The price of a miniature

[nic-e]

You sure they were Guild Ball? All the Guild Ball minis I've seen were metal. The ones I've got awaiting paint certainly are, and I've seen pretty much the whole line at shows 

All guildball are metal but they are very pricey. (£9 for a small metal otter!) 

[Cubs]

Urm ... no, a load of the Guild Ball stuff is resin (plastic?).

http://store.guildball.com/resin-miniatures

[Elbows]

Yep, there is a whole line of "starter" boxes which appear to be resin/plastic and are $30-35 for three figures or the six-pack for $84...accompanied by a whole bunch of metal blisters.  That's way too pricey for my blood, but I know people love the game.

[dinohunterpoa]

I remember being appalled when citadel raised its price per figure to 40p (Stirling) and then wasted some of that money on stupid blister packs!

On the whole I don't mind paying for quality and service. I'm aware of the need of small businesses and artists to make a living and recognise the amount of talent and effort needed to make my toys. I'm also very aware of the costs of volume and recognise that much smaller volumes are more expensive per unit.

I do object to a number of pricing practices from many companies.though. Here are a few.

1) packaging. You're charging me for cardboard plastic art work graphic design etc that I'm just going to discard

2) multiples. You decide to sell things in multiples rather than ones. I very very often don't want the same numbers you think I do. You argue multiples makes it cheaper because you don't have to package singles... I refer you to the cause of the problem in item 1

3) lack of imagination. Too many very talented people copying what others do at equal or higher prices! you want me to spend £5 on a figure? Then do something worth it, not just an oversized, charicatured knock off of what everyone else is doing.

4) fluff. I'm interested in figures. I have an imagination. I don't want to be paying more for figures because you decided you had to put a card, pamphlet, background book or British library in the blister pack. I certainly don't want several copies because I wanted three figures.

5) don't make me pay for how you run your business. I want to buy figures. I have no interest in your painting competition, the several hundred stores you keep open and the thousands of "helpful" staff. You're making me pay for those things in your product pricing and I'm not interested in them.

6) god complex. Ok, you can sculpt, you're good at it, you deserve to make a living. That doesn't mean your first four sculpts deserve a £100,000 Kickstarter and the opportunity for you holiday in the Bahamas twice a year.

Brandlin, that was perfect! 

[mcfonz]

I'm not sure I can agree with the fact that it's perfect.

Look at some of the popular games - take x-wing for example (ignore that they are prepaints). You buy the ships you want, they come with rules and additional cards that can be used with other ships etc.

I have no issue with people selling miniatures as part of a game system with the rules/stat cards in with them. When you buy a product you are buying the product. If you want just parts, you go direct - if they offer that service.

It's like going to buy a car and stating you don't want all of the fancy stuff and just want the engine and the chassis. The reality is most dealerships are just going to look at you like you are a weirdo and point you in the direction of contacting the manufacturer directly or a mechanic who maybe able to order in the parts.

This just smacks a lot of people wanting to have their cake and eat it.

Companies with stores - well there is only really GW. Lets slate off the company a large chunk of us found to be the portal into the wargaming world. Those chaps who have worked and do work in them who deliver a good service (mostly) to new wargamers. Sure, as a grumpy older wargamer no longer interested in their systems you may not wish to pay their prices but then this is why there are the various online and in my case, local discounters you can buy from with a 10-25% off the RRP.

At the end of the day, the only thing that will change the pricing strategy of a company is how well something is selling or not. So, if you don't like it don't buy it - whatever your reason is. If the company sails along nicely and continues to grow in stature and popularity then the problem clearly isn't their pricing strategy is it?

To be honest, this sort of discussion does nothing but ever draw divisions within wargaming. There is this sort of strange attitude that all miniatures of a similar size and scale should cost the same amount of money because they use the same amount of material etc.

Yet we have seen someone say that packaging multiples is about saving on packaging - it really isn't. In instances where miniatures are packaged in multiples it is to do with moulds, not saving on packaging. If you have five different sculpts x3 in one mould, you NEED to sell those five in a pack. If you sell them as individuals you can end up with multiples of one that is not as popular as the others. This can end up being more costly than packaging, and you see it mainly in the historical side of the industry. There is no reason to package miniatures together other than this if they are different poses etc.

Sorry but all I can do is end up shaking my head.

I started out in the mid '90's, when you could buy a terminator for £2.50 from GW. This was 'pocket money' back then. Now, a single miniature at GW is £8-9+, that's not pocket money to me. It has changed, but then so is who they are aiming their product at, and it's not people who have a tight budget. Should I moan? No, I take my business elsewhere. To one of the many very good boutique businesses. And like many independent businesses across many industries, they don't make mega-bucks. At times they can struggle, near collapse or even disappear. I like to think I am buying more than just a little bit of lead.

I am buying a piece of workmanship - a craftsman. In that sense, just like any other, sculptors are the main cost behind any piece of work. Their time is the most precious thing. The material nearly always is the least costly. The process can vary depending upon how much human interaction is needed (metal Vs resin).

[Silent Invader]

I started out in the mid '90's, when you could buy a terminator for £2.50 from GW. This was 'pocket money' back then. Now, a single miniature at GW is £8-9+, that's not pocket money to me.

In case anyone else is wondering, £2.50 in 1995 equates to £4.33 in 2015

Source: Bank of England Inflation Calculator

 

[Redmao]

Packaging...
Sure in the now online shopping world, packaging isn't as big a selling factor as it used to be when you could only buy your toys from the pegs and shelves of a store.
Back then, your eyes would get caught by the flashy box that was covered in impressive art depicting its (static) content in glorious dynamic and often explosive battle.


When I started in this hobby, I was more fascinated by the brands of that had spectacular box or card art than the ones who were simply bagged with a stapled piece of paper.
Maybe I missed some incredible minis because of that, but those paints made me dream about epic battles and adventures, more so than the simple pictures of painted minis.

I understand that as we grow into this hobby, we know the various brands and games and don't even look at the card art anymore, but it still has an important place as it identifies the brand for new comers.

[Lovejoy]

Yet we have seen someone say that packaging multiples is about saving on packaging - it really isn't. In instances where miniatures are packaged in multiples it is to do with moulds, not saving on packaging. If you have five different sculpts x3 in one mould, you NEED to sell those five in a pack. If you sell them as individuals you can end up with multiples of one that is not as popular as the others. This can end up being more costly than packaging, and you see it mainly in the historical side of the industry. There is no reason to package miniatures together other than this if they are different poses etc.

Sorry but all I can do is end up shaking my head.

I was being a good boy and trying to stay out of this, but seeing as it was me who said that we use multiples to save packaging costs, I suppose I ought to respond. 

Your assumption may be correct for some (especially budget historicals), but you ain't right when it comes to us, and many other minis businesses I know. We use multipacks because customers asked us to; they wanted starter warband sets they could buy, without having to be familiar with the rules. All our minis are in separate moulds; we don't combine multiple types of figures into one mould.

When we do a starter warband pack with 7 minis in it, that directly saves us 6 blisters, cards and foams - a £2.58 saving we can pass straight on to the customer.

I agree with everything else you said though! 

[mcfonz]

Yes, well, you are obviously clever and made sure that you put each sculpt in it's own mould.

Thing is, would I be right in saying you sell both? I should imagine the people that do as you do and do a mould for each individual sculpt may well offer it in both singular and multi-pack form.

I was more jabbing back at Brandlin's seemingly generic hatred of multipacks where he cannot buy the models separately in the singular form - which in most cases will mean they share a mould.

[Lovejoy]

Yeah, we sell singly mostly - the multipack thing was really an afterthought, to be honest! 

The problem I've found with multiple figures in each mould is when a cavity or two gets torn or doesn't cast well, and it screws up the whole pack. I've sculpted for 15mm historical guys who just supply 8 random figures per pack, so you get a handful from the mould spin, regardless of what they are. Sometimes you get lots of repeats... but selling them singly just isn't worth the hassle, given the low price historicals fetch.

So really, I agree with you on that as well! 

[Major_Gilbear]

I started out in the mid '90's, when you could buy a terminator for £2.50 from GW. This was 'pocket money' back then. Now, a single miniature at GW is £8-9+, that's not pocket money to me.

I also started GW in my early teens, probably around early 90's. I got £1.00 a week pocket money, and it would therefore take me 12+ weeks to get one 5-man squad of Terminators (...weren't they £15 or more a box?) No paint, no brushes, no glue. Just the models. To actually buy enough GW figures to play even small games with, I had to rely on birthday money and trades with friends. Even so, games like 40k and WHFB were outside my budget for a looong time.

Nowadays, a new-style plastic Terminator box is around £30 RRP (or £6.00 per model). That's a big price in real-terms, in a material that is mere pennies compared to making them in metal (and despite the upfront mould costs to GW).

Of course, the new Terminators are plastic, posable (...sort of), and come with a decent number of weapon options.

However, they are also about 40% of the points they used to be, so you need about twice as many to play 40k with as before. Yep, that means that to get a real equivalent in a game of 40k, the actual £/game value of the models has gone up by 200% (or from about £4.50 to £12.00 in real money terms).

And that's a big part of why despite liking a fair few models (and nowadays owning a lot of GW stuff from over the last 25+ years of collecting), 40k and GW in general is just turning people like me off. I apologise for singling out GW (I know there's a thread for these sorts of posts normally), but it is relevant to the discussion of "the price of a model" - they are a giant of the industry, and consequently what they can sell models for sort of sets the benchmark for what other sci-fi and fantasy models will sell for (whether you like it or not - miniature manufacturers of all sizes are businesses after all).

The problem I've found with multiple figures in each mould is when a cavity or two gets torn or doesn't cast well, and it screws up the whole pack.

I can imagine, and I think that's why a lot of companies (including GW, Corvus Belli, Reaper, and others) do the same thing as you. Then again, they usually do sell single-model packs too, despite some only being available as sets.