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 Peregrine wrote:
The countless people who pirate movies/music/games/etc just because they can would disagree with you.

The people who still buy movies/music/games/etc wouldn't.


Those who pirate media that they wouldn't pay for aren't going to be paying for it either way, so really aren't worth worrying about.

 insaniak wrote:
The people who still buy movies/music/games/etc wouldn't.

But that's the point, you have two main groups:

1) People who buy legal movies/music/games/etc when they want them, and don't get them at all if they feel the price/quality/whatever isn't acceptable.

2) People who pirate everything regardless of the price just because they can.

The claim was that there's a meaningful third group, people who currently pirate everything but would eagerly switch to being honest customers if only the prices were a bit lower. And I think the people talking about how they'd become honest customers are mostly just making excuses for pirating everything and have no desire at all to buy anything honestly.

Those who pirate media that they wouldn't pay for aren't going to be paying for it either way, so really aren't worth worrying about.

Exactly! GW would be insane to lower their prices and cripple their profit margins to compete with recasters when the people buying recasts (and downloading pdfs of books, etc) aren't going to buy honestly no matter how cheap GW gets.

 Peregrine wrote:
But that's the point, you have two main groups:

1) People who buy legal movies/music/games/etc when they want them, and don't get them at all if they feel the price/quality/whatever isn't acceptable.

2) People who pirate everything regardless of the price just because they can.

The claim was that there's a meaningful third group, people who currently pirate everything but would eagerly switch to being honest customers if only the prices were a bit lower.

I know several people myself who used to pirate all of their music who went 'legit' as soon as it became possible to download legitimate versions at a reasonable price. So I would agree with that claim.

How much of the overall they actually make up is anyone's guess, but they're out there.

Exactly! GW would be insane to lower their prices and cripple their profit margins to compete with recasters when the people buying recasts (and downloading pdfs of books, etc) aren't going to buy honestly no matter how cheap GW gets.

Only if you discount that third group.


From my experience, most people would prefer to have legit stuff... it just has to seem like good value to them. Those who say that they would willingly pay if the price was right quite often do actually mean it.

lowering prices means more sales. Some might call it a wash but when the lower prices still allow a profit margin that would sustain the company after all costs and still have a profit (IF the sales remained the same) would put them on a par with the recasters.
However, when the lower prices would increase the sales exponentially (enough to bring about a company profit margin that is double or more than it would be with the higher prices.......

No one ever accused them of having common sense. lol

i have only heard bad things about recasts. mould lines that are off, more pits than failcast, poor customer service....and thats without even considering the legal/moral issues. Not going to argue those because I dont have information on the legal and the morals of others aint none of my business, I worry bout my own and keeping mine to my standards. Others can do the same with theirs.
Personally, I would rather buy the real thing. Since the prices are so high, I go without if I cant afford it or find it discounted/used.

Assuming the 3rd group doesn't exist (people who buy recasts but would buy GW if they felt was worth it), why are recasts bad then? They're not stealing away customers (in absence of the aforementioned group all the remaining recast buyers wouldn't buy GW anyway) and it's helping increase awareness of the hibby (since now there's both recast and GW guys playing.

Personally I feel the 3rd group is quite numerous, at least in certain environments.
I grew up in a developing country, and as teemagers me&my friends pirated games and music because our families couldn't afford them or simply the notion of paying 40-50€ for a game was alien to our parents' culture and way of life. Later on we had availability issues. We pirated our first D&D books because nobody imported them here back then and most online shops would either not ship to us (due to rampant fraud) or offer no guarantees (and postal service was so bad there was a decent chance your order would just vanish, this is still an issue niwadays, 3 out of 10-12 Amazon orders I've placed last year vanished). Only reliable way to get books and miniatures was through trips or relatives abroad.

Now stuff is better. We earn enough to buy stuff, but if we had not become gamers as kids (and without piracy it wouldn't have happened), we wouldn't consider droppoing 500-1000€ a year on gaming stuff.

Let's face it, piracy in any field isn't going away. Even if GW managed to shut down all recasters (pure utopia) people will still be sharing 3d printable models on torrents(and quality will be getting better) and you can't shut down alternate model makers so the cheap/less fortunate will still get their fix.

Rather than invest time and effort in a futile endeavour I feel a company should focus on offering enough added value so.more and more people want the original, and even use the knock-off as free publicity

 Nem wrote:
I believe if a person takes the time, money, effort and imagination to build something they alone have the right to reap the rewards.

That doesn't sound like mass production to me.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
If prices were lowered, there would be a lot less recasting, because the relative difference would become less relevant.

What is ten bucks off if you've gotta work like crazy to use that cheap resin kit ?

BrianDavion wrote:that said, I'm not sure I'd wanna put in a credit card order with a recaster

Many of my friends have recasts. They offer up their credit card because the difference is that an imperial knight can be had for $30 **including shipping**, so they figure, "what's there to lose?" If they're happy with the first one, they buy a couple more, etc. I can attest to the quality remarkably good (often, indistinguishable).

Personally, the primary reason that I buy originals is that I wish to support the artists who create the work. After all, if they don't sell their work, they don't get to eat, they find new jobs, and then I have less new toys to play with.

Skinnereal wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
Except, AFAIK, it isn't breaking the law to purchase recasts, whether you know they are or no, so this is utterly redundant.

Recasts are unofficial counterfeits, and are either sold as the originals, or as recasts.
Knockoffs are dodgy, and are treated by the law as such.
Around here, that gets treated as 'receiving stolen goods'.

There's a big thick line between recasting for personal use, and selling recasts.

I'm not really sure that I philosophically agree that there's a big difference. If I take a Revenant Titan and recast it myself so that I can have two, how is that any better or worse, than paying Joe to recast it for me? Either way, FW doesn't get the money for it, right? The only practical difference is that Joe is much better at it than me, and Joe works for $1 per hour because he's in a country where that's a generous wage.

I don't see how buying a recast is a stolen good. The recast wasn't stolen. It's a bag of sculpted resin, and the resin was legally purchased. Besides, how would any inspector type (who didn't have anything better to do) know what a bunch of bits in a bag are supposed to be? I mean, it could be a Revenant Titan, or it could be Godzilla Slayer 637 when assembled, right? The bag doesn't actually *say* Revenant Titan on it. It just has some generic description of a toy.

Peregrine wrote:

 insaniak wrote:
The people who still buy movies/music/games/etc wouldn't.

But that's the point, you have two main groups:

1) People who buy legal movies/music/games/etc when they want them, and don't get them at all if they feel the price/quality/whatever isn't acceptable.

2) People who pirate everything regardless of the price just because they can.

The claim was that there's a meaningful third group, people who currently pirate everything but would eagerly switch to being honest customers if only the prices were a bit lower. And I think the people talking about how they'd become honest customers are mostly just making excuses for pirating everything and have no desire at all to buy anything honestly.

Those who pirate media that they wouldn't pay for aren't going to be paying for it either way, so really aren't worth worrying about.

Exactly! GW would be insane to lower their prices and cripple their profit margins to compete with recasters when the people buying recasts (and downloading pdfs of books, etc) aren't going to buy honestly no matter how cheap GW gets.

I don't think it's a valid to compare recast miniatures with movies/music piracy. It would, however, be valid to compare pirated PDF/epub codices with legitimate digital ones.

My two bits: music/movies pirated are actually *superior* in many ways to the legitimate version. Not only do they cost nothing, but the delivery is faster than it would take to drive to a store and buy a disc or order online, commercials for TV shows are edited out, media players can be superior to PVRs and bluray players, and of course, the big one: you can actually get pirated content before it's available legitimately. In other words, there are reasons to pirate beyond price.

In terms of recasts, there is nothing superior about recasts except price. The recasts aren't free, and they have to ship, usually by very slow post, from some developing country far, far away. If the recasts weren't cheaper, nobody would ever buy them.

I don't think it's possible for FW/GW to lower their prices to compete with recasters, because they'd never be able to afford to pay sculptors to make new models. The recasts of popular large models can be *insanely* cheap.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
Of course it's true, the less GW/FW charge, the less the recasters are able to charge. Sure, they can probably still turn a profit on a very small percentage of RRP, but there's a point where it ceases to be worth the time and effort.

But then is GW going to make much of a profit? After all, their costs of designing, manufacturing, and selling those kits is going to be higher than the recaster's, so if GW cuts their prices to the point that the recaster can't make much money their next financial report is going to be a disaster. And what would be the point? GW's primary market is people who aren't going to even know that recasts exist, I can't imagine they're losing so much money to recasters that putting them out of business would be worth destroying their own profit margins.

We know that the cost of design and production is an average of the low 20 per cents for GW - so yes, if we ignore the millstones that GW has saddled itself with outside of making and supplying a product, there is huge space to bring their price closer to what is available. The fact that GW probably can't because of their massive cost base is a big problem for them, and, from my perspective, is the most significant reason they're struggling.

People are willing to pay a premium for things if they see a reason to do so, currently GW aren't providing a compelling reason.

The countless people who pirate movies/music/games/etc just because they can would disagree with you. I suppose there are a few people who buy recasts to make some kind of ideological statement about how fair GW's prices are, but are they really that common compared to the people who only care about getting the cheapest possible price regardless of how ethical it is?

Actually, somebody, I don't recall who, mentioned in a previous thread of this nature that they had spoken at length with someone who recasts, and they felt that the "feth GW" factor was actually a substantial part of why people bought from them.

Certainly it seems like some of the recast kits I've seen on sale haven't offered a significant discount over what can be achieved by buying through a legitimate discounter, plus weeks of shipping time, so if these items sell sufficiently to be worth producing, then price cannot be the sole determinant of why they sell.

Talys wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:that said, I'm not sure I'd wanna put in a credit card order with a recaster

Many of my friends have recasts. They offer up their credit card because the difference is that an imperial knight can be had for $30 **including shipping**, so they figure, "what's there to lose?" If they're happy with the first one, they buy a couple more, etc. I can attest to the quality remarkably good (often, indistinguishable).

Besides, nothing's as safe as a credit card anyway, transactions can always be rolled back if they don't end up at your door.

Talys wrote:


In terms of recasts, there is nothing superior about recasts except price. The recasts aren't free, and they have to ship, usually by very slow post, from some developing country far, far away. If the recasts weren't cheaper, nobody would ever buy them.

I don't think it's possible for FW/GW to lower their prices to compete with recasters, because they'd never be able to afford to pay sculptors to make new models. The recasts of popular large models can be *insanely* cheap.

Both your statements are wrong.

Some recasters have much better quality than FW or GW finecast, none of them have any release agent to remove, some of them have better casting quality than ForgeWorld, with less warp, bubbles, sprue, mold lines, etc.

The cost of sculpting new models is overrated. A professional miniature sculptor will ask about 400 bucks for an extremely detailed (Primarch++) sculpt.
FW/GW could totally compete with recasters, but they wouldn't be able to pay business development costs and would have to make their books self-sufficient as they wouldn't be supported by miniature sales anymore.

Speaking about recasting in China - it is legal. The law really doesn't care about it.

It seems in recent months however that either GW or a larger entity have been putting pressure on 3rd party retail services like No thanks ! reds8n
Most recasts are removed from the sites if they are found, and the stores are 'closed down'.

By closed down I mean they just change name and continue their trade under a different name.

To counter this most recasters either have a catalog that you must ask for, or just post their products with a generic serial code and with pictures linked on another site so they do not get picked up.

Way to go dude, three pages we managed discussing the topic without mentioning any sellers by name (and consequently breaking Dakka rules!)

Hey they killed yoy-mart so things could change!

 Azreal13 wrote:
Way to go dude, three pages we managed discussing the topic without mentioning any sellers by name (and consequently breaking Dakka rules!)

They are not the sellers, they are a third party. Just to be clear.

That's like blaming google for someone's website.

I won't name the actual shops because of the rules.

Dakka might be able to ease up censoring the names of the third parties in the future, because as I said recast shops are actively being targeted and removed from them.

They're really not, they've had a crack recently, sure, but new usernames are easy to come by.

The sites in question would have to be really motivated to remove them permanently, and it does not appear that is the case.

EDIT
Oh, and not mentioning the shops but mentioning the third party sites? Come on, you don't see the fault in that reasoning?

If the rules are not to name any recaster or even the website they offer the items in, then on behalf of this topic I'd just like to chime in and say I have seen some of these knockoff products, and tbh they arent as bad as one might expect when one hears the word "chinese knockoff". For every hole you get in the resin, GW's finecast resin comes with one as well (except they offer to replace it for free if you take the model to the GW store). I have heard the recasters' resin is more brittle than GW though, so you better not drop those minis or they'll shatter.

 Azreal13 wrote:
They're really not, they've had a crack recently, sure, but new usernames are easy to come by.

The sites in question would have to be really motivated to remove them permanently, and it does not appear that is the case.

You are off the mark here. I don't know where you think you are getting your info from, but it is wrong.

Do you live in China? Do you view these sites daily? Because I do.

And I'm telling you they are clamping down on it. They are Motivated.

Sure new usernames are easy to come by....but the shops are unable to use the real names or pictures for the products.

Because of this they are finding it difficult to get new customers, or even get in contact with old customers, particularly foreigners (who are 99% of the market).

Most are choosing to go their own way and use their existing clients without the direct use of a 3rd party. This is good for people who know them and want to buy recasts, but bad for new customers, as they are near impossible to find.

This may change in the future, as things are always in flux here, but for the past 8 months or so the number of accessible recasting shops has been in decline.

I doubt your genuine FW Warhound would take too kindly to being dropped either!

But then, as long as it's a clean break a drop of superglue is all that's needed.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Big Blind Bill wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
They're really not, they've had a crack recently, sure, but new usernames are easy to come by.

The sites in question would have to be really motivated to remove them permanently, and it does not appear that is the case.

You are off the mark here. I don't know where you think you are getting your info from, but it is wrong.

Do you live in China?

No

Do you view these sites daily?

Yes.

And I'm telling you they are clamping down on it. They are Motivated.

Sure new usernames are easy to come by....but the shops are unable to use the real names or pictures for the products.

Because of this they are finding it difficult to get new customers, or even get in contact with old customers, particularly foreigners (who are 99% of the market).

Really?

Not seen that myself.

Most are choosing to go their own way and use their existing clients without the direct use of a 3rd party. This is good for people who know them and want to buy recasts, but bad for new customers, as they are near impossible to find.

This may change in the future, as things are always in flux here, but for the past 8 months or so the number of recasting shops has been in decline.

Certainly there are fewer sellers on one site, particularly, but not so much on the one I use and view more often.

But it takes no more than a few minutes on Google to find various 4chan threads and Reddits etc discussing all the info one needs, so perhaps there are fewer people simply tripping over them (as I did in the first instance) but the information is out there for someone who makes the effort to look, and it isn't hard to find.

text removed.

Reds8n

Are you doing it on purpose?

Don't name recasters or sites that sell recasts by name.

Seriously, how hard is that to follow?

If you have to use reddit or 4chan to find a page on a cataloging site, instead of the site's search engine, you can be sure that whatever they are selling is against the site's rules.

Before you could simply search for warhammer on those sites and get lots of recast hits. Now you can't. Rules have changed.

Oh, and not mentioning the shops but mentioning the third party sites? Come on, you don't see the fault in that reasoning?

As you have said, you have to check reddit or 4chan for the links. You can't find them by using the site's search engine.

So no, I can't see a fault.

I meant WRT breaking Dakka rules about recasters, but as your original comment has been moderated, I guess it doesn't matter whether you fail to see the fault or not.

You don't need reddit or 4chan to find the items, just the sites. I often browse the recasts, but as many of the keywords aren't used in the item descriptions (and haven't been for a long time from many sellers) I have found it easier to browse the categories - models made out of resin picks up a lot without a single search being needed, but key names still seem to bring up the right items (ie Warhammer, games workshop etc don't get listed a lot, but Revenant Titan still provides results)

Talys wrote:


In terms of recasts, there is nothing superior about recasts except price. The recasts aren't free, and they have to ship, usually by very slow post, from some developing country far, far away. If the recasts weren't cheaper, nobody would ever buy them.

I don't think it's possible for FW/GW to lower their prices to compete with recasters, because they'd never be able to afford to pay sculptors to make new models. The recasts of popular large models can be *insanely* cheap.

Both your statements are wrong.

Some recasters have much better quality than FW or GW finecast, none of them have any release agent to remove, some of them have better casting quality than ForgeWorld, with less warp, bubbles, sprue, mold lines, etc.

The cost of sculpting new models is overrated. A professional miniature sculptor will ask about 400 bucks for an extremely detailed (Primarch++) sculpt.
FW/GW could totally compete with recasters, but they wouldn't be able to pay business development costs and would have to make their books self-sufficient as they wouldn't be supported by miniature sales anymore.

 Azreal13 wrote:
I meant WRT breaking Dakka rules about recasters, but as your original comment has been moderated, I guess it doesn't matter whether you fail to see the fault or not.

You don't need reddit or 4chan to find the items, just the sites. I often browse the recasts, but as many of the keywords aren't used in the item descriptions (and haven't been for a long time from many sellers) I have found it easier to browse the categories - models made out of resin picks up a lot without a single search being needed, but key names still seem to bring up the right items (ie Warhammer, games workshop etc don't get listed a lot, but Revenant Titan still provides results)

Posting sites that allows the sale or promotion of recasts on dakka is not allowed. The original site I posted no longer allows it. So I said that they might be able to allow us to write it in the future. The logic is pretty clear. Whether you get mixed up in your own ambiguity is your own issue.

The largest 3rd party supplier in China has definitely changed policy. For example the search result for "Revenant titan" only delivery 1 result, and that is not a recast. Feel free to try it yourself.

Other sites may or may not change, as it is not clear what has brought it about, but some of them have begun to already.

When did GW start cracking down? I always had the impression it was around mid November onward.

 Sir Arun wrote:
When did GW start cracking down? I always had the impression it was around mid November onward.

Yep.

I'd say it's mostly a wasted effort. Chinese pirates are much more difficult to bully around than small western companies.

The pirates are making a living out of recasting thanks to GW's insane pricing policies anyway. GW has almost succeeded in pricing themselves out of their own market, only that way can recasters sell their recasts at 1/2 or even 1/3 of the original price and still make a profit.

Recasters sell for a price that covers material costs, finances their small home studio with 3d printer and affordable living in the Chinese market (where cost of living is cheaper)

GW sells for a price that includes all of the above (adjusted to UK cost of living) and then some to finance their IP trademarks, pay their design team who come up with the ideas for the miniatures in the first place, pay for logistics and distribution, warehouse maintenance, future investments and revenues for shareholders.

 Sir Arun wrote:
Recasters sell for a price that covers material costs, finances their small home studio with 3d printer and affordable living in the Chinese market (where cost of living is cheaper)

GW sells for a price that includes all of the above (adjusted to UK cost of living) and then some to finance their IP trademarks, pay their design team who come up with the ideas for the miniatures in the first place, pay for logistics and distribution, warehouse maintenance, future investments and revenues for shareholders.

All of which (except dividends and "future investments" whatever that means) is covered within cost of sales on their accounts, and is less than a quarter of their revenue.

I got a question. If it's legal in China, how do they get shut down then? I don't know remember the name but wasn't it said one or two got shut down a few weeks ago?

So how did GW actually shut them down? Why would they shut down if they didn't have to worry about anything because they were in China?

Once again, it's not legal in China.

The law is just poorly enforced.

One the one side I want to see GW crash and burn into a fiery pit,
On the other these sites make it affordable to play GW games. So I'm unsure. I also find it hillarious that fanboys buy from these sites despite 'loving' GW