The price of a miniature

[FramFramson]

These all seem fantastically low to me! I prefer higher-quality figures and I tend to be perfectly comfortable with individual figures which are $10-$15 USD, though I expect better than that if I'm buying a boxed set or multi-figure pack.

[nic-e]

I wonder, do you apply these rules to other retail purchases you make, or just wargames figures?

Unless you're buying your cornflakes in plain plastic bags, or your washing powder lose from a tub then you're presumably happy to pay for coloured packaging on other items that you only discard.

It's fairly common practice for retailers to offer say tins of beans or cans of coke as multiples, or do BOGOF, or 3 for 2 offers - I think multiples in blisters are the same thing, aren't they?

The only high street retailer I can think of that doesn't have a "helpful staff" model is Argos so again, unless you only shop there I'd suggest you're happy to put up with (and pay for) these things in other situations.

I'm genuinely curious why some people are happy to denigrate practices in the wargaming world that are commonplace in all other aspects of our retail dominated culture.

These things are just forms of marketing. Ways of persuading you to buy product A at the expense of product B - or as well as. We all know the game and Wargames manufacturers have to play it as much as any other retailer or they go out of business.

I think aswell to say you don't want to pay for packaging artwork or the added fluff/story is to belittle the practice of the artist who makes the figure you like, since you're essentially saying they should treat what they do purely as an economic exercise and not, as is often the case, a labour of love following lots of development and consideration, which often involves the creation of other artworks and stories for the characters being made to inhabit.
Yes, you're buying a miniature from them, but in asking them to supply that to you you have to take into account that for them the business of making these miniatures is often more than just a clock in clock out piece of work.

[Conquistador]

Actually, given all that is involved, plus inflation from the "distant past" if I was starting a fresh I simply would have to be more judicious which, if any, 25+mm Armies/war bands I built or start in a smaller size.  I begrudge the artists (sculptors, packaging artists, etc.,) nothing for they are making a living expressing themselves to please our interests.  I am still not eager to spend $10 for a figure (though in rare occasions recently I have) because of my upbringing but if they can sell them at that price then more power to them.

Much as I love my old and and my new Sandra Garrity figures I am not a painter of the quality to buy a figure of hers in the double digits some of her figures (or anyone else's for that matter) sell for on Reaper.  If I had only the option to build an army of double digit cost figures I simply would not be in war gaming.  Cheap?  No, just realistic about my skills and my limits - just as I won't buy a Lexus, Mercedes, or Corvette when a Toyota or Honda is available either. 

Let others spend that level of money on their addiction... hobby... which I applaud but I simply cannot bring myself to do that for war games.  Now a custom figure for a major anniversary gift is different.

[Kommando_J]

Some interesting points, i;d say though having seen plenty of commercial hobby product start ups fail that the project being a labour of love means nothing, more SHOULD see it as an economic exercise as ultimately that is what it is.

Don't get me wrong I love artwork/fluff/extras and will gladly pay for them in the form of artwork/books/merchandise....but packaging is something where ultimately I d prefer something secure yet simple.

I take the same approach to other products, function over form, I don't care about the cereal box, I care about the cereal(i'd take it out and out it in a container anyway) packaging for me usually is just a nuisance that gets thrown away, I don't like it being a justification to hike up prices though, look at warlord, obscene amounts of packing but they're postage is standard and free over a certain amount.

I don't see this as belittling the artist, when it comes to historical especially I prefer to do my own 'research' when it comes to fluff and background and when it comes to fantasy prefer a DIY approach.

When it comes down to it, it's a miniature company, that's what the customers are there for.

[Lovejoy]

Some interesting points, i;d say though having seen plenty of commercial hobby product start ups fail that the project being a labour of love means nothing, more SHOULD see it as an economic exercise as ultimately that is what it is.

The problem with treating it  as an economic exercise is threads like this. So many people complain about paying reasonable prices, that it often becomes impossible to sell stuff. So you cut prices, lose money, and another minis line disappears from the market.

A few years back I released some scifi troopers that were £3 each singly, and down to £2 in full platoon packs, which I thought was cheap, given that they were big and chunky and costing me £1.57 from the caster... but at the same time, another manufacturer launched a similar range for 2 dollars a figure, which was about £1.20 at the time. So I just got lots of questions about why I was trying to gouge the customer.

Now, I knew the other manufacturer and asked; turns out his new minis were a range he personally wanted, so he was funding them through his (highly paid) day job. He wasn't making a penny on them, didn't care about profit, he was just getting the toys he wanted while offsetting losses against tax. And having spoken to others, he's not alone, and that makes it very difficult for full-timers to compete...

[Legionnaire]

Only chucking in my 2p worth.

Personally I game skirmish games exclusively, 98% in 28mm with a very small 20mm collection. Hence I don't need a ton of models but several 'periods' for my interests. I buy mostly from retailers I've dealt with in the past and have proven themselves being a reliable source (EM4, Hasslefree, Copplestone, Artizan etc). For a 28mm metal model I find £4-5 a perfectly reasonable pricing, a bit more if it happens to be a large model or something I really fancy. I enjoy the gaming aspect more than the painting so give the models only a quick paintjob to get them on the table, although I've painted ALL my models... so although I appreciate a nice model, I don't go looking for those amazingly well sculpted high end minis that my painting will never do justice. I have a (for the moment) a complete Fantasy Flight Games Imperial Assault collection, where a single plastic blister cost about £6-8, but I have no objection to that. There's a license fee to use the Star Wars name, there are added cards for the two game variants and I think the sculpts are really good, so although I've spent a lot of money on that product, I have also got a lot of game for that.

Recently I've discovered Reaper Bones and I find them excellent for my use, they are nicely made, paint up quickly and have a low pricing, what's NOT to like??

[The Mystic Spiral]

Now, I knew the other manufacturer and asked; turns out his new minis were a range he personally wanted, so he was funding them through his (highly paid) day job. He wasn't making a penny on them, didn't care about profit, he was just getting the toys he wanted while offsetting losses against tax. And having spoken to others, he's not alone, and that makes it very difficult for full-timers to compete...

He's not alone. Happens all the time in painting too. Look at any of the "painting services" that charge £1.50 per 28mm. Artificially lowers the market price.

As an aside to Lovejoy, my other half bought some of his woodland critters(squirrel & snake) - at salute - we think £5-6 would be a fairer price for what you get.

J

[Lovejoy]

As an aside to Lovejoy, my other half bought some of his woodland critters(squirrel & snake) - at salute - we think £5-6 would be a fairer price for what you get.

J

Thank you! 

[jon_1066]

Most of what I do is in the region of 50-70 figures per side so I wouldn't spend more than £1.50 on a basic trooper.  Plastic I wouldn't spend more than £1 per figure and preferably 50p.  This would be in line with inflation on Citadel prices from 1987.  Characters I may go more but generally character models are in a style I dislike - overblown muscles and inflated axes.  I also have a lead mountain that will last me an age so I don't tend to get very much and can afford to wait on ebay.

Has the hobby become more niche than in 1987?  Are these release runs smaller?  I can understand a small manufacturer being more expensive but making £1 on something that costs you £1.10 to produce is a profit margin many companies would dream about (you are up at Apple iPhone levels there)

[Dags]

Costs involved in making a mini....

Sculpt - either a physical cost or the time of the sculptor

Master Mould (and the possibility of having to start from scratch if something goes wrong)

Master Castings

Production Mould

Advertising - as someone stated earlier he wants to see painted examples on a website... these need to be paid for (as does the website). Even if the manufacturer/sculptor is a good painter it still isn't free; it is time spent that could be used for some thing else.

Castings.... Either using a contract caster (and prices and quality vary widely) or in-house (cost of machinery, metal, space and power)

Quality control - time

Packaging - even if you don't blister, dealer bags do plus the time involved.

Add to that ancillary costs such as computers, space, electricity et cetera, et cetera.

If everything is taken into account the price of a miniature should probably be doubled. Of course 'the market' won't pay that.

[SteveBurt]

You don't cast one figure at a time; you cast a whole mould's worth.
The reason selling in multiples is much better for the manufacturer is that a figure pack is the output of a single mould spin.
If the seller has to separate the figures out, then inevitably some will sell better than others, so he ends up with spare figures.
In the case of historical stuff, you are normally buying units anyway, so buying figures in 6s or 8s isn't much of a hardship.
The Old Glory model of 30 foot or 10 mounted in a big bag can be less convenient.
As to price, the most expensive historicals are Foundry at £12 for a pack of 6 or 8 foot or 3 mounted. So about £2 a figure.
Everyone else is cheaper; Old Glory works out at less than £1 a figure. Most others are somewhere in between, typically £1.20 to £.150 a figure.
28mm plastics are cheaper; a box of 60 Victrix figures is £30, so 50p a figure.

I realise fantasy aficionados are used to paying far more than this for their figures, but they probably don't need 500 or so to make an army!

[horridperson]

Like Legionnaire I play skirmish games so my model count is quite low (painted ) and their is a lot of flexibility in what I'm willing to pay for a single figure.  I don't think about what a miniature is worth due to production; It matters what the model does for me.

If I'm sourcing models for a game I want to play (mostly models to paint) there a number of criteria that loosen my wallet/ open my bank account.  The numbers are in Canadian currency and relative to a single fig of approximately human size somewhere between 28mm and 32mm that scales well with the rest of my collection for the relevant project.

The model is a fair representation of what I'm looking for; I don't like the model much but don't hate it so much it will never be painted: $8

I like the model and it suits my purposes well: 10-$12

The sculpt is cool, a great fit for the project and I'm really excited to paint it when it arrives: $15

I love the model.  It "speaks" to me.  If it doesn't fit my project I'll change it so it does: $25+

The math is different dealing with boxed sets with multiple miniatures.  If I was buying 10 or 20 figures of a similar type I would expect the price/ unit to be quite a bit lower.  In a lot I'm sure there are a few really eye catching sculpts but there will likely be awful ones I wouldn't even want to pay for.

For the most part I'm still surprised by most miniature manufacturers; I find the prices very reasonable; Maybe it's because I bought quite a bit from GW .

[Brandlin]

I wonder, do you apply these rules to other retail purchases you make, or just wargames figures?

Unless you're buying your cornflakes in plain plastic bags, or your washing powder lose from a tub then you're presumably happy to pay for coloured packaging on other items that you only discard.

It's fairly common practice for retailers to offer say tins of beans or cans of coke as multiples, or do BOGOF, or 3 for 2 offers - I think multiples in blisters are the same thing, aren't they?

The only high street retailer I can think of that doesn't have a "helpful staff" model is Argos so again, unless you only shop there I'd suggest you're happy to put up with (and pay for) these things in other situations.

I'm genuinely curious why some people are happy to denigrate practices in the wargaming world that are commonplace in all other aspects of our retail dominated culture.

These things are just forms of marketing. Ways of persuading you to buy product A at the expense of product B - or as well as. We all know the game and Wargames manufacturers have to play it as much as any other retailer or they go out of business.

Your argument is spurious as it compares dissimilar markets.

But to answer your points.

No I don't have the same standards when buying washing powder for simple reasons. The washing powder is manufactured in tons, that's sent to customers in boxes by the hundreds of thousands. Therefore the artwork etc on the boxes is amortised over millions of units and it becomes almost negligible in cost. Likewise the packaging is cardboard which is mass produced and cheap. It probably accounts for a few pennies of cost on a few pounds of product. It's also necessary because brand loyalty in that market is low and the packaging has to fight for visual appeal alongside many other brands on a shelf. That is not the same market requirement as wargames figures. Out of interest I do buy many things without packaging. Eg vegetables, a simple paper bag is all that's needed, not a plastic tray, plastic wrap and a label.

Compare that to miniature packaging and art costs where I've seen manufactures use the argument that it's as much as 60p per figure. On a £6 figure that's 10%. It's not a necessary cost and its excessive. On a different note it's also mostly not recyclable.

I do understand the requirement for eye catching display material on products that need shelf appeal. Where they are competing with other similar products in the same store. I believe that's a very small fraction of the products in our industry. It only really applies to those companies large enough to be putting product into major stores such as GW.

As to your view of offers and BOGOF deals. I understand entirely the deal in providing discounts on quantity. However that's NOT the same as multiple figures in blisters for two reasons.
1) if I want one can of Coke I buy one can. Often buying single figures is not an option. I understand this may be at a slight premium.
2) several figures of different poses in a single blister is NOT the same product. Using your analogy it is "buy a can of coke and a tin of beans and a pack of washing powder and get a few % off". It's a great deal, IF you like beans and have dirty clothes AND are thirsty.

I understand the batch manufacturing approach and the necessary tooling (mould) that produce multiple products/figures per spin. However this is a manufacturing constraint that is being pushed on the customer. It's a hard problem to solve unless you have volume of sales and can produce a mould per figure. On the reverse side a metal figure is an unusual product as it can be recycled almost indefinitely. Whilst you wouldn't choose to put a low selling and high selling product in the same mould, demand may cause this. In many other products you'd lose all the value of the over produced product, at least with metal miniatures you can recoup the metal price even though the labour cost is lost.

As to "staff", yes of course I shop other places than Argos. My point was (although I may have made it poorly) that SOME games companies create a lot of additional activities that their business model generally doesn't support and then pay for them by upping prices. This doesn't apply to the vast bulk of producers that have smaller operations.

Firstly war gaming is a luxury market. No one NEEDS toy soldiers {admit it ;-)} but at the same time it's also a price sensitive market. It's also for the majority, very low volume and low margin. Those characteristics of the market suggest very specific marketing, production, distribution methods and business models. As an aside that's interestingly why KS has been so popular (when it works well, it solves or helps ease a number of problems above). However a number of companies continue To pursue distribution, packaging and marketing avenues that increase their prices in a price sensitive market and then complain how difficult the market is. In this market there are a lot of failed businesses and lines because they are marketed, packaged and distributed as premium products and this is reflected in the pricing but NOT in sales volume.

Now I am clearly not in possession of every fact of every manufacturer. However I have run two of my own businesses. I understand the need to market a product. However I challenge that very very few miniature purchasing decisions are taken stood at a shelf with company A product in one hand and company B product in the other choosing which to buy. The vast majority of those decisions are made through word of mouth either in clubs or through forums like this one. The products are ideally suited to photography and visual appeal which can be very well serviced on line.

Marketing is NOT about advertising or how you display and box a figure. It's about understanding the market you are in, the selling points of the products you develop and building your entire business model to exploit that knowledge and satisfy your customer for your own benefit.  Many many companies don't get this. In our industry and others. those that do, flourish.

Gw is not one of them.

[Brandlin]

I think aswell to say you don't want to pay for packaging artwork or the added fluff/story is to belittle the practice of the artist who makes the figure you like, since you're essentially saying they should treat what they do purely as an economic exercise and not, as is often the case, a labour of love following lots of development and consideration, which often involves the creation of other artworks and stories for the characters being made to inhabit.
Yes, you're buying a miniature from them, but in asking them to supply that to you you have to take into account that for them the business of making these miniatures is often more than just a clock in clock out piece of work.

I'm not belittling anyone's artistic ability in the slightest.

We have heard from both consumers and producers on this thread. And the common thread is that this is a price sensitive low volume market, yet the products are niche and require significant development effort.

The bottom line is we all perceive a VALUE in the things we buy. If the value to us is greater than the cost then we make a purchase decision. If it isn't we don't.

Conversely for the producer, his equation is can I make enough profit from this to do it. (We'll ignore cash flow for now, but it's often more critical as people like Andy from Heresy miniatures will testify). Note that "enough profit" will differ person to person. If it's a hobby endeavour then break even may suffice. If it's a personally commissioned line, then a loss may be acceptable - ie self funded. However I don't think a manufacturer can set out to operate in a certain manner, price his products accordingly and then complain that people think he's expensive and don't buy. Likewise I wouldn't have sympathy with a producer that sets his prices below his business costs, unless he's a rich philanthropist.

I'm very willing to pay top dollar for talent and originality. I'd very much like to pay sculptors for sculpting. I'd like MORE of the cost of the miniature in his pocket than spent on many of the aspects of the business we've discussed elsewhere. I see a number of practices from a number of companies that do not support this.

I dislike seeing the same high prices charged for poorer artistic work or unoriginal copying, especially when the pricing seems to be set as 'how much can I get away with?' and 'how much does everyone else charge?'

[Captain Blood]

I'm not sure what it is about the wargaming world that makes people think we are immune to the iron law of the market... This discussion pops up every few months on this forum, and elsewhere of course. And it's always basically the same plaintive argument from someone in the business: 'You enjoy the hobby - and we're just a cottage industry. So please let us make a decent living from it, by charging a bit more for what we do. Otherwise we'll have to stop doing it.'

I've been struggling to think of parallels with any other (strictly non-essential purchase) cottage industries or burgeoning 'craft' business sector where this argument would wash with customers. Micro/craft breweries? Speciality bakers or chutney makers? Artists? Writers? Bands? Yes, I would happily pay a price premium for a pint of craft ale from a specialist maker, over what I would pay for a mass produced pint. In part because I know it would be a better product, and in part, from an altruistic willingness to pay a little bit more to support a worthwhile craft business and a cause I believe in. So I might pay ten or twenty percent more for a pint. I might even pay fifty percent more.

What I wouldn't pay - and none of us would - is two or three times the price of an equivalent pint from a big brewer.

But that's what some people seem to expect when it comes to wargames figures. I can't really think of anywhere else where, if it is apparent that some traders can make a product for X price, customers would willingly pay (or be expected to pay) two or three times that for a broadly comparable product. It's simply not how the world works, is it?

Obviously if the quality is manifestly higher, that commands a price premium in any market. And it's true that a lot of fantasy and sci-fi miniatures are higher quality products than rank-and-file historicals. But it's a question of the size of the price differential, surely? If so many makers of metal miniatures can turn them out for somewhere between one and two pounds per figure, then does the quality difference in the move up to the cool kid 'craft makers', really justify a price tag of £5 or £6 per figure? Much less £10? Well, evidently from this discussion, to some people yes, to others no.

So - as with most of these circular philosophical arguments on this forum - it just comes down to personal taste. We're never all going to agree on it, nor persuade people who feel the other way about it. So why bother to expend the time and energy blithering on about it? (A question I ask myself every time I take part in one of these discussions! )