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 MajorTom11 wrote:
I will guiltily admit to buying recast from time to time. Or at least I did back when I was more avidly collecting. Frankly it was just too good to pass off when you wanted volume. I would still buy FW direct quite often as well, but if you wanted 30 mkIV back in the pre-plastic days then it was really, really tough to turn down a 50% + discount for really well done recasts.

I am not sure I would go do it again now a few years later, but a thriving recast market is the result of prices out of reach for many of the people wanting to play. Vicious circle. I would say although I cannot expect GW or FW to lower their prices per unit, they do seem to be moving in the direction of volume discounts and to me that is a very smart move.

This is kind of the way I see recasting. For filling out volumes of GW models, it can be pretty expensive; and when it comes to stretching your [insert currency here] as far as it can go, choosing whether to pay X for a single unit or paying X for 2-3 units.

One of the things I try to do to stretch my money is to buy recast bits. For my Necron Immortals/Deathmarks, I bought recasts of the front torso bit and the spine bits. I would eBay the plastic spine bits and buy plastic legs with those funds. In the end, I would be able to end up with 5 Immortals and 5 Deathmarks for only $30, and use all the bits in the kit. And when I wanted to do some conversions or scenery, I would get recast bits to do those. I could have easily made green stuff molds and done press casts, but for the amount of time that I would have put into making and casting everything, especially 2 part molds, it was easier to get some recast bits.

My other GW recasts are of the Necron characters. After going through 4 failcast Zahndrekhs and getting replacements from GW and them finally refusing to send me anymore, I just gave up and got a recast one. I only had to buy 1.

As to OOP miniatures, for me it varies on why they are OOP. Limited Run miniatures are designed to run out, so I try to avoid buying any. Dead companies such as Rackham or the Illyad miniatures I see as fair game. To me, it can mean spending $20 for 3 recast Ira Tenebrae to use in a RPG game or spending $95 for 3 of them. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Rackham-Confrontation-Ira-Tenebrae-/262385823808?hash=item3d1769f040:g:1E8AAOSwUUdXDsgE. If Rackham was still around, or if CMON would actually do something with the IP, I would buy from them.

For the most part, I avoid buying recasts of other miniature companies. Reaper, Dark Sword, Kromlech, Secret Weapons, Micro Arts Studio: all of these companies produce good quality mini's and materials at fair prices, and I'm happy to support them with my money.

 General Kroll wrote:
It's amazing the amount of twisted logic and over explanation people are going to in this thread to justify recasting, selling and buying.

Whether you like GWs business practices or not, it's still theft. Dont try and pass it off as anything else.

I've been sold recasts on eBay in the past. And damn right I've used the grievance system to report the donkey-cave who sold them to me. I'm not going to pay good money for your shoddy knock offs.

But what about the instances where the recasts are actually the same or better quality?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 JamesY wrote:
@kingsman if it was a model that was a) that rare and b) I was hugely attached to, I wouldn't be gaming with it for it to get damaged. However, it wouldn't be ultra rare if there was an easily accessible source of recasts, as any one would be able to obtain it just as easily.

Let's say it is your model. You own it, you love it, you saved for six months to be able to afford it on the resale market. Life throws you a surprise and so you decide to sell it on. Suddenly it's borderline worthless because that recaster has meant everyone who wants one got it for a fiver, and the market price for originals has dropped. I doubt you'd be happy with that reversal.

Same thing happens with an expensive MtG card when it gets reprinted. Sucks to be the one who bought it when it was expensive, but feels better when you can buy it when the price is down. I've been on both sides of it. It's the way it is.

 Ghaz wrote:

 Ketara wrote:
In which circumstance, it's not the recaster which sank Games Workshop and made them go bankrupt. It's not charging a more affordable, yet still profit making sum that drives them to bankruptcy. No, it's Games Workshop themselves waltzing along the edge of business failure on the backs of their own decisions.

So its the victim's fault they were the target of criminals?

It's pretty obvious what you're implying, but making the "If she didn't dress that way" straw man doesn't equate to the recasters and GW.

The reason why GW products have been the most common recast miniatures is due to their price.

This is a single, plastic, mono-pose model. It's $28!



There are a number of resin or metal miniatures that are more detailed and a third/half the price of a plastic miniature from GW. That is why recasters will make copies of GW miniatures instead of something like Dark Sword Miniatures or other smaller companies.

 Ghaz wrote:
The price of Louis Vuitton bags or Rolex watches doesn't give the counterfeiters a moral or legal right to copy their products. Its the same with Games Workshop. Trying to blame Games Workshop because of their pricing is trying to lay the blame on the victim and justify the illegal activity.

I can choose to buy much more reasonably priced watches, as I have. I can choose to buy my girlfriend much more reasonably priced handbags as well. And I can ridicule the inflated prices of those luxury items all I want, because I can buy what is essentially the exact same thing. I can buy 3rd party miniatures at a reasonable price as well. Lets see if GW lets me play my Necrons in their store with my Puppets Wars miniatures I have with them.


Those things you listed are luxury items - people are doing nothing more than paying for the brand name to inflate their ego's. These are toy soldiers that are used to play games with - not the collector's models that GW is desperately trying to convince everyone that they are. When people look at GW's prices and go "That's over priced" and the only response is "If you don't like the price, don't buy it", it seems that people are following that option and spending their money elsewhere. Hence GW's falling revenue and profit for the last number of years. If people are getting priced out of something, other things will rise up to cater to them.

If GW wants to be a luxury item like Rolex or Louis Vuitton, then spending the "luxury" price for GW products just becomes the same ego feeding, dick measuring of "I have more money that you". And at that point, I feel less problems with buying GW recasts.

 BigWaaagh wrote:
To quote many a poster already, 'Theft is theft'. There is no grey area, there never has been and those trying to make an argument that recasting a model because it's OOP is acceptable are dead wrong. There's not a single model out there that isn't readily available on Ebay or through one of the Swap Shops on community boards like Dakka. If you can't afford it, tough! Get something else or get a better job/allowance/return bottles for deposit/whatever so you can afford it.
If you've ever been a victim of theft, then you know how it feels and you know it's unequivocally wrong. Recasting is theft and if you think it doesn't affect GW, et al, then you're wrong again, because it does, which means, ultimately, it will affect us all...and not in a good way.

But it's not theft. It's a copyright infringement.

One of my recast models is a Necron Sentry Pylon. I got it at what I thought was a reasonable price. There was no way I would pay the $80 for a single model of that size/quality. If FW sold it at 10% higher than what I paid for the recast, I would have gladly gotten it through FW.

But because I would never, and will never pay FW $80 for such a simple model, is it a lost sale?

Talizvar wrote:
Like a guy I knew who wanted to field a "Circus of Pain" but did not want to spend the money on the models.
Printed card on round wood stands.
I was surprised at my emotional response: I spent MY money (legally for this topic) to field my army, no freaking way.
Do these people play at a GW store with recasts?
I dare them to play with bare resin if they see no difference.

I make hard decisions on what I buy and they "cheat" by buying recasts?
There are many competitive options for models but the difference is people want that model and pass it off as the real thing.

As I posted earlier in this thread:

 RivenSkull wrote:
If GW wants to be a luxury item like Rolex or Louis Vuitton, then spending the "luxury" price for GW products just becomes the same ego feeding, dick measuring of "I have more money that you".

When both myself and some of my friends got into 40k just out of high school, we didn't have the money to spend on the hobby, but we really wanted to play because we liked the 40k universe. So we made wooden pegs or blocks, or used printed out papers, or even got a few things off of eBay. And we played 5th edition 40k using those things, and had fun. We got to play with different armies using PDF's of the codecies, because the proxy mini's didn't have any concrete model.

But clearly, we shouldn't have done that because it wouldn't be fair to people like you who spent their money on the real, official miniatures. "Keep the lowly plebs out of our HHobby" and what not.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Do you actually see that many recasts of the newer expensive plastic characters? I haven't checked to see, when I last looked at recasters it was almost all resin stuff they were doing, and mostly FW. I buy almost no FW stuff either, mainly some 6mm scale Aeronautica Imperialis stuff before it was dropped and I started a DKOK force but only got a couple of kits before I gave up on them.

Yeah. Looking at a number of the Space Marine, $30 plastic kits of a single model, and looking at a recaster's stock listing right now, there are a good number of recasts at 1/3rd the price. The non-FW stuff is really a mixed bag on price. Much of the single models sit around the $10 mark, while some of the squads range about 33%-50% lower than the plastic kits - making buying the actual plastic kits from an online retailer at the 25%-30% a better option.

I still feel that the plastic kits are over priced, but when the cost becomes a matter of 10%-15%, it's often worth the extra percentage to get the plastics.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

For me it just gets tiring reading responses that come down to defences of self entitlement.

I'd have more respect for it if people just said "I buy it because I want it" instead of making up hollow excuses like how GW is evil but in their evilness produce kits you like so much you aren't willing to put your money where your mouth is and buy a product from another company.

I'll openly admit that I will buy recasts of FW because I want to get the model and that the retail price is far too high. Other factors (as explained below) also play into that decision. However, I would very happily buy directly from FW if the cost was much more reasonable. And while my GW spending (including recasts) has pretty much disappeared, I have been spending my hobby money on a number of other companies that offer their products at much more reasonable prices.

 Azreal13 wrote:

As I've already said, some will pirate for ideological reasons, but for pretty much everyone else it simply boils down to the fact that the price of the product is too high.

I'm somewhat in the middle of that. Yeah the cost of the product is one of the biggest factors, but I try and look at the company as well and how they act towards customers. And this goes across all platforms I pirate - Pirating Responsibly, as I try and look at it. Companies that treat me well and produce products that adequately reflected with the price will always see my monetary support. I will never pay for a Ubisoft game because of the way they openly treat PC gamers and the poor quality of their games on the PC platform; while I would never pirate anything from CD Projekt even though they don't have any DRM to worry about. They don't treat me like some lowly, money shoveling entity. In terms of recasters and the discussion at hand, I do try and look at more than just the bottom line cost of the models. GW doesn't see me as anything more than a fool with money - no market research and the "They will buy whatever we make" attitude puts me off to the company that unfortunately has been ruining it's IP's for years now. It's not that I think GW is evil or anything, it's just that why should I put up with their ridiculous pricing when they view me so poorly.