The price of a miniature

[Brandlin]

Well said captain blood.

Your premium price for craft beer argument is spot on. Because you perceive it to be BETTER. It has greater value to you.

I'm saying the same thing in essence. Better sculpts and casts, not fancier and more packaging with expensive stores and middleman costs and unnecessary, non optional add ons.

Would you like your craft beer served in a crystal glass, nestling on a red silk cushion, served in a bar that it owns (and won't let any other liquid in)? And every single pint accompanied by a booklet on where the hops came from?

Or marked up by all the middle men so the brewer only gets a small % of the cash you gave the bar man?

Or your craft brewer to run a KS to install new equipment to produce 100 times as much, stuff it in cans and try to tellyou it's the same stuff even though it tastes of plastic (oh and charge you more for the privilege ?)

[Lovejoy]

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)

I'd argue the hobby has become less niche, with bigger overall numbers of gamers. But release runs are smaller, as the number of competing businesses has proliferated even more.
As for the £1 profit on a £1.10 cost, I have to disagree. It sounds like a much bigger margin than most companies have - but remember they are including the cost of wages, salaries, company vehicles, premises, factories, R+D, utilities etc in their costs. The £1 profit on £1.10 is simply physical production cost versus sales price, with none of the other myriad expenses added in.

...Lots of accurate stuff...

Well said, Dags, I'm in total agreement.

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.

It's not just a matter of looking at a final figure and deciding if the quality is worth 3 times as much. It's things like paying £300 for a decent fantasy character sculpt, when that same £300 will get you 6 rank-and-file dolly conversions for a historical unit. Which you then sell in the hundreds, to army buyers, for a smaller profit-per-mini, but a much larger overall return. The guy asking £5 for a character model is not saying it's 3 times as good, he's selling it for the lowest price he can and still have enough to make another.
BTW, you referring to scifi/fantasy miniatures businesses as 'cool kid 'craft makers'' is pretty disparaging. This is how Jo and I put food on the table and shoes on our kid's feet.

[jon_1066]

I'd argue the hobby has become less niche, with bigger overall numbers of gamers. But release runs are smaller, as the number of competing businesses has proliferated even more.
As for the £1 profit on a £1.10 cost, I have to disagree. It sounds like a much bigger margin than most companies have - but remember they are including the cost of wages, salaries, company vehicles, premises, factories, R+D, utilities etc in their costs. The £1 profit on £1.10 is simply physical production cost versus sales price, with none of the other myriad expenses added in.
...

I guess that is the bit that comes down to release size.  Your fixed costs of running a business have to be supported by your miniature sales.  If you produce 100,000 models then they can be spread much further.  If you only have sales of 2000 then you have much higher overhead per miniature.  Hence the query about the scope of the hobby.

[Major_Gilbear]

Last point is that if £4 is too rich in 28mm then in 15mm the same quality of figure is about 75p and you can get some lovely stuff in 15mm these days.  Half the size, a quarter the price and a tenth the storage problem.

This is a great point, and one that I've considered a few times too... Especially with the advent of affordable high-resolution 3D printing, which makes small detail and consistent scaling much easier to achieve than with traditional hand sculpts at this scale. Even the cost of prototyping at 15mm is significantly less than 28mm.

I don't really agree with that to be honest...
5 reasons why (IMHO) historicals are generally cheaper:
1. There are a lot of basic troops that can be converted quickly from dollies, saving sculpting time.
2. They are often sold in large numbers, rather than as individual minis, thus benefiting from economies of scale.
3. A lot of historical manufacturers do it as a hobby; they often operate around break-even, funding themselves with a day job or a pension.
4. Historicals tend to be lighter and simpler, often around half the metal, of a sci/fant model, thus cheaper to mould and cast.
5. Historicals are typically just not as well sculpted as decent sci/fant stuff. There are of course exceptions, but that's the general rule. Most of the freelance sculptors I know charge around double for sci/fant stuff than they do for historical sculpting, because higher standards are expected.

It's largely down to the character/skirmish nature of most sci/fant stuff, versus the mass troop block style of most historicals.

There's a couple of other less obvious factors too:

1) We "know" what historical units look like, so there is no real need to have concept art created and developed compared to sci-fi or fantasy.

2) Historical models of the same time period and scale are usually pretty compatible with one another. Fantasy and sci-fi less so, as they are often taken from proprietary backgrounds which may not be very compatible.


Rick Priestly actually commented on these very issues when pressed on why Antares figures were rather more expensive than Warlord's other ranges. Simple answer was that to make the game compelling (and marketable), they had to design everything in that fictional universe from scratch, which means somebody has to be basically paid to sit there and design it all (several times if need be).

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)

No, but there are now far more games and manufacturers clamouring for attention. So the numbers of people playing any one game system (assuming Sci-fi or fantasy here) are more fractured than they may have been previously.

So even making 100% profit on the figures still doesn't add up to very much if the overall number sold is relatively low.

[eilif]

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.

Three points regarding multi-packs and mold usage.

1-The Recyclability of metals is only really a useful buffer if you're doing your own casting.  If you're paying a caster, then you can't recoup the cost of the cast figs just by selling them back to the caster.

2-For a small operation, Labor costs are still a big factor.  Time spent reusing figures you can't sell is time that could have been spent casting figures that do.

3-Regardless of the size of the operation limiting the number of SKU's is a huge boon.  Keeping track of every figure rather than just packs is just ALOT more work.

Thus, in many cases buying individual figs will be either not offered or will come at a premium.  There's really no way the cost can't be passed on to the consumer, nor should we expect that a producer/seller will be eager to eat them.

[TWD]

*stuff about beer*

This I completely agree with.
Though  think I used an analogy with artizan chocolate and Whispa bars when I made a similar point.


I also agree about I don't know why I get dragged in to these circular discussion.

[Artemis Black]

The biggest problem in these discussions always seems to be that gamers from different groups all join in and may as well be talking different languages to each other

Historical gamers and fantasy/modern/sci-fi skirmish gamers are barely in the same hobby. We like to pretend we are because it makes our hobby bigger but let's be blunt about it, we're not (Unless you happen to be someone who likes both).

I'm 'never' going to be interested in 100s of guys in funny hats with integral bases and, again let's be blunt, iffily scupted (Some exceptions these days with new plastics etc.).

And most historical gamers are 'never' going to be interested in 5 high quality, dynamically posed, multi-part, resin masters of 5 fantasy vikings that'll cost them the same as 80 of their usual ones.

As I only found this thread cos someone mentioned us, I should probably reply to that too

If you're into our part of the hobby, and you consider our average pricepoint of £5 to be at the top end of what you'd pay, you should probably get intimately acquainted with Ebay sorry. You're about to be priced out of the hobby unless huge advances happen fairly fast in plastic or something.

I would happily stick us in the ring to qualify for best value for quality of sculting/casting. There are a number of other companies out there doing great work that i'd never say we're 'better' than (I might if you catch me after a few pints ) but the vast majority, if not all, of the companies with sculpts I consider to be on Kev's level charge the same or more than we do. We've been holding on to our price point for a few years now with both hands, I don't know how much longer that'll last and I won't feel remotely guilty when we do have to finally bump up a level.

[jon_1066]

The biggest problem in these discussions always seems to be that gamers from different groups all join in and may as well be talking different languages to each other

Historical gamers and fantasy/modern/sci-fi skirmish gamers are barely in the same hobby. We like to pretend we are because it makes our hobby bigger but let's be blunt about it, we're not (Unless you happen to be someone who likes both).

I'm 'never' going to be interested in 100s of guys in funny hats with integral bases and, again let's be blunt, iffily scupted (Some exceptions these days with new plastics etc.).

And most historical gamers are 'never' going to be interested in 5 high quality, dynamically posed, multi-part, resin masters of 5 fantasy vikings that'll cost them the same as 80 of their usual ones.

...

It's ironic since I am primarily a fantasy gamer.  I suppose it comes down the the fact that the five resin fantasy vikings don't sell very many - hence they are highly priced to cover the contribution they have to make - hence they sell even less.  There is obviously a price/demand equation where as the price of a miniature increases they won't sell as many.  The problem is this can push a business over the edge of the curve - so sales shrink, overheads stay the same so miniature prices have to increase, so sales shrink further, etc.

[Artemis Black]

It's ironic since I am primarily a fantasy gamer.  I suppose it comes down the the fact that the five resin fantasy vikings don't sell very many - hence they are highly priced to cover the contribution they have to make - hence they sell even less.  There is obviously a price/demand equation where as the price of a miniature increases they won't sell as many.  The problem is this can push a business over the edge of the curve - so sales shrink, overheads stay the same so miniature prices have to increase, so sales shrink further, etc.

It doesn't really work like that. We price things based primarily on cost to us. There's some wiggle room but not much. All of our resin masters.cost 1 of 2 price points despite some being popular and others selling like 3 in total. The cost to us is almost always the same.

With metal we maintain a stable price point and costs are averaged out across the line. Which is why a figure like Jade who is skinny and in a pose that allows 17 or 18 to a mould costs the same as a multi part figure like Jason Shaw where we can only fit 7 or something.

[robh]

I see no purpose in paying premium prices for miniature works of art that I am going to paint because I (and I think the vast majority of gamers) cannot paint them well enough to justify the expense.

The extra detail and quality of boutique figure ranges is wasted on most of us. I am totally content to buy figures from one manufacturer at 60% the cost of another because after I have finished with them the difference in detail is not evident.

Of course that assumes the figures are even painted at all, most of our purchases in this hobby get stuck away in boxes and never seen again until we sell/trade them off for something else.

[Elbows]

RobH, I actually agree with your first point.  While I pay a little extra for sculpts I really like, that doesn't mean they have to be overly intricate or incredible.  That being said, an overly intricate miniature will turn me off because I can't be bothered to paint them or spend the time they'll deserve.

It's one of the reasons I find GW's design aesthetic pretty peculiar.  For a game which endears itself to far more 12 year olds than any other wargame...their miniatures are often the most intricate/over styled figures...completely beyond the realm of painting for 60-70% of their market.   

[Captain Blood]

BTW, you referring to scifi/fantasy miniatures businesses as 'cool kid 'craft makers'' is pretty disparaging. This is how Jo and I put food on the table and shoes on our kid's feet.

I'm afraid I don't know your company or products at all, so I certainly wasn't referring to you as one of 'the cool kids'. I was talking about outfits like Hasslefree and Heresy, who carry a very definite and cultivated 'cool' cachet. A positioning - well earned from the excellence of their output, choice of subject matter, as well as how they style and communicate themselves - that partly explains why they can successfully charge a premium price from their many loyal fans. 

[TWD]

Your premium price for craft beer argument is spot on.

Your argument is spurious as it compares dissimilar markets.

So toy soldiers are not like cornflakes but they are like craft beer?
Got it.


Presumably this craft beer is sold in unmarked bottles, or maybe just straight from a  bucket because fancy packaging is bad.
And not in pubs because middle men are bad.
Not even in the brewery's own pub because helpful staff are bad.

All of which begs the question of how you ever hear about or obtain this craft beer in the first place.


I imagine it must be quite hard work figuring out all the unnecessary expense you don't want to pay for before making a purchase.
"Gee, I'd love a tasty sandwich right now, but I happen to think the parent company is spending too much of the asking price on hats for it's employees. Until they sort out this headgear overspend I guess I'll just go hungry a while longer"
Me I look at a thing and if I want it then I look at it's price. Then I decide if I will receive an appropriate amount of pleasure for the thing in exchange for handing over that price.

I don't worry about whether I'm paying for packaging, helpful staff, the ego of the manufacturer or the company owner's predilection for Siberian hamsters.
I guess I've been doing this "buying stuff I like" thing all wrong.

[Kommando_J]

I'd say in regards to the point made about being better off on ebay, its far worse for prices.

I think the point that you need less miniatures for fantasy isn't a good one, a lot of fantasy gamers like big armies and in my experience the bare minimum of 'forces' tends to be around a dozen miniatures which at (using otherworld as an example) might work at say 9 henchmen at £11.00 for 3 so £33.00 and then three characters at 5/6/ each works out at £61 upwards which is a big chunk of change in many peoples books, you could buy a large plastic boxset for historical or fantasy for that point.

Please not I have nothing against Otherworld, i'm using them as an example as since leaving GW i've been more in contact with historical over fantasy so my knowledge of the fantasy market isn't as good.

I'd point out with regards to the notion that fantasy/sci-fi has to be done from scratch is a terrible one, most fantasy/sci-fi draws from real life, it's rare to see anything truly original, gates of Antares falls into this, despite My Priestley's claims its not very original once you look up close.

[OSHIROmodels]

A question I ask myself every time I take part in one of these discussions!

Yeah, but at least you paint stuff and add to the wealth of the forum...