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 Klerych wrote:

I already covered that when asked what I meant.. 'ere ye go:

 Klerych wrote:
It was only partially relevant, I admit. It's just that some people often like to justify themselves saying that they won't buy books/movies/games because they can't afford them/are too poor/have too low salary to pay for them while wasting even more money on stuff like alcohol and cigarettes. That's precisely what I call hypocricy.

Please make sure to notice the "some" in second sentence.

Yeah, but I really don't think that's at all relevant to pirated miniatures. I'd venture that most (if not all) people who buy recasts are already knee, waist, or neck-deep in the hobby. When the GW store guy tells you to buy multiple Devastator boxes just to make a four-man Lascannon squad, you know something is wrong.

Always angry all the time.

 Peregrine wrote:
And for a lot of people "unfair" is "anything above $0". Stop trying to turn this into some bizarre moral high ground where piracy is just a statement about fairness. It isn't, it's simply a decision that you'd rather steal something than not have it.

People might stop with the moral high ground if you stop acting as if everyone in this thread wants it as cheap as possible.

There will always be piracy, there will always be people buying recasts!
The amount of recast-buying would drastically decrease if Mega Boyz did not cost 50 euro; 35 would be a more realistic price.

 Steve steveson wrote:
It fundamentally IS a legal and moral choice. How can it possibly be anything else?

It's a moral choice in the sense of "Do I play against it or not."
But we don't need a discussion where people are calling eachother criminals because they buy recasts.
That is not the question that the TS asked and it's not a healthy discussion.

I really don't care about the morality thing, I just like miniatures. I'll be getting some recast Death Company as a bits source for a conversion (mad experiments of a heretical Sanguinary Priest, part of the lore for my CSM), among other things.

Kangodo wrote:


The amount of recast-buying would drastically decrease if Mega Boyz did not cost 50 euro; 35 would be a more realistic price.

This. If GW models were more realistically priced third party recasters wouldn't be able to undersell GW by more than a couple bucks and at that point people would go to GW for thier quality.
For the same price, I'd much rather have two pretty good quality riptides from china than one very good quality riptide from GW. However, if I was only saving 5-10$ by buying the chinese recast I'd stick with GW. The only reason this problem exists is because of the unrealistic markup on GW plastic.

 Hivefleet Oblivion wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:

 Yonan wrote:

 Hivefleet Oblivion wrote:
Making up a justification that GW treats its customers with 'spite'? really?

If you don't think GW treats their players poorly, perhaps you haven't dealt with them raising prices by 40+% in your country and then putting ridiculous restrictions on merchants in other nations to prevent you from ordering there. I'd call that spiteful, and damn straight I'll shaft 'em back for it.

Exalted. We pay far more than we should. And it's higher than 40% even after factoring in exchange rates

you're complaining about GW charging too much money for something

No, I'm complaining about them charging one person 40%+ more than another person. If I meant high prices I would have said high prices. I meant regional pricing. Charging me 40%+ more than they charge you and preventing me from ordering where you order from with trade restrictions is spiteful.

 Hivefleet Oblivion wrote:
You're distorting the argument to make it look like GW are being counterfeited because they're bad and after a quick buck. The reality is it's the counterfeiters who are thieves, after a quick buck.

Gabe Newell, CEO of Steam who has far more knowledge about this than you disagrees with you. Piracy is a service problem, it increases when customers find a disconnect between what they expect from the company and what the company delivers. Youc an't compete with free, but you *can* compete with service - every other miniature company competes better on price and is so much better than GW on the service aspect (ie. not being douches) that they don't / won't be widely recast.

Yea, this argument has already been shut down in other formats on a digital front. Provide a better service and a lower price and you can get people to stop pirating for sheer convenience alone.

When you have recasters that produce goods at a lower price and in better quality than Games Workshop, then the issues lies with Games Workshop. They have a popular product, and if they were smart, they would recognize volume sales, which lowers the cost barrier to entry, which then spreads word of mouth, is what they would want.

You essentially cannot buy any mini used on eBay these days because it can be a counterfeit. Looking at publicly forward sites you can easily find with Google, there are recasters making all the old metals still in metal. Some people prefer metal, painters for example, and this is a missed market. Then you have the same option in a more resilient resin than Finecasts or Forgeworld's.

So you have a cheaper and better product that gets the consumer what they want. A smart company sees this and realizes it's much easier to fix in house problems (volume, margins, MSRP, etc.) than litigation or trying to shut down the "bad guys." Or you try to pull an Apple and price fix to success, but we know how well that goes over (loved watching all the publishers tuck tail on that one!).

So in the end, the only reason why Games Workshop has a large recasting market is because they are at a good mix of solid market share, price gouging, and poor quality that is a perfect storm to make that a sustainable business model. The thing is, GW is losing sales to that at the same time they are losing sales to poor management of the game; it's a double hair-on-fire situation and they are solving it by litigating and bunkering up versus doing what already been shown the successful path.

I'd like to interject briefly to point out that this is not at all illegal in China, so the recasters are not "crooks".

 Frozen Ocean wrote:
I'd like to interject briefly to point out that this is not at all illegal in China, so the recasters are not "crooks".

Outside of the narrow scope that is our plastic army man addiction, intellectual property as a whole is in dire need of reform the world wide. As much as patent control is needed in the USA. It's a subject no one wants to slice and dice, but when you have corporations extended their profitability thanks to Disney, it's getting a bit asinine. Twenty years was quite generous, now it's at 70+ in the US?

Our society would prosper more if we actually allowed for the lending of ideas. Yes, some nod needs to be given for those specifically invested in R&D in various expensive industries that are a boon to us all, but I can only hope for IP reform to hit sooner than later.

The idea of granting legal, thus financial, rights to someone just because they "thought of it first" is silly in the context of society, thus denying the people who actually strive to make that idea a reality the real benefit. The concept of internet connectivity on cellular phones is an interesting one with regards to the US patent holder in that he got rich off the mere concept but was not involved in the actual creation of said concept, the making it happen.

Once you look into Games Workshop's past and realize how much of the fiction we love is actually stolen or based upon other mythos, then you realize that complaining about some recasters is might bit hypocritical if your aim is to defend GW.

 Peregrine wrote:

 azreal13 wrote:
But that's not opportunity cost.

That's just cost

If you're going to throw recognised terms around, please be sure that you know what they mean, and be consistent in their application.

Except it IS opportunity cost because the point is that the "spare time" recaster has a limited budget of time and money for things like buying new kits or making new molds, and that's very important when the choice is between buying a Warmachine kit to recast or buying the latest big GW thing to recast.

Whatever Peregrine, I'm pretty sure if you ever conceded a point then Dakka would implode, so rather than you have to constantly rejig the criteria to maintain your aura of invulnerability, you can have this.

I'll just add your name to the "all opinion, no clue" list when it comes to matters corporate and financial.

I'm one of the people in the camp that if GW would produce better quality for a more reasonable price I would buy from them.

When I started out with my Necrons, I got an Overlord so badly cast it had a hole in it's chest you could see through. GW sent a replacement with while not as bad was still crap. After going through this for a few weeks and ending up with 1 decent model and 3 finecrap piles, I looked elsewhere for anything resin from GW. All my Necron characters are recasts, and I've never had a single problem with them. Since buying IA:12 I've been picking up the Necron FW line via recasts. I've had minimal problems with the resin, and nothing ever has arrived so badly cast I wanted to throw it away.

 Steve steveson wrote:
Aren't allot of other things, like electronics and computer games, much more expensive in Australia? Assassins creed unity is 20% more than in the UK. 99 au$, which is £55. £45 in the UK. Makes me think there is some reason behind it than just "we'll charge them more"

Well, that's where you'd be wrong. Companies take advantage of the fact that we have no neighbouring countries to visit even if they charge a price well above what it's worth. People can claim international exportation prices, but really it's no different for here than anywhere else in the world that gets a fair price. And, it's even the same with downloadable products that have the same expense to sell globally.

Adobe was recently invested and asked under fair trading investigation by authorities, exactly why their downloadable program was sold in Australia for 150% the price of everywhere else. They could come up with no answer other than "we are free to charge whatever we like".

Is stealing from these companies still morally wrong? Yes, sure. I'm a thief. They are correct, they are free to charge whatever they like. But when it's cheaper for me to buy my stuff in a different country and pay for my international shipping myself, and they then restrict all retailers from selling international orders for no other reason than to allow themselves to bump up prices by 150%, I know that they are not delivering on a product worth the cost. It's easily arguable that they already don't before that. I don't even want to give my money in support of ANY business choosing to do this hence why I do pirate, I want to fight this unjustified mark up, that could easily be argued as far more immoral than the act of supporting sellers willing to charge a reasonable price as opposed to the original creator and owner of the product, giving them incentive to actually charge a sensible amount, at which point I will go back to them. As it stands I refuse to buy anything from GW as it just serves to support their decisions to deliver a subpar product for an overpriced retail cost. Does this make me a bad person? Possibly. I don't see what they are doing as much more than collusion for our country which is also illegal hence why their is a slow fight happening to put an end to the Australia mark up. Remember, not everyone who breaks the law is in the wrong, the law was written by people and sometimes it doesn't account for everything. Not everyone who kills someone is a bad person. I'm fighting them because I can't morally justify supporting them, whether or not that makes me a bad person in your eyes couldn't bother me the slightest.

Davor wrote:
Then again, how is Magic doing? By that I mean can not people just copy and print their cards? Sales are still going strong right? So how is the Magic sceane doing with "printed" cards.

From what I recall, sanctioned tournaments require the actual card. People can and do use printed cards for casual games, particularly for the rarer (and thus harder to get, more expensive) cards. I've also seen people playing with a junk card in a sleeve with the name of the card they want it to be written on the front of the sleeve in texta.

Overall, though, the existence of cheap inkjet printers and paper doesn't seem to have killed MtG off just yet. Just as it didn't kill off the publishing industry in general, which was what was predicted back when desktop printers first became a thing.

3D printing will be the same, at least to begin with. There will be those who will use it to make copies... and there will be those who will still prefer to buy the 'real' thing. At least until the printers get good enough that companies just start selling printable files as the 'real thing'.


And for your previous comment, there are plenty of people out there who have never downloaded an illegal copy of a GW book, or a song, movie or game. There are also plenty who may have done so when they were young and needed everything immediately in order to live, but who in later life have realised that if they can't afford to buy it legitimately they probably don't actually need it.

Just because a lot of people don't have a problem with this sort of thing, that doesn't mean that everyone does it.

 insaniak wrote:

And for your previous comment, there are plenty of people out there who have never downloaded an illegal copy of a GW book, or a song, movie or game. There are also plenty who may have done so when they were young and needed everything immediately in order to live, but who in later life have realised that if they can't afford to buy it legitimately they probably don't actually need it.

Just because a lot of people don't have a problem with this sort of thing, that doesn't mean that everyone does it.

I will just leave my exalt here.

I know I've already been branded an elitist jerk and show-off, but I'd love to make it clear - I have nothing against playing someone using recasts. For whatever reason he decided that he should buy them rather than save up for genuine models, doesn't matter - I can condemn his actions, I can disagree, I can not care, it's not my business and what I think about his choices and morality has nothing to do with my ability to play with him. Especially when it comes to Forge World - the prices are ridiculous and I am less likely to condemn him than I would be with someone buying recast tactical squad or Sternguards. I have seen Death Korps army made with ten times better resin that doesn't break and crumble when looked funny at at 40% the price and all-MK IV Space Marines army that'd normally cost as much as a used car and I had a blast playing against them.

Wow, I go to work and when I come back my threat has exploded.


However, it appears that there are a few reasons why people would or would not.

Would.
1. It's cheaper and Games Workshop is expensive.
2. I really don't care who I play so long as I get to play.
3. There is no difference between not using models from GW and not using glue/paint from GW.
4. Corporations are evil and must be treated as such.
5. Because they are cheaper it allows for a greater variety of units and we can have larger games containing more and more models.
6. Recasting is often better quality, people are just going for the better model.

Would not.
1. Recasting is theft and thievery is illegal.
2. It is unethical to cheat people out of all their hard work.
3. Just because some people believe that GW 'deserve it' doesn't mean it is actually okay to do it.
4. I most people pay the full whack for these items, it is only fair if you do too.


Personally, I'm on the side of 'I would.' I'm mostly on the side of I would because of the costs. Not just in GW, Warmachine is also just as expensive, even more so on a unit to unit basis (yes I know PP games are maybe a fifth or a tenth of the size of full warhammer ones. But £30 for what is basically 13 Imperial Guardsmen with mono-pose and poor plastic quality is much worse than anything GW have done, at least their models look the part.) I'm really tempted to start up a Horus Heresy Death Guard army. I wrote up a standard 2000 point list which I could use. The cost from Forge World was just shy of £700. My first motorcycle was £750. And this is for an army in which I wouldn't be able to swap a single unit out, it was all the models I needed.

Like a few people have said, I would much rather play a friendly good guy thief than an uptight WAAC player who bought all his stuff at full retail.

 welshhoppo wrote:
I'm really tempted to start up a Horus Heresy Death Guard army. I wrote up a standard 2000 point list which I could use. The cost from Forge World was just shy of £700. My first motorcycle was £750. And this is for an army in which I wouldn't be able to swap a single unit out, it was all the models I needed.

So then don't buy it. Just don't act like you're entitled to have it, even if you have to steal it because GW won't sell it to you as cheaply as you want.

 Peregrine wrote:

 welshhoppo wrote:
I'm really tempted to start up a Horus Heresy Death Guard army. I wrote up a standard 2000 point list which I could use. The cost from Forge World was just shy of £700. My first motorcycle was £750. And this is for an army in which I wouldn't be able to swap a single unit out, it was all the models I needed.

So then don't buy it. Just don't act like you're entitled to have it, even if you have to steal it because GW won't sell it to you as cheaply as you want.

Except I will probably by it from Forgeworld, just so I can tell people that I have more money than sense.

 Peregrine wrote:

 welshhoppo wrote:
I'm really tempted to start up a Horus Heresy Death Guard army. I wrote up a standard 2000 point list which I could use. The cost from Forge World was just shy of £700. My first motorcycle was £750. And this is for an army in which I wouldn't be able to swap a single unit out, it was all the models I needed.

don't act like you're entitled to have it, even if you have to steal it because GW won't sell it to you as cheaply as you want.

Don't act like they're entitled to the horrible copyright system we have in place, just because companies bought extensions far beyond it's original goal just to make more profit at the cost of creativity.

Just to weigh in on this one: a big problem, as with lots of companies, is that while you like the product, you do not want to support the company behind it in any way. To me, this is the very case with GW as I don't want to support the company behind the products and would gladly pay to see them going down if that was somhow possible.

It's worse when it comes to the rules part as their rules are terrible and extremely poor and not worth the cash they charge them for - that's why we don't buy the rules anymore. It's not a cost issue, as money is no issue for us, it's a "Vote with your wallet" issue.

Can we get a Kickstarter going to get rid of GW's management?

Davor wrote:
Again to the OP. What is wrong? What are you going to say when someone is using Privateer Press, or Vallejo paints instead of GW paints?

Heaven forbid if someone is not using GW paint brushes.

How about people who don't use GW glue?

When does it stop? Where does it start?

If you read the question properly youd see thats its about recasts, direct copies of copyrighted content, not alternatives to gw.

My thoughts are unclear to me on this matter. I would play somone with recasts, but im not sure id get recasts myself.
Thats being said, ive often thought about casting some basic sm bodies so that I can make the most of out of these multipart kits we get these days.
Its all so muddy...

bt

Just FYI, after GW gave me the copy paste speed written piece of trash that they called Tyranids 6E codex, I went at spent $300 on an iPad specifically to avoid giving them my money. I use it for no other purpose than a portable pirate copy of the codex.

I don't have an issue with spending money - but I refuse to support GW after the trash they have delivered. At this stage I am invested into the 40k game, and I want to see GW fail so that they can stop holding it back.

Luckily for me they made my iPad purchase worthwhile by releasing 7th as a lackluster grab for cash and trying to charge me $140 good one guys, wonder who here bought that and not just a brand-new tablet of their own for the same price.

 TheKbob wrote:

 Frozen Ocean wrote:
I'd like to interject briefly to point out that this is not at all illegal in China, so the recasters are not "crooks".

then you realize that complaining about some recasters is might bit hypocritical if your aim is to defend GW.

I'm not, though. I honestly don't care about the situation with copyright worldwide, GW, or anything. I am taking no moral high or low ground on this subject. My above post was just to challenge the thought that the recasters are criminals, because they're not. "Criminal" meaning "breaking the law".

First of all let me preface things with the statement that I do not own any recasts, unless somehow they are extremely good secondhand ones, which were made in metal, then bought by someone, painted badly, stripped partially, and then sold to me on Ebay to strip fully and then paint, all without me figuring out that they are recasts.


But......I would still like someone to pose a good argument as to why I should resign myself to never owning an original version of some extremely limited OOP model, like a Squat or a Zoat (or even something more relatively modern like a metal Marneus Calgar), versus it being possible to purchase a recast of that model. How would it possibly be stealing from and weakening GW if they themselves absolutely refuse to make a single dollar more on that product range?

And if someone decides to sell a recast of some old OOP model, how is that different than selling a secondhand version of the same model? Neither sale benefits GW, and both kinds of sale came from an original sale that way back in the day benefited GW, because even a recast, no matter how many of them are made, had to come from a real model bought from GW.

 Frozen Ocean wrote:

 TheKbob wrote:

 Frozen Ocean wrote:
I'd like to interject briefly to point out that this is not at all illegal in China, so the recasters are not "crooks".

then you realize that complaining about some recasters is might bit hypocritical if your aim is to defend GW.

I'm not, though. I honestly don't care about the situation with copyright worldwide, GW, or anything. I am taking no moral high or low ground on this subject. My above post was just to challenge the thought that the recasters are criminals, because they're not. "Criminal" meaning "breaking the law".

Well, given the fact that it's crime in pretty much every western country and China decided to make it legal because they make profit off it and they're rich and powerful enough to make anyone who has any objections gobble on their rice balls, it's kinda dubious. Of course there it's not a crime, but european/american recasts would be criminals. You know, in India rape is not a crime/noone cares and in some african countries genocide ain't a crime either as long as it profits the warlord. That way you can challenge the thought that even murder is not a crime depending on the location. :-)

So, if it's legal to produce them in the country that is selling them, and it is legal to buy them everywhere, then there is no argument based in legality, this is just a moral choice.

Oh, and if you're going to start throwing claims around like "rape and genocide are legal/no one cares" you'd better have some citations ready, or I might just accuse you of hyperbole.

Wha.... What??? There are people who would say NO to a game solely because they are using re-cast models????

Sheesh.

I have 2 lynxs and a few squads re-casted from china, and when I go for a game and I tell them, more often then not they ask me where it was, the name of the website, how much it costs, and how long shipping is so that they themselves can buy some. Ive not once had someone not play me because of off cast models.
I didnt realize there were white knights that serious.

Refusing to play someone with recasts is pathetic. It's their choice to buy them and it's not my place to judge them for it.

Let GW and the lawyers judge them if they have an issue. As for me? I'm there to play a game - not pretend to have the moral high ground over such a pointless non-issue at the gamer level.


Sure you can whine and complain that it's this complacency that means GW has to raise it's prices blah blah... frankly I don't care for this guilt tripping. I, and many other players buy models from Games Workshop or discount official models. If anything, it's GW's business model that would drive gamers like me towards other vendors.

I parted out a DKoK army. It was exactly $1 per point and an $1,850 list.

I laughed at that.

BrotherTitus wrote:

Davor wrote:
Again to the OP. What is wrong? What are you going to say when someone is using Privateer Press, or Vallejo paints instead of GW paints?

Heaven forbid if someone is not using GW paint brushes.

How about people who don't use GW glue?

When does it stop? Where does it start?

If you read the question properly youd see thats its about recasts, direct copies of copyrighted content, not alternatives to gw.

My thoughts are unclear to me on this matter. I would play somone with recasts, but im not sure id get recasts myself.
Thats being said, ive often thought about casting some basic sm bodies so that I can make the most of out of these multipart kits we get these days.
Its all so muddy...

bt

Oh I have read. My question is what is the difference? What is the difference between a GW product and a non GW product? For some, it's about legality as was mentioned before. For others, it's NON GW so it's not allowed. For some people, you CAN'T use PP minis or anything else into a 40K game. Recasts or not. That is why I said, when does it stop? Where does it start? Now I see the OP opinion which he never stated before so that is why I was asking.

Your going to have to make a strong case to say that recasting is immoral or instead just against a cultural norm that the United States has.

Cause, in other countries that is in fact not the case. With copyright law as well as the production of goods.