hogarth wrote: But right now it looks like another of Lago's "why make billions when we can make...MILLIONS!!" business plans.
OK so a mass manufactured run of models is almost certainly ALWAYS going to be cheaper to print than a print on demand run.
But here is the thing.
That does not make it more profitable.
As already mentioned there is shipping, damaged stock, and the risk of poor sales of that print run.
Then you can add in failure to supply unexpected demand, or demand in specific regions or over a long period of time.
Print on demand may not have higher profits
in a best case scenario but as long as your base cost/profits margin is doable it will always be the
more stable and reliable business model.
And this is the really big thing here, be it for your "young turk" scenario, the "old gaming company catches on to a good idea scenario" and my own "how an individual franchise outlet should do this" scenario.
And I think that the last scenario, the individual franchise outlet is very much one of the most important in WHY this is a viable model.
GW and other miniatures gaming stores are INCREDIBLY UNSTABLE BUSINESSES.
From the "main branch" perspective you are running giant cheap print runs of crap and just selling them to a hungry maw of a vague and uncertain size.
From the individual store owner/manager's perspective though you are purchasing and storing a HUGE value of miniatures. The overhead costs alone to stock a store with miniatures are HUGE, and the value of those miniatures leaches away with dropping interest in older stocks and ridiculous theft and stock damage rates.
The risk of dropping a miniatures store into the red with just a few runs of "bad" stock no one wants, a major robbery event, a repeated failure to fill orders due to a surly distributor, or just a bad couple of months while your huge rotting capital investment fails to bring in returns, is pretty damn easy.
With print on demand your individual gaming outlet is MUCH more stable. The ONLY way they won't make a profit is if the local market just
isn't there at all. If there IS a local community of a sufficient size to support the store then the store will cut a healthy profit, because the store will never end up with a vast pile of incredibly expensive crumbling shit that the local community randomly chooses to snub.
Now you may say "WTF does the distributer care, they get their cut selling to the chump store owners and don't care if they drive them out of business in the process" (and seriously, the prices and supply chains of GW prove that they are least don't give a shit if they drive their re distributors out of business on a regular basis, same goes for at least the Australian privateer press wholesale distributors)
But a
less insane "mother company" or whatever you call it
wants there to be more game stores because THAT grows their pie, that makes the hungry maw larger, makes it more stable, more predictable. Ultimately as a larger gaming company here you are actually selling those stores a business model, a brand name, access to your minis design server and software and promise that you won't sue them for printing your shit. And maybe you cut a smaller profit than you do selling mass print runs to that vast maw that so readily eats even unsaleable crap at it's own expense on a regular basis.
But your franchises can exist in a broader range of regions and markets, against more entrenched competitors, they survive harsh times more easily, a few bad releases will hardly hurt them at all and you will ultimately have more potentially viable franchises than you would if you copied existing business models in the industry (which are notoriously unstable).
A less profitable business model can defeat a more profitable one easily. Just because GW itself makes more money than your mother company doesn't mean dick if your franchises can come to town and survive poor marketing decisions and weaker gaming communities that GW franchises can't.
I mean sure GW ultimately could try and use that money to try some desperate innovative strategy to save it's ass... but you know it won't.
And in the mean time 3D printers march forward and threaten to wipe away large pieces of the GW style pie with or without an actual competitor using the technology.
Lago wrote:Hopefully when the costs go down and they're scratching their heads over how to grow the pie higher, they'll learn their lessons from the fiasco of the 3E (and 4E, come to think) miniatures line.
Here is a whole 'nuther branch of regular gaming.
Same sort of software and technology set up right. But this time in the hands of "Sensible Alternate Universe WOTC".
So using technology similar to the whole "print your own Spore critter" junk, which lets remember
already exists and has for a while.
And then tying that in to the "online D&D services business model" bullshit that WOTC has been wanking over unsuccessfully since the failed 3.0 character builder.
I mean we have all known for some time that if WOTC didn't have UTTERLY RETARDED programmers working for them they could long since have made that online D&D service they wanted to actually be something people would sensibly want to use. The potential services they could offer are huge.
Print on demand online model ordering would certainly be a REALLY REALLY attractive aspect of that service.
You could offer...
1) DMs the opportunity to custom print the exact monsters and NPCs they want for a specific adventure or campaign, even a custom one they wrote themselves (ideally written and stored online using the custom tools of the service of course, thought that's a whole other story). And if all your evil cult skeletons need to where a stylish red smurf hat? NO PROBLEM, because your mini's "range" is stupidly adaptable.
2) DMs can use your spore style monster builder to make custom monsters or modify existing monsters with equipment and scars and extra tentacles or size upgrades (and certainly anything that corresponds to your monster advancement rules, heck your Monster Advancement tool on your service probably auto generates a spore style monster, or at least drops you into the editor at your option with the additional expected parts sitting in your working pallet)
3) Players can totally get custom prints of their character. They can reprint them with different gear, in a different pose, on a horse, on a dragon, in the nude holding a soap on a rope, at a higher level with a hook in the place of their right hand, on fire, dead on the ground holding a "Medic!" sign, transformed into a mutant two headed zombie lord. They could put their face on the model, they can put their favorite Justin Beiber face on it, they could sculpt it themselves in the editor, they can pay extra to have some under paid sucker hand paint it, they don't have to sort through mountains of minis looking for that one something "kinda like" their character, they just click their character portrait and equipment lists in the online tools and drop into the spore style character editor. And they don't just buy one, the suckers will buy one every time they get a new fancy looking sword or new pretty dress, every damn level up, with variants for different steeds or states like dead, frozen, enlarged or reduced personed, mage armored, wounded, alternate formed, voltroned into a giant robot, on fire, asleep, in the bath. You turn many of your ONE model customers into customers who will buy a god damn box of the things.
It would be one of the big money makers in your milk'em'dry online D&D tools "service". Suckers go on it to plan their campaign or their character sheet with useful functional tools and their god damn dynamic character portrait and NPC libraries link right into the editors and the online print on demand store. ITS A GOD DAMN GOLD MINE.
DO it well and overnight your WOTC service largely obsoletes even the nicer old school RPG model makers like Reaper in the eyes of half your players.
