So we were chatting on Twitter this morning about miniatures from Wizards of the Coast. Once again the conversation of “Why can’t WotC produce awesome theme packs of monsters, rather than random boosters?” came up.
The reason is simple: they’d roll snake eyes on that gamble.
The fact is, Wizards isn’t really making enough money on miniatures as it is, and the randomized format is the most profitable format. Part of that is losing the D&D Miniatures game, so a consumer base dried up (not everyone moved on to the RPG like I did.) Part of that is rising oil costs (the plastic that creates those minis comes from oil.) Part of that is rising cost of production/distribution (they’re hand-painted, then shipped across the Pacific.) Part of that is lower sales (how many different kobold sculpts is anyone really going to buy, not to mention the “rare” issue discussed in today’s miniatures preview on the D&D website.)
I always refer back to Merric’s Law of Miniatures: Non-Random Packaging, Cheap Prices, and a Large Range of Figures: Choose two. I’ve seen the law amended to adding in (or replacing “large range of figures” with) Pre-Painted.
This is key to understanding why we can’t have an “Orcs Pack” or “Skeletons Pack.” Reaper Miniatures has been trying an experiment to sell theme packs. If you take a look at Miniatures Market’s website, you’ll see the issue: http://www.miniaturemarket.com/legendary_encounters1
You can buy a pack of Orcs. 3 identical ones. For $5.25 USD (MSRP: $6.99.) They’re all, at best, uncommon quality paint jobs. So you get the non-random packaging, and the pre-painted, but you sacrifice range of figures and cost. If you spent a little bit of time on eBay you could spend that same $5.25 and get a better selection.
And that was what WotC had been relying on for quite a while. The secondary distribution channel kept costs down, eliminated the problem of randomness, and they produced the large range of pre-painted figures.
Then the D&D Miniatures game failed. Well, technically it didn’t “fail” since it still exists today, but the number of players plummeted over the years, making that channel which was vital to the line’s economics dry up. If the Minis game was still popular, who knows? Perhaps WotC would have the ability to change distribution. It’s still doubtful, since now they’re just suffering trying to produce them at all, but who knows?
The key is going to be replacing that distribution channel. I firmly believe that is why they’ve moved away from Star Wars, taken on Heroscape, and started producing D&D board games containing unpainted recasts of previous sculpts. They’re trying to save the D&D Miniatures line. I keep encouraging people who love those little pieces of plastic to support these games. Buy whatever you can afford out of your gaming budget from these lines. If you don’t, plastic minis will be replaced with cardboard tokens by the time the calendar reads 2012.
To be honest, I’m normally not a collectable kind of person. I never bothered with Magic:The Gathering or any of those card games or even any other miniatures game specifically because of the random “gotta get them all” nature of those games. The D&D Minis game started as a way for me to get in some D&D when I was getting none at all, and snowballed for me (I now have near 2,000 D&D minis. Yeah…I know…) Personally, I actually embrace and enjoy the random nature of these minis. It’s kind of like my birthday every time I open a box, though sometimes my birthdays suck ;-)
Now I know some people make the argument “Well, if they allowed me to buy exactly what I want, I could afford, and would be more apt, to buy more.” The problem is, you wouldn’t. You’d buy exactly as many as you need, then you’d stop. How many of those Reaper packs would you realistically buy? Probably one or two of each of the orc packs if you’re being honest. Even if you bought 2 packs of each you’d have 18 orc minis, and only 3 different sculpts. You’d also have spent $31.50 on 18 uncommons. I’ll bet you could do better on eBay. You’d never pay what it would cost for a nice rare. Look at that Red Dragon from Reaper. It’s not even in the same ballpark with the ones produced by WotC. Yet it still costs what 3 orcs do. Trust me, it wouldn’t be that cheap if you bought a WotC quality one.
No one would ever buy enough of the theme packs to allow the line to survive. Tons of product would sit on the shelf unsold. A huge reason why WotC couldn’t do non-random in the past is because game stores refuse to carry non-random SKUs. They know they won’t sell enough and will be stuck with product. This is why the Beholders and Orcus are limited edition print runs. They’re only going to produce up to a few less than they can actually sell. Wizards gets to sell a product people want, and stores don’t refuse to carry it for fear they’ll be left holding the bag.
Again, with a line like Heroscape, where there is another market segment being served, you can maybe get away with fully visible boosters, and WotC is trying. It’s either that or you need to go and buy singles from resellers, whether that is a store like Miniatures Market, or eBay. Either way Wizards needs a bigger distribution of product if the line is to survive. It’s unfortunate, I know. I firmly believe that if it were possible to sell minis non-randomly, with rare quality, and covering every possible creature in every book that they would. They simply can’t, so they won’t.
You touch only briefly on the stocking issues inherent with nonrandomized minis, and those are really at the core of Merric’s Law, so I think its worth throwing in my angry 2 cents.
The reason that retailers don’t like the non random mini products is this. Suppose WotC comes out with several mini packs: A Gang of Goblins, A Bunch of Bugbears, A Lot of Lizardfolk, A K…something of Kobolds, An Orgy of Orcs, etc. Each one of those needs it own shelf space, otherwise customers will tear the shelves apart trying to get at the one they are looking for. That’s a lot of space a retailer doesn’t want to give up to stocking the same product.
But the problem is that Lizardfolk just aren’t as popular as Orc Orgies (or whatever). So, over time, the stores sell out of Orc Orgies and are left with a lot of Lots of Lizardfolk. The store doesn’t want to restock because they have minis on hand – one pack is the same as another in the accounting books – so they put out more and more Lizardfolk Lots to replace all of the other packs that sell. The Lizardfolk never sell and the store never restocks. When a product becomes a hassle for a retailer, who values shelf-space highly, they drop the product.
WotC doesn’t want this situation either. First of all, they don’t want to piss off their retailers and second of all, the retailers won’t restock the good stuff if the less popular sets aren’t moving. So, WotC won’t be able to move them. Moreover, WotC doesn’t want a situation where its customers can’t go to the store and find Orc Orgies and Goblin Gangs because all the stores have are Lizardfolk Lots. WotC can avoid the situation by allowing the retailer to exchange unsold packs for new stock, but all that means is WotC eats the cost of the unsold packs instead of the retailer.
The difference between a popular line and an unpopular line doesn’t even have to be that great to create this problem. Unless the different packs sell at exactly the same rate in each store, you will eventually get a situation in which the store is left with Swarms of Slaads and won’t restock the Dearth of Devils pack until the Slaads sell.
P.S.: This is probably a big part of the reason that the single visible mini packs didn’t help the situation. How many times did you go to buy a pack and say “but I already have the giant R&B singing plant, I want the one with the giant beholder,” dig through the shelves, and then decide you didn’t need new minis right now.
Yup. Well said Angry!
If any game stores are reading this: I think there’s a real business opportunity for selling an ‘upgrade pack’ for the Ravenloft (and other) board games. Essentially, sell the Ravenloft game, and for an extra $XX.XX, add on a pack of painted versions of all of the supplied (unpainted) miniatures. I know I, for one, am totally uninterested in an unpainted version of Ravenloft, and a number of folks I’ve talked to have agreed that while it’s an intriguing product, the cheap appearance is a turn-off.
Just thought I’d share that. :)
Anyway, my thinking is that Wizards has a pretty simple choice ahead of them: Start selling nonrandom miniatures, or stop selling miniatures entirely. I have nothing but respect for folks who collect D&D minis, but as Alio said, unless you start growing in number there’s not going to be enough inventory moving to make it worth Wizards’ while. Hasbro has dealt with the ‘nobody wants [action figure x]’ problem for decades now, there’s no reason why they can’t impart some of that inventory expertise into their subsidiary… it’s hardly an intractable problem.
Thank you for taking the time to lay out all this information. As I said on Twitter, I’m not an economist, so what do I know :)
I would still love to see minis sold as individuals or at least in packs, even if that’s a pipe-dream. I would settle for individual minis that were unpainted, or perhaps a pack that contained one painted mini and a handful of unpainted of the same type. If retailer shelf space is an issue, why doesn’t WotC’s parent company lay out some cash to set up a warehouse and online store for D&D stuff? Everyone and his brother has an online storefront these days. (I’m being somewhat facetious here)
I guess I wouldn’t have as much to complain about with the random packs if the monsters or rarities meshed with the other D&D products. For instance, assembling all the miniatures for just the first published 4e adventure, Keep on the Shadowfell, is quite difficult. The appropriate minis are spread out across multiple different lines of minis and the “rarity” of some makes them difficult or expensive to acquire. (I concede that this isn’t the best argument as H1 came out even before the rules were released and no line of minis was produced to support it, but I feel it’s representative of just that problem: minis not tying in with products written to use them).
It is particularly problematic when you look at 4e encounter design: Minions are heavily emphasized in 4e, but the miniatures line doesn’t meet the demand for the number of minion miniatures you often need. I think the rarity and decision of what miniatures are included in a line also needs to be tweaked or reevaluated. Why, for instance, is a Skeletal Tiefling (Savage Encounter) a common mini? Do characters really run into that many undead Tieflings? In some cases, it feels like the “common” minis are just the “boring” minis and the “rare” ones are “cool” minis, but perhaps that’s just personal opinion. (And, to be honest, that is the case for a lot of earlier sets because rarity was somewhat tied to the power/usefulness of the miniature in the miniature game, not the rpg.)
Anyway, those are my rambling thoughts on the issue.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, I’m definitely going to pick up Castle Ravenloft, both because I think it sounds cool and because of all the minis. I just wish it wasn’t so expensive… it seems like the price point on their boardgames is a little high.
Great article–something that I am really concerned with as well–specifically, as I bring my nine year old sons friends into the game–minis really matter to these kids–they build characters based on figures, the react to monsters with real feelings–if we move to tokens these kids are not going to dig the game nearly as much.
> The secondary distribution channel kept costs down,
I am not sure about this–I bet if I looked at it over time, my cost per mini was higher buying individual figures online, particularly if I included shipping. But that is fine because I am getting exactly the beholder that I want. I am willing to pay more for that.
> eliminated the problem of randomness,
Amen. and again, I will pay more for that.
> and they produced the large range of pre-painted figures.
i do not understand this point. The ‘secondary distribution channel’ is eBay in your example above, right? I have not purchased any hand painted old school lead mini’s online–and the sites that do sell them often sell very uniquely hand painted one of a kind type figures, which is not really what I think we are talking about…I thinking i am missing this third point.
During the discussion on Twitter, I brought up a few points, which I’ll mention here.
Stuart Robertson brought up the fact that army men are cheap, but as you stated, they’re not painted. Also, with Army men, kids buy tons of them. If you were given the opportunity to buy a bag of orcs, even 50 orcs, you’d only buy one bag, ever. We take care of our minis a lot better than any kid takes care of their army men. With kids, they’ll mow through army men, leaving them in the sandbox, blowing them up and melting them, etc. With minis, we handle them with care to avoid messing them up.
I must say, this post and the associated comments made me think about the way minis are sold in a way I hadn’t before, and it totally makes sense. It also makes a lot of sense that they’re doing these D&D board games; they have some mass appeal, and you can buy and play them without necessarily being interested in D&D, but a D&D player is going to get the game as well as a whole host of minis and tiles, all grouped along a specific theme (undead/horror for Ravenloft, presumably more traditional fantasy threats in Ashardalon). Either customer gets value, and Wizards sells a bunch of minis in a different format, and possibly gets some customers out of the deal.
What it also gives some insight into is the fact that more of their products in the upcoming year and a half are going to include sheets of cardstock counters, and why. If the minis line is effectively failing, then the fans are being done a disservice in a way. D&D is very much a minis-based RPG, and if the minis aren’t out there to buy because not enough people are buying them, then a lot of people are going to be upset, even if they weren’t going to buy most of those minis anyway. It makes the game, as a whole, a little less attractive and harder to get started with, and WotC doesn’t want that. Thus, the cardboard counters. If you can buy a monster book and know that you’re going to have an attractive and durable representation of each monster in the book right there in the box, that’s a big selling point.
Further, I can see WotC selling counter packs on their own, in much the same way that they sell Dungeon Tiles, for a similar price point. They could be grouped along thematic lines (common threats such as orcs and goblins, big stuff like dragons, giants, and so forth, creatures of the Far Realm, fey threats, etc.), and if the packaging were similar to the Dungeon Tiles sets, it would help to mitigate the shelf space issue (they can be shelved with the books, and you can see what each set is on the “spine”.
I would totally buy that product. Food for thought.
@yatesc: I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there isn’t a single person who wouldn’t prefer a pack of painted minis for the boardgames. That includes every person in Wizards’ offices. If the minis were painted though, they’d be so expensive no one would buy the box. I don’t really have the time, but I’ll bet if I were to add the original average cost of each of those minis in the Ravenloft set, the total would be significantly more than the set itself. The Dracolich in the box right now, according to ABPrices.com, is at minimum $39.50 USD. Granted, that’s with current rarity and such, but even when the set was released it was a ~$20.00USD. That’s one single mini available in the Ravenloft set.
As for Hasbro imparting their figure-selling expertise, there is a huge difference between D&D (or any minis game) and Hasbro action figures: potential market. RPGers like to think we’re a significant number, but in reality, we’re a niche market. While it might “feel” like there are a lot of us, there aren’t. Not when compared to the number of kids who will buy a Han Solo or Snake Eyes or Optimus Prime figure. We don’t even constitute enough of a market to convince a store like Target to stock our “toys” in their aisles. Sad, but true. Actually, they even carry Yu-Gi-Oh, but nothing D&D-related including minis.
@Kato: I understand your frustration. Trust me. I’d love to have specific minis that correspond to my needs. Even with the near two thousand minis I own, I still lack many I’d like to have. I actually have a list of minis I still desire.
The unfortunate thing is, those Skeletal Tieflings are crappy, but they allow the set to not cost $1000 to collect. Those weak sculpt/paint job figures are quick to develop and manufacture, therefore, they leave development and manufacturing resources for the gorgeous Sorrowsworn Reaper.
I don’t think even selling direct to the consumer would work out. First off, WotC relies heavily on their distributors. It’s a sacred relationship that I highly doubt Wizards would want to jeopardize. Even if they were willing to step on those toes, there’s no way they’d do that to their stores. Gaming stores are Wizards’ lifeblood. If WotC starts bypassing them, they run the risk that the stores will decide they can make better margins on Pathfinder and Warhammer.
I’m strongly leaning towards buying Ravenloft myself. I own all the minis in it (painted) and I really don’t like interlocking tiles (I own the Descent boardgame and don’t like them) but it just seems like such a cool idea and I’d like to support the line.
@david.schwarm: Yes, kids are a significant market. “When we were kids we didn’t need no stinkin’ minis” but today, kids kind of do. They’re far more visual than we were. Plus, 4E is predicated on having them on the table.
Regarding the secondary market keeping costs down, you’re thinking in terms of single individual miniatures. You have to look at overall costs. Did you get that rare more economically by never having bought a booster? You may have bought an entire case and still not got one, which would mean you spent more than $100USD and never got what you want. Then you have to factor in the far reduced cost of commons and uncommons. There was a time when I was buying loads of commons for 5 cents each. I bought whole lots of things like goblins for $1.
As for paying more for non-randomness, how much more would you pay? 5 times the current cost? As I said above, the Dracolich was in the $20-range when it was new. Would you pay that? Would you buy multiples? You’d have to in order to make the line feasible (and that would only be if WotC went with a direct distribution system introducing the problems listed above.)
I’m not sure where you’re coming from on the last point. WotC produces pre-painted plastic miniatures, and a wide range of them. The random booster model allows that. If they were theme packs they’d be more expensive, as I showed with my Reaper Legendary Encounters example. Plus there would be far less variety in the figures offered, as the Reaper example also shows.
@Mark: Great points. We could have a whole bag of repeated common-quality sculpts without paint, but how many people would be satisfied with that? And how many would any one person realistically purchase? Again, sheer number of consumers of the potential product would make them unprofitable.
@Brian Engard: I’m glad this gave you a different perspective. That was really my goal from the start. It’s really easy for us to speculate on what would be feasible but WotC surely knows better than we do. It’s in their best interest to make a product their consumer market desires. If they could produce theme packs profitably, I am one hundred percent certain they would.
You’re absolutely right that it’s critical to the current version of the game to sell something and if they have to, they’ll sell tokens (which they will be and have previously.) Again, I envision Heroscape as the real focal point for continued plastic. They’ll have to sell a lot though, since those boosters are fully visible. I strongly encourage anyone who likes plastic minis to support Heroscape as much as they fiscally can.
Angry DM hits on the most fundamental problem driving the whole process. Retailers refer to SKU fatigue in talking about any type of miniatures line and it’s a huge problem for both them and the manufacturers. Take a look at Privateer Press’s Warmachine game: There are over 30 individual SKUs (each with is own package, some in blisters needing a rack, others in boxes) for each faction and there are 6 factions (including mercs). That’s a huge amount of shelf/wall space to dedicate to that one line and each item really needs to be visible because stuff that isn’t immediately visible does not sell well. What that means is that a store needs a lot square footage to have an adequate stock and that square footage is generally very expensive unless you’re located in the middle of nowhere or in the hood – neither of which is conducive to long term success. That is the reason why game store owners love CCGs and other randomized games: they greatly reduce the number of individual SKUs they have to stock to support a line and encourage repeat purchases, which keeps the lights on and feeds the owner’s family. Boxes & blisters of lizard men nobody bought don’t.
@MJ Harnish: thanks for adding that information. My post was already over 1,000 words so I had to reduce the amount I delved into any particular thing. Plus, I don’t have deep insight into stores’ perspective, I’m just aware of the general problem.
@Alio – As someone totally uninformed on the Minis game, this entire discussion has been really interesting, thanks for leading it.
I had always assumed—perhaps foolishly—that Minis worked roughly the same as Magic. All the cards cost the same amount to produce (except foil, but stay with me here), but packs sell for significantly higher prices than the cost of 15 times Cost Per Card. (Not begrudging them that! Development is expensive, and profit is good.) I had assumed that Minis were the same way, where an ounce of plastic and a bit of paint costs the same, regardless of whether it goes into a rare mini or a common one. In the same way that you buy a pack of 15 Magic cards, you were buying a pack of X ounces of plastic and paint. But now I’m hearing that not all minis are painted the same way, even within size groups? (e.g. a rare medium mini has fancier paint than a common medium mini) I had no idea!
@yastec: Yes, there are more “paint steps” involved with progressively higher-level miniatures. Commons get the least, uncommons get more, rare more than both of them. I assume the new “very rare” will add even further paint steps to the process, at least, they had better otherwise I’m not seeing a real draw for even more elusive pieces.
My group uses Warhammer Fantasy figures for our D&D sessions. Sure, they can be expensive and need to be assembled and painted (which I feel is the best part of the hobby. I prefer modeling to actually playing Warhammer.), but they suit D&D’s needs perfectly.
Just a few examples…
Orcs and Goblins – orcs, goblins, trolls, giants, giant spiders, worgs
Vampire Counts – zombies, skeletons
Warriors of Chaos – evil looking fighters/clerics
Ogre Kingdoms – ogres (d’uh)
Every army has lord and hero models that can easily be used for PC models of every race (human, elf, dwarf, etc).
@Mike The other DM in my group uses Warhammer minis. He loves to model, paint, hand draw poster maps, etc. I love how they come out but I just don’t have the patience to do the work myself. I’ve considered at least buying Reaper and painting them, but I’d never get around to it. Coincidentally, I mentioned considering getting into painting minis on Free RPG Day this past weekend to my wife. Her answer was simply a groan.
I stopped buying random packs when they reduced the number of minis in them without reducing the price point and I really miss them. I mostly buy singles now (thankfully, I live about twelve miles down the road from miniaturemarket) but my favorite thing about random packs was opening them up to find something super cool that I never would have thought to buy.