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insaniak wrote: I mean, Spotify exists, despite the ease with which music can be shared.
And the artists on streaming services all complain about how little they are paid unless they are mega-stars. While I get your point, I think that's the concern a lot of businesses have about similar shifts in their own industry.
There's also the cost of those streaming services. Spotify has a massive library for a low cost per user, so it's economical for their subscribers. Netflix is struggling to keep its library with new streaming services popping up everywhere, and so a lot of people are returning to pirating shows and films.
Spotify has something simply going the Napster route doesn’t. An algorithm and extensive catalogue. It’s basically like a Radio station inclined to play your favourites and suggest future new favourites, with the added bonus of no moron talking over the records!
Again coming from a point of ignorance and likely failure of imagination, how would physical STL stuff compare and replicate that?
Fed up of Scalpers? But still want your Exclusives? Why not join us?
Kaptajn Congoboy wrote: I sure hope they keep 3d printing as a manufacturing method and just keep improving their technique. It has its limitations, but compared to resin or metal casting and injection moulding it has several advantages, chief one being that you don't have the issue of undercuts limiting sculpting.
Not like the sculpts shown would benefit from extreme undercuts in any meaningful way.
The vast majority of tabletop miniature designs fit just fine within the constraints of the resin medium, and GW has been showing lately how clever they can be with plastic designs.
I respectfully disagree. I think at it's heart Warmachine is a game about exploiting synergy and resource allocation/risk management that got co-opted by movement widget fetishists. It made for tedious and boring gameplay that drove the casuals (myself included) away in droves and I'm glad for it to be gone.
This is the best analysis in the entire thread. The widget fetishists seem to have found Marvel Crisis Protocol so maybe Warmachine can be left alone this time around 😺
I really hope this works out for PP.
You sir are a single point of light in the infinite, all encompassing bleakness that is this thread! Privateer Press is by no means perfect (and really no wargaming company is) but the level of hate they receive around here is fanatical. Play the games you like and leave the rest alone.
Games Workshop can get away with those prices because of how popular it is and the quality of their sculpts...this game is trying to reboot itself out of the gutter. Not only is that 3x the cost of the previous starter boxes it's also a large gamble for small business retailers trying stock all factions at launch.
Note to mention that GW does offer alternative options for those on lower budgets to get into the game.
GW hit the issues of big armies and big upfront costs to get started and it was one (not the only) contributing factors to Old World falling apart. The lack of ability for a cheap entry point with a lower model count, suitable for someone just getting started. <SNIP>
GW also offer more ways to connect with the hobby than the game. Painting, or just collecting and building are seen as valid, as is reading the fiction without buying any models. PP has, for good and ill, always been more game-centric in its communication – and the online community even more so.
Right. I feel like I have to explain myself and where I'm coming from. I've played a grand total of ... maybe three Warmahordes games over the years. But I've bought a bunch of models that I like, and could probably paint up a couple of small forces to play with. I've subscribed to Minicrate for years. I like models. My mates and the community I've got here in Stockholm like models.
Models are key for us, is what I'm saying.
I'd love to see Privateer embrace the hobby aspect – not just painting, but encouraging kitbashes and proxies more. Every time I've thought about buying into the game over the years, I've stumbled when I realized that a profile I need has a single model that I'd have to use multiples of, or a model I like can't be used in that particular theme. I just want to make cool toys and play with them.
This would make the game more approachable for me and my friends. I realize this is just wishlisting and wouldn't necessarily be appealing to all people
Kaptajn Congoboy wrote: I sure hope they keep 3d printing as a manufacturing method and just keep improving their technique. It has its limitations, but compared to resin or metal casting and injection moulding it has several advantages, chief one being that you don't have the issue of undercuts limiting sculpting.
Not like the sculpts shown would benefit from extreme undercuts in any meaningful way.
The vast majority of tabletop miniature designs fit just fine within the constraints of the resin medium, and GW has been showing lately how clever they can be with plastic designs.
None shown, no. But using it well is something a studio and sculptor can develop further. Although it might be some of the coming ones we have not seen in pieces are in fewer pieces than they might have been otherwise. It is all about using the medium well (as with all others).
GW has good kits, but I have also seen people using literally whole days sniffing plastic cement solvent and cursing when they do it wrong when putting together large, complex multipart kits with way too many pieces. That is one of the contraints of their process. And I have some GW polystyrenes released recently that just don't line up as simple two-parters and require a lot of gap filling and line filing. Also a possible contraint.
It is not as much what they do for the first go as what I think is POSSIBLE for them to do in the future as they gain experience on the process.
Consider my RPG gubbins, bought from DriveThruRPG.
I bought the big special bundle for Vampire 25th Anniversary. Gorgeous big printed book (ease of reference, personal preference) and a PDF of the same. Yes that PDF has been shared with my Players.
I don’t feel bad or naughty doing that, as VTM is, at the moment, pretty much a dead property not sold to the mass market. Same with Demon The Fallen (which I’m about to buy). I’ll have my copy for my shelf, and my players will, naturally, have access to the PDF copies.
Now, make those necessary for playing an active property? Why wouldn’t people freely share those files? Or even agree “I’ll buy STL 1-10, you buy 11-20 and Dave (there is always a Dave) will buy 21-30, and we’ll just print for each other.
3D printing is promising as a technology, but I just can’t really see it being mass market, at least not in a way that’s tasteful and worth the investment for a company, be it PP or GW et al.
Just for the record Vampire The Masquerade is not a dead property as it got a recent edition and is available to buy online/FLGS etc.
Those models look pretty rough. I've bought 3D prints from sketchy guys in Eastern Europe that looked better. Between that and the pricing structure, I don't think I'll be getting back into WMH. Best of luck to them as I really liked the game when I played in Mk2
The only thing they needed to do was to clean up the rules and give the game some love.
Instead, they killed it. Sorry, Hard Pass.
On a brighter note- I've got a few years of Jacks and other figures for sale...
At Games Workshop, we believe that how you behave does matter. We believe this so strongly that we have written it down in the Games Workshop Book. There is a section in the book where we talk about the values we expect all staff to demonstrate in their working lives. These values are Lawyers, Guns and Money.
Yeah, those photos don't show a level of quality of product that I would be willing to pay their asking price for. Even if I wasn't into 3d printing myself and knew, first hand, that you can absolutely get better results, I still would find these samples inferior to even Bones Black and Siocast (both of which I don't really like all that much, though they're better than PVC and Bones White).
On distributing STLs, yeah, that's a hard one. There is no effective DRM solutions for them, so there's always the possibility they will be shared. As others have mentioned, part of the key there is making them affordable enough that people won't mind paying for them (this is where all the STL Patreons do a great job; their monthly fees are easily affordable, so they get sufficient backers; look at Artisan Guild for example, who have over 6500 patrons at ~10 bucks a month). Of course, those companies are focusing only on digital distribution, and quite probably have a much lower recurring cost of running their own businesses (no warehouse/offices like PP has, probably a lot fewer employees, etc.). I'm not sure how tenable doing both STL and physical product is, though I suspect there is still a market for that since not everyone is going to have/want a 3d printer themselves and want to go to the LGS to pick up their toys. That physical distribution has a gianormous cost in comparison to digital only, though, so... yeah.
I'll wait for some of the good Khador designs to show up, see if they can iron out the issues.
Hell, a few rough surfaces probably wouldn't deter me from buying some of my favourites, assuming they're coming back. Still cheaper in terms of man hours than sculpting and printing them myself.
...wow. There's not only duplicated poses in the same unit, the different units also share the same poses. It seems they have used the same armatures for all sculpts, just changing around gubbins.
Not just that, the standard bearers are the EXACT same, even when their weapons don't match the rest of the units. The rest of the units are just arm swaps on the exact same bodies. I'm surprised they werent magnetized as well.
This is astonishingly lazy when you have patreons pumping out better sculpts every month.
...wow. There's not only duplicated poses in the same unit, the different units also share the same poses. It seems they have used the same armatures for all sculpts, just changing around gubbins.
Not just that, the standard bearers are the EXACT same, even when their weapons don't match the rest of the units. The rest of the units are just arm swaps on the exact same bodies. I'm surprised they werent magnetized as well.
This is astonishingly lazy when you have patreons pumping out better sculpts every month.
At the very least, not making them modular for arm swapping is really lazy. And yeah, just take a look at any successful Patreon, and you get more variety in any one of their single month releases. Now, of course, those folks are doing pretty much nothing but sculpting and have a lower overhead cost I'm sure, but come on... If PP can't afford to pay the extra couple hours of a sculptor's time to do some other reposing, then they're in worse financial straits than I suspected and have very little hope of turning it around with this, IMO.
Edit: Looking at those photos, though, does answer the question of what type of printer they're using, anyway. Those kind of artifacts are absolutely DLP.
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insaniak wrote: Yeah, I don't think the market will go fully 3d print until there is some sort of DRM for STLs... Or whatever format comes along to replace them.
You can't really DRM an STL. Or rather, you can, and maybe you could lock down your prints to only work on your machine that only supports files from a proprietary slicer etc, but it's highly unlikely you can develop those on your own, and if your software and hardware are based on anything resembling the current open-sourced ecosystem, someone's going to be able to reverse-engineer it.
Interestingly enough there was DRM on sliced files for high resolution resin printers a few years ago as Chitubox (well the company that owns them) was the only manufacturer for the internal logic boards for all resin printers and wanted to force people to use the paid version of Chitu to create these DRM files that the printer's board would then be willing to read.
It's why Lychee is popular now as they sprung up as a competitor software wise and I believe hardware too. I know my Phrozen Mighty 8k does not use Chitu hardware.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/08/02 16:43:39
Monkeysloth wrote: Interestingly enough there was DRM on sliced files for high resolution resin printers a few years ago as Chitubox (well the company that owns them) was the only manufacturer for the internal logic boards for all resin printers and wanted to force people to use the paid version of Chitu to create these DRM files that the printer's board would then be willing to read.
It's why Lychee is popular now as they sprung up as a competitor software wise and I believe hardware too. I know my Phrozen Mighty 8k does not use Chitu hardware.
It wasn't really DRM, though. It was a file format change that wasn't backwards compatible and supposedly required for newer Chitu-based boards. Eventually, that got sorted out, especially after a lot of public outcry.
Short of only selling pre-sliced files for a specific printer, there's not really much you can do to embed any DRM (and even that isn't gonna really work, for obvious reasons) into STL files. They're an open format on purpose.
Monkeysloth wrote: Interestingly enough there was DRM on sliced files for high resolution resin printers a few years ago as Chitubox (well the company that owns them) was the only manufacturer for the internal logic boards for all resin printers and wanted to force people to use the paid version of Chitu to create these DRM files that the printer's board would then be willing to read.
It's why Lychee is popular now as they sprung up as a competitor software wise and I believe hardware too. I know my Phrozen Mighty 8k does not use Chitu hardware.
It wasn't really DRM, though. It was a file format change that wasn't backwards compatible and supposedly required for newer Chitu-based boards. Eventually, that got sorted out, especially after a lot of public outcry.
Short of only selling pre-sliced files for a specific printer, there's not really much you can do to embed any DRM (and even that isn't gonna really work, for obvious reasons) into STL files. They're an open format on purpose.
Pre-sliced files, at least as they are done right now, are a non starter. They'd need to be able to take into account the specific resin and machine settings for them to be something people would buy.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/08/02 17:00:12
Pre-sliced files, at least as they are done right now, are a non starter. They'd need to be able to take into account the specific resin and machine settings for them to be something people would buy.
Yup. Definitely a no-go for several reasons. Short of having a proprietary printer which requires a proprietary resin which requires a proprietary file format, there's not much way of DRMing 3d printer files. And given all those proprietary requirements, I think that is pretty much a DOA proposition.
Albertorius wrote: That wouldn't be an issue in and of itself, I'm continually surprised by the quality our little desktop machines can churn out.
But they clearly need to do better.
Yeah, you can get surprisingly good prints out of small consumer level printers if you take the time to learn how to use them and refine your settings. This almost feels like they just grabbed a cheap printer and threw someone who's never spent much time with a printer and said, "Make it happen." As all of us in the 3d printing hobby know, there is some ramp up period and trial and error. That's fine, but pushing out stuff that is essentially your test prints, before you've done your optimizations (which, honestly, if you know you're always gonna be using X printer and Y resin, you can tune really well with a few iterations) as your sample pieces to "influencers" and as your GenCon preview is just asking for some egg on your face.
Heck, look at Greg's (3d Printing Pro) recent review of the Sonic Mighty 8k. That machine put out some amazing prints, and would be an ideal small production machine at under 1k USD and a reasonably large build plate to be able to print more at once, thus giving a time savings. But these samples look like they were done on a printer 2 generations old (pre-Mono screens maybe, definitely look like 2k resolutions). Not something that I think people would be willing to pay their asking price for.
I'm fine with 3D printed minis...as long as the quality is there. It clearly isn't with PP right now and they're gonna have a hard time selling this quality of model for $200 per starter set.
Khador preview box releasing early and I think they came off the best from the updated designs. Chonky legged Khador jacks look really good.
They've also added some cards to the beta
The 3 boxes should be up for sale this week
All orders over $100 will ship for free to U.S., Canada, UK, EU and Australia.
Also
SATISFACTION GUARANTEED Mass production using 3D printing technology is a new process for us, and as such, despite our best efforts we’re going to occasionally make mistakes. Even after 20 years of producing the good ol’ fashioned way, we still manage to make mistakes from time to time because we’re human beings making this stuff. But we always stand by our products and will make good on your purchase, so we hope you’ll be patient with us as we enter this exciting new era of production for Privateer Press.
If you receive a model part that appears to be misprinted or breaks too easily, we are always happy to replace that part for you. Just contact us through our customer support portal and we will get your replacement right out to you.
Most importantly, we want you to be happy with your purchase. If for any reason you are not completely satisfied with your preview battlegroup purchase, return the complete contents of the product to us in the original packaging with a copy of the receipt within 30 days of purchase, and we will provide you a refund for your purchase.
I've had really good customer service from PP in the past with defects so hopefully, if there are issues, they're able to keep that up.
Another interesting tidbit from the blog post today
Because UV light can affect the models, it is ill-advised to expose your unpainted model parts to direct sunlight for prolonged periods of time. But this is nothing new, as we’ve seen many tragic instances of melted resin models left to bake under the sun or in a hot car. We’ve also seen way too many tragic instances of armies being stolen out of cars, so let’s just all agree not to leave our armies in cars anymore, alright? Temperature is not as much a concern as continuous exposure to sunlight, however extremes can still be harmful. This should just be more incentive to get your models painted. So, paint your models!!!
I've never really thought about that even though I've had resin printers for around 5 years now. Plus I only game at home so I never have stuff out in the sun.
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2022/08/02 20:44:08
All orders over $100 will ship for free to U.S., Canada, UK, EU and Australia.
That's good to hear. I have no problem with the 3d printing as is. It's the way the industry is going and kudos to PP for being the first big player to take the step. I hope it works out for them. And the quality fo the prints shown is about what I expect from such prints. The cost, though, is steep considering what you're getting. The free shipping in Aus especially where the Australia Tax is a real thing, will help.
As for the designs, I like them. Not like WM of old, with the steampunk/deisal punk esthetic, but that's been steadily evolving since the game came out, so it's easy to file away under the world just getting better at their warmachines (pun intended).
The galaxy is littered with the single-planet graveyards of civilisations which made the economically sensible decision not to explore space.
Cost is pretty decent. 2 jacks with all their weapons and a caster definitely cost more than that now and the weapon swapping give these so much more play than a traditional battlebox. Mostly though, I'm happy to pick up the Khador stuff and decide what I think of the quality before buying in at the $200 starter. These being a different caster makes it a pretty great buy all around.
It will warp in extreme heat especially that of the western US. 2 part resin that is. Not sure about printed stuff.
UV resin doesn't really warp in high heat, at least not to the same extent that mold resin does. The bigger risk is leaving it exposed to UV light for long enough periods of time that it becomes brittle. A coat of paint or primer is enough to stop that, however.
Quite enjoying list building with these new jacks. Definitely more fun to design around than the Warcaster versions. The tradeoffs are just inherently more interesting even if some of the combos are obviously bad.
Automatically Appended Next Post: The 50 point army boxes are kind of exciting designs too now that I've reverse engineered the points a little. There's actually a fair amount of list building available just by dropping a unit to give yourself the points for a more premium jack. Definitely a lot more flexible to play with than I expected.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/08/02 22:24:19
It will warp in extreme heat especially that of the western US. 2 part resin that is. Not sure about printed stuff.
UV resin doesn't really warp in high heat, at least not to the same extent that mold resin does. The bigger risk is leaving it exposed to UV light for long enough periods of time that it becomes brittle. A coat of paint or primer is enough to stop that, however.
It doesn't actually become more brittle. UV resin reacts with sunlight until it reaches its final fully cured state. At that point it basically stops reacting. To actually do damage after that point you've got to leave it in sunlight for insane lengths of time - ergo lengths of time where most materials would discolour or be affected.
What does happen though is that some people try to under-cure a little bit so that the resin remains part-cured and a little more flexible than brittle. It's generally not advised because UV resin is generally only considered safe when fully cured. Also some of the brittle issues are, from what I've seen:
1) A result of people from PVC backgrounds (eg DnD models) who are simply not used to less durable models that you can't just chuck in a box at the end of the game session. They'd hit the same issues with regular cast resins too
2) A result of designers not being as experienced with making game models. So things like swords, arrow shafts and such are super thin, whereas someone casting would have made them thicker by design to be more durable.
3) The use of very cheap UV resins which have generally weaker properties.
