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A brief exchange about this happened on another thread, and I thought it deserved it's own topic.

By no means an 'Old timer' but I've been in the 40k hobby for a while now. Since 2nd edition I've seen many, many price hikes. I've also seen what seems to be less and less fully painted armies.

Without making any judgements about painted, unpainted or even GW prices my question is this. Is there a correlation between increasing prices and decreasing painting?

My suspicion -unprovable as it is- is that as prices have gone up, there has been a subtle shift in perception from GW games being something you paint your way into to GW games being something you buy your way into.

I could be totally wrong about this. There is of course the fact that during the same period of time, the size of the armies fielded in GW games has greatly increased as well, possibly making painting an entire army a more daunting task. However I still feel that there is something similar to the Collectible Card Game mentality in GW games now that (perhaps unintentionally) puts more emphasis on the monetary investment rather than the time investment.

Thoughts?

One other somewhat nebulous thought for consideration. Is it inevitable that as an activity becomes more expensive, the cost becomes more and more a part of the associations and values of the activity?

More recently I notice that some battle report sites have absolutely horridly painted/assemble minis. (if even painted at all) It's not exactly inspiring. These are the same people who malign 'soft' scores like painting and modelling or themeso I do think there is a definate shift towards the build' / CCG mentality.

Balanced codices would alleviate that. People would then play the army they want, not the army they 'have ' to use in order to be compeditive.