Why Miniatures are Randomized

[DonTadow]

Compare that to Heroscape (35 or 40 products in 2 years) or Games Workshop (zillions of products).

I agree with your assessment. Those minis were created to fuel an entirely different game in the spirit of randomized cards in Magic the Gathering. I think its a great system. If you want a specific mini there are dozens of avenues you can go to where you pay a market driven price. This is much better than if WoTc was left up to pricing specific minis. You'd be paying at least $1 to $20 more for certain minis as opposed to what you can purchase them from from a resell shop.

BTW, I quoted the above because I"m pretty sure this is wrong. Heroscape only comes out with 5 to 10 products a year. And that may be guessing too high. But they use a different marketing strategy. They limit quanities and usually only sell certain products for a limited time. Thus manipulating demand.

 

[Drawmack]

I have seen a couple of good ideas in this thread:
1) Sell and adventure with a pack of minis that represent the NPCs and villians in that module. This could help both markets. People looking for an adventure spend the extra $10.00 to get the minis with this adventure over other adventures. Granted the d20l prohibits 3rd party manufacturers from packaging the adeventure and the minis together. However, no one can tell you that you cannot release two related products. So sell the adventure with the d20 logo and the minis pack with your adventure's logo. Proxy association and still allows the items to sell individually.

2) Why not save up, buy 200 random packs and open your own shop selling the contents individually? From some of the posts looks as if some people are already doing this. Heck if you're buying that many random packs you could probably contact WOTC directly and get them at a pretty deep discount allowing you to sell hordes of commons cheaper then people can even buy the random packs.

3) Something, I've been thinking of for a long time. While generally low quality and single color I can buy a pack or 100 plastic army men for a buck. Now these packs are randomized, i.e. the number of gunners is not garenteed. So if I'm setting up a battle scene I have to buy 10 packs, at the whopping investment of 10 bucks. So how about low quality, single color orcs, kobolds, goblinoids, skeletons, zombies, etc. sold the same way. How many people would pay for that, I know I would. Even if they are single color and all look the same how cool would it be to have the players leave the room for a minute and come back with the minis sitting at the edge of a cemetary containing 200 zombies and actually have the minis to represent them.

 

[rgard]

I have seen a couple of good ideas in this thread:
1) Sell and adventure with a pack of minis that represent the NPCs and villians in that module. This could help both markets. People looking for an adventure spend the extra $10.00 to get the minis with this adventure over other adventures. Granted the d20l prohibits 3rd party manufacturers from packaging the adeventure and the minis together. However, no one can tell you that you cannot release two related products. So sell the adventure with the d20 logo and the minis pack with your adventure's logo. Proxy association and still allows the items to sell individually.

2) Why not save up, buy 200 random packs and open your own shop selling the contents individually? From some of the posts looks as if some people are already doing this. Heck if you're buying that many random packs you could probably contact WOTC directly and get them at a pretty deep discount allowing you to sell hordes of commons cheaper then people can even buy the random packs.

3) Something, I've been thinking of for a long time. While generally low quality and single color I can buy a pack or 100 plastic army men for a buck. Now these packs are randomized, i.e. the number of gunners is not garenteed. So if I'm setting up a battle scene I have to buy 10 packs, at the whopping investment of 10 bucks. So how about low quality, single color orcs, kobolds, goblinoids, skeletons, zombies, etc. sold the same way. How many people would pay for that, I know I would. Even if they are single color and all look the same how cool would it be to have the players leave the room for a minute and come back with the minis sitting at the edge of a cemetary containing 200 zombies and actually have the minis to represent them.

You can get a bag of unpainted single pose zombies that go with the game zombies.

 

[Raven Crowking]

When the subject of randomized miniatures -- or randomized anything, really -- comes up (e.g. Dear Hasbro), almost everyone characterizes it as an evil marketing ploy to take people's money.

Well, of course it's a marketing ploy to take people's money. Hence

No matter how much you may want something different, the economics of the game business simply won't allow another model to succeed at D&D's level. (And by "succeed," I don't just mean "make money for WotC." I also mean "get minis into the hands of gamers who want them.")​

The rest of the post, so far as I can tell, is an elaborate discussion of why another business model will make less money for WotC, and hence motivate WotC less to make non-randomized minis (thus not getting them "into the hands of gamers who want them").

Recognizing that something is driven by marketing is not, btw, the same as claiming that it is "evil".

Nor does this negate the general idea that the minis one finds undesireable are subsidizing the minis one does find desireable. If I buy a pack of 8 minis and get only three I can use in my game, the price of those three minis is actually higher than what it seems to be. Of course, I can trade them or sell them, hoping to recoup my loss. The point is that, in order to get those three minis, it is my loss, either because I had to buy the 8, or because I bought them through the secondary market (where someone else was trying to recoup their loss). In some cases, depending upon the minis I want and the market availability, I might actually get them for less than going rate.....which is why the secondary market is (or can be) such a good place to get goblins and orcs.

It is a fact that any good business model includes attempts to limit liability. You also want to maximize profit. If you can spend $20 to make either A or B, and A sells for $40 while B sells for $25, investing in A as far as the market will bear is a no-brainer, while B becomes (at best) a secondary concern.

 

[Estlor]

How hot do you heat the water?

My experience with action figures is this:

Very soft plastic (the kind that loses it's form under it's own weight) can be reshaped with hot tap water alone. Some of the harder yet still flexible plastic (such as the kind used in DDM) can be reshaped using this method, but only if the amount of reshaping is minor.

Most plastics become malleable when exposed to boiling water for a short period of time. You'll find you can even shove pins and paper clips into plastic that has been boiled (in fact, that's a good way to repair broken weapons in display action figures).

Cold tap water is typically enough to reset plastic, but if you're especially concerned (or if you need it to be very hard for some reason), a few minutes in the freezer will have it hard again.

 

[kenobi65]

Most plastics become malleable when exposed to boiling water for a short period of time.

Yup, that's my experience with the D&D minis. Hot tap water (which is somewhere around 140 degrees F, depending on where your water heater is set) isn't really hot enough. I use boiling water, and tongs to dip the mini into the water for about 5 seconds; that's usually enough to make the plastic malleable. And, in a lot of cases, this causes the mis-shapen item to spring back into its normal position (i.e., the shape it was molded into). Then, I run the mini under cold tap water for 10 seconds or so, making sure to hold the mis-shapen bit in the position I want.

About the only time this hasn't worked has been an incredibly botched TIE Fighter I just got in a pack of Star Wars Starships. The "solar panels", which are supposed to be flat hexagonal panels, were bent like those cup-shaped Tostitos. It took several rounds of heating to get them anywhere close to flat, and I think it still looks bad.

 

[Garnfellow]

I have seen a couple of good ideas in this thread:
1) Sell and adventure with a pack of minis that represent the NPCs and villians in that module. This could help both markets. People looking for an adventure spend the extra $10.00 to get the minis with this adventure over other adventures. Granted the d20l prohibits 3rd party manufacturers from packaging the adeventure and the minis together. However, no one can tell you that you cannot release two related products. So sell the adventure with the d20 logo and the minis pack with your adventure's logo. Proxy association and still allows the items to sell individually.

Paizo's Compleat Encounters line packaged miniatures and adventures together. (I thought it was produced using the d20 license, but maybe it was OGL after all.) I would be curious to learn if the line was financially successful. I don't think there are any new products planned, which might give us a clue.

(I ran the Dark Elf Sanctum last night, with some success. The Mike Mearls adventure was pretty good, and the miniatures were outstanding -- a shame I didn't have time to paint them. All-in-all, I thought it was money very well spent. I'll probably pick up a couple more sets.)

 

[mmadsen]

One thing that I found interesting was that distributors way back then were very upset with the large amount of product numbers they had. I got to see a lot of concept models that they wanted to release, but never did because they had to keep the product numbers as low as possible. That's partly why they moved to the plastic regiment sets.

Having a large number of SKUs (stock keeping units or product numbers) causes terrible, terrible inventory problems that are hard to appreciate if you've never had to manage inventory. In addition to the obvious work of tracking more products, there's the problem of having to stock more inventory because you never quite know how much you need of any one SKU.

Let me put this in gamer terms. Imagine our Evil Overlord summons an army, and he expects to assemble 1d20 goblin scouts, 1d20 hobgoblin heavy infantry, 1d20 human barbarians, 1d20 skeletons with scimitars, 1d20 zombies, and 1d20 wraiths. If he goes to the hobby shop to buy miniatures for his army, he might naturally buy 10 of each kind (SKU) of figure -- but then he'll have too many of each type half the time and too few half the time, and he might be off by a large margin in each case. To have a 95% chance of having enough figures of each type, and to avoid another trip to the store, he needs to buy 19 of each.

If he uses generic figures (chess pawns?), he needs enough to represent 6d20 figures. He can have a 95% chance of having enough by buying a few more than his estimated need (of 33). He doesn't need to order 95% of 120, because he can pool the randomness. He's not likely to need lots of everything.

And that's the quandry faced by the hobby shop, which doesn't know which figures will end up popular (with its customers, when the figures come out). With hundreds of different SKUs, it ends up buying much, much more inventory than it can justify, or it skips the product line entirely, knowing it can't make the money back (at least not in a timely manner).

 

[kenobi65]

And that's the quandry faced by the hobby shop, which doesn't know which figures will end up popular (with its customers, when the figures come out). With hundreds of different SKUs, it ends up buying much, much more inventory than it can justify, or it skips the product line entirely, knowing it can't make the money back (at least not in a timely manner).

My FLGS, Games Plus in Mount Prospect, IL, has an amazing selection of minis, from all sorts of manufacturers. They have a big GW selection, a big Reaper selection, a lot of Privateer Press, Iron Wind, Rackham, etc., etc. From the standpoint of me wanting to go in and find the perfect mini for a particular character, it's great. But, I'm sure it means that they wind up with a massive amount of cash tied up in their inventory. I know that they've got minis that have been hanging on their pegs for many years (they still have a surprising number of Ral Partha minis, for example).

 

[Drawmack]

You can get a bag of unpainted single pose zombies that go with the game zombies.

You quoted my entire post just to say that? From where, I'd buy them in a hearbeat.