GW changes to cheaper materials and puts up prices.

RuneBrush

RuneBrush

New member
Just caught up on this thread (including the slight deviation into deviancy...). I repeat my earlier comment about not agreeing about the price rise - in today's climate it's a very bad move and will discourage a lot of people from taking up GW game systems.

One thing that does seem to have been picked up on is the "a model will only cost 5p to make..." thought. This might be accurate for the raw material costs but looking at it in isolation is taking it completely out of context.

When you buy one of the new Finecast Miniatures you will have in your hand a minature in some kind of packaging. This will likely cost a few pence per miniature. In addition the physical container this will have had artwork created (possibly 30 or 40 man hours). The miniature will also have to have been delivered to a location (cost for delivery - GW will use couriers, this may be a LGS or your house), hand picked at the GW despatch location (troll for picking + overhead for the running the location).

Manufacture will require a new mold every X casts - they'll probably have one mold making multiples of a single miniature so you might get 500 out of the lifetime of one mold (this needs not only the mold material, but also the person to create said mold, oh and a location for them to be stored when not in use). A person to pour the 5p per miniature resin into the mold and QC the end result (again plus a location for this to occur and storage for the completed miniatures). A person/machine for putting the miniature into it's packaging. Finally right at the beginning of the process you will need a sculptor to spend upwards of 40 hours on a miniature's green, this to be made into a master and then resin casts of this to be made. Before that I guess you've also got the concept artist/designer/writer who will come up with the ideas for a specific minature that fits in line with the current ethos of the army.

All of a sudden, 5p for a minature balloons into a much higher figure... Yes GW will have set a break even point on sales and I believe the price of the whole range is excessive, but I really don't think GW are being given enough credit as to how much it costs to manufacture something.

The only reason I'm saying this is that I spent a lot of time coding a production system for a company that made health supplements. The raw material cost of a single tablet worked out for be fractions of a penny - a whole pot might only cost 15 pence for a few hundred tablets and be sold at £20+. However when you factored in the mixing time, potting time, overhead cost etc, the actual production cost of that pot was likely well over two pound.
 
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StarFyre

Active member
did someone say Megan Fox ? :)


On topic: i like the fact they are moving away from metals. It's just easier to modify plastic and resin models than cutting through thick metal. Yes, it can be done, but it takes alot of extra time/effort.

However, the cost sadly has gone up, but with only a few models, it may be worth it.

Sanjay
 
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RuneBrush

RuneBrush

New member
GW Linky

Well here are the Tomb King Finecast miniatures. Price wise I'd say they're on par with everything else. New Ushabti are £30 for 3 (infact cheaper than plastic equivalent, but less options) and Casket of Souls is £36 - same as most pieces that size.

p
 
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archreptile

New member
My main concern with the resin is the toxicity. I was looking forward to my son getting to the age where we could enjoy this hobby together together but filing and cleaning up resin is really not an appealling prospect. As a respiratory physician I have some insight into this and cleaning resin figures to any degree more than a very light filing with proper protection is actually potentially very dangerous.
Looking at the bottom of this page:
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/blogPost.jsp?aId=16700035a
Daniel has chose the empire captain. If you maximise the image and look at the hand on the hammer there is obviously just as much flash as you would see with the average plastic model.
Really hope this isnt the case...
 
Talion

Talion

New member
Here's a close look at one of the resin mini's as you can see a shit load of flash. I've also included the review by the owner

click


http://kirbysblog-ic.blogspot.com/2011/05/citadel-finecast.html
 
T

Torn blue sky

New member
To be perfectly honest , after looking at it for a length of time, it really doesn't even look "crisper" at all. I'd have to concur with the blog guy on that. The edges still look quite soft in places. If you took this thing and compared it to Forge world sculpts/casts (for instance) you'd see a marked difference immediately.
It really is as if someone sat down at HQ and come up with a brief that basically said "Look guys, we need flash, lots of flash, the more inconvenience we can cause the better. We need sub par casts and an even shitter material to cast it in... and money, a F*CK tonne of money!"
 
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xaeromancer

New member
I was about to dump a whole tax rebate into a Grey Knight army and, frankly, that's not going to happen at all.

Even taking Runebrush's time coding experience into account, it will be the tooling and materials that make the difference. I've worked on production costings myself and these are the largest area of overhead.

Now, being generous, we can say that this new material is as cheap as plastic (it's probably cheaper) and the moulds will be the same kind of centrifuge jobs as they use on the metal (because even if you are GW, you aren't going to chuck any machinery if you can still use it.) The moulds themselves will probably be made of a different (possibly more expensive) material, but this is sure to be easily absorbed by getting rid of the material cost of the metal alloy. The metal moulds would need to be replaced eventually, anyway. I'm not sure if this new material is any kinder to the moulds themselves. But even if they need to double the number of moulds, the material going in is so much cheaper that it's acceptable. I can't imagine the downtime and maintenance being much different. With regards to quality assurance and quality control, the entire Games Workshop group has a poor reputation for this. If they are happy to ship £50 rulebooks with errata slips on release, then bent, bubbled, flashed and flawed miniatures will be as common in resin as they are in metal.

No models have been re-sculpted. Most of GW's sculpting now uses the 3D prototyping rather than kneaditite or Milliput, the Dark Eldar range documents this. Since this cost was spread through the Tyranid, Space Wolf, Blood Angel, Dark Eldar and Grey Knight lines, they can't use the set up of that as an excuse. From now on, most of their sculpting costs will be the man hours in design.

The miniature will probably have been re-painted and re-photographed, this is probably the largest "set-up" cost of the conversion (if they can use the same centrifuges.) A new box will have been designed and, given the volumes GW will use, these may literally be ten a penny. My own experience of costings comes from packaging and I can say that entire jobs may be done at a loss just to keep the more lucrative elements of the contract. If there is a enough profit on the new space marine packaging, then the printer will run the entire LOTR line at a loss.

In conclusion:

Material costs, compared to metal, are an order of magnitude less.
Production costs are roughly the same.
Post-production costs are have increased by somewhat.

This does not justify a price increase. At all.

Of course, if they need to buy faster or stronger machinery, then this breakdown could collapse. But considering they are going from metal to resin, I can't see that being the case. If anything, they'll be selling on the smelters and autoclaves used to melt the alloys, which have probably not only held their the value quite well, but will free up the finance they were probably bought on. And machinery is costed to company capital, rather than production jobs, anyway.
 
K

Kalidane

New member
Here and elsewhere there seems to be a comprehension failure with pricing, in particular the EU external trade embargo.

Based off median post-tax hourly income, prior to the June hike:

NZ Space Wolves Battleforce = $170.70 or 9.34 work hours
UK Space Wolves Battleforce = £51.25 or 5.34 work hours

In the UK 15-20% discounts are easily found further reducing the work-hours required to make a purchase. Not so much in NZ.

IIRC the UK price goes to £60 in June. I'm a fairly big buyer of stuff I want because I really like it. I have around 300 Space Wolf models and would buy many more because I like more. More is good. I have 3 Leman Russ models because he is rare and some day I shall own them all. I will only ever paint one I'm sure.

I almost bought 4 boxes of SW terminators before the embargo and hike kick in then I remembered this company doesn't like me so I bought an undead army from Mantic. 110 models I like for half the price of the GW box containing 51 models I don't like.

Notes on the resin switch:
Many/most box art painted minis are in fact resin models. It turns out we are actually familiar with the cast quality already...

Grey resin photographs better than metal. Someone with more energy than I would have to explain why this is so.

I suspect anyone who believes the 'I quit' people will flock back with the next model release are basing their view on an extrapolation of their own behaviour or that of their group. This Saturday sees the limited release of something very cool that I will buy one of. When you see it you'll understand why the exception. There will be no purchases after that. A large number of other companies with top quality and excellent value will get all my hobby monies and my lazy interest in sculpting and casting just got cranked up a couple notches.
 
Tercha

Tercha

Member
Well the shareholders seem to be happy, Up 4.14% today (edit - when I looked - constantly changing of course)
Looking back at the historical prices - What happened on April the 7th?
 
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L

lono

New member
I've got hold of a Finecast model and it's hit and miss in terms of quality to be honest.

In some areas I'm impressed. Some parts are very very crisp and much better than you'd get with a white metal. Things I particularly noticed were ultra crisp fillagree and rock solid edges on parts of the power armour, as well as really refined detail on some smaller parts. So, the casting method can improve the look of old models without a doubt.

Middling stuff - I would say that the mould lines are not as savage as others are suggesting, much the same as on an existing metal model actually, which is not terribly suprising considering they are using the same moulds and same casting method (with tweaks) for resin as they did before.

In other parts however, it's not all as rosy. There are a lot more channels to aid resin flow, and drill holes, which means there's a lot of flash around it. It doesn't cause too much bother to clean, but it does look utterly rubbish on something claiming to be finecast. Also, resin flow to certain parts of the model seem to have been a little restricted, which means that the detail level isn't consistent. Some parts are the very oposite of finecast, with more blobby bits than i'd expect. Also, there are air bubbles, seemingly in the worst possible places. Lots on the edges on small detail.

I'd need to see more examples to build an overall picture of if quality is improved or not, but thought folks might like to hear a bit of a report.

Also, there are some more Finecast models on the GW site now - Dark Eldar stuff - http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/armySubUnitCats.jsp?catId=cat440160a
 
Bishop Odo

Bishop Odo

New member
The thing about flash is that it will only get worse as the mold wears, so really this is the best it will ever be, for the foreseeable future, and if this is the new way of the future why isn’t Forge World done this way?
 
TrystanGST

TrystanGST

New member
Haha amongst all this talk of price hikes, I found something rather interesting. I was looking for a pic of an old ork for another thread, and did you know that the Land Raider used to come two to a box? And for $9.99! Rhinos were 3 to a box. How far we've come. Or fallen, depending on your perspective.

http://solegends.com/citrt/rtb05landraiders.htm

Just in case you thought I was making it up.
 
TrystanGST

TrystanGST

New member
Haha I have one of the old Land Raiders. Ugly piece of kit. Damn effective in the game I played just the other day though.
 
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