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Price isn't everything - how much value do you get out of the various starters, both in what it includes and how much you have to add to get a complete force?

 Stormonu wrote:
Price isn't everything - how much value do you get out of the various starters, both in what it includes and how much you have to add to get a complete force?

this is broadly why the aforementioned oddly variable GW pricing is baffling for around £50-£60 you can get either a one faction Starter box for 40k, or a Bloodbowl / Sharespire box and xpac with 2/3 factions and whilst £ per model value is higher in the Start Collecting those boxes aren't really enough to start playing

But ultimately value is how many people justify hobby spending, for example my 10 player Guild Ball teams come in at £80-£100ish, more expensive than most GW stuff but worth it to me I play it far more often than 40k despite having nearly everything Eldar barring a Phantom

Its largely pointless trying to be objectively comparative about value, because it's a nebulous and inherently subjective idea, but way back I tried expressing cost as a percentage of a typical size force to play the game at the intended level, as opposed to a starter or other slightly unusual setup.

It's not perfect, but when a £10 Guild Ball player is 15% of a full sized force, or an X Wing fighter sized expansion can represent anything between 11-40+% of a typical list, whereas a £2.50 Tactical Marine represents ~0.5% it starts to eliminate some of the inherent weighting that skirmish games must apply to their price model simply to be viable in the market. Nor will it eliminate the wilfully narrow viewed people who insist they get no value from X because they like painting Space Marines and only Space Marines will do, but it's something that smooths out the bumps of a model for model comparison when not all games need anything like the same amount, and cost to play is hugely more relevant than cost per model any ways.

I don't really think bringing up concerns that are specific to me like "I only value space marines" really says anything at all about a general comparison of games in terms of cost to play. Those kind of idiosyncratic objections don't actually say anything about the comparison.

What I think is a valid criticism of the approach though, is to ask what the elements are that make up the percentage. You can download some free rules like the good One Page Rules. Then head down to the dollar store and get some army men and have $2 be 100% of a full sized game. So now does every commercial game come off as bad value in comparison? Maybe.

I don't think it's idiosyncratic to want miniatures that are better than generic factory recasts of 50+ year old toy soldier sculpts, even if in doing so you pretty much have infinitely worse value in terms of percentage of a full game.

 Azreal13 wrote:

 Flinty wrote:
GW doesn't charge based on materials or difficulty or points cost. They supply materials for a luxury hobby. So it gets benchmarked against other luxury hobbies like golf and, I don't know, hard-core cinema going or something, and price accordingly.

Citation needed.

Because that's a fairly bizarre method of pricing if true. I mean, why not pick precious gem collecting or race driving and really charge for their stuff.

What you're effectively arguing there is Tesco can charge £20 a dozen for chicken eggs because caviar.

No I'm not. Tesco aren't selling a luxury hobby, they sell basic foodstuffs with totally different market forces. Games Workshop have found a niche and are pushing the price as far as they think they can get away with. Because they produce extremely high quality model products and have a great market presence they can currently get away with it.

 Chamberlain wrote:
I don't really think bringing up concerns that are specific to me like "I only value space marines" really says anything at all about a general comparison of games in terms of cost to play. Those kind of idiosyncratic objections don't actually say anything about the comparison.

Yet people have used this as an argument with a straight face. On multiple occasions, and multiple posters.

What I think is a valid criticism of the approach though, is to ask what the elements are that make up the percentage. You can download some free rules like the good One Page Rules. Then head down to the dollar store and get some army men and have $2 be 100% of a full sized game. So now does every commercial game come off as bad value in comparison? Maybe.

I don't think it's idiosyncratic to want miniatures that are better than generic factory recasts of 50+ year old toy soldier sculpts, even if in doing so you pretty much have infinitely worse value in terms of percentage of a full game.

The "well I'll just use plastic toy shop £1 soldiers" defence is another old favourite too. We'll chuck the "I might as well just use home made card tokens" argument on the pile as well while we're at it.

Ultimately if people are willing to trot these out as defences of GW pricing, they're likely not really arguing in good faith, and should be treated as such. There's a clear, and, to my mind, fairly self evident, delineation between a product intended for war gaming and a product usable for war gaming, that line can blur, but comparing Warlord plastic kits to GW plastic kits (or, Bolt Action to 40K) is a more intellectually honest argument than Space Marines to toy shop "Bag O Soldiers."

 Azreal13 wrote:

Ultimately if people are willing to trot these out as defences of GW pricing, they're likely not really arguing in good faith, and should be treated as such. There's a clear, and, to my mind, fairly self evident, delineation between a product intended for war gaming and a product usable for war gaming, that line can blur, but comparing Warlord plastic kits to GW plastic kits (or, Bolt Action to 40K) is a more intellectually honest argument than Space Marines to toy shop "Bag O Soldiers."

I completely agree. I thought I had found the bottom with the bag o soldiers, but I forgot about paper/card.

As someone who does a lot of skirmish gaming (even with GW stuff) I don't see GW's pricing on a full army basis as applying to me but I think it's a great overall evaluation to look at the average cost of a 1500 or 1750 point game. I'd say 2000 points, but I keep hearing on tournament based podcasts that 2000 point games are not fitting in the promised time of 2 hours that GW talked about during the launch of 8th and I think most major events might shrink the points size a bit.

It's actually kind of a strange conundrum. On the one hand, it's very obvious that a individual set should be evaluated in terms of value for itself, but then there's the whole piece of a larger gaming purchase going on. A primaris character being £22.50 or a start collecting at £50 or a Know No Fear set at £50 can all be evaluated either by themselves, in comparison to one another, as part of a larger gaming outlay or in any of those ways in comparison to any product from any other company.

A friend of mine was very happy to buy the primaris librarian and chaplain after buying a Dark Imperium set and then trading the nurgle for another of the primaris set. the total outlay to get the army he has seemed quite reasonable to him even when adding in the expensive character. Would he feel the same had he built genestealer cults and bought the overkill box and then had trouble getting rid of the deathwatch half and then ended up with no where near as many points? Or any other army without a box set at all (start collecting, board game, starter or otherwise)? Probably not.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
There just seems to be so many disparate facts, conflicting priorities, inconsistencies in this discussion that I can see the appeal of just going with a percent of a full army evaluation.

It sort of cuts through all that, but I guess the objection then is that we're not comparing like vs like. A 200 figure WW1 army is not the same thing as a gang of 11 guys for a wild west shoot out. So percentage of full army might need to get broken down into types of games, but then we're back into the fragmentation and different priorities that caused the need for the comparison in the first place.

I guess the problem is that it's really hard to make meaningful comparisons on anything other than a single product basis. I can actually compare one infinity character with a single GW character. Or a small squad box of infinity guys with a small squad box of GW guys. Substitute other company's as you like. But as soon as I'm comparing a 4 ship X-Wing list to a 120 model 40k list, something seems off.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, isn't there a lot of psychological research that says that people make decisions for emotional reasons and then justify them with logical sounding ones after the fact? I wonder if its the same for evaluations for GW's pricing? We'll look at a price for a given release, come to our conclusion on a gut level and then frame our comparison in a way to let us tell ourselves it was all logical and rational?

Again, I think attempting to come up with frameworks like percent of a full army is part of cutting through this confusion, but I think it might actually not really solve anything. Either comparing a 100 pt X-Wing list of 2-8 ships to a 2000 point 40k army of 50-150 miniatures will resonate with us or it won't. Then we'll hunt for reasons to present to others that our acceptance or rejection of the comparison is actually rational.

$45 canadian Primaris Librarian vs $45 canadian Infinity: Yu Jing Guijia seems a lot more straightforward to me. What do I get for the same money when buying an individual miniature?

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I'd rather they bring back metal if it means we can get characters for half the price and I actually start buying them again

Last time GW changed to a different material to save money we got FineCost.

The price will never go down.

 thekingofkings wrote:

Teafortheteapot wrote:
https://www.games-workshop.com/en-AU/The-Harbingers-Collection-2018
For four 32mm models.

the US site has it as $140,

$140 seems a rather poor value when the Kingdom Death : Monster Dragon King expansion has a $150 MSRP.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poots/kingdom-death-monster-15/posts/1748638

Pretending that the GW 32mm figures trade against 4 of the 35mm figures, for $10 more, KD provides a couple extra 35mm figures, an Ogre-class boss (Tyrant) *and* a giant Dragon.

For me, smaller companies like Perry, Victoria, Warlord, Gripping Beast, North Star and others can make plastic miniatures at a fraction of GWs prices. And that's with out sourcing production.

GW is overpriced but smart. I always thought everyone would be willing to pay forgeworld prices for normal GW plastic kits and here we are.

Teafortheteapot wrote:
I thought GW couldn't surprise me with pricing anymore . . .

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-AU/The-Harbingers-Collection-2018

I actually scrolled up to check if I was on the NZ website. That's US$175 BTW. For four 32mm models.

WHO buys this?
Honestly, does ANYONE actually buy this?

 jeff white wrote:

Teafortheteapot wrote:
I thought GW couldn't surprise me with pricing anymore . . .

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-AU/The-Harbingers-Collection-2018

I actually scrolled up to check if I was on the NZ website. That's US$175 BTW. For four 32mm models.

WHO buys this?
Honestly, does ANYONE actually buy this?

I suppose there might be some sort of theoretical AoS player who has an order, chaos, destruction and death armies and wants the new characters for all of them.

Actually when I see people's signatures and they say things like "Dark Angels: 9000 pts, Tyranids 3000 pts" dropping that much on four characters seems totally possible for at least some portion of GW's customer base.

And since it's just bundling together 4 separate items at no savings, it doesn't take whoever enters it into GW's website that long to do. I bet there's a form on their back end for creating new web store items and they just paste in the text, mark what internal product codes will need to be shipped, upload some pictures, mark a time/date for it to appear as a preorder and a time/date for it to become a normal for sale item and hit "submit." How many people who were thinking of buying 2 or 3 of the harbinger figures that end up buying all four instead needs to do so before making such a "click saving" bundle becomes a no brainer?

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
$140 seems a rather poor value when the Kingdom Death : Monster Dragon King expansion has a $150 MSRP.

No, really, are you a plant DD?

Do KG sponsor you or something?

Looking at 4 harbingers vs dragon for a $10 price difference two thoughts come to mind.

One is Kickstarter - while this one appears to have a good track record, $150 is a punt. I might get nothing.

Secondly, I don't actually LIKE the dragon's head. Therefore, to me, the model has zero value. I would perhaps risk $20 on conversion material, but probably not even then (because I already have a large build pile).

Similarly, I dislike two of the harbingers, so, again, the bundle has zero value. I MIGHT buy the two I like, but not at that price.

 Azreal13 wrote:
Its largely pointless trying to be objectively comparative about value, because it's a nebulous and inherently subjective idea, but way back I tried expressing cost as a percentage of a typical size force to play the game at the intended level, as opposed to a starter or other slightly unusual setup.

It's not perfect, but when a £10 Guild Ball player is 15% of a full sized force, or an X Wing fighter sized expansion can represent anything between 11-40+% of a typical list, whereas a £2.50 Tactical Marine represents ~0.5% it starts to eliminate some of the inherent weighting that skirmish games must apply to their price model simply to be viable in the market.

Unless you play Shadow War of course, in which case that Marine is about 10% of your force and therefore a far better deal than the Guild Bowl player.

For that reason I don't think trying to quantify value based on the size of the game really works.

fair point but Shadow-War imho was one of the most underhanded bits of sharp practice GW have pulled in a longtime, a filler between 7th and 8th with enough opening support to imply Necromunda either wasn't going to happen or was a long way off to push sales (i'll admit the terrain was cracking and more than good enough as a stand-alone)

I haven't played it so I won't disagree.

My point is more that any objective attempt to quantify the value of a miniature by its price, size, in-game value or any other criteria is not going to work because the value of the miniature is subjective.

Why would someone pay millions for a painting when you can get a similar sized piece of art for a fraction of the price? Well, because some people may think the former is a masterpiece . . . whilst others think it is a piece of %^&£. But neither side can objectively explain why their view is *right*.

Yeah, I'm here to rant, but 4 champions for £80? Fething disgrace

I stopped buying GW stuff 4-5 years ago, but I foolishly left myself on their mailing list, so imagine my surprise when I get that AOS email with those prices.

I also got an email from Warlord Games, and there pushing their Waffen SS started army which is £90.

4 minis for £80 or 33 minis + tanks and artillery for £90?

GW you make is so easy

Do we really need to go through the differences between fantasy/sci-fi and historical ranges again?

At the end of the day, there are people that will divide the cost of the army by the models gained, and that is what is most important to them, regardless of quality, scale, or anything of that nature.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
33 minis + tanks and artillery for £90?

What a rip off.

306 men plus 4 vehicles: £11.99.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B075J4XFLK/ref=sspa_dk_detail_3?psc=1

 auticus wrote:
At the end of the day, there are people that will divide the cost of the army by the models gained, and that is what is most important to them, regardless of quality, scale, or anything of that nature.

Quite.

You can buy a 3500 Point 30k army for 300€.

30 Marines, 2 Characters, 5 Terminators and a Cybot for just 100€. That's a really good start. Over 1200 Points.

OR you can spend 85€ for a single squad of Seraphin. Or 80€ for a single 100 Point Solar Auxillia Squad.

It really depends on what you want.

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Do we really need to go through the differences between fantasy/sci-fi and historical ranges again?

If the difference you're talking about is the cost to design a fantasy/sci-fi model compared to just copying something from history, it's a largely completely irrelevant difference when GW is involved. The look/style/design/aesthetic of GW's stuff is fairly well set in stone by this point with all of the artwork done over the last 20+ years. By this point, GW might as well be treated the same as historicals in this regard.

 frozenwastes wrote:

GW is overpriced but smart. I always thought everyone would be willing to pay forgeworld prices for normal GW plastic kits and here we are.

People prefer plastic as their medium of choice. If the plastic detail is 'good enough*' compared to the resins, and is far less of a headache to clean/prep/assemble/paint than resin, why shouldn't folks be willing to pay the same price for plastic as for resin? People will pay for convenience, full stop.

stroller wrote:
Looking at 4 harbingers vs dragon for a $10 price difference two thoughts come to mind.

One is Kickstarter - while this one appears to have a good track record, $150 is a punt. I might get nothing.

Secondly, I don't actually LIKE the dragon's head. Therefore, to me, the model has zero value. I would perhaps risk $20 on conversion material, but probably not even then (because I already have a large build pile).

Similarly, I dislike two of the harbingers, so, again, the bundle has zero value. I MIGHT buy the two I like, but not at that price.

Please be aware that the Dragon King expansion was developed with Kickstarter funds, and presold on Kickstarter, I am comparing MSRP, not KS price. The KS price is significantly lower.

 John Prins wrote:

 frozenwastes wrote:

GW is overpriced but smart. I always thought everyone would be willing to pay forgeworld prices for normal GW plastic kits and here we are.

Some People prefer plastic as their medium of choice. If the plastic detail is 'good enough*' compared to the resins, and is far less of a headache to clean/prep/assemble/paint than resin, why shouldn't folks be willing to pay the same price for plastic as for resin? People will pay for convenience, full stop.

I always found a 2 to 3 piece resin model way quicker to clean and glue together than an equivalent plastic model made of maybe 10 pieces which still needs removing from a sprue, mold lines removing then gluing together.
And spray undercoating and painting is identical for resin and plastic.

I don't really get your point, unless you're talking about GW/FW resin which is in all fairness pretty lousy at times.

Hi John: You said:

$140 seems a rather poor value when the Kingdom Death : Monster Dragon King expansion has a $150 MSRP.

Then you linked to a kickstarter web page. I used the price you quoted. Assuming that that WAS the kickstarter price doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

The subjective like/not like is only marginally affected by price - for me at least.

 Gimgamgoo wrote:


I always found a 2 to 3 piece resin model way quicker to clean and glue together than an equivalent plastic model made of maybe 10 pieces which still needs removing from a sprue, mold lines removing then gluing together.
And spray undercoating and painting is identical for resin and plastic.

I don't really get your point, unless you're talking about GW/FW resin which is in all fairness pretty lousy at times.

I was. And more to the point, I've yet to see anyone who refuses to work with plastic, while tons refuse to work with metal/resin - though again, that's partly a GW quality issue, but plenty of folks refuse to buy ANY metals regardless of source.

stroller wrote:
Hi John: You said:

$140 seems a rather poor value when the Kingdom Death : Monster Dragon King expansion has a $150 MSRP.

Then you linked to a kickstarter web page. I used the price you quoted. Assuming that that WAS the kickstarter price doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

The subjective like/not like is only marginally affected by price - for me at least.

I linked to the KS page to show the $150 MSRP and content (HUGE Dragon, ogre-sized Tyrant, 6x 35mm Survivors).

If you had scrolled down, you would have seen that the KS price was $75, not $150.

The $150 MSRP is apples-to-apples with the GW $140 MSRP.

 John Prins wrote:

 Gimgamgoo wrote:


I always found a 2 to 3 piece resin model way quicker to clean and glue together than an equivalent plastic model made of maybe 10 pieces which still needs removing from a sprue, mold lines removing then gluing together.
And spray undercoating and painting is identical for resin and plastic.

I don't really get your point, unless you're talking about GW/FW resin which is in all fairness pretty lousy at times.

I was. And more to the point, I've yet to see anyone who refuses to work with plastic, while tons refuse to work with metal/resin - though again, that's partly a GW quality issue, but plenty of folks refuse to buy ANY metals regardless of source.

I’m with you on the metal. I don’t enjoy working or playing with metal models, and I know that’s a thing beyond just GW customers. I avoid it at all costs.

Resin though is widely used to great effect across the industry. Aside from GW, I’ve never heard anyone voice a complaint about resin. It holds great detail, is easy to clean, weighs about the same as plastic, allows for larger pieces to be cast than is typical for a plastic spruce, and would allow for far cheaper limited castings like these characters. Seems like a win-win, aside from the fact that GW can’t figure out how to produce high quality resin casts reliably. Some of the best models I’ve seen have been from a company called anvil industries out of the UK. I prefer them to GW plastic even.