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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9629225" data-attributes="member: 7044704">Last I'd heard, Reaper does some Bones casting themselves, but they lack the capacity to fulfill the big KS projects in-house and rely on Chinese sources for that.  That may have changed in the last three years or so, that's the last time I paid much attention to what was going one with them.  They've also been doing contract casting for other companies for years, which might see a spike in demand as people look for US sources.Perhaps we are wandering afield from RPGs a bit, so I'll leave this with one final set of responses.  If you care to start a thread elsewhere it might be worth pursuing further, but this is probably the wrong site for it in terms of reader base.  Certainly, but your standards (and mine, to a lesser degree) aren't for everyone.  A lot of gamers just want inexpensive figs to put on the table so they can play, and a big chunk of the STL market is aimed at catering to them.  Odds are many of those figs will never see a lick of paint (which isn't my thing, but it works for many people) but they also aren't costing (say) GW prices so there's less motivation to invest more time and effort into finishing them.Cheap printing is also a perfectly serviceably way to do meeples and similar low-def tokens, and I could see some board game publishers experimenting with offering free STL files with a no-frills game for those who want to print something slightly fancier.  Sort of the same approach the early Kill Doctor Lucky printings used.Printing in resin will get you much better detail, but as you said they're trickier to do yourself and have with the same durability issues as cast resins always have.  Maybe worse even, since part of the reason to print them in the first place is to create shapes that even a complex traditional mold can't manage.    I remain unconvinced by Siocast myself, but at the same time the early "white Bones" material was pretty dire too and they've improved materials steadily at the cost of higher prices for better material.  And even white Bones has suitable subjects - if it's a big, fairly smooth shape without much fine surface detailing you might as well pay less for the thing. I go back closer to 50, but I'll admit I was a dabbler for the first decade or so when I started working for a resin casting company.  Never was much of a collector, I was a paint-and-sell for the next few projects guy up until I lost an eye and most of my painting ability.Sure, but those deals are temporary and tied to FOMO.  They often retain good-to-excellent value post-crowdfunding (Wargames Atlantic springs to mind, as do the "Nickstarter" stuff from Brigade), but it's still a narrow window for the very best pricing - and the risk of crowdfunded fulfillment, of course.  I've been burned by enough of that that I don't take those chances any more.Nice to see that some folks still understand the merits of really good modular plastics even as other companies (eg GW) drift away from the concept, though.Yeah, D&L are doing a good job all around.  They'll certainly wind up in a better position than many companies with this mess - at least assuming no other random chaos intrudes, like a sudden invasion from one of their neighbors.  Fingers crossed against that. Yeah, absolutely.  I expect to lose a lot of smaller casters and distribution (what there is of it) is going be a mess going forward.  Some companies will be hit harder than others simply because of where they are, where their main market is, and their production techniques, but that's true of pretty much every business in the world now.At least we got to live through what was arguably the Golden Age of Miniatures, and if we're lucky we might see what arises from the ashes.  The minis hobby will survive in some form - just like roleplaying can't be killed outright.</blockquote>

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