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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jasonbostwick" data-source="post: 5151032" data-attributes="member: 34924">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.</blockquote>

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