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DakkaDakka,

I figured I ask this here to see what you all think??? With 3D printing on the rise, do you think that Games Workshop will go out of business when the consumer can purchase a viable 3D Printer

Let the dicussion begin!

They'll at the same time be boosted by people being able to get into the hobby cheaper (army book the only cost) and then deciding its only reasonable to pay for some things, or paying for some to keep content coming, and damaged badly by revenue loss.

Its down to the quality of rules releases, honestly, as 0-cost gaming can use whatever rules people want, while GW's are still designed to sell product and receive no editing support.

IF they fail to get their act together for content generation, the established community will migrate to better systems in large numbers, and the remainder will be insufficient to support the high-street presence when independent stores are gaining ground, leading to even more playerbase erosion.

At some point between now and the high-street presence going down the drain, hopefully GW will get their act together and save themselves. If not, they will die, and 3D printing will have played a small but significant part.

There's still a lot GW could do to stop that. Calling in the lawyers against people who torrent/download the 3D blueprints would be the one single act that could end them. Most obvious fix options would include hiring an editor, replacing the worst codex people (hi phil kelly, but not just him), putting more stuff into multipart plastics that're highly posable (and have most or all options present), making the kit prices more sensible (the new crisis team kit is a step in the right direction, for example), and I could go on.

Point being, there's a lot of options open, and 3D printing alone will not kill GW

Maybe one day.

It will be a long time before an individual can afford a 3D printer capable of printing an entire army of modern quality for a cost lower then GW ( or any other manufacturer for that matter) can cast it with current technology. Also, as 3D printing becomes of higher quality and more cost effective, GW could very well use that technology to cut their costs/increase quality, thereby still beating out the individual user at home with their printer.

Of course one day, 3D printing could be so cheap and so powerful that anyone could print all their miniatures at home, but such technology would bring about so many other changes that the shift of production of miniatures will hardly seem consequential.

No I don't think so.

It will be a while before 3-D printing can match the traditional casting process for detail.

3-D printing has more applications in manufacturing large scale plastic components, not small detailed luxury items.

Things like cell phone cases, electronic casings, etc...

3-D printing is also not to the point where it can mass produce stuff, thus it is limited to lower volume products.

Malik_Raynor wrote:
DakkaDakka,

I figured I ask this here to see what you all think??? With 3D printing on the rise, do you think that Games Workshop will go out of business when the consumer can purchase a viable 3D Printer

Let the dicussion begin!

Considering it is still dramatically cheaper, almost by a factor of 10, to buy a full army from GW than to just buy a 3D printer, let alone all the supplies you'll need to "print" a full army, I really doubt GW is going to lose out on anything soon. Add in the fact that you could easily buy 5 full 3K armies for 40k and still not even cover half the price of a 3D printer and you see how unlikely you position is.

No point in investing thousands of dollars to save hundreds by not buying minis...

Skriker

The quality of 3D printers has to go up -- most consumer-level 3D printers still have visible steps, which is going to be an issue at 28mm scale.

Beyond that, most consumers aren't professional-level character modelers, so people will be spending money on TurboSquid models.

Until a market opens up for cheaper tabletop-quality 3D models and stepless 3D printing becomes a consumer-level thing, it's not going to scratch GW's profit margin. Hell, it's not going to damage Raging Heroes' profit margin, and they 3D print their stuff and they're a lot smaller than GW.

GW will bankrupt itself with stupid decisions long before the little guy can afford to take them down.

At best a 3-D printer might be able to make some terrain or a few select bits.

I have been investigating a bit the possibilities of 3D printing with the Hobby.

There is definitely something to be done, the UV curated printer can print 0.1mm details, have walls has thin as 0.3mm and free wires with 0.6mm thickness.

Problem: is it's very expensive. You can't print that home, you have to find a provider online. A figurine should cost around the same price as a GW one.

But the 3D printing industry is moving fast, a couple more year and we might have some fine printing for cheap. Enabling anybody to create figurines or accessories for the hobby.

if it ever does get to the point when you can do that in the next 20-30 years and GW is still around, I would imagine the smart thing would be to sell the blue prints to their models at a somewhat steep price ($100 gets you all the Tact marines poses and weapons, etc)

You still buy books dont you?

Malik_Raynor wrote:
DakkaDakka,

I figured I ask this here to see what you all think??? With 3D printing on the rise, do you think that Games Workshop will go out of business when the consumer can purchase a viable 3D Printer

Let the dicussion begin!

Yeah, I think 3D Printing will put GW out of business. After all, look what happened to the music, TV and movie industries after the ability to copy and reproduce their products was available cheaply for everyone.

Oh wait.

I've good hope for it. We can compare it to the growth of 2D printers and other consumer electronics. 4 years before they were affordable for home usage they cost thousands of pounds and who'd knew we'd have devices in our pockets that can access all of mans' knowledge, but we do.
Hell, the advent of 4D printing is coming. That looks remarkable. You print 3d, multi material, objects and they 'build' themselves.

As for competing against GW? Unless casting is going to experience any attention maybe. No idea what their production practise is. Do they make a model, 3d scan it and laser cut a mould? Do they mould moulds? If they could innovate and aim towards reducing customer cost then I don't see why they couldn't compete still. However we all know GW's business practise isn't to do that.

The one thing that always seems to get lost in these talks is the mater of input. Before you can output a model from a 3d printer you need input. Which means you will either also have to buy a 3D scanner and sculpt your own models (assuming you are not outright stealing from GW) to scan (in which case you're better off sculpting and molding instead), OR you have to be able to use something like Zbrush or Maya AND be capable of producing quality, water tight models with correct thicknesses for everything. Maya alone is in the 4 - 7000 dollar range. I don't see enough people being able to this that it's going to hurt GW all that much.

The other possible route might be buying other people's models (there's plenty of sites where you can do this now but they tend to wildly unreliable) but in that case I could even see GW capitalizing on it. Something like "Purchase our 3D space marine pattern at x cost and be able to print all you want for 30 days". At which point the model would expire (which is easy enough to make happen now). Either way, I'm sure there are plenty of ways to take that and monetize it the way Apple has with iTunes.

It will be a while before 3-D printing can match the traditional casting process for detail.

It already does match the detail. http://www.shapeways.com/gallery/art?li=home-art" target="_new" rel="nofollow"> http://www.shapeways.com/gallery/art?li=home-art

It's just that those printers are not easily available to the home consumer.

Did 2D printers put newspapers and books out of business? No, they didn't. 3D printers might cut into GW's profit margins a little bit as they get adopted by the mainstream, but the idea that they'll drive GW (or smaller companies like it) out of business is laughable.

Everyone is looking at control of the digital model itself as the thing to prevent rampant copyright infringement.

Printers are cheaper but 3D scanners are a bit harder to get your mitts on.

GW e-books are getting under way, I could see them selling CAD models you can print for $50 that expires after 10 copies are printed. No actual material required by them and charge the same price!

Their change of distribution would be predictable.

Tycho wrote:
(assuming you are not outright stealing from GW)

This is a pretty big assumption. A few minutes after GW releases home-printable space marines (with a time-limited license) the first pirate downloads with the limits removed will go up. And even if GW doesn't sell their own 3d printing stuff all it takes is one person to scan the model (or make a better one) and distribute it.

 Brother SRM wrote:
Did 2D printers put newspapers and books out of business?

Actually they really have. Print newspapers are in serious decline now that the internet has made news freely available.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Talizvar wrote:
Everyone is looking at control of the digital model itself as the thing to prevent rampant copyright infringement.

Which, like every single other instance of copy protection ever invented, will add inconvenience for the legitimate customers while doing absolutely nothing to stop piracy.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Brother SRM wrote:
Did 2D printers put newspapers and books out of business?

Actually they really have. Print newspapers are in serious decline now that the internet has made news freely available.

That's not entirely correct.

2D printers didn't put newspapers and books out of business. The free availability of the information that would be printed by the printers did (which, to be fair is your second sentence).
CD burners didn't hurt music CD revenue. The free availability of the music did.
etc, so on.

Or, as people said above, 3D printers are meaningless without the templates/scans/etc.

Casting has been available for years, with a far lower skill requirement/initial cash outlay for equipment.
It hasn't put GW out of business.

I can go to the hobby shop in town and pick up everything I need to make moulds of (for example) space marines, I can find easy to follow guides of how to do it online.

So can anyone else.

My school library had books on doing this sort of stuff.

GW is still in business.

In fact I suspect that recasting is significantly cheaper and faster than 3D printing, however, GW is still in business.

PDFs of codecies are easily available online, most people have printers and web connections, GW is still in business.

It'll have limited effect, if any.

Casting has been available for years, with a far lower skill requirement/initial cash outlay for equipment.
It hasn't put GW out of business.

Exactly!

 marv335 wrote:
Casting has been available for years, with a far lower skill requirement/initial cash outlay for equipment.

Except you need the original model to make molds from, and you need a reasonable amount of skill to mold it properly if you want the same quality instead of a bubble-filled lump of resin that kind of resembles the original if you're really generous. With 3d printing eventually all you will need to do is get a 3d printer, plug it in, pour some plastic into the plastic tank, and start printing. Printing an exact copy of a model will be no more difficult than pirating an mp3 copy of your favorite album and burning a cd.

 pretre wrote:
2D printers didn't put newspapers and books out of business.

Well, not literally, but that's mostly because people realized that reading the news on their iphone was more convenient than carrying around a physical newspaper.

Or, as people said above, 3D printers are meaningless without the templates/scans/etc.

But, as said above, those files will inevitably exist. Anything that is purely information will always be available, so the only question is about the availability of a means to turn that information into a physical object.

 Peregrine wrote:
. Printing an exact copy of a model will be no more difficult than pirating an mp3 copy of your favorite album and burning a cd.

And yet the music industry still exists. It had to adapt (no more music videos), but still exists.

Well, not literally, but that's mostly because people realized that reading the news on their iphone was more convenient than carrying around a physical newspaper.

That misses the point entirely. The demise of print media is because the information is available not because you can read it on any one device or medium.

But, as said above, those files will inevitably exist. Anything that is purely information will always be available, so the only question is about the availability of a means to turn that information into a physical object.

A CD burner is what $20 bucks? Blank CD's are practically free. Music is available everywhere. Why do CD's still even exist? Same with DVDs, etc. I don't think it gets any easier than it is now. Heck, you don't even need a CD burner or blanks anymore, just copy to your iPhone or other device. And yet the industry didn't cease to exist.

Those technologies are worlds easier and cheaper than 3D printing miniatures and have not destroyed the parent industries. Imagine instead of 3D printing (the equiv of CD burning) that the iPhone 10 allows you to holographically project objects from 3D scanned files (the equivalent of ripping CDs and putting them on your iphone)*. Based on historical precedent, even that won't destroy the industry, it will just force it to adapt.

* Such a cool idea. I don't even need to paint my models, just place my iPhone on the table and hit play.

Except you need the original model to make molds from, and you need a reasonable amount of skill to mold it properly if you want the same quality instead of a bubble-filled lump of resin that kind of resembles the original if you're really generous. With 3d printing eventually all you will need to do is get a 3d printer, plug it in, pour some plastic into the plastic tank, and start printing. Printing an exact copy of a model will be no more difficult than pirating an mp3 copy of your favorite album and burning a cd.

Which is why all the major record labels are out of business ... oh wait ... they're not ...


EDIT: pretre ninja'd me ...

 pretre wrote:
And yet the music industry still exists. It had to adapt (no more music videos), but still exists.

Still exists, but constantly whining about how piracy is killing sales.

That misses the point entirely. The demise of print media is because the information is available not because you can read it on any one device or medium.

And that's what 3d printing is about. It isn't the production method that matters, it's that the product will be available for free to anyone who wants to take it.

Why do CD's still even exist?

Because there are still honest customers, and the music industry is based on a business model with large enough profit margins to take the loss and keep functioning. GW is in bad enough shape as it is, they can't just absorb the loss in sales and focus on the remaining honest customers. They'll inevitably try to raise prices to compensate for the loss, driving away even more customers.

As for DVDs, they exist because once you make a movie (and you will always make movies because watching one in the theater is an experience you can't pirate) the cost of making and selling a DVD is trivial.

 Peregrine wrote:

 pretre wrote:
And yet the music industry still exists. It had to adapt (no more music videos), but still exists.

Still exists, but constantly whining about how piracy is killing sales.

So, passing the metaphor. GW will still exist but whine about how 3D printing is killing sales

And that's what 3d printing is about. It isn't the production method that matters, it's that the product will be available for free to anyone who wants to take it.

and has some highly specialized and expensive 3D Printing equipment.

Because there are still honest customers, and the music industry is based on a business model with large enough profit margins to take the loss and keep functioning. GW is in bad enough shape as it is, they can't just absorb the loss in sales and focus on the remaining honest customers. They'll inevitably try to raise prices to compensate for the loss, driving away even more customers.

Aha. See now this argument I can get behind. Smaller profit margins make it more dangerous for GW. Counter proposal: Smaller customer base means the impact of pirates has less of an impact on their bottom line. i.e. people who have the cash to buy 3D printers are not a large enough percentage of the base to significantly impact sales.

You think the costs of quality 3d printers will remain high?
In 1984 HP released a 300-dpi, 8 ppm printer that sold for $3,495 ($8,168.09 today).
In 1987 HP released the LaserJet series II, $2,695 ($5,522.21)
In 1993 HP released the LaserJet 4L, a 600x600 DPI printer. That retailed at$1,229 ($2,092.54).

Today, you can go to Ebuyer and get this:
http://www.ebuyer.com/392277-epson-expression-xp202-aio-wifi-printer-scanner-copier-with-user-friendly-wi-fi-c11cc10302

3d printing has been so much, much quicker.

No, but it is still higher than most people are going to want to pay. And it has been 20 years since 1993. Granted, 3D printing is moving faster, but still that is not the short term.

Let me just toss this out there. I suspect that it really can't be that hard to make copies of Magic Cards that are good enough to fool just about anybody, that would easily be suitable for tournament play. In spite of this, Wotc seems to be doing just fine. If a rare costs 20.00 to put in my deck, and I need 4 of them, printing up 4 of my own for free seems a viable option, yet it hasn't put any sort of negligible dent in Wotc's business.

Assuming the technology becomes affordable down the road to own and use a 3d printer, it's still not an item that most people will invest in, simply so they can product their own wargaming minis.

I can buy a snowcone machine to ensure I don't ever have to buy a snowcone again, but it's not something I'm interested investing in.

Ferozz wrote:
I can buy a snowcone machine to ensure I don't ever have to buy a snowcone again, but it's not something I'm interested investing in.

BUT FREE SNOWCONES!

 pretre wrote:
No, but it is still higher than most people are going to want to pay. And it has been 20 years since 1993. Granted, 3D printing is moving faster, but still that is not the short term.

ok then, see that £50 with 5760 x 1440 dpi and tons of gizmo's chucked on top?
That would have cost £417 in 2008 (£483.72 w/ inflation). Without the scanner. Without Wifi. Without USB support. here. And that's apparently a great price.

Down to 10% of the cost in 5 years for the same printing specs.