MerricB said:
That's part of the tradeoff that makes the Law work.
Look, mini companies have two choices with mini packaging. Say you make 8 miniatures, and you need $8 profit.
If you sell them randomly, you sell them in one booster, and charge $8 for it. The booster is sold, you get $8. The purchaser might not want all the minis, but that isn't your problem. If you sell them non-randomly, and the purchaser only wants 4 of them, you have to sell them for $2 each. You end up with four unsold minis, but you get the $8 profit.
The problem with the non-random solution is in what happens to those 4 unsold minis, because storing them costs! (Either you, or the retailer, or the distributor).
Here's an interesting comparison: the minis you don't want are like the monsters you don't want in a Monster Manual...
Cheers!
This is all true, as far as it goes. But in your example, when minis are packaged nonrandomly, the manufacturer can probably increase the number of minis sold to 6 or so out of 8, through market research and targeting the mini subjects to what customers actually want. This would be a welcome change to the current rather farcical situation (though to be fair, Blood War was a
great improvement on this front) in which classic, MM1 monsters are carefully rationed out between sets, in order to string roleplayers along and coax them into buying as much superfluous rubbish as possible in their increasingly cranky quest to get hold of a solid set of playing pieces. It's possible i'm imagining things here, but I even seem to recall a WotC rep on Maxminis a while back pretty much admitting that was their marketing strategy, correct me if i'm wrong.
Seriously, a large percentage of minis are padding. Some will become popular because they're powerful in the skirmish game, but in the final analysis, most skirmishers don't care what the mini looks like as long as the numbers on the card are big enough. Most minis of any set get relegated instantly to the spares bin, sadly enough.
If this manufacturer of yours needs to make $8 from his 8 minis, he has two options. He can use random distribution and coax the purchaser into paying $1 each for a bunch of minis that (if he's lucky!) he'll use a fraction of, or he can raise his prices to, say, $2 per mini, but do his damndest to only make minis that people actually want. Blind Freddie would have known that everyone was going to hate the Bluespawn Godslayer, for instance, or the Frost Dwarf, or the Kobold Monk when we already have piles of other kobolds. We didn't need them. We only need so many iterations of 'dwarf with axe' or 'elf with bow'. Yes, this cuts down the total size of the mini range, but only a small fraction of the range ever sees any use anyway, and a large percentage of the
theoretical range is out of print and therefore inaccessable to most casual purchasers. Non-random packaging, higher prices, a bit of bloody attention paid to what subjects people actually want, and a smaller range of minis that do not go permanently out of print at the end of their manufacturing runs (therefore not requiring displacer beast-esque reprints) would be my preference.
But of course that's all from my perspective, and I'm a roleplayer. I have a sneaking suspicion the DDM range is run by and for skirmish gamers these days. I'd have assumed that there was more customer base on the RPG side of things, personally, but I suppose WotC has done more market research than I have...
