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Like, in real life, as in how many minis has GW produced to date?

And would this correspond at all to how many exist in the fluff?

Well, the number of marines that exist are roughly a thousand chapters, of roughly a thousand marines each. Even if we use the loose count, where the 1,000 marines per chapter is the line strength, and doesn’t count the drivers/support staff/etc, we still end up with a high estimate of 1,500,000 to 2 million marines.

I’m guessing GW has made more then that over the years, but that’s a blind guess.

Well, we can use that metric to have an idea of what would be necessary for there to be 1 million marines;

Right away we can apply "players" instead of "chapters". So if there's a 1000 players, each with 1000 marines, we have a million marines. There's definitely more than 1000 marine players worldwide though. If there were 5000 marine players, then each would only need to have 200 marines each. That's definitely not out of the question, as it seems that there's definitely players with more than 200 marines!

If there's 50000 marine players, which sounds maybe about right, then each only would need to have 20 marines for there to be 1 million marines. I think it's safe to say that most players have more than 2 squads of Marines.

As such, I think we can confidently say that there are more marines in the collections of players in the world than there are Marines in the Imperium of Man.

At last count, around 1,340.

Guys, there's as many marines as the plot demands.

The exact figure is 8765354.

A secret unnamed source told me and in no way did I make it up............

I quite like the idea that the in-universe number of marines is related to the out-of universe number of Marine chapters. Gives a bit more fluidity than the frankly ridiculous hard number given by GW...

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
I quite like the idea that the in-universe number of marines is related to the out-of universe number of Marine chapters. Gives a bit more fluidity than the frankly ridiculous hard number given by GW...

By Jove, he's discovered to bypass plot armour! All the chaos players have to do is melt down every marine they come across and we'll start seeing more blatant imperial defeats in-universe...although, this could potentially cause a rip between universes, causig them to spill into each other. I'm pretty sure no one wants the warp in their backyard- but apparently that Kharn fella is supposed to be pretty cool.

If they sold more Tacticals boxes than all of Fantasy in recent years, work from that.
Assume that they meant they sold more Tacticals sprues, which get added to bundles boxes. That goes towards answering the next part, which is the amount of marines sold overall.

There was a thing a while ago about Star Wars Stormtroopers:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35170829