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 Medium of Death wrote:
Well we had the studio comment about the robes being a problem that was made aaaaaaaaages ago, around the DE re-launch

Not just the robes, the hair was also cited as a problem. Jes Goodwin talks about it in a fair amout of detail in the first few paragraphs of this.

 Medium of Death wrote:
so maybe the SoB palstic kits are ready to rock.

Possibly... This source claims that GW people said that they now had the capabilities to make plastic Sisters.

 Medium of Death wrote:
maybe we will see the Sisters being released after or during the summer campaign.

Hmm, I doubt it. I think we would've heard something by now, if they were coming this year. I'm thinking sometime in 2015, myself. Just speculation, though.

weeble1000 wrote:
Yep, "We'll be back," and all that. GW is derivative to the point of being humorous.

Though not as much as they were in the early days. RT had an Inquisitor called Obi-wan and a fluff character who was Doctor Who in all but name.

 Troike wrote:

 Medium of Death wrote:
so maybe the SoB palstic kits are ready to rock.

Possibly... This source claims that GW people said that they now had the capabilities to make plastic Sisters.

Thanks for that. Have been looking for it for a while now.

 loki old fart wrote:
Sylvester =sly


You'd think they would sell them anonymously on ebay. Instead on melting them down.

Yeah, I never understood that policy. It would be more logical to just sell it at a reduced price, that way they are still making some money instead of just throwing it away. But no, apparently that makes GW's management sad, and we can't have that

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 loki old fart wrote:
Sylvester =sly


You'd think they would sell them anonymously on ebay. Instead on melting them down.

Yeah, I never understood that policy. It would be more logical to just sell it at a reduced price, that way they are still making some money instead of just throwing it away. But no, apparently that makes GW's management sad, and we can't have that

Not necessarily. You can melt the metal down to recast with essentially no loss of material, so it might make sense to melt down the slowest moving lines to use the metal for faster moving lines.

BUT:
1. I was under the impression GW had sold off it's metal casting machinery, so they don't have the ability to do new casts and
2. Even at 50% off, they'll get significantly more selling the slow selling figure as is than the raw metal would cost, so it's still a stupid idea.

I bet they'd also have been able to unload it in bulk to someone like Wayland, or stick them in a bargain bin in WHW. Or given them away free with WH:Visions subscriptions. There's no shortage of things to do that are better than melting them down.

I imagine they want to book the figures as losses for tax purposes; this has to be recorded, so no selling them under alias or giving away for free to anybody, even employers. They refuse to discount any products so as not to devalue the brand. Makes sense.

Herzlos wrote:


BUT:
1. I was under the impression GW had sold off it's metal casting machinery, so they don't have the ability to do new casts

They have. But they still have the moulds or something like that. During the great Specialist Games model purge last year many of the things I ordered I was told were on back order and took a while to turn up as they had to be sent out to a 3rd party to cast them up.

 Agamemnon2 wrote:

Herzlos wrote:
Last time I was looking on eBay, OOP metals were going for more than the RRP of the finecast replacements. That should give an indication of how people feel on the metal/FC front..

A big thing is that you can strip metal miniatures so much easier, and while they're harder to work on, the harder material means they withstand the knocks and dings of time better. If given a choice, I would always buy metal over finecast.

+1 !

My imperial guard army is solely composed of metal miniatures, and I like it as is.
If a metal mini is knocked over the table, a small paint chip may occur, but apart from that, these are safe and solid figurines to move around.
No fragile bits would broke off the miniature for being hastily hand-picked during the heat of battle, and so on...


For Imperial Guard, I think the Vostoyans will be deeply missed. They are quite recent and deserve to be continued. When they hit the stores in 2006 I nearly had regrets having my load of valhallans and kasrkins already, so did not purchased a platoon of them, but oh... Such a detail level and inspiration is unsurpassed in the IG plastic range.

About the time of the AS "kind of codex update" both IG and Sisters were restocked with metal models that had been gone since they started with finecast.
The codex/armybooks since has had precious little finecast, and basicly no old models has been finecasted to acompany the new books.

If anything, I would say GW is dropping the finecast as much as they can.

GW don't you dare drop Marbo from the next codex. He's just "heavily inspired" by something outside GW.

It's not my fault my kit-bashed version just happens to look like someone out of some movie line. Pshaw, leave my insta-demo charge alone!

Nice.
The base is as old-fashioned as the Rambo film series themselves !

 -DE- wrote:
I imagine they want to book the figures as losses for tax purposes;

That's not how taxes work. The only way you can make more money writing the product off than selling it is if you're committing fraud. Recouping, say, 30% of your loss by writing it off is worse than recouping 100% of your loss by selling it.

 MadCowCrazy wrote:
Sister Maria-kun...
[…]
Nisa-chan

Japan, corrupting everything that is pure and turning it into evil monstrosity.
Not even Cthulhu is safe !
(And yeah, he was supposedly already an evil monstrosity, but just click that link, I dare you, and tell me that you do not feel like your mind has been violated ! Though in all honesty, with tentacles and all that, it could have been worse ! Oh, and on an unrelated note, this too.)

Melting the stuff instead of a fire sale, that's illogical.
But sounds like the usual GW modus operandi so the rumour must be true.
Could you imagine GW making a one click bundle with all their metal stuff for IG at a discount? I swear it would sell and bring extra cash for GW... so HQ will probably throw away the stock, sell the warehouse and then say in the next shareholder report that they are still cutting unneeded costs agresively.

M.

 Miguelsan wrote:
Melting the stuff instead of a fire sale, that's illogical.

Not if you can make more selling the raw metal than the products you made from them.

Then again this is the company that sent old edition starters and non-starters like Dreadfleet to landfill, so who knows?

 Agamemnon2 wrote:
This could be, yes. It would mean quite a few plastic packs to cover even the characters, though. Commissars, regimental advisors, priests, tech-priests, primaris psyker. Then kits for ogryns and ratlings, stormtroopers and veterans. That's a lot of sprues, and I haven't even gotten to special characters yet.

Commissars and Advisors could be lumped onto a single sprue - greatcoat bodies with optional limbs and heads. Likewise for the Priests and psykers.

A Psyker Battle Squad/Imperial Priest Delegation boxed set? 5 guys, can be done up as either Priests/Psykers?

That would be amazing.

Ordered myself the deathwatch conversion pack. I've watched too many projects that I just keeping putting off vanish from the website in the last few months.
Get that lead pile up.

 Miguelsan wrote:
Melting the stuff instead of a fire sale, that's illogical.

Depends on the value of the metal and the quality of the remaining stock. It could mostly be stuff that has been sat at the back of shelves for years and needs cleaning and re-boxing before it could be sent out, or they are getting rid of dregs of stock that has been converted to FC or replaced and the IG stuff and it is going to be replaced by plastic and FC in a month. Sometimes it can be the best option. As anyone in publishing about book pulping.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Miguelsan wrote:
Melting the stuff instead of a fire sale, that's illogical.

Not if you can make more selling the raw metal than the products you made from them.

Then again this is the company that sent old edition starters and non-starters like Dreadfleet to landfill, so who knows?

According to Amazon, I can get a 1lb ingot of pewter for $19.99 (retail). Which is ~500g for £12, or 2.4p per gram. I don't know what a standard metal figure weighs, but we'll be generous and say 20g, so that's 48p in pewter. The cheapest metal figures are about £3, or 6 times of the raw pewter cost.

That's assuming GW buys 1lb a time at retail instead of getting some bulk trade rate*. So GW would need to sell at over 83% discount before it makes sense to use cast figures instead of buying the raw metal. That's also not factoring in the time wasted casting them in the first place.

So even if GW sold blind grab bags on the website for 50p/figure, they'd make much, much more than melting them down. And they'd absolutely fly out of the warehouse without any worries about repackaging or anything. Hell they could even sell the metal stocks in grab bags at 50p/gram and they'd vanish.


Edit: even if was stuff that'd got the finecast treatment, they could have a "look what we found in the back of the warehouse" sale at 75% of the finecast price and they'd probably clear the metal stocks in a weekend.


*retail normally has a markup of about 100%, and there's usually bulk discounts, so I wouldn't be surprised if you can get pewter in bulk for less than £10/kilo.

Hadn't you heard? GW are melting down all of their surplus metal miniatures and sculpting a huge middle finger outside their Nottingham HQ.

Herzlos wrote:

According to Amazon, I can get a 1lb ingot of pewter for $19.99 (retail). Which is ~500g for £12, or 2.4p per gram. I don't know what a standard metal figure weighs, but we'll be generous and say 20g, so that's 48p in pewter. The cheapest metal figures are about £3, or 6 times of the raw pewter cost.

That's assuming GW buys 1lb a time at retail instead of getting some bulk trade rate*. So GW would need to sell at over 83% discount before it makes sense to use cast figures instead of buying the raw metal. That's also not factoring in the time wasted casting them in the first place.

So even if GW sold blind grab bags on the website for 50p/figure, they'd make much, much more than melting them down. And they'd absolutely fly out of the warehouse without any worries about repackaging or anything. Hell they could even sell the metal stocks in grab bags at 50p/gram and they'd vanish.


Edit: even if was stuff that'd got the finecast treatment, they could have a "look what we found in the back of the warehouse" sale at 75% of the finecast price and they'd probably clear the metal stocks in a weekend.


*retail normally has a markup of about 100%, and there's usually bulk discounts, so I wouldn't be surprised if you can get pewter in bulk for less than £10/kilo.

If only it were that simple. Businesses write off product rather than putting it on sale all the time. There is all sorts of considerations beyond that, for example cannibalizing sales, the cost of the inventory management, P&P, investor and market confidence. Can you imagine how much people would complain about bent and broken minis if they were all checked in bags? They will have to justify to the accountants and investors why they are melting down the stock rather than selling it off. I don't know the ins and outs of what would be better or worse financially, but I doubt very much that they have not thought of selling it off like that, or going to the major re-sellers and offering it to them as remainders.

Herzlos wrote:
According to Amazon, I can get a 1lb ingot of pewter for $19.99 (retail). Which is ~500g for £12, or 2.4p per gram. I don't know what a standard metal figure weighs, but we'll be generous and say 20g, so that's 48p in pewter. The cheapest metal figures are about £3, or 6 times of the raw pewter cost.

That's assuming GW buys 1lb a time at retail instead of getting some bulk trade rate*. So GW would need to sell at over 83% discount before it makes sense to use cast figures instead of buying the raw metal. That's also not factoring in the time wasted casting them in the first place.

So even if GW sold blind grab bags on the website for 50p/figure, they'd make much, much more than melting them down. And they'd absolutely fly out of the warehouse without any worries about repackaging or anything. Hell they could even sell the metal stocks in grab bags at 50p/gram and they'd vanish.

All of that makes sense, but they may not believe they can sell those miniatures in the first place. No matter how much they're worth as miniatures, they're worth exactly $0 if they're sitting in a warehouse doing nothing. A company might not want the miniatures, but they may want the raw materials. And yes, you're right in that GW could do a sale to clear the stock and make themselves some money... but this is GW we're talking about. They're far more likely to sell their metal stock for a cheap short(est)-term gain than try to spend a longer time selling even discount metal minis. Plus they spent so much time talking about how FineCast was the greatest thing to happen in miniature gaming since the invention of dice that they would be mixing brand messages to suddenly turn around and start selling an 'inferior' product (I know it's not inferior, but when you've made out FineCast to be a combined cancer/AIDS cure, it's a bit hard to say "But also, you can buy the old stuff" without looking like a buffoon).

Additionally I can see them scrapping the whole lot rather than selling it at a discount because they've done it in the past.

They've done it before without cannibalizing sales, and in this case nothing is being written off. They are converting $x worth (at retail) of stock into $x/6 raw materials.

I get that they are worried the stuff won't sell, but what's the reason for it not selling? Lack of demand? Price too high?

There'd be nothing wrong with them running an obviously one off clearance and melting down the rest that didn't even sell at 50% off.

North star figs do it every few months; random themed bags of odd mini's that don't fit into packs (i.e. they've got 9 good casts but sell them in packs of 8). They tell you what the period is and offer them at a huge discount, because it's a better business move than melting them down. And that's a relatively tiny company compared to GW with presumably a smaller quantity of figures (North Star sells a handful of bags every few months).

Of course, this is GW, so I'm happy to accept that'll take the route that contradicts conventional wisdom where possible, and will just shake my head in disbelief.

Enceladus wrote:
Hadn't you heard? GW are melting down all of their surplus metal miniatures and sculpting a huge middle finger outside their Nottingham HQ.

The inscription will read, "This Is For All The Veterans."

Back on topic, the cost of metal has never been a genuine issue. Historically, the metals that go into the tin soldier alloy have remained fairly stable in price for many decades. There was a bit of a hike a couple of years back, because of Chinese demand, but that will smooth out as miners dig up more to exploit the higher price.

From GW's perspective, though, a plastic figure is always going to be cheaper. Even if it is only a few pence, when you make millions of figures it can add up. Transport is subtly cheaper due to weight. OTOH, metal is easily recycled and plastic moulding equipment is more expensive, so overall it may even out more than we think.

I think GW want to move away from being a hardcore wargame company and be more of a teen friendly advanced toy company. From that angle, plastic and even Finecast are much better than metal.

As regards the Sisters, I for one would be incredibly sad if they got squatted. I have never had a Sisters army but it's probably the one I would do, because the whole ethos and look and feel is concentrated 40K madness.

Hopefully, GW are doing plastic versions. It certainly would be easy to mould them with separate cloaks etc, just like Tyranid Gargoyles have separate wings.

More generally, special character figures can be moulded by gathering several of them into sprue frames for mass production, which you cut and package separately afterwards.

Herzlos wrote:

So even if GW sold blind grab bags on the website for 50p/figure, they'd make much, much more than melting them down. And they'd absolutely fly out of the warehouse without any worries about repackaging or anything. Hell they could even sell the metal stocks in grab bags at 50p/gram and they'd vanish.


Edit: even if was stuff that'd got the finecast treatment, they could have a "look what we found in the back of the warehouse" sale at 75% of the finecast price and they'd probably clear the metal stocks in a weekend.

Maybe there is just not that much to sell anymore? After all, Specialist Game stock cleared out pretty quick once the word got out, at full prices: given how insane prices some items command at Ebay they could have actually hiked the prices. Regular 40k/Fantasy stock is probably selling slower, but many ranges too have been sold out. So maybe all that is left is pittance and just not worth the effort.

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

 MadCowCrazy wrote:
Sister Maria-kun...
[…]
Nisa-chan

Japan, corrupting everything that is pure and turning it into evil monstrosity.
Not even Cthulhu is safe !
(And yeah, he was supposedly already an evil monstrosity, but just click that link, I dare you, and tell me that you do not feel like your mind has been violated ! Though in all honesty, with tentacles and all that, it could have been worse ! Oh, and on an unrelated note, this too.)

Cthuga isn't Cthulu. Completely different Great Old One.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha

@herzlos

1kg of LF Pewter cost £31.91 per kg. inc VAT

25kg costs £29.88 per kg

Based on prices from Tiranti.

Low melt LF alloy is a lot more expensive.

Bulk wholesale will be better but the costs aren't where you think they are.

OK that's a bit more than I'd found, but that's including VAT and presumably there are significant trade discounts?

Anyway, my figures were based on £24/kg so are still in the right ball park. The figures are still worth at least ~6x more as figures than pewter.

Again, not if no one's buying them and they're sitting in a warehouse doing nothing.

Okay, but what was their cost when purchased? If they paid half that price when they made these then there is profit. If they already wrote off the stock then anything gotten back is profit. Would they make more by lowering the cost of the sets? Most likely yes, but they could just dump it all in one go, and not worry about shipping, lost merchandise, or missing parts.