Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

So this came in the Old World thread and should be moved elsewhere, what percentage of GW kits (or minis in general) are never opened?

Now we all have our piles of shame and abandoned projects but we're talking about kit bought and never even looked at.

My feeling is a large percentage are, for the simple reason that the secondary market is close to retail price. If there were closets full of unbuilt kits across Europe and America surely we'd be able to get some for pennies on the dollar?

What are thoughts?

Pretty much 100% of what I buy is opened once I get it. Even if it heads to the PoS soon after. Gotta look at the sprues and get the sniff of the fresh plastic.

I’ve got some sealed blisters from when a FLGS went out of buisness and was dumping stuff, and the W+ minis which I’m leaving sealed until I decide I want to paint them. That’s the only sealed stuff I have.

I would say a large portion never go opened, but how large is hard to say.

My own mostly comes from buying of others unopened. As I am mostly good with my projects with unmade models coming from kits I wanted to work with part of the kit or just half the models.

Several years ago I posted on Facebook I was buying kits for $20 if they where unopened and in good condition and I didn’t expect so many local people to want to jump on such a small price for GW kits.
I am still working though those kits and it was crazy.
From those players it would estimate about 50% unopened. But that judgement would be rough.


Edit to put the $ on the right side :9

One photo nearly made me cry.

A real collector, and I mean REAL collector who may or may not have ever built and painted a model, had around ten unopened, still shrink wrapped Praetorian Imperial Guard army boxes.

And that was just a small part of his unopened MIB collection of GW products.

Y'know thinking about it, I did see a figure to the effect of 60% of books are never even OPENED (never mind finished). So yeah. Maybe.

With model kits I think the rate might be very high, I see people showing off their stashes of sci fi, anime and military kits all the time, more than they could ever build or paint. And of course without the pressure of a game it's easy to let them pile up.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Y'know thinking about it, I did see a figure to the effect of 60% of books are never even OPENED (never mind finished). So yeah. Maybe.

With model kits I think the rate might be very high, I see people showing off their stashes of sci fi, anime and military kits all the time, more than they could ever build or paint. And of course without the pressure of a game it's easy to let them pile up.

I actually think the game pressure may push people to buy more kits than needed, starting a new army so drop for 1000 points.
At least for the Gunpla group here the build rate would be maybe 90/95% since stopping a project for a month isn’t a big deal.
Why stopping a army project half way can mean losing the reason to even build it, if the game was a big motivator.

I remember some years ago there used to be a poster in the DCM area who would list everything they bought and that was 2 of every new GW release. Didn't matter what it was.

Remember someone on the Infinity forum that used to do likewise, auto delivery from a local store each month containing each new release.

I think those are extreme examples but its probably fairly common to buy much more than you could ever possibly build or paint, thinking "I will start a project with that at some point in the future".

I have a few that are mostly center piece units for armies that aren't my current focus. Have the Silent King and Morathi in my closet along with Triumvirate boxes for when I need the big people to enter the fray.

Have a few old school sealed blisters that are probably going to remain so for a long time. Mostly old Drukhari and SoB models.

The closest I come is a few issues of Conquest/Imperium which I bought just in case I want a Rhino or some Skitarii bits for future projects.

More then I want to admit.

I'm at the point now where I'm on one project till completion, but the impulse control on even that is really a test.

I couldn't share anything more an anecdotal, but I certainly have quite a few.

One common case I think is when I was more into 40k I had a Dark Angels army and would get it in my head I wanted an allied detachment, so I have a bunch of kits for Grey Knights and AdMech I never followed through on.

One uncommon case, when fantasy was squated the kits became insanely cheap and I bought a bunch of OoP kits, in case I wanted them later or, if need be, that I could sell once they became rare.

Back when I went on a bit of an Ebay buying spree of the old 2E Necron metal models to bulk out my army, I bought a few that were still in blisters. Haven't popped those yet.

I think the more depressing thought is how many kits were not only never opened, but then also thrown into the trash as people decided they just didn't want them, or parents cleaned out their grown-up kids' rooms of "old toys", etc.

From all the army's i have only a box of fanatics for empire are not done, because i needed 4 of them for my warshrine.

I have plenty of unbuilt stuff in box, (well the boxes my now be crushed) but they've all been opened so i could look at the sprues, thumb through the instructions and dream of building and painting them

Unopened, I think the only thing is Dominion sitting still in the box it got shipped in. *Unbuilt*, now that is another story - plenty there as I tend to have poor focus at times and jump from wildly varying projects.

Never opened as in haven't even taken the plastic wrap off? Or never opened as in opened the box, put the stuff back in it, and left it for later? I imagine the second happens all the time, the first seems like it would be a lot rarer. Most people would at least open the box, check the contents, admire the shiny new sprues, etc, even if motivation fails and it all goes into the pile of shame untouched. And on the secondary market that still counts as NIB for most buyers.

Personally I only have 4 kits that I'd say qualify as never having been looked at.
1) An original BFG starter box, still in shrink wrap.
It was bought for a BFG/40k combo campaign that died almost imediately. I couldn't make it the week BFG was being taught to the rest of the group. The next week it was announced that the campaign was being scrapped. Turned out that the majority didn't like BFG & then things degenerated into an argument of how the campaign was to be run. I didn't even have time to open my BFG box before the game was scrapped....
So this box resides in the bottom of my closet. Now & then over the years various people (who don't own any BFG) broaches the idea of playing some BFG - but nothing ever comes of it. I'll crack this box open the day someone else puts the 1st ship on the table.

2) 3 original FW Necron Pylons.
Sitting in a box right on top of the BFG set.
I was the victim of a GW rules shift on this one.
These things came out, had experimental rules on FW site. They were Heavy Support choices. "Cool, something other than my Monoliths in the heavy slot!"
The day after I got them? The rules changed & they became Super Heavies.
Well, the group I was playing 40k with at the time had a "No Super Heavies" rule. :(
I never bothered to build them (only verified that all parts are there). They went into a nice strong box & into the closet.
Every year we'd take a vote on a # of things - like Super-Heavies: Y/N?.... Eventually the group makeup shifted enough that the SH ban was overturned. But by then I was hardly playing 40k (more Historicals) & when I did 40k I was using my Demons.....
The current groups I play with? Super-Heavies/LoW, etc? No problem. So I COULD dig them out, build/paint them up & put them on the table. I just haven't got around to it yet.

Other than that? I've got about 75 GW kits (40/AoS/BB/etc) sitting unopened on a shelf.
That sounds like a lot, but around 25-30 are individual characters or really small units that could be knocked off the list on a rainy day as far assembly & base coating goes.
Everything on this shelf has an intended eventual use. So it's not like I just bought stuff for the sake of buying it. Of course some things were bought with an eye to the future. Yes, one day I will be in the mood to play <the Silent King>. Or maybe just build & paint him.... And when that day comes? He will no doubt cost more than when I bought him last year. No point in spending more $ than neccecary.

I cannot see myself buying something and never opening it, except maybe if I realized too late that I bought the wrong product. Once I've intentionally bought something, I will at least build it and see how I like it.

The idea of buying a whole pile of boxes and stashing them away to maybe open them at a later point is so strange to me. Might as well buy them when I'm ready to build them and free up the money for the time being.

For me it's mostly Made to Order stuff.
These are things that I have been hunting for 12 years but ebay prices were insane.
So GW put them on MTO, I bought them, but currently there are other projects on the line.

On the other hand there's a whole Spider project (several blisters from about 4 producers) unopened because I don't think I'll get them in the way I'm imagining them.

You're asking in a wrong place- an old forum full of hardcore hobbyists if there was a site for teenage boys (GW target audience) with the power of short lived enthusiasm inversely proportional to their attention span you could get a better picture

I think that very little product remains unopened forever, but it is likely that a large percentage is unopened by the original owner. My assumption is that except for rare collectibles once it goes on the secondary market it is much more likely to be opened and used.

It's not a perfect corollary since model trains are very much a collectible, but supposedly, a major model terrain company estimates that over half of the product they still is never run and much of that never even leaves the box

I have nothing unopened.

I do have a pile of shame: maybe half a dozen boxes still on sprue.

Many lots assembled in the "to be painted" pile....

Cyel wrote:
You're asking in a wrong place- an old forum full of hardcore hobbyists if there was a site for teenage boys (GW target audience) with the power of short lived enthusiasm inversely proportional to their attention span you could get a better picture

If anything I think it would be the opposite, teenage boys with no impulse control would have no unopened boxes because everything is torn open before they're out of the parking lot.

It's hard to really know because we never really have a true sense of how many sell to start with to compare the secondhand market against.


Certainly because miniatures require assembly and painting there's pressure to not just crack open every box and its VERY easy to over-buy models. Discounts, limited range, ranges coming to their end, purchases that we start and never finish; games that we get into that then locally never take off etc... There's good reason that many kits will be unbuilt.

I don't think you could easily put a % value on that without some extensive market research.



That said also don't forget that even if its a large percentage, the number that hit ebay is always going to be way less. We hold onto things for a rainy day; forget we even own them; put them in storage; lose them and heck these days I'd wager ebay itself is somewhat less used than Facebook groups and other platforms.

Out of print also puts prices up, sometimes very considerably because popular out of print stuff well sell fast and high because even if there is lots in sheds unbuilt, its not all for sale at once; and the limited nature makes people keen to snap them up fast when they appear incase its the last (or at least because the next one might sell for more or might not appear for years)

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
Back when I went on a bit of an Ebay buying spree of the old 2E Necron metal models to bulk out my army, I bought a few that were still in blisters. Haven't popped those yet.

I think the more depressing thought is how many kits were not only never opened, but then also thrown into the trash as people decided they just didn't want them, or parents cleaned out their grown-up kids' rooms of "old toys", etc.

Last year I went to my parent's house for Christmas, and my mom dropped this giant box on the dining room table. It was a smallish Tau army and decent sized elar army, all third edition vintage. mostly painted, but some stuff still in box or blister. I didn't recognize it, so I asked where she got it, assuming a thrift store or flea market.

She garbage picked it. She had stopped to pull out a Christmas decoration she saw in their trash, and saw this box labeled warhammer. it wan't anything too rare or OOP, but It there was box of Kroot, a krootox blister, and three aspect warrior blisters... just thrown away.

I'd say I only open about 5% of what I actually buy :(

 Polonius wrote:

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
Back when I went on a bit of an Ebay buying spree of the old 2E Necron metal models to bulk out my army, I bought a few that were still in blisters. Haven't popped those yet.

I think the more depressing thought is how many kits were not only never opened, but then also thrown into the trash as people decided they just didn't want them, or parents cleaned out their grown-up kids' rooms of "old toys", etc.

Last year I went to my parent's house for Christmas, and my mom dropped this giant box on the dining room table. It was a smallish Tau army and decent sized elar army, all third edition vintage. mostly painted, but some stuff still in box or blister. I didn't recognize it, so I asked where she got it, assuming a thrift store or flea market.

She garbage picked it. She had stopped to pull out a Christmas decoration she saw in their trash, and saw this box labeled warhammer. it wan't anything too rare or OOP, but It there was box of Kroot, a krootox blister, and three aspect warrior blisters... just thrown away.

Free Warhammer from the trash. That's the dream!
I'll shamelessly garbage pick if something obvious is there, but I've never found warhammer anything.

Going to tell my kid about this. He'll probably freak out about someone throwing out his beloved tau and Kroot.

 Eilif wrote:
I think that very little product remains unopened forever, but it is likely that a large percentage is unopened by the original owner. My assumption is that except for rare collectibles once it goes on the secondary market it is much more likely to be opened and used.

I buy a LOT of used stuff, eBay, Facebook marketplace, swap meets, whatever. The stuff I see tells the same story over and over: people buy a ton of stuff they never really use.

My favorite was a FB marketplace find. Guy had no real idea what he had, eventually told me his Uncle had it and gave it to him to sell. It was a huge lot of vintage 2004 WFB. Skull Pass box, four battalion boxes, handful of blisters, battlefield in a box, fortified manor, and a bunch of paints, flocks, glues, etc. Guy clearly dropped $1500 on warhammer, going all in. there were three built goblins, of which one had some paint. The rest was basically pristine. Plenty of stuff was still in shrink. Guy got excited, bought in huge, built three models, and then put it in a garage for 15 years.

I believe that's how consumerism based economy works in general. People thrive on easy and quick dopamine shots* from making purchases. Long term satisfaction that you need to put time and effort in doesn't look attractive in comparison.

*- double shots from buying online - one when making the purchase, second when product arrives.

I have a big pile of unbuilt stuff but open most of it to check out the sprues for heads and weapons I can possibly use to spice up some other project.

Most of the stuff that lay around for years are for armies I rarely play. Craftworlders as an example, I play once or twice per codex. But when I do I get super exited about them and buy new stuff to complement the collection. Then I realise I already have a pretty solid army, and the point level I play dont allow for more stuff. So after the game, lots of stuff goes to the closet instead.
This summer I built some harlies I had lying around since from when they were released in plastic.