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That was until I went to the local official Harley Davidson shop with my Dad the other day to buy him something for his birthday.My god it made GW look almost peasant like in its prices!

Example - 6 screws for some part on the engine. Just small screws, nothing fancy. £15!!!!!!!

A badge that goes on the engine cover - £90. Yes. £90 for a badge about the size of my hand with an eagle on it.

The list is endless and the prices are unbelievable. A guy bought a bike for £12'000 and spent £27'000 doing it up!!!!

So - does anyone else have or seen hobbies that sometimes put our plastic men in perspective? How much have you spent on other hobbies? I'm a semi-pro musician and have about £5'000 worth of basses, about £2'500 worth of amps and other various parts. I earn money from it though so it's paid for itself but still. Expensive hobby!

(This isn't a GW suck up thread, just shedding some light on how expensive other hobbies can be)

I used to play guitars and it was expensive, i have a bad habit of getting bored quickly so i used to buy something new like every month such as a new pedal, it was costing in excess of hundred quid a month which is cheap for guitar stuff . Not to mention the amound of gear i traded just to keep myself sane

Yeah, it's what I've been saying. As a hobby GW games are pretty reasonable.

I usually use the example of 4x4 off-roading that I used to do. Cost of petrol & repairs is expensive. I still have my Land Rover but can't afford to go off-roading any more, I play 40K instead.

Computers.
Just put out AUD$300 on a graphics card.

Shooting. Can't resell that lead when you're done with it.

Do you think the people who moan consistently about GW prices moan about the price of things in general? :-D

piperider361 wrote:Shooting. Can't resell that lead when you're done with it.

Buy a metal detector, find the used lead, then melt it down to cast figures...

Mick

I do a lot of cycling.
My bike was worth about £1000 new with the wheels alone as a pair worth £250
1 crash later and I had an unusable front wheel and another dodgy sholder plus a week long holiday in Switzelend/ France lymping. The new front wheel cost £180 - that was mid of the range bog standard...

Mountain biking. Bought a new tyre for the same price you'd pay for a car tyre several weeks ago. It's already shredded and needs to be replaced.

Photography. just can't stop throwing money at lenses and other bits and pieces. "Cheap" decent lenses cost about £300+ depending on what you're after.

4x4's (as above!). Used to own a Land Rover when I lived in Wales, that was a bottomless money pit.

Scuba Diving. You have the right to complain about the expense of a hobby when you have to pay for air to breathe!

Not quite sure how people are managing to spend quite so much on playing guitar, but then I'm somewhat easy to please, give me a stage, a working amp and a guitar and I'm golden. The initial layout for a decent setup can be a lot though, depending on your tastes.

I used to skateboard in my (not so) wild and misspent youth, that gets pretty damn expensive fast since you can spend 50 quid on something only to have it break near instantly.

PC gaming can be very expensive, if you insist on riding the bleeding edge and getting a high-end video card every year. I myself tend to get a $350 video card and make it last about 2 years, but I'm not as h4rcc0rez as I used to be, in my advancing age.

I built a NAS a few months ago - a 24 bay beast, and have started populating it with 2TB drives. The initial outlay was right around $1200 for the initial 3x 2TB build, and every time I add a new drive it's $80. Assuming the cost of the drives remain $80 until I finish populating it, I would have spent $1,920 in drives alone, for a total of around 3 grand.

Of course, 40TB will take even me a while to fill out, so I hope to make it last at least 4 or 5 years.

--

The most obvious analogy, of course, would be console gaming. A decent console would be around $400 initially, and lets say 3 games a month new, which are $64.19 with tax (my coworker works at Gamestop and knows that number intimately) - so, $192.57 a month? Your numbers may vary. I don't play console games so I have no idea what the average consumption would be.

piperider361 wrote:Shooting. Can't resell that lead when you're done with it.

Try being a shooter in the UK - The prices here are huge and getting worse all the time

Slinky wrote:

piperider361 wrote:Shooting. Can't resell that lead when you're done with it.

Try being a shooter in the UK - The prices here are huge and getting worse all the time

- I go shooting with cadets and we pay nothing to go. One weekend we turned up to the MOD range at Dymchurch and pelted 2,400 7.62 mm (We were using the L98A2) for absulutly nothing down the end range by the converted napoleonic fort.. Oh and there is no cost for using the Rifles.

And how about that swimming with sharks lark as well. The special alloy for the 'cage' you sit in is bloody expensive, and there's a chance that the shark might opt to chew through the chain which is attached to the ship, leaving you to plummet through the depths and to a watery grave!

At least with GW products you don't have the chance of that happening!

+2 to GW

Yet strangely, the price of hobbies (and toys and games) generally is coming down. At least here in the UK

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14119532

The BBC wrote:The Retail Prices Index (RPI) measure of inflation - which includes mortgage interest payments - also fell, from 5.2% to 5%, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The slowdown came courtesy of falling prices for games, toys and hobbies, as well as for clothing and footwear.

Fencing gear is quite expensive, thankfully my club loans me the kit I need.

But if you want a foil for competition it's about £120 with VAT. Your also gonna need it to work with electrics so make it £150 with VAT.

Low end (350n) jackets, breeches, plastrons and gloves will easily pass the £100 mark, £400 for high end gear. Then a foil lame for electrics again so another £70 odd pounds.

Masks range from £50 to £250 depending on what you get and whether you want electric or not.


Not as expensive as things that involve moving parts but still quite hefty on the wallet.

BAh its not as expensive as Mage Knights oh boy was that expensive in the long run.
Each blister pack which contained 6 models costed 16 dollars
Then a starter pack cost 35$
and only contained 10 models...
Then the heroes oh boy... 15 dollars for one hero. and then the items which were basically cards cost 10 dollars. EACH.

Then Mech Warriors ha was that a blast, but expensive again....

Then dirt biking costs a blunket and a arm.

Its not that GW is particularly expensive in the scheme of all things you can spend money on. Just that in the scheme of 5 gram pieces of plastic, it doesn't seem like great value for money. Especially compared to other 5 gram pieces of plastic which are 1/4 the price, or the same piece of plastic a month ago for half the price...

EDIT: My expensive hobby is Wakeboarding. $150-$250 for a day's fuel depending on how many people are on the water, $40000->$200000 depending on how 'pro' you want your boat, $1500 for a board with decent boots, $200 for a rope and handle. I'm prepared to pay more for premium products because I can easily tell the difference in quality and manufacturing process between a $200 and a $800 board: I see minis from other companies which are made in the same way with the same materials (and increasingly, the same quality) as GW minis for 1/4 of the pricem and that is what irks me.

I fly down solid gold Ferraris I own to Antartica every weekend and then proceed to smash them to bits with a variety of tools such as a hammer

Makes my fascinaton with plastic toy soldiers seem relatively cheap in comparison

Harley and Gibson are the respective GWs. You pay for the HARLEY DAVIDSON EXPERIENCE and you pay bigtime.

Italian sportsbikes. Oh, good. You've just burnt out the starter motor and taken the solenoid with it. £400 you say? Bargain...

Shooting definitely. I have a .45 so I pay about $100 for 250 bullets. I usually savor them but its really easy to go through them all in one session.

Want/need a new car too and that's expensive.

My two Harleys are my most expensive hobby but I wouldn't trade them for the world.

Just a bit of advice, when looking for a gift for a Harley Davidson enthusiast your best bet is a T-Shirt or Hoodie from a hard to get to store, like Maui, the Bahamas, any of the ports in Alaska...

Console video gamers. Talk about your "Feels cheap... is actually expensive" style hobby.

Xbox 360 on release day:
Console 400$ + Extra Controller 60$ + 3 Games 180$ = 640$

Throw in just 6 games a year @ 60$ x 6 years the system has been out = 36 games @ 60$ = $2,160!!!

Total cost for 6 years (release day to date) =$2800 if you only bought 6 games a year.

Drop your console habbit, and you could be swimming in Death Korps!!

gr1m_dan wrote:Do you think the people who moan consistently about GW prices moan about the price of things in general? :-D

£20 FOR 2 CINEMA TICKETS?!?! WAAAAA!

I like to think of my car as a hobby. Not because it's a wonderful piece of machinery or anything, but more because I've got this macabre sort of ticker in my head counting how long I can keep it running.

My wife's hobby s interior decorating. Last year she was complaining that she never had enough money for it; I told her she could match my gaming budget dollar for dollar. She told me that wasn't nearly enough.

Try Firearms,Paintball, SCUBA, or Autoracing for the true definitions of expensive hobby's

Someone mentioned earlier how it feels like we are not getting our moneys worth for the weight of plastic and comparison of other companies.

I know this sounds like ultra GW sucking up but what we have to remember is that we are not just paying for the model and it's value in plastic/finecast but wages of ALL the staff over all the stores and at GW HQ. We are paying for the rent/cost of running Warhammer World, the factories etc. If you've ever been to WHW you'll see why that's a huge factor. You can't really compare other companies to what GW is doing because they are all tiny in comparison to GWs size. This is why I believe prices are so high. Obviously they are high down to the fact they are PLC and shareholders are greedy mofo's but after comparing other hobbies I am holding back on my GW hate campaign over their prices.

Let me just make this clear, we are on about prices here...not their attitude to customers. That's another thread altogether!!! :-D


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Oh, I was going to start Airsoft soon...I really need to stop wanting more hobbies!

Remote Control Cars/Other Vehicles

I'm not talking about those cheap RC's at Toys R Us

I'm talking bout those machines you buy at hobby stores that will cost you several baneblades, not to mention replacement parts if you damage the thing