It's worth noting that we had about 6 years worth of D&D Minis at a fairly rapid pace; that's a pretty impressive run.
I think the pace is what harmed the lines, ultimately. I am not sure when the Glut hit - though I
am very sure that someone from Diamond Comic Distributors Inc. could tell you
precisely when that moment occurred.
My guess is that the timing was about the same time as the announcement of 4E at Gencon in 2007, though that does not necessarily mean that the 3E to 4E transition was the cause. I think it was more coincidence than anything.
I think that the fact that I can still buy
War of the Dragon Queen boosters at MSRP tells me that the glut happened about then. WotC would have been better served to have reduced the numbers of minis sold to distributors to ensure that scarcity of the retail boosters continued. That when something went Out of print - it meant "no longer available at retail" not - "no longer available from the manufacturer".
For example, it is nigh impossible to find boosters form the first five sets or so of DDM. Any boosters prior to War of the Dragon Queen are also very hard to find from any source.
But after that point in time? Not so.
Had WotC scaled back the development pace, or alternatively, had reduced the numbers of boosters they released per expansion, they might not have saturated the market as badly as they had and the whole thing might have stumbled on through the release of 4E.
That said, I expect that there were economies of scale and continuous production issues that militated in favor of the brisk pace they released DDMS at. I can well imagine that the infrastructure and the # of employees involved in designing and arranging for the production of DDM and SW minis became a fixed cost for Wizards, and to get the most value out of those fixed costs, increasing the production numbers and rapidity of product releases seemed a
very good idea at the time.
I also expect that production facilities were more cheaply arranged by Hasbro with the promise of more or less uninterrupted production runs, from one set to the next.
In short - there probably appeared to be very good reasons at the time to release the products in the volumes that they released them in and at the pace they were released at. It was only in hindsight when the oversaturation hit that WotC realized that supply was far outstripping demand more than they had planned. But at that point, I think it became too late to do anything about it when the 3E/4E effect hit them as well.
After that, it was all over but the crying.
On a happier note, having decided to run a
Star Wars: Saga Edition campaign since January, I've been buying Star Wars minis at quite a brisk pace. And I assure you, the numbers of Star Wars minis available in the secondary market for RPG use is - in a word -
AWESOME.
I have amassed a collection of about well over 1,000 minis now in the past three months for... $480? something like that. And less than a 10th of those were bought as randoms. I've bought hundreds and hundreds of commons and uncommons. And seeing as I have had the pick of production across 16 lines, let me assure you - that is a very healthy and EXTREMELY usable selection of minis to play a Star Wars RPG campaign with.
I'm
damned pleased with my SW minis collection - which is a FAR more usable mini collection for gaming purposes than my DDM collection is. I just wish I could pick up DDMs for as cheap as SW minis. *sigh* I've become spoiled, I fear.
