MerricB said:
The main expense of the product is not distribution.
It's storage.
Under your suggestion, the digester would never be made at all. It costs too much, and too much risk - if it were sold, it would be extremely expensive.
Look at it this way: you have bought 7 miniatures for a low price with an added extra digester rather than 8 miniatures you need for a higher price...
Cheers!
Yeah. Who was it who said that you can't really expect a company to turn a profit off of selling their products solely online? I don't know who said it, but I know it was someone in the business. Possibly from a smaller press company? Wish I could remember.
But yeah, for $1.25 a miniature, getting a couple that you don't want isn't really a big deal. Look at it this way:
The average Chainmail figure was $3.99. So for $10, you could only get 2 blisters, and pay half the price of a third blister (For the sake of argument, let's say it's a blister containing two small creatures, like a Gnome Infiltrator, and that you can buy one of those small creatures for half the price of the blister). Ok, so you get 3 miniatures for $10, 2 medium-size critters and 1 small.
But with this, you get 8 miniatures for $10, ranging in size from small, to medium, to large. Miniatures which A) Are already painted, so if you're not one to paint you've been saved a load of time right there, and B) Even if they do come in more than one piece, are a LOT easier to glue than pewter figures, so you don't have to spend hours gluing figures together.
Now, would it be a safe assumption to say that, for the most part, people are likely to find at least 3 miniatures in each expansion pack of creatures that they normally use? Personally, I think it's a likelihood that people will get, on average, at least 3 miniatures of monsters that they would normally use. So how is this worse? You end up getting 3 miniatures you normally use (Which you can get by buying those 3 Chainmail figures for $10), and 5 others essentially for free. And hey, even if you've never used a Digester before, who says you can't use one in the future? I certainly can see a lot of DM's who've never used certain monsters getting the miniature for it, and then getting an idea of how they can integrate the critter into their next game. If nothing else, it'd throw the players for a loop, the DM getting unpredictable and using monsters he's never before used.
And at the end of the day, if you just don't want that Digester, then just trade it for something you do want from someone else.
IMO, I don't think the randomness issue is a big deal. They're cheap enough that I can live with getting the occasional dog here and there (Like that Azer. The paint job on him looks like total crap). And I fully expect a Secondary Market to spring up at my local game stores, which'll allow me to buy any specific miniatures which I want at Dirt Cheap prices. Assuming the first expansion pack doesn't scare me off with crappily painted miniatures and bent plastic weapons a la HeroClix, I expect to have a couple dozen of these guys by the end of the first month of their release. Some bought through expansion packs, and others bought loose from my FLGS for a quarter a pop. My DM will likely do the same. He'll also probably take special notice of any monster miniatures which he gets but has never seen used in a D&D game before, and start coming up with ideas of how to use them in his campaign.