Future of D&D Miniatures

[Pour]

I would be willing to spend good money for well-made iconics and D&D staples, though how much good money I'm not really sure. I won't be picking up Orcus, but it's more because he's not as interesting to me as say a $75 Demogorgon, Lloth or Torog (especially Torog hehe).

I did buy a Beholder, the Ultimate Tyrant, in the secondary market and just love the size, paint and quality. That said, I won't be picking up the Beholder pack just so I can preserve my Tyrant's 'cool' factor in my collection (and it's been said before just how many times someone is going to be using any kind of Beholder in their game, cool as they are).

I've become something of a mini fiend with my discovering of Troll and Toad, though, and I will be making more purchases for bulk commons and choice singles, as well as purchasing several boosters of Lords of Madness. Summers are kind of my live game season, as I run three groups from May-August. And after purchasing Fat Dragon 3D Tiles, I need more 3D characters to fill them!

If I had to speculate about the future of DDM, I think Lords of Madness will be the last true set and it'll end up a lot like how people have been wanting, packs specifically based on various common monsters like orcs, goblins, kobolds, drow, etc and then higher-priced packs centered around more obscure but desired monsters like illithids, liches, demons, devils, and the like. It just seems the natural evolution given what we're seeing.

 

[El Mahdi]

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[Alaxk Knight of Galt]

That's what I don't understand about this upcoming Orcus mini. The way they are releasing it ensures that demand will far exceed supply...but doesn't that mean that you are not selling to (and not making money from) a significant amount of people who want to buy it?

It just doesn't make sense to me. (Although I guess all of the above would mean having to completely ditch the random model - which to me just seems self limiting.)

So, here is my latest story. From this thread I learned of the Colossal Red Dragon (obviously, I behind the times when it comes to minis). Cool, I'd like to have that to go along with my gargantuan Black Dragon. So I charge amazon only to discover that it's going for $350 on the secondary markets. YIKES. I could see paying MSRP for ($80 or so), but $350! Sorry, I'll pass.

So I'm not sure what the WotC strategy is on their minis. What's the cost in keeping something like that in production. Wouldn't an iconic item such as that continue selling? Whatever the plan is, it confuses the heck out of me.

 

[amysrevenge]

So I'm not sure what the WotC strategy is on their minis. What's the cost in keeping something like that in production. Wouldn't an iconic item such as that continue selling? Whatever the plan is, it confuses the heck out of me.

Yeah, if WotC was actively involved in the secondary market I could see it, and I can even see that if you blindly applied the MtG model to DDM then it makes a kind of sense, but surely even a cursory evaluation would determine that the collectible natures of cards and minis (especially with the skirmish game framework removed from the minis) are different enough to warrant different marketing strategies. C-U-R-VR works fine for cards, but isn't suited to minis.

The only way that they could get me to buy new minis directly from a store would be to have them in small-ish open packs (like the PH series) or even in individual blisters. I'm sure thay they could do some sort of market research/testing to get a reasonable guess of how many of each mini to put out there to prevent a shelf full of unicorns turning stale...

 

[jasonbostwick]

I'm not in the toy business - this is mostly speculation based on snippets of what I've heard from Wizard's reps a few years back when they spoke more candidly about how miniature production worked.

I imagine that keeping minis in stock after the first run sells out is much like keeping a book in print. To bring the cost per unit down to a point where they make a decent profit on each mini sold, they need to produce a large number of figures per run.

The demand on a niche item like Orcus minis isn't the same as something like an iPad, where there is a factory constantly churning out new iPads to keep up with demand. Wizard's contracts out some factories in China to make a run of their minis, basing the size of the run on data from their previous sales figures (from the glut of Player's Handbook Series minis, evidently sometimes they overestimate). Once that run finishes, the molds and paint step routines are packed up and the factory is retooled to make something else. In all likelihood that 'something else' isn't even another line of minis - its Happy Meal toys or Kinderegg surprises.


This process finishes months before the minis are released to distributors.
(This is why suggestions that they produce mini packs that match up directly to a published adventure don't work - their mini production works on a much longer time frame than their book production).


Any sales feedback they recieve from the set can help them adjust print run sizes for the next set down the line, but can't help them if they've made too large or too small of a run. In a few cases (the Harbinger and Deathknell DDM sets, I believe, and one of the Star War's sets) WotC saw financial reasons to do a full reprint of the set, but these were large-scale reprints in response to a very high demand.

Selling out of a particular set of minis is exactly what Wizards wants to do to stay profitable. If they reprint a line and there isn't as much demand as they anticipated, they get stuck with a massive overstock that they can't get rid of and they lose money. (See TSR's Dragon Dice for an extreme example.)

I imagine that this was happening towards the end of the ICONS line - I picked up my Gargantuan Blue Dragon significantly reduced from MSRP three years after it had been released. Hell, you can still get them on Amazon.

With that sales data in mind, Wizard's is intelligent to limit the production of Orcus. Remember, Orcus almost didn't get produced at all because of the dwindling sales of the ICONS line. Orcus is a very niche figure - I'm a minis fan with a very large collection, right in their target audience, and I'm not really that interested in it.

 

[Alaxk Knight of Galt]

The only way that they could get me to buy new minis directly from a store would be to have them in small-ish open packs (like the PH series) or even in individual blisters. I'm sure thay they could do some sort of market research/testing to get a reasonable guess of how many of each mini to put out there to prevent a shelf full of unicorns turning stale...

The real puzzling thing is this though, these minis are beyond edition neutral, they are game neutral (assuming some sort of fantasy RPG). Play 1st, here some minis. Play 3rd, here are some minis. PF, no problem, buy the D&D minis. Want to get back some of that Lapsed DnD Player money (from an estimated 22.5 million possible players), here is a perfect opportunity.

There must be something behind this that my small mind just can't grasp.
Edit: Jason makes some interesting points...
Edit 2: Orcus holds very little interest for me (unlike the dragons). Does the WotC HPE module line end with an Orcus battle?

 

[frankthedm]

So, here is my latest story. From this thread I learned of the Colossal Red Dragon (obviously, I behind the times when it comes to minis). Cool, I'd like to have that to go along with my gargantuan Black Dragon. So I charge amazon only to discover that it's going for $350 on the secondary markets. YIKES. I could see paying MSRP for ($80 or so), but $350! Sorry, I'll pass.

Don't make assumptions on the secondary market based on Amazon & Ebay speculators. Those yahoos just spout prices at 2-4 times the going rate in hopes of finding someone desperate.

Here are the recent completed ebay auctions. Solid prices but that dragon is only $400 for the fool soon parted with his money.

16 Bids $165.00 4/11/2010 21:23
19 Bids $160.00 4/11/2010 19:10
1 Bid $150.00 4/7/2010 16:22
20 Bids $137.50 4/1/2010 19:31
23 Bids $180.00 3/30/2010 19:11
Buy It Now $160.00 3/30/2010 12:40
35 Bids $172.38 4/7/2010 10:15

Those who want one, I think Games Plus still has one in stock.

 

[jasonbostwick]

There are a few reasons that individually packaged minis aren't a good fit for Wizards.

With individually packaged minis WotC can't leverage the retail market beyond very specialized game stores - I can't imagine Barnes and Noble (or even the comic book shop where I used to buy my minis cases) wanting to stock a rack of dozens of seperate UPCs of minis. In the downtown area of my city, there are 4 hobby stores within walking distance of eachother that sell D&D books and D&D mini boosters, plus a chain bookstore that has a limited selection. Only one of these has the shelf space to stock larger lines of minis in the format Reaper uses.

The PHB Heroes sets and the last three forays into visible minis (with a randomized element) were able to get into stores because each set was one UPC - the retailer ordered a case and got one booster of each visible mini. To get individually packaged minis into most stores would probably require the same process.

Most retailers don't want to have to think about how many white dragon minis they should order and how many hobgoblin chiefs they should order. Unless the store owner is familiar with the game, they have no idea.

Beyond the retailer, Wizard's can't operate under the model that Reaper uses because of the differences in economies of scale that plastic models use vs. metal models. The mold for a metal miniature is fairly cheap, and you can do a fairly limited run of figures to pay back the cost of the cast. The steel mold used for plastic miniatures is a significantly larger expense, so print runs need to be much higher, as I alluded to in my previous post.

You can't make niche minis in plastic. The only way 'niche' minis got made in the randomized model was by subsidizing them with cheaper commons produced in bulk. The rarity model seems like it is a way to milk consumers into 'chasing' their most wanted figures, but it also reflects the differences in production cost per miniature. An orc grunt is one piece of plastic that has at max four steps of paint slapped on it. A Large Grey Dragon is four seperate pieces and a significantly more complex paint job.

A good example of the difference in materials necessitating a change in business model is Privateer Press. The Hordes/Warmachine line is a traditional metal miniatures line, with minis being sold individually. For their monsterpocalypse line of prepainted plastics, they went with the randomized booster model just because of the financial realities of having plastic shipped over from China vs. casting pewter minis in their warehouse.

 

[amysrevenge]

I can certainly see where you're coming from, jasonbostwick. Seems like they are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

 

[El Mahdi]

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