or herself.
Pretty much. GW is willing to test what the market will bear, and enough of their market share has the disposable income to afford it, price be damned.
For me, $45 CAN for a Primaris character is too high a watermark, I'll convert characters from Dark Imperium instead. I'd be willing to spend $30 CAN for 1-2 models per army if they're really spiffy and hard to convert up, but that's about the limit.
Galef wrote: I never buy individual characters. It's cheaper just to buy a box of similar models and convert. It is also adds more character to your army
This one. I don't think I've bought a character box in years.
Kroem wrote: It is swings and roundabouts though. I remember paying £12 for 10 Ork boys 18 years ago now, and at this present moment they cost a grand total of £18!
Not to mention the wealth of customisation options available in the current kit compared to the old one.
So yes they can gouge you on some things, but they do have bargains in there still (the start collecting sets for one!).
That same box of Ork boyz had 16 models in it too. The modern one has 11.
Remember when Cadians came 20 to a box?
Did it really? Haha I forgot that bit.
I remember my friend refusing to buy plastic models because they felt too light so he had to pay through the nose for all his Catachans!
Eldar wraithguard are one of the few products that have gone DOWN in price.
When I got my initial 5, back in the late 90s, they were approx $15AUD each, in metal. So $75 for the "unit". Another $5 for a pack of 5 40mm bases to update them (because they were always falling over on 25mm bases anyway).
Current AUD retail for the box of 5 in plastic is:$55AUD.
It's the only comparator I have, since I haven't bought anything new from GW since 2013.
The clamshell pack characters are expensive, but to me its less the price itself, I'd pay that for a character - but not a monopose one with maybe an alternative head or weapon arm - I want something that if I have four of in an army will all be assembled differently enough they cannot be visually identified as the same model.
The old "Orc warbles, foot and mounted" type model for example where the price feels decent value, or decent enough.
Not paying that price for what looks like a starter set model
Desubot wrote: Eh dunno monopose doesn't exactly bother me
they often look good enough and occasionally come with some extra customization options
its only a pain when it comes to multiples in your army.
Depends on the model, I can tolerate them as special characters who will be one off models - but not as generic captions, officers, heroes etc - just because I want multiples with the armies I tend to run, the monopose ones should be in addition to, not instead of
Brotherjulian wrote: What really got me though was the prices for individual plastic character models. I paid like $30 for a single BA jump pack chaplain. I work around the plastic industry and believe me, it isn't 30 cents worth of material.
Well apart from usual GW extra price hike these also suffer's from GW's fixation in "everything must be plastic". Even kits you don't expect to sell as much as basic grunts so when static expenses are same whether you sell 1 or 10000000 sprues guess how costs needs to be compensated...
The moment GW decided they won't in future produce anything but plastic this was inevitable.
Brotherjulian wrote: What really got me though was the prices for individual plastic character models. I paid like $30 for a single BA jump pack chaplain. I work around the plastic industry and believe me, it isn't 30 cents worth of material.
Well apart from usual GW extra price hike these also suffer's from GW's fixation in "everything must be plastic". Even kits you don't expect to sell as much as basic grunts so when static expenses are same whether you sell 1 or 10000000 sprues guess how costs needs to be compensated...
The moment GW decided they won't in future produce anything but plastic this was inevitable.
Other companies manage to make kits in the same hard plastic with the same low volume expectations and manage to price them better than GW. GW has the benefit of tooling and casting in house as well, while other companies outsource to places like Warlord for that, which increases the overall cost.
Brotherjulian wrote: I'm still dipping my toes in the water so to speak with 8th edition 40k. It seems promising but I have to wonder if I'm just throwing more money down the hole. I get enraged with them pulling the rug out from under me every few years and making me buy new stuff again. (Been in this game 23 years) So I'm into 8th ed now for the Dark Imperium set, as well as codexes for Space Marines, Blood Angels, Eldar, Chaos Marines, and Imperial Guard. Also a few boxes of Primaris guys, because they're good at getting my money.
What really got me though was the prices for individual plastic character models. I paid like $30 for a single BA jump pack chaplain. I work around the plastic industry and believe me, it isn't 30 cents worth of material.
I came home and was putting stuff away when I came across one of my EBay purchases from awhile back. A rogue trader/2nd edition metal techmarine, still in the blister pack. There's also an Imperial commisar in the same pack for some reason.
The 90s price tag for this model? $5.50
I'm not saying they should give em away but it's hard not to feel a little bit angry. I swear there are less expensive drug habits I could take up.
Really... You work around the plastic industry? What part of it? Let me guess; judging by your nescient comment... Raw material supplier. FYI; there's quite a bit more to it than just the cost of the plastic material.
The Rhinos were the same for a box as RTB001 marines were ($30AUD at the time).
At that point we're entering apples and oranges territory. The models you're both describing were vastly different in size and quality so a price comparison isn't particularly accurate. Comparing for instance the fully featured multiple larger sprue poseable space marine captain with gobs of bits to a monopose primaris Lt though isn't.
Brotherjulian wrote: I get enraged with them pulling the rug out from under me every few years and making me buy new stuff again. (Been in this game 23 years) So I'm into 8th ed now for the Dark Imperium set, as well as codexes for Space Marines, Blood Angels, Eldar, Chaos Marines, and Imperial Guard. Also a few boxes of Primaris guys, because they're good at getting my money.
Part of the problem with GW's pricing can be explained by the behavior quoted above.
Per your own admission you still willingly buy the new stuff at prices you don't like. You aren't alone. There are thousands of us doing that. So, why would GW change? We gripe about pricing, then a new edition or new models are released and we fall over ourselves to buy it all up. Rinse and repeat edition after edition.
So who is really insane here? GW? Or us, the customers, who engage in the same behavior over and over again expecting different results?
This is why they should have kept using metals for character models where applicable.
Easy, cheap, quick turn-around, many more "limited editions" available. People who didn't game when metals were popular might not be aware of how many random miniatures GW put out, almost monthly, because of how easy it is to mass-produce metal figures.
GW's prices don't bug me...if I don't like something, I don't buy it. My nerves are grated a bit though by the wild inconsistencies within their line-up. While GW and others have explained why they choose to do it, it's tough to compare the "great deals" with the "go feth yourself" models.
For example: Betrayal at Calth, or Burning of Prospero = fantastic and reasonable, borderline really good value. $30-35-40 single figure in plastic? Get stuffed GW.
Had a chance to shop in a local store with free credit, so not my money going out. Looked at the new Necromunda sets- $40 for a 10 model box. But I play fantasy so I looked at the witch elves set. $80 for a 10 model box. So newer sets are getting cheaper, but if you fancy and older kit you are pretty much out of luck.
It's called "customer perceived value". Asmodee is doing this now with its games, such as FFG. Essentially, GW products are the Gucci handbags of the gaming industry. Some people think they're somehow worth the price, others don't.
Brotherjulian wrote: What really got me though was the prices for individual plastic character models. I paid like $30 for a single BA jump pack chaplain. I work around the plastic industry and believe me, it isn't 30 cents worth of material.
Didn't used to be like that. When the first wave of single-frame plastic miniatures came out I was very supportive of them. Even bought all of them despite not playing Warhammer.
Things have gone downhill dramatically since then, with the price of single characters just through the roof now.
Brotherjulian wrote: What really got me though was the prices for individual plastic character models. I paid like $30 for a single BA jump pack chaplain. I work around the plastic industry and believe me, it isn't 30 cents worth of material.
Well apart from usual GW extra price hike these also suffer's from GW's fixation in "everything must be plastic". Even kits you don't expect to sell as much as basic grunts so when static expenses are same whether you sell 1 or 10000000 sprues guess how costs needs to be compensated...
The moment GW decided they won't in future produce anything but plastic this was inevitable.
Other companies manage to make kits in the same hard plastic with the same low volume expectations and manage to price them better than GW. GW has the benefit of tooling and casting in house as well, while other companies outsource to places like Warlord for that, which increases the overall cost.
So what company sells plastic character models they expect to sell less sprues than others in same prices to sprues they can expect to sell like hundreds of times more?
And not saying there's no extra price hike but expecting both standard infantry and HQ models to cost what 2£ a model is pipe dream.
In that context, it does make some sense. They're going to sell far, far, far more boxes of Plaguebearers than they are Heralds. The cost to make the mold of each is in a similar range - the mold for the plaguebearers might be 3-4x as much what with multiple sprues, but they're recover the mold costs very quickly. The mold cost of the Herald, though, will take a while to recover - unless they charge out the yin-yang for it.
I think GW sets their prices to recover mold/design costs ASAP, then leaves the cost in place, because people were fine paying the inflated cost anyways. They know they can't charge endless amounts for troops models, but the characters and big special pieces?
Let's say fixed price is 100,000£. You expect to sell 10000 sprues of A and 1000 sprue B. Guess what? To make up for fixed cost sprue B then needs to sell for 10x price or sprue B is making loss. The price of plastic itself is pretty neglible so amount of plastic the 10x more sprues take doesn't affect price hugely. Then top of that hero price common in many companies and GW extra price hike and there you go.
You can't sell as many sprues of characters as you do for basic guys. Who needs as many sprues of characters as basic guys? Nobody. Even worse with special characters which rules flat out prevent using more than 1(and the way no options are many players don't want more than 1 generic model since they are all carbon copies anyway so might get the 1 and rest in other way)
Let's say fixed price is 100,000£. You expect to sell 10000 sprues of A and 1000 sprue B. Guess what? To make up for fixed cost sprue B then needs to sell for 10x price or sprue B is making loss. The price of plastic itself is pretty neglible so amount of plastic the 10x more sprues take doesn't affect price hugely. Then top of that hero price common in many companies and GW extra price hike and there you go.
You can't sell as many sprues of characters as you do for basic guys. Who needs as many sprues of characters as basic guys? Nobody. Even worse with special characters which rules flat out prevent using more than 1(and the way no options are many players don't want more than 1 generic model since they are all carbon copies anyway so might get the 1 and rest in other way)
I get the volume issue but isn't that GWs fault? They've decided to make a low volume sales product out of a high volume sales material. They then dump the costs of this choice onto the consumer. Let's not forget the switch to plastic was supposed to drop the cost of minis within the industry for consumers. In the main it did. Just not with GW who decided to switch everything to plastic including low volume sales miniatures where plastic just isn't economically viable.
niall78 wrote: I get the volume issue but isn't that GWs fault? They've decided to make a low volume sales product out of a high volume sales material. They then dump the costs of this choice onto the consumer. Let's not forget the switch to plastic was supposed to drop the cost of minis within the industry for consumers. In the main it did. Just not with GW who decided to switch everything to plastic including low volume sales miniatures where plastic just isn't economically viable.
Yes. That's why I'm not happy with plastic everything. That's been IMO one of the big mistakes GW has made. Right material for right job. If they did characters for example in metal they could even also release tons of variable character poses like they used. Not same commissar only. Remember when there was like half a dozen different commissars? Bits would also be feasible. Imagine having option to buy some other weapons for your characters!
It's a bit of an irony that GW completely abandoned Finecast as it is, in theory, the perfect material for low-volume character casts. It's the happy medium between the workability and low price of plastic and the low production cost (in terms of moulds and machinery, not material costs) of metal.
niall78 wrote: I get the volume issue but isn't that GWs fault? They've decided to make a low volume sales product out of a high volume sales material. They then dump the costs of this choice onto the consumer. Let's not forget the switch to plastic was supposed to drop the cost of minis within the industry for consumers. In the main it did. Just not with GW who decided to switch everything to plastic including low volume sales miniatures where plastic just isn't economically viable.
Yes. That's why I'm not happy with plastic everything. That's been IMO one of the big mistakes GW has made. Right material for right job. If they did characters for example in metal they could even also release tons of variable character poses like they used. Not same commissar only. Remember when there was like half a dozen different commissars? Bits would also be feasible. Imagine having option to buy some other weapons for your characters!
I'd agree completely. Another upside is you could rejuvenate high volume core forces for factions in plastic a lot quicker if a lot of your design and production capacity wasn't going into low volume characters.
I too certainly missed the miniature variety once metal got canned. My first RT/2nd Marine army is nearly 50% metal and the variety is striking. Beaky Marines helped with that as well!
I play historical a lot. Core armies these days are high quality plastics. Cheap for high volume. You then sprinkle in a whole lot of metal for the more characterful stuff. Even mixing with the plastics for extra effect. The result is great variety at low enough costs.
niall78 wrote: I get the volume issue but isn't that GWs fault? They've decided to make a low volume sales product out of a high volume sales material. They then dump the costs of this choice onto the consumer. Let's not forget the switch to plastic was supposed to drop the cost of minis within the industry for consumers. In the main it did. Just not with GW who decided to switch everything to plastic including low volume sales miniatures where plastic just isn't economically viable.
Yes. That's why I'm not happy with plastic everything. That's been IMO one of the big mistakes GW has made. Right material for right job. If they did characters for example in metal they could even also release tons of variable character poses like they used. Not same commissar only. Remember when there was like half a dozen different commissars? Bits would also be feasible. Imagine having option to buy some other weapons for your characters!
I don't get it. Plastic kits are more suited for having different bits than metal ones. Also they're much easier to convert than medal models.
I can't speak for other people but the possibility of converting stuff made me put more money into GW stuff. Think about biker characters that are not in the catalogue, to assemble them you need to buy the standard bikes kit and probably something else just to have the necessary bits to make those characters. Monopose plastic models can be converted quite easily and can also be kitbashed mixing other kits. This should encourage people to buy more models, or at least it did for me.
I've never thought of converting metal models instead, and the majority of plastic bits don't even match them. Even if the metal character comes with different bits to chose, what do I do with the spared ones? I used pretty much all my spared bits from different boxes to convert stuff, plastic is way more handy than metal, which is heavier and harder to cut.
That's also the reason why I'm opposing the politics of removing options/characters that are absent in the original kit or are not in the official catalogue. IMHO people would buy more models if conversions/kitsbashing are the only ways to represent some unit/character.
The decision to release monopose characters has nothing to do with the material, unfortunately it's a GW politics.
You guys aren't even thinking with portals. GW could just put a monopose character on every regular troop sprue. Bingo bongo, you've got half a dozen different poses per faction pretty fast. You'd end up throwing most of them away but you do that with superfluous guns anyway.
Back to prices in gneral, the price of a cinema ticket is 6 times what it was in 91, GW seems on par or better.
Blackie wrote: I don't get it. Plastic kits are more suited for having different bits than metal ones. Also they're much easier to convert than medal models.
Either they would have to make HUGE sprue for character with variant torsos, legs etc or they would have to make different sprues which costs money.
Sure first option would be nice but really do you see them releasing character box with say 5 different torso/legs? And how that would be different to releasing box of 5 characters then...
For metal they can create alternative models for dirt cheap. Moulds are practically free unlike plastic that's big investment. It's metal itself that's pricey but the way this runs out it's much more affordable for small print runs. Ie characters.
It's just not financially possible for GW to release say 8 different looking commissar in plastic. Short of them making big box of 8 commisars! Which works fine for those who want 8 but what about those who want 1? 2? 3? 4?
Now those who want 4 commisars are stuck with one model with variable pistol. Wopedoo! When there were metal models you could pick 4 different models. You could order bits! Need 10 power weapons? No need to buy 10 boxes that have one. Just buy 10 power weapons.
I like the plastic character models. But, I'd prefer it if they went back to the Space Marine Captain and Empire General style of boxed set.
Multipart, with a good few options, compatible with the rest of the range.
Consider the Nurgle Herald, Sloppity Bilepiper and Spoilpox Scrivener. Those could've, conceivably, been designed as a single, flexible kit. Even if you can only build the one, you'd still have the spares left over. That of course allows those on a tighter budget to convert up the other two by adding the parts onto standard Plague Bearers.
But for now at least, they've stuck with the mono-pose approach.
If GW just bit the bullet and realised they don't have to make as much profit on every single sprue. They're not going to make a loss on these, but just sell them so people aren't put off. The school club I used to run had 10 or so new year 7 kids turn up each year wanting to play. The first figure they go look up for a new army is a boss and who can blame them. They see the price. Maybe 1 of those 10 kids would go onto collect and play. If those single figures had been priced reasonably, I'd have seen a much larger take up of the game. Seriously GW, a pre-teen/early teen kid is not going to want to buy 1 small plastic monopose soldier, for the price they could pickup a few week old PS4 game.
If they made the sprue full size and fit on loads of options that could build 2-3 variant HQ models with options galore, that would be far more economical.
But... GW collectors/gamers keep on buying at those prices... GW don't need to change.
Brotherjulian wrote: What really got me though was the prices for individual plastic character models. I paid like $30 for a single BA jump pack chaplain. I work around the plastic industry and believe me, it isn't 30 cents worth of material.
Well apart from usual GW extra price hike these also suffer's from GW's fixation in "everything must be plastic". Even kits you don't expect to sell as much as basic grunts so when static expenses are same whether you sell 1 or 10000000 sprues guess how costs needs to be compensated...
The moment GW decided they won't in future produce anything but plastic this was inevitable.
Other companies manage to make kits in the same hard plastic with the same low volume expectations and manage to price them better than GW. GW has the benefit of tooling and casting in house as well, while other companies outsource to places like Warlord for that, which increases the overall cost.
At the same time, though, GW has physical stores, which add costs in another angle. BUT, they do make quite a bit of a spike of excessive margin, nevertheless.
They aren't holding a gun to your head. You can always play with the models you own - or you can sell the models you own.
The fact of the matter is that: if you stocked up on GW products from 15 years ago, and held them, you could resell them today at a profit.
So the best investment strategy in GW is either: look at the price tag and then buy it to collect, sealed boxes.
Or if you want to play the game and have fun, your best investment is to paint, assemble, and care for your models as best as you can.
GW is reaching a point where their recirculation and vintage products are building up collector value.and even if your models are crap they can be resold...
And if you are a fantastic painter you can get a job at GW, buy GW products at a discount and resell them at a pretty decent profit,
and for that matter: you can buy and fix up and repaint someone else's models. You can also get cheap recasts from China
So it really depends. Considering the quality of their game, the quality of the models themselves has gone up and up over the years, and they've still kept the kits within the same kind of buying range. They've managed to keep bringing new blood into the game, while respecting older players and creating the possibility for a real community of artists and creators to thrive. There is every opportunity to play the game without paying if that's what you're looking to do, but to have that kind of environment you have to accept that there are others playing the game too and also trying to survive. It seems fair to me, but you have to decide for yourself whether it's worth it.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Seriously. Every time you buy anything in any shop, you're contributing to it's running costs.
Because if you're not, and indeed nobody is, it's not going to be open for very long at all.
I haven't set foot in a GW shop for two and a half decades. Why should I pay a premium for a service I don't get?
Charge the shop customers more if shop costs are an issue. Those customers are receiving an extra service. The vast majority who don't have access to this service shouldn't be paying for it in inflated miniature costs.
Grimtuff wrote: And the cost of running those stores should be passed into the consumer why...?
... That's literally how a business works. You translate costs (not just production ones) and margin to benefits into the prize of the final product. The thing is, while its true they have pretty hefty costs from the stores, they also spike further the pricing.
As a long time gamer of warhammer I have to say the price of some of the models is too much. I think the deals on the actual troops and units can be very good like that Plaguebearer box pointed out above.
I have more issue with the big models like the Lord of Change Greater Daemon. Back when the original metal greater demon got rebooted around the time of 40k 3rd edition it was priced at around £25. For a large very detailed model made of metal I think this was fair and with inflation etc I would expect it to be around £45 today.
Now I can go to the website and see the new plastic LoC is £70! That's the same price as Blood bowl with spare change for a pot of paint.
I'm all for GW making a profit but these big centrepiece HQ or Vehicles cost way more than they should.
---
I'd be possibly okay if GW ever had sales or a black friday type event in there stores but they never happen either. Do they even still do the New Store deal where if you bought three box sets you could get the cheapest free? I remember in tale of four gamers (the first one) the guy making the skaven army took advantage of this to get a lot of minis.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Seriously. Every time you buy anything in any shop, you're contributing to it's running costs.
Because if you're not, and indeed nobody is, it's not going to be open for very long at all.
I haven't set foot in a GW shop for two and a half decades. Why should I pay a premium for a service I don't get?
Charge the shop customers more if shop costs are an issue. Those customers are receiving an extra service. The vast majority who don't have access to this service shouldn't be paying for it in inflated miniature costs.
Because that’s the price, and no other business allows you to adjust said price depending on which bits of the their overheads you do and don’t agree with?
Shuma-Gorath wrote: As a long time gamer of warhammer I have to say the price of some of the models is too much. I think the deals on the actual troops and units can be very good like that Plaguebearer box pointed out above.
I have more issue with the big models like the Lord of Change Greater Daemon. Back when the original metal greater demon got rebooted around the time of 40k 3rd edition it was priced at around £25. For a large very detailed model made of metal I think this was fair and with inflation etc I would expect it to be around £45 today.
Now I can go to the website and see the new plasticLoC is £70! That's the same price as Blood bowl with spare change for a pot of paint.
I'm all for GW making a profit but these big centrepiece HQ or Vehicles cost way more than they should.
Metal + plastic. Plus bigger size. Even with metal it would be up in price due to more metal + metal price has gone up
To provide some more helpful advice for characters; check out Ebay for 3rd Party sculpts. There is a fairly decent thriving 3rd party industry making figures that will fit in well with many different armies.
Off the top of my head Scribor makes some good Space Marine character fill in models also. I came back to 8th after stopping at the beginning of 6th and had a fair bit of a character shock also so I went looking elsewhere for models.
Elbows wrote: This is why they should have kept using metals for character models where applicable.
Easy, cheap, quick turn-around, many more "limited editions" available. People who didn't game when metals were popular might not be aware of how many random miniatures GW put out, almost monthly, because of how easy it is to mass-produce metal figures.
GW's prices don't bug me...if I don't like something, I don't buy it. My nerves are grated a bit though by the wild inconsistencies within their line-up. While GW and others have explained why they choose to do it, it's tough to compare the "great deals" with the "go feth yourself" models.
For example: Betrayal at Calth, or Burning of Prospero = fantastic and reasonable, borderline really good value. $30-35-40 single figure in plastic? Get stuffed GW.
I'm learning how to spincast right now. Besides the initial investment - I would charge people 7-10$ for most 28mm infantry metal minis to make a profit + shipping cost which is around what the old metal HQs cost. $14-18
Single injection mold figure for $35? No thank you
Brotherjulian wrote: What really got me though was the prices for individual plastic character models. I paid like $30 for a single BA jump pack chaplain. I work around the plastic industry and believe me, it isn't 30 cents worth of material.
Well apart from usual GW extra price hike these also suffer's from GW's fixation in "everything must be plastic". Even kits you don't expect to sell as much as basic grunts so when static expenses are same whether you sell 1 or 10000000 sprues guess how costs needs to be compensated...
The moment GW decided they won't in future produce anything but plastic this was inevitable.
Other companies manage to make kits in the same hard plastic with the same low volume expectations and manage to price them better than GW. GW has the benefit of tooling and casting in house as well, while other companies outsource to places like Warlord for that, which increases the overall cost.
So what company sells plastic character models they expect to sell less sprues than others in same prices to sprues they can expect to sell like hundreds of times more?
And not saying there's no extra price hike but expecting both standard infantry and HQ models to cost what 2£ a model is pipe dream.
Picking the extreme of going from 15 GBP to 2 is a choice on your part and not something being proposed by most (or possibly any) in the thread. If anything, most people complaining here expect an increase in the cost of a character compared to a 5-10 model per sprue figure but are saying that the 7x jump for a similarly sized and detailed model to 15 GBP is way too much. If you're going to engage in an intellectual discussion online, please attempt to do so honestly instead of tilting at nonexistent windmills.
Let's say fixed price is 100,000£. You expect to sell 10000 sprues of A and 1000 sprue B. Guess what? To make up for fixed cost sprue B then needs to sell for 10x price or sprue B is making loss. The price of plastic itself is pretty neglible so amount of plastic the 10x more sprues take doesn't affect price hugely. Then top of that hero price common in many companies and GW extra price hike and there you go.
You can't sell as many sprues of characters as you do for basic guys. Who needs as many sprues of characters as basic guys? Nobody. Even worse with special characters which rules flat out prevent using more than 1(and the way no options are many players don't want more than 1 generic model since they are all carbon copies anyway so might get the 1 and rest in other way)
Another bad comparison since you're apparently comparing a unit sprue to a character sprue. Please take a look at the relative size differences in an unboxing video between the tiny character sprue and the full size unit sprue; the molds don't cost the same. Also, your price of 100k GBP is ridiculous even by 1990's standards. Finally, nothing in business foces a company to make the return on investment in exactly the same time for each product necessitating ridiculous prices to keep every product on an even keel at all times in terms of profit with every other one.
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Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: I like the plastic character models. But, I'd prefer it if they went back to the Space Marine Captain and Empire General style of boxed set.
Multipart, with a good few options, compatible with the rest of the range.
Consider the Nurgle Herald, Sloppity Bilepiper and Spoilpox Scrivener. Those could've, conceivably, been designed as a single, flexible kit. Even if you can only build the one, you'd still have the spares left over. That of course allows those on a tighter budget to convert up the other two by adding the parts onto standard Plague Bearers.
But for now at least, they've stuck with the mono-pose approach.
When I first saw the captain, I'll admit that there was some sticker shock on my part as I had skipped 4th edition and the beginning of 5th and was used to older $10-15 power armor character prices in metal during 3rd. When I looked at the sheer number of extra bits in that box though, I saw that it was a reasonable price increase given the utility and a good example of using the medium (plastics) for a new type of product (single character models). The current monopose you're lucky if we give you an extra pistol or head plastic characters for even more money are a different story IMO though. It would have been reasonable IMO for instance if they had come out with a $30 Primaris lieutenant that had most of the options on the sprue for instance (jet pack, an assortment of power weapons and relics, etc).
GW being a publicly traded company also has a lot to do with the prices. Most/all(?) other wargaming companies are private businesses. The 'owner' decides how competitive the company needs to be. GW has shareholders to keep happy, and shareholders generally aren't happy with 'break even after paying people's salaries' like private companies might be. So GW will charge whatever the market will bear, and will keep raising prices until the market won't bear it anymore.
As to the cost of big plastic units, I'm less price sensitive. These things in resin or metal would weigh a ton and be fairly fragile without extreme effort in assembly, so going to plastic, even at a premium, is IMO worth it. The resin GuO is $212 CAN, the new plastic GuO is $170 CAN. The plastic one will be easier to cart around and keep from getting damaged. I'm not going to get bent out of shape over the cost of the materials to make it being cheaper, it's a better material for big models.
I had thought GW prices have little do with how much the model cost to manufacture, but I could be thinkint someone else, but was basically determined by the points of model based on the point value or cost to field the unit? At least I thought it was some formula or similar fashion. Units that would cost more points to field in the game cost more $$ to purchase vs cheaper to field which would cost less $$.
I started an Inquisition/IG army this year and have kept almost completely to 3rd party models. (A WW2 Sherman, some 1500's European infantry) then I scour the bits box at my local FLGS and it's now 33-50% GW bits. Boom: tourney legal.
also, 40 guys only cost me $20.... 2 tanks only cost me $40. I could buy 2-3 of these armies for the cost of 1 GW army.
supreme overlord wrote: I started an Inquisition/IG army this year and have kept almost completely to 3rd party models. (A WW2 Sherman, some 1500's European infantry) then I scour the bits box at my local FLGS and it's now 33-50% GW bits. Boom: tourney legal.
also, 40 guys only cost me $20.... 2 tanks only cost me $40. I could buy 2-3 of these armies for the cost of 1 GW army.
I thought it was at _least_ 50% GW? Not at _most_ 50%
supreme overlord wrote: I started an Inquisition/IG army this year and have kept almost completely to 3rd party models. (A WW2 Sherman, some 1500's European infantry) then I scour the bits box at my local FLGS and it's now 33-50% GW bits. Boom: tourney legal.
also, 40 guys only cost me $20.... 2 tanks only cost me $40. I could buy 2-3 of these armies for the cost of 1 GW army.
I thought it was at _least_ 50% GW? Not at _most_ 50%
it changes depending on where you go, I've found most people dont care (or will bother to check) so long as it looks good. and my FLGS (and local group) doesnt care if it's 0% GW so I'm good where I'm at, YMMV
Yeah and honestly at least here in the US, no actual GW stores are running tournaments because they're all tiny hole in the wall places that don't have room for it. It's the FLGS that are running them, so if they are cool with your conversions you should be good to go.
GW's prices, a thread sure to be full of 'back in my day' posts Anyway, yes, GW's prices are above and beyond insane when you think about it. Take Guardsmen for instance, and lets ignore the old "20 for £15" box. For £20ish I can get ten 16 year old models with options for two out of the possible nine weapon options (before we count the sergeants choices) and sculpts that make them look like gorillas in armour. For £23 I can get 25 British Infantry with all the options plus extra parts to make 2" mortar teams and PIAT teams and parts to make officers, well cast and in scale with proportions that actually look human. For £25 I can get 30 German Infantry that look just as good and come with enough parts to make command units and MMG teams and have all the options available as well. For £27 I can get the Pioneers box set that comes as above but with a huge range of metal bits to upgrade the infantry, and add in new weapon options such as Flamethrowers and the Goliath demolition vehicle.
These are far superior casts and provide far more options but at the same time cost a lot less than the IG Infantry do. They are also easier to assemble and are not showing as much wear on the molds as the IG infantry are. In every sense of the word they are superior, and I get more of them per pack, so why are the IG infantry so expensive?
Or what about tanks? A LRBT will cost me nearly of £40, but a Panzer III or a Churchill will only cost me around £18 to £20, and even a mega tank like a Konigstiger only costs at the most £22. Sure, these are slightly smaller vehicles but they have more parts and are far more detailed.
Some people call me mad for claiming Infinity is less expensive than Warhammer 40K, but it is. For less than a third of what my incomplete IG army has cost me I have amassed a sizable Nomad army with options for both Vanilla and a Bakunin sectorial and enough toys to ensure I have plenty of flexibility, and a burgoning PanO force. The models are nicer and for what they do they are a lot cheaper.
Some people call me mad for claiming Infinity is less expensive than Warhammer 40K
Well, those people are living a pipe dream almost. I have seriously yet to see a PURE skirmish game (that is 10-15 models side) that costs more than 40k or any mass battles game.
Simply put, GW's products are overpriced.
Happens in most publicly traded companies. Iphones cost less than 80 dollars to make.
and since GW does everything(model wise i know their books and some terrain are outsourced) in house (possibly by virtue) its not going to be the absolute lowest price possible.
and since GW does everything(model wise i know their books and some terrain are outsourced) in house (possibly by virtue) its not going to be the absolute lowest price possible.
Ah, capitalism. Much like gravity, it can be a real b***h sometimes. GW has finally turned it around (by basically telling their customers - hey we've just turned it around, without actually changing anything) and now they're making money again, hand over fist. Well, kudos to them.
But as to the OP? Yeah, the prices are insane. The blood angels chaplain with jump pack was a watershed moment for me (one of many) at $57 for a single model. Now the primaris characters are all $60 each for a single model. Plastic. It *is* insane, and i will not pay that. That's not the scary part. The scary part is that other people are paying that. We could end world hunger if people just stopped buying gw.
I am at the point I only buy their LOTR/Hobbit range, the prices are still....high, but with what I do (using them across multiple games) I can sorta justify it. that and its harder to get the old mithril minis,
I try to skirt around their pricing by buying bulk starter set models and converting them into whatever I need. It's not that expensive when you're paying $1-3 US per model to get stuff like the DI Primaris or Plague Marines, and then a few bucks here and there for conversion bits. I do get suckered into models like Morty though. Most expensive model I've ever bought.
But yeah, unless the sculpt is mind blowing, there's no way I'll buy a single character for $25-30 when I can just throw some bits together and make my own out of what I have.
and since GW does everything(model wise i know their books and some terrain are outsourced) in house (possibly by virtue) its not going to be the absolute lowest price possible.
and yet that is what we would like!
No, that's a short sighted attitude. That's what drives companies into the ground. Obviously plastic minis aren't going to be 'cost of the plastic + shipping', and a lot of things have skewed market perceptions (like Kickstarter, for one!) on what a plastic mini 'should' cost, but I'd rather pay more per unit and have a company stick around than pay as little as possible and have them close up shop when they make a small error in estimating warehouse space or have a badly received release.
Yes, I still think GW's prices are too high, value wise, but they are charging what a lot of people will pay, and it's a luxury product, not a necessity.
Galef wrote: I never buy individual characters. It's cheaper just to buy a box of similar models and convert. It is also adds more character to your army
This one. I don't think I've bought a character box in years.
Yep very much this.Plus there's so much amazing non-GW stuff out there you can use these days to help make something different/special.
DarkTraveler777 wrote:
Brotherjulian wrote: I get enraged with them pulling the rug out from under me every few years and making me buy new stuff again. (Been in this game 23 years) So I'm into 8th ed now for the Dark Imperium set, as well as codexes for Space Marines, Blood Angels, Eldar, Chaos Marines, and Imperial Guard. Also a few boxes of Primaris guys, because they're good at getting my money.
Part of the problem with GW's pricing can be explained by the behavior quoted above.
Per your own admission you still willingly buy the new stuff at prices you don't like. You aren't alone. There are thousands of us doing that. So, why would GW change? We gripe about pricing, then a new edition or new models are released and we fall over ourselves to buy it all up. Rinse and repeat edition after edition.
So who is really insane here? GW? Or us, the customers, who engage in the same behavior over and over again expecting different results?
Second hand is the way to go. And as much as I hate to say it, I have limited myself to Necromunda, and Shadow War.
Our local game stores are now down to one or two games on the table, as the product sits on the shelves, stacking up as fast as they can get it in. No one is buying, a lot of people are selling.
Warmachine is about as bad. People are dropping full painted armies. As of now, Hero clicx, card games, and X wing are taking up the slack. Even those sweet looking new Pathfinder figures that came out are getting more love then GW.
To everyone, get your stuff second hand. It is there for the taking/ trade.
Just went to check the prices on the new nurgle stuff and it's getting more and more ridiculous. 50 CAd for a single beast of nurgle and 80 cad for two guys on flyes (when 3 plague drones are 70$).
Fortunately for me, AOS and 8th edition (to a much lesser extent) pretty much killed my interest for thse games, so Im only buying necromunda stuff at the moment
streetsamurai wrote: Just went to check the prices on the new nurgle stuff and it's getting more and more ridiculous. 50 CAd for a single beast of nurgle and 80 cad for two guys on flyes (when 3 plague drones are 70$).
Fortunately for me, AOS and 8th edition (to a much lesser extent) pretty much killed my interest for thse games, so Im only buying necromunda stuff at the moment
Actually surprised the Beast of Nurgle isn't more. It's on a 60mm base, and Tau Broadsides and Commanders are $60 CAN, though they come with drones.
I'm not bothered about the prices across the board for newer, multi-part unit kits, but with individual characters, it does get a little silly.
Units-wise GW kits are consistently among the best models available and the wealth of different options, as well as the ability to combine with other kits with ease, does lead to many great conversion opportunities which I do think it's worth paying extra for, especially if you get ~20% off through an independent retailer. Whenever I buy an Ork Trukk for instance, I always manage to make two Trukks out of the kit, by using the wheels and a scratchbuilt chassis for one and the plastic chassis and a deffkopta rotor to make the second a "hover Trukk" for example.
But paying around £20 for an individual character is a joke, and has lead me to converting most of the new character models I use. It's a real shame as some of the character models are stunning but the price keeps me away. I'd love to pick up the Deathwatch Watch Master purely to paint, but I can't justify that price tag for something that's going to sit on the shelf . As the OP points out, GW could half the price of these kits and still make a great profit. Sadly they insist on keeping the price so high.
I personally buy a model and then paint it. rather than going out and buying a massive army in one go. meaning my expenditure is fairly low.
Also i consider the fact that if i pay £30 for a model, but then spend 10+ hours building and painting it then the cost of my enjoyment per hour is pretty low.
i dont really game though so i guess this wouldn't work if your main thing was gaming.
But it's flawed logic when it can be applied to any other model which, should it have a lower purchase price, makes the cost per hour even smaller. It still makes the cost of GW against a competitor just as relatively high.
But it's flawed logic when it can be applied to any other model which, should it have a lower purchase price, makes the cost per hour even smaller. It still makes the cost of GW against a competitor just as relatively high.
He said he didn't game. When you build models to paint and build, you don't want "cheap" models just to paint and build for the act of doing it. You want specific pieces that you love how they look, to motivate you.
So is basically approaching GW's product form a different perspective. If you just want them has a gaming piece, yeah they are overpriced. If you want them has a "painting/modelism" proyect, well. They can't be overpriced has long as you believe the look is good enough to justify the price, becuase in that "Hobby" everything is subjetive.
On the basis of ‘overpriced’, I really don’t get it.
GW set their price in a market largely free from competition.
I mean, it’s not like they’re selling tyres or computers, where value is the key. There, cheap is nasty, and equally you can literally Pay For The Name.
GW? Buy, or buy not. There is no whine. Churlish I know, but also true. There’s great many things in life I wish I could afford, but can’t. But other than housing I don’t get bent out of shape over it.
GW set their price in a market largely free from competition.
I mean, it’s not like they’re selling tyres or computers, where value is the key. There, cheap is nasty, and equally you can literally Pay For The Name.
GW? Buy, or buy not. There is no whine. Churlish I know, but also true. There’s great many things in life I wish I could afford, but can’t. But other than housing I don’t get bent out of shape over it.
Housing, medical care, having children. But please don't price me out of bread and circuses.
But it's flawed logic when it can be applied to any other model which, should it have a lower purchase price, makes the cost per hour even smaller. It still makes the cost of GW against a competitor just as relatively high.
He said he didn't game. When you build models to paint and build, you don't want "cheap" models just to paint and build for the act of doing it. You want specific pieces that you love how they look, to motivate you. So is basically approaching GW's product form a different perspective. If you just want them has a gaming piece, yeah they are overpriced. If you want them has a "painting/modelism" proyect, well. They can't be overpriced has long as you believe the look is good enough to justify the price, becuase in that "Hobby" everything is subjetive.
Oh right, and nobody has ever made a miniature that anyone's wanted for less than GW sell theirs for? Frankly, if you're buying models to paint only, GW are a fairly crude and basic choice, they're designed as gaming pieces at least in part and plastic doesn't have the resolution of detail resin does.
You're right that most things are subjective, and "this model gets me X hobby hours" is a perfectly fine rationalization on a personal level, but it doesn't make for a very strong argument against the very objective comparison of models made from the same materials using the same techniques and offered for radically different selling prices.
GW set their price in a market largely free from competition.
I mean, it’s not like they’re selling tyres or computers, where value is the key. There, cheap is nasty, and equally you can literally Pay For The Name.
GW? Buy, or buy not. There is no whine. Churlish I know, but also true. There’s great many things in life I wish I could afford, but can’t. But other than housing I don’t get bent out of shape over it.
The best argument you can offer is "don't like it, don't buy it?" How disappointing, I expected many pages of detailed justifications about how they're using premium polystyrene and the finest Swiss steel cast dies.
I just came back myself, and I built all my characters minus one of my Terminator sorcerers (mainly because I didn't wanna pay $50 when I only needed a single model...) However, I now have the bits to convert my own Terminator lords in whatever config I want for a long, long time. Yes, single model prices from GW are insane, especially for finecast; $20 for a single banner wielding model? Get bent, I'll buy a kit of chaos space marines for $15 more and get 10 dudes too!
Or do you seriously think every company, barring The Great Satan Games Workshop aims to merely break even?
No. Of course they don’t. They seek to get their product on the shelf for the highest possibly price, but at the lowest possible cost.
Am....am I the only one with even the most crack-handed and rudimentary grasp of how business actually works in the real world?
And note, I’ve made no move to defendGW’s profit margin. I’m simply pointing out that In The Big Boy’s World, ain’t nobody actually gives am airborne reproductive act at a rolling deep fried comestible whether the asking price is even dimly limited by the production cost.
Elsewise, why pay for Ferrari, when you could by a Skoda? They’ll both get up from A to B. Why pay for a Blu-Ray when one could buy a knackered ex-rental VHS? And so on and so forth.
Or do you seriously think every company, barring The Great Satan Games Workshop aims to merely break even?
No. Of course they don’t. They seek to get their product on the shelf for the highest possibly price, but at the lowest possible cost.
Am....am I the only one with even the most crack-handed and rudimentary grasp of how business actually works in the real world?
And note, I’ve made no move to defendGW’s profit margin. I’m simply pointing out that In The Big Boy’s World, ain’t nobody actually gives am airborne reproductive act at a rolling deep fried comestible whether the asking price is even dimly limited by the production cost.
Elsewise, why pay for Ferrari, when you could by a Skoda? They’ll both get up from A to B. Why pay for a Blu-Ray when one could buy a knackered ex-rental VHS? And so on and so forth.
You are misunderstanding what others are saying.
Why should customers care if GW needs to make a profit or even just barely break even if the price is too high for the customers?
This is in a discussion about the market including cheaper competitors of equivalent quality, or at least a better value for price. GW's overhead, shareholders and branding requirements don't factor into the customer's comparison shopping.
Automatically Appended Next Post: To rebut your analogy, people aren't buying blu ray like they used to because streaming exists.
But it's flawed logic when it can be applied to any other model which, should it have a lower purchase price, makes the cost per hour even smaller. It still makes the cost of GW against a competitor just as relatively high.
He said he didn't game. When you build models to paint and build, you don't want "cheap" models just to paint and build for the act of doing it. You want specific pieces that you love how they look, to motivate you. So is basically approaching GW's product form a different perspective. If you just want them has a gaming piece, yeah they are overpriced. If you want them has a "painting/modelism" proyect, well. They can't be overpriced has long as you believe the look is good enough to justify the price, becuase in that "Hobby" everything is subjetive.
Oh right, and nobody has ever made a miniature that anyone's wanted for less than GW sell theirs for? Frankly, if you're buying models to paint only, GW are a fairly crude and basic choice, they're designed as gaming pieces at least in part and plastic doesn't have the resolution of detail resin does.
You're right that most things are subjective, and "this model gets me X hobby hours" is a perfectly fine rationalization on a personal level, but it doesn't make for a very strong argument against the very objective comparison of models made from the same materials using the same techniques and offered for radically different selling prices.
Probably this is because I have slept 6 hours in the last two days and I have just come home from a exhausting W40K tournament. But I don't understand what you are saying.
I agree, theres other companies doing better products from a "propainter" perspective at better prices. But at the same time, when you are measuring their products from a pure aesthetic subjetive way, you can't really say they are overpriced. It doesn't matter that other companies are doing other models with a better technical, proportion, whatever level, at a better price, in resin with finer detail, etc... if the painter prefers the aesthetic of the GW model, the rest will not work for him.
This is not like Mantic where GW has gaming pieces are, objetively, overpriced (This of course doesn't mean they are priced out of the market. They normally aren't, at least if they aren't extreme cases like Fyreslayers, Witch Elves, Vampire Bloodknights) because a Mantic dwarf with an axe is just as usefull has a gaming piece has a GW dwarf with an axe.
This is in a discussion about the market including cheaper competitors of equivalent quality, or at least a better value for price. GW's overhead, shareholders and branding requirements don't factor into the customer's comparison shopping.
This is very true, but what DOES factor into the comparison shopping is the IP and hype machine GW has built up over decades. Valuable IPs are by definition valuable and can therefore charge more.
To a degree, GW's product is more valuable because it's attached to a better IP people care more about. The hype machine costs money to run, which raises the price as well. The release schedule requires cash flow. And so on.
Even at GW prices it's still a cheap hobby, relatively speaking. Yes, you can spend less going with other company's products, if you're very price sensitive. I can't bring myself to pay $45 CAN for a single 32mm character model either, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to abandon buying GW product entirely, it just means I'm going to be more selective.
That said, I backed a lot of miniature KS that I haven't painted much of once I got the product and was disappointed, so cheaper product doesn't necessarily mean good value either. The best value is the miniature you're excited to paint and play with, regardless of its source and/or cost. Mantic's Enforcers are cheaper than Space Marines, but I'd rather paint Space Marines.
I noticed some people say that they purchased GW mini's for painting and that there where none better out there. Can I ask them where they have been for the past decade?
There are many mini producers whom sell far superior models to GW (not hard to do in all honesty, unless you consider 'cartoony animeish with chunky features and way too much bling' to be good) and at prices that are far lower than the absurd sum that our beloved GW demands.
master of ordinance wrote: I noticed some people say that they purchased GW mini's for painting and that there where none better out there. Can I ask them where they have been for the past decade?
There are many mini producers whom sell far superior models to GW (not hard to do in all honesty, unless you consider 'cartoony animeish with chunky features and way too much bling' to be good) and at prices that are far lower than the absurd sum that our beloved GW demands.
I do tend to prefer GWLOTR/Hobbit minis to Mithrils, but yeah the 40k/AoS models are just too cartoony for my tastes. I prefer the malifaux and Confrontation metals to paint.
I remember buying Njal Stormcaller for $12 in the late 90's, even with inflation that would be under $20 in today's money.
The EXACT same model is now $33 (converted to inferior resin when it used to be metal) while the new plastic characters weigh in at $50.
That said, I think Blood Bowl these days is pretty good value, and the only thing I've bought from them recently. GW pricing is wonky as all hell, some things don't seem to bad others are just crazy.
The other day, I read that thread about GW making a profit, and my jaw dropped.
It amazes me that they are still in business with those prices. Why?
Let me give you some examples.
I haven't bought WD in years, and a flicked through a copy at WH Smith the other day.
Pages of adverts, gak poor articles, the usual format that has stayed the same.
Later on, I'm in a model railway shop. And I see Humbrol paint. And Tamiya paint. And it's cheaper. And the quality is better than GW paints, and then I remember Vallejo paints that are cheaper, better, and give you more.
And yet, I'm lead to beleive that in this day and age of the internet, people still buy GW paints.
And then you look at some of their crazy model prices.
And then you look at a ton of other companies doing high quality models...for cheaper...
And you wonder where GW is making this profit from...
But it's flawed logic when it can be applied to any other model which, should it have a lower purchase price, makes the cost per hour even smaller. It still makes the cost of GW against a competitor just as relatively high.
To this i would say that its true, its cheaper per hour to get a cheaper model, but when the comparison is between paying £1 per hour or £3 its neither here nor there for me.
master of ordinance wrote:I noticed some people say that they purchased GW mini's for painting and that there where none better out there. Can I ask them where they have been for the past decade?
There are many mini producers whom sell far superior models to GW (not hard to do in all honesty, unless you consider 'cartoony animeish with chunky features and way too much bling' to be good) and at prices that are far lower than the absurd sum that our beloved GW demands.
To both of these i will concede that GW minis are not the best on the market. However I absolutely love 40k lore and the setting, and whilst i can get a tank approximately equivalent to a LRBT in terms of modelling that is probably cheaper and more detailed, it just doesn't excite me. I don't see it scything through hordes of orks or anything awesome like that, to me it's just a ww2 tank.
Its totally subjective, but for me that's part of my main enjoyment of the hobby.
This is in a discussion about the market including cheaper competitors of equivalent quality, or at least a better value for price. GW's overhead, shareholders and branding requirements don't factor into the customer's comparison shopping.
This is very true, but what DOES factor into the comparison shopping is the IP and hype machine GW has built up over decades. Valuable IPs are by definition valuable and can therefore charge more.
To a degree, GW's product is more valuable because it's attached to a better IP people care more about. The hype machine costs money to run, which raises the price as well. The release schedule requires cash flow. And so on.
Even at GW prices it's still a cheap hobby, relatively speaking. Yes, you can spend less going with other company's products, if you're very price sensitive. I can't bring myself to pay $45 CAN for a single 32mm character model either, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to abandon buying GW product entirely, it just means I'm going to be more selective.
That said, I backed a lot of miniature KS that I haven't painted much of once I got the product and was disappointed, so cheaper product doesn't necessarily mean good value either. The best value is the miniature you're excited to paint and play with, regardless of its source and/or cost. Mantic's Enforcers are cheaper than Space Marines, but I'd rather paint Space Marines.
Bingo. Warmahordes was, when I played, way cheaper and many of the models were of equal quality (since I quit I know their prices spiked as well).
The 40K IP is just way, way, too damn good. Even when I wasn't playing 40k, I sitll bought every major game release (Dawn of War 3, Total war, etc.) because I love the lore behind 40k and fantasy. Theres just so much, and some of it is amazing. The characters and universe have so many possibilities. And while the models are amazing, and yes others are doing them just as good if not better, the lore and character of their universes (so far) cannot compete with 40k.
That said, the start up of 40k is expensive... but once your in, its not so bad. $75 for a new land raider, or $60 for the new Call of Duty? At least the Land raider I won't get bored of after 20 hours. Yes, the games expensive, but if your playing 40k your probably not necessarily "poor".... just pick the models you want and buy them one at a time.
master of ordinance wrote:I noticed some people say that they purchased GW mini's for painting and that there where none better out there. Can I ask them where they have been for the past decade?
There are many mini producers whom sell far superior models to GW (not hard to do in all honesty, unless you consider 'cartoony animeish with chunky features and way too much bling' to be good) and at prices that are far lower than the absurd sum that our beloved GW demands.
I think a lot of GW's customer base is just used to their aesthetics and proportions. If one doesn't play GW games exclusively (or heavily) then it's easier to get away from that. But if you need GW-like stuff because you play their games and are used to that then it's harder to get away from it. It's ingrained and takes time to dislodge. It's not set in stone (FW is a bit less exaggerated proportioned and sometimes with less bling) but you have certain parameters to keep in mind for your squad/army to look cohesive.
If somebody moves more into the paining side of the hobby then there still that connection to GW even if there's no direct need for exactly the same proportions. It's like a comfortable habit, nobody will just give it up. I remember liking GW when I got into the hobby and then when exploring other miniature lines not being satisfied with those. GW had certain exaggerated features but that also made paining more fun or accessible. Even if another company had miniatures of the same size the more normal proportions meant details like hands/faces/weapons were usually much smaller (and less impactful). It took me some time but at some point GW's more extreme exaggeration started to look more grotesque or like they are overdoing it and I think in the long term size and scale creep helped other manufacturers more than GW. It allowed others to have details that are a bit bigger with more normal proportions while GW had to keep the degree of exaggeration relatively constant to keep their lines cohesive.
AOS minis (new fantasy) and the new Marines are all bigger by default and seem a bit (a tiny bit) less exaggerated and that seems like their way out of about two decades of consistent styling/sizing/proportions. In the end it's about personal preference and somebody linking mostly only GW miniatures doesn't make them wrong although it might indicate a unusually focused appreciation of aesthetics.
Zid wrote: That said, the start up of 40k is expensive... but once your in, its not so bad. $75 for a new land raider, or $60 for the new Call of Duty? At least the Land raider I won't get bored of after 20 hours. Yes, the games expensive, but if your playing 40k your probably not necessarily "poor".... just pick the models you want and buy them one at a time.
This argument makes no sense. It's possible to not be "poor" and still think their prices are simply too high. I've got more than enough disposable income to play 40k, but I find much more value elsewhere in the hobby. This leaves much of that disposable income for other things outside of the hobby, which is a nice bonus.
If someone really likes the universe, you said yourself there's ways they can enjoy it that are more reasonable. They have novels and video games for both phones/tablets and PCs. I'll happily buy Total War Warhammer or Dawn of War to enjoy the universe while also laughing with the rest of my gaming group about their insane model pricing over a game of Infinity or Malifaux.
I just dropped $300+ on Plastic Soldier Company products. From what I can see the box says made in Great Britain. So at least some of the products are made by people with the same standard of living as the consumers.
For example- a German late war panzer army has the following for $57-
This late war German panzer army box set will give you all you need to start fighting on the Eastern and Western fronts of WW2. Included in this box you will get 6x Panzer IV's, 4x Panthers, 4x SdKfz 251/D Halftracks, 2x Tiger I's, 47x Panzergrenadiers, including 3x LMG teams, Command and panzerfausts and panzerschrecks, 1x mixed base sprue and a generic decal sheet with balkankreuz.
master of ordinance wrote: I noticed some people say that they purchased GW mini's for painting and that there where none better out there. Can I ask them where they have been for the past decade?
There are many mini producers whom sell far superior models to GW (not hard to do in all honesty, unless you consider 'cartoony animeish with chunky features and way too much bling' to be good) and at prices that are far lower than the absurd sum that our beloved GW demands.
And potato heads. Don't forget the potato heads. You look at it and think - yeah, if that were a bit bigger, i'd put it in a pot and boil it and then eat it when it was done with some steak and vegetables. Bobby G has a potato head, and he's one of the more recent models. It does make you wonder.
Galef wrote: I never buy individual characters. It's cheaper just to buy a box of similar models and convert. It is also adds more character to your army
It is how I put it in the gw survey. In believe the price of squad is still acceptable but heroes are way too expensive. The point of extra bits is also very relevant to me. But in a way I also understand that they sacrified customizable part to achieve better dynamism of the models. A great exemple is boyz, which are very customizable but have a more "toy" feeling due to how arm and torso should be interchangeable. Still a pair of head and pistols could always be an option.
Nevertheless, considering the opener pov, I would like to make some comments:
• the price of a mini is in no way related to material
• cost of sculpting, painting, displaying each mini is getting more expensive as quality goes up
• molding protocols for plastic are more expensive than for other materials
• these costs are less important in proportion when the number of sold items goes up
• 1$ in 2018 is not 1$ in 1990
• your wallet as a working adult is not your wallet as a kid
I think all things considered the last point is the more important. GW is perfectly aware they ahave a captive and passionate grown up market and it is why they have different kind of prices. Their politic looks like to me as "if you want exclusive stunning character models, pay for it"
My only major problem is that GW's increases prove people don't care. They'll happily forgive years of dickery for a fresh coat of paint and false promises. 8th edition 40k is the best it's ever been, the likes we haven't seen since the olden days, yet the game is probably as bad as it's ever been as well, and yet people don't care and still clamor to buy it. 40k killed off all its competition here when before it was roughly even, and for what? For a game that promised to be better and while it might better than the awful mess of 7th edition is still pretty much a dumpster fire.
That's the worst part. GW has learned that they can put up enough smoke and mirrors, throw up a community site and have mediocre painting videos from a mook who has become a meme, and then still ignore game balance, and they'll make record profits.
Zid wrote: That said, the start up of 40k is expensive... but once your in, its not so bad. $75 for a new land raider, or $60 for the new Call of Duty? At least the Land raider I won't get bored of after 20 hours. Yes, the games expensive, but if your playing 40k your probably not necessarily "poor".... just pick the models you want and buy them one at a time.
This argument makes no sense. It's possible to not be "poor" and still think their prices are simply too high. I've got more than enough disposable income to play 40k, but I find much more value elsewhere in the hobby. This leaves much of that disposable income for other things outside of the hobby, which is a nice bonus.
If someone really likes the universe, you said yourself there's ways they can enjoy it that are more reasonable. They have novels and video games for both phones/tablets and PCs. I'll happily buy Total War Warhammer or Dawn of War to enjoy the universe while also laughing with the rest of my gaming group about their insane model pricing over a game of Infinity or Malifaux.
I can see your point. I suppose it depends on how you look at it, I love the universe and GW's models, and coming back I was a bit afraid of the prices. Now that I've established an army I guess i'm OK with them. If I dislike the price of a model, I'll find a way to convert one or build one from cheaper kits
Wayniac wrote: My only major problem is that GW's increases prove people don't care. They'll happily forgive years of dickery for a fresh coat of paint and false promises. 8th edition 40k is the best it's ever been, the likes we haven't seen since the olden days, yet the game is probably as bad as it's ever been as well, and yet people don't care and still clamor to buy it. 40k killed off all its competition here when before it was roughly even, and for what? For a game that promised to be better and while it might better than the awful mess of 7th edition is still pretty much a dumpster fire.
That's the worst part. GW has learned that they can put up enough smoke and mirrors, throw up a community site and have mediocre painting videos from a mook who has become a meme, and then still ignore game balance, and they'll make record profits.
Thats a little hard on Duncan. Why don't you eat a snickers?
A $45 CAN space marine captain might not seem so bad if you've got 3000 points of space marines - it's certainly not NECESSARY - after all, you've got 3000 points of space marines, but you obviously like space marines at that point. It's an expensive optional buy, but because it's strictly optional you probably don't care so much about the price.
It's going to bite a lot harder if you're just starting primaris space marines and you need a captain for the sweet, sweet re-roll buff, and it's a lot harder to convert a Captain because the primaris kits don't come with tons of options.
It'll be interesting to see what happens when GW discontinues Dark Imperium, though we'll probably see Start Collecting Primaris Space Marines with a Captain, Intercessor and the ETB dread.
That's the worst part. GW has learned that they can put up enough smoke and mirrors, throw up a community site and have mediocre painting videos from a mook who has become a meme, and then still ignore game balance, and they'll make record profits.
Thats a little hard on Duncan. Why don't you eat a snickers?
Duncan's videos are aimed at beginners, but are pretty decent for that. He's actually pretty good at communicating technique.
You just have to remember that the videos are there to sell GW product (GW brushes! GW paint! GW water pot! GW palette paper!) more than anything else.
If you believe GW plc are just selling minatures to people who collect them at any price.(Snob value.)
Or to ''collectors who play'' who think ''..if I just buy some more it will validate all my previous purchases...'' (Sunk cost fallacy.)
Or to new customers who believe the marketing hype.
And they are not selling to people who care about the game play experience, or who expect similar value for money that other companies give.
Then you are right! But you also have to believe there are enough ''GW loyal fans'' to keep paying any price no matter how high.Otherwise GW plc would have gone bust by now.
Zid wrote: That said, the start up of 40k is expensive... but once your in, its not so bad. $75 for a new land raider, or $60 for the new Call of Duty? At least the Land raider I won't get bored of after 20 hours. Yes, the games expensive, but if your playing 40k your probably not necessarily "poor".... just pick the models you want and buy them one at a time.
This argument makes no sense. It's possible to not be "poor" and still think their prices are simply too high. I've got more than enough disposable income to play 40k, but I find much more value elsewhere in the hobby. This leaves much of that disposable income for other things outside of the hobby, which is a nice bonus.
If someone really likes the universe, you said yourself there's ways they can enjoy it that are more reasonable. They have novels and video games for both phones/tablets and PCs. I'll happily buy Total War Warhammer or Dawn of War to enjoy the universe while also laughing with the rest of my gaming group about their insane model pricing over a game of Infinity or Malifaux.
I can see your point. I suppose it depends on how you look at it, I love the universe and GW's models, and coming back I was a bit afraid of the prices. Now that I've established an army I guess i'm OK with them. If I dislike the price of a model, I'll find a way to convert one or build one from cheaper kits
Conversion only gets you so far. I've got about 2k of Tyranids in the cupboard, not including my Heirophant. I'd really like to get them out and use them. I really would! But there's things I want, because I've used those for a long time and have gotten a bit bored with them. I would really like a pair of Exocrines, a pair of Haruspex and a pair of Trygons. I played the old Epic games, so these are awesome nostalgia pieces. Those are not models that you just convert. However, that's also about $600au. That buys me a LOT of other things.
Alternately, there's things I want for Malifaux and Infinity. I'd like the Hassassin Bahram starter and Hassassin Muyibs box to expand my Haqqislam. I'd like the Amphibious Assault box and Waldgeists for the Zoraida crew I got for Christmas. Box of those expansions to my collection are under $100. They add more to my collection than what I'd have added with those Tyranids in terms of what they open up in terms of gameplay. Buying both also leaves me with ~$400 to do other things with. That's where I see value.
The characters are insanely priced, there’s no doubt, but the “cost of materials” argument is irrelevant. The design, tooling and manufacturing of hard plastic miniatures costs a lot, from wages to production.
It in no way justifies the cost of characters, but I am kinda tired of the argument that the raw material is very cheap, therefore we are getting screwed.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: The other day, I read that thread about GW making a profit, and my jaw dropped.
It amazes me that they are still in business with those prices. Why?
Let me give you some examples.
I haven't bought WD in years, and a flicked through a copy at WH Smith the other day.
Pages of adverts, gak poor articles, the usual format that has stayed the same.
There is practically no adverts in White Dwarf these days - the odd Job opportunities ad, a page or two of BL stuff, but it is nothing compared to the WD of yore. The articles I suppose are a matter of taste, but the mag has improved out of sight since the weekly pamphlet was dropped. The format has changed dramatically in this latest incarnation.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: Later on, I'm in a model railway shop. And I see Humbrol paint. And Tamiya paint. And it's cheaper. And the quality is better than GW paints, and then I remember Vallejo paints that are cheaper, better, and give you more.
Again, this is a matter of taste, but as you have been out of the GW for many years I am guessing you haven't used GW paint recently. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it, in fact it is very good. It is much better than Humbrol. I use paint from Vallejo and Minitaire with the odd P3 thrown in. A have a few GW pots too - mainly for specific colours. And their technical paints are very handy. I don't use them as my main paints because they are far too expensive. But the quality is absolutely fine.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: And yet, I'm lead to beleive that in this day and age of the internet, people still buy GW paints.
It makes sense if you are new to painting, or not a confident painter - the GW tutorials are actually pretty good, and obviously direct you with GW specific paints.
And then you look at a ton of other companies doing high quality models...for cheaper...
And you wonder where GW is making this profit from...
Their pricing is insane, I think everyone has agreed on this for the past 30 years. I got into the hobby around 1991, so have seen many different eras of pricing and manufacturing. I game in most periods and I have plastic kits from Warlord, PSC, Fireforge, Conquest, Battlefront, Victrix to name a few. All of these kits are high quality and very reasonably priced. You can get a big Bolt Action army up and running very cheaply with some great plastic kits for example. But that doesn't mean GW kits don't have an appeal - firstly they have a unique IP that people love. Secondly they are usually a lot of fun to build and a lot of fun to paint. I don't really game with any GW systems anymore, but I still buy the odd boxed set - the Primaris Marines were an absolute joy to paint, a lot of fun. I'm putting together some Sector Mechanicus terrain for Necromunda at the moment, and the quality is outstanding, the models are an absolute blast to paint and they look wonderful when finished. True, I had to harvest a kidney to buy them, but I don't mind because they provide me with the sort of rush I love that this hobby gives me. And besides, everything in this hobby is cheap compared to my other hobby, which is photography. And every day I am thankful I was never bitten by the "classic car" bug!
This named character mini, sculpted to insane levels of detailing and skill, an utter beauty to behold, the most recent and up to date figure in her line, will cost me £7.00, and it comes with an alternative head option. She is also metal.
Image of infinity model spoiled for size, it's the nifty new Joan
Spoiler:
This is the closest and cheapest GW equivalent that I could find, and it racks in at a surprisingly cheap £8.20, though when you consider and it is a 20 something year old sculpt that does bring some thoughts to mind. Actually this is a pretty damn good sculpt, and still holds up well today. She is also not a named character, and is thus discounted.
Spoiler:
BUT, we are comparing recent releases, so how about something more recent?
This initially springs to mind, but it is not a named HQ choice. Still, this rather ridiculously named HQ choice costs a whopping £22.00, an obscene amount for a poorly designed plastic kit.
Eventually we find our (relatively) recently released named character unit in the form of the all new plastic Kharn the Betrayer. For the low, low, price of £22.00 you can own a cartoonishly sculpted Kharn that tries to gloss over the poorly sculpted detail with vast amounts of excess bling and gribbly bits that add nothing to the overall model, save to hopefully distract you from how the 'hair' on the tassels took more like fins, or how the grill texturing is so thick and clunky. And to be honest, Kharn is one of the better releases since they moved over to this new style.
Spoiler:
Yes, there are cheaper HQ's, with many coming as low as £10.25 (Uriah Jacobus) but these are the ancient sculpts that have yet to be updated, and are often generic unnamed characters. For this test we needed a recent release of a named character of 28 - 30mm in height. And we got one all right.
So, compare Corvus Belli's Joan D'Arc with GW's Kharn the betrayer and weep as you realise just how blatantly overpriced GW's products are.
Caliginous wrote: Again, this is a matter of taste, but as you have been out of the GW for many years I am guessing you haven't used GW paint recently. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it, in fact it is very good. It is much better than Humbrol. I use paint from Vallejo and Minitaire with the odd P3 thrown in. A have a few GW pots too - mainly for specific colours. And their technical paints are very handy. I don't use them as my main paints because they are far too expensive. But the quality is absolutely fine.
GW paints are very good. Their main issues are (as usual) price and the pots suck. If you're happy paying double what you'd pay from Vallejo and/or prefer the colour range, go for it. Under no circumstances should they be left in GW's pots to dry out - buy yourself some dropper bottles and decant them into it. GW are not alone in this - Privateer Presses paint range is the same. Fantastic paints, awful pots with lids that break after a few uses and should be decanted into dropper bottles.
Technical paints can't really have their pots changed, but those are very good too. I really like their blood effect paint, and it's much easier to use than Tamiya Clear Red. I'll pay more for an easier user experience.
With regard to the Canoness vs Jean, the paint job certainly doesn't do the canoness justice, and she does come with about a dozen weapon options and wargear, vs. Jean who only has the one loadout. And I do know you did discount it due to not being a named character.
I took my son to an LGS, as he wanted to buy some models with his allowance and holiday money. His words: "GW miniatures sure are expensive." He is 8. He was most disappointed that he couldn't find anything "cool" in the $15 range. He still bought 2 characters, but I could tell it pained him. I can see him moving to historicals soon. LoL
Cruentus wrote: With regard to the Canoness vs Jean, the paint job certainly doesn't do the canoness justice, and she does come with about a dozen weapon options and wargear, vs. Jean who only has the one loadout. And I do know you did discount it due to not being a named character.
I took my son to an LGS, as he wanted to buy some models with his allowance and holiday money. His words: "GW miniatures sure are expensive." He is 8. He was most disappointed that he couldn't find anything "cool" in the $15 range. He still bought 2 characters, but I could tell it pained him. I can see him moving to historicals soon. LoL
Dunno where you're getting a dozen weapon options from, there's two left hand options, two right hand options (does the books count as a weapon?) and two back pack options (which are purely cosmetic.)
Plus the body and the base, that's the 8 parts listed in the description.
But old sculpts ultimately do GW a lot of favors, as all their price rises for several years have been loaded into new releases, which can make old models start to look like good value, until you realize you're paying 2008 prices in 2018 and that when the range updates the number will explode.
Cruentus wrote: I took my son to an LGS, as he wanted to buy some models with his allowance and holiday money. His words: "GW miniatures sure are expensive." He is 8. He was most disappointed that he couldn't find anything "cool" in the $15 range. He still bought 2 characters, but I could tell it pained him. I can see him moving to historicals soon. LoL
The guy that runs my FLGS had the same criticism. He finds it hard to sell GW to the younger crowd because there's nothing in the 'pocket money price point' anymore. Used to be you could pick up a single character for $15au or a 2-3 miniature blister for $25-$30au, but now it's rare to find anything below $50au.
Cruentus wrote: I took my son to an LGS, as he wanted to buy some models with his allowance and holiday money. His words: "GW miniatures sure are expensive." He is 8. He was most disappointed that he couldn't find anything "cool" in the $15 range. He still bought 2 characters, but I could tell it pained him. I can see him moving to historicals soon. LoL
The guy that runs my FLGS had the same criticism. He finds it hard to sell GW to the younger crowd because there's nothing in the 'pocket money price point' anymore. Used to be you could pick up a single character for $15au or a 2-3 miniature blister for $25-$30au, but now it's rare to find anything below $50au.
That's the ticket. Same thing in the us, prices adjusted of course. Lots of our games shops only carry small selections now, but bones has taken off like wildfire for reaper.
I took my son to an LGS, as he wanted to buy some models with his allowance and holiday money. His words: "GW miniatures sure are expensive." He is 8. He was most disappointed that he couldn't find anything "cool" in the $15 range. He still bought 2 characters, but I could tell it pained him. I can see him moving to historicals soon. LoL
Definitely GW's biggest mistake is pricing the younger end of the market out of their product. That's the problem with going corporate, you lose sight of long term goals because the shareholders reward more immediate success. The 'Easy to Paint' stuff is a step in the right direction, but there's not nearly enough variety in either army or sculpts to keep people going. They should have a variety of First Strike style releases and Easy to Paints to train the customer base.
And they should keep popping out that give-away Primaris Marine they had for the Dark Imperium launch. Any new customer should be handed one of those babies.
This named character mini, sculpted to insane levels of detailing and skill, an utter beauty to behold, the most recent and up to date figure in her line, will cost me £7.00, and it comes with an alternative head option. She is also metal.
Image of infinity model spoiled for size, it's the nifty new Joan
Spoiler:
This is the closest and cheapest GW equivalent that I could find, and it racks in at a surprisingly cheap £8.20, though when you consider and it is a 20 something year old sculpt that does bring some thoughts to mind. Actually this is a pretty damn good sculpt, and still holds up well today. She is also not a named character, and is thus discounted.
Spoiler:
BUT, we are comparing recent releases, so how about something more recent?
This initially springs to mind, but it is not a named HQ choice. Still, this rather ridiculously named HQ choice costs a whopping £22.00, an obscene amount for a poorly designed plastic kit.
Eventually we find our (relatively) recently released named character unit in the form of the all new plastic Kharn the Betrayer. For the low, low, price of £22.00 you can own a cartoonishly sculpted Kharn that tries to gloss over the poorly sculpted detail with vast amounts of excess bling and gribbly bits that add nothing to the overall model, save to hopefully distract you from how the 'hair' on the tassels took more like fins, or how the grill texturing is so thick and clunky. And to be honest, Kharn is one of the better releases since they moved over to this new style.
Spoiler:
Yes, there are cheaper HQ's, with many coming as low as £10.25 (Uriah Jacobus) but these are the ancient sculpts that have yet to be updated, and are often generic unnamed characters. For this test we needed a recent release of a named character of 28 - 30mm in height. And we got one all right.
So, compare Corvus Belli's Joan D'Arc with GW's Kharn the betrayer and weep as you realise just how blatantly overpriced GW's products are.
That Kharn model was absolutely awful, far worse than the one before him, which is sad, because kharn is a neat character from the HH series.
I have a problem master of ordinance. Your joan of arc price is off For me she wil cost €15.75 whereas Kharn will cost 29. so that's only 100-ish percent more.
For the record Kharn (and GW as a whole) is expensive. There are brands/ miniature makers that are way cheaper because their company culture is centered around that. Gw is a premium-priced brand and therefore has to maintain premium prices to maintain that part of their audience. Snob-attitude is thing, see the recent raw water craze.
The price of a model(or products as a whole) is decided by what the market is willing to pay and not production cost. US health care is the most obvious example of what happens when you let a market run completely crazy. tough there are other factors involved there. On the other end of that, entire markets have crashed because people weren't buying it anymore.
So on a pure value perspective GW isn't worth it compâred to some of it's competition, really when compared to some re-casters like the $11 las turrets someone linked earlier in the thread they're saints.
Increase or no, she is still cheaper, and a far superior model too.
I think you did highlight a major problem with GW though, namely that they are a culture in their own. When average Joe thinks of wargaming he thinks of GW, and when his kids want to get into the hobby they go to GW, and GW is all they know. Couple this with GW's delusional self-branding as "purveyors of premium collectable miniatures" and you have an open license for the company to hike its prices and charge ludicrous amounts of money for what are essentially very poor and clunky figures of limited detail, and because of the mix of a dedicated, almost cult like, fanatical fanbase, the massive IP and the simple fact that they are often the place that people come to in order to enter the hobby they can get away with what would be to any other company cooperate suicide.
This named character mini, sculpted to insane levels of detailing and skill, an utter beauty to behold, the most recent and up to date figure in her line, will cost me £7.00, and it comes with an alternative head option. She is also metal.
Eventually we find our (relatively) recently released named character unit in the form of the all new plastic Kharn the Betrayer. For the low, low, price of £22.00 you can own a cartoonishly sculpted Kharn that tries to gloss over the poorly sculpted detail with vast amounts of excess bling and gribbly bits that add nothing to the overall model, save to hopefully distract you from how the 'hair' on the tassels took more like fins, or how the grill texturing is so thick and clunky. And to be honest, Kharn is one of the better releases since they moved over to this new style.
Soooo...We have model that's cheap in small quantities due to material vs model that is expensive in small quantities due to material and top of that model you have little reason to buy more than 1 which just limits on number of copies GW is expecting to sell...
This is why GW shouldn't use plastic for everything.
Quality of sculpt is another subject but it's totally unrealistic for the Kharn to be equally priced as the Joan. That would be GW doing loss quite likely. MAYBE work for generic loyal space marine special character(generic as in not chapter tied) but not for world eater special character.
This named character mini, sculpted to insane levels of detailing and skill, an utter beauty to behold, the most recent and up to date figure in her line, will cost me £7.00, and it comes with an alternative head option. She is also metal.
Eventually we find our (relatively) recently released named character unit in the form of the all new plastic Kharn the Betrayer. For the low, low, price of £22.00 you can own a cartoonishly sculpted Kharn that tries to gloss over the poorly sculpted detail with vast amounts of excess bling and gribbly bits that add nothing to the overall model, save to hopefully distract you from how the 'hair' on the tassels took more like fins, or how the grill texturing is so thick and clunky. And to be honest, Kharn is one of the better releases since they moved over to this new style.
Soooo...We have model that's cheap in small quantities due to material vs model that is expensive in small quantities due to material and top of that model you have little reason to buy more than 1 which just limits on number of copies GW is expecting to sell...
This is why GW shouldn't use plastic for everything.
Quality of sculpt is another subject but it's totally unrealistic for the Kharn to be equally priced as the Joan. That would be GW doing loss quite likely. MAYBE work for generic loyal space marine special character(generic as in not chapter tied) but not for world eater special character.
They probably be should be doing special named characters through forge world. though their already existing character series.
Desubot wrote: They probably be should be doing special named characters through forge world. though their already existing character series.
So they can all get massive scenic bases that are in no way practical?
Well they dont need to be though i will say the dead marine the primarus apothocary guy is standing on did make it hell to put him on a gw plastic urban base.
Quality of sculpt is another subject but it's totally unrealistic for the Kharn to be equally priced as the Joan. That would be GW doing loss quite likely. MAYBE work for generic loyal space marine special character(generic as in not chapter tied) but not for world eater special character.
Cost of sales (the cost of making and developing the product in order to sell it) currently runs ~25% of RRP before sales tax. Now that'll swing up and down based on each product, but it's a useful average.
On that basis, GW could sell the plastic Kharn for the same price as Joan and still realise a profit. The reason they don't is because a) they can charge more and people are paying it and b) CB have nothing like the overhead that GW do. GW customers pay a hefty premium for their stores, even if they live in a part of the world that doesn't have any.
The thing from my end of it, having come from DnD back in the 80s, is that those generic minis were a couple of bucks each, tops, and Bones is now in that market area - I just bought two amazing looking Pathfinder Battles Gnolls by Deep Cuts, pre primed grey, for $3.99. That was value for me, and I bought them just to paint them up.
On the other hand, GW's move to Finecast was supposed to be due to the increasing cost of metals (cheaper for the consumer), plastics were supposed to be cheaper for the consumer. Neither of these has panned out, in fact, with minor exceptions, prices have continued to increase, not decrease.
Perry can do metal historicals at 6 models for 7GBP. Warlord do metal characters for their historicals lines for $3-4 each. (Historicals have no IP to protect, so arguably there is less 'development', I know, and more competition for like models, so that keeps prices down). So you can't tell me that the price of metals is such that they HAVE to use plastic. Other companies even do resin far cheaper than GW or FW. We are clearly paying what the market will bear, and for the IP.
I also don't see it changing. Of course, as a player of all kinds of miniature games, I'll also continue to buy GW, but at a waaaay lesser rate than I did, and I have way more disposable income now.
With re: to comparing to other companies, with Jean D'Arc as an example, I have all kinds of Jean models from different sculptors, and I wouldn't buy the Infinity one, it looks odd to me. So, as a personal preference I wouldn't spend my money on it, there is no value for me. And that's the way cost and comparison discussions will always go.
I dunno direct shipment of metal models could be a problem since they seem to do quite a lot of direct sales and ship quite a lot of product around different gw stores.
it may seem small but that gak adds up.
Not sure about historical and their logistical issues.
So, compare Corvus Belli's Joan D'Arc with GW's Kharn the betrayer and weep as you realise just how blatantly overpriced GW's products are.
Ya know
just seeing the minimarket sale.
just took a look at those bat man models.
they are single figures in metal with fantastic sculpts that are 20$ per model.
The funny thing is that those figures still only come to £14.50, which is far cheaper than the supposedly 'cheap material' Kharn, and they look far better.
This named character mini, sculpted to insane levels of detailing and skill, an utter beauty to behold, the most recent and up to date figure in her line, will cost me £7.00, and it comes with an alternative head option. She is also metal.
Eventually we find our (relatively) recently released named character unit in the form of the all new plastic Kharn the Betrayer. For the low, low, price of £22.00 you can own a cartoonishly sculpted Kharn that tries to gloss over the poorly sculpted detail with vast amounts of excess bling and gribbly bits that add nothing to the overall model, save to hopefully distract you from how the 'hair' on the tassels took more like fins, or how the grill texturing is so thick and clunky. And to be honest, Kharn is one of the better releases since they moved over to this new style.
Soooo...We have model that's cheap in small quantities due to material vs model that is expensive in small quantities due to material and top of that model you have little reason to buy more than 1 which just limits on number of copies GW is expecting to sell...
This is why GW shouldn't use plastic for everything.
Quality of sculpt is another subject but it's totally unrealistic for the Kharn to be equally priced as the Joan. That would be GW doing loss quite likely. MAYBE work for generic loyal space marine special character(generic as in not chapter tied) but not for world eater special character.
The funny thing is that Plastic, along with FinecrapTM where both implemented to bring the costs of producing the figures down and to thus allow the models to be sold at a lower price, and yet for some weird reason the prices of GW's products continue to rise again and again. Kharn should, in theory, be pricing in at around £6 to £8 at the very most, though in all honesty the detailing is not good enough to warrant that, but even so the material and production costs do not add up. Joan is a metal model, cast from a far more expensive substance in a process that is far more costly and using moulds that will wear out far faster and yet CB still manages to turn over a profit. Kharn is a plastic model, cast in a cheaper material using a cheaper production method and moulds that are far hardier and longer lasting, and yet he manages to come in at over 3 times the price? Something is most certainly wrong there.
You also pointed out that Kharn, as a named character, will not sell as many models as a generic HQ unit, a valid point I will give you that, and that this is a good enough excuse for him to price in at such a stupendous amount of money when compared to Joan. This is inherently wrong, once again Joan is also a named HQ for a subfaction of a faction (as is Kharn). She will not sell as well as, say, a Knight blister or a Remote pack, but still CB manages quite happily to turn over a profit with her and her far pricer production costs. So if the whole "named special snowflake" label is not a valid reason to hike the pricing on a single model up vastly then what is?
Cruentus wrote: The thing from my end of it, having come from DnD back in the 80s, is that those generic minis were a couple of bucks each, tops, and Bones is now in that market area - I just bought two amazing looking Pathfinder Battles Gnolls by Deep Cuts, pre primed grey, for $3.99. That was value for me, and I bought them just to paint them up.
By Wizkids. Deep Cuts is the product line name. Nolzur's Marvelous Unpainted Miniatures is the product line name for the D&D minis which the WizKids company makes.
I had no idea that they were pre-primed. How well are they cleaned? That sort of plastic can be a PITA to deal with. If it is the same plastic as the WizKids pre-paints.
So, compare Corvus Belli's Joan D'Arc with GW's Kharn the betrayer and weep as you realise just how blatantly overpriced GW's products are.
Ya know
just seeing the minimarket sale.
just took a look at those bat man models.
they are single figures in metal with fantastic sculpts that are 20$ per model.
The funny thing is that those figures still only come to £14.50, which is far cheaper than the supposedly 'cheap material' Kharn, and they look far better.
They're also licensed, so you're getting charged for the IP license, but Kharn (and Warhammer in general) is GW's own IP, thus no licensing costs, and still costs way more?
As can be expected, the comparison between models becomes far, far worse in Australia. Joan is $19, Batman miniatures are anywhere between $15 and $25 for a single named character, Malifaux I can buy special characters in plastic with far, far better sculpts for as low as $12 a model, almost all of which are a higher percentage of an actual list than a GW character (lowest comes to 10% of a standard list, but in terms of models it's usually 12% at the least, and cost wise it's 20% or higher)
What about Kharn? What does he cost? $60.
For the same price as him, I could buy a crew starter plus extras for Malifaux, Infinity or Batman and be able to comfortably play a game. Any of those options can get me unique, named special characters, and in the case of Batman they're superheroes that have 40+ years of established background and a well known IP, but the models themselves are still 30-50% of the cost of Kharn after licensing
This named character mini, sculpted to insane levels of detailing and skill, an utter beauty to behold, the most recent and up to date figure in her line, will cost me £7.00, and it comes with an alternative head option. She is also metal.
Eventually we find our (relatively) recently released named character unit in the form of the all new plastic Kharn the Betrayer. For the low, low, price of £22.00 you can own a cartoonishly sculpted Kharn that tries to gloss over the poorly sculpted detail with vast amounts of excess bling and gribbly bits that add nothing to the overall model, save to hopefully distract you from how the 'hair' on the tassels took more like fins, or how the grill texturing is so thick and clunky. And to be honest, Kharn is one of the better releases since they moved over to this new style.
Soooo...We have model that's cheap in small quantities due to material vs model that is expensive in small quantities due to material and top of that model you have little reason to buy more than 1 which just limits on number of copies GW is expecting to sell...
This is why GW shouldn't use plastic for everything.
It really shouldn't be causing prices to be that dramatically high.
Wyrd set up their boxes so that you'll never want to buy it more than once. If it's a model you can legally take more than once, they will usually (mostly old models don't do this, new models absolutely do) set up the amount in the box to be a bit more than you'd reasonably take in a normal game, so it's unlikely most people will actually ever field the whole contents let lone want to buy it again. If it's a model that has a specific maximum you can take, they will put that maximum in the box.
Their individual infantry sized characters are about 1/4 the cost of GW's, and their large boxes are at most the cost of a tactical squad. Again, for something you'll only ever buy once. They also outsource all of their mold tooling and production, which increases the cost compared to GW who do it in house and just pay wages.
GW set their prices as high as they do for several reasons. They have shareholders to appease (because Kirby spent over a decade telling them they were the Porsche of miniatures, so they can't drop the prices). They have a retail chain to sustain (there's a reason no one else does this). Basically any reason you can come up with for their prices being so high, they're either self inflicted or they know their customers are gullible.
It is up to the consumers to determine if they are getting value for their money and they will ultimately determine what prices GW charges and whether they stay in business. I assess the value of my gaming miniature purchases based on a number of factors including: how they look, how their "fluff" appeals to me, how they assemble/paint, how they play on the table top and, perhaps most importantly, how likely I am to play with them on the tabletop. Wonderfully detailed and cheap miniatures for a game that nobody plays are of very little value to me.
I will drop $30 CAD on a Dark Angels Lieutenant because he looks cool, his background appeals to me, he plays well and I will actually get to play him on the tabletop. I will not spend $15 CAD on a random Sci Fi game model regardless of how it looks or how much it is cheaper, because I will not play it. I know that I can go to a city in North America and Europe and find a game of 40K. That is wrapped up in the value for me.
I’d say £38,000,000 profit in six months has rathe pissed on your chips on that count....
GW had a pretty bad decade if you'll recall. One of the primary complaints was pricing; the other was the state of the rules. GW has apparently given a well-received rule set and given some discount starting boxes to address these concerns. However, the pricing issue is becoming ever more relevant with each new release. how many poor codex releases will it take for GW to reverse all their progress?
This is in a discussion about the market including cheaper competitors of equivalent quality, or at least a better value for price. GW's overhead, shareholders and branding requirements don't factor into the customer's comparison shopping.
This is very true, but what DOES factor into the comparison shopping is the IP and hype machine GW has built up over decades. Valuable IPs are by definition valuable and can therefore charge more.
To a degree, GW's product is more valuable because it's attached to a better IP people care more about. The hype machine costs money to run, which raises the price as well. The release schedule requires cash flow. And so on.
Even at GW prices it's still a cheap hobby, relatively speaking. Yes, you can spend less going with other company's products, if you're very price sensitive. I can't bring myself to pay $45 CAN for a single 32mm character model either, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to abandon buying GW product entirely, it just means I'm going to be more selective.
That said, I backed a lot of miniature KS that I haven't painted much of once I got the product and was disappointed, so cheaper product doesn't necessarily mean good value either. The best value is the miniature you're excited to paint and play with, regardless of its source and/or cost. Mantic's Enforcers are cheaper than Space Marines, but I'd rather paint Space Marines.
I've had the opposite experience. GW has devalued their IP greatly in my eyes. I also have bought a lot of KS minis and minis from other manufacturers, but I have generally been satisfied with their quality and their utility.m even when I wanted to buy more GW minis, I had a hard time overcoming the opportunity cost because there were so many other minis that gave better perceived value than what GW offered.
I’d say £38,000,000 profit in six months has rathe pissed on your chips on that count....
GW had a pretty bad decade if you'll recall. One of the primary complaints was pricing; the other was the state of the rules. GW has apparently given a well-received rule set and given some discount starting boxes to address these concerns. However, the pricing issue is becoming ever more relevant with each new release. how many poor codex releases will it take for GW to reverse all their progress?
This is in a discussion about the market including cheaper competitors of equivalent quality, or at least a better value for price. GW's overhead, shareholders and branding requirements don't factor into the customer's comparison shopping.
This is very true, but what DOES factor into the comparison shopping is the IP and hype machine GW has built up over decades. Valuable IPs are by definition valuable and can therefore charge more.
To a degree, GW's product is more valuable because it's attached to a better IP people care more about. The hype machine costs money to run, which raises the price as well. The release schedule requires cash flow. And so on.
Even at GW prices it's still a cheap hobby, relatively speaking. Yes, you can spend less going with other company's products, if you're very price sensitive. I can't bring myself to pay $45 CAN for a single 32mm character model either, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to abandon buying GW product entirely, it just means I'm going to be more selective.
That said, I backed a lot of miniature KS that I haven't painted much of once I got the product and was disappointed, so cheaper product doesn't necessarily mean good value either. The best value is the miniature you're excited to paint and play with, regardless of its source and/or cost. Mantic's Enforcers are cheaper than Space Marines, but I'd rather paint Space Marines.
I've had the opposite experience. GW has devalued their IP greatly in my eyes. I also have bought a lot of KS minis and minis from other manufacturers, but I have generally been satisfied with their quality and their utility.m even when I wanted to buy more GW minis, I had a hard time overcoming the opportunity cost because there were so many other minis that gave better perceived value than what GW offered.
I often think discussions like this are filled with a lack of understanding between the different parties.
I don't think that's the fault of either party in the discussion.
They simply are involved in different hobbies. Ones a general Wargamer the other a GW collector/painter/player.
The price (or quality) of other systems to the GW fan is a complete irrelevance. You might as well be offering them a price comparison with a fishing rod.
The funny thing is that Plastic, along with FinecrapTM where both implemented to bring the costs of producing the figures down and to thus allow the models to be sold at a lower price, and yet for some weird reason the prices of GW's products continue to rise again and again. Kharn should, in theory, be pricing in at around £6 to £8 at the very most, though in all honesty the detailing is not good enough to warrant that, but even so the material and production costs do not add up. Joan is a metal model, cast from a far more expensive substance in a process that is far more costly and using moulds that will wear out far faster and yet CB still manages to turn over a profit. Kharn is a plastic model, cast in a cheaper material using a cheaper production method and moulds that are far hardier and longer lasting, and yet he manages to come in at over 3 times the price? Something is most certainly wrong there.
You also pointed out that Kharn, as a named character, will not sell as many models as a generic HQ unit, a valid point I will give you that, and that this is a good enough excuse for him to price in at such a stupendous amount of money when compared to Joan. This is inherently wrong, once again Joan is also a named HQ for a subfaction of a faction (as is Kharn). She will not sell as well as, say, a Knight blister or a Remote pack, but still CB manages quite happily to turn over a profit with her and her far pricer production costs. So if the whole "named special snowflake" label is not a valid reason to hike the pricing on a single model up vastly then what is?
Yes plastic costs less than metal but molds cost crapload more than metal molds that are basically free. Metal is CHEAPER than plastic for small print runs. How hard this simple concept is to grasp? If you have print run of 100 models metal is LOT CHEAPER than plastic to produce. Plastic is cheap for stuff you sell tons. Basic troops. The stuff you expect to sell many many many boxes to single customer and preferably to many many customers. Maybe even needing more than 1 sprue per box. It comes very expensive however when you sell only 1 sprue per customer. Which isn't even for every customer you have(world eater model isn't going to be of interest to imperium, eldar, tau, tyranid, ork or even many chaos players).
Joan is made of metal DESIGNED for small print runs(like special characters) while Kharn is from matel that is pretty much designed to be anti-small print runs. Joan costs LESS to produce than Kharn. Surprise surprise it costs less. Even if GW didn't put any GW extra Joan would cost less. Unless GW somehow like 100x their customer base.
If you can sell few dozen Joan's you have recoupped production expenses basically. Designer's salary of course is another thing. Few hundred's wouldn't even make notable dent in production expenses(salary of designer excluded) of Kharn...
The funny thing is that Plastic, along with FinecrapTM where both implemented to bring the costs of producing the figures down and to thus allow the models to be sold at a lower price, and yet for some weird reason the prices of GW's products continue to rise again and again. Kharn should, in theory, be pricing in at around £6 to £8 at the very most, though in all honesty the detailing is not good enough to warrant that, but even so the material and production costs do not add up. Joan is a metal model, cast from a far more expensive substance in a process that is far more costly and using moulds that will wear out far faster and yet CB still manages to turn over a profit. Kharn is a plastic model, cast in a cheaper material using a cheaper production method and moulds that are far hardier and longer lasting, and yet he manages to come in at over 3 times the price? Something is most certainly wrong there.
You also pointed out that Kharn, as a named character, will not sell as many models as a generic HQ unit, a valid point I will give you that, and that this is a good enough excuse for him to price in at such a stupendous amount of money when compared to Joan. This is inherently wrong, once again Joan is also a named HQ for a subfaction of a faction (as is Kharn). She will not sell as well as, say, a Knight blister or a Remote pack, but still CB manages quite happily to turn over a profit with her and her far pricer production costs. So if the whole "named special snowflake" label is not a valid reason to hike the pricing on a single model up vastly then what is?
Yes plastic costs less than metal but molds cost crapload more than metal molds that are basically free. Metal is CHEAPER than plastic for small print runs. How hard this simple concept is to grasp? If you have print run of 100 models metal is LOT CHEAPER than plastic to produce. Plastic is cheap for stuff you sell tons. Basic troops. The stuff you expect to sell many many many boxes to single customer and preferably to many many customers. Maybe even needing more than 1 sprue per box. It comes very expensive however when you sell only 1 sprue per customer. Which isn't even for every customer you have(world eater model isn't going to be of interest to imperium, eldar, tau, tyranid, ork or even many chaos players).
Joan is made of metal DESIGNED for small print runs(like special characters) while Kharn is from matel that is pretty much designed to be anti-small print runs. Joan costs LESS to produce than Kharn. Surprise surprise it costs less. Even if GW didn't put any GW extra Joan would cost less. Unless GW somehow like 100x their customer base.
If you can sell few dozen Joan's you have recoupped production expenses basically. Designer's salary of course is another thing. Few hundred's wouldn't even make notable dent in production expenses(salary of designer excluded) of Kharn...
Which raises the question why GW decided to produce single-pose character models in hard-plastic?
Convenience would be my guess. Same model design platform and rapid prototyping type affair. If a Studio Member can design Mook Squad #39583, they can design a special character.
It also suggests something about their confidence in their sales volumes. Only suggests though, not as if I or anyone else outside of GW's bean counters would have any actual data on that.
Cruentus wrote: I took my son to an LGS, as he wanted to buy some models with his allowance and holiday money. His words: "GW miniatures sure are expensive." He is 8. He was most disappointed that he couldn't find anything "cool" in the $15 range. He still bought 2 characters, but I could tell it pained him. I can see him moving to historicals soon. LoL
The guy that runs my FLGS had the same criticism. He finds it hard to sell GW to the younger crowd because there's nothing in the 'pocket money price point' anymore. Used to be you could pick up a single character for $15au or a 2-3 miniature blister for $25-$30au, but now it's rare to find anything below $50au.
This. I dont but new gw stuff much anymore but i wanted to add to my eldar. I got a 25 USD gift card and went to the website. There was like almost nothing i could get. Especially because every single phoenix lord seems out of stock for the US. WTF you just released the codex?
For $25 you can get a lot from other companies. Plus i really like trying out other rules.
Haven’t read much of the convo to this point, apologies. I’ve simultaneously considered their prices a ripoff and yet still bought them for the past 20 years. The difference is that for the past few years I only buy stuff above $30 U.S. from eBay, used (~50% off) or new at a discount.
I’m a bit of a fool, I suppose, as even with (or because of) the discounts, I have so many unassembled models, it’s ridiculous. I don’t really care for other companies’ products, and don’t play AoS or any other GW games. 40k is and will probably always be my only interest, wargaming-wise.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Convenience would be my guess. Same model design platform and rapid prototyping type affair. If a Studio Member can design Mook Squad #39583, they can design a special character.
Up to a point, the process is the same regardless of the medium. The difference comes when the prototype is used to either make a silicon mould or is designed down into pieces and arranged on a sprue to be machined into a die. AFAIK that step is usually something done by a skilled specialist who knows what will and won't work, not by the designer, although I'll concede it's possible GW do it differently given its mostly in house.
It also suggests something about their confidence in their sales volumes. Only suggests though, not as if I or anyone else outside of GW's bean counters would have any actual data on that.
Do you mean it suggests a lack of confidence? Because given unit costs fall with volume in plastic, if they were confident of volume they might be less sharp in their pricing.
JohnHwangDD wrote:For small model production runs, I look at Kingdom Death: $25 per model, in resin, with fantastic detail. 35mm true scale, to boot!
Compared to GW, seems like KD is very fairly priced.
Tho I can't get free shipping to a local KD store, so there is that.
Overlooking your rabid attempts to shoe horn KD plugs into every possible post you're absolutely right. Outside of the GW eco system, the prices they charge are equivalent to the most boutique, most exclusive models from small producers, but their quality is equivalent, in the main, to the broader mass market product.
As already covered, it's generally accepted that it's cheaper to do metal or resin for low volume sales. Whilst you will eventually need to replace the molds, they're still a fraction of the cost of a steel cut die for plastic.
That GW feel they can sell enough, say, Kharn The Betrayers to cough up for a plastic sculpt suggests they're confident they can at least break even. And I used a named character specifically there because, in the grand scheme of things, you're most likely to sell only one to each collector, on account they can only ever field one. Whilst some might buy multiple because a) they just really really like it b) they use it for conversions c) they're a bit touched in the head d) Insert Reason Here, they're likely a comparative minority.
Whether they then sell them for £8, £18 or £88 is ultimately down to good ol' capitalism. And anyone thinking their competitors offer some kind of 'ethical' prices is fooling themselves!
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Convenience would be my guess. Same model design platform and rapid prototyping type affair. If a Studio Member can design Mook Squad #39583, they can design a special character.
It also suggests something about their confidence in their sales volumes. Only suggests though, not as if I or anyone else outside of GW's bean counters would have any actual data on that.
I think it has a lot to do with the fact that lots of gamers don't like working with metal miniatures.
Plastic is easy to clean up and generally has far smaller mold lines, and the models are designed to be easier to clean by virtue of the casting process (i.e. the mold line will always be on the outside edge that's easy to reach). With metal (and resin), this just isn't the case. The flexible molds affords great freedom to the sculptor, but if there's any mold slip in casting, the end customer is in for some serious PITA cleanup.
So I can see someone spending $30 on a plastic character where they could get $15 metal characters from some other game/line that might be superior in detail, but be a much bigger time/effort sink to clean and prep. Those sorts of folks tend to value time over money, because they have more free time with money - so yeah, GW is catering to customers with lots of disposable income.
Wolf_in_Human_Shape wrote: Haven’t read much of the convo to this point, apologies. I’ve simultaneously considered their prices a ripoff and yet still bought them for the past 20 years. The difference is that for the past few years I only buy stuff above $30 U.S. from eBay, used (~50% off) or new at a discount.
I’m a bit of a fool, I suppose, as even with (or because of) the discounts, I have so many unassembled models, it’s ridiculous. I don’t really care for other companies’ products, and don’t play AoS or any other GW games. 40k is and will probably always be my only interest, wargaming-wise.
Like I said above this is the reason why discussions like these are hard to reconcile. People aren't arguing from different sides of the same hooby. They are arguing from the perspective of different hobbies.
Wolf_in_Human_Shape wrote: Haven’t read much of the convo to this point, apologies. I’ve simultaneously considered their prices a ripoff and yet still bought them for the past 20 years. The difference is that for the past few years I only buy stuff above $30 U.S. from eBay, used (~50% off) or new at a discount.
I’m a bit of a fool, I suppose, as even with (or because of) the discounts, I have so many unassembled models, it’s ridiculous. I don’t really care for other companies’ products, and don’t play AoS or any other GW games. 40k is and will probably always be my only interest, wargaming-wise.
Like I said above this is the reason why discussions like these are hard to reconcile. People aren't arguing from different sides of the same hooby. They are arguing from the perspective of different hobbies.
Though it is generally only perceived as a different hobby by the GW hobbiests.
Wargamers do not see them as separate hobbies at all. (Because, really, they aren't, at least if the main reason a given hobbyist is buying the minis is to play the game. Collectors are a whole different kettle of fish.)
GWis finally starting to have decent rules again - even when I disagree strongly with how they market them.*
My hope, if not yet an expectation, is that as sales improve, the price of the miniatures will start to decrease.
But it is a delicate balancing act - drop the prices too early, or too fast, and you have cash flow problems.
Wait too long, or increase prices too far, and you suffer from the same drop in sales that GW is finally starting to recover from.
The Auld Grump
* I really, really wanted to jump in on the new Necromunda, but chopping the releases up the way they have means that I will be getting the minis - slowly - but skipping the new game for at least a year.
What they have for the new version is fine - it is the way that they have chopped up the releases that has me choking.Which is a damn shame - as I said, what they have is fine, and does a nice job of fleshing out the setting.
*EDIT* And, to be fair - because GW was kind enough to let folks continue to host the old Necromunda rules online, I don't have to upgrade the rules - which means that I can focus on getting the miniatures - which I do consider a great improvement on the older models, and a heck of a lot easier to modify. Overall - I think that the game is going in the right direction, it is only the way the rules are being broken down that annoys the hell out of me. Consider it a 7, when it could have been a 9.
Azreal13 wrote:Up to a point, the process is the same regardless of the medium. The difference comes when the prototype is used to either make a silicon mould or is designed down into pieces and arranged on a sprue to be machined into a die. AFAIK that step is usually something done by a skilled specialist who knows what will and won't work, not by the designer, although I'll concede it's possible GW do it differently given its mostly in house.
If I remember correctly they have software that helps and automates the sprue arranging process to a degree (that's why the cuts of individual dynamic character pieces look a bit odd). And their setup is rather simple, no undercuts that need side actions or other complicated stuff. And they can also use aluminium instead of steel (quicker and cheaper but less robust, depending on treatment) for miniatures that they don't expect to sell too well.
GW works at a scale where I can't really see pre-production cost (concept design, CAD, mould making) being a significant factor in their per box price, no matter how bad an individual box sells.
JohnHwangDD wrote:For small model production runs, I look at Kingdom Death: $25 per model, in resin, with fantastic detail. 35mm true scale, to boot!
Compared to GW, seems like KD is very fairly priced.
Tho I can't get free shipping to a local KD store, so there is that.
Overlooking your rabid attempts to shoe horn KD plugs into every possible post you're absolutely right. Outside of the GW eco system, the prices they charge are equivalent to the most boutique, most exclusive models from small producers, but their quality is equivalent, in the main, to the broader mass market product.
Psh. The only reason I bring up KD is because I have some understanding of them for comparison purposes. I suppose I could have gone with Arena Rex just as easily - those sculpts are very nice, but I'm not sure how they price out, so I can't make the value case.
Besides, you're far too charitable to GW - compared with a KD figure, GW's Kharne is an obviously inferior sculpt at a higher price point.
lord_blackfang wrote: You guys aren't even thinking with portals. GW could just put a monopose character on every regular troop sprue. Bingo bongo, you've got half a dozen different poses per faction pretty fast. You'd end up throwing most of them away but you do that with superfluous guns anyway.
Back to prices in gneral, the price of a cinema ticket is 6 times what it was in 91, GW seems on par or better.
I can't speak to where you live, but in the US a movie ticket in 1991 averaged $4.21, and now it averages $9.18, so you're off by an order of magnitude. If you adjust for inflation, movie ticket prices have remained essentially static for around 30 years, which is a pretty far cry from the land raider that was $50 when I started playing selling for $75 just a few years later - I want to say it jumped to that about 4 years after I started. It's not even the worst example, just the one that comes most readily to mind.
At one point IIRC in one of the stockholder reports a few years back, they said something about having found the upper bounds of price elasticity. It turned out that was pretty far from true, judging by the last 2 or 3 years.
lord_blackfang wrote: You guys aren't even thinking with portals. GW could just put a monopose character on every regular troop sprue. Bingo bongo, you've got half a dozen different poses per faction pretty fast. You'd end up throwing most of them away but you do that with superfluous guns anyway.
Back to prices in gneral, the price of a cinema ticket is 6 times what it was in 91, GW seems on par or better.
I can't speak to where you live, but in the US a movie ticket in 1991 averaged $4.21, and now it averages $9.18, so you're off by an order of magnitude. If you adjust for inflation, movie ticket prices have remained essentially static for around 30 years, which is a pretty far cry from the land raider that was $50 when I started playing selling for $75 just a few years later - I want to say it jumped to that about 4 years after I started. It's not even the worst example, just the one that comes most readily to mind.
At one point IIRC in one of the stockholder reports a few years back, they said something about having found the upper bounds of price elasticity. It turned out that was pretty far from true, judging by the last 2 or 3 years.
I tried to price comparison a Land Raider last year to other kits produced by other makers at the same scale.
Closest I could get to its price was a World War One British Mark IV tank from one of the leading scale model manufacturers. This kit came with fully articulated tracks, brass gun barrels and photo etched parts. To get near the Land Raider price I added a motor and RC add-on that allowed to user to move the tank though a controller. The whole lot came in at less than the GW Land Raider.
At one point IIRC in one of the stockholder reports a few years back, they said something about having found the upper bounds of price elasticity. It turned out that was pretty far from true, judging by the last 2 or 3 years.
That pretty much says it all, though. They wanted to see how far they could push the price of things, rather than seeing what price brought in the most sales revenue. IMO that's not good thinking, because it assumes that the customer will buy the same amount until they stop buying entirely, which really isn't the case. More likely they spend less overall and start exploring other options, padding their existing armies rather than starting new ones, and spending the 'new army money' on different game companies.
Keeping your customers is important, because getting new customers costs a lot of money - this is true in every industry!
Pricing what the market will bear is smart business, as it allows them to optimize their position on the sales volume / price curve, without having to wonder whether they're leaving any money on the table (they're not). Producing slightly fewer items for higher overall revenue results in the highest possible net profit. This is common practice with every other luxury good like watches, jewelry, purses and women's clothing. It also applies to housing rental and airline tickets, where it's generally better to extract higher revenue even if you give up several low-/non-profit sales.
As a consumer, it's easy to choose whether to buy or not. In my case, I have slowly, but surely, sold off my GW backlog at a good price and basically stopped buying.
JohnHwangDD wrote: Pricing what the market will bear is smart business, as it allows them to optimize their position on the sales volume / price curve, without having to wonder whether they're leaving any money on the table (they're not). Producing slightly fewer items for higher overall revenue results in the highest possible net profit. This is common practice with every other luxury good like watches, jewelry, purses and women's clothing. It also applies to housing rental and airline tickets, where it's generally better to extract higher revenue even if you give up several low-/non-profit sales.
As a consumer, it's easy to choose whether to buy or not. In my case, I have slowly, but surely, sold off my GW backlog at a good price and basically stopped buying.
Somebody once said the end game for GW would be selling a ten foot high solid gold Space Marine a year to some kid from Dubai.
not sure if this has already been mentioned but has anyone factored in the cost of producing the moulds? the actual moulds for injection moulding are expensive to produce and with the case of the clam pack characters people are only likely to buy one of them and not everyone is going to buy one, GW have to factor this in which is why they are much more expensive due to this much more limited window for sales and the fact that they still have to cover the costs of producing the moulds, paying the designers etc.
that said those generic primaris characters prices are absurd for what they are, especially when compared to the prices of the primaris lieutenants that were released for the BA and DA.
It's been mentioned. Quite often. It's expensive, but not as expensive as some have made it out to be. Moreover, some of the kits are years old, the costs of their mould would have long since been made back (Land Raider I'm looking at you!).
You can fit 10 of those clampack figure frames in one mold plate. Need a comparison? Find some of the old Marine plastics. Jump Marines, Tacticals, whatever. Each Marine was its own little sprue connected to a bigger sprue. Slap 10 character models to 1 pressing and you shave down tooling design costs significantly. It'd shock me if they DON'T press them out like that.
Just Tony wrote: You can fit 10 of those clampack figure frames in one mold plate. Need a comparison? Find some of the old Marine plastics. Jump Marines, Tacticals, whatever. Each Marine was its own little sprue connected to a bigger sprue. Slap 10 character models to 1 pressing and you shave down tooling design costs significantly. It'd shock me if they DON'T press them out like that.
It doesn't really save on tooling costs. Bigger moulds require more machining and thus are more expensive.
It would just let them cast models faster by being able to punch out several models in a single casting. It doesn't look like they do though, models cast in bunches usually have an ugly bit of runner hanging off the side where it was broken away from the batch - current GW character models don't seem to have that.
It might be that they have smaller casting machines for smaller castings like characters and bigger casting machines for doing the big sprues on baneblades and whatnot.
I meant as far as having separate plates for each character.
Without touring their plant, I have NO IDEA what machines they use for injection molding. However, most machines are set up to only run a narrow width of sizes, so I assume that they may have about 4 or 5 plate sizes available, unless theirs is a machine that can adjust the plate mountings for the molds to take multiple sizes.
if you've got to the point where you're playing games that are large enough in scale to warrant use of the skyrunner council I think £100 is going to seem like nothing to you.
Brotherjulian wrote: I'm still dipping my toes in the water so to speak with 8th edition 40k. It seems promising but I have to wonder if I'm just throwing more money down the hole. I get enraged with them pulling the rug out from under me every few years and making me buy new stuff again. (Been in this game 23 years) So I'm into 8th ed now for the Dark Imperium set, as well as codexes for Space Marines, Blood Angels, Eldar, Chaos Marines, and Imperial Guard. Also a few boxes of Primaris guys, because they're good at getting my money.
What really got me though was the prices for individual plastic character models. I paid like $30 for a single BA jump pack chaplain. I work around the plastic industry and believe me, it isn't 30 cents worth of material.
I came home and was putting stuff away when I came across one of my EBay purchases from awhile back. A rogue trader/2nd edition metal techmarine, still in the blister pack. There's also an Imperial commisar in the same pack for some reason.
The 90s price tag for this model? $5.50
I'm not saying they should give em away but it's hard not to feel a little bit angry. I swear there are less expensive drug habits I could take up.
Really... You work around the plastic industry? What part of it? Let me guess; judging by your nescient comment... Raw material supplier. FYI; there's quite a bit more to it than just the cost of the plastic material.
Straight to assumptions that the OP has no idea what he is talking about and aggressive douchebaggery and open doubt. Impressive.
Glasdir wrote: if you've got to the point where you're playing games that are large enough in scale to warrant use of the skyrunner council I think £100 is going to seem like nothing to you.
Careful that you don't spill that giant 7-Eleven mega mug of GW Kool Aid. The primary determinate of MSRP (or RRP for brits) of those particular space elves with spears on jetbikes compared with other almost identical in size, shape, and detail space elves with spears on jetbikes shouldn't be fluff IMO.
Dysartes wrote: Out of interest, would anyone who works in the industry mind confirming roughly what, in 2017 it costs to tool a single mould for plastic sprues?
One doesn't even need to work in the industry. Just look at the SJG Ogre Miniatures Set 2 Kickstarter, along with the current Dream Pod 9 Utopia Kickstarter. It's quite a bit less than $30k for a large tool. I suspect a single character tool is under $5k.
JohnHwangDD wrote: Pricing what the market will bear is smart business,.
Finding the sweet spot where price and sales volume align for maximum profit is smarter business. Now, if GW is at the point where they literally can't make more sales than they are capable of producing product, then ratcheting up prices makes sense (ignoring their current production problems, which are temporary).
JohnHwangDD wrote: Pricing what the market will bear is smart business, as it allows them to optimize their position on the sales volume / price curve, without having to wonder whether they're leaving any money on the table (they're not). Producing slightly fewer items for higher overall revenue results in the highest possible net profit. This is common practice with every other luxury good like watches, jewelry, purses and women's clothing. It also applies to housing rental and airline tickets, where it's generally better to extract higher revenue even if you give up several low-/non-profit sales.
As a consumer, it's easy to choose whether to buy or not. In my case, I have slowly, but surely, sold off my GW backlog at a good price and basically stopped buying.
The approach you describe has lead to a boom in the industry of writing articles about why millennials are killing the economy by not buying stuff any more.
Glasdir wrote: if you've got to the point where you're playing games that are large enough in scale to warrant use of the skyrunner council I think £100 is going to seem like nothing to you.
Careful that you don't spill that giant 7-Eleven mega mug of GW Kool Aid. The primary determinate of MSRP (or RRP for brits) of those particular space elves with spears on jetbikes compared with other almost identical in size, shape, and detail space elves with spears on jetbikes shouldn't be fluff IMO.
not sure you've quite understood what I was saying. that box set is entirely character models which do already sell for higher prices, in order to use all those models in a game you will have to be playing a very large game (at least 3000pts at the bare minimum) otherwise you wont be able to actually take them in a game legal detachment. In order to be playing such large games you'd have had to have spent a lot of money on your army already to make up the rest of it at which point spending £100 isn't going to seem like much to the person buying it as they will have already spend far more than that buying the rest of their army. microtransaction based games also have these people as well and you may well have heard them referred to by the term "whales" https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/63lvak/what_is_a_whale/
Glasdir wrote: if you've got to the point where you're playing games that are large enough in scale to warrant use of the skyrunner council I think £100 is going to seem like nothing to you.
Careful that you don't spill that giant 7-Eleven mega mug of GW Kool Aid. The primary determinate of MSRP (or RRP for brits) of those particular space elves with spears on jetbikes compared with other almost identical in size, shape, and detail space elves with spears on jetbikes shouldn't be fluff IMO.
not sure you've quite understood what I was saying. that box set is entirely character models which do already sell for higher prices, in order to use all those models in a game you will have to be playing a very large game (at least 3000pts at the bare minimum) otherwise you wont be able to actually take them in a game legal detachment. In order to be playing such large games you'd have had to have spent a lot of money on your army already to make up the rest of it at which point spending £100 isn't going to seem like much to the person buying it as they will have already spend far more than that buying the rest of their army. microtransaction based games also have these people as well and you may well have heard them referred to by the term "whales" https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/63lvak/what_is_a_whale/
Ok, thanks for clarifying. I agree that it's more likely for those who have spent $3000 on a faction to buy it compared with those who spent $300 but my point was that the prime determinate of the price of the product shouldn't be its fictional backstory.
Who cares if they are characters or not. The point is they probably cost about £5 to produce. I would understand if they were assembled and painted, but when you spend £100 and then open the box to find a fivers worth of plastic, it's crazy.
It's even a rip off by their own standards. Sure there are 5 in this box set, but a box of 3 regular jet bikes is a mere £25.
How does producing these characters cost more than these exactly?
Sy2pie wrote: Who cares if they are characters or not. The point is they probably cost about £5 to produce. I would understand if they were assembled and painted, but when you spend £100 and then open the box to find a fivers worth of plastic, it's crazy.
It's even a rip off by their own standards. Sure there are 5 in this box set, but a box of 3 regular jet bikes is a mere £25.
How does producing these characters cost more than these exactly?
asides from potential man hours going into the actual 3d modeling, and extra work that goes into cutting up and properly making what could be a fairly complicated steel block probably not that much more than a normal unit.
and yet it ultimately doesn't matter, they decided to increase the price because they knew they wouldn't sell more than x amount of them so they are squeezing as much profit out of their investment as possible. that's just how characters work for them. and it seems that trend will continue as people still buy them.
Sy2pie wrote: Who cares if they are characters or not. The point is they probably cost about £5 to produce. I would understand if they were assembled and painted, but when you spend £100 and then open the box to find a fivers worth of plastic, it's crazy.
It's even a rip off by their own standards. Sure there are 5 in this box set, but a box of 3 regular jet bikes is a mere £25.
How does producing these characters cost more than these exactly?
I'll quote my initial post in this thread for you
Glasdir wrote: not sure if this has already been mentioned but has anyone factored in the cost of producing the molds? the actual molds for injection molding are expensive to produce and with the case of the clam pack characters people are only likely to buy one of them and not everyone is going to buy one, GW have to factor this in which is why they are much more expensive due to this much more limited window for sales and the fact that they still have to cover the costs of producing the molds, paying the designers etc. that said those generic primaris characters prices are absurd for what they are, especially when compared to the prices of the primaris lieutenants that were released for the BA and DA.
as I said, making the actual molds is very expensive, sure the material cost is cheap but they have to make back the cost of the mold as well which is significantly higher than that of the materials, they also have to cover the costs of store staff wages, delivery and designer wages. The fact that these are character models means that people are probably only likely to buy a couple at most and not everyone who buys 40k stuff is gonna buy eldar and not everyone who buys eldar is going to want a jetbike farseer, this means they aren't going to sell as well as something like a box of troops (something which every eldar player needs) meaning that they have to put the prices up on them otherwise they'd lose money on the clampack models and would have to either stop producing them or make them in limited runs so that they can generate hype about them being limited in order to sell them and make the money back instantly rather than very slowly over time, neither of which is good. That box set is a remnant of when we still had the godawful formations of 7th, those were created entirely to solve the problem of models not selling. the formations were given OP rules to appeal to the aforementioned whales who would buy them in order to win. This ensured that those models got sold in order to make back their production costs.
Sy2pie wrote: Who cares if they are characters or not. The point is they probably cost about £5 to produce. I would understand if they were assembled and painted, but when you spend £100 and then open the box to find a fivers worth of plastic, it's crazy.
It's even a rip off by their own standards. Sure there are 5 in this box set, but a box of 3 regular jet bikes is a mere £25.
How does producing these characters cost more than these exactly?
asides from potential man hours going into the actual 3d modeling, and extra work that goes into cutting up and properly making what could be a fairly complicated steel block probably not that much more than a normal unit.
and yet it ultimately doesn't matter, they decided to increase the price because they knew they wouldn't sell more than x amount of them so they are squeezing as much profit out of their investment as possible. that's just how characters work for them. and it seems that trend will continue as people still buy them.
We know it's possible to sell a single hard plastic 30mm model for around $12 because Malifaux exists. It's not the cost of the mould. It must be more of your second point. I just wonder how many people decide not to buy primaris marine units or a box of plague drones or the new great unclean one due to the cost of the characters.
Just to make a couple of counters in regards to some points that have been made without having to mess around with and edit a ruddy great quote tree..
- GW have their own equipment in house, to my knowledge every other, or nearly every other, model maker working in plastic contracts somebody else to do their manufacturing, who in turn will be looking to make a profit from that process. As a consequence, irrespective of how much a die costs to machine, GW are almost certainly paying substantially less than any competitor.
- not for the first time in this thread, we know the amount GW spends on manufacturing and development of product, both in real cash terms and as an easily calcuated percentage of their income (and subsequently, a percentage of the RRP.) So how expensive the dies are in real cash terms isn't really an issue, we know that the whole expenditure of producing and making models is around a quarter of their income, dies, machining time, designing, plastic, the whole shebang. It's right there in the financials.
- GW have their creative staff largely on salary, meaning that there is no increased financial cost for spending longer on a more detailed or larger model. There is an opportunity cost in that a creative working in one project won't be able to do something else simultaneously, but equally GW have more people in their studio than anyone else, so this is mitigated.
What always bugged me the most is like Azreal13 says, other companies can do the same hard plastic sprue kits like GW does, often (always?) contracting out to someone like WGF or Renedra or whomever (so paying a fee to them) and still often give more models than GW, often with the same general level of quality (aesthetics are subjective of course; Bolt Action models have the same level of detail if not more than GW models, but aren't sci-fi 40k visuals), at less price.
Well, it has been a while. I was going to say some stuff about the relative points of inhouse production and the like, but Azreal has me covered.
Back to Kharn though, in all honesty even if he is a 'limited run' by GW standards he will still cost a lot less to produce than Joan over all. And if the plastic really does cost that bit more for a run of his size then why have GW not cast him in metal?
It really does, as another poster put it, seem to be the GW people whom consider GW's products to be 'out side' the hobby, whereas everyone else just regards it as one and the same.
My personal theory on why plastic is simply they're still GW and still risk averse (albeit less self defeatingly than they were under Kirbett.) Metal, especially in the sort of volumes they'd need, does still remain volatile as a raw material cost, and resin, as Finecast will have shown them and pretty much everyone else knew already, isn't really suitable as a mass volume product. They also both have much more stringent QC requirements due to the degradation of moulds, curing times etc.
Plastic has none of these issues, one can reliably turn out sprue after sprue of near perfect product with minimal human intervention, the only drawback being the significantly higher set up costs, and if you've got a customer base that will stump up a high enough price at retail to allow you to very quickly recover those costs and start making an enormous gross margin, that ceases to be any sort of a drawback.
If the customer base were more price sensitive, they'd be forced to adjust their approach, but while enough people remain happy to put their hands in their pockets, GW will continue to do what suits them best and charge whatever they need to to realise that.
Personally I do wonder whether we're in somewhat of a honeymoon period and whether there may be a backlash on the horizon, but given the growth recently, it'll have to be the mother of all backlashes to slow them down any.
I'm surprised to see so much discussion of costs in this thread, cost based pricing is quite an old fashioned way of doing things imo.
I'm sure GW use a value based pricing method based on leveraging their great brand recognition and market share. Therefore I would expect them to be more expensive than the smaller companies who are trying to gain market share and brand recognition.
Where I work we say that if the customer isn't complaining about the price then you aren't charging enough, so I'm sure the boffins at GW towers would love this thread!
JohnHwangDD wrote: Pricing what the market will bear is smart business,.
Finding the sweet spot where price and sales volume align for maximum profit is smarter business. Now, if GW is at the point where they literally can't make more sales than they are capable of producing product, then ratcheting up prices makes sense (ignoring their current production problems, which are temporary).
GW is almost certainly at the point where they can't sell any more stuff at their current price levels, and it appears they are doing just fine on profits. GW ratchets up prices, and sees how they sell. If it's slow, they simply wait until the market catches up with the price. Not a big deal.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Azreal13 wrote: - GW have their own equipment in house, to my knowledge every other, or nearly every other, model maker working in plastic contracts somebody else to do their manufacturing, who in turn will be looking to make a profit from that process. As a consequence, irrespective of how much a die costs to machine, GW are almost certainly paying substantially less than any competitor.
GW needs to generate a profit on that invested capital, and it's possible that a 3rd party manufacturer works at a lower net margin.
And this is what is quickly turning me off from the hobby.
It seems a lot of 8th was designed around how to get existing players to spend more money and how to get new players into the game and then have them spend even more money.
The intro boxes are full of mediocre models that are easy enough to use but require more models to make a really well rounded force.
Most of the models that I own as a SM player are really no longer competitive so those of us who have been in the hobby for 20 years can't just plunk down our existing armies but need to tool up with the new hotness (I'm not going to go buy 3 fire-raptors and my termies, vanguard vets, stern guard, grav, drop pods, Land raider, Templars don't see the table and now my razorbacks are hitting the shelf after CA and with ITC champion missions...)
I'm starting to feel exploited rather than excited (CA seemed a very thinly veiled cash grab to sell more primaris and punch FW in the sensitive bits while it ignored most of the balance issues) and with GW promising to keep changing the rules to keep the registers ringing rather than balance the game I feel like a fool to keep supporting their business...
bananathug wrote: And this is what is quickly turning me off from the hobby.
It seems a lot of 8th was designed around how to get existing players to spend more money and how to get new players into the game and then have them spend even more money.
The intro boxes are full of mediocre models that are easy enough to use but require more models to make a really well rounded force.
Most of the models that I own as a SM player are really no longer competitive so those of us who have been in the hobby for 20 years can't just plunk down our existing armies but need to tool up with the new hotness (I'm not going to go buy 3 fire-raptors and my termies, vanguard vets, stern guard, grav, drop pods, Land raider, Templars don't see the table and now my razorbacks are hitting the shelf after CA and with ITC champion missions...)
I'm starting to feel exploited rather than excited (CA seemed a very thinly veiled cash grab to sell more primaris and punch FW in the sensitive bits while it ignored most of the balance issues) and with GW promising to keep changing the rules to keep the registers ringing rather than balance the game I feel like a fool to keep supporting their business...
Wait really?
a company needing to get new blood to survive and get veteran players to buy things when often times they wont as they already have a completed army is a bad thing?
Azreal13 wrote: - GW have their own equipment in house, to my knowledge every other, or nearly every other, model maker working in plastic contracts somebody else to do their manufacturing, who in turn will be looking to make a profit from that process. As a consequence, irrespective of how much a die costs to machine, GW are almost certainly paying substantially less than any competitor.
GW needs to generate a profit on that invested capital, and it's possible that a 3rd party manufacturer works at a lower net margin.
I'm not sure I agree, even so, ultimately the profit on the capital is just money on paper, it doesn't really exist and is just an accounting conceit, it isn't even like GW has "GW Machining Ltd" as a subsidiary to muck about with taxation.
I'd be more inclined towards the cost of the equipment being amortized and written off against tax over treated as profit making investment, and I expect the proof one way or another is in the financial report, but I don't have the enthusiasm to go looking.
The idea of a model "making back its production costs" is a very narrow and incorrect way of looking at the situation. Whether or not a particular model earns a profit is irrelevant, what matters is if GW as a whole makes a profit. To analyze the success of a product line you have to look at the product line as a single unit and ignore its various components. For example, it's ok if a space marine HQ kit makes less profit (or even loses money!) if that HQ is a necessary component in the space marine army and helps to drive sales of the product line as a whole. It's why you can't take things to an extreme and discontinue everything but the single kit that has the highest profits, nobody is going to play a game of 40k where the only model is the space marine tactical squad box. You have to maintain a certain level of diversity in the 40k product line to keep the game interesting and appealing, even if it means investing in specific kits that are individually less profitable.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Also, in analyzing per-unit profit vs. sales volume don't forget that GW is not a normal business. They aren't just selling a product in a one-time transaction like many businesses, they're selling a social hobby that depends on having a certain critical mass of market share to maintain its existence. A box of space marines has essentially zero value if you don't have anyone to play 40k with. This means that doubling their per-unit profit at the cost of halving their market share would be suicide, it would likely start a death spiral where finding people to play 40k with gets harder, so people stop buying, making it even harder for the remaining customers to find players and keep buying, and so on until GW dies.
Uh, what? Look at the top of the page, for posts arguing that the prices have to be high because each model has to make back the cost of its individual molds. And on the previous page you can see JohnHwangDD defending setting prices as high as the market will bear, with reduced sales volume as an acceptable tradeoff.
Yes, every model should absolutely be priced in order to give it the best chance of recovering it's capital investments, otherwise you'll inevitably end up making a loss overall.
Acknowledging that some may fail, but are necessary to maintain in the range, is pretty self evident. It's also pretty unlikely for GW given the length of time much of their product remains on sale, a kit would have to be spectacularly unpopular to not ultimately break even.
As to your second point, that's what you get for double posting.
Azreal13 wrote: Acknowledging that some may fail, but are necessary to maintain in the range, is pretty self evident. It's also pretty unlikely for GW given the length of time much of their product remains on sale, a kit would have to be spectacularly unpopular to not ultimately break even.
Sisters of Battle would be the poster child here - a range that is so spectacularly unpopular that GW, with its vast resources, will not commit to developing plastic models, knowing that they will not ultimately break even.
Azreal13 wrote: Yes, every model should absolutely be priced in order to give it the best chance of recovering it's capital investments, otherwise you'll inevitably end up making a loss overall.
Again, this is not necessarily true. Consider something like the old push-fit 5-man squads GW used to (still does?) do as newbie starter kits, or the stripped-down version of 40k they were trying to get into mainstream retail stores. You don't care if something like that recovers its capital investments directly because you're using it as a loss leader to get customers to buy your other products. The total value added by making the loss leader is positive, so you do it.
It's also pretty unlikely for GW given the length of time much of their product remains on sale, a kit would have to be spectacularly unpopular to not ultimately break even.
This is true. GW is pretty much guaranteed to break even eventually on any product they sell, simply because the molds last so long. But this is just another reason that the idea of a kit "making back its mold costs" as a factor in pricing is not relevant, so I'm not really sure where you're disagreeing with me.
Azreal13 wrote: Yes, every model should absolutely be priced in order to give it the best chance of recovering it's capital investments, otherwise you'll inevitably end up making a loss overall.
Again, this is not necessarily true. Consider something like the old push-fit 5-man squads GW used to (still does?) do as newbie starter kits, or the stripped-down version of 40k they were trying to get into mainstream retail stores. You don't care if something like that recovers its capital investments directly because you're using it as a loss leader to get customers to buy your other products. The total value added by making the loss leader is positive, so you do it.
.
Of course you bloody care!
You might accept a higher than average chance it won't, but that's not the same thing. Neither is a loss leader and something failing to recoup its development costs, at least not when you're a manufacturer and a retailer simultaneously.
It's also pretty unlikely for GW given the length of time much of their product remains on sale, a kit would have to be spectacularly unpopular to not ultimately break even.
This is true. GW is pretty much guaranteed to break even eventually on any product they sell, simply because the molds last so long. But this is just another reason that the idea of a kit "making back its mold costs" as a factor in pricing is not relevant, so I'm not really sure where you're disagreeing with me.
Because the sooner your costs are recouped the sooner you start making the biggest gross margin, and we know that the lion's share of sales occur when a GW product is released.
A lot of discussion about plastic monopose characters earlier in the thread. It seems to be the solution is dual kit characters with lots of options in the box- a perfect example is the chaos terminator lord/sorcerer. You can buy the same kit a few times and model one as a lord, one as a sorcerer and then subsequent kits as terminator unit leaders with no cloak. No reason they couldn't also do a kit with options for a power armour lord, sorcerer and maybe dark apostle. Use the same kit for unit leaders and exalted champions
HQ's in boxes of troops has a precedent too. The tyranid warrior kit can be three warriors or two warriors and a prime. The meganobz kit can make a big mek in mega armour.
Then do specialised characters (warpsmith, independent characters etc.) in metal or finecast.
Snake Tortoise wrote: A lot of discussion about plastic monopose characters earlier in the thread. It seems to be the solution is dual kit characters with lots of options in the box- a perfect example is the chaos terminator lord/sorcerer. You can buy the same kit a few times and model one as a lord, one as a sorcerer and then subsequent kits as terminator unit leaders with no cloak. No reason they couldn't also do a kit with options for a power armour lord, sorcerer and maybe dark apostle. Use the same kit for unit leaders and exalted champions
HQ's in boxes of troops has a precedent too. The tyranid warrior kit can be three warriors or two warriors and a prime. The meganobz kit can make a big mek in mega armour.
Then do specialised characters (warpsmith, independent characters etc.) in metal or finecast.
Could go further.
The Chaos Sorceror/Lord Termie kit is of course now something of a legacy. From memory, we got four character kits of a similar stripe then - Space Marine Commander, Chaos Termie Lord, Empire General and Orc Warboss. All of these kits came with lots of options - and barring the Commander, the bits for other characters.
But that was abandoned for reasons we'll never know (and anyone claiming to that doesn't work for GW in the studio etc is probably a liar on that count).
If they resurrected it? Well, lets consider Primaris. One kit of Primaris characters - can make the Lieutenant or Commander, depending on how many spangles you pile on. Then sell an additional sprue (or bundle it in, I don't care) for Librarian and Chaplain parts - similar to the Chapter upgrade sprues.
Sy2pie wrote: My argument is, if it costs £25 to make 3. Why is it costing £100 to make 5 which are near identical? It's a rip off by their own standards.
Perception of value.
I drive a Skoda Octavia. You may know that this is essentially a slightly less posh, slightly stretched VW Golf under the bodywork. In fact, to stretch the comparison further, it’s functionally comparable to the Audi A3.
Playing around with the configuration tools on the appropriate websites, a mid-range (though fairly bare) Octavia costs £21k. An absolute base-level A3 nearly £26k. For no other reason than the badge.
The Chaos Sorceror/Lord Termie kit is of course now something of a legacy. From memory, we got four character kits of a similar stripe then - Space Marine Commander, Chaos Termie Lord, Empire General and Orc Warboss. All of these kits came with lots of options - and barring the Commander, the bits for other characters.
But that was abandoned for reasons we'll never know (and anyone claiming to that doesn't work for GW in the studio etc is probably a liar on that count).
If they resurrected it? Well, lets consider Primaris. One kit of Primaris characters - can make the Lieutenant or Commander, depending on how many spangles you pile on. Then sell an additional sprue (or bundle it in, I don't care) for Librarian and Chaplain parts - similar to the Chapter upgrade sprues.
It's bizarre that they don't do kits like that any more. It sucks having HQ plastic kits that are one pose with no weapon options. Not that they aren't usually great models, but the expensive Kharn kit could have had some head and arm options and been a nice Khorne chaos lord too. It's most frustrating when many start collecting kits include single pose plastic HQ's, like dark eldar.
I guess one could argue they're easy to convert. But shame about the general lack of Bitz available to some armies (in terms of useful sprue leftovers)
Dysartes wrote: Out of interest, would anyone who works in the industry mind confirming roughly what, in 2017 it costs to tool a single mould for plastic sprues?
One doesn't even need to work in the industry. Just look at the SJG Ogre Miniatures Set 2 Kickstarter, along with the current Dream Pod 9 Utopia Kickstarter. It's quite a bit less than $30k for a large tool. I suspect a single character tool is under $5k.
And that's outsourced. Pretty sure making them in-house will reduce the price, whatever it is.
I admit I simply will not pay $30-35 USD for a single plastic character. Not going to happen. It's not a major concern since I play Eldar and mostly stick to used metals on eBay. I have no problem paying $30-35 for a squad of models or a small squadron of light vehicles, etc...but for a single figure? Nope.
If you want to hide behind the "oh, tooling is expensive" argument, I'd say - do multi-character boxes. Look at the Thousand Sons box of sorcerers. If Eldar ever got a proper release, there's zero excuse to not have 3-4 models in a box, capable of making Farseer/Warlock/Seers (possibly even a Bone Singer), etc. I'd have far less qualm paying $35-40 for a box of several modular characters. Basically bring back the old Space Marine command squad boxes but in plastic. Combine the Primaris Chaplain/Apothecary/Librarian into a single box, even if you want to charge $50 for it, etc. While I wouldn't be stoked about paying $10-15 for a single miniature, I find that acceptable.
So, until that kind of thing becomes commonplace I won't be buying any plastic characters from GW unless they're second hand or someone has a clearance. I own precisely one...and it was a Christmas gift from a friend.
I fully support GW selling stuff at whatever cost they can get people to purchase stuff at - there are enough sadists around to buy them at $35, so good for them. Personally, I just vote with my wallet. Despite having two large 40K armies, GW direct gets very little money from me.
Azreal13 wrote: Acknowledging that some may fail, but are necessary to maintain in the range, is pretty self evident. It's also pretty unlikely for GW given the length of time much of their product remains on sale, a kit would have to be spectacularly unpopular to not ultimately break even.
Sisters of Battle would be the poster child here - a range that is so spectacularly unpopular that GW, with its vast resources, will not commit to developing plastic models, knowing that they will not ultimately break even.
Unpopular? Sisters are incredibly popular with the fanbase its just that GW seem to think that they are not. Case point, that limited edition Cannoness figure was expected to take several weeks to sell out, not the several hours it actually took. The sell out shocked GW who for some reason (and despite the fact that people are still willing to spend £55 on 10 20+ year old monopose figures) did not think that the Sisters line was popular. Dont mistake GW's ignorance for poor a lack of popularity.
Azreal13 wrote: Acknowledging that some may fail, but are necessary to maintain in the range, is pretty self evident. It's also pretty unlikely for GW given the length of time much of their product remains on sale, a kit would have to be spectacularly unpopular to not ultimately break even.
Sisters of Battle would be the poster child here - a range that is so spectacularly unpopular that GW, with its vast resources, will not commit to developing plastic models, knowing that they will not ultimately break even.
Unpopular? Sisters are incredibly popular with the fanbase its just that GW seem to think that they are not. Case point, that limited edition Cannoness figure was expected to take several weeks to sell out, not the several hours it actually took. The sell out shocked GW who for some reason (and despite the fact that people are still willing to spend £55 on 10 20+ year old monopose figures) did not think that the Sisters line was popular. Dont mistake GW's ignorance for poor a lack of popularity.
Realistically how big is the fan base?
the cannoness could be because people want sisters or entirely possible its because its limited and shiny. you also cant underestimate scalpers and just straight collectors.
i mean how fast did marbo disappear. do they have a massive fan base?
Without knowing precisely how many were available, one can't make any claims as to the popularity of anything based on it selling out. If there were 50 Canoness models and they had to cast another 30, it hardly rates as massively popular yet the narrative of the events still holds true.
I'm sure the numbers were higher, of course, but it isn't good evidence.
Azreal13 wrote: Acknowledging that some may fail, but are necessary to maintain in the range, is pretty self evident. It's also pretty unlikely for GW given the length of time much of their product remains on sale, a kit would have to be spectacularly unpopular to not ultimately break even.
Sisters of Battle would be the poster child here - a range that is so spectacularly unpopular that GW, with its vast resources, will not commit to developing plastic models, knowing that they will not ultimately break even.
Unpopular? Sisters are incredibly popular with the fanbase
Dont mistake GW's ignorance for poor a lack of popularity.
Yes, unpopular based on actual sales. Yes, GW can sell things to both of the Sisters players still out there, but nobody else is buying them.
Don't mistake irrational fan support for actual sales potential. ____
Azreal13 wrote: Acknowledging that some may fail, but are necessary to maintain in the range, is pretty self evident. It's also pretty unlikely for GW given the length of time much of their product remains on sale, a kit would have to be spectacularly unpopular to not ultimately break even.
Sisters of Battle would be the poster child here - a range that is so spectacularly unpopular that GW, with its vast resources, will not commit to developing plastic models, knowing that they will not ultimately break even.
Unpopular? Sisters are incredibly popular with the fanbase
Dont mistake GW's ignorance for poor a lack of popularity.
Yes, unpopular based on actual sales. Yes, GW can sell things to both of the Sisters players still out there, but nobody else is buying them.
Don't mistake irrational fan support for actual sales potential.
Then again thats based off the exceptionally expensive metal army. it probably skews the numbers pretty bad for current times.
so asides from the original release which may have been low they dont have much to go on that would be accurate. and they probably deemed the risk to be higher than it was worth. or not and they are just holding onto it for a rainy day.
Azreal13 wrote: Acknowledging that some may fail, but are necessary to maintain in the range, is pretty self evident. It's also pretty unlikely for GW given the length of time much of their product remains on sale, a kit would have to be spectacularly unpopular to not ultimately break even.
Sisters of Battle would be the poster child here - a range that is so spectacularly unpopular that GW, with its vast resources, will not commit to developing plastic models, knowing that they will not ultimately break even.
Unpopular? Sisters are incredibly popular with the fanbase
Dont mistake GW's ignorance for poor a lack of popularity.
Yes, unpopular based on actual sales. Yes, GW can sell things to both of the Sisters players still out there, but nobody else is buying them.
Don't mistake irrational fan support for actual sales potential.
Then again thats based off the exceptionally expensive metal army. it probably skews the numbers pretty bad for current times.
so asides from the original release which may have been low they dont have much to go on that would be accurate. and they probably deemed the risk to be higher than it was worth. or not and they are just holding onto it for a rainy day.
Not really. My Imperial Guard army is metal, and it's pretty sizable, despite the fact that I could have saved a bit buying plastic Catachans instead. However, I liked the look of the Tallarn models best, so the price premium basically didn't matter. Proving GW is correct to price what the market will bear.
Plastic Guardsmen are only slightly less expensive than the metals (which are still available), and Sisters are only slightly more expensive per model compared to those. But still significantly cheaper than Sisters of Silence or Forgeworld resin Guardsmen.
Price is not a factor for GW collectors, and GW's price strategy is both rational and correct.
Price is not a factor for GW collectors, and GW's price strategy is both rational and correc
Collectors, maybe, but there's a whole hoard of gamers out there too. The assumption their strategy is correct is impossible to support when we don't know that a drop in price wouldn't generate a spike in volume that far offsets the reduction in income per sale.
Price is not a factor for GW collectors, and GW's price strategy is both rational and correc
Collectors, maybe, but there's a whole hoard of gamers out there too. The assumption their strategy is correct is impossible to support when we don't know that a drop in price wouldn't generate a spike in volume that far offsets the reduction in income per sale.
It would probably take a big price drop to bring those folks back. The people who are that price sensitive tend to be very price sensitive.
Price is not a factor for GW collectors, and GW's price strategy is both rational and correc
Collectors, maybe, but there's a whole hoard of gamers out there too. The assumption their strategy is correct is impossible to support when we don't know that a drop in price wouldn't generate a spike in volume that far offsets the reduction in income per sale.
It’s unlikely to.
When you cut a price, you’re not necessarily cutting production costs. So instead, you’re slicing into your profit margin. So any boost in sales will typically have to exceed the cut in price to actually pay off.
Example using easy, round numbers. This is not meant to be demonstrative of GW’s actual margins....
Box costs £100. You have a 50% profit margin.
You then reduce your price 20%, to 80%.
If sales remain the same, you’ve just cut your profit margin by 40%. If you increase sales by 20%, you’re still 20% down.
Remember, most retailers reduce prices not to drive profits, but get rid of excess stock.
Ok Doc, when you've got a minute I'd like your handy guide on educating familial matriarchs in the process of sucking bird ova.
Besides, simply stating "it's unlikely to" is just an opinion, and one that doesn't necessarily hold up when one of the things that has supported the turnaround at GW has been the introduction of bundles which contained actual discounts.
I'm not outright stating it's the better idea, but it is an alternative approach, just not the one GW went for.
Remember, most retailers reduce prices not to drive profits, but get rid of excess stock.
But we're not talking about reducing prices, we're talking, theoretically, about an alternative pricing strategy where you don't go after the highest £ per unit sold, but instead price more attractively in order to drive volume and, again, theoretically, make more profit overall. Not the same thing at all.
The people with most comprehensive understanding of GW pricing strategy, profit margins, sales volume and so on are, unsurprisingly, GW.
If they thought lowering prices would increase profits they would do it. They could be wrong, but as noted they control every aspect of production and a significant amount of distribution and sales. They have the most comprehensive information with which to determine the optimal pricing point. We have comparatively little information to work with and suggestions that this or that measure would make them even richer are, at best, difficult to substantiate.
Now whether we as individuals feel these prices are reasonable or fair is an entirely separate matter. Personally I cannot understand why anyone would buy branded clothing, a brand new car, or a computer that cost more than £500, but that doesn’t mean such things are overpriced,
Ultimately, when running a business these days, thanks to EPOS etc,, you have access to all the information in the world about how you're doing.
Most large chains even monitor how many people are walking in and out of the store so they can reconcile that with sales made, adjust staff levels etc. (If you want to mess with the manager of your local branch of *insert name here* pretend to be looking at something in the doorway while drifting over the threshold and back, watch him turn pale as the system registers dozens of people walking in and out of the store without anything going through the till!)
Thing is, for all that, much still ultimately boils down to a judgment call. Once you've made that call, you'll never ultimately know if it was the right one, because you can't go back and try again, and even if it fails you can't know another option would have succeeded, and if it works you can't know that another option wouldn't have done even better.
So while chasing high margins is undoubtedly working for GW, chasing volume is just as valid a pricing strategy for a company to adopt, just one that, at some point in time, GW rejected in favor of another approach. There is now no way of saying that over the last few decades it wouldn't have done better, because that isn't our reality.
All of that is entirely true. However it is equally true to say that GW could have increased all prices by 5% for the same period and made even larger profits.
Price is not a factor for GW collectors, and GW's price strategy is both rational and correc
Collectors, maybe, but there's a whole hoard of gamers out there too. The assumption their strategy is correct is impossible to support when we don't know that a drop in price wouldn't generate a spike in volume that far offsets the reduction in income per sale.
GW knows, because they tried the lower price / higher volume thing before moving to, and sticking with, the higher price point that persists today. As a profit-seeking and profit-maximizing company, if that lower margin volume drove higher overall profits, GW would have stopped raising prices unless absolutely necessary. But that didn't happen. Instead GW accelerated price increases to the maximum that people would pay. GW got people to buy boutique versions of their product (miniatures, not rulesets), along with new, high end items like End Times and Primaris Marines.
still suspect part of the pricing plan is due to the millstone of the B&M store chain, profit by volume would be a way less risky experiment from a warehouse or three but the stores have to operate on a shelf space/margin/expenses kind of model
Price is not a factor for GW collectors, and GW's price strategy is both rational and correc
Collectors, maybe, but there's a whole hoard of gamers out there too. The assumption their strategy is correct is impossible to support when we don't know that a drop in price wouldn't generate a spike in volume that far offsets the reduction in income per sale.
GW knows, because they tried the lower price / higher volume thing before moving to, and sticking with, the higher price point that persists today. As a profit-seeking and profit-maximizing company, if that lower margin volume drove higher overall profits, GW would have stopped raising prices unless absolutely necessary. But that didn't happen. Instead GW accelerated price increases to the maximum that people would pay. GW got people to buy boutique versions of their product (miniatures, not rulesets), along with new, high end items like End Times and Primaris Marines.
I'm not sure I remember that period in GW history? Serious question, when weren't they always charging a high price relative to the competition?
I'm sure you don't believe Primaris or End Times are "high end" any more than I do, they're just more GW products.
Denny wrote:All of that is entirely true. However it is equally true to say that GW could have increased all prices by 5% for the same period and made even larger profits.
True, but then thats simply a discussion about whether they've fully exploited their chosen strategy, not whether another one would be more successful.
Turnip Jedi wrote:still suspect part of the pricing plan is due to the millstone of the B&M store chain, profit by volume would be a way less risky experiment from a warehouse or three but the stores have to operate on a shelf space/margin/expenses kind of model
Most definitely, that's all tied up with my whole "decisions made decades ago" thing. There are several aspects of modern GW which at some point were a decision to be made, rather than a reality to be dealt with, and we simp,y don't know how things would have gone if different decisions had been made.
Az- They briefly flirted with lower price points on some boxes, most notably the Chaos and Cold One knights that were released in this period both at £12 a box IIRC.
Azreal13 wrote: Ah ok, so more the odd release than a period of history where they pursued the strategy wholesale?
From what I remember it was one of GW's ill-fated experiments under Kirby's reign as (I was told by GW staff at the time) "they were seeing how these would sell" or something as their prices were out of whack with the rest of the plastics range (IIRC this would have been about 10 years ago tops) where most of the other boxes were in the £15 to £20 range.
Obviously GW concluded it didn't work as we never saw cavalry boxes priced like that again.
Price is not a factor for GW collectors, and GW's price strategy is both rational and correc
Collectors, maybe, but there's a whole hoard of gamers out there too. The assumption their strategy is correct is impossible to support when we don't know that a drop in price wouldn't generate a spike in volume that far offsets the reduction in income per sale.
GW knows, because they tried the lower price / higher volume thing before moving to, and sticking with, the higher price point that persists today. As a profit-seeking and profit-maximizing company, if that lower margin volume drove higher overall profits, GW would have stopped raising prices unless absolutely necessary. But that didn't happen. Instead GW accelerated price increases to the maximum that people would pay. GW got people to buy boutique versions of their product (miniatures, not rulesets), along with new, high end items like End Times and Primaris Marines.
I'm not sure I remember that period in GW history? Serious question, when weren't they always charging a high price relative to the competition?
I'm sure you don't believe Primaris or End Times are "high end" any more than I do, they're just more GW products.
Back in the 80s & 90s, GW priced very competitively with all sorts of sales deals. I remember when they used to do Buy 2, Get 1 FREE opening sales -33% off price in store. That's a significant savings. And you used to be able to buy individual bits, rather than having to buy whole models, for customization. Or consider the Land Raider / Rhino bundles from way back when (of course, at the time, the competition didn't even do vehicles).
When originally released, End Times absolutely were high end, boutique items, and the price tag reflected it. Now, they're "normal" GW product.
JohnHwangDD wrote: Yes, unpopular based on actual sales. Yes, GW can sell things to both of the Sisters players still out there, but nobody else is buying them.
Don't mistake irrational fan support for actual sales potential.
And don't mistake lack of sales of an all-metal army with nonexistent rules support for lack of sales potential. SoB aren't going to sell well right now no matter how many people would love to buy an army because metal sucks to work with (cleanup is hell, assembly is difficult and requires tons of pinning, converting the monopose models requires hacking them apart and sculpting it back together, even getting them to stay painted is a pain) and once you've invested the ridiculous amount of time and effort to build your all-metal army you're stuck with ancient rules and constantly questioning if your army is going to continue to be legal. Of course not many people are going to buy into an army in that state. If you replace SoB with C:SM you'd see space marine sales crash as all but the most hardcore space marine fans stop buying.
Price is not a factor for GW collectors, and GW's price strategy is both rational and correc
Collectors, maybe, but there's a whole hoard of gamers out there too. The assumption their strategy is correct is impossible to support when we don't know that a drop in price wouldn't generate a spike in volume that far offsets the reduction in income per sale.
GW knows, because they tried the lower price / higher volume thing before moving to, and sticking with, the higher price point that persists today. As a profit-seeking and profit-maximizing company, if that lower margin volume drove higher overall profits, GW would have stopped raising prices unless absolutely necessary. But that didn't happen. Instead GW accelerated price increases to the maximum that people would pay. GW got people to buy boutique versions of their product (miniatures, not rulesets), along with new, high end items like End Times and Primaris Marines.
I'm not sure I remember that period in GW history? Serious question, when weren't they always charging a high price relative to the competition?
I'm sure you don't believe Primaris or End Times are "high end" any more than I do, they're just more GW products.
Back in the 80s & 90s, GW priced very competitively with all sorts of sales deals. I remember when they used to do Buy 2, Get 1 FREE opening sales -33% off price in store. That's a significant savings. And you used to be able to buy individual bits, rather than having to buy whole models, for customization. Or consider the Land Raider / Rhino bundles from way back when (of course, at the time, the competition didn't even do vehicles).
A sale isn't a pricing strategy. It's promotional activity. You can conduct a sale independently of a broader approach. Equally individual bits doesn't really constitute a high volume approach, in fact for all the effort involved I would expect that the margin on bits was actually pretty huge as a percentage. Equally I'm not sure how a product released pre-public ownership, 30 years ago when the company was essentially bunch of friends improvising things as they went can really be relevant to anything other than that era? I'm also pretty sure back then that GW stuff wasn't exactly cheap in relation to other products, one or two lines (maybe) aside.
It looks pretty much to me that GW have never tried the higher volume approach in a meaningful way. That's fine, that may always have been the right call. But there's no way to be certain.
When originally released, End Times absolutely were high end, boutique items, and the price tag reflected it. Now, they're "normal" GW product.
I think you and I have different ideas of what constitutes "boutique" so there's little point in getting bogged down in semantics.
Dude, the End Times models absolutely were "boutique" centerpieces, and sold as such. And back in the day, GW definitely pushed volume as a strategy, for which sales and such were a part of their push. It baffles me that you don't understand that, or are willfully denying it.
JohnHwangDD wrote: Dude, the End Times models absolutely were "boutique" centerpieces, and sold as such.
By what standards? I don't remember them being any different from the rest of GW's product lines. Sure, some of them are big, but so are Baneblades. They were more detailed, but that was less of a change in business concept and more of the inevitable result of improvements in sculpting technology compared to the 20+ year old sculpts that were still around in WHFB. They were still mass-produced plastic model kits for your standard tabletop army, and nothing special from the point of view of the miniatures hobby as a whole.
And back in the day, GW definitely pushed volume as a strategy, for which sales and such were a part of their push. It baffles me that you don't understand that, or are willfully denying it.
Back in the 80s is so far back in the day, in such a different world, that any strategy used back then has nothing to do with modern GW and its business choices.
JohnHwangDD wrote: Dude, the End Times models absolutely were "boutique" centerpieces, and sold as such. And back in the day, GW definitely pushed volume as a strategy, for which sales and such were a part of their push. It baffles me that you don't understand that, or are willfully denying it.
I agree with everything Peri said in response.
And that happens so rarely that you're almost definitely wrong.
JohnHwangDD wrote: Yes, unpopular based on actual sales. Yes, GW can sell things to both of the Sisters players still out there, but nobody else is buying them.
Don't mistake irrational fan support for actual sales potential.
And don't mistake lack of sales of an all-metal army with nonexistent rules support for lack of sales potential. SoB aren't going to sell well right now no matter how many people would love to buy an army because metal sucks to work with (cleanup is hell, assembly is difficult and requires tons of pinning.
This. It's not cost that stopped me from doing a SoB army. I had some trial minis and painted them up, but the thought of doing 100 of the buggers in metal stopped me cold. If they had plastics, I would have bought Forge World Repressors and Exorcists to boot. A friend of mine built a SoB army, and I helped him come up with the dead-easiest paint scheme we could, because he was new to painting, but no way in hell was I gonna help him clean and file 100 metal sisters. Especially not once the lead laws came in to screw over miniature wargamers forever with that godawful PEWTER.
One has the example of the Dark Eldar to see what's possible when an unpopular range is revisited with updated sculpts and plastic kits.
I can't believe Sisters are less popular than DE were, even to this day, otherwise I'm sure they'd have been quietly retired. While I enjoy winding up the super touchy Sisters players as much as the next man, that there isn't a credible argument for their reinvention is a pretty weak stance to adopt.
I can only imagine the SOBs were very unpopular waaay back in 2nd edition when they came out. That was a time when most models were metal anyway so being metal wasn't a huge negative to collecting an army.
Afterall, Necrons came out originally in all metal about the same time the SOBs did and Necrons got a full plastic release the next edition.
G-dubs must still be struggling with those damned infernal sleeves!
JohnHwangDD wrote: Yes, unpopular based on actual sales. Yes, GW can sell things to both of the Sisters players still out there, but nobody else is buying them.
Don't mistake irrational fan support for actual sales potential.
And don't mistake lack of sales of an all-metal army with nonexistent rules support for lack of sales potential. SoB aren't going to sell well right now no matter how many people would love to buy an army because metal sucks to work with (cleanup is hell, assembly is difficult and requires tons of pinning.
This. It's not cost that stopped me from doing a SoB army. I had some trial minis and painted them up, but the thought of doing 100 of the buggers in metal stopped me cold.
Really? I've got something like 200 metal Imperial Guard, and another 300 metal Eldar. 100 is nothing.
Also, Sisters are basically mono-pose minis with backpacks. Easy-peasy to assemble, and Dakka's Gallery shows that cleanup is entirely optional.
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AllSeeingSkink wrote: I can only imagine the SOBs were very unpopular waaay back in 2nd edition when they came out. That was a time when most models were metal anyway so being metal wasn't a huge negative to collecting an army.
Afterall, Necrons came out originally in all metal about the same time the SOBs did and Necrons got a full plastic release the next edition.
G-dubs must still be struggling with those damned infernal sleeves!
I heard that GW is still trying to move the original production run of Sisters from 2E!
JohnHwangDD wrote: Really? I've got something like 200 metal Imperial Guard, and another 300 metal Eldar. 100 is nothing.
You are clearly the exception to the rule. For most people metal models are a huge negative and dealing with 100+ of them is a strong reason to avoid an army even if they otherwise like it. Add on the lack of rules support and it should be obvious why even players who would be interested in a plastic SoB army stay far away from the current version.
Also, Sisters are basically mono-pose minis with backpacks. Easy-peasy to assemble, and Dakka's Gallery shows that cleanup is entirely optional.
IOW, "SoB are easy if you just accept having mold lines everywhere on your very expensive army". Do you honestly think this is a compelling defense?
JohnHwangDD wrote: Really? I've got something like 200 metal Imperial Guard, and another 300 metal Eldar. 100 is nothing.
You are clearly the exception to the rule. For most people metal models are a huge negative and dealing with 100+ of them is a strong reason to avoid an army even if they otherwise like it. Add on the lack of rules support and it should be obvious why even players who would be interested in a plastic SoB army stay far away from the current version.
Also, Sisters are basically mono-pose minis with backpacks. Easy-peasy to assemble, and Dakka's Gallery shows that cleanup is entirely optional.
IOW, "SoB are easy if you just accept having mold lines everywhere on your very expensive army". Do you honestly think this is a compelling defense?
Can't say I've had too much trouble cleaning up mould lines on metals. I'm no great painter, my gallery is evidence that I favour speed over quality (well, on anything that isn't destined for my display cabinet) but I still clean off mould lines, fill gaps, etc and I never noticed a massive overhead on metals vs plastics in that regard.
Also if you're the sort of person who cares that much about how your models look I don't see how metal is a huge difference in how you handle them. If you care about how they look you aren't throwing them loosely in to a box regardless of what they're made from.
The SOB are ancient old so I guess the casting is inferior to new age metal minis. If I compare the Infinity models to GW plastic stuff. I spent prolly
the same time cleaning both materials, maybe a bit more on Infinity but that's cause they have the tiniest details and I have to be careful not to
file the definition on them.
Also the mold lines are so shallow that I'm having a hard time spotting them, GW minis have bigger mold lines.
You really don't need to pin them cause of the square slots in their joints, just a bit of scoring will do the job perfectly.
JohnHwangDD wrote: Yes, unpopular based on actual sales. Yes, GW can sell things to both of the Sisters players still out there, but nobody else is buying them.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Can't say I've had too much trouble cleaning up mould lines on metals. I'm no great painter, my gallery is evidence that I favour speed over quality (well, on anything that isn't destined for my display cabinet) but I still clean off mould lines, fill gaps, etc and I never noticed a massive overhead on metals vs plastics in that regard.
Honestly, I can't see how you could say this unless you really don't spend much time on either. Even a well-cast metal miniature is going to have at least as much material to remove on mold lines, except it's metal instead of plastic/resin so you have to file it off and very carefully avoid damaging the rest of the model instead of quickly scraping it off with a knife blade. And god help you if you get a metal miniature with mold slip, which requires a lot of repair work and rarely (never?) happens on plastic kits. IMO metal is almost as bad as finecast in how much of a pain it is to deal with, and I won't touch either.
Also if you're the sort of person who cares that much about how your models look I don't see how metal is a huge difference in how you handle them. If you care about how they look you aren't throwing them loosely in to a box regardless of what they're made from.
Even if you're careful with metal models you still get a lot more edge chipping. Just touching the model can rub off paint from the edges, and then there's stray dice, bumping a model accidentally, etc. And if you do remove paint it leaves a bright silver spot that is impossible to miss, instead of a bit of gray that often blends in with the remaining paint. Plastic and resin models are much less vulnerable to that kind of damage.
Really? I've got something like 200 metal Imperial Guard, and another 300 metal Eldar. 100 is nothing.
Also, Sisters are basically mono-pose minis with backpacks. Easy-peasy to assemble, and Dakka's Gallery shows that cleanup is entirely optional.
Apples to oranges. Metal eldar have mold lines mostly in easy to file places without tons of extra detail. I had tons of them back in the lead era of the early-mid-90's when they came 5 to a blister. Easy mode. Metal Kasrkin (going by your photo gallery) were worse, but nowhere near Sisters level of annoying - mold lines down the middle of ornate pauldrons and bob hair cuts? Forgettaboutit!
As to clean up being optional, those people are monsters and should feel bad.
4 small plastic toy soldiers that come unpainted for £52.50
I'll say it again. 4 small plastic toy soldiers for the price of a brand new top range PS4 title.
And we wonder why there's less kids coming into the hobby.
I realise the WKs will jump on this saying how detailed they are, or how many options they have, or how big they really are, or how we can choose not to buy, or how they can afford them, or the hours they'll take to paint making it value. But really... 4 small plastic toy soldiers for £52.50...
It's funny because yesterday I bought on Amazon 4 1:144 Gundam models (which are just a bit smaller than Imperial Knights, each) for about 30 cents less than the box of three big custodes cost.
4 small plastic toy soldiers that come unpainted for £52.50
I'll say it again. 4 small plastic toy soldiers for the price of a brand new top range PS4 title.
And we wonder why there's less kids coming into the hobby.
I realise the WKs will jump on this saying how detailed they are, or how many options they have, or how big they really are, or how we can choose not to buy, or how they can afford them, or the hours they'll take to paint making it value. But really... 4 small plastic toy soldiers for £52.50...
stroller wrote:I see Gimgamgoo's 4 soldiers.. and I raise him... just the captain-general.
£22.50 for 1 28mm figure. No thanks.
So the same price as any Primaris special character and a box of Aggressors/Inceptors? And they've been around for what 8 months? The Allarus Custodians are cheaper than the Deathshroud Bodyguard and the Captain-General is cheaper than Typhus
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Can't say I've had too much trouble cleaning up mould lines on metals. I'm no great painter, my gallery is evidence that I favour speed over quality (well, on anything that isn't destined for my display cabinet) but I still clean off mould lines, fill gaps, etc and I never noticed a massive overhead on metals vs plastics in that regard.
Honestly, I can't see how you could say this unless you really don't spend much time on either. Even a well-cast metal miniature is going to have at least as much material to remove on mold lines, except it's metal instead of plastic/resin so you have to file it off and very carefully avoid damaging the rest of the model instead of quickly scraping it off with a knife blade. And god help you if you get a metal miniature with mold slip, which requires a lot of repair work and rarely (never?) happens on plastic kits. IMO metal is almost as bad as finecast in how much of a pain it is to deal with, and I won't touch either.
Actually as we speak I'm painting a squadron of 4 metal He111's after just having finished squadrons of 12, 6 and 6 Bf109's, Spitfires and Hurricanes respectively.***
Most mould lines you can clean up with a knife, any gates you trim off with clippers, flappy bits with the sharp side of the knife and 4 out of 5 lines can be scraped away with the blunt side the same way you do with plastic. Occasionally you get a line where the knife starts to chatter in which case you do need to pull out a file, but in all of the 32 metal models I've cleaned recently that only happened, ummm, twice I think.
Really it hasn't taken me terribly long to prep them. You do have to learn what isn't going to show under primer because the nature of metal it'll look worse when it's bare metal than it will after you prime it. So my tactic is clean them up as well as I think is necessary (read: not a perfect mirror finish or anything stupid like that) then prime them, if I can still see the flaws I work those areas a bit more and prime them again.
That is literally the exact same process I go through on ANY model I actually care about, clean, prime, inspect, continue cleaning and reprime if necessary. In those same aforementioned 32 metal models I only found myself repriming two of them because I didn't clean a couple of lines fully.
You're the guy that argues the superiority of resin to plastic even though you have to saw off gates and unwarp damned near every part. I don't see the difference between metal and plastic as any worse than the difference between resin and plastic. Buying FW models indeed I've had more issues with FW resin than GW's metals back when they still made them.
***I will note that the metal planes I have are particularly badly cast with pitting, insane draft angles and some areas that obviously just didn't cast right, but GW metals I never had those sorts of problems. The worse I can say about GW metals is I've had 2 models where the mould slipped, an Epic Thunderhawk from the 90's and a SW Iron Priest also from the 90's.
Also if you're the sort of person who cares that much about how your models look I don't see how metal is a huge difference in how you handle them. If you care about how they look you aren't throwing them loosely in to a box regardless of what they're made from.
Even if you're careful with metal models you still get a lot more edge chipping. Just touching the model can rub off paint from the edges, and then there's stray dice, bumping a model accidentally, etc. And if you do remove paint it leaves a bright silver spot that is impossible to miss, instead of a bit of gray that often blends in with the remaining paint. Plastic and resin models are much less vulnerable to that kind of damage.
If you wash a metal model and use a metal primer they're amazingly resistant to paint damage. Still not so much that I'd throw them loosely in a box together, but I've recently accidentally dropped some of my metal models on a varnished wooden floor and was surprised that no damage was done. In recent memory the only damage I did was when I dropped a metal Night Goblin Boss off my desk and landed straight in to a glass I had sitting on the floor, it had a chip from the initial impact but the bouncing around in the glass didn't manage to knock anything else off.
Of course 99% of the time I just make sure my models aren't hitting stuff, plastic models can get damaged too and greasy fingers are a nightmare for any model.
I did have an issue with paint rubbing off on my metal Lizardmen as a kid, but that was because I was stupid and didn't clean them or use a proper primer.
Gimgamgoo wrote: 4 small plastic toy soldiers that come unpainted for £52.50
Shrug. $75, but for how many hours of entertainment? Considered per hour that compares pretty well to a lot of other things.
I'll say it again. 4 small plastic toy soldiers for the price of a brand new top range PS4 title.
And we wonder why there's less kids coming into the hobby.
Well yeah, if you're looking for zero-effort entertainment (as many kids are) of course you're going to buy the video game. But that isn't a very relevant comparison since it's something so far outside of the GW market. You might as well say that those toy soldiers are really cheap because you can buy two boxes of them for the cost of renting an airplane for an hour and still have some cash left to get dinner on your way home.
Metals all day for me. Given a choice? I'd take metals most of the time, under most circumstances for infantry models. Vehicles, of course I'll take plastic.
Of course I actually like single-piece metal minis, so that's a heavy bias. This picture is six months old, but everything in the army that isn't a new plastic kit is metal (and there are about 30-40 more figures now...again mostly metal)
JohnHwangDD wrote: Really? I've got something like 200 metal Imperial Guard, and another 300 metal Eldar. 100 is nothing.
Also, Sisters are basically mono-pose minis with backpacks. Easy-peasy to assemble, and Dakka's Gallery shows that cleanup is entirely optional.
Apples to oranges. Metal eldar have mold lines mostly in easy to file places without tons of extra detail. I had tons of them back in the lead era of the early-mid-90's when they came 5 to a blister. Easy mode. Metal Kasrkin (going by your photo gallery) were worse, but nowhere near Sisters level of annoying - mold lines down the middle of ornate pauldrons and bob hair cuts? Forgettaboutit!
As to clean up being optional, those people are monsters and should feel bad.
Well, as my sig hints, I've got 50 Sisters of Battle, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with prepping them, either. And I've got another 120-ish Dogs of War that were similarly prepped.
I get that not everybody likes to prep metal, but 1-piece metal infantry, or even 2-piecers with backpacks really aren't that much work, because you don't have to that much gluing compared to multi-part models like the 3E Eldar Guardians and 3E Dark Eldar Warriors. It's different work, but once you've cleaned that Sister, she's basically good to go. Go build a pile of those 9-piece Eldar plastics and report back on whether they're really easier than 2-part Sisters of battle.
JohnHwangDD wrote: I get that not everybody likes to prep metal, but 1-piece metal infantry, or even 2-piecers with backpacks really aren't that much work, because you don't have to that much gluing compared to multi-part models like the 3E Eldar Guardians and 3E Dark Eldar Warriors. It's different work, but once you've cleaned that Sister, she's basically good to go. Go build a pile of those 9-piece Eldar plastics and report back on whether they're really easier than 2-part Sisters of battle.
On the other hand, now you're comparing monopose metal models (which are often awkward in design because of having to be a single piece) to multi-part models with far greater customization potential. One-piece plastic models would be much easier to clean up, if you're willing to settle for all of the disadvantages of having one-piece models.
JohnHwangDD wrote: [
I get that not everybody likes to prep metal, but 1-piece metal infantry, or even 2-piecers with backpacks really aren't that much work, because you don't have to that much gluing compared to multi-part models like the 3E Eldar Guardians and 3E Dark Eldar Warriors. It's different work, but once you've cleaned that Sister, she's basically good to go. Go build a pile of those 9-piece Eldar plastics and report back on whether they're really easier than 2-part Sisters of battle.
Have done so, and yes, they're easier. Yes, they're nine pieces, but it takes a few seconds to clean each piece. Also built Tau, Kroot, Cadian Shock Troops, various Space Marines and Tyranids. I also did some of the old metal Grey Knights, and they were a tedious slog being 3-piece lead-free pewter and just as ornate as Sisters, so it turned me off the idea of Sisters. I had the old metal Eldar (in lead, no less), and cleaning them was easy by comparison.
If I could rely on GW to give me good castings - I mean actual good castings, not "obvious by minor mold slip and heavy flashing", then maybe I'd consider Sisters, but GW's quality control isn't that good on metals, and never has been.
JohnHwangDD wrote: once you've cleaned that Sister, she's basically good to go.
If I could rely on GW to give me good castings - I mean actual good castings, not "obvious by minor mold slip and heavy flashing", then maybe I'd consider Sisters, but GW's quality control isn't that good on metals, and never has been.
Well, you're obviously not going to get sub-hairline alignment like with hard plastics, but GW metals are generally pretty good. Almost always well under 1mm alignment.
My understanding is that GW will replace (for free) a badly-cast miniature. It's not like GW releases a lot of really badly-made minis, at least, not compared to other metal minis manufacturers, but I wish I'd known that way back when I was actually playing 40k for the few that were really bad.
JohnHwangDD wrote: Well, you're obviously not going to get sub-hairline alignment like with hard plastics, but GW metals are generally pretty good. Almost always well under 1mm alignment.
Clearly spoken by someone who never had to deal with the old Tau stuff. They were bad overall, but the sniper drones were so absolutely terrible that I cut the unit out of my army plans entirely rather than have to deal with that garbage. And replacing defective parts doesn't really help when the whole inventory is trash.
Peregrine wrote: Shrug. $75, but for how many hours of entertainment? Considered per hour that compares pretty well to a lot of other things.
Are they somehow more entertaining that the same amount of money and time spend on, for example, Perry Miniatures plastics sets? Because that kind of money will net you about three plastic boxes there, so... 60-70 minis, I guess? One would think you'd be spending more time being "entertained" with those.
To Foxfyre: "So the same price as any Primaris special character and a box of Aggressors/Inceptors? And they've been around for what 8 months? The Allarus Custodians are cheaper than the Deathshroud Bodyguard and the Captain-General is cheaper than Typhus"
And for the same reason I don't have any of those either.....
Albertorius wrote: Are they somehow more entertaining that the same amount of money and time spend on, for example, Perry Miniatures plastics sets? Because that kind of money will net you about three plastic boxes there, so... 60-70 minis, I guess? One would think you'd be spending more time being "entertained" with those.
Does it really matter if I spend $1 per hour or $2 per hour when either miniatures option is still cheap relative to my other hobbies? Whatever miniatures I happen to buy next it's a rounding error in the overall budget compared to the $170/hour I'm spending on tomorrow's airplane rental. I might as well spend a bunch of time worrying about whether I should fly in to the airport with the $10 burger or the one with the $12 BBQ plate.
Gimgamgoo wrote: 4 small plastic toy soldiers that come unpainted for £52.50
Shrug. $75, but for how many hours of entertainment? Considered per hour that compares pretty well to a lot of other things.
I'll say it again. 4 small plastic toy soldiers for the price of a brand new top range PS4 title.
And we wonder why there's less kids coming into the hobby.
Well yeah, if you're looking for zero-effort entertainment (as many kids are) of course you're going to buy the video game. But that isn't a very relevant comparison since it's something so far outside of the GW market. You might as well say that those toy soldiers are really cheap because you can buy two boxes of them for the cost of renting an airplane for an hour and still have some cash left to get dinner on your way home.
I see you chose to miss the other part of that same post...
Gimgamgoo wrote:
I realise the WKs will jump on this saying how detailed they are, or how many options they have, or how big they really are, or how we can choose not to buy, or how they can afford them, or the hours they'll take to paint making it value. But really... 4 small plastic toy soldiers for £52.50...
Although I have no figures to prove it, but it just seems there's a lot less young blood coming into the hobby than a few decades ago. So, my comparison about spending money on a console title was a little more relevant than your airplane one. Without new blood, all we'll have are an aging and dying out set of gamers with prices continually rising to keep up with the profits required. As many of us got into this hobby buying figures with pocket money, it's getting less and less likely for the kids today.
Gimgamgoo wrote: 4 small plastic toy soldiers that come unpainted for £52.50
Shrug. $75, but for how many hours of entertainment? Considered per hour that compares pretty well to a lot of other things.
Only a mad man considers the monotonous drone of painting an entire army as "entertainment"
Playing a game with that army? Yeah. Painting the first few models in an army? Yeah. Finally finishing said army? Absolutely.
Painting dudes numbered 5 to 500 in an army? Insanity
Wargaming only really classifies as good value if you are really passionate about the bit in between painting the first squad and finally finishing the last squad. I'm sure there's some people who do love every minute of it, but I think most people don't.
My hobby car may have cost me 10 times the price of an army, but I genuinely consider every hour in the driver's seat as entertainment, not so much every hour of painting said army.
The car also holds its value better than the 40k army.
Came back to gw products a while ago with age of Sigmar, plus some black Templar stuff. But damn the prices they set are pretty stupid.
My main gaming is now ww2, mainly bolt action and I don’t think you can beat the price tag for warlord games plastics. A box of 30 dudes for just over 20 quid and vehicles from 15-20.
Set against a box of 10 Cadians for 18 odd quid.
Which frankly those minis are pretty crap. Don’t even get started on the single character prices. Just my view anyway.
Albertorius wrote: Are they somehow more entertaining that the same amount of money and time spend on, for example, Perry Miniatures plastics sets? Because that kind of money will net you about three plastic boxes there, so... 60-70 minis, I guess? One would think you'd be spending more time being "entertained" with those.
Does it really matter if I spend $1 per hour or $2 per hour when either miniatures option is still cheap relative to my other hobbies? Whatever miniatures I happen to buy next it's a rounding error in the overall budget compared to the $170/hour I'm spending on tomorrow's airplane rental. I might as well spend a bunch of time worrying about whether I should fly in to the airport with the $10 burger or the one with the $12 BBQ plate.
And this have something to do with something being or not objectively bad value against other options in the same hobby... how, exactly?
I am aware that stamp collection is much more expensive. It matters not when I'm talking about small monopose mandolls in relation with other small monopose mandolls.
Plus, you know, for some people the monetary difference might actually be important, even if it's a non issue for you.
Albertorius wrote: Are they somehow more entertaining that the same amount of money and time spend on, for example, Perry Miniatures plastics sets? Because that kind of money will net you about three plastic boxes there, so... 60-70 minis, I guess? One would think you'd be spending more time being "entertained" with those.
Does it really matter if I spend $1 per hour or $2 per hour when either miniatures option is still cheap relative to my other hobbies? Whatever miniatures I happen to buy next it's a rounding error in the overall budget compared to the $170/hour I'm spending on tomorrow's airplane rental. I might as well spend a bunch of time worrying about whether I should fly in to the airport with the $10 burger or the one with the $12 BBQ plate.
I don’t know about you guys, but I have a hobby budget I try desperately to stick to. Sure, I CAN spend more, but it’s going to come from somewhere else like savings, tithing, vacation money, etc... I imagine if you don’t really track your expenses and have a decent income it may all just mesh together and not seem to matter if you spent $200or $250 last month. That’s kind of how I did it before we had kids, because it didn’t really matter as much then.
Now though, despite being more able than ever to not worry about GW prices, I recoil from what I perceive as bad value compared to other games I enjoy like bolt action.
That said, it also matters what your priorities are in the hobby itself. If you’re more a collector/ painter the original price of the minis is going to matter less. As I’m interested primarily in the gaming, it definitely matters to me.
JohnHwangDD wrote: My understanding is that GW will replace (for free) a badly-cast miniature. It's not like GW releases a lot of really badly-made minis, at least, not compared to other metal minis manufacturers, but I wish I'd known that way back when I was actually playing 40k for the few that were really bad.
I'm sure they will, but it's still effort and frustration on my part. If I can fix it, I might as well fix it. GW's quality control has had highs and lows over the years - when I was considering SoB as an army, they were definitely in a low and I wasn't prepared to put up with it. At the current metal prices for SoB, their QC had better be on their AAA game.
Albertorius wrote: Are they somehow more entertaining that the same amount of money and time spend on, for example, Perry Miniatures plastics sets? Because that kind of money will net you about three plastic boxes there, so... 60-70 minis, I guess? One would think you'd be spending more time being "entertained" with those.
Does it really matter if I spend $1 per hour or $2 per hour when either miniatures option is still cheap relative to my other hobbies? Whatever miniatures I happen to buy next it's a rounding error in the overall budget compared to the $170/hour I'm spending on tomorrow's airplane rental. I might as well spend a bunch of time worrying about whether I should fly in to the airport with the $10 burger or the one with the $12 BBQ plate.
We get it. You have money. How about we discuss how the other 98% deal with sticker shock? For some people, minis are not just a tertiary hobby to distract us from how lonely our horses must feel when we jet to Dubai.
I maintain that products within impulse-buy pricing ranges make for the best entry into a new range, and the easiest way to introduce new players.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: We get it. You have money. How about we discuss how the other 98% deal with sticker shock? For some people, minis are not just a tertiary hobby to distract us from how lonely our horses must feel when we jet to Dubai.
I'm not exactly in the 1%, and I'm hardly alone in that level of budget. I know plenty of people making not all that much money who think nothing of regularly blowing $50 in a night of drinking. Even the cliche of dinner and a movie is getting up to the $50 per person level. The simple fact here is that 40k models are not all that expensive relative to other things people spend their entertainment money on.
I maintain that products within impulse-buy pricing ranges make for the best entry into a new range, and the easiest way to introduce new players.
New players are an entirely different subject. 40k's prices aren't that bad as an ongoing hobby once you've decided it's something you want to do, but the time and money investment required to start the game is awful. But, rather than slashing prices to impulse buy levels (a decision that would require a massive explosion in the popularity of 40k to make up for the loss of revenue) what 40k needs is a smaller-scale entry option. Kill team is a step in the right direction, but the lack of support is a major mistake. Even if the per-model cost doesn't change much for starter sets having a way to play a real game of 40k for $100 and decide if you like it enough to invest more is the biggest thing GW could do to grow the hobby.
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Albertorius wrote: And this have something to do with something being or not objectively bad value against other options in the same hobby... how, exactly?
I am aware that stamp collection is much more expensive. It matters not when I'm talking about small monopose mandolls in relation with other small monopose mandolls.
Plus, you know, for some people the monetary difference might actually be important, even if it's a non issue for you.
Why is value so important? Do you really gain that much satisfaction from knowing that you have successfully optimized your grams of plastic per dollar? I can't see how anyone can find that approach enjoyable. Buy the miniatures you want, and if the cost per model is higher buy them at a slower rate. If you want 40k then the fact that some unrelated historical game you have no interest in gives you more grams of plastic per dollar shouldn't have much impact on your buying choices.
Peregrine wrote: Why is value so important? Do you really gain that much satisfaction from knowing that you have successfully optimized your grams of plastic per dollar? I can't see how anyone can find that approach enjoyable. Buy the miniatures you want, and if the cost per model is higher buy them at a slower rate. If you want 40k then the fact that some unrelated historical game you have no interest in gives you more grams of plastic per dollar shouldn't have much impact on your buying choices.
Wow, way to twist words, there. Cmon, is it so hard to grok that, if you have more than one choice of stuff that you can equally enjoy (say, for example, I equally enjoy 40k, Perry and Gundam models... which I do, or RPGs, which I could say I enjoy even more), one might choose one over the other because one's better value for your (hard earned, and not infinite) disposable hobby money?
I mean, I like Agressors, Inceptors and even these new goldboys, but I've chosen to buy 4 Gundam kits for the same price of any single one of those boxes, which incidentally are quite a bit more fun to assemble, and I even can play posing and reposing them, with no hint of glue used whatsoever! Because I've pondered all the options where I could have spent my month's hobby money on stuff I might enjoy, and I've decided that it made much more sense to me that way. I might even enjoy it more, because I'll have more stuff that I enjoy!
Also, I have found that I can't justify to myself buying GW's character models for the price they ask, which is just as well, as kitbashing is fun.
Gimgamgoo wrote: 4 small plastic toy soldiers that come unpainted for £52.50
Now double it and you'll see how I feel.
So, 8 small plastic toy soldiers that come unpainted for £105.00?
If anything, I feel GW's prices hurt the most on the rulebook side of the game, particularly the digital versions. Seriously, $40 for the ebook version C:SM, and it's a fething epub. So I'd have to jump through half a dozen hoops just to get the damn thing to display on my PC (feth ever getting it to display properly on my Kindle Fire), and it would still have problems.
Grimtuff wrote: Ah the old metal models debate again. I feel sometimes like I'm the only person on this forum who doesn't use gak glue or something...?
Metal models do not fall apart just by giving them a funny look.
Kroem wrote: It is swings and roundabouts though. I remember paying £12 for 10 Ork boys 18 years ago now, and at this present moment they cost a grand total of £18!
Not to mention the wealth of customisation options available in the current kit compared to the old one.
So yes they can gouge you on some things, but they do have bargains in there still (the start collecting sets for one!).
That same box of Ork boyz had 16 models in it too. The modern one has 11.
Albertorius wrote: I mean, I like Agressors, Inceptors and even these new goldboys, but I've chosen to buy 4 Gundam kits for the same price of any single one of those boxes, which incidentally are quite a bit more fun to assemble, and I even can play posing and reposing them, with no hint of glue used whatsoever! Because I've pondered all the options where I could have spent my month's hobby money on stuff I might enjoy, and I've decided that it made much more sense to me that way. I might even enjoy it more, because I'll have more stuff that I enjoy!
Sure, but it sounds like the primary reason for your decision is that you prefer the Gundam kits independent of price. And that's fine. I, on the other hand, wouldn't have even the slightest interest in those Gundam kits if they were free. What I object to is the comparisons like "look how many miniatures you could get from this historical company" when neither the person making the comparison nor most of the other people in the thread have any interest in buying those cheap miniatures. A high score on grams of plastic per dollar is not sufficient to justify a reasonable purchase decision.
Albertorius wrote: I mean, I like Agressors, Inceptors and even these new goldboys, but I've chosen to buy 4 Gundam kits for the same price of any single one of those boxes, which incidentally are quite a bit more fun to assemble, and I even can play posing and reposing them, with no hint of glue used whatsoever! Because I've pondered all the options where I could have spent my month's hobby money on stuff I might enjoy, and I've decided that it made much more sense to me that way. I might even enjoy it more, because I'll have more stuff that I enjoy!
Sure, but it sounds like the primary reason for your decision is that you prefer the Gundam kits independent of price. And that's fine. I, on the other hand, wouldn't have even the slightest interest in those Gundam kits if they were free. What I object to is the comparisons like "look how many miniatures you could get from this historical company" when neither the person making the comparison nor most of the other people in the thread have any interest in buying those cheap miniatures. A high score on grams of plastic per dollar is not sufficient to justify a reasonable purchase decision.
At the same time Peregrine, not most of us can afford to hire an aircraft at $170 per hour, and many of us struggle to justify £50 on 10 nice models, let alone £52 on four rather clunkily detailed models. I play 40K, and I also do historicals and Infinity, and nothing compares to the price of GW. Its not just the weight, its the number of figures. For just over half of what your four guys cost I can get Joan and four Knight Hospitaller's, models that look lovely, that I will enjoy, and will also be nearly 2/3rds of my army. For the price of your four guys I can build my German platoon, with armour support. For that price I can purchase a Figma figurine. Simply put, GW is overpriced. There is no getting around this. They produce average sculpts, they are not special in any way. They are just incredibly greedy.
Nice signature btw , its nice to see a fellow Maiden fan.
Peregrine wrote: Why is value so important? Do you really gain that much satisfaction from knowing that you have successfully optimized your grams of plastic per dollar? I can't see how anyone can find that approach enjoyable. Buy the miniatures you want, and if the cost per model is higher buy them at a slower rate. If you want 40k then the fact that some unrelated historical game you have no interest in gives you more grams of plastic per dollar shouldn't have much impact on your buying choices.
Wow, way to twist words, there. Cmon, is it so hard to grok that, if you have more than one choice of stuff that you can equally enjoy (say, for example, I equally enjoy 40k, Perry and Gundam models... which I do, or RPGs, which I could say I enjoy even more), one might choose one over the other because one's better value for your (hard earned, and not infinite) disposable hobby money?
I mean, I like Agressors, Inceptors and even these new goldboys, but I've chosen to buy 4 Gundam kits for the same price of any single one of those boxes, which incidentally are quite a bit more fun to assemble, and I even can play posing and reposing them, with no hint of glue used whatsoever! Because I've pondered all the options where I could have spent my month's hobby money on stuff I might enjoy, and I've decided that it made much more sense to me that way. I might even enjoy it more, because I'll have more stuff that I enjoy!
Also, I have found that I can't justify to myself buying GW's character models for the price they ask, which is just as well, as kitbashing is fun.
It's been almost a decade since I've been motivated to buy something new at retail from GW. I will, however, buy every Transformers Generations figure that comes out with a few notable exceptions.
Just Tony wrote: It's been almost a decade since I've been motivated to buy something new at retail from GW. I will, however, buy every Transformers Generations figure that comes out with a few notable exceptions.
I haven't bought any GW stuff in over a year, when I bought a set of MTO Diazettes direct from GW. If they did MTO Horrors, I'd probably get a set of those, too. OTOH, I'm net cash positive for GW for the past several years, as I've sold off various GW items.
Lucky for me, all of that evil, dirty GW money has allowed me to buy pretty heavily into Kingdom Death.
Peregrine wrote: Sure, but it sounds like the primary reason for your decision is that you prefer the Gundam kits independent of price. And that's fine. I, on the other hand, wouldn't have even the slightest interest in those Gundam kits if they were free. What I object to is the comparisons like "look how many miniatures you could get from this historical company" when neither the person making the comparison nor most of the other people in the thread have any interest in buying those cheap miniatures. A high score on grams of plastic per dollar is not sufficient to justify a reasonable purchase decision.
Actually, I hadn't bought a single Gunpla in something like a couple of years, whereas I've bought Betrayal at Calth and Burning of Prospero. Because, as it happens, I like both 40k and gunplas, and those two boxes seemed like a very good value for what I got, so I even have a unit of Custodes, and they're hella cool.
But see...
- BaC/BoP? 38 and 47 miniatures each, for 125 euros (plus, you know, actually playable right out of the box with no other purchase needed, if you want to).
- The Legio Custodes Preorder? 4 miniatures for 70 euros
I like 30/40k enough that I can justify buying the formers, but not the latters.
Bought the bac box too as I myself thought it was a great box, but yeah am much as I like the 30k/40k setting there’s no defence for these crazy prices.
As I said earlier and as have other people there no excuse for price settings like gw are putting out.
I go back to my example of warlord games, great price and great minis to boot. I get more joy from building historicals these days. That’s probably nothing to do with gw mind, more likely me getting older and more beardy lol
xKillGorex wrote: Bought the bac box too as I myself thought it was a great box, but yeah am much as I like the 30k/40k setting there’s no defence for these crazy prices.
As I said earlier and as have other people there no excuse for price settings like gw are putting out.
I go back to my example of warlord games, great price and great minis to boot. I get more joy from building historicals these days. That’s probably nothing to do with gw mind, more likely me getting older and more beardy lol
I suspect GW 'defense' is: they are making lots of money with their current prices.
Likewise, their 'excuse' for the high prices is: people buy them.
I have no criticism or objection to someone saying 'Those kits are way too much for me to buy. I prefer 'X' anyway', but the language used in this discussion seems to suggest that there is some moral issue with GW prices, or that people who are willing to pay them need to defend them somehow.
That confuses me. Capitalism is about making money, not being nice.
No not at all bud, I know there’s a need to make money but for me it’s more down to preference I guess. I’ve no issue if people are happy to buy the kits and enjoy the models.
To me I just like to see my money go a bit further when it comes to spending out on hobby/ toys purchases. If I’m honest I think most of the other products out there while cheaper are of same if not higher quality for other gaming systems.
Still this is just my point of view/ thoughts and not meant to be taken as a slight against anyone.
I enjoy painting and modelling as much (maybe more?) than playing. It also takes me ages to paint stuff because I take my time and my wife/son also need my attention (as well as work/family/etc).
Now, if I factor in the painting time as 'fun' then some of the expensive kits don't look like too bad value for money; I'm gonna get hours of fun out of the kit before I've even put it on the table.
If you are a gamer who sees painting stuff as almost a tax for getting your fun then the value for money argument looks a lot less compelling.
Denny wrote: Now, if I factor in the painting time as 'fun' then some of the expensive kits don't look like to bad value for money; I'm gonna get hours of fun out of the kit before I've even put it on the table.
Thing is, that's only true if the only thing you find "fun" to build and paint is the expensive stuff, of course. As soon as you find as fun building and painting other, cheaper stuff, the analogy doesn't really hold, as then you would have had as much fun either way and you would also have extra money for whatever else.
Maybe it's because I like many different things, but a lot of the time GW seems to give a worse cost to fun ratio when compared with other, equally fun stuff (not always, they also do some pretty nice stuff at competitive prices... which makes these other instances even more baffling).
I really find it hard to believe most people find building and painting armies fun There's a lot of elements surrounding the building and painting of an army that is fun, but the actual building and painting itself is so monotonous.
I'm sure there's some crazies that like it, but surely they're the exception rather than the rule?
I can understand enjoying building and painting 1 or 2 models in an army, beyond that I find it arduous more than fun.
90% of my GW tiime is spent painting. Painting and storytelling are the two things I get out of the hobby more than anything. The pure gamers that are only into gaming and not much else surely exist in great numbers but the people that enjoy painting armies are not a tiny minority in my experience.
auticus wrote: 90% of my GW tiime is spent painting. Painting and storytelling are the two things I get out of the hobby more than anything. The pure gamers that are only into gaming and not much else surely exist in great numbers but the people that enjoy painting armies are not a tiny minority in my experience.
I never said the others were pure gamers.... I'm sure LOTS of people love reading fluff, creating army list, theoryhammering and mathhammering, coming up with paint schemes, chatting on internet forums or loitering in their local gaming shops. None of that stuff actually requires buying a model though.
I'm sure LOTS of people love painting the first squad or two of their army, and I'm sure LOTS of people love painting the last squad in an army and seeing it all completed.
People who enjoy painting all the models in between? Insanity
I often work on some models that are pure display pieces which never see a gaming table. I enjoy doing so. But they aren't whole armies and nor are they GW models. I spent well over 100 hours on a Spitfire that only cost me $50AUD and actually enjoyed it because it's not monotonous like painting a whole army.
Perhaps some crazy folk find the monotony soothing or something, lol.
Denny wrote: Now, if I factor in the painting time as 'fun' then some of the expensive kits don't look like to bad value for money; I'm gonna get hours of fun out of the kit before I've even put it on the table.
Thing is, that's only true if the only thing you find "fun" to build and paint is the expensive stuff, of course. As soon as you find as fun building and painting other, cheaper stuff, the analogy doesn't really hold, as then you would have had as much fun either way and you would also have extra money for whatever else.
Maybe it's because I like many different things, but a lot of the time GW seems to give a worse cost to fun ratio when compared with other, equally fun stuff (not always, they also do some pretty nice stuff at competitive prices... which makes these other instances even more baffling).
It doesn't need to be expensive, but it needs to be something I'm interested in. I have zero interest in historical because then I feel like I should be trying to duplicate a colour scheme rather create my own. I also dislike tanks or machines and I'm not too interested in painting humans unless is a small project like a gang or something. I like monsters and mutants and other 'fantastical' creatures. So no, it doesn't have to be expensive or GW to be fun (I bought a bunch of stuff from Heresy, Mantic and Creature Caster fairly recently) but once you eliminate tanks/robots, historicals, and 'normal' humans, there are far fewer 'cheap' options than you might think.
Also the money . . . is just not much of an issue? I could spend about four grand on miniatures today and it would not affect my day to day life at all (except my wife would kill me and I'd have to put off refurbishing the bathroom). I don't do this of course because I'm boring and responsible (which is incidentally one of the reason I could afford to do it ), and I do try and save money when I can. Like everyone I have my line (the new Beast of Nurgle, for example, is too rich for my blood), but money isn't a pressure on my hobby time.
My big restriction is time.
I don't have much time to paint or to play and I have a massive backlog of plastic. I only play with painted miniatures, so if I buy a big expensive model today it will take me . . . four months of so to get on the table?
Because of this I tend to only buy new stuff that I really like. At that point price isn't much of an issue; I'd rather pay more for something I really like than get something cheaper than I won't enjoy painting as much (learnt my lesson there, thank you Mantic kickstarters).
I can't say I enjoy every model (in the same way as when I go to the gym I don't enjoy every rep) but the pay off is fantastic and makes everything worthwhile. There is massive achievement in spending months or years working hard to achieve a goal. Nothing else comes close.
Wow, 10 pages on GW pricing, again...
Maybe, just maybe, there IS a problem.
Honestly, I will NEVER pay full retail for a GW ANYTHING ever again.
Ever.
Simply as a point of principle - never.
Rather see the company fail than encourage 30USD for a single plastic monopose model whose rules will be buffed just prior to release and then nerfed just prior to the next model's release.
I am not a fish.
I will not leap on shiny plastic things just because they are shiny plastic things.
Ebay. China. Trades. That is the way to roll.
Also, with paints like INSTAR and others,
I will never use another GW paint.
Ever.
Why bother?
Why feed the beast,
so that when he gets hungry he simply needs more and more to fill his greedy belly?
I can't say I enjoy every model (in the same way as when I go to the gym I don't enjoy every rep) but the pay off is fantastic and makes everything worthwhile. There is massive achievement in spending months or years working hard to achieve a goal. Nothing else comes close.
Yep. I discovered this the first time I finally completed a full army that I actually considered reasonably well painted (Epic Orks in my case). Some of that was pretty dull. You try drybrushing sand between tiny 6mm Ork infantry blebs without getting the paint in the wrong place... But I finished them a year ago, I've played dozens of games with them since then, and I *still* sit back, admire them and bask in that quiet glow of satisfaction.
I wouldn't get the same feeling if I'd commissioned someone to do it. There's nothing like knowing that you put every single brushstroke there yourself. And every conversion, every kitbash, etc. Like building a shed yourself instead of having someone do it for you.
Besides, the painting itself can be relaxing if you've got the radio on (or something less old-fashioned perhaps )
If people who enjoyed painting--or at least people who relished the payoff at the end--were a tiny minority, every company would be selling nothing but prepainted figures.
For instance, I can't get into FFG's Star Wars spaceship games because they occupy a weird middle ground between boardgame (where pre-done stuff is expected and you don't really have a strong attachment to the models) and miniatures game (where you do a lot of the work yourself and form a strong emotional connection to 'your mans').
Lego is the same. In the late 90s, they made their kits simpler and simpler, because they thought that kids didn't have the attention spans for it anymore and wanted to get playing as soon as possible. Only later did they realise that slowly building a Lego kit, trying not to make mistakes, and getting to the end knowing you did it all yourself, is a big part of the appeal--even if all you did was follow some instructions.
(On the other hand, I do think the average size of 28mm armies got completely out of control somewhere around the early 2000s and has only grown worse since then. There's no way I could cope with painting up armies of that size. 28mm to me is fundamentally a skirmish scale. It boggles my mind how people routinely paint up 10 tanks and 300 men or whatever. That's what Epic scale is for! Or it used to be, anyway. And at GW prices... *shudder*)
(On the other hand, I do think the average size of 28mm armies got completely out of control somewhere around the early 2000s and has only grown worse since then. There's no way I could cope with painting up armies of that size. 28mm to me is fundamentally a skirmish scale. It boggles my mind how people routinely paint up 10 tanks and 300 men or whatever. That's what Epic scale is for! Or it used to be, anyway. And at GW prices... *shudder*)
It's a matter of scale.
Once you've done, say your 30th fully painted marine, the sense of accomplishment has petered out to some extent, but there is still joy in what you've described.
Having 2 meters of painted tanks, some of which bear your blood from the intensity of work put into them (And i've noticed models that I specifically recall bleeding on during assembly perform better, take that as you will), rocking them up against a titan and *winning* is a sensational feeling.
One that somewhat dulls the previous sensation of accomplishment. The high takes more and more work to achieve, and there isn't really a natural 'out' if you've got £20> of disposable income a month and access to ebay.
As an aside, if you get into the hobby with 2-3 people with the same level of enthusiasm, there's a peculiar form of 'arms race' of who can get the edge first, fastest and - often - best painted, without much thought to the effort involved. I still fondly recall the 8 month long fight I had with my fellow new-starter of SM vs Necrons in the middle of 4th, which I won at the last with consistent fluke lascannons, after about 1500pts of failed experiments.
I have in the past few years at different times focussed on Transformers toys, LEGO and Gundam models, as well as getting back into GW around a year ago after a 15year-ish hiatus.
I also play video games when time allows, and none of those are necessarily cheap hobbies. I defended GW pricing (eww, I feel dirty) in another thread on this, but yeah, they're expensive.
I'd definitely argue that Gundam or LEGO can be at least as rewarding in a modelling sense, and certainly you can always go back and repose a Gunpla kit (there are some that you'd be very, very brave to do that with though...) and LEGO clearly has a lot of re-playability.
That said, aside from a few blips here and there, I've put most of my hobby spending into GW-related stuff this past year. I've gone heavy on the "bargain" packs where possible, and made use of old, often unpainted models as well as updating old paintschemes to hide my adolescent shame...well, one of them anyway.
I'm far from determined to win at all costs playing the game. In fact I've still not played a game since getting back in. I do enjoy list building, and prefer that any models I make are tabletop legal in loadouts, etc, but have been a lot more forgiving in this aspect in my older age.
I'd rather get models I like the look of, and think I'll enjoy building and painting. That's my primary concern. Once I've decided what I want to get to build and paint, then I worry about the best load-outs, and I've a ton of Tau and Nids that I'll be asking questions about whenever I get around to building them.
I've limited time to build and paint, and so take my time getting through stuff. Possibly spending a bit more time on rank and file troops than I should be at the moment, but I'm trying to get better at painting, and trying out new techniques. Its definitely an enjoyable and rewarding process, so I feel I'm getting my moneys worth.
The biggest issue I have with GW models is the disparity in price between models. The single packed characters, vs squads isn't just a case of 1 guy vs 5, but often a case of maybe getting a choice of 2 weapons or heads vs a choice of entirely different units in some cases. I like variety and having spare bitz for future conversions, and when those all come in a box of 5 or 10 guys for maybe only a few quid more than a single character (and often not even a special named character, but a generic guy) it does seem steep. Of course, there are often ways around this.
As I enjoy the modelling aspect a lot, I've taken the route of only building plastic models for my in progess mixed Aeldari army. Given that there's about 4 plastic units in the entire Craftworld range, that's made things interesting, and time-consuming, but resulted in some fun models. I'm slowly amassing enough models for enough armies to try and persuade some friends to give the game a go, without requiring the intial buy-in of buying, building and painting an army, and am really enjoying the journey.
It IS expensive, but I'm not going crazy with the spending and getting my time and money's worth out of it right now, even in comparison to other hobbies. Do I think some of the models could be cheaper? Of course, especially some of those who seem artificially high because they're somehow considered more important, or they've received rules updates making them more attractive gaming purchases (funny that ) but actually have less options from a modelling sense. Do I combat this by purchasing bundle deals or spreading out my purchases, and limiting myself to not buying any more when I realise I've 4 boxes of plastic toy men not even built, let alone painted? Why, yes, yes I do. Is that perfect for everyone? I'm fairly certain the internet would close down in a couple of days if everyone could agree on even one topic.
the danger with price gouging is that there is always the risk of people saying "enough" and abandoning the game wholesale. That would be a disaster for the folks who enjoy the setting and even the rules. The idea is make a nice hefty profit, but dont bleed the customer dry doing it, and generally you will make more if you sell more, cheaper sells more.
Especially that in most cases you can get 20-25% off.
you're absolutely right. Outside of the 
Especially not once the lead laws came in to screw over miniature wargamers forever with that godawful PEWTER.
)