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Good evening.

So with the release of the new edition and primaris marines I've seen alot of people unboxing and painting these miniatures before they are officialy released, some seem to be popular people amongs the community and other not so much, not that I have anything against that!

So how come some people get these before the release?

Promotional purposes.

GW wants podcasters and youtubers and bloggers to show off and talk about their products. So they send them copies beforehand to help build interest before they go on sale.

Because they are normally people who run the mayor bogs/fan sites and gw will send out review copies to them or they run retail shops and are opening the review copies . The blogger thing is new but gw have a long history of sending out pre release stuff to shops .

Pretty much a reinvention of the old 'Black Box Thursdays' in store, a practice which ended in, oooooh....2010, possibly 2009?

Essentially each store received samples of that week/months releases to show off, and in theory (but rarely in practice due to time constraints, especially when staff levels were cut) build and paint to put in the window.

Sending samples out to InterNerds widens that net somewhat

Also a few people know 'places' which get product a week earlier, basically at preorder day. These could be continental GW hubs or other depots. Several years ago some people had product a month or two in advance directly from GW because they were a good mate of someone there and this may still be the case but they stopped posting about it online.

But today, as mentioned already, this is mostly because of preview copies

Yeah I can remember when fantasy 5th edition came out our store got a empty box to display and a hand full of bretonians and lizard men to paint up .this was a month before release and before the wd was out .

Part of GW's new era, a few years back they wouldn't even tell retailers what was coming.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Part of GW's new era, a few years back they wouldn't even tell retailers what was coming.

I miss the gymnastics that the manager would go through when I was literally telling him exactly what was coming and he couldn't confirm it, it reached the point where when we were the only one in the shop he openly talked about it as what was the point in denying it. Cool guy, he also openly admitted that some of the minis were using none GW paints at the studio.

foenixphate wrote:
he also openly admitted that some of the minis were using none GW paints at the studio.

They also don't use gw glue to assemble them, or gw brushes to paint them.