This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/ShornVisage on 2024-05-10 20:56:00+00:00.

Man, a sort-of-hobby-history post. From me. Who’da thunk it? I’ve tried to source this up better so it won’t get removed by the mods this time, but we’ll see how it goes. And do bear in mind, since a fair bit of this is about capturing player sentiment, a lot of the sources will be ancient, dead forum threads where players ‘theorycrafted’ reasons for their outrage. Let’s get started.

What is Warhammer?

Warhammer is… a lot of things. On its most basic level, it’s a set of two tabletop war games, but on another much more real level, it’s about so much more that saying it’s about two games is unforgivably reductionist. Spanning multiple universes with common and distinct elements, Warhammer comprises four universes, five settings, a hundred series of novels and comic books and video games, several expansive repositories of lore, and a thousand micro-communities that, together, comprise one overall community that spans the globe.

But let’s not get masturbatory (leave that to Slaanesh); all of these things exist to prop up the one, central point of Warhammer: Minis for a game you play on the table. But as you fall inexorably down the pipeline towards the hobby’s tootsie center, you will hear one warning, again, again, and again: Don’t waste your hobby money on Finecast models.

Why is Warhammer so expensive?

Look, I won’t lie to you: Collecting Warhammer, whatever the setting or side game, is never cheap. But the prices aren’t arbitrary, despite popular player sentiment. It’s easy to say offhand that these little bundles of plastic are more expensive than you’d think, but let’s consider all the production that goes into a single Warhammer model for a minute. (Mostly taken from here!)

The initial phase of modern model creation is that someone has an idea. Generally, that idea gets described to an artist, who creates a 2D rendering of what they’d have the model look like. Maybe this appearance prescribes the lore, maybe the lore prescribes the appearance.

Either way, a bundle of those renderings get passed to a 3D artist who turns renderings into something they can print. Maybe they do only a handful of these for a single character model. Either way, that highly-detailed 3D sculpture gets 3D printed as a large master mini, and sent to the crew in R&D.

Because half the enjoyment of the hobby comes from assembling the models yourself, this team has to figure out the best way to break down the components into multiple parts that fit together when cut from a single-piece plastic grid, called a ‘sprue’. If there’s no way to make it work, even if you split the model bilaterally down the side, the model is rejected and sent back to the 2D guy to make some new renders.

If the model passes the ‘breakdown’, however, another 3D artist reverse-engineers the model, breaking it down into component parts as agreed, and arranges them onto a sprue file.

At this stage in production, Games Workshop, being the only industry giant able to practically afford this part, rents supercomputers to run an advanced fluid dynamics simulation on the sprue file. Since melted plastic is injected into molds during production, they need some assurance that there won’t be constant production errors where a certain pocket doesn’t fill, and that the pressure won’t build too high and cause the machines to burst scalding plastic onto factory workers. If they find out that the injection won’t work, it’s time for the breakdown crew to get cracking again, and if they’re out of ways to skin that cat, this entire process starts over from the very beginning.

However, if the sprue simulation gets the green light, the file is 3D printed to create the master sprue, which is used to create a master mold, which is used to make the molding plates for the company factories and then lovingly placed in careful storage. Wouldn’t want to waste all that work, now.

This is the kind of rigor that modern GW products need to pass to finally be sold, and in the face of covering the costs of all of that, plus the actual production of the model you bought, plus the extreme cost of shipping low-density, low-weight products possibly overseas, is $40 USD for a single dude on foot and $55 for a squad of ten dudes really so bad? I say no. Although since I started updating this project to fit the subreddit rules, another price increase has been announced.

That is, unless something is wrong with the dude being sold on a more fundamental level.

Finally, let’s talk about Fineca- wait, shit, material history.

Like I said, that’s the modern production process. Several of those steps were impossible in, say, the 90s.

For one thing, Warhammer in the modern day is not sold primarily through a company-produced Sears catalog called White Dwarf, (although that magazine is still kicking around, amazingly) but via the internet. For another, model molds don’t have to be carved by hand by artists into green blocks, so a lot of finer detail and less awkward proportions are possible. And because less awkward proportions are possible, they’re able to use less crude materials than what they started out with.

You see, early Warhammer models were sold in White Dwarf, if not in your local hobby store, and the molds did have to be hand-carved, and so awkward proportions were the best their artists could do, so they did have to use a more basic material: Metal.

That’s right, early minis were made through a much more traditional kind of molding, not a stone’s throw away from how medieval blacksmiths made swords, where melted metal was more poured than injected into the molds and then refined in the factory, with byproducts that were punched out or shaved off the sprues getting recycled.

Upsides:

• Metal just feels higher-quality compared to plastic.
• Metal is generally more durable than plastic.
• Metal is good at holding its shape, even if a heavier bit is dangling off of a comparatively thin portion of the model.

Downsides:

• Part of that high-quality feel comes from the fact that metal is heavier, which means that it’s harder to transport, and, if you like magnetizing your miniatures’ bases, means you need larger, more expensive magnets for every model. But not too large; too strong a magnetic pull, and you could rip the mini off of its own legs.
• That durability is a bit of a joker’s trick; if you drop a metal mini, it could snap the same as plastic, same pain in the ass either way, but it’s less prone to punctures than it is to dents, which sounds better, but painting over a small hole is actually much easier than filling in a dent in a hollow object.
• Most company competitors are using some kind of plastic for their figures, and it’s harder to ‘kitbash’ different model kits together when their materials aren’t very comparable. (This was during a time when GW encouraged kitbashing, mind you)
• There aren’t really any modeling materials that are great at adhering to paint, but metal in particular isn’t very amenable to paint coating its surface, and this is a hobby about painting things. This, as you may expect, causes problems.

In other words, metal did the job just fine, but the medium was evolving by the late aughts, and Old Man GW was falling behind. With them resting on their laurels, other companies had started to leverage new tech, and profits were hitting a gulley. Then, around 2010, some overpaid fellow in R&D came across an alternative: Resin.

Enter stage left

It is very difficult to say how it happened, of course; model companies are understandably cagey about their preferred material formulas. What we do know is that GW saw resin as the upgrade it needed, and the benefits seemed pretty clear.

Upsides:

• Resin is much, much lighter than any metal. Say bye-bye to those transport problems.
• In part because it’s so light, and in part because it isn’t dug out of the ground, resin is cheaper than metal as well.
• Resin is flexile; where other materials break, it is more likely to bend, and what can be bent can be unbent.
• Resin is much nicer to paint than any metal; its surface is much smoother, and paint binds more uniformly to the surface.
• Resin is capable of a lot more theoretical accuracy in modeling. More accuracy, more detail. Who doesn’t love more detail?

So in May 2011, GW announces the switch, and it’s out with all metal production, in with the newly-dubbed Finecast Resin (So named after all that fine detail it can pull off). It should be a slam dunk, right?

Well……

What you may have noticed in that last paragraph was that I didn’t say, “Games Workshop conducted a long series of tests to ensure that Finecast was up to the task of replacing metal across the entire model line,” and that’s because they didn’t. GW already had perfectly good mold plates; why bother checking every single one for production issues? Just swap the metal with the resin pellets and start printing the money.

And the answer for that “why bother?” is that when you change from melted metal to resin, you…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1cozy4o/warhammer_laying_a_minefield_how_games_workshop/