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Cause this fellow seems to be doing that

- link removed -

well 40ks popularity lives from piracy

there would be a lot of people not playing the game if the had to buy the books and models for full price

yet selling direct scans is another thing as giving them away for free and it is not ok to make money with the work from others
and browsing the site, there are a lot who sell copies

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Cause this fellow seems to be doing that

Not a fan, honestly.

I have no problem with someone creating their own "clones" of official minis from scratch, but actually scanning to sell feels... off.

That and I expect then to be much less crisp than actual 3d files.

against it. As Albertorius said: creating something similar from scratch is OK in my book (there might be exceptions), but outright scanning not. Wouldn't be OK for any other companies/artists work.

I'm less against the principal if it's an out of production model.

I'm against it.


Because today its GW and GW are the "big bad" in the market who can "take it". Tomorrow its Infinity, Privateer Press and Burrows and Badgers being scanned and sold like that.


Basically if you feed that kind of attitude within the market it will spread and it will eventually cause damage.




Personally I also think its lazy and useless and is only feeding a "race to the bottom" in terms of pricing for a luxury product that doesn't need to be produced. Encouraging that race means that 1 guy with a scanner can make a profit, but that a firm which creates art, lore, stories, rules, models and more; which promotes the hobby and pushes it forward - all dies because they can't compete with copy-cat products that basically have such an insanely low overhead and none of the original production costs.






In the end we gamers should be just as concerned with IP theft as the firms themselves.
Heck I personally try to avoid any outright copies, I'd rather we reward 3D artists who are creating new ideas and fresh takes, even if they are designed along a similar thematic line. I'd rather see original works rewarded and pushed up than just seeing it as a means to get "cheaper models".

Heck 3D designers already have an uphill struggle with a bunch of people who steal STLs and then put them up for sale at insane prices and market heavily - plus many are hard to shut down because they host in China and other nations that are hard to issue takedown orders too.

Yes, fully support new creations that may complement an existing line and not downright scanned copies of existing models. Yes, lots out there and sometimes hard to know it is something that has been copied, as I am not always aware of every model in every line, so when I see something cool, I might grab it, not knowing it was a blatant rip-off.

As others have stated, I am for people designing similar or working to make something unique, but just buying a scanner to make money is bad.

I'm good with it. Plenty of Chinese companies copy Gucci but people still buy the real thing because they want an actual Gucci wallet and not just a chinese wallet that has little Gs on it. Maybe it will make GW rethink their pricing structure and stop raising prices at 2-3x the rate of inflation every other year.

Toofast wrote:
Maybe it will make GW rethink their pricing structure and stop raising prices at 2-3x the rate of inflation every other year.

Why would they? Even with the price hikes they are still selling out of everything that people want to buy. Stores can't even get product from them other than the latest releases. They are only incentivized to keep hiking prices further as the demand is outweighing their ability to supply.

I have no problem with OOP models. If GW want's to make money on OOP models, they can do what Wargames Foundry does and start making the old models once again.

Against.

Feel free to scan so you can have a template or a scale sample or whatever to help make your own creation though. But just an "asset flip" using a scanner is in poor taste, and I wouldn't buy from any seller who does it.

3D prints and re-casts... Not on my table.

 oni wrote:
3D prints and re-casts... Not on my table.

How would you know? Once they're painted, a good recast is indistinguishable from the real thing.

From where you　buy.

tneva82 wrote:
From where you　buy.

What if your playing at a shop? Never played the opponent before and they are fielding a mix of 3d prints and Forgeworld models that you don't know where they purchased them from? Do you ask for a receipt?

Not trying to be rude, but I went to play AOS up at the local shop a while back, and one player was using large models to count as his Sons of Behemat(probably spelled wrong). His army was on the right sized bases and scaled correctly to another players SOB army, it wasn't painted, but then again half the tables were not painted or horribly painted and the new armybook just came out. The player was nice to play with and talk too, and he was testing out the army before spending hundreds of dollars on 5 models to build his army.

Toofast wrote:
I'm good with it. Plenty of Chinese companies copy Gucci but people still buy the real thing because they want an actual Gucci wallet and not just a chinese wallet that has little Gs on it. Maybe it will make GW rethink their pricing structure and stop raising prices at 2-3x the rate of inflation every other year.

This.

Was looking forward to buying some Russian recasts earlier this year but...

 Hairesy wrote:

Toofast wrote:
I'm good with it. Plenty of Chinese companies copy Gucci but people still buy the real thing because they want an actual Gucci wallet and not just a chinese wallet that has little Gs on it. Maybe it will make GW rethink their pricing structure and stop raising prices at 2-3x the rate of inflation every other year.

This.

Was looking forward to buying some Russian recasts earlier this year but...

I bought a squad of venatari as a test. They were better than the FW models in terms of casting quality and mold slips. Before I could order anything else from the guy, Russia did a Russia and now I'm back to FW prices

Toofast wrote:

 oni wrote:
3D prints and re-casts... Not on my table.

How would you know? Once they're painted, a good recast is indistinguishable from the real thing.

For a pickup game with someone I just met or someone I don't know that well; I likely wouldn't unless they told me. Though, I do tend to ask when I see a FW model.

 oni wrote:

Toofast wrote:

 oni wrote:
3D prints and re-casts... Not on my table.

How would you know? Once they're painted, a good recast is indistinguishable from the real thing.

For a pickup game with someone I just met or someone I don't know that well; I likely wouldn't unless they told me. Though, I do tend to ask when I see a FW model.

When people I ask, I ask them to pick out which units in my army are 3D printed, which ones are from the forge worlds of Russia, and which ones are legit. When they can't do that, I ask why it matters. Unless it's a sanctioned GW event and then I just say "yup all GW/FW here" and I'm good. When it comes to game time, these are game pieces and as long as they look the part, WYSIWYG and painted then it doesn't really matter if they were made by GW, a Russkie huffing resin fumes, or a 3d printer.

Toofast wrote:

 oni wrote:

Toofast wrote:

 oni wrote:
3D prints and re-casts... Not on my table.

How would you know? Once they're painted, a good recast is indistinguishable from the real thing.

For a pickup game with someone I just met or someone I don't know that well; I likely wouldn't unless they told me. Though, I do tend to ask when I see a FW model.

When people I ask, I ask them to pick out which units in my army are 3D printed, which ones are from the forge worlds of Russia, and which ones are legit. When they can't do that, I ask why it matters. Unless it's a sanctioned GW event and then I just say "yup all GW/FW here" and I'm good. When it comes to game time, these are game pieces and as long as they look the part, WYSIWYG and painted then it doesn't really matter if they were made by GW, a Russkie huffing resin fumes, or a 3d printer.

Yes, well... We obviously have very different opinions on the matter and likely conflicting personalities. At least this little pre-game Q&A would alleviate us from not getting along for 2 hours.

Most of my games are tournaments so if someone doesn't want to play me, fine by me. I'll grab some Cuban food next door, have a smoke and enjoy the free win.

Toofast wrote:
Most of my games are tournaments so if someone doesn't want to play me, fine by me. I'll grab some Cuban food next door, have a smoke and enjoy the free win.

Just curious if this does come up often at tournaments? While recasts may be difficult to spot on the table most of the stand in printed stuff I would think would be pretty easy to see and raise a stink about

Direct scans is a hard no from me.

Alternate sculpts, even if inspired by GW models, are fine. But outright scans is nope.

On one hand, sure, giving the finger to GW always feels good. On the other hand, like someone else already said, today it's GW, tomorrow it's Warlord/Mantic, then Reaper, then who else? So, no, I'm not really in favor of a direct scan of a model.

That said, now that I own a 3d resin printer, I would like it if more companies would be willing to sell the STLs of their models. It feels like we're back in the early days of the internet and media distribution all over again. The fear that the companies had that, once they put something online, they'll sell just one digital copy and everyone will share and pirate that one copy all over the place. But we've proven, countless times, that it doesn't work that way. Sure, there will always be some piracy, but that happens even now with physical products. But once you make things easier to buy at a good price point, people will buy it. Steam, iTunes, Amazon, they're all proof of that.

It is pretty cute how we've cultivated a sense of moral outrage at playing against someone using recasts or prints. Like really, if you work at a game store sure fine. Protect your inventory, but then again... why aren't you investing in a printer that people can rent?

From a archival stand point I 100% feel like everything should be scanned. A digital archive could be the difference between something being able to be restored and something getting binned.

Should people go out and scan then print and entire army? No I think you should support the games you enjoy playing. I'm also not your dad and can't stop you.

 Hairesy wrote:
It is pretty cute how we've cultivated a sense of moral outrage at playing against someone using recasts or prints.

It's really cute how we've cultivated a culture where stealing is like totally okay man.

There is also the fact that (at least the ones from the OP example)... well, those scans are crap, honestly.

If you go check the actual previews of the pieces, they're basically blobs with the general shape of the part instead of what I am used to get when I open a patreon's monthly minis, for example.

Why would I prefer to get that instead of someone's own 3d sculpt based on the same GW mini?

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Hairesy wrote:
It is pretty cute how we've cultivated a sense of moral outrage at playing against someone using recasts or prints.

stealing is like totally okay man.

Only quoting part of someone's opinion to misrepresent what they said, so hot right now.